Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  "I don't need any Brussels," Slava said, spitting into his own hand. From the way he pronounced the name of the Belgian capital, it was clear he had never heard of it. "I need my papa." I could commiserate with him—I needed my papa, too.

  The Austrian Airlines plane timidly pulled up to the gate. By a quirk of geography, Petersburg is only a forty-minute flight from the ultra-modern city of Helsinki, Finland, the northeastern bastion of the European Union. After we'd boarded and the plane had hobbled down the rutted runway and ascended, we looked down at the country beneath us, at the strange shapes of superannuated factories squat-ting below. I considered composing a proper fare-thee-well to the nation that had nursed me with sour milk and a cold nipple, then held me in her thick, freckled arms for too long. But before we knew it, Russia was gone.

  Timofey was sent to economy, while Alyosha-Bob and I enjoyed the first-class cabin. It was still morning, so we limited ourselves to Irish coffees and a light snack of Scottish salmon and crepes. Grabbing my stomach in two hands, I rolled the toxic hump against the wide lumbar-supporting seat, gasping with pleasure. I don't think any man has ever been as excited to fly over Poland in an Airbus jet. I grabbed a butter knife and challenged Alyosha-Bob to a mock duel; we clanged utensils for a while, my friend clearly sharing in my joy, but it seemed the other first-class passengers were not amused by our exuberance. Even this early in the day, the multinational businessmen were clacking away on their laptops with one hand and spreading Nutella over their crepes with the other, whispering to their companions on how best to carve up Russia's dwindling industry and win favor with some American mutual fund. Then I noticed the Hasid.

  Be good, I told myself, knowing that in the end, it would not be possible to hold my tongue. He was in his thirties, scraggly-bearded and pimpled, as are they all, with red eyes round as coins. He did not wear the usual top hat, just a jaunty fedora, beneath which peeked out the half-moon of his yarmulke. I doubted he had actually bought a first-class ticket, this citizen of the Eternal Shtetl, so perhaps some kind of upgrade scheme was in effect. You never know with these people.

  A stewardess was bent over the Hasid, trying to coax him into accepting a kosher meal of chicken livers on toast points that they had prepared especially for him. The Hasid blinked repeatedly at the hostess's young Austrian bosom, but on the subject of the livers, he would not yield. "It has to be certified," he kept saying, nasally and dourly. "There are many ginds of gosher. Where's the certifigation?"

  "No, this is kosher, sir," the stewardess insisted. "Many Jews have eaten it. I've seen them eat it."

  "I need proof," the Hasid whined. "Where's my proof? Where's the certifigate? I need the rabbinigal supervision. Show me the proof and I'll eat it." Eventually the stewardess left, and when she did, the Hasidic cretin reached into a velvety black pouch to produce a can of tuna, some mayo, and a slice of matzoh. Licking his fat lips, he hunched his shoulders and, with some effort, pried the lid off the tuna can. Then, as if lost in one of his interminable Bctruch, Baruch prayers, the Hasid began to thoughtfully mix the mayonnaise and the tuna together, rocking slowly as he did so. I watched him for about four hundred kilometers of airspace, mixing his mayo and tuna, then spreading it carefully on the brittle matzoh. Each time the stewardess passed, he would shield his creation from the gentile passage of her Teutonic behind. "A firm Austrian ass," he seemed to be saying to himself, "does not mix with my kosher tuna fish." Would it be eliminationist of me to say that I wanted to kill him?

  Are there certain feelings that, as a Jew, I may safely harbor in my fat heart that a non-Jew may not? Would it really be self-hatred to despise this man with whom I shared nothing more than a squirrelly strand of DNA?

  The Hasid lowered his mouth into his beard to murmur a few words of thanks to his god for this pathetic bounty, then, with a crackle, bit into his store-bought tuna and glorified cracker. Thinking about the cheap fish combined with the foul inner lining of his mouth nearly turned my stomach. Since I was four rows away, it would not have been possible to smell the pungent Hasid, but the mind creates its own scents. I could no longer keep silent.

