Little Failure (47 page)

My output is a story a week or a batch of poems. I write as soon as I wake up, the hangover still pulsing in the damaged front of my brain, to the
thwacka-thwacka
sound of roommate Irv’s first vigorous masturbation. I write before coffee; I write with Big Blue gurgling in
the corner; I write like a child who needs to prove something. The Oberlin creative writing department takes me on, takes me in. There is a professor called Diane Vreuls (such a strong Dutch last name), tall and striking, approaching retirement, who gets what I’m doing. In her tiny cramped office in the basement of the building that resembles the first three floors of the World Trade Center, she points out a passage where one of my characters crawls through the woods. “How does he crawl, Gary?” she asks. And then she gets down on all fours, and, with all six feet of her plus the gray halo of long hair, she crawls every which way. And I get it. And I understand how it’s done. How the words convey the world around me and the world trapped inside me.

I am walking on water. Yes, that’s what writing can do. I am walking across the Atlantic Ocean at a diagonal, looping up the English Channel, making hash of the Danish archipelago, sliding up the Baltic Sea, down the Gulf of Finland. “Well, we know where we’re going,” David Byrne is singing on the stereo, “but we don’t know where we’ve been.”

I am going to Moscow Square, to Tipanov Street, but what I don’t know how to do yet is to go beyond my childhood courtyard with its sooty black pipe and rusty rocketship.

To the Chesme Church. To the helicopter launching pad. Up, up, into the air and between the spires.

I write with J.Z. cross-legged across the bed from me, buried in statistics and psychology textbooks. Years later, she will become a healer, just as she promised herself.

I’m desperately trying to have a history, a past. I’m flooding myself with memory, melancholy and true. Every memory I repressed at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, where I pretended to be a good East German, is coming back to me. I write about eating
pelmeni
dumplings with my mother by the mermaid statue in Yalta. I write about the mechanical chicken I used to play with in the Crimea.
About the girl with the one eye in our first apartment in America, the one who played Honeycomb license plates with me. I proudly use words I just picked up, words like “Aubusson,” writing next to it, in parentheses, “French rug.” I stick the Aubusson into a kind of literary action story called “Sundown at the International,” complete with “jet-black Sikorsky helicopters.” Fifteen years later, that story will be expanded into the novel
Absurdistan
.

Sometimes my writing sucks, but sometimes it strives for the truth and it works. My parents are fighting across its pages. I am learning English. I am learning to be second-class. I am learning
Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
. Faced with an American pizza parlor, my “mother instructs me to order a pizza with meat on it so that I’ll have a complete meal.” My imagination is allowed to roam in all directions, even ones that fail (
especially
ones that fail). I hand in a truly strange character sketch of Nikita Khrushchev celebrating a lonely seventieth birthday on a collective farm. I write about my grandmother’s fictional meeting with Pope John Paul II.

And then it all comes to a halt.

Oberlin imports a hot young teacher, a disciple of the guru editor Gordon Lish, famous for his editing of Raymond Carver and his grueling $2,600 workshops back east. Every story I hand in comes back with “Gary, I know what Gordon would say about this story so let me save you $2,600.” At first, I don’t give a fuck what Gordon would say, and, given Oberlin’s impressive tuition, my parents (and the federal government) have paid way more than $2,600 for this class anyway. But the teacher wears skimpy outfits—a tiny floral spaghetti-strap number in the middle of the Ohioan winter—and she breaks our flannelled hearts with each and every workshop. I want to please her badly. So I begin to write in the terse, indecipherable bullshit-mysterious style that Gordon Lish, somewhere in Manhattan, is clearly asking of me. “The
shuka
is in the pot.” Whatever that means. Several of my classmates decide to quit writing once the semester is over, which, subconsciously, may be the goal of the entire Gordon
Lish program, to reduce beginners to nothing, to clear the decks of those who would disobey the master. On certain cold days, I unwittingly fall into a Hebrew school prayer on the way to class, rocking back and forth to keep warm, chanting, “
Sh’ma
Oberlin, Gordon Lish
Eloheinu
, Gordon Lish
Echad
.” (Hear, O Oberlin, the Gordon Lish is our God, the Gordon Lish is One.) But it doesn’t help. The spaghetti-strap teacher tells me what I am writing is not literature, although she does have more hope for me than the other students because “I have a better understanding of grammar.”

