Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  Even our Asians are Russian. The census form was more shocking still. Apparendy we now live in a country called "The Russian Federation." July came around, and I realized that I was looking at the two-year anniversary of my internment in Russia. Two years? How had it come to pass? I had arrived in July 1999, ostensibly to visit my father for the summer, completely unaware that he was about to murder an Oklahoma businessman over a 10 percent stake in a nutria farm. But that's not entirely true. From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn't returning to New York anytime soon. You know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they've ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about "going beyond the cordon" when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others.

  I remember coming back. A rainy summer day. The Austrian Airlines plane dipped its left wing, and through the porthole I caught first sight of my homeland after close to ten years of living in the States.

  Let us be certain: the Cold War was won by one side and lost by another. And the losing side, like any other in history, had its countryside scorched, its gold plundered, its men forced to dig ditches in faraway capital cities, its women conscripted to service the victorious army. From my plane window, I saw defeat on the ground. Windstrewn, deserted suburban fields. The gray shell of a factory sliced in two by some unnameable force, its chimney leaning precariously. A circle of seventies apartment houses, each sinking toward the circular courtyard that separated them, like old men huddled together in conversation.

  There was defeat on the faces of the Kalashnikov-toting boys who guarded the dilapidated international terminal, ostensibly from the rich passengers of our Austrian Airlines flight. Defeat at Passport Control. Defeat at Customs. At the curbside line of sad men with battered Ladas begging to ferry us into town for hard currency, defeat. Yet on Beloved Papa's face, prune-dry, oddly sober, infused with a misbegotten familial glow, there was something like incumbent victory. He tickled my stomach and made a manly poke at my khui. He pointed proudly at the armada of Mercedeses ready to ferry us to his four-story kottedzh on the Gulf of Finland. "Not bad, these new times," he said to me. "Like an Isaac Babel story, but not so funny." For his dissident Zionist activities in the mid-eighties (particularly for kidnapping and then peeing on our neighbor's anti-Semitic pooch in front of the Leningrad headquarters of the KGB), my father had received a two-year sentence. It was the best gift the authorities could have given him. The months he spent in prison were the most important of Papa's life. Like all Soviet Jews, Papa had been trained as a mechanical engineer in one of the city's second-tier universities, and yet he was a scheming working-class boy at heart, not terribly different from his new criminal cellmates with the greasy necks and unshaven noses. Placed in this element, Papa fronted the gangster talk. He devised all kinds of cigarette-related prison capers. He turned bread crumbs into shoe polish and shoe polish into wine. He smuggled in copies of Penthouse, pasted the centerfolds on the back of a willing inmate with girlish hips and rented him out by the hour. By the time Beloved Papa got out, two things had happened: Gorbachev had graciously called off most of that annoying, unprofitable communism with the long lines and detonating television sets, and Beloved Papa had met everyone he would need to know in his reincarnation as a Russian oligarch. All those Georgians and Tatars and Ukrainians with the sweaty-brow entrepreneurial spirit so beloved by the American consulate. All the Ingush and Ossetians and Chechens with the casual attitude toward public violence that would create the fine explosive Russia we know today. These men could throw a punch, strangle a hooker, fake a customs form, hijack a truck, blow up a restaurant, start a shell company, buy a television network, run for parliament. Oh, they were kapitalists, all right. As for Papa, he had things to offer as well. He had a good Jewish head on him and the social skills of an alcoholic. And Mommy was dead. There was no one to knock him over the head with the frying pan. No Mommy, no Soviet power, nothing to fight for—he could do as he pleased. Waiting for him outside the prison gates, he found a chauffeured Volga sedan, the kind that used to ferry around Soviet apparatchiks. And standing in the shadow of the Volga, with his hands in the pockets of his dungarees and fat loving tears in his eyes, was his giant uncircumcised son. The two-year anniversary of my own Russian imprisonment passed without ceremony. July gained in days; the White Nights were no longer so white, the blanched evening sky gave way to a palette of genuine blue, the seasonal madness of my servants—their lusty cries and frequent couplings—abated. And still I would not leave my bed. I was waiting for my analyst.

