The Russian Debutante's Handbook

35. THE COUNTRY FOLK

ON THE WAY to the southern brewery their caravan had passed seemingly the entire unremarkable oeuvre of the Stolovan landscape. Only one mountain, a compact trapezoid indistinguishable from its neighbors, drew Vladimir’s attention, for Jan announced in a proud, instructive tone that this was the mountain on which the Stolovan nation had originated. Vladimir was impressed. What a comfort to know the mountain from which your kind had once come hollering down! He imagined that if the Russians had had such a mountain it would be a great, sweeping Everest out in the Urals on which a military surveillance base would promptly be built, its RKO-style antennas arching into the heavens, announcing that the sons and daughters of the Kievan Rus had laid claim to the taiga and its grizzly bears, the Baikal and its sturgeons, the shtetl and its Jews.

The only other point of interest on their way to the brewery was a half-built nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town, its cooling towers rising over a vast field of failing carrots in long spirals of unfinished skeletal grating, as if the meltdown had already occurred.

The brewery town itself was a charmless little burg where the steeples of Gothic churches, the mansions of the leading merchants, indeed the town square itself had long been cleared away for a claustrophobic quadrant of graying buildings, each nearly identical, even if one was a hotel, the other an administrative center, the third a hospital. They drove straight to the hotel, its lobby a furry seventies affair crammed with prickly recliners, stale air, naked legs, and, in an homage to the leading employer of the locality, a sparkling vat of the local beer rising out of the shag carpeting like a lone Easter Island–head statue. But upstairs, in the Executive Wing (as the rooms with the brass doorknobs were designated), Vladimir felt a thrill of apparatchik camaraderie—these rust-colored, bric-a-brac-less quarters surely must have housed their share of Light Bulb Factory #27 directors and similar happy-go-lucky communist officials. If only František was here!

Not that Vladimir lacked Soviet residue among his traveling companions: He was accompanied by the Groundhog, Gusev, and two fellows who routinely passed out before the meat course was served at the biznesmenski lunches and were rumored to be the Groundhog’s best friends from his Odessa days. One was a small hairless fellow who kept badgering Vladimir about the efficacy of minoxidil. His name was Shurik. The other one was called the Log, and looking at his withered, combative face—nine-tenths scowl, one-tenth eyebrow—one could easily see him floating lifeless down a river, belly up, blood trailing from the nail-thin indenture in the back of the head.

Perhaps better company can be had if one knows where to find it, but Vladimir, newly happy and secure, was as excited as the first-time hostess of a slumber party. Why, even Gusev, who had once almost killed him, seemed a lion tamed as of late. On the ride in, for example, he had bought Vladimir a pastry from a roadside restaurant. Then, with all the grandness and civility befitting the Hapsburg Court, he had let Vladimir cut in front of him on the line for the pissoir.

And so, with the world once again revolving in his direction, Vladimir was seen running about the hallways as if on spring break, shouting in a sparkling Russian: “Come see, gentlemen… A Coke machine that also dispenses rum!”

His room came with a pair of twin beds and Vladimir half hoped the Groundhog would split it with him so they could stay up late, smoking noxious Mars-20 cigarettes, drinking from the same bottle, shooting the breeze about NATO expansion and loves lost. And indeed, with collegiate bravado, the Groundhog soon stuck his head into the doorway and said: “Hey, wash up, you little Yid, and we’ll hit the bar across the square. We’ll rape and pillage, eh?”

“I’m there!” cried Vladimir.

THIS WAS SOME bar. It was run by the local union in the basement of the former Palace of Culture and was habituated by the workers who were laboring on the nuclear power plant, and had probably been doing so since around the time Vladimir was born. Seven o’clock and already mad, hallucinatory inebriation had set in across the board. And then, as if the limits of human endurance were not yet pronounced exhausted, the whores were sent in.

The prostitutki in this part of the world formed a stylized labor brigade. Every one around five feet, nine inches in height, as if that particular span had been adjudged most convenient for the local boys; hair hennaed till it had the consistency of a well-worn mop; breasts and bellies, stretched by births bulging corsets a dirty mauve in color. They shimmied up to the dance floor without much enthusiasm and then, in a tradition that has become diktat in the eight formerly Soviet time zones—Lights! Disco ball! ABBA!

Vladimir’s crew had only uncapped their first beer when the whores arrived and disco fever struck. The Groundhog and his boys immediately got giggly on the scene, fingering the Polo insignia on their shirts, mumbling, “Oh, the country folk,” as if they were having a Chekhov moment of their own.

“These women have thighs that can squeeze the life out of you,” noted little Shurik, not without appreciation.

“But this beer,” Vladimir said. “It tastes like they keep a rusty nail in the bottle. This is the brewery that will export to the West?”

“Pour some vodka into it,” the Groundhog said. “Look, it even suggests it on the bottle.”

Vladimir looked over the label. Part of it did seem to read: “For best results add vodka, 6 ml.” Or maybe this was the complex name of the brewery, one could never tell with the Stolovans. “Fine,” Vladimir said and went to get a bottle of Kristal from the bar.

An hour later he was dancing to “Dancing Queen” with the prettiest fille de nuit in the house. She was the only one that did not tower above Vladimir, and that wasn’t all that set her apart from her colleagues: She was young (although not “only seventeen,” like the dancing queen of the title), she was lanky and especially lean in the chest, and, most significantly, her eyes did not have that staged good-humored look of the other whores. No, these were the clear, disinterested eyes of a New York debutante with poor grades sent to a college in West Virginia, or else a teenager in a contemporary advertisement for jeans. Even through his considerable inebriation—for do not think that vodka, when deposited in beer, creates a neutralizing reaction—Vladimir felt an affinity with this young, damaged apprentice to the trade. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Teresa,” she said in a mean, hoarse whisper, as if she was spitting the name out of her mouth forever.

“Vladimir,” he said and bent down to kiss her speckled neck, aiming for a slot between the carefully spaced hickeys left by others.

But he didn’t get a chance to pounce. The Groundhog had swept him aside with one apelike swoop, and attached him to the dancing triad of Groundhog, Gusev, and the Log. They had left their three prostitutes behind (all substantial middle-aged ladies drowning in blush) and were asserting their Russianness with a kind of abbreviated Cossack dance. Crouch together, rise together, kick out one foot, kick out the other… “Opa!” shouted the prostitutes, their faces as red-and-white as the Polish flag. “Faster, little dove!” they encouraged Vladimir.

But it was out of Vladimir’s hands. The force of the drunken Groundhog, pulling, pushing, swinging, squatting, was entirely responsible for Vladimir’s own sorry movements. The Groundhog was a florid mass with a coherence all its own, giving generously to the reverie around him, shouting, “One more time, brothers! For the Motherland!”

At his first opportunity, Vladimir yelled, “Bathroom!” and ran for cover.

In the piss house, the union had just installed automatic flushers from Germany and mirrors over the urinals. Taking advantage of this march of progress, Vladimir groomed himself: He pushed down his wild hair and tried to string the most wayward locks into loops behind his ears; he opened his mouth and examined his slick, ivory teeth; he pulled back his hairline and promised to himself to sacrifice a goat to the makers of the hair tonic minoxidil. He said to himself: Of course, I’m not going to fall in love with a prostitute, and headed out.

