Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  My manservant followed two steps behind me, carrying a leather pouch in which was interred a pair of pork-and-chicken roulettes from the famed Yeliseyev food shop, a bottle of Ativan, and a slug of Johnnie Walker Black, all in case I felt faint and started to teeter over. My only friends, Alyosha-Bob and Rouenna, huddled together in a corner, their relative Western beauty and steady demeanor giving them the air of American movie stars. I spent half the funeral walking toward them but was constantly waylaid by supplicants.

  The aforementioned synagogue crew was on hand, old men with shaky hands, moist eyes, and big loose bellies—many mentions of Papa being the moral consciousness of our city by the Neva, a human pillar holding up the Lermontov synagogue like some demented Hebraic Atlas. And, by the way, look at that sad Jewess by the grave! Quiet Sarah! With the gardenias pressed to her heart! To her very heart! For no heart beats stronger (or faster) than a Jewish heart! Ah, what a couple we would make! The rebirth of Leninsburg’s Jewish community! Why should I be alone for even one more hour? Take this day of sadness, Misha, and make it one of renewal! Listen to your elders! Show the heartless swine who did this to your papa, show them that…

  Well, the only problem with such a gesture was that the heartless swine in question, Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora, had actually been invited to Beloved Papa’s funeral. After Alyosha-Bob had convinced him that I could survive in Europe only with a minimum of thirty-five million dollars, Captain Belugin had dragged them along as a sign of our budding rapprochement. In fact, tall, pale-faced Oleg the Moose and his rosy, horizontal cousin—their shapes roughly approximating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—were already ambling over to me to share their condolences, my idiot relatives quietly parting before them, cowed by their murderous zeal, the fact that Oleg and Zhora had actually done to Boris Vainberg what each relative had long dreamed of doing.

  I backed away, clutching a passing candy wrapper with both of my big, squishy hands, but they were soon upon me. “Your father was a great man,” said Oleg the Moose, nervously combing back his pompadour, his trademark single antler. “A righteous man. A leader. He loved his people. I still have that 1989 article about him from the American magazine, the one where he’s dancing around with a jug of moonshine. What was it called? ‘Shabbat Shalom in Leningrad.’ You know, it wasn’t always easy between us, but all our disagreements to the very last were just fights between brothers. I think, in some measure, we’re all sort of responsible for his death. So Zhora and I are going to pledge a hundred shtukas each to the synagogue. Maybe they’ll buy some extra Torahs or something. We’re going to call it the Boris Vainberg Judaica Renaissance Fund.”

  A shtuka was a thing, or US$1,000, the basic unit of measurement in my dead papa’s universe. A hundred shtukas was not very much, a week of whoring on the Riviera. I looked down at my pricey German shoes, both covered with a fine iridescent film. What the fuck? Damn polymers floating in from the railroad, likely. I pledged right then and there to donate at least one thousand shtukas, US$1,000,000, to Misha’s Children.

  “You know what, let’s make it two hundred shtukas each,” said syphilitic Zhora, picking violently at a back tooth with his pinkie, looking like the bald Chernobyl porcupine they joked about on television. “The cantor said the synagogue needs a new ark. That’s where they stash the Torahs after they’re done singing from them.”

  I stood there listening to my father’s killers. Oleg and Zhora were of Papa’s generation. All three had been made fatherless by the Great Patriotic War. All three had been raised by the men who had managed to avoid battle, the violent, dour, second-tier men their mothers had brought home with them out of brutal loneliness. Standing before the menfolk of my father’s generation, I could do nothing. Before their rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could only shudder and feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and complicity. These miscreants were our country’s rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats—perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I could do a little of each.

  “How’s your health?” I asked syphilitic Zhora.

  He made a circular motion around his crotch. “Eh, you know, a little better, a little worse. Every day something new. The key is to catch it at the early stage. There’s a new venereal clinic on Moskovsky Prospekt—”

  “If you don’t want to end up like Zhora, better put a sock on your gherkin,” Oleg the Moose said with fatherly solicitude. We laughed quietly. “By the way, how’s it going with your visa situation?” he asked. “I think you’ll have better luck with the American consulate now that your father is gone. Even the worst tragedies often bring with them something positive.”