  On the day Dr. Levine finally returned from Rio, the widowed Mrs. Vainberg called me, begging for an audience, her voice an accordion of unhappiness and dread. "What do I do, Misha?" Lyuba cried. "Teach me how to sit shiva for the dead. What are the Jewish customs?"

  "Are you sitting down on a cardboard box?" I asked her.

  "I'm sitting on a broken toaster."

  "Good enough. Now cover up all the mirrors. And maybe don't eat pork salami for a couple of days."

  "I'm all alone," she said in a thin, automatic voice. "Your father's gone. I need a man's hand to guide me."

  This kind of antediluvian talk made me anxious. A man's hand?

  Jesus Christ. But then I remembered Lyuba standing up for my Beloved Papa at the funeral, trying to launch herself at Oleg the Moose. I felt sad for her. "Where are you, Lyuba?"

  "At the kottedzh. The damn mosquitoes are killing me. Ai, Misha, everything reminds me of your father. Like this seven-pronged Jewish candelabra and the litde black boxes he used to wrap around his arm. Judaity is so complicated."

  "Complicated, yes. I lost half my khui over it."

  "Would you like to come over?" she asked. "I bought some orange towels."

  "I need some rest, sladkaya," I said. "Maybe in a week or two." Oh, Lyuba. What would become of her? She was twenty-one. The peak of her beauty had passed. And what did I just call her? Sladkaya?

  My sweet one?

  Timofey trudged in, a weak, servile smile hoisted onto his grim physiognomy. "I brought you a fresh botde of Ativan from the American Clinic, batyushka" he said, brandishing a large sack of medications. "You know, Priborkhin's master was also in bed with depression, but then he took a litde Zoloftushka and some Prozakchik, and off he went to run with the bulls in Spain!"

  "I don't know about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors," I said. "I think I should stick just to anti-anxiety meds for now."

  "I want only to see batyushka smiling and throwing his shoe at me with vigor," Timofey said, bowing as far as his cracked spine allowed. I dialed Dr. Levine on my mobilnik. Our sessions began at five P.M. St. Leninsburg time, which meant morning on Park Avenue, the hearty American grasses swaying over the landscaped median, a procession of dark blue Town Cars ferrying moneymakers downtown, everybody tastefully dressed and with no blood on their hands. Or not too much blood, anyway.

  I imagined Dr. Levine—his Semitic face freshly tanned from the beaches of Ipanema, his belly perfecdy rounded from a judicious intake of churmsco and black beans—looking over the empty leather couch before him, the speakerphone turned on, the room ablaze with photographs of colorful Sioux tepees, perhaps suggesting the pathway to a better self, that tight litde wigwam inside my heart.

  "I'm mi-se-ra-ble, Doctor," I howled into my mobilnik. "Lots of dreams about my papa and me paddling a boat down the Mississippi, which be
comes the Volga and then some kind of African river. Or sometimes I'm eating a pierogi and my dead papa's inside. Like I'm a cannibal."

  "What else comes to mind about that?" Dr. Levine said.

  "I dunno. My manservant says I should start taking reuptake inhibitors."

  "Let's wait another week or so before we reconsider your regimen." I listened as Dr. Levine's humane voice crackled across the incomprehensible distance between here and there. I wanted to reach out and hug him across the ether, but that's just the transference talking. In fact, we used to have a strict No Hugs Rule when I saw him in person. "How are the panic attacks?" he asked. "Are you taking Ativan?"

  "Yeah, but I've been bad, Doctor! I've been mixing it up with alcohol, which I shouldn't do, right?"

  "You shouldn't mix Ativan with alcohol. That's right."

  "So I've been bad!"

  Silence. I could almost hear him wiping his tender, doughy nose. He gets allergies in the summer, poor guy—his only weakness. Dr. Levine is in his fifties, but, like many Americans of his social class, he has the boxy chest of an athletic twenty-five-year-old and a tight, if slighdy feminine, behind. I am not a homosexual by any stretch, and yet I have dreamed many times of making passionate love to his ass, my big body draped over his smaller one, my hands rubbing his sweet gray-bearded muzzle. "Do you want me to say that you're bad?" Dr. Levine said evenly into his speakerphone. "Do you want me to hold you responsible for your father's death?"

