Shylock on the Neva

Shylock on the Neva

SHYLOCK ON THE NEVA

by GARY SHTEYNGART

Issue of 2002-09-02

Posted 2002-08-26

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 Cafй, 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 Cafй. 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 an-other route.

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 in 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,

then, young man?"

"Alexander the First. No, wait, the Second."

"The great reformer. And what kind of art are you interested in, Mr.

Painter? These days, I'm afraid, it's all showmanship, like that

unfortunate Muscovite who goes around the world pretending he's a dog."

"No, I don't like him at all," Chartkov confessed. "I'm a realist. I

paint what I see. Social justice for the common man, that's what I

like." And he proceeded to mumble some hodgepodge of Western art theory

and comfy Russian chauvinism. "Of course, it is the Jews who have

brought Russia to her knees," he whispered, interrupting his work to

light a nearby candle in honor of a dead Romanov.

"And do you have a lady friend?" I asked.

He betrayed his twenty-four years by blushing crimson and throwing his

gaze in the four major directions, finally settling his eyes on the

sketch of two whores, both provincially pretty, yet one unmistakably

older than the other; one, in fact, quite old, a telltale trail of

life's third set of wrinkles forming a Tigris and Euphrates on her

forehead.

"A mother-daughter act," Chartkov explained. "They're from Kursk

Province. A sad story." Sad, but rather typical. I will omit the

particulars, except to add that both mother and daughter were graduates

of some local polytechnic institute. "Very cultured people," Chartkov

said. "Elizaveta Ivanovna plays the accordion and her daughter, Lyudmila

Petrovna, can quote the major philosophers."

His use of their patronymics was strangely touching—I knew immediately

what he wanted to do; after all, it is the only path our young

Raskolnikovs can follow. "I will save them!" he said.

"Presumably it is the daughter you fancy," I said.

"Both are like family to me," said Chartkov. "When you meet them you see

how they cannot live without each other. They are like Naomi and Ruth."

I chose to let this comparison stand. "My dear Chartkov," I said. "I

would certainly like to make their acquaintance. You see, perhaps there

is something I can do to better their position."

Chartkov examined me through his dopey thirty-ruble glasses. "I hope you

do not mean to hire them," he said.

"Good heavens, no," I assured him. And then I proposed we cut short our

session and have dinner with his whorish friends.

On the way to the National Hunt club, Alyosha, my well-greased source at

the Interior Ministry, called to warn me of a deadly Godzilla roll set

to poison me at the Kimono Japanese restaurant on Bolshaya Morskaya. I

changed our dinner plans in favor of the infamous Noble's Nest, by the

Mariinsky Theatre, while helping Chartkov empty a small bottle of cognac

in the back seat of the Mercedes, a car to which he warmed immediately.

"I compare it to the troika of yore," the monarchist said without any

irony, wiping his little mouth with my favorite handkerchief.

The National Hunt was all but empty at this time of day, with only four

drunk officers from the Dutch Consulate passed out at a back table by

the empty roulette table. Despite the lack of an audience, Elizaveta

Ivanovna and her daughter, Lyudmila Petrovna, were up on the makeshift

stage grinding against two poles to the sound of Pearl Jam. They looked

remarkably like the sketches Chartkov had drawn. Immediately, I was

reassured about the whole enterprise, about the innate talent I believed

Chartkov possessed, and about my own hopes for immortality.

Mother and daughter resembled two sisters, one perhaps ten years older

than the other with naked breasts pointing downward, a single crease

separating them from the little tummy below. The mother was imparting to

Lyudmila her theory that the pole was like a wild animal which one had

to grasp with one's thighs lest it escape. The daughter, like all

daughters, was shrugging her off, saying, "Mamochka, I know what I'm

doing. I watch special movies when you're asleep."

"You're a dunderhead," the mother said, thrusting to the sound of the

ravenous American band. "Why did I ever give birth to you?"

