Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

Author:Gary Shteyngart [Shteyngart, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Retail
ISBN: 9780812995336
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Sometimes I get angry. On the school bus back at SSSQ, I find an Israeli girl—some Shlomit or Osnat—whose star shines even less brightly than my own, and I make fun of her mercilessly. She has a mustache like my grandmother’s and a training bra. I slide into the seat next to her and make jokes about her need to wax her mustache with something called “turtle wax,” an insult that I’ve overheard from another bus mate and that seems like just the right kind of topical cruelty to use on this small, dark, friendly creature. I tease her about her training bra and what I can only imagine lies beneath it. What I can’t quite understand is that I have a crush on this girl precisely because she has a mustache just like my grandmother’s, which makes me want to hug her and tell her all of my troubles. The girl informs on me to Mrs. R, the kindly educator who helped me with my shoelaces and sang Troo-loo-loo-loo when I was in first grade. Mrs. R takes me aside on the bus line and tells me to stop bothering the girl. Mrs. R’s gentle opprobrium, much worse than her anger, makes me so ashamed I consider skipping the school bus and walking across Queens to my grandmother’s house. The truth is I don’t even understand what turtle wax is. The truth is that if those furry lips were to graze my own, I would not turn away.

I get angry even among the peaceable kingdom of Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony. There is a new kid no one likes exactly. Straight out of Minsk or somewhere, scrawny, undernourished, weak, Belorussian. He is with his grandmother, and we don’t know the whereabouts of his parents. He looks like a younger version of my step-grandfather Ilya—the unhappy eyes, the Leninist forehead—and that makes me hate him even more. My favorite book of the summer of 1984 and the two subsequent summers is Nineteen Eighty-Four. I commit the passages in which O’Brien tortures Winston to memory. When the kid is alone staring sullenly at a comic book over a picnic table, I approach him. I sit down and begin to speak in measured tones. “Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

I slide over to the kid. He cowers before me, which I both love and hate. He is more slabyi than I am, which is good. But I am about to sing from my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion at the Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, which makes me—what? A man. What would a man do?

Before he can stop me, before I can stop me, I grab his hand. I hold up my left hand, thumb hidden, four fingers extended, just like in Orwell’s book.

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