By this time the ABBA selection had settled on “Chiquitita,” which, drunk or not, is a terribly difficult song to dance to. Consequently, the ranks of dancers were decaying; the picniclike tables around the dance floor began filling up with the prostitutki and their men. But nowhere could Vladimir spot the Groundhog and his crew, not to mention his young whore. Feeling abandoned and with no place to invest his excitement, Vladimir went to refill his bladder at the bar. “Dobry den’,” he told the tanned young bartender dressed in a tank top depicting an alligator playing with an American football.

“Hi, friend,” said the barkeep in near-perfect English, as if the waves of the Pacific were stroking the sands of Malibu outside. “What can I do for you?”

Vladimir enumerated a lengthy list of booze while the bartender carefully looked him over. “Tell me, where did you come from?” he finally asked.

Vladimir told him.

“I have been there,” the barkeep said and shrugged, obviously not impressed by the City on the Hudson. He moved on to another customer, a worker wearing nothing but a desperate grin and a cap of a striking blue color.

When he returned with the beer portion of Vladimir’s request, Vladimir asked about his friends. “Went for a smoke outside,” said the globetrotting mixologist. He bent down to Vladimir’s level and now a most non-Californian scent could be detected from beneath his lanky arms. He said: “I have a note for you. But it’s not from me, you understand?” He said this in a tone grave enough to indicate that Vladimir’s response was necessary before the note was given.

“I understand,” Vladimir said with the same gravity, only inwardly he was excited, for he believed it to be a love note from his prostitute, and he was deeply interested in the kind of seductions she would deploy and in what form and language. He took the small, folded ribbon of purple paper from the barkeep, who immediately galloped off to the other end of the bar, and unfurled it. A carefully drawn gunsight stared back at Vladimir, and beneath in boxy letters the familiar bilingual legend:

It was signed collectively, “The Stolovan Skinheads.”

Vladimir did not say, “Ah…” He was on his feet and walking toward the exit. The soft flesh of prostitutes, the pungency of their perfume and hair, was an obstacle course he negotiated with partial success, saying along the way, “pardon, pardon, pardon…” But he was thinking, Skinheads? Where? Who? The workers? They have hair. A pace or two from the door he finally saw them out of the corner of his eye—the black military jackets, the camouflage pants, ankle-high boots; the faces didn’t even register.

Outside, the familiar darkness disturbed by smog and the distant grumble of dysfunctional Trabants, an empty dirtyard facing the rump of a low, gray municipal building, the only illumination provided by the light trailing from the bar’s open door. In front of him two skinheads appeared from different directions, both coming from outside his line of sight, coming together as if they were going to meld into a single unit, as if he was suffering from double vision and there was really only one set of gritted teeth, one pair of busted lips, and only one black swastika painted on an orange T-shirt below.

Vladimir turned around. The space between him and the bar door was rapidly filling up with young men and determined expressions; it was evident that the workers and the prostitutes in this town were not the only ones who formed identical cadres, for the enforcers of local ethnic purity resembled one another to the last detail. Perhaps they were all fathered by the same bald, slightly overweight man with his fists always squeezed by his side, and one eye permanently squinted as if against the oncoming glare of the African sun.

Then their ranks broke to admit one who was surely their leader—a head taller, broad-shouldered but thin, with a pair of contemporary wire-rims and the urgent, piercing gaze of a young German intellectual let loose in an American graduate program. The tall one looked down at Vladimir’s head as if it were a breeding ground for baby hydras and said, “Passport!”

Vladimir exhaled for the first time. He remembered, for some reason, that he didn’t have a Soviet passport where his nationality would be listed as “Jew,” and from this particular fact he allowed himself the idea of a loophole. No, it wasn’t going to end like this. An entire life, a special little creature, an existence whose precariousness was its very leitmotif, extinguished at the hands of morons! “No! No passport!” he said. “Groundhog!” he shouted in Russian, in the direction of the bar.

The leader looked toward his men. “Jaky jazyk?” he barked. This was similar enough to Russian for Vladimir to understand: “What language?”

“Turetsky,” one of the skinheads happily said, smashing a fist into his palm. Turkish.

The intellectual fixed his gaze on Vladimir once again. He was starting to work on a smirk of his own, which considerably united his appearance with those of his comrades. “You are from Arabia!”

Arabia. Arabia! Could it be they were looking for a different kind of Semite? “No Arabia!” Vladimir shouted, waving his hands dangerously close in the direction of the leader. “America! I am America!” He happily remembered the extremist fervor of some of his Zionist classmates in Hebrew school. “Arabia, tphooo!” He spit—unfortunately, on his shoe. “Islams…” He brought a mock trigger to his head and shot himself, “Boom!” although really he ought to have been shooting somewhere else, in the direction of the imaginary Arab, perhaps. Laughter broke out among the ranks at this self-indicting gesture, but it quickly got lost amid a volley of inimical snorts and a tightening of the ethnic-cleansing cordon sanitaire around Vladimir. Some of the hooligans were already spreading their legs apart, the better to keep their balance during the one-serving pogrom to come.

“Look,” Vladimir said and, with hands shaking and vision blurred from the tears he could no longer control, tried to extricate his wallet from his jeans. “Give me a minute… Please, what will it hurt you… Look… American Express… American Express… And this is a New York State driver’s license. You gentlemen ever been to New York? I know plenty of skinheads there. We go raise hell in Chinatown sometimes…”

The leader examined Vladimir’s exhibits and then, in what Vladimir saw through his betraying tears as a foreboding gesture, put them into his own wallet, stepped back an inch, and nodded to the ground where he once stood.

“Please,” Vladimir said in Stolovan. He was ready to say it again.

A fist landed above Vladimir’s right eye, but before that pain was fully realized there was the sensation of flight and then the feeling of his body breaking up against the ground, his tailbone emitting a crack as the pain radiated outward from a hundred terminuses, and then a great cheer went up, although he didn’t understand the exact word (hurrah?), then a girder, it would seem, landed against his ribcage and then one, two more on the other side, flashing in bright childhood yellows then receding to darkness and the aftershocks of pure pain, and then someone had jumped on his clenched fist and—bozhe moi, bozhe moi—there was that cracking again, the cracking you could feel in the back of your mouth, the cheering again (hurrah?), Morgan… wake up in Prava, shto takoie? which language? pochemu nado tak? my God, not like this, svolochi! you have to breathe, nado dyshat’, breathe, Vladimir, and your mama will bring you… zhirafa prinesyot… a stuffed giraffe… ya hochu zhit’! I want to live! to continue to exist, to open your eyes, to run, to say to them, “No!”