"Ladies!" Chartkov cried out to them. "My dear ones! Good evening to

you!"

"Hi, there, little guy," mother and daughter sang in unison.

"Ladies," said Chartkov. "I would like to introduce you to Valentin

Pavlovich. A very good man who only today has given three hundred

dollars to my landlord."

The ladies appraised my expensive shoes and stopped writhing. They

hopped down from their poles and pressed themselves against me. Quickly,

the air was filled with the smell of nail polish and light exertion.

"Good evening," I said, brushing my dark mane, for I tend to get a

little shy around prostitutes.

"Please come home with us!" cried the daughter, massaging the posterior

crease of my pants with a curious finger. "Fifty dollars per hour for

both. You can do what you like, front and back, but, please, no

bruises."

"Better yet, we'll go home with you!" the mother said. "I imagine you

have a beautiful home on the embankment of the River Moika. Or one of

those gorgeous Stalin buildings on Moskovsky Prospekt."

"Valentin Pavlovich runs a bank," Chartkov said, shyly but with a

certain amount of pride. "He has offered to take us to a restaurant

called the Noble's Nest."

"It's in the tea house of the Yusupov mansion," I said, with a pedantic

air, knowing that the mansion where the loony charlatan Rasputin was

poisoned would not make much of an impression on the ladies. Chartkov

managed a slight, historic smile and tried to nuzzle the daughter, who

favored him with a chaste kiss on the forehead.

[pic]

It is no secret that St. Petersburg is a backwater, lost in the shadow

of our craven capital Moscow, which itself is but a Third World

megalopolis teetering on the edge of extinction. And yet the Noble's

Nest is one of the most divine restaurants I have ever seen—dripping

with more gold plating than the dome of St. Isaac's, yes; covered with

floor-to-ceiling paintings of dead nobles, to be sure. And yet, somehow,

against the odds, the place carries off the excesses of the past with

the dignified lustre of the Winter Palace.

I knew that a fellow like Chartkov would rejoice. For people like him,

educated members of a peasant nation catapulted into the most awkward

sort of modernity, this restaurant is one of the two Russias they can

understand—it's either the marble and malachite of the Hermitage or a

crumbling communal flat on the far edge of Kolomna.

Chartkov began weeping as soon as he saw the menu, and the whores

started sniffling, too. They couldn't even name the dishes, such was

their excitement and money lust, and had to refer to them by their

prices—"Let's split the sixteen-dollar appetizer, and then I'll have the

twenty-eight dollars and you can split the thirty-two. Is that all

right, Valentin Pavlovich?"

"For God's sake, have what you wish!" I said. "Four dishes, ten dishes,

what is money when you're among friends?" And to set the mood for the

evening I ordered a bottle of Rothschild for U.S. $1,150.

"So, let's talk some more about your art," I said to Chartkov.

"You see," said Chartkov to his women friends. "We're talking about art

now. Isn't it nice, ladies, to sit in a pretty space and talk like

gentlemen about the greater subjects?" A whole range of emotions, from

an innate distrust of kindness to some latent homosexuality, was playing

itself out on Chartkov's red face. He pressed his palm down on my hand.

"Chartkov is doing those nice paintings for us," the mama said to me,

"and we're going to use them for our Web page. We're going to have a Web

page for our services, don't you know?"

"Oh, look, mama, I believe the two 'sixteen dollars' are here!"

Elizaveta Ivanovna cried, as two appetizers of pelmeni dumplings stuffed

with deer and crab arrived, both dishes covered by immense silver domes.

"We're talking about art like gentlemen," Chartkov said once more,

shaking his head in disbelief.

[pic]

The evening progressed as expected. We drove to my apartment, taking in

the sight of the city on a warm summer night—the sky lit up a false

cerulean blue, the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress bathed in

gold floodlights, the Winter Palace moored on its embankment like a ship

undulating in the twilight, the darkened hulk of St. Isaac's dome

officiating over the proceedings. Here was our Petersburg—a magical set

piece of ruined mansions and lunar roads traversed by Swedish tourists

in low-slung, futuristic buses—and we all had to sigh in appreciation

for what was lost and what remained.

