Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “I’m Belgian,” I shouted, waving my passport. “I’m a Belgian citizen. We’re going to the Hyatt. We’re in a Hyatt car. This is my driver. I’m a very important man, a Jew.”

  The soldier sighed. “The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land,” he recited. “My mother will be your mother—”

  “Forget my mother for a second,” I said. “Do you know who my father was? He was Boris Vainberg.”

  “I’m supposed to know every Jew in the country?” the soldier asked. He raised his Kalashnikov and skillfully placed it directly inside the knot of Sakha’s Zegna tie. A familiar liquid was dribbling along the inseam of the poor man’s trousers and onto his shoe. His body glowed red from within his crisp cotton outfit. It was possible he was having a heart attack.

  I, on the other hand, had never felt more in control.

  “You don’t know who Boris Vainberg was?” I shouted at the soldier. “He sold the eight-hundred-kilogram screw to KBR.”

  “You’re with KBR?” the soldier asked.

  “Golly Burton, Golly Burton,” Timofey brayed from the backseat.

  The soldier lowered his gun. “Why didn’t you say so from the start?” he said. He looked at us with sad, childish eyes, resigned to the prospect of one less beating. “Move along, sirs,” he said, throwing us a lazy salute.

  Sakha managed to throw the car into gear, and we slowly proceeded up to the International Terrace, behind the rump of an armored personnel carrier. The democrat had stopped crying and now produced only short bursts of urine, his hands dug into the steering wheel, his eyes following the anti-aircraft gun bouncing directly in front of us.

  “Wow,” I said in English. I turned around to look at my manservant. “Did you see that, Timofey? We did it. We saved a life. What does it say in the Talmud? ‘He who has saved a life has saved an entire world.’ I’m not religious, but my God! What an accomplishment. How do you feel, Sakha?”

  But Sakha could not supply the words of gratitude I deserved. He merely breathed and drove. I decided to give him some time. I was already composing an electronic message to Rouenna about the day’s exploits. What had she told me in that dream about the eight-dollar apple? Be a man. Make me proud. Done and done.

  The Boulevard of National Unity was choked with eight-wheel BTR-70 armored personnel carriers, whose sloping, boatlike hulls would be familiar to anyone who watches BBC World. Tanks guarded the strategically important Benetton store and the 718 Perfumery. Slender Absurdi men in black jeans and tucked-in dress shirts, armed only with their holstered mobilniki, darted along the boulevard, minding the drunken soldiers who would hurl abuse at them on occasion, promising to inflict anal sex upon them and whatnot.

  Nearing the Hyatt and Radisson skyscrapers, we were caught in a mass of screaming and shoving pedestrians bent on the same destination. Soldiers had surrounded them and were tearing through their documents and pulling at their crosses. They slapped people across the head or fondled young girls with giggly pleasure. At the heart of the action, a young soldier was trying to tug a chain off a matronly neck while punching her in the mouth. “Robbery!” the woman was yelling. “Save me, citizens! Robbery!” For some reason, Timofey and I both laughed nervously at the large woman’s strife. We were reminded of something deeply Soviet—a person’s dignity being slowly dismembered in front of others.

  Respectful of the Hyatt sign on our jeep, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. “Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first,” I said to Sakha.

  The democrat nodded and said nothing. As we maneuvered into the Hyatt’s circular driveway, he shouted two words that made no sense, turned the wheel sharply to the left, and slowly drove us into the camouflaged side of a BTR-70. The air bags inflated before us. Smothered with white, my fat cheeks scratched by the billowing nylon, I stumbled out of the jeep. An officer was running up to us, followed by a line of soldiers. At last I understood what Sakha was screaming behind me. Two words. “Colonel Svyokla.”

  In a novel written during the golden age of Russian literature, a man named Svyokla would look like a svyokla, that is to say, he would be red as a beet. But in the era of modern produce, Colonel Svyokla’s head resembled a giant genetically modified peach, fraudulently spherical and ripe, the skin dry and crisp. He wore neither the democratic goatee favored by Sakha nor the Middle Eastern mustache sprouting from his soldiers’ lips. He looked like one of the dignified older men from the Caucasus whom one often finds in the back of St. Petersburg casinos, sipping Armenian cognac with some beauty, ignoring the hurly-burly provincialism at the roulette wheel and the so-called dance floor.

