Little Failure Read Free

promptly kicked off the premisesand had to live in a kind of underground hut, where a puny three-year-old Ukrainian boy also tried to play with my rooster, with similar consequences. Hence, the only words I know in Ukrainian:
“Ty khlopets mene byesh!”
(“You boy are hitting me!”) We didn’t last too long in the underground hut either.
    I suppose I was a tightly wound kid that summer, both excited and confounded by the sunny southern landscape before me and by the sight of healthier, stronger bodies bouncing around me and my broken rooster in their full Slavic splendor. Unbeknownst to me, my mother was in the middle of a crisis herself, wondering whether to stay with my sick grandmother in Russia or leave her behind forever and emigrate to America. The decision was made for her in a greasy Crimean cafeteria. Over a bowl of tomato soup, a stout Siberian woman told my mother of the senseless beating her eighteen-year-old son had endured after his conscription by the Red Army, a beating that had cost him a kidney. The woman took out a photo of her boy. He resembled a moose of great stature crossbred with an equally colossal ox. My mother took one look at this fallen giant and then at her tiny, wheezing son, and soon enough we were on a plane bound for Queens. Roosterovich, with his sad limp and beautiful red wattle, remained the only victim of the Soviet military.
    But whom I really missed that summer, the reason for my violent outburst against all manner of Ukrainians, was my real best friend. My father. Because all those other memories are just cue cards for an enormous stage set that has long evaporated along with the rest of the Soviet Union. Did any of this really happen? I sometimes ask myself. Did Junior Comrade Igor Shteyngart ever really huff and puff his way across the shoreline of the Black Sea, or was that some other imaginary invalid?
    Summer 1978. I lived then for the long line to the phone booth marked by the word LENINGRAD (separate phone booths for different cities) to hear my father’s voice crackle dimly against every technological problem the country was experiencing, from a failed nuclear test in the Kazakh desert to a sick braying billy goat in nearby Belorussia.We were all connected by failure back then. The whole Soviet Union was just fading out. My father told me stories over the phone, and to this day I think my hearing is the most active of my five senses because I would strain to hear him so acutely during my Black Sea vacations.
    The conversations are gone, but one of the letters remains. It is written in my father’s clumsy childish script, the script of a typical male Soviet engineer. It’s a letter that survives because so many people wanted it to. We are not an overly sentimental people, I hope, but we have an uncanny knowledge of just how much to save, of how many wrinkled documents a Manhattan closet will one day hold.
    I am a child of five in a subterranean vacation hut, and I am holding in my hands this holy scribbled letter, the Cyrillic dense and filled with crossed-out words, and as I am reading I am speaking the words aloud, and as I am speaking them aloud I am lost in the ecstasy of connection.
    Good day, dear little son
.
    How are you doing? What are you doing? Are you going to climb the “Bear” Mountain and how many gloves have you found in the sea? Have you learned to swim yet and if so are you planning to swim away to Turkey?
    A pause here on my part. I have no idea what these sea gloves are and only a dim recollection of “Bear” Mountain (Everest it was not). I want to focus on the last sentence, the swimming to Turkey one. Turkey is, of course, across the Black Sea, but we are in the Soviet Union, and we obviously cannot go there, either by steamship or by doing the butterfly stroke. Is this subversive on my father’s part? Or a reference to his greatest wish, the wish that my mother relent and let us emigrate to the West? Or, subconsciously, a connection to the