Along the way, we took turns hitting the driver with birch twigs,

ostensibly to improve his circulation, but in reality because it is

impossible to end an evening in Russia without assaulting someone. "Now

I feel as if we're in an old-fashioned hansom cab," said Chartkov, "and

we're hitting the driver for going too slow. Faster, driver! Faster!"

"Please, sir," pleaded my driver, a nice Chechen fellow named Mamudov,

"it is already difficult to drive on these roads, even without being

whipped."

"No one has ever called me 'sir' before." Chartkov spoke in wonderment.

"Opa, you scoundrel!" he screamed, flailing the driver once more.

I got the call from Alyosha, my well-placed source at the Interior

Ministry, and instructed Mamudov to avoid the Troitsky Bridge, where a

prospective assassin awaited my motorcade by the third of the cast-iron

lamps. Why do so many people want to kill me? I'm a good man and, it

should be clear by now, a patriot.

Back home it was the usual seraglio—my Murka in a half-open housecoat

was dancing with herself in front of the wall-length dining-room mirror;

the Canadians had fed crack cocaine to my cook, Evgeniya, and the poor

woman was now running around the house screaming about some dead peasant

Anton, crying black tears over her wasted fifty years. The North

American culprits themselves were sprawled around the parlor listening

to my collection of progressive-house records, recently airlifted out of

Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district.

As soon as they caught sight of the mother and daughter, the two

Canadian boys and the one Canadian girl understood the unique sexual

situation before them. Chartkov began to protest and cry against this

"inhumanity," reminding the Canadians that the mother played the

accordion and the daughter could quote Voltaire at will, but I quickly

took him into my study and closed the door. "Let's talk about art," I

said.

"What will become of my girls?" the painter asked. "My poor Elizaveta

Ivanovna and Lyudmila Petrovna," Chartkov said, eying the multitude of

English and German volumes that graced my bookshelves, abstruse titles

such as "Cayman Island Banking Regulations," annotated, in three

volumes, and the ever-popular "A Hundred and One Tax Holidays."

"Enough of this whimpering," I said. "Chartkov, do you know why I hired

you to execute my painting?"

"Because you slept with my sister Grusha," Chartkov surmised correctly,

"and she recommended me to you."

"Yes, initially so. But over the weeks I've come to appreciate you as,

mmm, a Christ-like figure. And I use the term loosely, because our

language has become as impoverished as our country and it's often hard

to find the right term, even if you're willing to pay hard currency for

it. See now, you alone can paint a picture of me, Chartkov, that will

guarantee my immortality. The problem is, it has to be real. Not this

General Suvorov nonsense. I mean, what next? Will you portray me in a

tricorne hat, riding a white mare to victory? Let's be realistic. I'm a

young moneylender, aging swiftly and, like all Russian biznesmeny, not

too long for this world. Also, in case you haven't noticed, I have dark

hair and a broken nose."

"But I want to make you better than you are," Chartkov said. "I want to

restore Christian dignity to your battered soul and the only way to do

so is . . . the only way—" I could tell his attention was occupied by

the piercing Russian "Okh, okh, okh!" coming from the parlor,

accompanied by some heartless Canadian grunting.

"That's precisely what you don't want to do," I said. "I'm a sinner,

Chartkov, and I am not too proud to admit it. I am a sinner and as a

sinner you shall paint me! Look deep into my hollowed-out eyes, try on

my disposable Italian suit, smoke from my musty crack pipe, befoul my

summer kottedzh on the Gulf of Finland, stuff yourself with my deer-and-

crab pelmeni, whip my manservant, Timofey, until he begs for his life,

wake up next to my ruined provincial girlfriend. And then, Chartkov,

paint exactly what you see."