  “Misha Vainberg,” Colonel Svyokla said, shaking my hand. “What a pleasure. My mother will be your mother…”

  While he addressed me, the soldiers were dragging Sakha out of the Hyatt jeep. Sakha was not resisting them; he was merely being carried along by their collective force, his dark head bobbing in a sea of camouflage. “I used to work for your father, Boris, as his local oil consultant,” Colonel Svyokla said, gamely ruffling my hair. “His death was a terrible tragedy. A major light was snuffed out for the Jewish people. My condolences.”

  At the far edge of the driveway, beneath a sign reading DANGER: LOW OVERHEAD CLEARANCE, a group of men had been assembled at gunpoint. They stood there with a terrible resignation, their ties hanging limply around their necks, arm hair glistening beneath their short sleeves, some of their eyes already swollen shut, presumably from rifle blows.

  “There has been an attempted Sevo putsch,” the colonel explained to me. “We’ll take care of it in a few minutes. Go back to the hotel, Misha.”

  I ran as quickly as my weight allowed and burst headlong into the chilled Hyatt lobby. Alyosha-Bob and Larry Zartarian caught me in an embrace, and we all fell to the marble floor.

  “You have to…You have to…” I said, scrambling all over them, my hands flopping up and down as if I were swimming toward a distant lighthouse.

  “There’s nothing…There’s nothing…” both of them were saying in answer. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  I spotted Josh Weiner among a clutch of oil workers, their hands filled with afternoon beer mugs. “Josh,” I cried. “Josh, help me. They’ve got Sakha.”

  The diplomat was looking deep into his palms, which he had stuck out in front of him. He turned his hands over carefully, never shifting his downward gaze.

  “Josh!” I said. Timofey leveraged my weight with his and brought me to my feet.

  I hobbled over to Weiner, but he silently turned away from me.

  “We’ve already filed a protest,” I heard him say.

  “The people they’re going to shoot…they’re not rebels. They’re all democrats!”

  “Did you hear what I just said, Vainberg?” Weiner grated through his teeth. “We’ve filed a protest.”

  I turned around and made for the sunlight. “Misha, no!” Alyosha-Bob shouted, throwing himself upon me, but I knocked him out of my way with one enormous squishy fist.

  I emerged onto the driveway to the sound of angry male voices. “On the ground!” the soldiers were yelling to Sakha and his cohorts. I felt them. I felt the soldiers with their warm ethnic blood and clan loyalties, their adolescent swagger and inbred psychoses, their made-up heraldry of lamb pie, plum brandy, and a hairy virgin for the wedding feast.

  “On your knees!” the soldiers shouted.

  The men, some of them heavy, others bestowed with an academic’s lack of physical grace, found it difficult to arrange themselves in this tenuous position. Several were tipping over and had to be dragged up by their collars. The soldiers had fallen in line behind them, one soldier to a man, a ratio that did not bode well.

  Sakha’s eyes fixed on me. There were tears on his face; I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. “Misha,” he shouted to me. “Mishen’ka, please. Tell them to stop. They will listen to a m
an like you. Please. Say something.”

  I felt Alyosha-Bob’s hand tugging on my sleeve, his little body pressing into mine. “Golly Burton!” I yelled. “KBR!”

  The soldiers looked to Colonel Svyokla, who nodded. They shot the men through the back of the head, the bodies of their victims jerking up in unison with the discharge, then hitting the driveway with tremendous speed, a cloud of loose gravel swirling around them.

  The spent bullet casings rolled down the driveway to my feet. A dozen bodies lay on the ground.

  19

  My Gray Reptile Heart

  Forty stories above the war, civilization à la Hyatt enclosed us.

