Free Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart Page A

two children, a boy and a girl, who are shrunken down to the size of a kopeck and have to fend for themselves against giant mosquitoes and the like. The second book, the one responsible for everything else that has ever happened to me, is called
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese
. In the book, Nils, a bad boy prone to hitting the animals on his farm, is also magically shrunk down to a kopeck and then has to brave an adventurous life with the wild geese who carry him all over Sweden, to Lapland and back.
    The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
by Selma Lagerlöf—incidentally, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—is a Swedish book, much loved in that country. It is no coincidence that the two books from which I learned how to read were both about small children shrunk to even smaller size and then forced into a hostile world. The lesson, at least to me, was clear: Bad boys don’t grow. And according to the
All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development
, which my mother studies religiously, with its diagrams of naked drawn boys of ever-ascending size with their ever-enlarging nutsacks, I am also not growing very well, in either corpus or sack. In every respect, I am a small
thing
full of limitations. When my aunt Tanya brings me my favorite ice cream, I get up and very seriously declare: “Thank you, but no. I am not allowed to eat it.”
    In the Soviet Union
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
is a fine book for a five-year-old, although in the United States the dense one-hundred-sixty-page volume would likely be assigned in fifth grade and, in some states, in college. The biggest regret of my childhood is missing the television airing of the 1950s Soviet adaptation of thebook, called
The Enchanted Boy
. It is the first time I take a pencil to paper and, with the help of my father, write a letter to the broadcaster, Channel One, on the devilishly tiny-squared, graph-paper
tetradka
that every Russian child knows well.
    Respected Channel One
,
    I am a Leningrad boy, age 5. Last week you showed
The Enchanted Boy. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese
is my favorite book. I have read it so many times I have to use masking tape to hold it together. I cried when I found out you have already shown
The Enchanted Boy.
Please, please show it again. I really want to see it
.
    With respect
,
    Igor Shteyngart, City of Leningrad
    My father and I walk past the pharmacy, past the Lenin, to drop the letter into a mailbox. I feel very close to my father at the moment. Holding his hand, I am jumping up and down with excitement, even though I might get sweaty and sick from all the jumping. When we get to the mailbox, my father folds the piece of paper bearing my childish scrawl in half and throws it in, without postage or address. At the time, I both know
and don’t know
that the letter will never reach Channel One in Moscow. I am both hopeful
and
I know better than to be hopeful. But what does my father know? That the paramount state broadcaster will not reair the story of Nils and the geese just because a five-year-old boy with an insufficient nutsack demands it? Or that soon we will leave the country for good, and there will be no Channel One in the free world; there will be, eventually, seven holy channels in the New York metro area—channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13—and even more if we purchase a UHF bowtie.
    Back on the Culture Couch in 1977, I am rereading Nils asthmatically, letting enough air into my lungs so that I may hear the actual words spoken aloud by me, imagining that they are being spoken aloud on the television set. My grandmother Galya joins me. I have two grandmothers. Grandma Polya, on my father’s side, likes to sitwith me on our favorite bench in Moscow Square and feed me various meats. She will come with us to America and be my best friend for a long time. Grandmother Galya, unbeknownst to me, is slowly descending into vascular dementia. She is the main reason my mother doesn’t