Chartkov wiped some more of his infinite tears and helped himself to a

bottle of sake that I now pressed into his hand. "Will this get me

drunk?" he asked shyly, examining the strange Asiatic lettering.

"Yes, but you mustn't stop drinking it even for a second. Here, it goes

with this marinated-squid snack. And in return for your work, of course,

I will pay you, Chartkov, pay you enough for you and your Ruth and Naomi

to live a comfortable life forever. Perhaps you can even 'save them,' if

that's indeed still possible."

"Eight thousand dollars!" Chartkov cried out, grasping at his fragile

heart. "That's what I want!"

"Well, I would think considerably more." I was, in fact, expecting to

spend at least U.S. $250,000.

"Nine thousand, then!" Chartkov cried. "And I shall paint you just as

you like! With horns and a yarmulke if you so desire!"

What could I say? If only I had been a Jew there would have been no need

for Chartkov's services. Our Jews are steeped in familial memory and

even when they die, for instance when their Lexus S.U.V. gets blown off

a bridge by a well-armed rival, they remain locked in the dreary

memories of their progeny, circling over the Neva River for eternity,

dreaming of their herring and onions. I, on the other hand, had no

progeny, no memory, and really very little chance of surviving this

country of ours for more than a few more months.

Why deceive myself like the rest of my New Russian compatriots? My

wealth notwithstanding, Chartkov's was the only eternity I could afford.

"Well put, Chartkov," I said. "So we are in agreement. And now let us

not keep our company waiting. I shall send Timofey out to fetch an

accordion. That way the beautiful Elizaveta Ivanovna can entertain us

with her other talents."

"God bless you, Valentin Pavlovich!" cried Chartkov, pressing my hand to

his cheek.

[pic]

The next afternoon I woke up with the usual tinnitus in my left ear, a

series of duck flares going off in my peripheral vision. The crack-

cocaine pipe—the "glass dick," as the Canadians had called it—stared at

me accusingly through its single eye. My pillow was covered with

alcoholic slobber and what looked like little crack mites dancing their

urban-American dance. Meanwhile, coiled up next to me, my Murka was

making tragic whistling sounds in her sleep, shielding herself from

phantom childhood punches with one upraised skinny arm.

It was a fine moment to be a St. Petersburg gentleman. I called Timofey

on the mobilnik and he came ambling in from the next room, already

dressed in his morning frock. "Did you deliver the painter Chartkov to

his digs?" I asked of him.

"Yes, batyushka," said Timofey. "And a great one he was, that painter.

Soused, like a real alkash, and easy with his fists, like my dear dead

Papa. I had to carry him up to his flat, and once I laid him out on the

divan he started hitting me with his belt. Then we had to get on our

knees and pray for a good half hour. He kept shouting 'Christ has

risen!' and I had to reply 'Verily, he has risen!' Such people I do not

understand, sir."

"The ways of artists are beyond us, Timofey," I said. "And did you give

him nine thousand dollars in ninety consecutive bills of a hundred

dollars each?"

"That I did, batyushka," said Timofey. "The painter then took off all

his clothes and touched himself in many places with the American

currency, while whispering batyushka's name most reverently. I was so

scared, sir, that I spent half the night in the alehouse."

"You're a good manservant, Timofey," I said. "Now go tend to our

Canadian friends while I spend the day frolicking about."

I meant what I said about frolicking. Being a modern moneylender is not

a difficult occupation. Armed with computers and bookkeepers and hand

grenades, I find the work pretty much takes care of itself. My most

pressing duty is showing up at the biznesmenski buffet at the T Club

every Thursday and glowering across the swank airport-lounge dйcor at my

nearest competitors, the ones that keep trying to blow me off the

Troitsky Bridge.

