Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “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 quietly 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 dead-end 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 Fontana del Moro, the portly 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 little bigger. In the old days, the rooms were arranged in a rectangular pattern around an open smoke 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 the 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 enclosing 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 cattle. “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 little 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 cavali
er 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 little 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 settled from her round chestnut eyes into the vicinity of her slightly 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 simultaneously 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!”

  28

  Dead Democrats

  My dinner companions were an inspiration. They ate fervently. 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 lightly 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 discreetly 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 Svanï. 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 tender 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 Svanï 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 little brother, the youngest at the table.

  “Certainly he was,” his father agreed, cupping the young man’s thick chin with one hand and rustling 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, evidently 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 Jew-bashing. 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 Jörg 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.”

  The father twitched, nearly pulling off his shirt, then pulling it back on again. Bubi and the others loudly denounced the Russian and threatened to eject him from the table. But I would not oblige Volodya by becoming angry. “I am not much taken with Judaism,” I announced. “I am a multiculturalist.” Except there was no Russian word for “multiculturalist,” so I had to say, “I am a man who likes others.”

  The toasts continued. We drank to the health of the pilot who would one day fly me to Belgium. (“But you should stay with us forever!” Mr. Nanabragov added. “We won’t let you go.”) We drank to Boris Vainberg, Beloved Papa of blessed memory, and the famous eight-hundred-kilogram screw he sold to a certain American oil services company.

  Finally it was time to toast to the women. Mr. Nanabragov’s hunch-backed Moslem manservant, who went by the name of Faik, was sent into the kitchen to gather the womenfolk. They emerged, greasy and sweaty and middle-aged, wiping their brows with aprons. Only my Nana and one of her school chums looked glossy and air-conditioned, as if they had spent their evening free of food preparation. (In fact, they had been toking up marijuana in Nana’s room while trying on padded bras.)

  “The bee is here because it senses honey,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching and jerking and thrusting his hips. “Women, you are like bees—”

  “Hurry up, Timur,” said a sallow older woman, her sparse hair coated with flour. “You’ll chatter until the sun comes up, and here we are with lamb to grill.”

  “That’s my wife, everybody!” Mr. Nanabragov shouted, pointing at his spouse. “The mother of my children. Look at her carefully, perhaps for the last time, because if she overcooks the kebabs, I think I’m going to kill her tonight.” Laughter and toasting. The women glanced back at the kitchen impatiently. Nana rolled her eyes but remained standing until the master of the house shouted, “Women, go! Fly away…But wait. First, my dear wife, give me a kiss.”

  Mrs. Nanabragovna sighed and approached her husband. She kissed him six times, on the cheeks, temples, and nose. She made to leave, but he got up, tipped her over, and kissed her loudly on the lips with a protracted shoooo sound while she whimpered and swung her arms about. “Papa,” Nana said, “you’re embarrassing her.” Nana looked at me with brown-eyed despair, as if she wanted me to either separate her parents or inflict the same assault upon her. I was incapable of either. Meanwhile, the ravishing of Mrs. Nanabragovna continued.

  “O-ho!” the gathered c
ried. “True love!” “They’re inseparable.” “Like something out of a movie.” “Fred and Ginger.”

  Mr. Nanabragov let go of his wife, who fell to the ground and had to be helped up by her girlfriends. She shook the dirt off her skirt, bowed shyly to the men gathered at the table, and ran off to the kitchen, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. Nana grabbed her friend’s arm and, with an exaggerated male swagger, followed the older women inside.

  The excitement brought forth by the women abated. The lamb arrived, and its gristly, fatty consistency kept our mouths working hard. Faik the manservant, a half-visible Mohammedan gnome, appeared at our elbow to carve up new chunks of a giant kebab. “Eat, eat, masters,” he said. “If you spit out some of the gristle, perhaps Faik will make a meal for himself. That’s right, spit your gristle at me, excellencies. Am I not a man? Apparently not.”

  I could not believe a manservant could speak so brashly to his masters, and I almost expressed outrage on behalf of my host. But Mr. Nanabragov said only, “Faik, we are at your disposal, brother. Eat what you wish and drink as your faith allows.” With that, Faik cut himself a few choice morsels and absconded with someone’s wine horn.

  Gradually the men began to regain some of their speech faculties. After they were done masticating the lamb and gargling their dessert wine, they picked up their mobilniki and started snarling orders across town or cooing to their mistresses. A group of older men who were clearly styling themselves after Mr. Nanabragov, with their half-open linen shirts and improvised nervous twitches, were having the same endless discussion that dominated the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg that summer: whether a Mercedes 600S (a so-called shestyorka) was better than a BMW 375i. There was little I could add to that debate, other than my preference for a Land Rover, whose seats squished around me so pleasantly. Other men, including the taciturn anti-Semite Volodya, were talking about the oil industry in terms I could not follow—“light, sweet crude,” “OPEC benchmark,” things of that sort.