Little Failure Read Online Free PDF Page A

Uncle Electric Current, a bad man who wants to do me harm.
Dyadya Tok
, along with my meat vocabulary (
vetchina, buzhenina, kolbasa
) and
Soplyak
(Snotty), are some of the first words I learn in the mighty Russian tongue. There is also my savage cry of
“Yobtiki mat’!
,” a childish mispronunciation of
Yob tvoyu mat’
, or “Go fuck your mother,” which, I suppose, provides a nice overview of the state of relations between my parents and their two families.
    My hunger and curiosity are evenly matched by worry. It will take five more years before I formulate death as an end to life, but my inability to breathe gives me a good preview. The lack of air is making me nervous. Isn’t this elemental? You breathe in, and then you breathe out. It doesn’t take a genius. And I try. But it doesn’t happen. The machinery is creaking inside me but to no effect. I do not know other children, there is no basis for comparing myself with them, but I know that, as a boy, I’m all wrong.
    And how long will the two creatures holding my mouth open with a tablespoon continue to do so? I can tell that it is hurting them terribly.
    There is a photograph of me at one year and ten months taken at a photo studio. Wearing a pair of children’s jogging pants with their outline of a cartoon bunny on one of the front pockets, I hold a phonein my hand (the photo studio is proud to exhibit this advanced Soviet technology), and I am getting ready to bawl. The look on my face is that of a mother in 1943 who just received a fateful telegram from the front. I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. “Why was I so scared of everything?” I ask my mother nearly forty years later.
    “Because you were born a Jewish person,” she says.
    Perhaps. The blood coursing through my veins is mostly Yasnitsky (my mother) and Shteyngart (my father), but the nurses at the Otto Birthing House have also added 10, 20, 30, 40 cc’s of Stalin and Beria and Hitler and Göring.
    There is another word:
tigr
. My infancy is not graced by toys or what they now call educational tools, but I do have my tiger. The common gift for a young mother in Russia in 1972 is a stack of cotton diapers. When my mother’s coworkers find out that she lives in the fancy new buildings by the Neva River—today these buildings look like something from a declining part of Mumbai, with varicolored, slapped-on wooden balconies—they realize diapers won’t do. And so they gather the eighteen rubles needed to buy a luxury gift, a stuffed tiger. Tiger is four times larger than I am, and he is orange in just the right way, and his whiskers are as thick as my fingers, and the look on his face says,
I want to be your friend, little Snotty
. I can climb across him with as much acrobatic skill as a sick boy can muster, just as I will climb across my father’s chest for many years to come, and, as with my father, I will pull at Tiger’s round ears and squeeze at his plump nose.
    There are more memories here I would like to capture and display for you, if only I were faster with my net. Under the care of my paternal grandmother Polya, I fall out of a baby carriage and land headfirst into asphalt. This may create learning and coordination difficulties that persist to this day (if you see me driving down Route 9G, pleasebe alert). I learn to walk, but without any particular confidence. In neighboring Latvia, on summer vacation at a local farm, I stumble into a coop with my arms outstretched and bend down to hug a chicken. Tiger has always been kind to me, how much worse can this colorful smaller animal be? The Latvian chicken shakes its wattle, steps forward, and pecks me.