  “Hey, if you go to Washington, tell my son to stop diddling Spanish girls and tend to his studies,” said Zhora. “Hold on a minute! I’m going to give you his e-mail address at the university.” He handed me a scrap on which he had written, with curly Cyrillic flourishes, Zhora2@georgetown.edu. “And tell him nothing less than Michigan for law school, that little popka.”

  We laughed again, the prickly voltage of fraternity coursing through our triumvirate, leaving me a little shocked. “There’s a funny anecdote about three Jews—” I started to say, but was interrupted by a starchy, provincial scream.

  “Murderers! Animals! Swine!” Lyuba was shrieking from the open grave. “You took my Boris! You took my prince!”

  Before we knew what was what, she made a run for Oleg and his cousin, her skinny arms windmilling past the large patriarchal Vainbergs and all the small fry with their orange perms and leather fanny packs. Tear-streaked and crimson, with a child’s delicate pink lips, Lyuba’s face looked uncharacteristically young, so young that I instinctively extended a hand to her, because this kind of youth does not survive long in our Leninsburg; it’s burned out like those malicious orange freckles that had once ringed her nose.

  “Lyuba!” I shouted.

  Captain Belugin acted quickly, shoving the poor widow under his blazer and gently herding her away from the funeral party, toward the railroad track with its overturned polymer cars. He was chanting comforting mantras above her cries (“All is normal…it’s only nerves”), although I could hear her last muffled words: “Help me, Mishen’ka! Help me strangle them with my very hands!”

  I turned away from her, looking instead to Sarah, the pretty Jewess, the prize of our people, proffering us a collection of her saddest smiles and also something smooth and pale and blooming in her hands. Gardenias.

  Soon it was time to bury Papa.

  7

  Rouenna in Russia

  Ghetto Daze, Part II

  “I didn’t come all the way to freaking Russia to look at no oily paintings, Snack,” Rouenna said. We were in the Hermitage, in front of Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre on a Sunny Afternoon. Rouenna was flying out the next day, and I had thought she might want to check out our city’s unequaled cultural patrimony.

  “You don’t want no oily…?” I stammered. We had spent five years loving each other in New York, and I still had no idea how to respond to the vagaries of Rouenna’s mind, which in my imagination resembled a gorgeous ripe sunflower being pummeled in a summer storm. “You don’t like late-nineteenth-century impressionism?” I said.

  “I came here to be with you, bobo,” she said.

  We kissed: a 325-pounder in a vintage Puma tracksuit and a brown woman in a push-up bra. I could feel the babushka guards creaking with racial and aesthetic indignation, but that only made me kiss Rouenna harder as I ran my big, squishy hand along her arched back and into the open crevice of her two-fisted ass.

  We heard a cough filled with phlegm and suffering. “Behave yourself in a cultured manner,” an old voice instructed.

  “What the bitch say?” Rouenna asked.

  “The old people will never understand us,” I sighed. “No Russian ever can.”

  “So we outie, Snack?”

  “We outie.”

  “Let’s go home and cuddle.”

&nbs
p; “You got it, shorty.” During her two weeks here, I had tried to show Rouenna a picture of life in St. Leninsburg in 2001. I’d bought us a motorboat and a sea captain and taken her around the canals and byways of our Venice of the North. She’d let out a few “ooohs” and “dangs” and “aw, dips” at some of the more spectacular palaces, their fading pastel coloring more appropriate for South Beach than for just south of the Arctic Circle. But, like most poor people, she was less a sightseer at heart than a dedicated economist and anthropologist. “Where the niggaz at?” she’d wanted to know.

  I assumed she meant people of modest means. “They’re everywhere,” I said.

  “But where the real niggaz at?”