“No!” Vladimir raised a broken fist into the air and swung it at a target that wouldn’t present itself. His eyes opened simultaneously and he saw two figures standing in the direct light of the bar. For a second his eyes focused, then unfocused, then, through an extraordinary ripple of pain charging through his spine like current, focused once more. He couldn’t make out their expressions exactly, only that Gusev was nodding, while the Groundhog was looking straight ahead. And then, Vladimir let his fist drop. He saw a boot’s wedge of steel making its way expressly toward his face and said, in two languages at the same time: “Come on.”

“Davai.”

36. IN HAPPIER TIMES

HE IS WALKING from her dormitory; it is the first time they have slipped their hands into each other’s pants. He is walking through the town square, a meticulously planted conglomerate of trees, lawns, and flowerbeds, which the Midwestern college maintains to remind itself of its less progressive Eastern brethren. It is morning. The clouds extend practically to the tops of the leafless oaks and a light drizzle sweeps in out of nowhere as if to remind the pedestrian of what clouds are all about. And yet, in one of the vagaries of Midwestern weather, this overcast February morning suddenly achieves an unlikely springlike temperature, conveyed through a wind as warm as the gust of a hair dryer.

He is wearing a heavy brown overcoat bought by Mother in anticipation of this bedeviling climate. Today, unlike frigid yesterday, he has unbuttoned it to the hilt and stuffed his scarf in his pocket, ignoring his mother’s decades-old advice to “never let your guard down when warm weather suddenly appears, Vladimir. It is a silent killer, like venereal disease.” But Mother is nowhere in sight, and he is free to catch both cold and gonorrhea.

This thought, in particular, makes him smile, and he stops in the middle of the square and puts his hand up to his nose, the one that had recently gone inside his new lover’s utilitarian cotton underwear, had even gotten a rash from rubbing against its harsh elastic strap, then sniffs his other hand to compare. What animal smells she harbors, that sleek, soignée Chicagoan with her fashionable pageboy cut and strong Marxish opinions.

Ave Maria! It is the first time he had put his hand inside there. He has always imagined the first time would be with some castoff, a large, insipid girl even more scared then he was. Now everything has changed. Now he is standing in the middle of the square, rethinking it all, calculating his bounty with different functions: subtracting Leningrad, dividing by Baobab, adding the Chicagoan, and multiplying it all by his nascent ability to shed his past and become Educated American Man, one bored but ultimately happy superhero.

That pleasant moment in the town square lasts so long that he will remember it even when the particulars of his first tussle with another’s genitalia will lose their distinctness. He will remember it just so: the birds confused by the weather chirping away, clinging to the leafless trees whose branches creak and tremble under the birds’ weight as if they, too, are being reanimated by the warmth; the bare copses, regal and long, stretching the length of the college’s ivied, pink-granite cathedral, recently reformed into a godless student union; the neo-Victorian turrets of the humanities building, once bustling with Pynchonites and Achebians, now abandoned to the intellectual ennui that settles in by spring term. Yes, this apparition, this beautiful and unlikely flora and fauna are finally his. Vladimir College, founded 1981, by the last wave of hopeful Leningrad Grain Jews disembarking at JFK and penetrating a thousand versts inland to mingle their sons and daughters with the new world’s soft and fuzzy liberal elite. Thank you Momma and Poppa Girshkin for the $25,000 per year in tuition and costs. It will all work out in the end. I will not be a disappointment.

He makes sure he is the only person standing in the square’s brief morning light, then embraces himself tightly the way he imagines the Chicagoan will do all night when she falls completely in love with him, when they begin to hammer out their plans of marriage after graduation. So far, they have spent their first night in a supine position, mostly out of the embarrassment of facing each other in bed, and he has developed all sorts of aches from the unfamiliarity of her grounded mattress. But he takes the pain in stride as evidence of his adventure, and, for the time being, he cannot imagine love’s other malevolent pains, the vast penalties for casual infractions and trust misplaced. Although, truth be told, this particular ache hurts like hell too. And so he decides to head to his own dormitory, to his kind and sedulous Jewish roommate from Pittsburgh who will not be loath to fire up the bong on a special occasion like this. And then to get some sleep, finally.

HE OPENED HIS eyes for a moment of incalculable brevity, then closed them as the weight of his eyelids had become oppressive. In the darkness the pain seemed disseminated, a condition common to every part of his body as opposed to the several sites that through cast and bandage had been designated ground zero. But what he saw, in that burst of light and cognizance, was more than he needed to see. A cracked, mildewed tile, its hue a green, which undermined all greenness. Imagine a plant has been taken to a dank factory basement and there taught to reject all it once treasured—the air, the dew, the light and the chlorophyll—until the wilted thing resigns itself to making friends with the basement boiler. And then, in that instant, over that chipped, malformed tile, the outline of a fan blade passed with an anguished whoosh. A slow and ancient fan, its contours bulbous like the rear of a Studebaker.

He knew then the reality of the matter. Not the Midwest’s gray sky above him, but Stolovaya’s. And he remembered his last thought before he had lost consciousness, the graceless final option of a man without a country: Escape. He could already imagine his getaway plane, which, under the influence of the dated ceiling fan, had become a silver Trans-World stratoliner, its four propellers buzzing past sepia-toned clouds with thirty passengers and five crew members, headed for La Guardia Field.

His woke up to find his wrist warm, as if a localized fever had struck. This feeling was particularly disconcerting because south of the wrist lay a heavily anaesthetized void: his hand, likely a jumble of straight things twisted and smooth enclosures undone, no Trans-World stratoliner, rather the modern wreckage of a Boeing in a scrub field, bodies scattered about.

Morgan had slipped a hand around his wrist. She was pressing her index finger into it, measuring the pulse. She had on a straw hat with a daisy, beneath which her face was not just sad, but of a sadness—that is, sad and luminous. Her unpainted lips were chapped from worried nail-biting, a distant approximation of Vladimir’s lips split by a boot. Immediately, Vladimir deduced that the hat with the daisy was as much an effort to seem unaged by this experience as an attempt at levity for his benefit.

“Morgie,” he said. And then he remembered what this was all about. “I live.”

“You’re going to live a long time,” she said, maneuvering around the bandages to kiss his nose. “We’re both going to live a long time. And be happy, too.”

And be happy, too. Vladimir closed his eyes and considered this. It almost didn’t matter if she was right or wrong. He took in a deep breath, as deep as he could with his lungs brushing against surfaces ruptured and organs impaired. She smelled salty and vital. Her hat fell off as she leaned over him and a curtain of hair brushed against his face, some getting trapped in his hungry nose.

“I live,” Vladimir said, squeezing tight the fist that had survived.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO his visit, Kostya was still pulling out apricots and bananas, along with dozens of mortally wounded local violets and gardenias from the outdoor market. He set up this harvest on the sills of Vladimir’s twin windows, which looked out onto a silent New Town back street, bowing all the while as if he were offering sacrifices to a gilded Buddha.

Kostya had already apologized, professed his innocence, and crossed himself a thousand times. He had read Vladimir a letter from the Groundhog, written in a half-literate Russian, a letter whose gist was: “We men, if we must to be called men, must not let slights go unpunished.”

The slight was then specified: “My poor, sick father…How could you betray him? And after all he has had to live through: Marriage and immigration, the Soviet navy and the American projects, the Stalin years and the early 90s recession. And I was no blessing as a kid, either, as you can imagine.”