The Lish professor is there only for a semester, and then I am returned to Diane. It takes me a while to recover. Diane is tough with me but also patient and kind. More important, she knows how to laugh with every inch of her six-foot-long Dutch-Serb body, ridiculous laughter, Eastern European laughter. People who think literature should be
Serious—
should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will never take off—are malevolent at best, anti-Semitic at worst. Within Diane’s welcome embrace I stop writing “The
shuka
is in the pot.” I return to the work at hand. I plow on Napoleon-like toward Moscow Square and then toward Moscow itself.

There is an exchange program with the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite institution that once educated the Soviet Union’s future diplomats. Moscow is not St. Petersburg (hometown patriots might say it is the opposite), but Moscow is
really
Russia, by which I mean Asia. It is my holy truth.

I am all set to go to Moscow for my junior year, to reclaim the Little Igor inside me.

And then the women in my life tell me no.

My mother is scared of Russia in 1993. Yeltsin’s tanks firing at the parliament building. Chechnya getting ready for full-scale war. Gunfights in broad daylight. In the decade since we’ve emigrated, my parents have never said one good word about the country, other than to
praise its many bearded writers and creamy Eskimo ice cream. The Internet as we now know it is not yet a fact, but Mother presents me with a Xeroxed wire piece about some hapless student thrown to his death out of the window of a Moscow University dorm.

I write a story called “Three Views from the Avenue of Karl Marx,” an earnest homage to my uncle Aaron and the labor camps. My professor tells me to send it off to
The New Yorker
, nearly precipitating a happy heart attack on my part. Am I really that good? My mother reads it, sighs, and tells me, “That’s not how it happened.” The details are all wrong.

I am heartbroken. Oddly enough, the pain feels similar to being called a Red Gerbil in Hebrew school. There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction. When the inevitable rejection slip comes from
The New Yorker
, I decide I have to go back to Russia to get the details right.

But then there is the other woman.

J.Z. understands that I need Russia for my stories. But she doesn’t want to lose me for a year. We are just getting started. We are so very much in love. And so I have a choice: my writing or, possibly, my girlfriend.

It is not even a choice.

Fuck Russia. I will spend a semester with J.Z. in then-trendy Prague.

These sentences appeared in my first novel,
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
. Needless to say, Prava is a kind of Prague, and Vladimir, the hero, is a kind of me. When I saw those Soviet bloc apartment buildings,
paneláks
in Czech (literally “prefabricated panel housing”), out of the window of a bus from Prague’s airport, J.Z.’s hand clasped in mine, I knew I wanted to write a novel, and I knew what it would be about. When you’re twenty-one there really is only one subject. It appears in the mirror each morning, toothbrush in hand.

The semester in Prague was my reconnaissance mission. In practical terms, I learned nothing, not even Czech, which should have been fairly easy for a Russian speaker. Maybe I learned that a half draft of pilsner spilled over a plate of onions and cheese and then sopped up with thick country bread could make me happy.

Along the way, some things happened that happened also in my novel. In a small village north of Prague, I was nearly beaten to a pulp by Czech skinheads who mistook me for an Arab. I was saved by my New York State driver’s license and my American Express card, proof of my non-Arabian nature. (In the novel, my hero, Vladimir, gets the beating from which I escaped, and then some.)

Then there were some things that happened
nearly
as they did in my novel. Jealous after J.Z. had danced with an Australian or an Israeli, I drank myself so stupid that I found myself crawling along the tram lines to our dormitory, my death forestalled only by the ferocious nighttime clang of the number 22 tram and the intervention of an equally drunk Czech policeman.

And then there were some things that didn’t happen in the novel at all. On Buda Hill, overlooking the bulbous and overdone Hungarian parliament building, J.Z. stared into my camera lens, her black hair
picked up by the wind, the combination of Armenian and southern Wasp features finally settling into something undeniably Eastern European, the smile that wasn’t, the pale beauty that was.

A cold, rainy, muddy, miserable day in late May. The Oberlin College commencement exercises of 1995. Two-thirds of the manuscript of what will be my first novel is under my arm. I am happy and I am scared. J.Z. and I are breaking up. It is not anyone’s fault. She wants to return to North Carolina. I want to be in New York, where I mistakenly think another love will quickly swoon into my arms.

But I don’t want to end my Oberlin story there. Let me go back a year. There is a dorm called South, which, as I’ve mentioned, resembles a lost terminal of Newark Airport. This is where I’ve just had an asthma attack, my first in five years and the worst one of my life.

It’s been several weeks since I’ve checked out of Oberlin’s pitiful hospital, several weeks since J.Z. held the phone clamped to her ear, my mother relaying to her my health insurance information as I struggled to breathe in my sweaty little dorm bed; the two women in my life, their Russian and southern accents, my mother’s awful exactness, J.Z.’s love and fear.