Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  "Thank you," I said. "I've never learned how to eat properly." Which is the truth.

  "You know, I bought an orange comforter from Stockmann," she said, and turned away to expel her breath. I smelled the freshness of a youthful mouth, a strong British breath mint, and the sulfuric undercurrent of lamb's tongue. She smiled, her twin cheekbones going off the scale of Eastern European cheekbones and into lovely Mongolian territory, while her pinprick nose stretched itself into nonexistence. Despite the steady drafts of central air-conditioning, your correspon-dent felt himself becoming warm-faced and a bit untidy beneath the armpits. The denim blouse hugged Lyuba's frame so that when she turned around, one could see an important crease forming between the cheeks of her zhopa. Meanwhile, the talk of orange comforters both soothed and intrigued.

  "Won't you come and see it?" she said. "It's in the bedroom," she quickly added. "I'm worried it's not the right one."

  "I'm sure it's fine," I said, feeling an unexpected jolt of ethical misgiving. This was followed by an image of Jerry Shteynfarb's authorial goatee burrowing into the heat between Rouenna's thighs. The ethical misgivings evaporated. I followed Lyuba.

  We passed through the main quarters, a kind of gallery devoted to outrageous Italian furniture, enough glossy mirrored surfaces that I could catch the devastating sight of my own deflated posterior and the halo of my small but growing bald spot. My papa's meter-long oil painting of a wise but grizzled Maimonides with what looked like a ten-ruble note sticking out of his pocket completed the room. Outside the windows, the gracious classical lines of the Twelve Colleges Building suspended over the Neva provided a necessary counterpoint.

  "I'm throwing everything out," Lyuba said, sweeping her hand over the ensemble of buffed mahogany monstrosities possibly entided Neapolitan Sunrise or something of the sort (there are ware- houses full of this shit in New York's Brighton Beach, in case the intrepid reader is interested). "If you have the time," Lyuba said, "we can drive down to the IKEA in Moscow, maybe get something in paisley."

  "What you're doing, Lyubochka, is very healthy," I told her. "We must all strive to be as Western as possible. That old argument between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles . . . It's not much of an argument at all, is it?"

  "Not if you say so," Lyuba said. She opened the bedroom door. I had to look away at first. Lyuba's comforter was the most orange thing I have seen this side of the Accidental College library, which was built in 1974, possibly by the American Citrus Growers' Asso-ciation. It was . . . I couldn't find the right word. An entire sun had exploded in Lyuba's bedroom, leaving behind its afterglow for us to ponder.

  "You've become a modern woman," I said, and heaved myself aboard with a few difficult motions.

  "Feel the smoothness," Lyuba said as she setded in beside me. "It looks like it's fashionable polyester from the American seventies, but it feels like cotton. I've got to find a good dry cleaner. Otherwise they'll just bleed the orange out."

  "That mustn't happen," I said. "You've really got something here." Above her dresser I noticed a framed photograph of Beloved Papa unveiling a tombstone shaped like a giant Nokia mobile phone at his graveyard for New Russian Jews, sacrilegious laughter gathering in his clever eyes.

  "But wait, there's more," Lyuba announced. She ran into the bathroom and came out with a pair of orange towels. "This is what you and Svedana were talking about at the Home of the Russian Fisherman!" she said. "See, I listen to everything you say!" I squinted at the towels, feeling a spectacular headache gathering steam somewhere in my sinuses. "Maybe you should mix the orange with some other Western color," I suggested. "Lime, maybe."

  Lyuba bit her smooth lower lip. "Perhaps," she said. She looked doubtfully at the towels in her hands. "It's hard to know these things, Misha . . . Sometimes I think I'm such a fool. . . Ah, but listen to thisl" She turned on a litde stereo with the flick of one lacquered nail. It didn't take me long to recognize the Humungous G's gorgeous urban love ballad "I'm Busting My Nut Tonight." Lyuba laughed and sang along with the soulful R&B chorus, moving her hands in front of her torso in a sad Russian approximation of slow jamming. "I'm baaaaasting my nut tonight / Your pusseeeee feels so tight," she sang in a tired but hospitable voice.

  "Uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh," I grunted along with the chorus.

  "Uhhhh, shit," I added.

