Little Failure (54 page)

With my first novel about to be born in the late spring of 2002, I feel my life shifting irrevocably; all those tectonic plates that once shuddered against each other are finally aligning to make a permanent surface upon which I can grow plants and herd cattle. It gets easier. But there’s something my analyst knows that I don’t: This burst of sheer joy will not last long. Already, the mechanisms at my disposal are working to revert myself back to the mean, to the unhappiness, to the drinking. A particularly cruel and personal review finally comes by way of the West Coast and that is the one I savor, the one I draw comfort from, the one I memorize. But this will not be my worst review by far.

The phone rings in my West Village duplex, with its childish triptych of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stretching along an entire wall, with its sense of a happy new couple trying out life together. Another terrific early review has just landed on my laptop, and tonight we are going to my favorite sushi restaurant, on Hudson Street, to celebrate. The day before, David Remnick, the editor of
The New Yorker
and my father’s future nemesis, had called me personally to ask if I could write an article on Russia for the venerable magazine.

I pick up the phone eager for whatever else the world can provide me.

It is my father’s voice. “
Mudak
,” he says. My mother’s howling takes up the rest of the conversation.

The Russian word
mudak
stems from the ancient term for “testicles,” and in a rural sense connotes a castrated piglet. In a modern sense it is perhaps closest to the American “dickhead.” In my father’s arsenal of words I know that it is the nuclear option, and that’s what it feels like when he says it: like being deposited in the middle of
Threads
or
The Day After
. Dead trees are whistling around me; a bottle of milk is melting on my doorstep. “
Attack warning red!
” “Is it for real?” “Attack warning is for bloody real!”

Mudak
. Added to Snotty and Weakling and Little Failure, this may be the final word to grace the tombstone of our relationship. Because while the hurt is still thrumming in my ear—
why can’t you be proud of me in my finest moment to date?—
I am back on my psychoanalyst’s couch trying on the new words I’ve just taught myself.

I am not a bad son.

Through the howling coming at me from across the East River, I discern the source of my parents’ anger, the
mudak-
inciting pain. A Jewish newspaper has sent a reporter to meet my parents in their natural habitat and in her subsequent article has suggested that my parents somewhat resemble the hero’s parents in my novel.

“We don’t ever want to speak to you again,” my mother is shouting at me.

If you won’t speak to me, it is better not to live!

Those are the traditional expected words on my end. But what I say instead is: “
Nu, khorosho. Kak vam luchshe
.” Well, that’s fine. Do as you please.

And that stops the howling. And that makes them backtrack, if not apologize. But it is too late. The
razvod
has been signed and notarized, not between my mother and my father but between them and me. I will continue to see them and love them and call them each Sunday night, as mandated by Russian law, but their opinions of me, the fanged hurt of their own childhoods, will not rend my world asunder, will not send me to the nearest bar, will not be unleashed upon the woman I share my bed with.

But then there’s also this. My mother, a financial administrator at a New York nonprofit, the hardest-working person I have ever known, dutifully going over a letter with me over the phone while I’m at Oberlin, making sure those nefarious articles are in place. “Igor, is it ‘We have submitted budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993,’ or ‘We have submitted
the
budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993’?”

“Submitted
the
budget,” I say, literally rolling my eyes, holding the phone away from me as if I am speaking to a younger version of myself. “I have to go, Mama. Irv is here. We’re going to [light up a spliff and] see a movie.” But how can I, the Red Gerbil of Solomon Schechter School, not recognize what it’s like to be ashamed of what comes out of my mouth, or, in my mother’s case, what is painstakingly typed beneath the letterhead of her agency? “Mama, your English is so much better than the Americans who work with you,” I say to her. “You really don’t need my help.”

But she does. And now I’ve published a book that mocks, gently, but sometimes not so gently, a set of parents that are not entirely dissimilar from my own. What does that feel like for them? What does it feel like to pick up a book, or an article in a Jewish newspaper, and not fully understand the subtlety, the irony, the
satire
of the world depicted
therein? What does it feel like to be unable to respond in the language with which that mockery is issued?

And as I’m suing for my
razvod
, how can I also not celebrate my parents, my exes? After all, they could not have known that all these years I had been sitting there with the only thing truly at my disposal, the only thing truly mine. My notebook. Taking notes. “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”
^†
—Czesław Milosz.

My father’s favorite saying to me: “Maybe after I die, you will come pee on my grave.” It is supposed to be sarcastic, but what he’s really saying is “Don’t let go.”

“Don’t let go of me.” Because sometimes it may seem like I have. Because instead of my fighting back, instead of my indignation, what he hears is silence.

