Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  "Looks good to me," I said.

  "No, it doesn't look good at all," Zartarian said. "There hasn't been activity on those rigs for months. It's a Chevron/BP concession, but most of the Chevron and BP oil monkeys flew out with the airlift. And now there are all these empty KBR trucks all over the place. KBR's buying trucks left and right, even the crappiest Russian Kamaz models. And they're just sitting there."

  "The cease-fire is holding," I said. "They'll reopen the airport soon and get this Figa-6 thing going. This luau is a positive sign, Larry. Don't be such a worrywart. You're letting your mother affect your mood. I know what that's like, to have a parent. It's not easy." I gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  "Do me a favor, willya?" Zartarian said. "Nana's father pretty much runs the SCROD. See what he thinks about all this. Try to get a handle at dinner tonight."

  "Okay, Larry," I humored him. "I'll try to get a handle. You try to get some rest. You're working too hard."

  "Hey, if I survive this war, they're going to post me someplace big."

  "If,"I said, maliciously.

  Zartarian's cell phone rang, and the Armenian mumbled something in the local tongue. "The SCROD men are here to pick you up," he said. "Remember, Misha, we're all in this together."

  "Hey," I said. "How did you get your phone to work?"

  "You can still dial inside the country," Zartarian explained. "It's the rest of the world that's verboten."

  "Ah, so we're back in the USSR."

  The SCROD men were actually two teenage boys in adjutants'

  uniforms. They were over by the glass elevator playing with a pair of submachine guns, pretending to mow each other down, then falling on the floor and grasping their stomachs, moaning in English, "Officer down, officer down."

  "Boys, don't shoot anything," Zartarian admonished them.

  "We've got important guests here."

  I was hoping for a BTR-70 armored personnel carrier, but the boys drove a Volvo station wagon, rusty around the edges. Feeling like an American high school student departing for the senior prom, I waved goodbye to Zartarian and his mother, who looked sternly at her watch, her bewhiskered countenance reminding me to return at a decent hour and to keep my nose clean.

  We drove at an ungodly speed down the Boulevard of National Unity—jammed with sweaty bodies on a summer Friday night—and then plummeted down to the Sevo Terrace. The boys sat up front, chattering in their language and occasionally leaning out the Volvo's windows to shoot rounds into the still night air, a fearsome rat-a-tat that almost made me dip into my Ativan stash. "Boys," I said. "Act a littie cultured, why don't you?"

  "Sorry, boss," one of the lads mumbled in a farcical Russian.

  "We're just happy it Friday night. Everybody go dancing. Maybe you dance with a Sevo girl?" The other boy hit him lightiy with his submachine gun and told him to shut up.

  "I don't know how it is in your language, but when you talk to your elders in Russian, it is important to use the polite vy form of address," I instructed them. "Or at least you should ask if it's possible to switch to the familiar ty."

  "May we switch to the familiar Vy, boss?"

  "No," I said.

  The boys lapsed into a quiet moodiness for a few minutes and then went back to their barbarian chatter. I was not unhappy to be left alone. The rolled-down windows permitted a delightful breeze to enter the Volvo's cabin, thankfully skirting the young brutes up front with their leather-and-semen odors and instead tickling my nostrils with the smells of ocean and tropical trees—the tang of jacaranda, say. I took out my Belgian passport and, as I often did these days, pressed it to the hard nipple that stood sentinel over my heart. I was happy at the chance to see my Nana in her parents' house. For reasons all too complex and murky, the sight of children and their parents together aroused me.

  The Sevo Terrace esplanade was ablaze with the flash and fizzle of makeshift fireworks aimed at the broad front of the Caspian. Most often these missiles failed to reach their watery target and fell instead upon the crowds of Sevo who had assembled by the edge of the sea and who now beat a panicked retreat from the aerial assault, children and elderly strapped to the backs of the working-age. "There's a war on," I said, "and these people gather to be shelled by fireworks. Unbelievable!"

  "They just want to have fun, boss," one of my escorts told me.

  "We Sevo people like to roast the lamb and have a good time."