On this warm summer day, the Neva River playful and zippy, a panorama of

gray swells and treacherous seagulls, I walked over the bridges to the

Peter and Paul Fortress. But unless one gets very excited about third-

rate Baroque fortifications, there's really nothing to see, so instead I

followed a group of young schoolchildren. In their own way, the children

were sublime: destitute in their lousy Polish denim and Chinese high-

tops, scarred with acne and low self-esteem, members of the world's

first de-industrialized nation but still imbued with our old cultural

deference, a Petersburg child's mythical respect for Dutch pediments and

Doric porticoes. I watched them fall silent as the tour guide intoned

about an occupant of the fortress's ramshackle prison, a revolutionary

who once wiped away his tears with Dostoyevsky's handkerchief, or some

other such luminary.

Can it really be true, as the sociological surveys tell us, that only

five years hence these tender shoots will forsake their cultural

patrimony to become the next generation of bandits and streetwalkers? To

test this theory, I looked into the face of the prettiest girl, a dark

little Tatar-cheeked beauty with a pink, runny nose and flashed her my

standard Will-you-sell-your-body-for-Deutsche-marks? smile. She looked

down at the monstrous Third World clodhoppers on her feet. Not yet, her

black eyes told me.

Saddened by our children's plight, I doubled back over the Palace Bridge

and pushed through the long line of sweaty provincial tourists at the

Hermitage, shouting all the while about some obscure Moneylender's

Privilege (droit du dollar?). I wangled a self-invented Patriot's

Discount out of the babushkas at the box office by pretending I was a

veteran of the latest Chechen campaign, then ran straight up to the

fourth floor, where they keep all the early-twentieth-century French

paintings.

I stood before Picasso's portrait of the "Absinthe Drinker" and

marvelled at the drunk Parisian woman staring back at me. How many

Soviet years have we wasted here on the fourth floor of the Hermitage,

looking at these portraits of Frenchmen reading Le Journal, pretending

that somehow we were still in Europe. In our musty felt boots we stood,

staring at Pissarro's impressions of the "Boulevard Montmartre on a

Sunny Afternoon" and then, out the window, at our own dirt-caked General

Staff building, its pale semi-circular sweep forming the amphitheatre of

Palace Square. If we squinted our eyes, or, better yet, took another nip

out of our hip flasks, we could well imagine that the General Staff's

delicate arch was somehow a portal onto the Place de la Concorde itself,

its statue of six Romanesque horses harnessed to Glory's chariot really

an Air France jetliner ready to sail into the sky.

And, let me ask you, For what all that suffering? For what all those

dreams of freedom and release? Ten years later, here we were, a hundred

and fifty million Eastern Untermenschen collectively trying to fix a

rusted Volga sedan by the side of the road.

You know, it was best not to think about it.

So I returned my gaze to Picasso's absinthe drinker and this time

discovered a previously elusive truth. The drunk Parisian had not been

staring at me all those years, as I had romantically, egotistically

supposed, but solely at the blue bottle of absinthe, her face radiating

as much slyness as despair, a careful contemplation of the heavy poison

before her. I do not know a great deal about Western art theory, but it

seemed possible to me that this woman, this absinthe drinker, had what

the American louts at the Idiot Cafй called "agency."

Cheered on by my deductions, I sneaked a mouthful of crack cocaine in

the men's room, then sailed out of the Hermitage, through the arch of

the General Staff building, and out into the hubbub of Nevsky Prospekt.

I wanted very much to buy a warm Pepsi for eight rubles, just like the

common people drink, and a piece of meat on a skewer. But, as I

approached a food stand manned by a fierce babushka wearing what

appeared to be a used sock on her head, my mobilnik vibrated with a text

message from my friend Alyosha at the Interior Ministry: "Beware the

meat skewers of Nevsky."

[pic]

The next few weeks were manna. I drank, I smoked, I wrestled with warm-

bodied Canadians. I came down with an awful itch in that conclusive

place we all talk about, but what can you do? And then I got a call from

the painter Chartkov. "Patron!" he cried. "Your likeness is almost

ready!"