  "I know you and Alyosha love this song," she said. "I've been playing it over and over. It's so much better than techno and Russian pop."

  "In terms of popular music"—I spoke now with the authority of a former Multicultural Studies major—"you should listen mainly to East Coast hip-hop and ghetto tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically. Even so-called progressive house! Do you hear me, Lyuba?"

  "Categorically!" Lyuba said. She looked at me with her soft, vacant gray eyes. She pressed both hands into the formidable ridge of her breastbone. "Mikhail," she said, using my formal name, which, for as long as I've lived, usually means some form of punishment is at hand. I looked up expectantiy.

  "Help me convert to Judaism," she said. She plopped down on the orange comforter, pressed her skinny legs into her tummy, and beamed the inquisitive look of youth in my direction. There was some tenderness there, a warmth in my belly, and I could feel it start spreading below. I looked at her beside me—litde Lyuba in her tootight denim dress, the two firm potato dumplings of her zhopa, rubbing against my milky outer thigh. I needed to concentrate on the conversation at hand. Now, what was she saying? Jews? Conversion?

  I had much to say on the matter.

  "Turning into a Jew is not a good idea," I told her, my grave tone likening it to turning into a dung beetie. "Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties. It's a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check. It's a losing proposition for everyone involved, the Jew, his friend, even his enemy in the end."

  Lyuba was not convinced. "You and your father are the only good people in my life," she said. "And I want to be tied to both of you by something substantial. Think how great it would be if we could pray to the same God"—she turned her matted blond head into her armpit—"and if we could share a life together." The second part of that sentence I decided to put aside for the moment, because all the lies and evasions in the world were not going to erase her plaintive, impossible plea from my waxy ears. So I wanted to disabuse her of the first part, at least. "Lyuba," I said in my most even (and most detestable) voice, "you must understand that there is no God."

  Lyuba turned her pink face to me and smiled gratuitously, favoring me with one of her laminated thirty-one-tooth salutes (a prominent incisor had to be retired last summer after she misjudged the strength of a walnut).

  "Of course there is a God," she said.

  "No, there is not," I said. "In fact, the part of our soul we reserve for God is a kind of negative space where our worst sentiments reside, our jealousy, our ire, our justification for violence and spite. If you are indeed interested in Judaism, Lyuba, you should carefully read the Old Testament. You should pay particular attention to the character of the Hebrew God and His utter contempt for all things democratic and multicultural. I think the Old Testament makes my point rather forcefully, page by page."

  Lyuba laughed at my little tirade. "I think you believe in God in your own way," she said. Then she added, "You're a funny man."

  Ah, the impudence of youth! The easy manner of their speech!

  Who was she, this Lyuba, this girl my father had rescued from some Astrakhan collective farm a few years ago, all covered in hog shit and bruises? This sullen teenager he had adopted like the daughter he wished he had fathered instead of me—skinny, loyal, and without a tantalizing purple khui he could swipe at. I had always thought of Lyuba as a contemporary version of Fenechka in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, the peasant housekeeper, obtuse and limited, who falls into the arms of the kindly minor noble Kirsanov, to be played in the movie version by Beloved Papa. My capacity for misunderstanding th
e range of people is truly astonishing. Lyuba was no Fenechka. She was more like a modern-day Anna Karenina or that silly brat Natasha in War and the Other Thing.

  "Hey," she said. "It's my favorite part of the song. When Humungous G . . . how do you say it? When he busts."

  "When Humungous G busts some rhymes," I said.

  She stood up on the bed, and with her hands making jabbing urban motions, her hips thrusting like those of a fertile American university student, Lyuba sang: Seexty-inch plasma screen

  Bitch, you never seen

  Such mad expensive shit

  Poot my fingers on your clit

  Uh, sex in the Lex

  Check my dzhenuine Rolex

  Vaiping cum off your tits

  Fm busting phat beats

  Right past yo' shoulder

  It's over

  Now go coookfor my kids

  "That's very pretty," I said. "Your English is improving."

  "And another great thing about Judaism," she said, "is how old it is. Boris told me that by the Jew calendar, we're in the year 5760!"

  "It just doesn't stop, does it?" I said. "But what is the past, Lyuba?

