Little Failure Read Free Page B

and these words are truer and sadder than any in my life. Why a few days more?
Why not right now?
My father. My hometown. My Leningrad. The Chesme Church. The countdown has already begun. Each moment, each meter of distance between us, is intolerable.

    It’s 1999. Three years after my panic attack at the Strand Book Annex. I’ve returned to my Petersburg, née Leningrad, née Petrograd, for the first time in twenty years. I am twenty-seven years old. In about eight months, I will sign a book deal for a novel no longer called
The Pyramids of Prague
.
    But I don’t know that yet. I’m still operating on the theory that I will fail at everything I try. In 1999 I am employed as a grant writer for a Lower East Side charity, and the woman I’m sleeping with has a boyfriend who isn’t sleeping with her. I’ve returned to St. Petersburg to be carried away by a Nabokovian torrent of memory for a country that no longer exists, desperate to find out if the metro still has the comforting smells of rubber, electricity, and unwashed humanity that I remember so well. I return home during the tail end of the Wild East days of the Yeltsin era, when the president’s drinking bouts vie for the front pages with spectacular acts of urban violence. I return to what, in looks and temperament, is now a third-world country in steady free fall, every childhood memory—and there were fates worse, far worse, than a Soviet childhood—soiled by the new realities. The accordion-style bendy bus on the way from the airport has a hole the size of a child between its two halves. I know this because a smallchild nearly falls out when the bus lurches to a halt. It takes me less than an hour after landing to find a metaphor for my entire visit.
    By day four of my return I learn that my exit visa—foreigners in Russia must have a permit both to enter and
leave
the country—is incomplete without a certain stamp. A good third of my homecoming is spent hunting for this validation. I find myself boxed in by gargantuan Stalin-era buildings in the middle of Moskovskaya Ploshchad, Moscow Square, the exact neighborhood where I lived as a child. I am waiting for a woman from a questionable visa service so that I can bribe a hotel clerk with a thousand rubles (about thirty-five dollars at the time) to have my visa properly authenticated. I am waiting for her in the scruffy lobby of the Hotel Mir, “the worst hotel in the world,” as I will call it in my
Travel
+
Leisure
article a few years later. The Hotel Mir, I should add, is exactly down the street from the Chesme Church.
    And without warning I can’t breathe.
    The world is choking me, the country is choking me, my fur-collared overcoat is pressing down on me with intent to kill. Instead of Tony Soprano’s “ginger ale in my skull” I am subject to an explosion of seltzer and rum across my horizon. On my seltzer-and-rum legs I wobble over to a new McDonald’s on the nearby square still crowned with Lenin’s statue, the square where my father and I used to play hide-and-seek beneath Lenin’s legs. Inside the McDonald’s I try to find refuge in the meaty midwestern familiarity of this place.
If I am an American
—
hence invincible—please let me be invincible
now
! Make the panic stop, Ronald McDonald. Return to me my senses
. But reality continues to slip away as I put my head down on the cold slab of a fast-food table, weak third-world children all around me dressed in party hats celebrating some turning point in little Sasha’s or Masha’s life.
    Writing about the incident in
The New Yorker
in 2003, I surmised: “My panic [attack] was an off-shoot of my parents’ fear twenty years ago: the fear of being refused permission to emigrate, of becoming what was then called a
refusenik
(a designation that brought with it akind of jobless state-sanctioned purgatory). Part of me believed that I would not be allowed to leave Russia. That
this—
an endless cement square teeming with unhappy, aggressive