Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  We entered the cathedral, which offered a nice break from the heat. Despite this amenity, it was largely empty, save for the old women violently crossing themselves by clusters of candles and whispering angrily at their missing god. No doubt about it, the church was an afterthought. The real action was on the esplanade, where commerce and matters of the groin held sway.

  The head of the cathedral’s octopus was taken up by a colossal dome, ringed by a circle of skylights that in turn lit up a fetching fresco inlaid upon the dome. “This was the original seal of the first Sevo potentate,” Nana said. “A lion with a sword is riding atop a fish. This is to show that all power is ephemeral, and that even the mightiest ruler can lose his grip on the affairs of state.”

  “That’s kind of nice,” I allowed.

  “It’s my favorite symbol,” Nana said. “I hate the whole business with the footrest, so I wear one of these instead.” She withdrew from between her breasts a pendant bearing the lion-surfing-on-a-fish motif. I reached out to touch it. Its sweaty warmth, a product of her natural heat, made me feel wobbly and wet. I wanted to press my nose to it, too.

  “Tell me, please,” I said. “What is the difference between the Sevo and Svanï? You both look so cute to me. Why can’t we all just get along?”

  24

  Why the Sevo and Svanï Don’t Get Along

  The Sevo and Svanï started out as one people, much maligned and forever in the shadows of the Persians, Turks, Slavs, and Mongols, who in different periods would come over to plunder and rape them pretty hard. And then along came Saint Sevo (the Liberator, mind you!), who, in the time-honored tradition of so many other religious personages, had a vision. What made this Liberator’s vision particularly funny, not to mention oddly contemporary, was that he suffered it while high on a local herb called lanza. A fresco in one of the octopus’s pre-tentacle alcoves showed a wiry peasant bent over a stone pot, nasally inhaling three strands of pasta, really the vapors of the lanza herb, which transported him temporarily into the next world (the ceremony of lanza-sniffing is performed by Sevo monks to this day), where he met, of course, Jesus.

  Jesus, rendered in the fresco as a spectral, bleary-eyed figure nearly as stoned as Saint Sevo himself, told our visionary that all was not right with his people, particularly the priests who had just last year excommunicated the saint for sleeping with their teenage daughters and forced him to live along the parched saltwater-blasted strip that would one day be known as the Sevo Terrace. “Look,” said Jesus. “I’m a good guy, right? But enough is enough. After you come down from your lanza high, I want you to get your homeys together, get your pointiest utensils, and spear the bejesus out of all your enemies. And when you’re through spearing, I want you to fuck every underage cutie in town. I’m talking, like, sodomy here. Right in the dumpster. Capiche?”

  “Muh-huh,” Saint Sevo replied. “So saith the Lord. And believe me, I’m all over it. But, Jeez, can you give me a sign? Something I can show my homeys. So that they know I’m, like, legit.”

  “Goeth you,” said Jesus, “to the highest rise of the lowest terrace of your city. And then digeth you. Digeth and digeth, night and day, mornings and afternoons, skippeth you the lunchtime, and then you shall uncovereth that which you seeketh.”

  So the very next morning, Sevo the Liberator brushed off his hangover and ran to the highest rise of the lowest terrace—this, by the way, is where the octopus of the Sevo Vatican is presently located—and started digging. For many grueling days: nothing. And then, holy shit! A little piece of wood or something. But clearly very holy. The saint-to-be went back to his wretched hut, gathered a fortnight’s stash of lanza from the backyard, and, with the piece of holy wood before him, got terrifically high. Oy vei, how many visions he had! Eighteen, to be exact, each represented in the cathedral by a primitive fresco (where did these poor, constantly pillaged people find the time for frescoes?). The most important vision of all, the one that would give birth to the entire Sevo nation, featured Christ on the cross, bloody and spent, whispering for Saint Sevo to get down on his knees like a doggie and lick the spilt blood pooling on the footrest. This our boy did gladly, only as he was lapping up the sacred corpuscles and pulling the resulting splinters from his tongue, a dirty, thieving Armenian crept up to the cross and chipped for himself a hefty chunk of Christ’s footrest, tilting it to the position thereafter found on the Sevo cross.

