Free Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

championship.”
    “Chess,” the Fan Man snorts, tapping the altimeter gauge. “A pursuit for idiots and layabouts. Don’t even talk to me about chess, Mama.”
    “I’m just making an example!” Mother yells. “I’m drawing parallels between the arenas of chess and life. Remember, it was I who taught him how to walk! Where were you when he was hobbling around like a Jew? Ah, but it’s always left to the mother. Who make them their Salad Olivier? Who gets them their first job? Who helps them with their college essays? ‘Topic Two: Describe the biggest problem you have ever faced in your life and how you overcame it.’ Biggest problem? I walk like a Yid and I don’t love my mother . . .”
    “It would be better if you shut your mouth,” Rybakov says. “Mamas are always meddling, always trying to give their boys theteat . . . Suck! Suck, little one! And then they wonder why their sons turn out cretins. Besides, he’s my Vladimir now.”
    Mother sighs and crosses herself in her new fashion. She turns around to smirk at Vladimir chafing away in the cargo bay, the straps of the parachute kit burning the delicate white meat of his shoulders.
    “Nu,” Rybakov shouts to Vladimir. “Ready to jump, Airman?” Beneath the aircraft, a blue grid of urban light is replacing the void of the countryside. The nascent city is bisected by a dark loop of river, illuminated solely by the lights of barges making their way downstream. The word PRAVA, glowing in neon, is spelled in giant Cyrillic characters on the city’s left bank.
    “My son is waiting for you . . .there!” The Fan Man points somewhere between the neon P and the neon R. “You will recognize him right away. He is a substantial man standing by a row of Mercedes. Handsome like his father.”
    Before Vladimir can object, the doors of the cargo bay open, and the parachutist is engulfed by the cold night air . . . The nebulous sensation of plummeting in a dream.
    I’m falling to earth! thinks Vladimir.
    It is not an unpleasant feeling.

8. THE PEOPLE’S VOLVO
    VLADIMIR AWOKE AT noon in the uptown studio of Francesca’s friend Frank. This Frank, an evident Slavophile, had decorated his room with a half dozen handmade icons of gold crepe, along with a wall-sized Bulgarian tourist poster showing an onion-domed rural church flanked by a terrifically woolly animal (baa?). Vladimir would never find out exactly what happened on that long journey uptown, how he was wheeled in past the doorman, how the apartment was requisitioned for his use, and the other details lost on the inebriated. Quite a first impression Vladimir must have made—five minutes of conversation followed by a light coma.
    But then . . . ! But then . . . On the Swede-made instant-coffee table . . . what did he find? A pack of Nat Sherman cigarettes to steal, yes . . . And next to the cigarettes . . . Next to the cigarettes there was a note. So far so good. And then on the note . . . concentrate now . . . in looped middle-class script, Francesca’s last name (Ruocco) . . . Her Fifth Avenue address and phone number . . . And, to conclude, a sympathetic invitation to drop by her house at eight and then to a TriBeCa party by eleven.
    Success.
    With shaky fingers, Vladimir lit a Nat Sherman’s cigarette, along, brown cylinder tasting of honey and ash. He smoked it in the elevator although this was the kind of newish building where smoke detectors abounded. He smoked it past the doorman, out onto the street, all the way into Central Park. Only then did Vladimir remember his original plan, the drunken plan he had formulated before he boldly took the seat opposite Francesca.
    Vladimir ran through the park. A happy run interspersed with a hop, a skip, and a jump. What beautiful feet he had! What wonderful Russo-Judeo-Slavo-Hebraio feet . . . Just right for sprinting down this bike path. Or for a grand entrance at Francesca’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Or for setting