  I didn’t want to take her to the outer suburbs, where I hear people are subsisting practically on rainwater and homegrown potatoes, so I took her to the nether reaches of the Fontanka River, the quasi-industrial area our grandparents called Kolomna. I hasten to paint a picture of this neighborhood for the reader. The windswept Fontanka River, its crooked nineteenth-century skyline interrupted by the postapocalyptic wedge of the Sovietskaya Hotel, the hotel surrounded by symmetrical rows of yellowing, waterlogged apartment houses; the apartment houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks featuring, in no particular order, a bootleg CD emporium, the ad hoc Mississippi Casino (“America Is Far, but Mississippi Is Near”), a kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab salad, and the usual Syrian shawarma hut smelling invariably of spilled vodka, spoiled cabbage, and some kind of vague, free-floating inhumanity.

  “This is what I’m talkin’ about,” Rouenna said, looking around, breathing it all in. “South Bronx. Fort Apache. Morrisania. Fuckin’ A, Misha. And you’re saying these just average folks?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I don’t talk to the common people much, really. They look at me like I’m some kind of freak. In New York, when I get on the subway and homeys see my size, they give me respect.”

  “That’s ’cause you look like a rap star,” Rouenna said, kissing me.

  “That’s ’cause I am a rap star,” I said, licking her lips.

  “Behave yourself in a cultured manner,” a passing babushka spat at us.

  Rouenna was no stranger to violent death, so when Papa was blown up on the Palace Bridge, she knew how to be tough and not let me fall into further melancholy. “You gotta ‘snap, crackle, pop’ out of this,” she told me, holding me forcefully by my lower chin and snapping the fingers of her other hand.

  “Like the American Rice Krispies cereal,” I said, smiling. “ ‘Snap! Crackle! Pop!’ ”

  “What I just say? Did you call your shrinkie-doodle-doo?”

  “He’s at a psychiatric conference in Rio all month.”

  “Now, what do you pay that asshole for? All right, spudster. I’m gonna have to fix you up myself. Take ’em off. Show me what you got for mommy.”

  I unzipped my Puma tracksuit, letting everything spill out in short order. I got down on the Mies van der Rohe daybed, assuming my analytic position with difficulty. Because my neck is so fatty, I suffer from terrible sleep apnea—impossibly loud snoring, constant shortness of breath. It gets worse when I lie on my back, so when Rouenna sleeps next to me, she instinctively pushes me over on the side with one of her muscular thighs, and I instinctively marshal my fat into an unconscious rollover. A night camera would probably capture something like a postmodern underwater ballet.

  “Flip,” Rouenna said. I got down on my stomach. “Thatta boy.”

  She laid her hands on what I call my “toxic hump,” a black molten peak of stilled flesh and bad circulation, a monument to inactivity grown during the two years of my Russian exile, the repository of all my anger, a kind of anti-heart on the back of me that keeps the sadness pumping. As Rouenna began to knead and contour the intractable hump with her thick fingers, I began to warble in humility and delight: “Oh, Rowie. Don’t leave me. Oh, Rowie. Oh, lovey. Don’t go.”

  The sadness poured out of my toxic hump and flooded the far-flung veins buried like transatlantic cables across my body. I recalled my mommy’s tear-stained face after she lost me at the Yalta train station one summer and thought the dastardly Gypsies had kidnapped and eaten me. “I would have killed myself if something had happened to you,” Mommy said. “I would have thrown myself off the cliff of the Sparrow’s Nest.” Of course, Mommy lied to me constantly, the way mothers in terrible societies do to keep their children from needlessly suffering. But I knew she was telling the truth just then. She would have killed herself. Her life was contingent upon mine. A nine-year-old child, I briefly foresaw my parents’ deaths—cancer ward, a ball of flame—and buried the knowledge deep in my then-tiny gut.

  “You’re not breathing right, honey,” Rouenna said. The idea of my impending loneliness had formed a chicken bone in my throat. I was slowly losing oxygen. “Do like me,” Rouenna said. She inhaled slowly, held the air in, then released it all over my left ear. The heavy incidence of sour cream and butter in the Russian diet had added a new dimension to her breath. Her breasts, tied back with a kind of wide summer bandanna, were a reassuring presence against the toxic hump and the warm, sweaty flesh that gathered around it like the foothills of Mount Etna.