  "There are many ways to spend an enjoyable evening," I said,

  "without getting maimed. In my day we drank port wine and talked well into the night about our hopes and dreams."

  "We only hope and dream of moving to Los Angeles one day, boss. So what's there to talk about?"

  "Yes—mm," I said, but I could not come up with an equally damning reply.

  We circled the floodlit octopus of the Sevo Vatican and took a narrow road that led beneath the so-called Founders' Wall and into the oldest part of the city. Each terrace had its own Old Town, built at the time of either the Persian occupation or the Ottoman incursion, I cannot remember which. On the Sevo and International terraces, these were settled by the original Moslems whose beehive baths and stubby minarets had created two miniature Istanbuls quiedy removed from the rest of the city. But the Sevo Old Town was free of Moslems. Rising on a slight ridge, it was trellised by a set of winding roads, each charting a route between mountain and sea, and each eventually leading to a deadend bluff upon which a formidable old house, squatting on timber chicken legs, reproached the driver for disturbing its solitude. The choicest homes were bored directly into the ridge and wore the frippery and ostentation of two centuries past. Their exteriors paraded soft colors, pale yellows and greens, and a ghostly azure that may have once mirrored the now-gray sea below. The houses were graced by long wooden balconies, intricate apertures that often hung from all three sides and were engraved with the lions and fishes of Sevo mythology. They were as beautiful as anything I had seen since landing in the country. We were headed for a house that eclipsed the others in scale, a broad white structure punctured by the occasional skylight, while some of its neighbors were dilapidated to the point of lacking windows and roof tiles. As we neared the Nanabragov manse, it became clear that the house had been built of poured concrete. It was merely an expensive parody of the traditional Sevo home, a shell of cement that had grown balconies and winding staircases with the same cold resolve as it had sprouted the satellite dishes lining its roof. My escorts had gone silent and slack as we pulled up to the house. They touched their weapons and breathed slowly through their noses. They craned their heads to better see the satellite dishes on the roof. They thought in tandem of their Los Angeles destiny, a fate that could not be articulated in words, only in gunfire and the hot-tub embrace of naked women.

  A circular driveway surrounded a copy of Bernini's Fontanel del Mow, the pordy Moorish sea god at its center made out of marble several grades too shiny. I saw my Nana run out of the house, dressed in her usual fashion—tightness and youth, puckered flesh and hoop earrings, the hood of her clitoris clearly visible inside a pair of black sweatpants.

  "Hey you," she said.

  I trembled in response. "Hi-hi."

  "Don't you look nice?" she said. I was wearing my tent-sized polo shirt and a pair of khaki pantaloons that I had bought on Dr. Levine's advice. "Yum," she said. "Gimme that sweet face." She kissed me long and hard, squeezing the nonentity of my ass, the pleats of my khakis billowing like two zeppelins in response. I glanced back at my stunned escorts as if to say, "See, this is what happens to cultured people who use the vy form of address."

  "Come in," Nana said. "My pops is dying to meet you. Dinner's ready. They just shot three lambs." She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

  We strode into a vestibule the size of a good barn, four gilded mirrors reflecting the room's emptiness, creating the kind
of vacant infinity I had always associated with the afterlife. An identical room followed, and then a third and a fourth. Finally we entered a chamber that contained a leather recliner, opposite which hung a flat-screen television. I was reminded of the homes of my former neighbors, the young investment bankers I had known in New York whose downtown lofts ("loft spaces," they proudly called them) maintained the air of a hasty wartime retreat.

  "Look around you," Nana said, reprising her job as an American Express tour guide. "This is a traditional Sevo home. The layout is similar to that of any peasant's house, only a litde bigger. In the old days, the rooms were arranged in a rectangular pattern around an open sm&ke hole. We're not so primitive, so instead of a smoke hole, we have a small courtyard." We entered the small courtyard, which properly should have been called a national forest, indeed fhe national forest of more than one nation, a combination of trees ranging from the palm to the mulberry, among which finches and sparrows caroled at one another, spouting their rapid, nervous gibberish like market sellers vying for a single customer.