  The past is murky and distant, while the future we can only guess at. The present! Now, that's something to believe in. If you want to know what I worship, Lyuba, it is the sanctity of the present moment." Words have consequences. For at this point Lyuba jumped up from the bed, unhooked her Texas-style belt, and, in an Olympic moment, catapulted the hem of her long denim dress over her knees, her brown wiry pizda, her taut belly, the long pale oval of her face—until, momentarily, she stood there naked before me.

  She was staring furtively into some incidental part of me, my abdomen, say, her hands by her sides. After a while, she lowered her gaze still farther, until it fell onto her own breasts, two little white baggies that lay peaceably atop her tanned ribs.

  She picked up one breast, squeezed it, and then did likewise with the other.

  "Well, that's how it is," she told me with a shrug. "I'm very hot for you inside."

  I lay there, half a meter away from this young Russian woman, trying to remember who I was, exacdy, and whether sympathy could masquerade for arousal or the other way around. There was reason for both. Lyuba had a lean, athletic body (especially for someone who did nothing all day), interrupted only by a swatch of shiny, hardened skin running along one hip and dipping toward her genitals, where a relative had set fire to her when she was twelve. Beloved Papa had always claimed that this was the part he kissed most gendy, but it was hard to tease this simple image—Papa's fish lips puckered atop Lyuba's disfigurement, his everyday rage tempered by compassion—

  out of my already put-upon imagination.

  Events were taking place that made me feel somehow peripheral. Lyuba was lying down on the bed once more, her legs hanging in the air, her pizda a cozy brown-fur pelt between them. "I have to prepare myself," she said. She took out a plastic tube and, with a most unpleasant sound, squirted something onto her fingers. She then inserted the fingers inside herself. "This makes it easier for me," she explained.

  It was impolite to just sit there and stare. I began to take off my pants so that I could present my purple half -khui, my abused iguana, to Lyuba. It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. And so I was compelled to act like a man, though in reality I had long ago floated right through the ceiling, past the ocher jumble of Leninsburg roofs, over and around the golden prick of the Admiralty, and onto the dark blue expanse of the Gulf of Finland, where I used to believe my dead mother's essence hovered about in a happy, cultured limbo above the topiary of one of the czars' summer palaces (though, as I've said before, nothing of our personality survives after death). Meanwhile, in a surprise move, my mercurial genital had already engorged itself and was positioned for love, proof that one doesn't actually have to be present to consummate the sex act. It dawned upon me that Lyuba had set "Busting My Nut Tonight" on repeat play, and that Humungous G's urban missive was helping me focus on the task at hand. Busting my nut when? Why, tonight, of course. I crawled on my knees along the orange comforter toward Lyuba, bringing the khui toward her.

  "My khui" I announced sadly.

  "Yes, it's your khuichik," Lyuba said, tilting her head for a better view.

  "It is possible to touch it now," I whispered, letting Lyuba tug at my much-maligned khui-knob with a cold hand. I turned it sideways so that she could see the long scar running along its underbelly, the clumps of skin attached at improvised angles like the fragmented bits of a car bumper following a head-on collision.

  "Ai, what happened?" Lyuba asked.

  I took a deep breath and blurted out my story in one long sentence, digressing only to explain the words "mitzvah mobile." She put the purple thing in her mouth to silence me. No matter how often it happens, it is always surprising to find a woman's wet mouth drawing tight around my khui.

  "Mm," she said.

  "What?" I said.

  She took the khui out. "It tastes fine," she said. "You're very clean."

  "Well, I'm not worried about the taste," I said.

  "Lie down on me," Lyuba said.

  I did as she said. Her body was cold underneath mine, and even the inside of her pizda was barely at room temperature, probably because she had overlubricated with what must have been a very cold gel. I kept slipping out and getting angry, but I used the anger to poke her all the harder. We were in the traditional baby-making position, and from my vantage point I could barely make out the contours of her small Slavic breasts. Lyuba's eyes were closed, and she seemed to be moving her hips from left to right to the sound of Humungous's phat beats, which was not the rhythm I had in mind. "We should be either dancing or fucking," I complained. Either dancing or fucking. That was pure Beloved Papa. I even had that idiotic Odessa gangster accent he used when he thought he was being suave.