A settlement was offered: “We have fixed each other good, Vladimir. But now everything is solved and ended. Now we have work to do. There must be no more hurting and beating, only friendship and respect. You will heal and then we will go to the restaurant where you sang so well and I will pay for the dinner and wine.”

And finally a postscript: “I could have had them kill you.”

Kostya removed the last piece of fruit from his gym bag. He polished the apple with his hankie and carefully placed it on Vladimir’s stomach. “Eat it immediately,” he said. “This kind of apple quickly turns brown on the inside.” He must have seen in this a fitting analogy for himself, for he clasped his hands to his powerful stomach, as if shoring up his guts, and said, “My God, those animals! They will suffer tenfold for this when their time of reckoning comes. And they will suffer eternally. Although it must be said, if one is to speak truthfully, that you have sinned against them as well, Vladimir. You have betrayed the trust of an old man. Of an invalid! And as for the Groundhog… he pays us handsomely, no? For all his pathologies, he is a kind man in his own right. And mostly he treats us like brothers.”

Vladimir moved a fraction so that the apple rolled off the side of the bed and sent Kostya scrambling. He wanted to be surrounded by friends, not by the man who had trained his body for eight months only to allow for its destruction within minutes. “Tell the Groundhog to forget it,” Vladimir said. “I will have nothing more to do with this organization. I am leaving the country. And you better get out of this business as well, before they nail you to the cross like your friend there.”

“Please don’t talk like that, Vladimir,” Kostya said, polishing the apple with renewed vigor. He looked very Western these days in his tattersall Brooks Brothers shirt and tan chinos, but his frightened eyes reminded Vladimir of an old, toothless peasant, the kind he had only seen in picture books of Russia. “Now is the time to renew faith, not deny it,” Kostya was saying. “And I wouldn’t think of leaving the country if I were you. The Groundhog will certainly not allow it. There’s a guard outside the room and the front and back entrances to the hospital are also guarded. I’ve seen it myself, Vladimir. They won’t let you go. Have an apricot, please…”

“I will call the American embassy!” Vladimir said. “I am still an American citizen. I know my rights.”

Kostya looked at him askance. “That will only create problems, don’t you think?” He said this a little too forcefully, without his usual pious restraint, leaving Vladimir, for the first time, in question of his allegiances. “Besides, there’s no phone in this room. Now, here, let me get the curtains. What an astoundingly beautiful day it is outside. If only you could go for a walk.”

“Please get out,” Vladimir said. “You and your fucking religion, and this fruit… What am I supposed to do with all this fruit?”

“Vladimir!” Kostya pressed the apple to his heart. “Say no more! God can only forgive so much! Cross yourself!”

“Jews don’t cross themselves,” Vladimir said. “We’re the ones that put Him up there in the first place, remember?” He single-handedly drew the rank bed sheets over his head, a painful maneuver that brought to fore the sum of his injuries. “Now get out!” he said from beneath his linen fortress.

A DAY PASSED into night, then the situation was reversed.

A young Slovak nurse, her eyes and hair dark like a gypsy’s, came to administer painkillers every couple of hours or so; to return the favor, Vladimir let her eat Kostya’s fruit. This nurse was as sturdy as a sausage. She flipped Vladimir over without a sigh, mindful of his fractures, then pressed the needle deep into his rear, a pain Vladimir had come to enjoy as it signified the onset of sweet giddiness.

With an entire socialist pharmacopoeia coasting through his veins, Vladimir spent his days either laughing maniacally as he tried to build an airplane out of the institutional wax paper, or, when the effects of the drugs were at their nadir, dolefully mooing to a bedside picture of Morgan, whose four-hour daily visits were obviously not enough. The times in-between he spent chattering away to himself in both Russian and English, chronicling his childhood and the end of his childhood, often pretending there was a bevy of grandchildren, small and furry, surrounding his bedside. “And when I was your age, Sari, I lived with a dominatrix in a condemned Alphabet City flat. Later, she went with my best friend Baobab, but by this time I was already a mafioso in Prava. What a business!”

But soon enough, in a week, say, Vladimir’s grandchildren became tall and beefy, their features lightened, the tips of their noses curled upward, and sweatshirts with the names of American sports teams suddenly appeared. Vladimir guessed at their lineage. He knew he was reaching some sort of a decision.

“It’ll be the perfect place to recover,” Morgan said. “You’ll see where I was brought up, the real America. And Cleveland’s so nice in the summer. And it doesn’t smell at all anymore—they’ve cleaned up the Cuyahoga River. And if you want, my father can give you a job. And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.” She lowered her voice: “By the way, Tomaš and I are almost finished with our work here. Just so you know…”

“Let me think about it,” Vladimir said, even as a whiff of hardy Midwestern air wormed its way through the shut windows.

And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.

The next day an adventuresome Vladimir ate a dish of soggy dumplings along with a trace of gulash minus the paprika (for health reasons, according to his doctor). He was able to flip himself over for the nurse, who said several encouraging words in her language, then slapped his butt kindly.

The nurse brought in copies of the Prava-dence, and here Vladimir could not escape Cohen’s raging commentaries about anti-Semitism and racism in Mittel Europa, in response to which Cohen was speedily organizing a march to the Old Town Square under the banner EXPATRIATES, LET YOUR DISGUST BE KNOWN! Swastikas would be burned, folk music played, and the Mourner’s Kaddish recited by a visiting dignitary for “a certain fallen friend.”

“But I’m not dead,” Vladimir reminded him when Cohen arrived along with František.

“No, no,” Cohen mumbled. “Although…” He did not elaborate, but instead blotted at his red eyes with both palms, creasing the unshaven portion of his face below. “Let’s have a beer,” he said and took out a bottle, which, with a great deal of clumsiness and running foam, he eventually uncapped and placed in Vladimir’s good hand.

The beer did not seem like a good idea to Vladimir, what with all the exotic drugs pumped into his posterior, but he took a few sips nonetheless. Over the course of the past nine months he had shared so many beers with Cohen that drinking this final one was akin to a memorial, and looking now at his haggard friend brimming once again with righteous energy, Vladimir was sad to think they might never see one another again. “Well, I hope your march goes as well as your work on Cagliostro,” Vladimir said. “You have a knack for these things, Perry. I’m glad you were my mentor.”

“I know, I know,” Cohen said, brushing it off, embarrassed.

“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to help me to my feet.”

They looped their arms under his shoulders, and with František’s considerable heft accounting for most of the propulsion, lifted him off the bed while he grunted and said “Ach!” On his feet, he was quickly impressed by his mobility. The feet were, with the exception of a few bruises, remarkably undamaged. His attackers had obviously been more concerned with juicier areas and most of the fractures were concentrated among his ribs, which made him feel as if his torso was a package bulging with broken glass. When he held his posture erect and did not breathe excessively, he could commute from the bed to the door easily, but any time his locomotion required a shift of the body or an extended inhalation, things got a little blurry and dark at the edges.