  The courtyard was so big that one often lost sight of the house en-closing it. All the empty gilded rooms we had seen before were merely a front, for the life of the house coursed solely through this warm green center, which was anchored, naturally, by a long table covered with enough aromatic food and dark red wine to stab me in all my needy places.

  Nana's father, the master of the house, was surrounded by his many guests, their warble striving to outdo that of the birds above them. Once I was espied, he shouted, "Quiet!" and reached for what appeared to be the horn of a ram, such as the Judeans use in their elaborate ceremonies. Momentarily a similar specimen, jiggling with wine, was placed in my hand by an elderly servant, while the guests, upon discovering the proportions hidden beneath my billowing outfit, began to gasp and exclaim.

  "Quiet, oh you throaty Sevo people!" the master shouted with a spectacular twitch of his entire tiny body, as if he had just been jolted by electricity or branded like a head of catde. "A great man is among us tonight! We drink now to the son of Boris Vainberg, to our young dear Misha, formerly of St. Petersburg, soon of Brussels, and always of Jerusalem. Why, everyone knows the Vainbergs have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. Misha, hear me and understand my words! When you are here among the Sevo, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, my nephew your uncle, my daughter your wife, and you will always find water in my well to drink."

  "True! True!" the gathered throng shouted, and lifted their horns, as I did mine. A peppery concoction overflowed my mouth and dribbled down my chin. I looked in wet, alcoholic incomprehension at the litde man who had supplied the seed that had birthed my Nana, a man who now stared into my eyes with the same fierce possessiveness I often cast upon my morning sausage. As he reached out his arms in a futile attempt to embrace all of me, Mr. Nanabragov's boyish body twitched yet again, nearly jumping out of his half-open linen shirt. He made a kind of peremptory snort and wiped his nose with his wrist. Another twitch followed, this one exposing part of his tanned chest, made stubbly by thick gray hairs but otherwise smooth and firm. Then he fell upon me and hugged me and kissed both my cheeks. I could feel him twitching and vibrating against me, not unlike the electric razor that denuded my chin each morning. "Mr. Nanabragov," I said, enjoying the florid warmth of the father nearly as much as that of his daughter, "your Nana has made me so happy here. I almost wish this war would never end."

  "Me, too, dear boy," Mr. Nanabragov whispered. "Me, too." He let me go, then turned to his daughter. "Nanachka," he said, "go help the women with the lambs, my treasure. Tell your mother if she overgrills the kebabs, I'll feed her to the wolves. And we need more lipioshka, honey. Your new cavalier likes to eat, by the looks of him. How dare we leave him hungry?"

  "I want to stay, Papa," Nana said. She put her hands on her hips and glowered with a teenage obstinacy. She looked so different from her father—he a tiny nervous snowflake, and she a great wide vessel of hope and lust. Only their full red lips bore similarity, the father's bubbly wedges endowing him with a drag queen's pouty glamour.

  "This dinner is only for the men, angel," Papa Nanabragov said, and I noticed that indeed the courtyard was filled by exemplars of that one uninspiring gender. "Go have fun with your girlfriends in the kitchen. What nice lamb you'll make. Just don't overcook it. You want to keep your cavalier happy. What a fine man he is."

  "That's so old-school," Nana said in English to him. "That's so, I don't know, like, medieval."

  "What was that, my littie sun?" the father said. "You know I'm not so good with the English. Even my Russian's an embarrassment. Now go. Fly away. But wait. . . Give me a kiss before you leave." I had never seen my Nana stifle her anger before, mostly because she had never been angry with me (how can one be angry at a man of such few qualities?). She exhaled deeply, her loveliness setded from her round chestnut eyes into the vicinity of her slightiy bowlegged lower half, and I thought she would soon start to cry. Instead, she went over to her papa, put her arms around him, and dutifully kissed him six times, once on each red cheek, once on each bald temple, and twice on the fleshy nose, curved downward like a comma. He tickled her. She laughed. He did his strange out-of-body twitch and simulta-neously slapped her behind, imparting a squeeze. "You know, sir," I said, "it would be nice to have Nana and her pals at the table. Women are pretty."