  "Oh, God, no," I said. "I mean, in some way I've always hoped that he would die . . . Oh, I see what you're saying. Oh, shit, right... I'm a bad, bad son."

  "You're not a bad son," Dr. Levine said. "I think part of the problem for the past two years is that you don't really do anything with your time. You don't spend it profitably, the way you did in New York. And your father's death obviously doesn't help things."

  "Right," I said. "I'm like that Oblomov character who never gets out of bed. How sad for me."

  "I know you don't want to be in Russia," Dr. Levine said, "but until you can figure a way out, you have to learn to deal with your situation."

  "Uh-huh," I said, fiddling with a fresh Ativan botde.

  "Now, remember when you were in New York, you kept telling me how beautiful Moscow is . . ."

  "St. Petersburg, actually."

  "Sure," Dr. Levine allowed. "St. Petersburg. Well, why don't you start by going for a walk. Look at some of that beauty you love. Take some time to relax and feel yourself distracted by something other than your problems."

  I thought of spending a day at the pleasant Summer Gardens, eating a stick of ice cream beneath a belligerent-looking statue of Minerva. I should have bought many more ice creams when Rouenna was around, although we did enjoy at least five a day. If only I had treated her better, maybe she wouldn't sleep with that bastard Jerry Shteynfarb, maybe she would have stayed with me in Russia. "Yes," I said. "That's what I must do . . . Precisely. I'll put on my walking shorts right away," Then, before I could stop the transference, I blurted out, "I really love you, Doctor . . ." And then I started to cry.

  One Day in the Life of Misha Borisovieh

  I didn't last long in the Summer Gardens. All the shady benches were taken; the heat was abusive; pious grandmothers passing by with their young charges would use me to illustrate four of the seven deadly sins. And my Rouenna, with her zippy bravado and distaste for all things classical ("Some of these statues ain't got no ass, Misha"), was nowhere to be found.

  "To the khui with this," I said to my Chechen driver, Mamudov, who was keeping me company on a nearby bench. "Let's see if Alyosha is at the Mountain Eagle."

  "He can't spend a day without his litde mutton kebab," Mamudov opined sourly of my American friend.

  We drove over the Troitsky Bridge, the Neva River eager and playful on a summer day, a panorama of gray swells and treacherous seagulls. Alyosha-Bob was indeed parked behind a rickety wooden table at the Mountain Eagle, chasing a vodka bottie with a plate of pickled peppers, cabbage, and garlic. We embraced and kissed three times in the Russian manner. I was introduced to his companions, both employees of ExcessHollywood, his DVD import-export business: Ruslan the Enforcer, a man with a shaved head and a fatalistic expression who handled security for the company, and the young art director and Web designer, Valentin, a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts.

  "We're drinking to women," Ruslan said. "Alyosha complains that his Sveta makes fun of his prowess in bed and threatens to leave him if he doesn't move to Boston and give her a comfortable life in the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood."

  "Sad but true," Alyosha-Bob said. "Meanwhile, Ruslan tells me that his wife cheats on him with a sergeant in the militia and that he has found stains on her hose and panties."

  "Also, when they k-k-k-k-kiss," Valentin stammered shyly, "a suspicious manly scent comes from her mouth."

  "And as for our friend Valentin," Ruslan the Enforcer said, gesturing to the artist, "he is not too young to know of heartache, either. He is in love with two prostitutes who work at the Alabama Father strip club on Vasilevsky Island."

  "Well, to women, then!" we said, clinking our glasses. As if drawn by our toast, a pretty Georgian girl with furry arms dropped a fresh botde of vodka in front of me and threw some charred mutton kebabs on our plates. We chewed on the grisde thoughtfully, slivers of onion crackling between our teeth. The sun sailed westward over the canal running past the ramshackle restaurant, past the disturbing city zoo where the once-proud lions of the Serengeti now live no better than our pensioners, and toward the greener pastures of the European Union.

