Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online

near-holy belief at that. And whatever grace was imparted to him in those few years before the first German Panzer Division crossed the border, I want to believe in it, too.
    “If the war hadn’t happened,” my father says, “my parents would have had two, three children.” Rarely, but sometimes, the differences between us collapse as quickly as the Soviet Union’s defenses on June 22, 1941. Like my father, I am also an only child.
    “Your mother and I should have had another baby,” my father says of that absence. “But we didn’t get along in America.”

    Hitler betrays Stalin and invades the Soviet Union. Stalin is horrified by this breach in schoolyard-bully etiquette and holes up in his tree house outside Moscow, where he suffers a nervous breakdown. He is about to fuck up so completely that it will take twenty-six million Soviet death certificates to save civilization from collapsing. At least two of those death certificates will bear the last name of Shteyngart.
    The Germans are advancing upon Leningrad. My grandfather Isaac is sent to the front to hold them back. For 871 days, the siege of that city will take 750,000 civilian lives, its starving residents forced to feast on sawdust; their pets; at worst, one another. Here my story almost ends. But as with so many of us foreigners clogging the subways of Queens and Brooklyn, a single twist of fate keeps our kind shuffling along. Before the Germans surround the city, Grandma Polya’s Children’s Home is evacuated from Leningrad. She, along with my three-year-old father, Semyon, and his cousins, is sent to a dark, freezing village called Zakabyakino in the Yaroslavl Region, some four hundred miles to the east of Leningrad. To the Russian ear “Zakabyakino” has the ring of “Hicksville,” and to this day, my father will refer to all remote, farcical places—e.g., the Catskill Mountains, the state of Ohio—by that name.
    The first memory of my father’s life? The evacuation from Leningrad, with the German air force in hot pursuit. “We were on a trainand the Germans would bomb us. We would hide under the train wagons. The Messerschmitt planes had this sound, ZUUUUU … WOO … WOO.” My father, an emotive speaker, raises his hand, his knuckles dusted with fine hairs, and drops it in a slow but decisive arc to mimic the bombing run as he does the Messerschmitt sound. ZUUUU …
    In Zakabyakino, the survivors of the Messerschmitt bombings, my father included, are met with relative good fortune: They do not starve. There is milk and potatoes in the village. There are also fat country rats, which crawl in with my father and cousins with the intent of eating the slim Leningrad children as they sleep on the stove. To escape them, one of my aunts jumps out of a second-floor window.
    My aunt jumping out of the window to flee the rats is my father’s second childhood memory.
    My father has a best friend his age. A non-Jewish kid named Lionya. When he is three years old, my father’s best friend dies of some unspecified war-related disease. This is my father’s third memory: Lionya’s funeral. My father tells me of Lionya’s existence during the spring of 2011. “Lionya,” short for “Leonid,” is a fairly unremarkable Russian name, but in my first novel, published in 2002, the childhood friend of the novel’s hero, Vladimir Girshkin, happens to be Lionya, and indeed, he is one of the few truly sympathetic people in the book (together Vladimir and Lionya share a batch of Little Red Riding Hood candies given by Vladimir’s mother and fall asleep side by side on a Soviet kindergarten mat). In my third novel, published in 2010, “Lionya” is the Russian name of one of the two main characters, Lenny Abramov. Without knowing who he was, I have spent half my life honoring Lionya in prose.
    The fourth memory: February 1943, the news arrives from the front, my father’s father, Grandfather Isaac, has been killed near Leningrad. The Soviet troops, my