I had not expected such haste. "But we haven't even had another

sitting," I said.

"Your physiognomy is imprinted on my brain," Chartkov said. "How can a

moment pass when I do not think of my savior? Please, let me stand you

for a drink at Club 69, and then we'll examine what I call 'Portrait of

the Raven-Haired Moneylender; or, Shylock on the Neva.' I know you'll be

pleased with me, sir."

I agreed to an immediate viewing, and summoned Timofey to fetch the

cars. Could it be? My mortality giving way to an oily doppelgдnger's

everlasting life?

Anyone who can afford the three-dollar cover charge—in other words, the

richest one per cent of our city—shows up at Club 69 at some point

during the weekend. This is without doubt the most normal place in

Russia, no low-level thugs in leather parkas, no skinheads in swastika T-

shirts and jackboots, just friendly gay guys and the rich housewives who

love them. It brings to mind that popular phrase bandied about at the

Idiot Cafй: "civil society."

Chartkov showed up, wearing a colorful sweatshirt several sizes too big

and imprinted with the logo of the Halifax Nautical Yacht Club. He'd

grown plumper in the last few weeks and shaved off his flaxen goatee to

reveal a little hard-boiled egg of a chin. "Looking good, Mr. Painter,"

I said.

"Feeling good," he said. "Hi, Zhora." He waved to a slinky boy behind

the bar filling a bucket with grenadine. "How's life, cucumber?"

"Zhora's going to Thailand with a rich Swede," Chartkov said to me.

"Let's go upstairs," he added, "and I'll buy you a hundred and fifty

grams of vodka. Oh, how we'll celebrate!"

We sat beneath a statue of Adonis and watched a submarine captain trying

to sell his young crew to a German tour group. The seventeen-year-old

boys, sporting heroic cosmonaut faces and hairless scrotums, were

awkwardly trying to cover their nakedness, while their drunken captain

barked at them to let go of their precious goods and "shake them around

like a wet dog." I suppose civil society has its limits, too.

"Look what I bought today at Stockmann," Chartkov shouted. "It's a

Finnish hair dryer. It has three settings. And look at the color!

Orange! I'm going to do a lot of work with orange now. And also lime.

These are the colors of the future. Is there an electrical outlet here?

This machine not only blow-dries your hair; it sculpts it."

"What about your lady friends?" I said. "Lyudmila the philosopher and

her mother with the accordion. Weren't you going to save them?"

"You know," Chartkov said, handing me a vodka from a passing tray, "you

can't really save somebody until they want to save themselves. In the

past few weeks I've been peeking around the English bookstore on the

Fontanka. There's this one volume on how to deal with people, 'Hand Me

My Cheese!,' or something of the sort, that has made a great impression

on me. The problem with the modern Russian is that he is not . . . Ah,

what's that word? He is not 'proactive' enough."

"Also, he is frequently drunk," I added, raising my glass. "That's

another problem. Well, here's to us modern Russians. May God save us

all!"

"God won't save us until we save ourselves," cautioned the former

monarchist. "We've got a lot of work to do in this country. We've got to

start by looking seriously at our 'core competencies'—"

I grabbed Chartkov by the shoulders. "Enough," I said. "Let's go to your

house."

Chartkov blanched. "Please, sir," he said. "I am not a pederast. I

merely come to Club 69 for the atmosphere."

"The painting!" I said. "I must see it at once."

"Very well," Chartkov said. "But I paid three dollars a head for the

entrance fee, so together it is six—"

"Look here, painter," I said. "If your rendering is as good as I think

it is, I'll give you another nine thousand U.S. dollars on the spot!"

"We must hurry then!" Chartkov cried.

[pic]

The hallway of Chartkov's communal flat was littered with paint cans,

and spent bottles of Crimean port wine. "I bought the whole floor of the

building for seven thousand U.S. dollars from that awful Armenian,"

Chartkov explained, "and the first thing I did was throw the dying

soldier and his whole invalid family out on the street. That'll teach

them to blacken the name of the Russian painter, may the Devil take them

all! When this place is finished, I want to create a multimedia studio.

