Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  I looked down at the terraces beneath me. The morning glare of foam and pollution rising off the remains of the sea had coated the city in the bruised pink color of corned beef. With the cease-fire in effect, citizens, Sevo and Svanï, went about their lives, burrowing into the ready maw of the 718 Perfumery or gathering around taxis and failed minibuses to spontaneously drink Turkish coffee and spit sesame seeds at the sun. Armored personnel carriers bristling with armaments and antennae idled listlessly next to cafés, looking like the empty shells of dead insects.

  I found a notecard from Larry Zartarian:

  Dear the Guest,

  Please Your Attention. Federal and SCROD forces are seiging the city. Airport is closed. Whilst the political Situation in our country is resolving ourselves, You may enjoy the historical beauty of Svanï City (which Frenchman Alexander Dumas calls “Pearl of Caspian”—Ooh la la!). Adjacent to Hotel is American Express Tour Company. It is only just for You.

  I once asked Zartarian about the funny English he used in his letters to the hotel guests, and he confessed he was trying to represent himself as a wily local and not some middle-class brat from the San Fernando Valley. Poor Zartarian. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see his corpse laid out next to his mother’s, ready for repatriation to Glendale.

  I looked over the note and asked myself: What would Alyosha-Bob do in this situation? He would always do something. I put on a pair of gigantic square sunglasses and slipped into my roomiest vintage tracksuit, the one that prodded my stomach forward and held it prominently in place, so that altogether I resembled the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il.

  It was time, as Dr. Levine would say, to go for a walk.

  At the American Express office, two girls, one white and blond, the other sweetly brown and local, were lolling about their desks, applying nail polish and speaking quietly in English and Russian, their tongues clicking and clacking over all the right terms (“chick lit,” “chill-out room,” “Charing Cross station”).

  I warmed to them immediately, these sweet Western-minded creatures. I even managed to forget Alyosha-Bob’s absence for a moment. “Hey,” I said to the girls en anglais. “Whassup?”

  “Good afternoon,” the blonde chirped. “Bienvenue. Welcome to the American Express.” She smiled genuinely, and the other—the dark one—cast her eyes down and grinned with her very full red mouth. The blonde was clearly an ethnic Russian; her name tag read Anna Ivanovna or something similar. I couldn’t tell if I liked her or not. The way she huddled herself over her full bosom, she was neither particularly alluring nor entirely ignorant of the art of making young men suffer.

  When I looked at the dark one, however, my thoughts immediately started to wander down below. She was dressed in a tan T-shirt and denims much too tight for her Southern hips. Often when I am compelled by a woman, my fantasies begin not with the brilliance of her smile, or the way she brushes back tendrils of her own curly hair, but rather, with the “great unknowable”—the way her reproductive complex looks when white workaday underwear is pulled over it in the morning, and whether or not certain hairs stray from the fold. For all this I can blame the collected works of Henry Miller, which I read during my internment at Accidental College and which coincided with my induction into hairy American multiculturalism.

  “I’m a Belgian interested in the history of your country,” I said, words that would have rung especially true if “Belgian” had been substituted with “Russian” and “country” with “vagina.”

  The blond girl started squealing about the different kinds of tours they had. Arts, crafts, churches, mosques, beaches, volcanoes, caves, stork habitats, oil fields, fire temples, “the world-famous Museum of Applied Carpet Making”—few cities could rival the Absurdi capital for the range of nonsensical crap on offer.

  “The only problem with making a tour,” said the blond one, “is that my grandmother is Svanï, so I cannot go to the Sevo Terrace, and Nana is Sevo, so she cannot go to the Svanï Terrace.”

  “What?” I said.

  “As part of the cease-fire, there are restrictions on travel for Sevo and Svanï citizens,” the blonde said. “As a foreigner, of course, you are completely exempt.”

  I noticed a large cutout of a locomotive bearing the American Express logo, upon which somebody had written, All American Express luxury trains out of Republika Absurdsvanï are canceled by order of federal government and SCROD. It seemed that I was left with nothing but stork habitats and the graces of two pretty women.