  A typical male Russian sadness descended upon us. "Speaking on the subject of women," I said, "I fear my Bronx girl, Rouenna, may be the quarry of the emigre writer Jerry Shteynfarb."

  "I remember that weasel," Alyosha-Bob said. "I saw him in New York once after he wrote that Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. He thinks he's the Jewish Nabokov."

  Ruslan and Valentin snorted at the idea that such a person could exist. "I don't think they should expose young people to Shteynfarb," I said. "Especially at a school like Hunter College, where the students are poor and impressionable."

  We drank to the difficult lives of impressionable poor folk and to the end of American imperialism in the guise of Jerry Shteynfarb. Valentin the artist seemed most roused by such sentiments, knocking his glass over and casting his gaze toward the heavens. He was a lean, sallow fellow with the overearnest expression of the Slavic intellec-tual. All the distinguishing signs were there: flaxen goatee, bloodshot eyes, porcupine hair, uneven bottom teeth, great big potato nose, thirty-ruble sunglasses from a metro kiosk. "You don't like American imperialism, eh?" I said to him.

  "I'm a m-m-monarchist," the fellow stammered.

  "Now, there's a popular position for a young man these days," I said, thinking: Oh, our poor dispossessed intelligentsia, why do we even bother to teach them literature and the plastic arts? "And who's your favorite czar, then, young man?" I asked.

  "Alexander the First. No, wait. . . the Second."

  "The great reformer. Well, that's very nice. And who are your whorish friends?"

  "They're a mother-daughter act," the artist explained. "Some people derive a thrill from watching a mother and daughter touch. They're from Kursk Province. Very cultured people. Elizaveta Ivanovna plays the accordion, and her daughter, Lyudmila Petrovna, can quote the major philosophers."

  His use of their patronymics was strangely touching—I knew immediately what he wanted to do. After all, it is the only path our young Raskolnikovs can follow. "I will save them!" he said, and I knew immediately that he would not.

  "Presumably it is the daughter you fancy," I said.

  "Both are like family to me," said Valentin. "If you meet them, you see how they cannot live without each other. They are like Naomi and Ruth."

  We drank two shots in rapid succession, one to Naomi and one to Ruth. The mood veered toward belligerence and sentimentality. I floated in and out of sever
al conversations.

  "Fuck them all," Ruslan the Enforcer was saying at one point, although I was unsure to whom he was referring. "Throw them all under the tram! See if I care!" The Georgian girl came with more mutton and a thick loaf of khachapuri, a homey flatbread filled with soft ricottalike cheese. We drank to Georgia, the girl's beautiful, uncontrollable, destitute country, and she nearly threw her arms around our necks and cried out of shame and gratitude.

  A new set of vodka bottles came, one for each man.

  "It's emasculating," Alyosha-Bob was saying in a dramatic voice that he had started to adopt in Russia. "How can she do this to me?

  How much more can I give to her? I've given her everything that's in my heart. Why can't she love me for who I am? What does she think is waiting for her in Boston?"

  We drank to Alyosha-Bob's heart. We drank to his manhood. We drank to his weak Jewish chin and billiard-ball head. We breathed out the poisonous vapors streaming down our gullets, a rainbow of alcohol floating above our heads, while the setting sun turned the spire of the nearby Peter and Paul Fortress into a flaming exclamation mark. We drank to the setting sun, our silent conspirator. We drank to the golden exclamation mark. We drank to Saints Peter and Paul. A new set of vodka botdes came, one for each man.

  "Why can't my website be called www.ruslan-the-enforcer.com?"

  Ruslan was saying. "Why does it have to be ruslan-the-punisher.org?"

  "Because ruslan-the-enforcer.com is already taken," Valentin gendy explained.

  "But I am the Enforcer. I know Ruslan the Punisher. He lives with his mother by the Avtovo metro station. He is a nothing man. Now people will think that I am him. They won't hire me to do the bloody work. I will be humiliated." We drank to Ruslan's renowned strength and his tough fists. We drank to his bad childhood. We drank to his website.

  A new set of vodka botdes came, one for each man.