Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online Page B

your
shutki
,” my mother says.
    Aunt Tanya, ready to ingratiate herself with me, has her own opinion.“Yes, they say you will soon be forgotten, but many writers aren’t acknowledged until after their death.”
    My father nods. His work here is almost finished. “And tell Remnick that if he doesn’t stop writing bad things about Israel, I will be forced to write a letter to
The New Yorker
.”
    “Look,” I say, pointing at a skyscraper just coming into view. “That eagle! It’s Barclays Bank. Remember how our first bank checks in America had that eagle on them?”
    My father’s gaze is upon me. Trying to gauge my reaction; trying to figure out what to say next.
    Let me stop for a moment. What is it like to be him right now? What does he see through his brow-heavy stare? His son. A stranger. Ordering truffled things from the menu. With his Obama and his Remnick, the haters of Israel. My father has been to Israel for only seven days, but he loves it as obediently as anyone who doesn’t understand his young lover, who sees only her slinky dark shape, the curve of her settlements. In the third-floor attic where my father lives—the spacious second floor has long been surrendered to my mother—life is punctuated by the boom of the classical records and the drone of extremist rabbis on the radio. How did his son travel so far from there? Isn’t it his duty to stay by his father?
    After each teardown, after each discussion of Internet rankings and blogs, after each barrage of insults presented as jokes, my father finishes with, “You should call me more.”
    My son. How could he leave me?
    I am looking down to see part of the floor moving around the restaurant’s core. A dullard at physics, I don’t understand how this works exactly: why this part of the floor is gently turning and the other part is perfectly still. I picture a team of sweaty, harnessed immigrant men in the basement of the Marriott making the skyborne restaurant revolve. “The soprano Galina Vishnevskaya has died,” my father says.
    “Ah.”
    “I went to the same musical school in Leningrad as her. Theyruined her voice, and they ruined my voice, too. They made me a bass instead of a baritone.”
    It’s about him now. About his opera career, the one he gave up to become, like most Soviet Jewish men, a mechanical engineer. It’s not about me. I breathe easily. At another recent dinner my father had put his arm around me, his face so close to mine that the whites and grays of his goatee nearly touched the grays of my stubble, and said: “I burn with a black envy [
chyornaya zavist’
] toward you. I should have been an artist as well.”

    The weekend after the Marriott dinner, I call them from the rural house where I spend half the year, trying to work. “The French Internet says your book is one of the best of the year!” they shout.
    “They love you in France!” my father says.
    I don’t want to hear anything about the Internet, bad or good, but suddenly we’re laughing. We’re talking about my father’s design work on what would become the world’s biggest telescope in 1975, a telescope that, like most Soviet products big and small, died on arrival. “Oh, how many Hero of Socialist Labor awards were given for that damn thing, and it didn’t work!” my father says. This is our little world, Soviet satire, failed empires, ridiculous dreams. I am filled with longing for them, for their company. I’m smiling and snug under the covers, the first dusting of December snow out my window, thick, clean country snow.
    Down and up. Up and down. I am forgotten. I am remembered. I am number thirty. I am beloved in France. What is this? This is parenting. The parenting he knew, the parenting he gave. It is familiar and safe. Safe for some of us.
    A few weeks before, at another family gathering, my father leans over the small woman who is now my wife and begins one of his “life on the farm” monologues. “When I was young, I kill sheep.