  I turned to the dark Nana Nanabragovna (plucking her name from the pewter tag on her bosom), who was assessing me with her chestnut eyes and wry little mouth. I guessed that she had a robust sense of humor, or at least liked to laugh, and that once we were in bed I could provoke some ticklish giggles out of her. I could see myself kissing the warm, flat bulb of her nose and saying, “Funny girl! Who’s my funny girl now?” This is what I used to do to Rouenna when the mood struck me.

  Having been put in the position of choosing between the two American Express ladies, or at least between their ethnicities, I had to proceed diplomatically, lest feelings be hurt. “Where is the church that looks like an octopus?” I said, knowing full well that it was on the Sevo Terrace.

  “That’s the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator,” Nana said. Her English, I noted, was authoritative and fully American, with a hint of consonant-free Brooklynese. Sain’ Sevah duh Lih-buh-rai-tah, accent on the penultimate syllable.

  I gave my regrets and a roll of cash to the blonde. Nana got her car keys.

  Once she was in motion, it became clear to me that my new friend was a big girl. Not Misha Vainberg big, of course, but in the 70-kilogram (150-pound) range, factored into a height of about sixty-six inches. Despite the healthy country girl’s body, urban fashion had not passed her by. She wore her denims lower than a Lower East Side mami and to the same devastating effect. Her tight tan-colored T-shirt canoodled her breasts. The space between her low-slung denims and high-slung T-shirt was taken up with a band of glossy sun-stroked flesh prickled here and there with dark hairs that stood on end, reminding me of the imported cypresses lining the Boulevard of National Unity. Remarkably, the transition from spine to posterior showed few color gradations—her entire dorsal area approximate to the hue of her upper arms, a solid gold tone. Her denims bifurcated a nice big ass. Her face was wide and emotive enough to accommodate the loves and losses of a dozen aristocratic Persian women, the particular nationality she most resembled. She had the barest of feminine mustaches, which, when covered with cream or froth, would remind me of myself as a twelve-year-old boy. The heat, which smothered me and made a sour borscht of my genitals, kept its distance from her, seemingly angling for a quick passing rub against her bosom. She drove a shiny black Lincoln Navigator decorated with a white-and-blue American Express flag, which, from a distance, resembled the less powerful standard of the United Nations.

  When we were both locked into her truck, we turned to each other and smiled. There we were, two people, one a continent of flesh, the other a mere Madagascar, maneuvering onto leather, sliding our seats forward and back, folding ourselves into the car while mumbling things in Middle-Atlantic English, grunting and sighing like an old couple. We seemed, at least to me, inevitable.

  I recited by heart the last e-mail Rouenna had sent me before the Internet was shut off:

  Dear Misha, I am sorry you are in a dangerous place and people are dying but 1) your email was once again all about you, you, you (how about asking me about MY life for a change?) and 2) when are you NOT in a dangerous place where people are dying? Anyway, I’m sure you’ll get out of your predigament just fine, because your a survivor.

  P.S. You really should’nt hate Proffessor Shteynfarb who likes you a lot and has lots of wity and interesting things to say about you.

  P.S.S. I should have told you earlier but I think your shrink is a real idiot.

  In other words, I thought I was ready for a new love. I was re
ady to feel safe again in someone else’s arms. I was ready to forget my Rouenna, at least for a while.

  Nana and I drove down the Boulevard of National Unity, eyeing the commerce around us and sneaking looks at each other. A half-dozen empty KBR flatbed trucks idled in the middle of the thoroughfare, charged with some mysterious purpose we could only guess at.

  “I thought the road between the terraces was impassable,” I said.

  “You are an important person, Mr. Vainberg,” Nana said, smiling and showing off her lipstick-stained incisors, “and we are a hospitable people. My mother will be your mother, and there’s plenty of water in my well for you to drink.”

  “If you say so, Miss Nanabragovna,” I said. But as we approached a roadblock of jeeps and armored personnel carriers, I reached for the familiar plumpness of my wallet and felt up several US$100 bills, ready to be doled out to any teenager with a gun.

