Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier - Softcover

gary shteyngart

Shylock on the Neva

I awoke one day to a phone call from the painter Chartkov, a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, a lean, sallow fellow with a flaxen goatee and the overearnest expression of the Slavic intellectual — yes, we all know the kind of person I’m talking about. Bloodshot eyes? Porcupine hair? Uneven bottom teeth? Great big potato nose? Thirty-ruble sunglasses from a metro kiosk? All of it.

How did I wake up? I felt a sexual vibration in my pocket and realized I had fallen asleep with my pants on, my mobilnik still lodged next to that conclusive organ everyone cares so much about. “Af,” I said to the painter Chartkov. What else can one say under these conditions, this damn modernity we all live in? May it all go to the Devil, especially these tiny Finnish phones that nuzzle in your pocket all night.

“Valentin Pavlovich,” the young painter’s voice trembled.

“Oh, you bitch,” I said. “What time is it?”

“It’s already one o’clock,” the painter said, then, realizing he was taking too many liberties with me, added, “Perhaps, after all, if it’s not too much of a bother, you will still come and sit once more for your portrait as we have previously arranged.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” I said. “Well, why don’t I wash myself first? Isn’t that how the civilized people do it, in Europe? They wash first, then they sit for a portrait?”

“Mmm, yes,” said the painter. “I— You see, I honestly don’t know. I’ve never been to Europe. Only to Lithuania, where I have an uncle.”

“Lithuania,” I said. “All the way to Lithuania? Such a worldly artist you must be, Chartkov.” I instructed him to await my arrival patiently and then turned off the phone. Do I sound unkind? A typical New Russian? Well, let me assure the reader: I’m a very nice person, but on this particular day I was feeling a little out of sorts, a veritable crab.

The culprit was crack cocaine. On the previous night, I had the pleasure of meeting three Canadians at the Idiot Café, two boys and one girl. They had been brave (and idiotic) enough to bring a few rocks of the stuff into our drug-addled city and we adjourned quickly to my house to smoke it.

It was my first time! Bravo, Valentin Pavlovich! What was it like? Not so bad, much like going into a dark, warm room, where, at first, some pleasant things happened, a steady tingle to the nether regions, a flood of happy tears and gay sniffling, and then some very unhappy sensations, probably having to do with the miserable past we all share, the youthful beatings by parents and peers, and the constant strain of living in this Russia of ours. Yes, these are the sorts of things one babbles about the morning after he puffs on the crack pipe — “Russia, Russia, where are you flying to?” and all that Gogolian nonsense.

I retired to the parlor, and discovered that the Canadians were still there. They were sprawled out on the divans, lost beneath thick worsted blankets my manservant, Timofey, must have thrown over them. I could make out the shape of the Canadian girl — twenty-one years old, and with legs and thighs as powerful as a horse’s — and hear her piercing snore. In the West, even the drug addicts are healthy and strong. I considered falling in love with the girl, just for some extra Canadian warmth in the morning. But what foreign girl would want me? They’re very psychologically adept, these girls, nothing like ours, and I can’t fool them with my money and good English.

So I went back to my bedroom to see my cheap, fatalistic Murka, still asleep, coughing her way through the midday slumber, her pincerlike legs folded up. Poor girl. I rescued her from some collective farm on a biznes trip to the provinces a few years back. She was seventeen, but already covered in pigshit and bruises. On the other hand, you should have seen how quickly she installed herself in my flat in Petersburg and fell into the role of rich, urban girlfriend — asleep most of the day, drugged out at night, weepy and sexless in between. To see Murka with a shopping basket and a charge card at the Stockmann Finnish emporium on Nevsky Prospekt, yelling brutally at some innocent shop clerk, is to understand that elusive American term “empowerment,” the kind of thing the foreigners teach you at the Idiot Café. I kissed Murka tenderly, washed myself as well as I could and called for Timofey to dry me off. My manservant, a big Karelian peasant, beat me with a twig to improve my circulation and then strapped me into an Italian lamb’s-wool suit jacket, the kind that makes me look ten years older than my age and fat into the bargain. Oh, what a business is fashion!