  "I respectfully dissent," said Mr. Nanabragov. "There's a time for prettiness and there's a time for seriousness. Let's eat!"

  Dead Democrats

  My dinner companions were an inspiration. They ate ferventiy. They ate with their hands. Their hands were always full. I occupied a large part of the main table, and they would reach over me, around me, past my nose, under my chin, to grab an oozing cheese pie or a warm hunk of pheasant or a stuffed grape leaf the size of a forearm. They inhaled their food into one side of the mouth while expelling Armenian anecdotes from the other. The food was good, the meat fatty and charred just right, the cheese lightiy smoked, the soup dumplings coated with enough black pepper to make one cough and weep and thank our put-upon earth for all its spicy produce. I became nervous and discreedy slipped several Ativan tablets into my ram's horn, letting them dissolve amid the strong Sevo wine. But for all the Ativan in the world, I could not quell my anxiety. I started to rock back and forth, as I always do when confronted by food of this caliber. Mr. Nanabragov took this for a sign of Hasidity and started to make a toast to Israel.

  "We Sevo understand your country's problems," he said, mistaking Israel for my country. "We, too, are the victims of our geography. Why, just look at our neighbors. To the south, the Persians, in the other directions the Turks, farther north the Russians. And sharing our country, the apelike Svani. What problems we have. Just imagine, Misha, what would happen if, instead of occupying and subduing the Palestinians, the Israelis found themselves reeling under the Moslem yoke. I would compare both our peoples to a beautiful white mare saddled under a loutish black brute who digs his spurs into our ten-der flanks. Ever since Saint Sevo the Liberator found the piece of Christ's True Footrest delivered to us by that thieving Armenian—

  I'm sure my Nana has told you the story—we have been a nation apart from our neighbors, blessed by education and prosperity but cursed by our small numbers and the whip of our Svani masters." He pretended to raise a whip high above his head and made a whooshing sound.

  "Israel must support us, Misha, don't you think? Tell Israel that we should be as one. Tell them that we are both the last hope for Western democracy. If he were alive today, Boris Vainberg, your father of blessed memory, would be the first to run to the Israeli embassy and beg for their help on our behalf. And I know I speak for everyone around the table when I say that each of us would die for Israel as well."

  "To Israel!" the gathered toasted.

  "To the friendship of the Jews and the Sevo."

  "Death to our enemies!"
>
  "Well put!"

  "Jesus was a Jew," volunteered Bubi, Nana's littie brother, the youngest at the table.

  "Certainly he was," his father agreed, cupping the young man's thick chin with one hand and rustiing his dark mane with the other. They looked alike—Bubi was also a small, girlish-looking beauty who was doubling nicely around the edges, a victim of the Southern good life. He was free of his father's boisterous twitches, evidendy content to live within his own cotton T-shirt, which bore the likeness of the famed Latin American guitarist Carlos Santana. "Yes, Jesus was a Jew," the father confirmed, nodding wisely at the fact.

  "Alas, if you read Castaneda, you will see that he was not," someone said.

  "Hush, Volodya!" another shouted.

  "Don't mistreat the Jews," yet another volunteered. I momentarily put down the soup ladle I had been using to shovel grainy osetra caviar into my mouth and looked at this Volodya. He was the only ethnic Russian at the table, an inflated, red-faced man with the sad, clear eyes and droopy ears of Vladimir Putin. I later found out that, like Putin, Volodya was a former KGB agent. Disgraced from that service after stealing above and beyond his allotted quota of amphibious jeeps and shoulder-fired rockets, he now worked as a security consultant for the SCROD. I decided it was best to ignore him. "I'm not interested in this man," I said, haughtily tapping my caviar ladle against my ram's horn.

  But this Volodya would not let up with his quietly voiced Jewbashing. Whenever my hosts toasted to the wisdom and financial muscle of the Jews, he would say, "I'm a good friend of the Austrian nationalist Jorg Haider."

  Or: "It just so happens that some of my best friends are neo-Nazis. Good fellows, they work with their hands."

  Or, more subtly: "Of course there is only one God. But that doesn't mean we don't have our differences."