“I’m ready to leave,” Vladimir told them.

Cohen instantly voiced his intention of staying and fighting until every young man with a shaved head was tied up for nine hours and forced to sit through a screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but František merely shook his head (his eyes, too, now had a hard look and were ringed underneath) and said: “Perhaps you are not aware of the situation outside. The guard here and the two guards by the entrance.”

Vladimir turned to František and spread out his good hand, palm-upward, in the famous “Nu?” gesture.

“Nu?” František said. “What can I do? You understand now what our adversaries are capable of.” Then he sighed tremendously. But as the sigh exhausted itself, his face took on the pleased, royal appearance of Son of Apparatchik II. “All right, I see something, yes… But perhaps we should wait until your physique improves.”

“No,” Vladimir said. “It has to be now. Tell me, František… How much money do I have?”

František shook his head sadly. “That fool Kostya has frozen your DeutscheBank account. As a preventative measure, I was told.”

“I thought as much,” Vladimir said. “So what’s left for me here? Nothing.”

It was clear that his two friends had never expected to hear those words from Vladimir Girshkin, for immediately they came together and put their arms around his body, as gently as two men without children can do.

“Wait!” Cohen said. “What do you mean ‘nothing’? There must be something we can do! We can press charges. We can alert the media. We can…”

“Your girlfriend,” František whispered into Vladimir’s unbandaged ear. “She says they’re going to blow up the Foot this Friday at three o’clock precisely. The explosion will serve as a decoy.” František allowed himself a slight squeeze of the fractured former King of Prava.

“Be prepared to run,” he said.

VLADIMIR HAD AN interesting dream. In this dream he ate dinner with a normal American family that took up an enormous dining table over which hung three well-spaced chandeliers—that’s how big this normal family was.

During the meal in the dream they ate St. Peter’s fish, which was chosen for its low caloric content and not for any religious reasons. This was explained to Vladimir by a man named Gramps, who, quite normally, sat at the head of the table. Gramps had lived a long time and was knowledgeable about many topics, especially about great, big wars. He was also the only person at the table to have a face, although it wasn’t the kind of face that, by itself, could imprint itself on the collective memory of a nation, in the manner of Khrushchev or the Quaker Oats Man.

It was an old man’s beetle-browed, double-chinned, wine-reddened face, a face that had clearly seen more good than bad through the years, even when you factored in the great, big wars—especially when you factored in the great, big ones. Yes, Vladimir never thought he would enjoy hearing about duty and courage and biting the bullet so much. And he was very polite to Gramps: When the old guy spilled gravy over the sleeve of Vladimir’s cuffed white shirt, Vladimir made a very appropriate joke, which was not in the least offensive to anyone present and seemed to put Gramps at ease. The dream ended right after Gramps had been put at ease.

Vladimir woke up pleased with his pleasantness at dinner, his stomach still purring under the gentle weight of the imaginary goy-fish. Sunlight flooded the room while a playful wind knocked at the windows. His nurse was wheeling in the breakfast cart. She was very animated, constantly pointing out the window and evidently saying a lot of nice things about the day outside. “Petak!” she said. Friday!

Vladimir nodded and said “Dobry den’” to her, which besides being a form of greeting also happened to mean “good day” in Stolovan.

She took out his breakfast—a single boiled egg, a piece of rye bread, and black coffee. Then, without ceremony and still gesticulating about the bountiful weather, she took out of the tray’s bottom compartment a briefcase, which she placed next to Vladimir’s good arm. “Dobry den’,” she cheered and, smiling like a dark, Indo-European angel, wheeled the breakfast tray out of Vladimir’s life.

At first Vladimir admired the briefcase itself. It was a handsome affair of taupe patent leather monogrammed with Vladimir’s initials. He even thought of Mother and wondered if the first letter of the monogram could be changed in her favor.

Inside, there was an amusement-park-for-the-adult set. The first item Vladimir noticed was, of course, the revolver. It was the only gun he had ever seen that was not attached to a cop or to one of Gusev’s men, and the idea that it was in his possession proved more hilarious than frightening. Still-life of V. Girshkin with Sidearm. The gun came with a diagrammed set of instructions, scribbled in hasty pencil: “Gun already loaded with six bullets. Release safety. Aim. Hold gun steady. Press trigger (but only after you have aimed directly at target).” Hey now, thought Vladimir. Accent or not, I am a child of America. I should know how to blow someone away instinctively.

Next to the pretty gun were stacks of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred to a stack, ten stacks in all; his U.S. passport; a plane ticket for that day’s 5:00 P.M. nonstop to New York; and a brief note: “When the nurse knocks twice, the guard outside your room has been distracted. The Foot will explode two minutes later. Run for the nearest taxi (two blocks down is Prospekt Narodna, the closest thoroughfare). Your friend will be waiting for you at the airport. Do not waste time explaining yourself to the hospital staff—they have been taken care of.”

Vladimir clasped the briefcase shut and moved one foot off the bed, aiming for his tasseled loafer from Harrods.

Just then there were two knocks at the door.

…Out the door Vladimir went, galloping madly, good hand around his body, a body which seemed ready to fold up like an army cot at any minute. He was rounding corner after corner, through miserable green corridors that seemed no more than an extension of his room, past innumerable older nurses with breakfast carts paying him no heed, all the while following the magic red sign bounded by an arrow and an exclamation point that surely must have meant EXIT!

Outside! into the Prava spring! a street curling away hopefully toward Prospekt Narodna, lined with ancient, bloated Fiat ambulances… A familiar BMW stood directly across the way from the hospital steps; two associates of the Groundhog’s, Shurik and Log, were being entertained by a trio of elephantine nurses, whose hair—three bales of loose blond straw—was lifted behind them by the wind, potentially obscuring Vladimir’s escape. It would seem the gang was clowning around with a hypodermic needle.

Three o’clock on his watch. The second hand moved five seconds forward. An orange ball overhead. A displacement in the sky. The Old Town shook. The New Town shook. The earthquake had begun.

Morgan!

Vladimir knew he had to move quickly but he could not take his eyes off the burning Foot. It was oddly reminiscent of the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty, except this torch was far grander, blowing beautiful swirls of gray smoke over the Tavlata and into the open courtyards of the castle above. Toward the back of the Foot, where the elevator and power cables ran alongside the Heel, electrical sparks blazed into blue-white spirals of lightning, which lashed out—harmlessly, one would hope—at the Baroque forms of the Stolovan Wine Archive and Hugo Boss outlet below. Alpha had been right in his calculations: the Foot imploded, its top two-thirds collapsing into the hollow of the bottom third. This truncated, smoking Foot was truly a landmark, the proverbial “ash heap of history” around which former Cold Warriors and the economics faculty of the University of Chicago would soon gather to warm their fleshy hands.

She had done it, Morgie! She had set the skyline on fire!