  Now, Christ is crucified along with two so-called thieves—a Good Thief, who defends him and is promised eternal salvation by the Son, and the Bad Thief, who pretty much goes straight to hell. The footrest of the Svanï cross, like the standard Orthodox cross, is slanted with the part on Christ’s right pointing upward, so that Jesus is leaning toward the Good Thief. But in Sevo mythology, after the dirty Armenian chips away at the footrest, Christ leans in the opposite direction, that is, toward the Bad Thief. This has all sorts of crucial theological implications, none of which I can remember.

  Anyway, back to the story. So the Armenian, chunk of footrest in hand, ran back to his native land, hoping to bless his co-nationals with the glory of the Footrest of the Lord. But God much detested the Armenians, clever bastards that they are, and He laid for the fellow a trail of golden coins, which the greedy Armenian naturally followed all the way to what is now the Sevo Terrace. Lost in that arid, inhospitable clime, the Armenian offered all his gold to Yahweh in exchange for His mercy, but the ever-mercurial Judeo-Christian God struck him down instead (and took back all His money to boot). The chunk of footrest was buried there in the sand alongside the Caspian, to await the day when a certain stoned Liberator would appear, pick up the holy wood, gather his homeys, and spear-fuck half the land. Those chosen homeys and their newly raped betrothed would become the Sevos of today.

  I have laid out the tale of the Sevo-Svanï schism in a hopefully entertaining hip-hop fashion, but it was related to me by my Nana in a less joyful manner. She used complex terms to describe the religious differences, such as “dyophysitism” and “monophysitism,” along with frequent allusions to some Holy Council of Aardvark that rocked the region in A.D. 518, not to mention that whole Good Thief, Bad Thief hullabaloo. I do not wish to disparage her considerable knowledge of local prejudices, nor the faith to which she nominally belonged. I believe that when confronted with the irrational, we must not laugh, even when laughter is richly deserved.

  We stepped out of the cathedral and onto the broad series of steps that connected the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator with the half-naked esplanade before it. “Look around you,” Nana said. “Forget the religion crap. Look at the geography. We Sevo live along the coastline, and the Svanï live in the mountains, the valleys, and the desert. For a thousand years, the Svanï have been farmers and herders, and we’ve been the traditional merchant class. That’s why there’s the stuff about the Armenian in the tale of Christ’s footrest—because the Armenians, not the Svanï, are our traditional competitors. We’re cosmopolitans trying to cuddle up to the West, while the Svanï screw sheep and pray for salvation. That’s why our churches are empty and theirs are full. That’s why ever since trading became more important than farming, we’re the ones with the big bucks.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “I’m proud of you people. Merchants are more evolved than agriculturalists. That’s a fact.”

  She ignored my comment, staring out into the oil fields silently tapping the seabed from the edge of the esplanade to the inky line of the horizon. She stared as far out as the violet-dappled halls of New York University, and, with one big, squishy hand shielding my blue eyes from the sun’s glare, I stared along with her to the classrooms and cafeterias, the modern African-dance recitals and poetry slams, past the bustle of Broadway and Lafayette Street to the cast-iron triangle of Astor Place.

  “Now, as part of your tour, Mr. Vainberg,” Nana said, “I will take you out to a traditional Sevo lunch. Do you have any dietary restrictions?”

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” I said, pointing to
my stomach.

  25

  A Sturgeon for Misha

  We walked down the esplanade, past a creaky bumper-car set imported from Turkey, festooned with indecipherable Turkic exhortations beneath a cartoon of a young brown woman being chased by a drooling gray wolf brandishing a knife and fork. To think how much of this world we don’t understand. We pass it by and shrug. But if a Turk had appeared on the esplanade and explained to me why this cartoon was supposed to be funny, why it was attached to a bumper-car set for children, and why, pray tell, this particular set of bumper cars had landed here in the middle of Absurdistan and not in some dusty provincial Turkish amusement park—well, just think of how much more I would now know about this Turk and his nation, how much less prone I would be to dismiss his kebab-skewering, Atatürk-loving, repressive ways. Perhaps it would prove instructive for Misha’s Children to spend their summers in a Turkish resort by the Black Sea, sunning themselves and learning about their dark Moslem cousins. I made a note to call Svetlana in Petersburg and tell her to make it happen.