  The soldiers manning the roadblock were taking an afternoon siesta beneath a tarp they had rigged between two of the APCs. I expected my tour guide to reach between her breasts and produce a Sevo cross for the soldiers to inspect, a prospect that made me dizzy with excitement, but instead Nana honked her powerful Navigator horn until a few rumpled youths languidly emerged from beneath the tarp.

  Nana opened her window and leaned out as far as she could, in the meantime letting me look deep into the beginning of her ass crease and the tightness of denim against her caramel thighs. MISS SIXTY, read the label on her jeans, a new brand I was sure would catch on with the middle class.

  “Boys, let me through,” Nana shouted in Russian, the word “boys” sounding both coquettish and imperious.

  “Yes, mistress!” The soldiers saluted and stood at attention. They ran back and started moving aside the tarp and their vehicles, cursing at one another to hurry along.

  The salutes and ceremony were repeated at the Svanï Terrace checkpoint. I wondered aloud as to why Svanï soldiers would so honor a Sevo woman. “It is because we are flying the American Express flag,” Nana said, although her ripe young voice sounded uncharacteristically false as she said it. She turned away from me, then put on her sunglasses, cursing as one of its hinges caught in the tangle of her arm hairs.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, waving away the pain.

  Our Navigator plunged down the winding road, and I soon found myself at the bottom of the world.

  23

  The Sevo Vatican

  If the Svanï were made whole by their remote-control market and their association with Alexandre Dumas, the Sevo boasted a stranglehold on the sea. It loitered close by, gray and muted, peeking out from behind the faded mansions of the oil aristocracy that had decamped here a century ago, when the Caspian had first announced itself as a source of seemingly endless fuel and antagonism.

  Instead of looking for a place to park, Nana simply abandoned her vehicle at a busy intersection. An elderly policeman crisply saluted her and rushed over to stand at attention beside it. He whistled to a passing soldier, who took off his shirt, dipped it into a nearby fountain, and began washing down the Navigator’s sandy windshield. “You seem to be very popular,” I said to my new friend, who merely shrugged. What the hell was going on here? I wished Alyosha-Bob would appear and explain things to me in his pedantic way. I felt vulnerable—susceptible—to anything without him.

  Nana walked ahead of me, relating the peculiarities of the local architecture commissioned by late-nineteenth-century oil barons. “Really?” I said when told of the original owner of a massive neo-Gothic pile. “This was built by Lord Rothschild? The Jew?”

  “Are there many Jews in Belgium, Mr. Vainberg?” my tour guide asked.

  “Yes, quite a few,” I said. “Personally I live in Brussels, but if you ever find yourself in Antwerp, you will see a funny sight sometimes—the local Hasids riding around on their bicycles, with their dark coats flapping along. We Belgians have quite an open society, you see.”

  “So you are a balloon?” she said.

  I was hurt to the stomach by her frankness, by the idea that such a sweet woman could be a fat-baiter. “I do have a fondness for food,” I admitted, “which may indeed make me in your eyes a balloon—”

  “No!” She laughed. “Not a balloon. Oh, you poor man. A Walloon. A French Belgian.”

  “Ah, oui,” I said. “Un Wallon. C’est moi.”

  “Parce que nous parlons français.”

  “Mm, no,” I stammered, for I had never bothered to learn that complicated tongue. “No French, please. Right now I am trying to practice my English. Sadly, it is the language of the world.”

  Nana stopped and allowed me a nice look at her glistening body and face. If she trimmed herself just a little, she could be a chesty athlete; a swimmer, say, for I have heard that female swimmers rely on their massive bosoms for buoyancy.

  “As you may have heard,” Nana coyly told me, “the Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land.”

  “It is my understanding,” I said in my most flirtatious and least reprehensible voice, “that they are your brothers, and whoever is their enemy is your enemy also.”

  “You say ‘they,’ ” Nana said.

  “I mean ‘we,’ ” I conceded.