  "Fraulein," I called to the stewardess, who ambled over and gave me, at best, a business-class smile, front teeth only. "I am horribly offended by the gentleman Hasid," I said, "and I would like you to ask him to put away his awful food. This is first class. I expect a civilized ambience, not a trip to Galicia circa 1870."

  The stewardess fully opened her mouth. She held her hands before her in some kind of protective gesture. I noticed the little poky hips stretching her uniform: sexy, in a childbearing way. "Sir," she whispered, "we allow our passengers to bring their meals on the plane. It is to accommodate their religion, yes?"

  "I am a Hebrew," I said, showing her my big, squishy hands. "I share the same faith as that man. But I would never eat such a meal in first class. This is barbarity!" I was raising my voice, and the Hasid craned his neck to look at me. He was a sweaty sight, eyes moist, as if he had just emerged from his prayer house.

  "Easy, Snack Daddy," Alyosha-Bob said. "Chill."

  "No, I will not chill," I said to my homey. And then to the stewardess: "I am a patron of multiculturalism more than anyone on this plane. By turning away your chicken livers, this man is practicing a most sanctimonious form of racism. He is spitting in all our faces!

  Chiefly mine."

  "Here we go," Alyosha-Bob murmured. "Put our Misha in a Western setting, and he starts acting out."

  "This is not acting out," I hissed. "You'll know when I act out." The stewardess apologized for my distress and told me she would bring around a higher authority. A tall, homosexual Austrian man soon appeared and told me he was the chief purser, or something of the sort. I explained my predicament. "This is a very awkward situation," the purser began, staring at his feet. "We are—"

  "Austrian," I said. "I know. It's fine. I absolve you of your terrible guilt. But this is not about you, it's about us. It's good Jew versus bad Jew. It's mainstream versus intolerance, and by supporting the Hasid, you're perpetuating your own hate crime."

  "Eggs-cuse me," the Hasid was saying as he stood on his hind legs to a tremendous Hasidic length of almost seven feet. "I goudln't help overhearing—"

  "Please, sir, sit down," the purser said. "We're taking care of this."

  "Yes, sure, coddle the Hasid," I said, and then rose myself, smacking the purser lightly with my stomach. "If this is how you run your first class, then I will go to economy to sit with my manservant."

  "Your seat is here, sir," said the stewardess. "You have paid for it." The purser, meanwhile, fluttered his dainty hands to indicate that I should keep walking right out of his gilded realm. Alyosha-Bob was laughing at my foolishness, tapping his head with his fist to indicate that I was not all well.

  And he was right: I wasn't all well.

  "Because of you, I am not a man," I spat at the Hasid as I walked past his row. "You took the best part of me. You took what mattered." Before leaving, I turned around to address the first-class passengers: "Beware of their mitzvah mobiles, fellow Jews among you. Beware of circumcisions late in life. Beware of easy faith. The Hasids are not like us. Don't even think it." With those words, I pulled back the curtain into steerage. I will not risk humanizing the first-class Hasid by writing down in detail the medieval horror upon his pale face, the cyclical, never-ending fright that so distorts our people. In the cramped economical quarters, by a reeking bathroom, in the midst of a wildly discordant color scheme drawn to make poor folk feel better about their travel, I found a seat next to my Timofey. "What are you doing, batyushka T he whispered. "Why are you here? This place is not for you!" Indeed, it was difficult to reach a rapprochement between my girth and the Austrian concept of an economy seat; I ended up with my ass where my back should have been, palms pressed into the seat in front of me.

  "I am here out of principle," I told my manservant, reaching over to pat his spongy old head with its thick womanlike hairs. "I am here beca
use a Yid tried to take my honor."

  "There are Jews and there are Yids," Timofey said. "Everyone knows this."

  "It's not easy to be a cultured man nowadays," I told him. "But I'll be fine. Look out the window, Tima. Those mountains could be the Alps. Would you like to see the Alps someday? You could go with your son and have a little picnic."

  A look of such transcendent disbelief came over Timofey that I could only feel grief for him. And grief for me, too. There was enough grief on the plane for both of us.

  Good grief, as the Americans say.

