“The next world?” Faik said, scratching at his stubbly sailor’s haircut. “You know, some people look forward to the next world, but not Faik. In the next world, they’ll ask me, ‘What did you do in the previous world?’ And I’ll say, ‘I worked like a horse to feed my family.’ And they’ll say, ‘Good, you can work like a horse to feed your family here, too.’ ”
“You’re lucky to be employed by such a prominent family,” I said. “Children are starving in Tajikistan.”
“A prominent family,” Faik said. “Everyone at the table tonight was former KGB. Even Parka Mook the playwright was a collaborator in the end. Sevo nationalism! They’re the same assholes who ran everything before. It took them two seconds to switch from the hammer and sickle to Christ’s True Footrest. And that cretin of a son Bubi. With his Porsche and his hookers. What a disgrace.”
I knew that Faik was right about the Nanabragovs. I knew I was getting into something ugly, or at least morally taxing, but I did nothing. I let it happen. Slowly, and then not so slowly, I was being pulled toward the SCROD. I was starting to believe in Nana and her family. I was falling in love with her father and his twitchy beliefs. I had been caught unawares by Parka Mook and his glorious Sevo dictionary. Quietly the Vainberg Rises.
At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch. We all wanted to soar high above the city, take on the earthly powers below, and champion the rights of somebody, anybody. The Sevo people would do just fine, thank you. Democracy, it turned out, had the makings of the best Disney cartoon ever made.
“Would you rather live under Georgi Kanuk?” I shouted at Faik. “Gambling away the country’s oil fortune in Monte Carlo? And no freedom of speech?”
“Freedom of what?” the Moslem manservant said. He blew a barrage of smoke at a lamb’s head that served as the table’s centerpiece and was already being picked apart by a squadron of flies. “They recruited half the boys in Gorbigrad for the last war. They put my son in an APC that exploded without any explanation and burned him from the waist down. He’s twenty-three now, Bubi’s age. How am I going to marry off a cripple? Do you know how much money I’ll need to get him even a half-decent girl? Who’s going to pay for all those German salves I coat his body with? He looks like a mayonnaise sandwich, my only son. But who cares about another mangled Moslem boy? We’re all just fodder for the Kanuk family or the Sevo merchants. Maybe I should try to move to Oslo, like my cousin Adem. But what’s the use? The Europeans shit all over him. Or maybe I can drive a taxi in one of the Gulf states, like my brother Rafiq. But those sandy Arabs treat us like Negroes down there, too. And you can’t even get a decent drink because of those crazy Wahhabite mullahs. Wherever we Moslems go, it’s the same khui. What’s the use of living?”
“You should be thankful your masters are trying to give you democracy,” I said. “Freedom is going to change your son’s life. And if not his life, then the lives of his children. And if not their lives, then the lives of their children. By the way, I run a charity in Petersburg called Misha’s Children—”
Faik waved me away. “Please,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic and that you slept with your stepmother. So what can be said about you?”
What indeed?
30
A Sophisticate and a Melancholic No Longer
I’ll tell you something else. When I was four or five years old, my parents used to rent this wooden hut for the summer. The hut was about a hundred kilometers north of Leningrad, close to the Finnish frontier. It was perched on a yellowish hill featuring all kinds of decrepit vegetation and this rotting hornbeam tree that would take up human form and chase after me in dreams. At the bottom of the hill was a brook that made this characteristic pshhhh sound that I think all brooks make (they don’t really burble, per se), and if you followed the brook around innumerable bends and cataracts, you’d emerge into this gray socialist village—which wasn’t really a village anymore but some kind of depot for trucks bearing benzene or kerosene or another highly flammable gas.
Oh boy. Where am I going with this? Right. So Beloved Papa and I had this nautical theme going. He’d get these old beat-up shoes and he’d rip the tops off, so all you’d have was the rubber sole, and then he did some other things to the shoe—he made a kind of improvised sail out of paper and twigs—and we’d sail these shoe-boats down the brook. I think we ran alongside our sea-shoes, cheering them on, singing songs about ants and caterpillars and Mommy in her apron baking poppy cakes, my papa’s face a jaunty combination of sparkling black eyes and wind-whipped bushy goatee. And if I try hard with my mind I can ascribe some kind of daily heroism or gentleness or even filial love to the scene of father and son following their rubber-sole regatta down the stream to a former village, now a base camp for idling benzene trucks, their sides stenciled with the fair warning: KEEP YOUR DISTANCE—TRUCK MAY EXPLODE.