  Thoughtful and depressed after the history lesson, Nana and I walked along a pier stranded between two listing derricks and toward a mammoth pink clamshell. The clamshell, once in use as an amphitheater, had found more profitable use as a seaside restaurant called the Lady with Lapdog. We were the only customers despite the prime dining hour, the waitstaff having gone to sleep around a circular table, mostly middle-aged men in transparent white shirts, heads buried in their hands. They looked up at us wearily, displeased by the midday disturbance. We ordered the tomato salad, drenched in olive oil. It had been some time since I’d seen vegetables that colorful. I grabbed my gut, turned away from Nana, and started rocking back and forth, as if imitating my sworn enemies the Hasids.

  “Mmm,” Nana said. “Fresh, so fresh.”

  She poured herself a Turkish beer and I did the same, only adding a glass of Black Label to the equation. An old waitress in a filthy miniskirt and fluorescent panty hose approached, bearing in each arm a dish of eight perfectly square sturgeon kebabs. I glanced at Nana, but she hardly noticed me, lost as she was in the act of lancing her first kebab with her mighty fork.

  My mind collapsed on itself, the toxic hump started humping, but it was unsure of the brand of toxicity to be released—either cold melancholy or the streetwise aroma of the Bronx. The sturgeon kebabs were the color of an Indian chicken tikka, their edges were charred black as the void, but their consistency was mealy and tender. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I whispered in appreciation. The fish juices pooled over my chin and fell in oily yellow drops onto the plate, the tablecloth, my track pants, onto the ceramic floor of the Lady with Lapdog, into the barely breathing Caspian Sea, over the starving deserts of the interior, and into the lap of my beloved Nana, sitting across from me in silence, eating.

  More fish came. I ate it all. I could feel my father’s hands upon me. The two of us. Together again. Papa drunk. Myself timid yet curious. We would stay up all night. We would ignore Mommy’s threats. Who could think of a school day in the morning when you could drop your trousers and pee all over the neighbor’s anti-Semitic dog? I could feel my father’s vodka breath in my mouth, in my nose, in my ears, my pasty body pressed to his prickly one, both of us sweating from the ghetto heat of a Leningrad apartment in deep winter, drowning in that strange atavistic stirring, shame and excitement in equal measure.

  I ordered a batch of the Central Asian flatbread called lipioshka, using it to soak up the sturgeon juices shimmering on my plate. The beer and Black Label were gone; fresh cantaloupe had replaced them. The fruit was as bright and orange as the fish kebabs, only bursting with sugar instead of salt. I let the wedges chill against my inflamed gums, then breathed in the cantaloupe, which coated my throat with orange lather before dissolving into the center of my body, gone forever, like everything else I’ve ever eaten.

  I looked up at Nana. She was shivering with delight. Her big, tough, cracked homegirl’s lips were purple and flecked with all the juices on offer, except for mine. She was more alive than anything around her, and her aliveness distorted the oil derricks behind her and the Sevo octopus and the dingy esplanade and the Turkish bumper cars, and that made it all real and lovely and true. “There is a new seafood restaurant,” she said.

  “On Tenth Avenue,” I said.

  “Not far from—”

  “—that new boutique hotel—”

  “—they’re gonna build.”

  “The one with the portholes—”

  “—next to the Belgian place.”

  “The one thing you can’t find—”

  “—in New York?”

  “Right—”

  “—is a good paella.”

  “You need a very big skillet—”

  “—the tapas bar.”

  “The one on Crosby—”

  “—with the sherries.”

  “The boquerones—”

  “—the olives.”

  “Zagat-rated—”

  “—twenty-three for food.”

  “I went on a date—”

  “—there?”

  “Everyone does.”

  “Even you?”

  “Me?”

  “I wish.”

  “I wish right now.”

  “I wish I was—”

  “Me, too.”