  “I love you so much,” I said. “I love you with everything I have.”

  “I love you, too,” Rouenna said. “You’ll get through this all right, baby. You gotta have faith.”

  Faith was one of Rouenna’s specialties. Her family’s tiny duplex on Vyse and 173rd in the Bronx fairly burst with olive-skinned ceramic Madonnas nursing sweet baby Jesuses, just as the fifteen reproductive women of the extended household gave sustenance to their newborn Felicias and Romeros and Clydes, everywhere breast milk and obeisance and quiet American devastation. In the late seventies, when Rouenna was a toddler, their apartment building in Morrisania had been torched for insurance purposes. One afternoon a threatening anonymous note was slipped under their door, and by evening “finishers” came to strip their apartment of its electrical wiring and plumbing fixtures. Rouenna’s mom draped her with a blanket to protect her from the winter cold, and by nightfall their building joined the parade of torches lighting up the northern bend of the Harlem River. Fortified by the quiet submission of the poor, they trooped over to a homeless shelter that had been recommended to them by other relatives in similar circumstances. Eventually some Methodists won their trust by feeding them. They found her mother a job sweeping city streets, and one of the younger, more mobile grandmothers was set up selling sweet ices on a street corner (the men of the household had long since fled). The Methodists helped them fill out applications for the new government housing that was then slowly revitalizing the Bronx. By the nineties, Rouenna’s family had climbed into the ranks of the lower middle class, their meager but ever-growing worldly goods racing ahead of their obliterated urban psychologies. And then I came along, the “rich Russian uncle sent by God” who had taken such interest in their daughter’s development. Little did they know who was saving whom.

  “I know you’re all heartbroken over your daddy,” Rouenna said as she worked the hump, “but I gotta say, he didn’t do right by you.”

  “He didn’t love me enough?” I asked.

  “He drags your ass to Russia, then he kills the Oklahoma dude, and now you can’t leave. My family may be fucked up, but at least we look out for each other. When I told my moms you was Jewish, not Methodist, she was like, ‘Long as he treat you good.’ ”

  “It’s different in Russia,” I said, kissing one of Rouenna’s hands, which was cradled beneath my chin. “Here a child is just an extension of his parents. We’re not allowed to think or act differently from them. Everything we do is to make them proud and happy.”

  “Whatever,” Rouenna said. “Why don’t you just do what makes you proud and happy and let your dead father rest already?”

  “You know what that would be, sweetie?” I asked.

  “You wanna bust a nut in me?”

  “I want to do som
e laundry.”

  Like all Jewish boys growing up in Russia, I’d had all of my earthly needs (save one) taken care of by my mother, but after Rouenna moved into my gargantuan Financial District loft, she exposed me to a new experience—the Laundromat. At first I insisted that a professional laundress wash our socks and underwear, but Rouenna taught me there was something simple, methodical, and pleasing about doing it yourself. She taught me all about temperatures and detergents and how to treat “delicates.” After the drying machine stopped spinning, we would roll up our socks together. She would make perfect little balls out of the socks, and when we got home, it was such a pleasure to unroll them and put on a warm fresh pair. I’ll always associate self-laundered socks with democracy and the primacy of the middle class.

  I took Rouenna down to the cellar. A laundry was already in progress. My manservant, Timofey, was supervising a young new maid as she sorted through my tracksuits and loincloth-style underwear. “Yes, that’s how we do it here,” Timofey was saying to the maid, nodding sagely. “That’s just how the master likes it. What a good girl you are, Lara Ivanovna.”

  I chased away the servants, threatening to beat them over the head with my shoe (it’s a little pantomime I do with the staff; they seem to enjoy it). “Thanks for FedExing me the fabric softener sheets, Rowie,” I said. “We don’t have the good kind here. I can’t get enough of this ‘outdoor fresh scent.’ ”

  Rouenna was looking over the control panel of the new washing machine I had airlifted out of Berlin. “How does this work, boy-o?”