  “It’s pretty obvious, Monsieur Vainberg,” Nana said. “I had a Jewish roommate in college.”

  “Here?”

  “No, at NYU.”

  I must have appeared utterly blank-faced, for Nana felt the need to slowly explain. “New York University,” she said.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, of course. I know it well. You are a graduate of NYU?”

  “I’ll be a senior this fall,” she said.

  I breathed heavily and embraced my own stomach, my balloon, if you will. She turned away and walked ahead of me. I followed her ass, stunned and queasy at the prospect of being so close to New York, the city of my dreams. So that’s how it was! Another American cruelly trapped in a foreigner’s body. Perhaps I could come with her to NYU in September (if the war had ended by then). Perhaps the generals in charge of the INS, in their Noahlike wisdom, would make an exception for two hungry and fully consumerist post-Soviet bears.

  We had started upon the Sevo Terrace’s esplanade, which extended for a good kilometer toward the gleaming octopus of the so-called Sevo Vatican. Despite the pre-lunch hour, despite this being a workday, the promenade was choked with throngs of Sevo out for a stroll, sucking up petroleum fumes and trying to re-create an old Soviet nostalgia for “the sea,” which here consisted of gray snatches of salt water lapping up to the barnacled bases of the oil derricks.

  The promenade seemed to cater to the needs of the fertile fifteen-to-twenty-nine demographic, but children also mature fast these days. I witnessed a five-year-old in a bow and polka-dot dress dancing like an aged American slut to an accordion tune, as her parents angled for photographs, shouting at the accordionist to play something a bit more lively.

  How different my Nana looked from her countrywomen. There was no mistaking her for anything other than a college senior, twenty-one years old, swift, determined, and carefree, her body a wide testimony to earthly pleasures sought and found, while all around, barely pubescent girls were already consigned to a brutal, dolled-up middle age spent at the hands of anxious relatives and dim-witted, controlling young husbands. Nana had been privileged to leave the former Soviet Union at just the right time in her psychosexual development. Her expectations were as enormous as my circumference.

  At the end of the esplanade, the Sevo Vatican cast its eight tentacles trying to ensnare believers, the three-meter Sevo cross gleaming from its hooded dome like an aerial antenna stacked on top of a satellite dish. “You have to admit, it does look like an octopus,” I said to Nana.

  “I think it looks more like an egg,” she said. “Like an egg that’s inside one of those things they put them in. Like when you order a poached egg.”

  “Like you get at a diner,” I said.

  “Yes, like you get
at a Greek diner,” she said.

  “Yes, like you get at a Greek diner in New York,” I said.

  We smiled sadly at each other, bound by our use of the throwaway American “like,” and I reached out my big, squishy hands, hoping she would reciprocate. But she didn’t just yet. “Anyway,” she said, “I am a Sevo, like it or not, so I have to feed you the official Sevo line. Here goes…”

  And so for the next half hour, while I stroked her body up and down with my lurid male gaze, Nana told me many, many facts about the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator. I will try to relate to the reader some of the highlights (did I mention the orange highlights in Nana’s soft brown hair?), but for a full appreciation of this weird octopuslike church, the reader should turn to the Internet.

  The cathedral was built in either 1475 or 1575 or 1675; certainly there was a 75 in there somewhere. Around this time, the whole of Absurdistan suffered under the sway of the nearby Persians (or was it the Ottomans?), so naturally the Svanï claimed that the cathedral was originally a mosque, not a church, as it was built in brick rather than stone, the material of choice for those nefarious Mohammedans. But no! It was always a church, according to Nana (whose ass instinctively tilted upward whenever she exclaimed something), and anyway, who were the Svanï to talk? They had reached all kinds of accommodations with their Persian (or Ottoman) overlords during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and they had the habit of putting stones around Sevo churches to claim them for their own. I’m not sure why this was significant, but the serious way in which Nana related these preposterous things only made me hotter for her, for when she talked her hooey, she resembled an actress longing to be recognized, a veritable American starlet with a full-moon face and the readiest of lips.