  I eased my elbows onto the fish-stained tabletop, sneaked my head into the crook of my arm, and let loose with the sadness. I felt Nana touch my soft wavy hairs with her hand, which was slow and methodical in its ministrations. Unconcerned about the snickering waiters, she was quiet and dry-eyed, a professional tour guide comforting her charge after he was robbed of his wallet and passport. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry for nothing,” she said, which may not have been her best English, but I understood what she meant.

  “I’m drunk,” I said, which was only partly true.

  She settled the bill and we walked slowly, unevenly, at last hand in hand, down the pier toward the teeming esplanade. A SCROD billboard hung along the pier, a Communist-era-looking tableau of three middle-aged local men beneath an exclamatory slogan in the local language. All three had hooded gray eyelids, reminding me of a parade of turtles sauntering down toward the tide. One looked like a tired intellectual. He and another were distinguished by poorly made silver teeth, the third by a thick, feminine mouth and a daring young man’s expression. A wheezing loudspeaker beneath them blasted the techno music of five years ago interrupted by snippets of angry Sevo oratory. “What does it say?” I asked, pointing at the billboard.

  “ ‘The Independence of the People Will Soon Be Realized!’ ”

  “I like that funny-looking guy with the girlie mouth,” I said. “He looks like an Odessa singer. He must be the junior dictator of the bunch. ‘Don’t hate me. I’m not Stalin. I’m only in training!’ ”

  “He’s my father,” Nana said.

  I did not register what she had said at first; per the usual, I had been lost in thought about some aspect of myself. “Oh,” I said finally. I stopped to examine my palms, the prominent green veins trying so desperately to bring blood to the fingers.

  “I have something to tell you, Misha,” Nana said in Russian, dispelling what was left of my Belgian identity. “My papa knew your papa well. They were in business together. He was a very dear man. When he came to Svanï City, to our house, he would bring me sugar cubes and mandarin oranges. As if there were still shortages, like in the Soviet days. As if I were starved for vitamins and sweets.”

  “Oh,” I repeated in English.

  I closed my eyes, trying to think of Papa, but what happened next trumped his memory. The ripe green papaya smell beneath the perfume, the feathery but strong feel of arms against my side hams, the soft kiss of downy lips against my forehead. Beneath the picture of her own father exhorting passersby to violent rebellion, my Nana was holding me close.

  26

  Food, Decor, Service

  The next week I spent i
n love—with her, with the distant American city we held in common, and with myself for being able to so quickly recover from the post-traumatic stress of Sakha’s murder and Alyosha-Bob’s flight. We had sex practically on the same day we met; the myth of the conservative Eastern girl dispelled with a few slutty poses struck over a shared bottle of Flagman vodka at the Hyatt’s Beluga Bar, followed by a trip up the glassed-in elevator, a five-minute bout of red-lipped fellatio, and then the sloppy application of a South Korean condom. These all proved fun activities, and I was able to stay hard for a while, even though I find condoms repellent, another attempt to smother and belittle my khui, only this time at the hands of the South Korean rubber barons.

  She approached lovemaking as would many a big girl (and I mean big, not fat), with a sense of duty and equality and full-bodied joy that smaller, more rodentlike women do not possess. She giggled and playacted. She pushed me onto the bed, and I pretended to tip over, when in actuality that was exactly what I did, nearly snapping my fine Hyatt bed in two. “Come here, sweetie,” I said, American to a fault. “Come to daddy.”

  “Whatchoo got for me, daddy?” she said, arms on her hips, young face shining with sweat, dark brown eyes glazed over with sexy drunkenness. “Show me whatchoo got.”

  “Yeah, you wanna see, sugarplum?” I said. “You wanna see what I got?” And for the first time since the Hasids snipped me, I was not afraid to bring it out to the light—the long scar, the patches of skin stapled to the stem, the general look of a rocket that had failed reentry. Nana was not interested in the particulars. She shrugged, smiled, then went at it progressively—putting it in her mouth, turning it around, withdrawing it with a popping sound, some laughter at that, wiping her mouth with the inside of her elbow, then stuffing my thing back into the warmth of her oral cavity.