Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online Page A

grandfather among them, make several attempts to break the blockade of Russia’s second city, but they are outgunned, their most talented officers having already been shot dead during Stalin’s purge. It is unknown how Isaac Semyonovich Shteyngartdied. For decades I was told he died in a tank, burned alive in a gruesome but heroic gesture to stop the Germans, but that is untrue. My grandfather was an artillerist.
    After her husband is killed, Grandmother Polya buries herself in work at the Children’s Home and refuses to acknowledge her husband’s death. Like so many women with death certificates, she continues to wait for him until after the war.
    At age five, my father is one of the millions of Russian children who cannot fully comprehend the man missing from the household. A few years later when the war is over he finally
does
understand. He hides under the couch, and he cries and thinks of a man he does not know. Later, when he discovers classical music, when he hears Tchaikovsky, he will cry to that, too. Under the couch, he listens to Tchaikovsky through his tears and hatches plots that will allow him to go back in time and assassinate Hitler. Still later, Grandmother Polya is remarried to a man who will all but destroy my father’s life and make me into whatever it is I am today.
    My life begins with a much-mimeographed piece of paper: “To Citizen Shteyngart P. [Grandma], NOTIFICATION, Your husband Sergeant Shteyngart Isaac Semyonovich, fighting for the Socialist Motherland, true to his military oath, evincing heroism and courage, was killed 18 February 1943.”
    Somewhere in distant Yaroslavl, little Lionya is buried.
    My grandfather’s body lies in a soldier’s grave near Leningrad, which is to say, closer to home.
    And the Germans, they are always massing. And Stalin, he is still cowering at his tree house near Moscow. And the Messerschmitt pilots, they know their targets well. ZUUUUU … WOO … WOO.

    Father.
    What are you doing?
    What are you saying to me?
    Who is speaking through you?
    “I read on the Russian Internet that you and your novels will soon be forgotten.”
    Staring ahead at me like an angry, wounded child, then laying his gaze down, as if scared of it, on his prix fixe dish of something truffled. We are at the View, the revolving restaurant of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Dinner at the Marriott plus a $200 gift certificate to T.J.Maxx, the inexpensive clothing store, is my mother’s dream birthday gift.
    “Yes,” my mother says, “I read that, too. It was ____.” She cites the name of a blogger. My parents have not read my latest book, but they know the name of the blogger in Samara or Vologda or Astrakhan or Yaroslavl who says I will soon be forgotten.
    Do you want me to be forgotten, Father? Do you want me closer to you?
But I do not say the obvious. “Look.” I turn to my mother. “It’s the Hudson River. And beyond it, those lights—New Jersey.”
    “Really?” My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me. Each time I see her now, her hair is younger and spunkier, sometimes bobbed, sometimes teased, and her pretty face stands up to the sixty-seven years it has known with youthful bluster. She will not let go of life as easily as my father will.
    “That’s Four Times Square,” I say, trying to deflect my father’s crooked stare. “The Condé Nast Building.
The New Yorker’s
offices are there, as well as many other magazines.”
    “A ranking of New York writers came out on the Internet,” my father says. “You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick”—
The New Yorker
’s editor—“was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch”—one of the magazine’s brilliant staff writers—“was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.”
    “Semyon, stop,” my mother says.
    “What?” my father says. “
Ya shuchu
.” I am joking.
    “
Shutki!
” he says, loudly. Jokes.
    “No one understands