  14

  The Norway of the Caspian

  We landed at the Viennese airport, taxiing past the glassed-in main terminal where the planes always ran on time, to a problematic sideshow of a building reserved for flights to the not-quite-ready-forEurope places like Kosovo, Tirana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and my native St. Leninsburg. There were no jetways at this diminished building; two buses came to pick us up, one for the first-and business-class passengers, another for the rest of us. I watched from my window as the wily Hasid maneuvered to be the first aboard the first-class bus, clutching his velvety tuna pouch as if it contained the diamonds he surely sold for a living. Shame, shame.

  Walking down the stairs, I made sure to breathe in the fine European Union air before being bused to the cigarette-smoke-filled terminal where the rest of my YugoSovietMongol brethren waited unhappily for their flights back to Tartary. I tried to make my way to the main terminal, but you had to pass an immigration counter with a normal Western passport before you could buy cigarettes duty-free or move your bowels astride the latest model of Austrian toilet. Soon, very soon, I would have my Belgian passport. Not soon enough, let me tell you.

  Alyosha-Bob whiled away the hours before our next flight laughing at my anti-Hasid campaign, making side curls out of the shaggier portions of my hair. He would run up and, like a child, throw himself on the loose hams hanging off my back. I tried to walk away from him, but he's the faster of the two of us. By the time they started boarding our flight to Svani City, he had curled me a nice set of payess.

  As the flight was announced, the most olive-skinned people in the terminal rushed the gate, and soon a jostling mass of mustached men and their pretty dark wives, each wielding bags from Century 21, the famed New York discount emporium, had laid siege to the poor Austrian Airlines personnel. This was my first introduction to the Absurdistan mob—a faithful re-creation of the Soviet line for sausages, fueled by the natural instincts of the Oriental bazaar. "Calm down, ladies and gentlemen!" I shouted as young, hairy men bounced off me, seemingly using my mass to ricochet to the front of the line. "Do you think they'll run out of seats on the plane? We're in Austria, for God's sake!"

  Once aboard, the Absurdis began unwrapping their many purchases, modeling designer ties for their wives, and exchanging footwear across the aisles. Their first-class shenanigans did not manage to offend me as much as the Hasid's had on the last flight, perhaps because the Hasid was one of my own, while the only occasion one has to meet an Absurdi in St. Petersburg is at the market, when one is searching for a gorgeous flower in the middle of winter or wants to make a pet of some exotic mongoose. I don't mean to denigrate the Absurdis, or whatever they call themselves. They are the resourceful and clever representatives of an ancient trading culture, which, along with the massive quantities of oil lapping at their shores, helps explain why their country is the most successful of our formerly Soviet republics, the so-called Norway of the Caspian. I turned to the window to watch our plane follow the curves of the Danube as the orderly Austrian houses with their peaked roofs and backyard swimming pools turned into the housing projects surrounding the stumpy castle of Bratislava, Slovakia, which in turn gave way to the melancholy buildup of Budapest (I could even make out the fin de siecle Parliament building on the Pest side and the old Austro-Hungarian seat of power on the Buda), which eventually surrendered to some sort of war-torn Balkan landscape, cities shelled into random organic forms, gaping bridges, the jumble of wrecked orange-tiled houses clustered together like coral reefs. "I'm taking one step backward so that I can jump clear across the board," I consoled myself. As the West receded into another time zone, the stewardesses compensated by serving us a crispy quail salad of the first order; the drinks menu offered up some pleasant surprises as well, especially in the port category.

  "I'm going to miss you, Snack," Alyosha-Bob said as he drank a glass of forty-year-old Fonseca. "You're my best friend."

  "I'm sentimental already," I sighed.

  "Belgium's going to be good for you," my friend said in English, the language we spoke when we were alone, our fooling-around language. "There's nothing to do there. There's no one to fight against. You won't be such a nut job. You'll cut back on the emotions. I can't believe you actually started that Misha's Children thing and hired Valentin and Svetlana to run it."

  "Remember the motto of Accidental College? 'Think one person can change the world? So do we.' "

  "Didn't we used to make fun of that motto, like, every single day, Snack?"