Now, tell me, what was the point of all that? What am I trying to do here? Why is it so hard to come up with a solid block of grief for a deceased parent? Why can’t I rehabilitate my papa the way Gorbachev rehabilitated Stalin’s victims? See, what I’m going for is a kind of totalitarian triumph-over-adversity story with Beloved Papa cast in the role of wise, fun-loving, middle-class parent. I’m trying here, Papa. I’m doing my best. But the truth always seems to dampen my best instincts.
The truth is this: the damn shoe-boats never made it down the brook, they sank within ten seconds of becoming waterlogged or else were eaten by a hungry Soviet beaver. The truth is this: after a while, we ran out of shoes, and Beloved Papa would make boats out of walnut shells (same concept but much smaller boat), and these we would sail around our rusticated bathtub, only they also became waterlogged and sank pretty quickly, too. The truth is this: Beloved Papa had a very dim knowledge of flotation, a very faulty understanding of how physical objects are kept aloft by water, this despite the fact that, like every other Soviet Jew, he was a mechanical engineer by training.
The truth is this: on some level, Beloved Papa could not believe he had played his part in giving birth to a living, bumbling, farting, sentient creature such as me, and he would grab me fiercely enough to leave bruises on my arms and stare into my eyes with a kind of helpless fury, his budding love for me hemmed in on all four sides by fear. And self-knowledge.
He didn’t want to hit me. He didn’t want to swipe at my khui. Not this early on. But hitting young boys was the done thing (“If you don’t hit, you don’t love,” his idiot relatives used to say), else they grew up cretins who couldn’t pummel their way through grade school. Papa’s stepfather had beaten him with a poker when he was seven, and by the time he was thirteen, Papa had celebrated his manhood by beating his stepfather half to death with the same poker. He then clocked some relatives pretty hard and also disfigured a local drunk suspected of ravishing children. He really went nuts with the poker. There was a nice kind of closure to that, although a few years later Beloved Papa had to spend some time in a sanatorium.
The truth is this: Beloved Papa had no idea what the hell to do with me. He lived in an abstract world where the highest form of good was not child rearing but the state of Israel. To move there, to grow orang
es, to build ritual baths for menstruating women, and to shoot at Arabs—this was his lonely goal. Of course, after socialism collapsed and he finally got a chance to get drunk and happy-fisted on a Tel Aviv beach, he discovered a goofy, unsentimental little country, its sustaining mission nearly as banal and eroded as our own. I guess the lesson is—freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
Meanwhile, back at the Park Hyatt Svanï City, I was as free as I had ever been. I took my own ritual baths mornings, afternoons, and evenings, liberating my body from its degrading fat man’s smells. I could not recall the last time I was so clean. The size of the Hyatt’s tub (an artifact of Roman proportions) encouraged me to take to the water. Splish, splash, goes an American ditty. And I can’t remember the rest.
I was a changed man. A sophisticate and a melancholic no longer, no matter what Faik would say. I loved my physicality, and I wanted to share it with the world, or at least the illiterate young maids who would stumble upon me, scream blehlebhlebhhebhhhhheh! or some other local expression, put up their skinny arms in protest, and run for the door. “Come back, little dopes,” I would shout, throwing a wet sponge after their tails, “all is forgiven!”
