cotton boxers, was feeding a hardcover book into the giant fan, its remainders flying out the window and onto the snow-covered quadrangle.
“Die, Pasternak, die!” he was shouting.
“Hey, Bob,” Jerry Shteynfarb casually said, “what do I do with the toaster oven?”
“Toss it!” Alyosha-Bob shouted. “The fuck I gonna use it for? I’m never eating again. Hey, look at this, guys. Fucking
“Right on,” said Shteynfarb and, without any compunction, hurled the toaster oven out the window, his weak literary arm straining under the metallic load.
“Hey, guys,” I said. I blew my nose against my coat sleeve. “Hey. Why you throwing everything out the window?”
“Because every
“We’ve each taken three tabs of acid,” Vladimir Girshkin explained, his eyes dark and blank beneath his tortoiseshell granny glasses. “And now Bob is getting rid of all his worldly belongings.”
“Oh,” I said. “Maybe he’s a Buddhist.”
“Oh,” said Shteynfarb. “Maybe he’s not. Maybe he just wants to say fuck-all to everything for no reason. Does everything have to be systematized for you, Misha?”
Alyosha-Bob had turned his dilated pupils my way and challenged me with a skinny red index finger. “You’re Snack Daddy,” he said, using the nickname I had managed to acquire through my dining hall exploits. I stood in awe of his near-naked splendor, the way he appeared perfectly sane and competent even as he presided over the demise of all the beautiful things his parents must have bought him. This was a new kind of Jew, a super Jew, one divorced from the material world.
“You’re Queasy Bob,” I said. “I’ve seen you around the Honor Scholars’ Library.”
“I know about you,” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re the son of that refusenik Boris Vainberg. You’re the real deal. You’re like a part of history.”
I smiled at all three designations. “No, I’m not so big a person as you think,” I said. “I am just…” I stopped to pick through my vocabulary. “I am just…I am just…”
“You heard him, he is just,” Vladimir Girshkin said.
“Misha the Just,” Jerry Shteynfarb said.
“Snack Daddy the Magnificent,” Girshkin picked up.
I looked sadly at my compatriots. Three Russians from Leningrad. Striving for the attention of a solitary American Jew. Why couldn’t we do better by each other? Why couldn’t we form a team to assuage our loneliness? One day I had offered Girshkin and Shteynfarb some homemade beet salad and a loaf of authentic rye bread from the local Lithuanian-owned bakery, but they had only laughed at my nostalgia.
“I am just a student of history,” I told Alyosha-Bob.
“Say, Bob, whaddaya want to do with this?” Vladimir Girshkin said as he picked up a framed photograph of a sweet, dimple-faced Alyosha-Bob huddled beneath his impossibly beautiful mother, an Assyrian princess in hoop earrings, her lustrous hair held back by chopsticks, and his father, a Yankee professor adrift in a corduroy suit one size too large. Later, I would spend my summers with the Lipshitzes at their upstate New York farm, watching them administer their stunningly profitable business, Local Color. They catered to wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians who would rent out their spread for weddings. During the ceremony, they would be joined by the local townspeople, the local color, as it were—articulate, poor black and white families who would show up and pretend to be longtime friends of the bride or groom, talking in their catchy, bebop dialects about failed crop cycles and the demise of the rust belt. I learned much about the unhappy state of the American family from my summers with the Lipshitzes, especially about the use of silence as a corrective tool.
“Break the glass,” Alyosha-Bob said of the framed photo, “then shred the picture in the fan and throw the frame out the window.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” said Vladimir Girshkin. He picked up a paperweight of St. Basil’s Cathedral that had been sitting peaceably amid the junkscape of Alyosha-Bob’s desk and started smashing the family portrait, the jarring noises drowned out by the twirl of the industrial fan.
“Should I shred your clothes before throwing them out?” Jerry Shteynfarb asked, rustling through a huge pile of rugged outerwear.
“Give me my coat,” Alyosha-Bob said.
He put on a pair of baggy denims and a hoodie, a prescient evocation of the gangsta-rap phenomenon that was just starting to spill out of South Central, while Shteynfarb fixed him with his snide authorial gaze. I wondered if Shteynfarb had taken the acid at all; possibly he was here only to observe Alyosha-Bob, to gather material for his unfunny short stories chronicling the differences between Russians and Americans. “Your coat?” Shteynfarb said. “What the hell for?”
“I want to go for a walk with Misha.”
“But we’re throwing all your stuff out!” Girshkin shouted. “You promised us.”
“Carry on without us, boys,” Alyosha-Bob said. “We’ll be back before sunup. And then we’ll all go to the Pen and Pencil for breakfast. How ’bout that?”
Before the disappointed Russians could answer, Alyosha-Bob had escorted me out onto the quadrangle, which was now covered with a pile of his shredded books and broken records, forming a collage around the twisted form of his rowing machine and the dark remains of his stereo. Girshkin and Shteynfarb were still following orders, dutifully tossing out the smashed carcass of an Apple Macintosh computer and a lovingly slashed beanbag.
Alyosha-Bob and I trundled rhythmically through the snow, walking in no prescribed direction but stealing occasional happy looks at each other. “Queasy Bob,” I said. “Why, if I may ask, are you dispensing with all of your personal effects? Are you indeed a Buddhist?”
“I’m not anything,” he said, breathing hard against the cold. “But I want to be a Russian. A real Russian. Not like Shteynfarb or Girshkin.”
I sighed with pleasure at the unspoken compliment. “But real Russians love all the things you have thrown out,” I said. “For example, I am now asking my father to send money so that I may buy an Apple Macintosh computer. Also I would like Bose speakers and a Harman Kardon subwoofer.”
“You really want all that shit?” Alyosha-Bob asked. He stopped walking and looked at me. In the wintry light, I could see his chilled face, slightly cratered with the aftereffects of late chicken pox, so that his physiognomy mirrored the moon that hung above us, the rich, industrialized American moon.
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’ve been associating Russian life with spirituality.”
“Well, some of us are believers,” I said. “But mostly we just want things.”
“Oh,” he said. “Wow. I think Girshkin and Shteynfarb have really led me astray.”
We walked on, compacting the snow beneath us into tiny abstract monuments to our future friendship, following in the wake of the lamp-lit beacons of our own breath. “Let’s talk in Russian from now on,” he said. “I know only a few words.
“Waste incineration plant,” I said in Russian.
“Hmm.” I noticed his boots were untied but decided not to say anything, to preserve the sanctity of the moment. The landscape of the empty campus unfolded before us, as ominously still as a desert ruin. On most days I felt that the imposing neo-Gothic collegiate architecture was challenging me to excellence, but that night I felt the deep wooden hollowness of an Accidental College education, as if everything I had needed to know lay in some puddle of blood on a street in Vilnius or Tbilisi. Perhaps the most important part of my college days would consist of instructing Alyosha-Bob, of forging his peculiar Russian-bound destiny.
“Student psychiatric clinic,” I said in Russian.
“Gay and Lesbian Liberation Center.”
“Nicaraguan Sister Co-op.”