I met this French guy at Club 69, and together we're going to offer

painting seminars and a hatha-yoga clinic—"

"Just please hurry!" I cried as we raced through the long communal

hallway.

The painter opened the door to his old room.

The first thing I saw was my own jutting lower lip, the one that had

given me the nickname Flounder in Pioneer camp; then my eagle nose bent

at several junctures from years of schoolyard beatings and domestic

scrapes; then my hazy dark eyes, two dim ovals set way back into my

skull; then my arms thick and corded, bulging with implied violence, one

raised to strike my manservant, another hovering over my lap to protect

myself from life's intimate dangers.

My skin was yellow and black in places, my forehead crossed by a

monumental green vein. I was caught off center, staring joylessly into

an empty corner of the canvas, where the painter had added his own

initials.

He had me, Chartkov. He had done well, the poor idiot. There were some

excesses, to be sure: I was sporting a pair of Hasidic side curls, while

a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" floated incongruously in

the background, a ten-ruble note sticking out in the form of a bookmark.

There was no point in telling Chartkov that I was, in fact, not a

Judaist; rather, a mixture of Greek and some kind of Siberian mega-

Mongol. If he was inspired to paint me in this manner, so be it.

"Here's what you must do, Chartkov," I said.

"What is it?" said the painter. "Should I put on some Pearl Jam? Fetch

my patron some tea?"

"Just add a little detail," I said. "Paint a mobilnik pressed to my

ear."

"Of course," the painter said. "It will be done first thing in the

morning! Oh, but now my mind is filled with questions of an embarrassing

nature—"

"Timofey will bring you another nine thousand U.S. dollars," I said.

Chartkov threw his arms around me and wept convulsively. His body felt

thin and reedy compared with my own. I smelled American herbal shampoo

on him, along with the stench of stale Parliaments. "If you wish," he

whispered in my ear, "you may also take me from the back."

[pic]

I woke up the next morning to the familiar cellular vibrations in my

pocket. Alyosha, at the Interior Ministry, was warning me of a

prospective assassination on Leninsky Prospekt. The day had come. I

kissed sleeping Murka goodbye, leaving her the number of a colleague who

would treat her no worse than I had. I climbed past the Canadians in the

parlor and ordered my driver to set off for the southern suburbs.

I had spent my entire adolescence on Leninsky Prospekt. A wide Soviet

boulevard filled with nineteen-seventies apartment blocks that might as

well have landed from the Andromeda galaxy—long, cumbersome rows of

flats, a grayish, intergalactic color, flanked by ten-story towers on

which the words "Glory to socialist labor!" and "Life wins out over

death!" used to lord over us in fantastic block letters.

As soon I got out of the car, my phone rang once more. A strangled sound

emerged from the earpiece. On the far edge of the Kolomna district, in

the studio of the painter Chartkov, my immortal double was calling out

to me. He was singing a childhood song in a boy's sweet voice,

breathless with Leningrad asthma:

Let it always be sunny,

Let there always be Mommy,

Let there always be blue skies,

Let there always be me.

I breathed in the real and imagined smells of Leninsky Prospekt, the

factory coal fumes, the Arctic frost, the black exhaust of my mother's

cardboard cigarettes. Two figures emerged from behind a burned-out milk

stand and approached me. I stood there waiting for them, my hands

protectively cupping myself but my jacket open and my tie askew. I did

not say a word to them. What was there to say? I heard them clicking

their rounds into place, but my gaze fell elsewhere. I was mesmerized,

as always, by the orange-yellow aurora of pollution hanging over the

horizon of the contrived city, that juncture where snow banks and

apartment towers meet to form nothing. [pic]

) лит. Шейлок 2) бессердечный, жадный ростовщик