But there was no time to feel pride for his strange beloved. Caught in the aftershocks of the explosion, the city continued to rumble beneath his feet, as if an endless metro train was winding its way underground. Vladimir looked to the BMW. The Groundhog’s men were crouched on the ground alongside the Stolovan nurses, looking up to the giant flaming limb. Vladimir briskly walked away from the scene, swinging his briefcase resolutely. In his pressed trousers and Prava-dence T-shirt, having shed his hospital gown, he was the consummate American businessman shunning taxi rides in favor of exercise, even if his left hand was bandaged into a fuzzy white ball, while a thick strip of gauze adorned his forehead. He breathed evenly at restful intervals in order to build energy for the next exertion, just the way Kostya had once instructed.

This was wise. As he approached the street’s curve, which would definitively take him out of the Russians’ line of sight, the twin banks of sooty buildings echoed Shurik’s unhappy voice: “HALT!”

Exert!

And he was gone, the architecture scrolling around him, an engine swiftly firing up a dozen meters behind. Now he could only feel his head and his two feet—one, two, one, two—carrying aloft the rest of his ridiculous body, like Kostya bearing his cross. And the wind! The damn wind blew the wrong way down the never-ending street like a reprimand, slamming into Vladimir’s unfortunate chest, knocking out his air supply.

A reprisal! Like a nesting doll, the side street bore a side street. Following the rules of escape, Vladimir ducked into it. But the alley must have harbored some obscure museum, for it was chock-full of melancholy school children being siphoned through, like a slow-motion running of the bulls.

Vladimir stopped, regained a single breath, and shouted: “The Russians are coming! Run!” This warning proved especially legitimate since it was shouted in Russian and against the background of a steadily exploding hundred-meter statue of Stalin’s Foot. Pandemonium broke out, with the kiddies bleating, school bags flying through the air, teachers pushing their plumpness forward into children, children squeezed into the gray plaster of buildings, falling like toy soldiers into the vestibule of a new subterranean pizza parlor. Waving his hand in the air like a flag of national resistance, Vladimir charged through, still screaming his warning; he managed to knock down only one kid—a slow, sad-looking little Kafka who reminded Vladimir very much of himself as a child. He was sorry to see him go.

Forward! Ahead, a great light spilled into the side street, a light born of uncluttered space, of an enormous boulevard, of Prospekt Narodna—the Avenue of the Nation! Still screaming his dated warning, Vladimir careened into a crowd of peace-loving lunchtime strollers, all craning their necks to see the carnage of the Foot, caught up in the universal mood of astonishment and joy.

Behind him, his pursuers let loose the klaxon to clear the side street of third-graders. Not an easy task, since the alleyway was about as big as the BMW itself, and the sidewalks could accommodate only so many little Stolovans.

Feeling time was on his side, Vladimir pushed through the knots of businessmen in purple suits and white socks and leapt into the middle of the street. Once again, he ran. Only now there was no duality of smashed torso and Olympian legs. There was only pain and speed! Now, the happy wind was on the right side of history, and it spoke louder than the clang of the long-beaked tram heading in his direction: VLADIMIR VICTORIOUS!

He altered his course by a hair and brushed past the cream-and-orange streetcar, catching sight of the terrified babushkas clutching their Kmart bags within, for up ahead was the storied store itself. But Vladimir couldn’t even contemplate escaping into men’s casuals, just as in his frenzy he had lost sight of his original goal: finding a taxi, of which surely a dozen green exemplars by now had passed, alongside a procession of police cars, lights ablaze, rushing toward the burning Foot.

One! two! one! two! with the legs, not stopping even for a breath until the counting became a singular onetwooo, when suddenly the Prospekt Narodna concluded itself and he had to apply the brakes.

Ahead, the hazy blue of the Tavlata and a bridge spanning its length. The thought of being trapped on the bridge with nothing but the murky river below did not appeal; Vladimir turned right on the embankment, but at this point suffered a brief convulsion. His ribs scraped against each other with the imagined sound of cutlery and an immense ball of blood anchored in phlegm rose up to coat his mouth with metal. Bent over with pain, his former speed unthinkable, Vladimir made slow progress up the embankment toward the castle in the distance.

He passed the famed restaurant where he had eaten with the Groundhog, and briefly considered taking refuge in its international quarters. Any place with nymphs on the walls and Cole Porter on the piano could not possibly play host to an afternoon assassination. But the building next to it was by far more intriguing. An enormous Stolovan tricolor hung from the ground-level window; it was distinguished by the socialist star, long since banished from similar flags. Indeed, if one strained one’s ears against the hum of the city, the “Internationale,” shrill and raspy, could be heard from within like a painful birth. Of course! The Great Hall of People’s Friendship! This was where František delivered his well-paid speeches to the old communist faithful.

In the distance, where the Prospekt Narodna lapsed into the river, the auto of Shurik and Log ground itself to a full and complete stop with smoking tires and all the appropriate sounds. Vladimir turned to the other direction, the direction of further escape, to catch the monstrous, sloping hood of the Groundhog’s customized Beamer easing its way onto the embankment. And so his fate was sealed.

Past a thick velvet curtain lay the bottom floor of a spacious villa converted into an auditorium. A marble Lenin towered over an empty podium. The podium itself looked out over rows of folding chairs occupied by the Sons and Daughters of the Radiant Future—those crisp octogenarians—the grandmas still dressed in blue work dresses, their revolutionary spouses now sporting significant bosoms to which their many insignia were pinned.

Toward the front of the room, by Lenin’s left toe, to be exact, Vladimir caught sight of the youngest person in the joint save himself. His question mark of a cowlick had always been a dead giveaway in a crowded bar. František, with the benefit of his height, noticed Vladimir as well and quickly started making his way back, managing to shake every single hand that was offered him, like a rabbi during a break in the minyan services. “What the hell?” he said, pushing Vladimir back toward the velvet curtain and the street outside.

“I couldn’t get a cab!” Vladimir shouted.

“Jesusmaria! How did you find this place?”

“The flag… You told me…” Vladimir closed his eyes and remembered to breathe at any cost. He breathed. “Look, they’ve surrounded the two streets, this way and that way. They’re going to start going into buildings. Do you see what I mean?” He looked around to see if any Guardians of the Foot were present, fearful they might recognize him from Morgan’s showdown at Big Toe… But all the babushkas looked the same to him.

“What about the Foot?” František said. “I felt the ground shaking. I thought—”

“It’s gone,” Vladimir said. “Finished.”

His voice carried all too well. Gray heads were turning, chairs squeaking backward, and the hall was soon suffused with amazed whispers of “Trotsky!”

At first, František did not pay these rumors any notice, probably figuring that anything at all could have stirred up the waves of senility fiercely undulating through the room. Instead, he was trying to calm Vladimir, reminding him that they were in this together, that they were both fellow travelers, “men of taste in a tasteless world,” and that he would do anything to save Vladimir. But by then the disparate whispers of “Trotsky!” were united into a single proletarian chant, and the two could no longer ignore the gathering momentum. With embarrassed smiles they turned to face the People and affected a little wave of the hand.

“Interesting,” František said, as he energetically massaged his bare temples. “How very Menshevik of them. I would never have imagined…But all right…Never mind. Shall we try for Plan Z, then? I take it you still know your Marxism-Leninism, Tovarishch Trotsky?”