Timofey brought around the usual convoy — two Mercedes 300 M S.U.V.s and one S-class sedan, so as to form the letters M-S-M, the name of my bank, for, you see, I am something of a moneylender. As we took off for Chartkov’s neighborhood, the call came through from Alyosha, my well-bribed source at the Interior Ministry, warning that a sniper was set to pick me off at the English Embankment. We took another route.

c c c

Chartkov lived on the far edge of the Kolomna district. I hasten to paint a picture for the reader: the Fontanka River, windswept (even in summer), its crooked nineteenth-century skyline interrupted by a post-apocalyptic wedge of the Sovetskaya Hotel; the hotel surrounded by rows of yellowing, water-logged apartment houses; the apartment houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks housing a bootleg-CD emporium; the ad-hoc Casino Mississippi (“America Is Far, but Mississippi Is Near”); a burned-out kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab salad; and the requisite Syrian-shwarma hut smelling of spilled vodka, spoiled cabbage, and a vague, free-floating inhumanity.

Chartkov shared his communal quarters with a slowly dying soldier just returned from Chechnya, the soldier’s invalid mother, his two invalid children, and an invalid dog. The painter’s studio was at the very rear, his front door covered with a poster of the American superband Pearl Jam. When I arrived, Chartkov was busy being thrown out of his room by a squat Armenian landlord in a filthy nylon house gown. Remember how I described Chartkov at the outset? The great big potato nose? The flaxen goatee? Well, picture the same nose now dappled with luxuriant Russian tears, the flaxen goatee moist with dread, the red-rimmed eyes working double time to produce these ample waterworks. “Philistine!” Chartkov was screaming at the landlord. “How can you throw a painter out on the street! It is we artists who have introduced Russia to the world! We who wield the brush and the pen! We gave the world Chekhov and Bulgakov and Turgenev!”

“Those were all writers!” the dying soldier screamed, peeking out of his little hole, his invalid children clutching his leg braces as he made long stabbing motions with his crutch. “What painters has Russia given the world?” he shouted. “Throw the scoundrel out, I say!”

“Yes, indeed,” the landlord said. “If you walk through the Hermitage, it’s all Rembrandts and Titians. Nary an Ivan in sight. Now, if you were a writer . . .”

The painter almost choked on his considerable tears. “No painters?” he cried. “What about Andrei Rublyov? What about the famous Ilya Repin?” he cried. “What about ‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’?”

“Is that the one where the little doggie is in the boat and he’s standing up on his hind legs?” the landlord asked, twirling his mustache thoughtfully.

Being a patriot and wanting to spare Chartkov any further embarrassment, I decided to intervene. I proceeded to ask the Armenian the amount he was owed, and was duly informed that it was eight months’ rent, or U.S. $240. I called my Timofey, who ran up with three U.S. hundred-dollar bills, and then I told the landlord that no change was needed, at which point everyone in the flat gasped, crossed themselves three times, and retreated to their miserable quarters.

I was left alone with the young painter. Chartkov turned away from me, buried his face in his hands, brushed aside his tears, and sighed in a heartbreaking fashion — in other words, did everything possible to avoid thanking me for my generosity. He shuffled into his room, where an old flower-print divan from Hungary, the kind intellectual families favored during the Soviet era, proved to be the only furniture in his possession. A series of incomplete portraits of what seemed to be whores from the National Hunt strip club were scattered about the room, each girl’s smile vicious and true to life.

“Here’s what I’ve drawn thus far,” he said. He showed me a full-sized sketch, my dour, opaque face staring back at me with all the bravado of a General Suvorov, my dark hair bleached to a Slavic yellow, in the background an M-S-M Bank sign in old-fashioned Cyrillic characters — I looked ready to fight the Turks at Chesme, instead of my usual daily battle with the hash pipe and the tricky zipper on my khakis. Such nonsense!

He motioned me to the divan and proceeded to apply charcoal to paper. “So you’re a fan of old Ilya Repin,” I said. “Is that what they teach you at the Academy these days? A little reactionary, no?”

“I’m a m-m-monarchist,” Chartkov muttered, scowling for no reason.

“Now, there’s a popular position for a young man these days,” I said. Oh, our poor dispossessed intelligentsia. Why do we even bother to teach them literature and the plastic arts? “And who’s your favorite tsar, th...