The steam rose off my flanks as if emulating the incense crowding the dome of the Sevo Vatican. The water took responsibility for my sins. It absorbed the enormity of my dead skin, sloughing it off in reptilian layers, the sum of which, miraculously, did not clog the drain but evaporated to form a rainbow above the toilet. It buoyed parts of me I had long scorned, my necks, my chests, buoyed them one by one and made them brilliant and holy in the reduced, foggy light. It floated my legs upward until they naturally assumed the position of the pregnant Virgin in stirrups, until I could feel the smooth underwater kicks of the Son in my stomach. Overall, I found myself both beautiful and blessed. The mirrors arrayed above the bathtub showed me as I truly was—a tall man with a round, wide face, small blue eyes deeply set, the nose of a smart, predatory bird, a thicket of elegantly graying hair that had recently aged me into a long-denied maturity.
“What do you think of your son, eh?” I ask Beloved Papa, whose imaginary breakfast table I had placed directly beside my tub.
Papa was chewing a piece of hunter’s kielbasa atop a piece of buttered bread, a morning treat his Swiss doctors had erroneously guessed would kill him. With the unsandwiched hand, he held his mobilnik, tipping it into his meaty mouth as if he meant to swallow it, too. “No,” he said, eyes boring through the near-infinity of his billfold, dry alcoholic mouth puckering on every heavy word. “No, that’s not it at all. If he dares…Why, I’ll fuck him good. We’ve got everyone down—Sukharchik in Customs, Sashen’ka at Agricultural Import, Mirsky in Moscow, Captain Belugin at the precinct. Who does he have? Next time he comes up empty-handed, I’ll throw his mother under the tram!”
“Papa! Look at me! Look how fine I’ve grown. Look how the water makes me so pretty and young.”
Papa grabbed a teacup and drank down the hot liquid without so much as a snort of pain. He liked to think he was as strong as the bulls with the shaved heads and bad childhoods whom he had gathered around him. He liked to think of himself as a man for all seasons, as long as the seasons were dusty and dry. “Just wait a minute, Misha,” he said. “I’m talking on the phone, right?”
How little use he had for me. But then why did you send for me, Papa? Why did you interrupt my life? Why did you put me through all this? Why did you have my khui snipped? I have a religion, too, Papa, only it celebrates what’s real. “Asparagus,” Papa said into his mobilnik. “If they’re from Germany, the white ones, they’ll sell. Just do what needs to be done this time or you’ll get it in the pizda from me and mine.”
“Get it in the pizda, Papa? That’s not very nice. Children have ears, you know.”
He shut off the mobilnik with an exaggerated click, the way he’d seen it done on television shows. He wiped the kielbasa and butter off his fingers with one of Lyuba’s Hermès scarves. He walked over to the bathtub and stood over me, so that I shuddered and felt my nakedness before him. Is this why Isaac is always naked in the paintings while Abraham is safe and warm in his robe?
“Remember how you used to bathe me, Papa?” I said. “You bathed me until I was twelve. Until I got big, eh, Papa? And then you stopped. Too much work, you said. Too much to wash.”
“I’m a busy man now, Misha,” Papa told me. “The times have changed. Now everyone’s got work to do. Everyone except you, it seems.”
“I had an art internship in New York,” I reminded him. “And a nice loft. I had my Rouenna to do laundry with. Why did you kidnap me, Papa? Why did you kill that poor Roger Daltrey from Oklahoma?”
“Fine,” Papa said. “You want me to wash you? Where’s the sponge?”
He put his hand on my neck. It was coarse and warm. He smelled reassuringly of garlic. As he cupped one of my breasts, I tried to see the disgust on his face, but his eyes were closed. He lifted up my breast and sponged underneath it. You have to keep all the crevices clean, he used to teach me. He scrubbed. Harder and harder. He went for my stomach, grabbing a fold, roughly sponging it until it felt raw and used, then moving on to the next. “Do you still love me, Papa?” I asked.
“I’ll always love you,” he said, moving along, moving downward.
“I want to believe in something, too, Papa,” I said. “Just like you believed in Israel. I want to help the Sevo people. I’m not stupid. I know they’re no good. But they’re better than their neighbors. I want to avenge Sakha’s death. Will you love me more if I do something important with my life?”
“You want to help someone, help your own kind,” Papa said, scraping the dust and sand off my thighs.
“Mr. Nanabragov tells me I should talk to Israel. How do I do that, Papa? What’s the trick?”