“It was my major in the Midwestern col—”

“Then please follow me.”

“But, of course, whatever you’re thinking is madness…” Vladimir started to say, but in the meantime he followed the madman faithfully to the front of the room. A flawless hush settled over the congregation, well-trained after forty years of marching happily into the future and never bowing to facts.

With arms swinging in martial fashion and chin set firm, František mounted the podium. “Dear friends of Glorious October,” he said in perfect Russian. “We have a guest today the caliber of which we have not seen since that Bulgarian with the funny parrot last year… Yezdinsky, was it? Only thirty years old, but already thrice a Hero of Socialist Labor, not to mention the youngest person ever to receive the Order of Andropov for Heroic Operation of a Wheat Combine… Comrades, please welcome the General Secretary of the Central Presidium of the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists and a serious contender for Russia’s presidency in the next election… Comrade Yasha Oslov!”

The geezers rose to their feet in an enormous polyester wave, cheering “Hurrah, Trotsky!” even though Vladimir’s alias had by now been established. Noticing his injuries, some of the grandmas were shouting: “What ails you, Trotsky? We’ll fix you up!”

Vladimir waved to them solicitously as he climbed the stairs, nearly losing his fragile balance in the act. He set his briefcase full of greenbacks on top of the lectern and adjusted the microphone with his working hand, waiting for the applause to subside. “Stalwart comrades,” he shouted and immediately stopped. Stalwart comrades… Um, and then what? “First let me ask you, is it acceptable that I speak in Russian?”

“But of course! Speak, Russian eagle!” the audience said as one.

My kind of audience, Vladimir thought. He breathed in all his doubts once, felt the pain of breathing, then dispelled them into the air, thick with the smell of groceries going bad and cheap suits worn on a warm day. “Stalwart comrades!” he shouted into the silence. “Outside it is a warm April day, the sky is clear. But over the mausoleum of Vladimir Ilych,” he turned for emphasis to the statue of Lenin, “the sky is a perpetual gray!”

“Woe, poor Lenin!” moaned the crowd. “Poor are his heirs.”

“Poor, indeed,” Vladimir said. “Just look what has happened to your beautiful Red Prava. Americans everywhere you turn! (The crowd roared its opposition!) Performing lewd sexual acts on the Emanuel Bridge as if to laugh at the sanctity of the Socialist Family and to spread their AIDS! (Roar!) Shooting up their marijuana with dirty needles in the Old Town Square, where once a hundred thousand comrades thrilled to the words of Jan Zhopka, your first working-class president. (Roar! Roar!) Is this why for forty years you have toiled in the fields and melted all that metal… melted all that metal into steel, built those wonderful trams, a subway system that is the envy of the Paris Métro, public toilets everywhere… And let’s not forget the human element! How many faithful, energetic young comrades have we produced, like Comrade František here…”

He waved to František in the front row and presented the crowd with both an upturned thumb and a victory sign (he wasn’t about to skimp on them). “Franti!” cheered the crowd.

“Yes, Comrade Franti has been dispensing Red Justice since he was in diapers! Keep beating up that counter-revolutionary element with your mighty pen, dear friend!” Oh, he was starting to like this! He paced before the lectern like an agitated Bolshevik, even touching the cool marble of the Big Daddy of the Revolution for support. “Look at my hand!” he shouted, waving the bandaged package in the air with his other hand. “Look what they’ve done to it, the industrialists! I spoke my mind at a rally of Negro workers in Washington, and the CIA put it through a meat grinder!”

At the mention of the meat grinder, a comrade in a frumpy mink and floral headscarf could no longer contain herself. She sprang to her feet and waved a segmented string of sausages around her head, lasso-style. “I paid forty crowns for these!” she shouted. “What do you think of that?”

“Yes,” the crowd picked up the rallying cry. “What do you think of that?”

“What do I think of that?” Vladimir pointed to himself as if he were surprised that they would solicit his opinion. “I think that the store owner responsible for charging forty crowns for those sausages should be shot!”

The entire crowd was now on its feet; its ovation must have been heard over at the restaurant next door. “I think his family should be forced to leave Prava as enemies of the people,” shouted the incorrigible Vladimir, “and his children never allowed to attend university!” Hurrah! answered the crowd.

“His cat should be turned into cat food!” Hurrah!

“And what do you think of twenty crowns for a carp?” another inquisitive babushka wanted to know.

“Disgrace! Why have we let the labor camps of Siberia go idle? And what about those nice Stolovan uranium mines? Comrades, when the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists takes control, these new entrepreneurs will really have their work cut out for them!”

The crowd lapsed into cheerful laughter and applause, gold teeth sparkled across the room, and more than one hand reached to calm the overexcited beating of a faulty heart. “We will take care of them one by one, dear tovarishchii. We will strangle the life out of them with our own bare hands, those fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits!”

Now, what can one say about coincidences? Either one believes in a higher power or one just shrugs. Looking back, Vladimir would concede that at that moment he was tempted to believe, for no sooner had the words “fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits” escaped his mouth, than the Groundhog parted the velvet curtain and burst into the room, trailed closely by Gusev and the Log. Yes, they all had on their Armani pinstripes and were looking more porcine than ever, although perhaps the power of suggestion played some part in that.

“There they are!” shouted Vladimir, pointing, he thought, directly into the Groundhog’s solar plexus. “They’ve come to disrupt our dignified meeting! For the honor of the Fatherland, tear those pigs to shreds!”

The Groundhog tilted his head and sucked in his cheeks in amazement, as if to say, “Et tu, Brute?” Then an enormous kielbasa landed on his head and the crowd charged.

Vladimir did not witness all the weapons at their disposal, suffice to say crutches played a big part, but for him the most enduring scene of the melee, like war footage that gets played over and over again on the networks, was the sight of a plump matron in heels stabbing at Gusev’s heart with the business end of a sturgeon, shouting: “Is that hard enough for you, you crook?” while her confused victim pleaded for mercy.

And so, as old soldiers heaved metal chairs against the intruders, and sausages circled overhead like Sikorsky choppers, František hurried Vladimir toward an alternate exit to the embankment. “Brilliant!” was the single word he said, as he pushed him out into the noon light and slammed the door shut behind him.

Still full of revolutionary fervor, but now reminded of more pressing matters, Vladimir ran down the embankment chasing a departing taxi. “Halt, comrade!” he was shouting out of habit.

The taxi squealed in compliance and Vladimir heaved himself inside with a crack of something internal. “Oh, for the love of God…” He sneezed, and two gushers of blood were released, one per nostril, the way one imagines a winning racehorse lets out fire at the finish line.

The driver—a teenager by the looks of him, his shaved head tattooed with the anarchist’s goofy “A”—caught sight of this blood-bath in the rearview. “Out, out,” cried the anarchist driver. “No blood in auto! No HIV! Out!”

A stack of a hundred hundred-dollar bills hit the back of the driver’s head (Vladimir had thrown it with such force that it left a momentary red trace on that great moony surface). The driver looked down at the stash. He threw the little Trabant into gear.