When he tells me that one of my postcollege girlfriends is too fat, that he’s personally affronted by her weight, although he does “respect her right to exist,” there is silence.

When my mother tells me, before I am to go off on a trip to India, that I shouldn’t get any vaccines “because they will give you autism,” that canard of the extreme right wing, there is silence.

Silence instead of the yelled rebuttals, the peeing on the grave, which they’re used to, which feels familiar and pee warm. “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual,” my father said when I told him I had started psychoanalysis. Beyond the post-Soviet distrust of the practice—mental hospitals were used by the Soviet state against its dissidents—there is another fear. You can fight with your gay son, tell him he is a disgrace in your eyes. And he will fight back, will beg for your love. But what do you tell someone who is silent?

And within that silence, time itself has stopped. Within that silence, the words hang in the air, fluttering in Cyrillic, not entirely painless but without the power to bring back the small, unquestioning child at their mercy.

Don’t get any vaccines. They’ll give you autism. Don’t write like a self-hating Jew. Don’t be a
mudak.
Soon you will be forgotten
. How can I not hear the pain in that?
His
pain?
Her
pain? How can I not publicize that pain?

And how can I not travel, across eight time zones, to its source?

Author and Lenin rekindle their bromance on St. Petersburg’s Moscow Square
.

I’
M BACK IN
R
USSIA
. It is June 17, 2011, the temperature is cold and gloomy, but with some outlandish bursts of warmth. In other words the temperature and the way I feel about the country of my birth are one and the same. Since my first return to Russia in 1999, I’ve been back almost every other year, dutifully taking down everything I see, categorizing each kernel of buckwheat and pale sheet of salami, testing myself by walking into the Chesme Church where the maquettes of gallant eighteenth-century Turkish and Russian fighting ships once faced off in their eternal Anatolian battle. I’ve shared vodka shots with weeping policemen in Haymarket Square, slipped on innumerable
patches of ice, nearly been sliced in half by a Georgian ruffian; in other words, done all the things one normally associates with a trip to the former Soviet Union.

I am on the morning’s first speedy train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The train is called the Sapsan, named for the mythical peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest animal, and designed by the equally mythical engineers of Siemens AG. I am hungover to the point where even the gentle German rocking of the Falcon brings on serious flashes of nausea. In the past few years I’ve been careful about my drinking. But on the night before my current Moscow-Petersburg journey, spurred on by that most lubricated of creatures, an aging Russian intellectual, I drank myself to the point where I wedged myself into the cupboard of a Moscow bar. I remember a pleasant young American television executive working on some suspicious-sounding international project telling me, “Wow, you really
do
drink like a Russian.”

Afterward, blankness, the flash of a hipster hotel on a trendy island off-shore from the Kremlin, a hundred-dollar last-minute cab to the train station, and here I am in the
biznes
-class carriage of the Falcon, a thirty-eight-year-old man about to start writing his first memoir. Which is what brings me to St. Petersburg in 2011. Even as I am inching my way between Russia’s two biggest cities, my parents are charting their path across the Atlantic. My mother has not been to Russia in twenty-four years, since her mother died, and my father in thirty-two years, or from the time he left the Soviet Union in 1979.

We are all coming home.

Together.

A wind whips the Falcon into the station. It is early summer, but the St. Petersburg skies are gray, that unremitting gray of upstate New York in winter. The days are almost at their longest, the light is flat and cruel; soon, there will be no real sunset. At night, by moonlight, the sea wind sends the Finnish clouds on secret missions over the city.

I’ve booked two sleek hotel rooms across from the train station near Uprising Square for me and for my parents, but when I show up, tired and haggard from my insomniac trip to Moscow (its purpose: an article about a Muscovite magazine called
Snob
), I am told my room isn’t ready. To my exhaustion is added a strand of fear. What if I don’t get any sleep before my parents arrive? They have come at my request, have traveled to a country they don’t particularly want to remember. Over the years I’m the one who’s returned so many times, have penned so many nightmarish scenarios about the place, and now I’m the one who has to protect them. But from what? From memory? From skinheads? From the treacherous wind? All I know is that I need to be my best for them. My mother is in her mid-sixties and my father in his early seventies. By Russian standards, they are already advanced pensioners. Finally given the room key, I plop down on all that cheap blond wood, large TV flashing images of all the other properties owned by the hotel chain, which, par for the global course, is based in Minneapolis but administered out of Brussels. Two tidy Ativan tablets touch the tip of my tongue, and the usual ragged, unsatisfying, chemical sleep approaches.