  Generators hummed deeply within the skyscraper, allowing the illusion that we were on an American spaceship floating past the tanks and armored personnel carriers, the fake Irish bars and Royal Dutch Shell oil platforms, toward some remarkable and disingenuous Hollywood conclusion. “Everybody into the pool! It’s party time!”

  I dialed, and misdialed, and dialed again Dr. Levine’s number. Finally the good doctor came on the line, coughed, sneezed (seasonal allergies again), hacked, and wished me a good day. “Dr. Levine, emergency,” I said. “I’m in Absurdsvanï Republic. I’m in great danger. Terrible things. Please advise me—”

  With great patience and analytic equipoise, Dr. Levine beseeched me to calm the fuck down. “Now, where is this place?” he asked.

  “Have you been watching the news?”

  “I saw the news last night.”

  “So you heard about the civil war.”

  “What civil war?”

  “In Absurdsvanï. In the capital. They’ve sealed off the airport. And they shot my friend in the back of the head.”

  “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.” Dr. Levine sighed. “What is this Absurdsvanï?”

  “Absurdsvanï is on the Caspian Sea.”

  “Which is where, exactly? My geography’s a little off.”

  “The Caspian Sea? It’s, you know, south of Russia, near Turkmenistan—”

  “Where?”

  “Near Iran.”

  “Near Iran? I thought you were still in Moscow last time you called.”

  “St. Petersburg.”

  “Still, Iran must be a great deal farther off than Moscow. What are you doing there?”

  I explained in so many words that I had traveled to Absurdistan to buy European citizenship off a crooked Belgian consular official after nailing my dead father’s young wife. A reproachful silence followed. “Is this a legal way to get citizenship?” Dr. Levine asked.

  “Well,” I said. “ ‘Legal’ is a relative word…”

  You son of a bitch, I thought. How dare you suggest that I shouldn’t avail myself of every last chance to get out of Russia when your own great-grandparents probably bribed half the czar’s men in the Pale of Settlement and then sneaked out in a mail bag, just to make sure their descendants could lounge on a fine walnut-trimmed Eames chair on the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street, issuing half-baked censorious statements to the insulted and injured and collecting US$350 an hour for the privilege? But instead of saying this, I started to cry.

  “Let’s go through the important questions first,” Dr. Levine said. “There seem to be a lot of people being shot to death or blown up by land mines in your recent past. So let me ask you: Are you in a safe place? Is your life in any immediate danger? And, given the possibility that you may now experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress such as feelings of detachment, anger, and helplessness, do you think you can make rational decisions that will keep you safe in the future?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, choking off my sobs to concentrate. “My friend Alyosha-Bob is trying to get us out of here. He’s very smart, you know.”

  “Well, that’s positive,” Dr. Levine said. “In the meantime, you should spend your time constructively. Try to occupy yourself as you did in Moscow. If it’s safe to do so, go for a walk or do some exercise. This type of activity, combined with three milligrams of Ativan a day, should lower your anxiety level.”

  “Do you think I can really—”

  “Look, why don’t you just try to relax?” Dr. Levine said. I could hear him slurping on his beloved citrus shake with vitamin boost, the modern equivalent of the analyst’s cigar. “Just don’t get so worked up,” he said.

  “Try to relax? How do I do that? That’s like trying to drink my way to sobriety.”

  “You know what helps another patient of mine when he gets all worked up? He goes out and buys a suit. Why don’t you go out and buy a suit, Misha?”

  “I’m too sad to buy a suit,” I whispered.

  “What else comes to mind about that? About your sadness.”

  “No one cares about me, not even you, Doctor,” I said. “I saw a nice democrat killed in front of me, and I try to grieve the best I can for him, but I can’t. And I try to grieve for my papa, but nothing, as you say, ‘comes to mind about that.’ And I try to be good, I try to help people, but there’s no way to be good here, or if there is, I don’t know it. And I’m scared, and I’m lonely, and I’m unhappy, and I’m chastising myself for being scared, and lonely, and unhappy, and for being alive for thirty years and having nobody, not one soul save for Alyosha, who would care for me. I know there are people in New York and Paris and London who have the same problems, and that I shouldn’t feel exceptional by comparison, but everything I do and everywhere I go, it’s all wrong, wrong, wrong. And it can’t just be me. I need to know that it’s not just me. I need to hear that I’m better than this. I wake up in an empty bed and I look at my heart and it’s gray. Literally. I take off my shirt, I pick up my breast, and my heart’s all leathery and gray like a reptile’s.”