The way to the airport required a quick U-turn, which a car any larger than a Trabant could not perform. In this respect, Vladimir was fortunate. In the respect that the U-turn took him straight into the Groundhog’s armada of BMWs and mafiyosi in retreat from the octogenarian Red Army, he was not.

His driver pressed on the horn dutifully and cursed as well, but with all the confusion up ahead he could not help but hit a large object, which Vladimir to his dying day would believe was Log. However, considering the glare of the afternoon sun and the blinding red flashes exploding around his corneas, he could have been wrong. It could have been a friend of the Log.

Nevertheless, the force of the impact steered the Trabant into the railing of the embankment. The Trabi, knowing a greater physical force when it crashed into one, bounced back into the street, saving Vladimir and his driver from a lapse into the river. A remarkable car, the Trabant! Such shyness and humility, such understated presence. Mother had always wanted Vladimir to marry a girl just like this Trabi.

“Car is dead!” the driver moaned, even as they made exceptional progress up the embankment and onto the bridge that snaked off from Prospekt Narodna. “Pay me!” Flustered and at the teenager’s mercy, Vladimir hit him with another ten thou, in response to which the driver pulled a confetti of wires and a single lightbulb out of the dashboard. This immediately sent the Trabant into heat: with terrific gusto and a transparent lack of regard for traffic signals they bounded through the Lesser Quarter and around Repin Hill.

A curtain of gray smoke rising from the Foot now blanketed the city, smoke as thick as the scalloped clouds one sees looking down from an airplane window. A premature night had descended upon Prava, coloring the spires and domes of the Old Town with an eerie industrial beauty.

By this point, the pain in Vladimir’s ribs was becoming acute. He broke down in a fit of coughing. There was something in his throat, a thick string of coagulated blood, and he pulled at it, pulled until the whole food chain unwrapped itself from within his stomach and landed on the driver’s bald pate.

For a second his cause seemed lost; for a second it looked like he would have to walk it to the airport. But all the driver said, in the meek, bewildered way of a proud local boy suddenly covered in a Westerner’s innards, was, “Pay me.” When the money fell alongside him, he gunned the engine once more.

Looking down at the city below them, Vladimir could see the BMW caravan making its way up the hill, one car on the heels of the next, forming a dark-blue river not unlike the Tavlata, except flowing a great deal more energetically and up the slope of Repin Hill. Vladimir shuddered, amazed at the power of the organization to which he once belonged, although a chain of luxury German automobiles was perhaps its most potent manifestation. Unless, of course, every link in that chain was strafing you with gunfire.

This happened a good ten minutes hence. The Trabant had quit the other side of Repin Hill and emerged onto the main highway leading out of the city. Vladimir was suffering from a dizzying attack of blood and tears. He was leaning his head back to keep the blood down and whispering to himself his father’s “no-tears” manifesto, when a bullet took out the back window of the Trabi. The tiny shards of glass drew fine red lines on the back of the driver’s head, complementing (rather befittingly) the tattooed “A,” symbol of the anarchists. “Ah!” shouted the driver. “Artillery is shooting to death car and Jaroslav! Pay me!”

Vladimir crept down into the pool of his own blood. The driver, Jaroslav, swerved into a no-man’s land between the guardrails and the freeway proper. The thin Trabant squeezed past a trailer truck in front of them bearing the logo of a Swedish modular-furniture company.

Shell-shocked, Vladimir crawled back up to look through the nonexistent window behind him. The Swedish furniture truck now separated their car from the Groundhog’s shooting party like some kind of ad hoc U.N. reaction force. But the Hog’s men apparently had no respect for Swedish furniture. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students, they continued to shoot as the truck swerved madly to stay on the road. Finally, their labors produced results—with an audible whoosh, the back doors of the truck blew away.

A houseful of Krovnik dining tables in assorted colors, Skanör solid-beech glass-door cabinets, Arkitekt retractable work lamps (with adjustable heads), and the daddy of them all—a Grinda three-piece sofa ensemble in “modern paisley,” came sailing out of the back of the truck and onto the flotilla of BMWs to settle once and for all the Russo-Swedish War of 1709.

THEY PULLED UP to the departure terminal. Vladimir, in a gesture of last-minute good will, threw another ten grand at Jaroslav, who slapped Vladimir’s sweat-soaked back, and, his own eyes now tearing, shouted: “Run, J.R.! One car still follows us!”

He ran, absentmindedly wiping the blood off his nose onto the already bloodied hand bandage. He slapped his passport on the desk of the half-awake security team guarding the departure gate. At that formal moment, his briefcase, stuffed with about fifty thousand dollars and a gun, came to mind. “Oh, pardon me,” said the ever-vigilant Vladimir. He hobbled over to the nearest trash can, sheepishly took out the gun, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, deposited that useless item within. “Don’t even ask about the gun,” he said to the nice, walrus-mustached gentlemen in dark green. “What a long day!”

“American?” said the security commandant, a tall individual, fit and lean, a shock of white hair beneath his beret. It was more of a statement than a question. With a minimum of malice, he told Vladimir to keep his blood-soaked hands off the spotless white counter, then stamped a childish picture of a departing plane into the passport and waved Vladimir through the gate. With ten minutes until departure, Vladimir prepared for a final sprint.

Directly behind him, Gusev and the Groundhog were running up to the security counter, buttoning up their double-breasters, straightening their ties, and shouting in Russian: “Stop the criminal in the bloodied shirt! The little criminal, stop him!”

Vladimir stopped, as if frozen by these hurtful words, but the security detail hardly turned around. “We don’t speak Russian here,” the commandant announced in Stolovan as the others laughed approval.

“Stop the international terrorist!” Gusev was hollering, still in the wrong tongue.

“Passport!” the chief hollered back at them in the international language of border police about to get more than a little surly.

“Soviet citizens don’t need passports!” cried the Groundhog, and, in a final suicidal gesture, leapt for the departure gate and Vladimir.

Vladimir continued to stand there, transfixed by the gaze in the eyes of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the crooked gaze of the same hatred, lunacy, and, in the end, hopelessness, that his father, the Fan Man, had worn like a badge… And then the eye contact was broken by so many swinging batons, well-aimed kicks in the groin, and an older man in uniform bent over the Groundhog and Gusev shouting revenge for the Soviet incursion of 1969.

“Oh, my poor people,” said Vladimir suddenly as the violence commenced. Why had he said this? He shook his head. Stupid heritage. Dumb multicultural Jew.

Among the few last passengers ascending the stairs, he did not even recognize Morgan. Foolishly, he was looking for her bright face to stand out with the luminance of a supernova, for a great, preternatural shout of “Vladi!” to shake the tarmac. Lacking all of the above, he ran nonetheless… Ran the way he was taught by Kostya and by life, ran toward her, toward the hum of jet engines, the sparkle of the sun on metal wings softly shaking, the unbearable sight of yet another landscape falling away beneath him as if none of it had ever happened.

He ran—there was not even the time to lie to himself that he would be back. And lies had always been important to our Vladimir, like childhood friends with whom one never loses an understanding.