  "I guess I'm growing up," I said smugly. "Maybe I'll get a doctorate in Multicultural Studies in Brussels. Maybe that will make me look good to the generals in charge of the INS."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "They love multi—"

  "Shhhh," Alyosha-Bob said, putting a finger to his lips. "It's quiet time now, Misha."

  Our plane began its approach to Svani City. The light of early evening revealed a green mountainous terrain skirted by pockets of desert, which were, in turn, filled in with pockets of something partially liquid resembling a sick man's gastric misadventures. The farther we descended, the more pronounced became the battle between mountain and desert, the latter pockmarked by lakes iridescent with industry and on occasion surrounded by blue domes that could have been either giant mosques or small oil refineries.

  It took me some time to realize that we had reached the shores of a major body of water, that the brown, alkaline vistas of the corroded desert now brushed up against a dull band of gray that was, in fact, the Caspian Sea. A circuit board of oil derricks strung together the coastline and desert, while farther out to sea, massive oil platforms were connected to one another by slivers of pipeline and, in some places, maritime roads upon which tanker-trucks left vapor trails of yellow exhaust.

  We descended rapidly into this apocalypse. Apparently I had misjudged not only the borders of the sea but the depth of the local sky, which collapsed before our advance, as if estimating correctly that another planeload of money had arrived from Europe and that dollar bills and euros would soon fall like snowflakes upon the ruling class. As the plane touched down, the yokels in economy clapped in typical third-world fashion, cheering our safe arrival, while we in first chose to keep our hands in our laps. We taxied past a billboard. Three stylish teenagers, a redheaded beauty, an Asian beauty, and a young black man in dreadlocks (a feminine beauty in his own right), critically regarded us with their handsome, expressionless eyes. THE UNITED

  COLORS OF BENETTON WELCOME YOU TO SVANI CITY, the billboard read.

  In keeping with the progressive theme, the arrivals terminal was newly built to resemble a post-Mongolian yurt made of tinted glass, corrugated steel, and the occasional exposed pipe—the kind of generic design favored by mineral-rich nations teetering between Eastern exotica and Western anonymity. Inside, we found a cool, open metallic shed layered with the smells of perfume counters and stores dispensing freshly baked baguettes along with the most cultured of yogurts, the small flags of the world's countries and the oversize flag of Microsoft Windows NT limply hanging from the rafters to remind us that we were all global citizens who loved to travel and compute. But the Absurdi citizens were not yet accustomed to the new world order. Despite the trappings of modernity around them, they rushed toward Passport Control, shouting in their incomprehensible local tongue and hitting one another with their Century 21 bags. Alyosha-Bob had a multiple-entry Absurdi visa
that entitled him to join an expedited lane, while Timofey and I stood in an endless queue for foreigners, waiting to get our visa photos taken.

  Help was on the way. A group of fat men in blue shirts and bricksized epaulets on their shoulders were soon circling around me, eyeing my bulk with warm Southern eyes. Just so you know, I'm an attractive kind of obese person, with a head that is proportionally sized to my torso and the rest of my fat distributed evenly (save for my deflated ass). On the other hand, these Absurdi fellows, like most overweight people, resembled huge moving tents, tiny heads wedded to larger and still-larger girth. One of them had a camera tied around his chest. "Excuse me," he said in Russian, the lingua franca of the former Soviet empire, "who are you by nationality?" I sadly held up my Russian passport. "No, no," the fatty laughed.

  "I mean by nationality."

  I saw what he was after. "Jew," I said, patting my nose. The photographer put his hand to his heart. "I am very honored," he said. "The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. When you are in Absurdsvan'i, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink."

  "Oh, thanks," I said.

  "A Jew shouldn't have to wait in line to have his picture taken. Let me do it for you right away. Smile, mister!"

  "Please get my manservant, too," I said.

  "Smile, manservant!"

  Timofey sighed and crossed himself. I was handed two small photos. "Remember what I said about my mother being your mother?" the photographer asked. "Well, sadly, our mother is in the hospital with a collapsed liver and a keloid scar on the left ear. Would it be possible—"

  I had already prepared several US$100 bills for this kind of eventuality, one of which I handed to the photographer. "Now we must go to the line for the visa application blank," the photographer said.