  I heard several bouts of strained nasal breathing. I grasped the receiver, waiting to hear that it wasn’t just me, that I was better than this, and that there was no such thing as a gray reptilian heart. “Say it!” I whispered, barely audibly, and in Russian. “Do your job! Make it work! Give me some happiness!”

  More analytic silence followed.

  “It is true,” Dr. Levine grudgingly allowed, “that the circumstances in which you live present a unique set of problems.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was true. Bad circumstances made for unique problems. I waited for more. I waited for one minute, then for another, but in vain. Oh, come on, Doctor. Throw a dog a bone. Tell me I’m better than this. Talk about my heart. I put my face in one of my big, squishy hands and I cried, exaggerating my wails in the hope that the doctor would take pity and absolve me of my sins.

  But he wouldn’t do it. Not for US$350 an hour. Not for all the money on the Cayman Islands. Not for all the money in this gray-hearted world of mine.

  As depressed and immobile as a twenty-first-century Oblomov, I lay on my bed scrolling through the darkest corners of the Internet, the laptop whizzing and bleating atop the mound of my stomach. I watched all kinds of unfortunate women being degraded and humiliated, tied up, spat upon, forced to swallow gigantic penises, and I wished I could wipe off their dripping faces, whisk them away to some Minneapolis or Toronto, and teach them to take pleasure in a simple linear life far from their big-dicked tormentors.

  I decided to write Rouenna an electronic letter.

  Dear Rouenna,

  I am in a small country called Absurdsvanï, to the south of Russia, near Iran. A civil war has broken out and innocent democrats are being shot in the street. I am trying to save as many people as I can. The Belgian government has awarded me citizenship in recognition of my services, but it may be too late to save my own life. Pray for me, Rouenna. Go to mass with your abuela Maria and pray for my soul.

  I don’t know if your new boyfriend has taught you to read Freud yet, but I want to tell you about a dream I had in which you sold me an apple for eight dollars. My analyst says it means that everything you ever did for me was conditional upon my money. From the very beginning when you saw my loft and said, “Dang, jumbo, I think I finally made
it,” you were using me. (See, I don’t forget a thing!) My analyst, who is a medical doctor, says you better change, Rouenna, because what you’re doing to me is going to destroy you inside. You’re the one who’s going to be hurt by your actions and that’s a medical opinion. Think about it!

  If I make it out of here alive I’ll still be yours forever, because you’re the only thing that makes my life worth living.

  Your Loving Russian Bear, Misha

  Actually, I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning the apple dream to Dr. Levine, but it was always useful to bring up an authority figure with Rouenna. As soon as I sent the message, an auto response popped up on my screen.

  Hey there cowboys and cowgirls! I cant answer your message right now because me and my man are going up to CAPE COD for a week just to chill out from all the stress thats been killing us!!!! While y’all steaming like chinese dumplings in NYC we’ll be staying at a famous film director’s house in hiyanissport (cant say who it is or Proffessor Shteynfarb will kill me!). Ha ha. Just kidding. I’ll be back next Wednesday so dont miss me too much. Kisses, R.

  Thought of the Day: “The earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to.”—Voltaire, French Philospher. Totally true!!!!!

  I reread the message, the laptop pneumatically rising and falling on my belly with each breath. There was a phrase that had stuck in my mind. It wasn’t the Voltaire. I reread Rouenna’s message. “Film director.” That was it. Not a movie director, but a film director. Christ. I tapped at the keyboard with a numb forefinger, winding my computer back to the stream of pornography, the clean-shaven vaginas confronted with twirling batons. I fell asleep in a whirlpool of rage, a woman’s false moaning registering thinly on the laptop’s speakers.