  "Sorry," she said, and moved her hips in a more accommodating up-and-down fashion, cupping her breasts to give them more shape. I dutifully tucked into each sturdy nipple with my big Americanmade teeth, then moved my face up to look into Lyuba's. She was wincing in rhythm to our quiet humping (my weight is an impossible thing to bear), her eyes wet and focused on the ceiling. She squeezed my ass, perhaps to encourage me. She seemed to want me to say something. To commiserate with her. But it's hard to know what to say when you're khui- deep inside your father's young wife. So instead I tried to be gende. I looked deep into the hollows beside her nose, where a herd of teenage orange freckles once roamed. The surgery that had removed them was not perfect, and I could still see, beneath the initial layer of skin, the afterimage of the burnt-out orange spots. I kissed these blemishes, her childhood's last bequest, drawing a forced smile from Lyuba. I carefully touched the hardened skin where her relative had charred her. It was the consistency of warm cellophane, and it was frightening.

  "Ai," she said. "You're tickling me. Will you finish soon?"

  "I'm sorry," I whispered. I was sweating all over her. The room was stale and tropical, filled with the odor of an unhealthy male body suddenly pressed into service.

  "It's okay," she said. "It's this lubricant—"

  "No, it's my fault," I said. "I'm taking all these medications, so it's hard to— Oh! Ah, wait, Lyubochka! Oofa!"

  And so it was over. I pulled out of Lyuba and looked at my wet knob. One of my testicles was missing. It had apparendy risen up into my abdomen. "Fuck, Lyuba," I said. "I'm missing an egg here. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

  "You're not satisfied with me," Lyuba said.

  I poked around there for a bit, worried that the nonexistent God was taking His Freudian revenge on me. The testicle descended. My hands were shaking. Humungous G was still singing "I'm Busting My Nut Tonight." Never in my life had I found hip-hop to be so detestable. Plus there was something else to consider. Lyuba. Intercourse. Nature's remorseless path. "Oh, the devil take it," I said. "We didn't use a prezervatijf"

  "I
t's Monday," Lyuba said. "I never get pregnant on a Monday." She was making a fort for herself out of the fringes of the comforter, sinking her whitish body into its orange ramparts with many postcoital sighs, preparing herself for a fine afternoon nap. What did she say? No pregnancies on Mondays. Wonderful. Now, why was Humungous G still rapping? I went over to the stereo and punched it with my big, squishy hand, but the fat urban motherfucker just kept on bangin

  "You're not satisfied with me," Lyuba repeated, clicking off the stereo with a remote control. "Boris usually made a special sound. Like he was happy."

  "No, it was very nice," I said. I tried to think from a goal-oriented perspective, just as they taught us at Accidental College. "I finished inside you."

  I looked up at the photograph of my father happily unveiling the Nokia-phone tombstone, three Soviet-era gold teeth glinting in the sun, a combed-over black curl forming a Spanish < across his forehead. I felt myself losing my precarious hold on consciousness and set myself down on the bed. Lyuba yawned widely, and I smelled her lamb-tongue breath once more, which reminded me quickly of every Russian person I had ever known—from my dead grandmothers, who took me for stroller rides along the English embankment, to Timofey, my loyal manservant, who was presently waiting for me with the Land Rover on the very spot where I was once strolled. All of us had enjoyed a lamb's tongue in our lifetime. How droll!

  "Let's get some sleep, then," Lyuba said. "Our bed is very comfortable. It's like staying at the Marriott in Moscow." Our bed, indeed, was very comfortable. Her zhopa rubbed at me from behind, the way Rouenna's used to rub me when I couldn't fall asleep during anxious nights. Lyuba seemed to want me to put my arms around her little body. Her hair smelled musty and yet artificial, like nothing I had encountered before. I imagined Lyuba as a woman in her thirties, her hair hennaed a popular aquamarine color, her posture stooped like that of so many of our premature babushkas. Would she even be alive then?

  "I hope we make lots of love together, little father," she whispered. I tried to go to sleep, but there was nothing to dream about, except the usual Eastern European nonsense about a man sailing an inflatable Fanta botde around the world looking for happiness. But one thought remained and would not be extinguished.