But Papa just kept rubbing along, his body rocking back and forth, his jaws clenched, his lemur head bobbing along. “Think one person can change the world, Misha?” he said at last.
“Yes,” I said. “I really do. Do you?”
Papa took off his shoe. He took out a pocketknife and, in a few frenzied motions, separated its sole, creating the preliminary outline of one of the childhood shoe-boats he used to build for me. He put the sole into the bathtub. It made a few seaworthy gestures, rolled along the waves caused by my deep breathing, then lifted its prow to the ceiling and promptly sank.
I looked around the empty bathroom. It was all quiet now except for the high-tech beeping of some Hyatt appliance. My papa was dead. Alyosha-Bob was gone.
I had work to do.
31
The KBR Luau
August came to the republic. An unpleasant warm wind materialized from the south—from Iran, I suppose—boxing Svanï City into a rectangle of hot air. The weather was so unforgiving, Timofey had to accompany me around town putting ice cubes between my tits in a desperate effort to refrigerate me. Being a Belgian, I began to appreciate what my fellow countrymen had to endure down in King Leopold’s un-air-conditioned Congo.
The main event of the social season was the Kellogg, Brown & Root luau in celebration of the Chevron/BP Figa-6 oil fields. Everyone was talking about it—the white men by the Hyatt pool, the teenage soldiers manning the roadblocks, the young maids Timofey had arranged to scrub my feet in the afternoon. KBR was especially famous for its very generous “goody bags,” and people were wondering what they would get at the rooftop luau (let me spoil the fun a little: it was a tin of beluga caviar accompanied by a mother-of-pearl serving spoon engraved with the Halliburton logo; a selection of scents from the 718 perfume store, including their new Ghettomän aftershave; and gold earrings shaped like tiny offshore oil platforms, which made a nice gift for Timofey’s new girlfriend, one of the older Hyatt maids). The KBR luau was, without a doubt, the hottest ticket in town, and I saw my invite as a sign that I had arrived. If I was going to help Nana’s father and the SCROD in their quest for Order and Democracy, it was important to keep my compass needle poin
ting true north, and in Absurdistan that always meant Golly Burton.
I heard the KBR people had a really easygoing Texas attitude (their company is headquartered in Houston), so I put on some checkered shorts and a banged-up pair of sandals that kept slipping off my sweaty feet no matter how much I tightened the straps. Nana, however, looked super-sexy in her flaming cowboy boots and a formfitting Houston Astros T-shirt that finally made me appreciate the sport of baseball.
On the special Halliburton day, Nana and I made quick love in front of the CNN-tuned television, gave each other a tender, aromatic sponge bath, then took the elevator one floor up from my suite to the roof terrace.
We were greeted by a tall American soldier in Oakley sunglasses and a Kevlar helmet, armed with an enormous assault rifle, an unusual sight, given the cease-fire. A civilian female greeter put fragrant leis of orchid and rose around our necks and slapped a khaki KBR baseball cap on my head and a straw Halliburton beachcomber on Nana’s, warning us of the effects of the blazing sun. “Are the goody bags inside?” Nana asked, craning her neck anxiously.
I could smell a thousand American hamburgers aflame, some exuding pure red meat and charcoal, others coated with a voluptuous layer of processed cheese. The roof was jammed with Halliburtonites and well-connected natives. The Absurdi men had dressed up in their traditional woolen pants and brown wingtips, their wives fronting thick gold necklaces and amber bracelets you could fit around a birch tree. The KBR folks were divided into two camps: British (mostly Scottish) employees in crisp white shirts and pressed trousers, and their more freewheeling Texas and Louisiana counterparts in Hawaiian shirts and knee-high black socks. Local cooks had formed a serving line to dish out steaming bowls of shrimp gumbo and crawfish étouffée, while more discriminating eaters were laying siege to the Svanï City Sashimi Company. The rooftop’s open-air view was magnificent and all-inclusive, a front-row seat to the amphitheater that was the Absurdi capital, although a long banner covered the best parts of the skyline with the words KELLOGG, BROWN & ROOT + CHEVRON/BP = LIGHT, ENERGY, PROGRESS.
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