Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “I’m fighting with my Nana,” he said. “I want her to quit her job at the American Express office so that she can become the mother of your children.”

  I had been privy to this argument when Nana had mounted me, sans condom (how wet her vagina, how flustered my khui), the previous night, bawling about her father’s simple nature with each vicious straddle. “Children are like champagne corks,” I advised Mr. Nanabragov, patting him on the back. “They should be pointed away and released.”

  “I don’t understand,” my potential father-in-law said. “Why are children like champagne corks?”

  “Just get me the Internet,” I told him.

  We met in an airless conference room adorned with a series of warped walnut panels and a tremendous Sevo flag, a sturgeon leaping up over an oil derrick against a background of red and green—red for the blood of the Sevo martyrs and green for the color of American dollars. The men who had gathered around the conference table were the same ones who had come to Mr. Nanabragov’s dinner party, only Bubi was missing due to a hangover. They sat there in white short sleeves, gray woolen slacks, and wingtips, their mobilniki parked next to their salads and glasses of fizzy mineral water, gossiping loudly in their own language. I might have been at a Lions Club ladies’ lunch somewhere in Sinclair Lewis country if not for the bloody flag hanging above us, the oil derricks gleaming outside, and the occasional mumble of the special American word “LOGCAP.”

  The meeting started with a media roll call. According to Mr. Nanabragov, since the shelling of Gorbigrad had begun, Absurdsvanï was featured in thirty-four news reports, about half of them implicitly sympathetic to the Sevo people. “CNN, check,” Mr. Nanabragov intoned, making a sweeping check mark with his twitching arm. “BBC One, check; BBC Two, check; MSNBC, check; Rai Due, check; Deutsche Welle, check…”

  “What about people jumping into the Alexandre Dumas Ravine?” I asked. “Doesn’t that look bad?”

  “They’re not jumping, they’re sliding down,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Which reminds me, have you talked to Israel yet? Because there’s good news on that front. Parka, tell us the good news.”

  The Cultural Minister, his morning face bristling with nose hairs, was staring out the window at the Caspian’s lackluster tides. “Wake up, grandpa,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Tell Misha about the Mountain Jews.”

  Parka Mook fell out of his morning stupor and fixed me with his yellow eyes. He sniffed in my direction as if ascertaining my genus and specie. “Mr. Vainberg,” he said, “good morning. How are you? Well rested? That’s very nice. Now, allow me to play the fool’s fool and tell you about our latest brilliant idea. Do you know who the Mountain Jews are? No? You don’t? What a delightful man you are! How easy it must be not to know or care about your own people. Well, briefly, the Mountain Jews have lived among us probably since the time of the Babylonian exile. In the mountains, you see. Their mother has always been our mother, and they have always had water from our well to drink. And believe me, they drank and drank. They drank until our wells ran dry.”

  “Parka!” Mr. Nanabragov cautioned.

  “In 1943 the fascist troops were headed directly for Svanï City, hoping to take control of the oil and the strategic port. The Mountain Jews turned to the local Sevo and Svanï leaders, asking to be hid among them in case the Germans came, or at least to secure their passage across the Caspian. I have found evidence, anecdotal evidence from several village elders, that the Svanï were lukewarm to the idea of saving the Jews, while the Sevo were mildly enthusiastic. So there you have it. Let the truth be known.”

  “But the Germans never reached Absurdsvanï,” I said.

  “Unfortunately not,” Parka Mook said dryly.

  “So who cares if the Sevo might have helped them. In truth, they didn’t.”

  “Still, it’s a beautiful story,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “One minority willing to die for another. You should be shouting about it from a rooftop, Mr. Minister of Multicultural Affairs.”

  Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and Leisure was shamelessly picking at my salad. I gave him such a look, he nearly stabbed himself with his own fork. I reached in with one of my two big squishies and palmed a wedge of ripe, bleeding tomato. “The Holocaust is a serious business,” I said. “It requires very expert branding or we’ll all look like a bunch of idiots.”

  “Branding I don’t know about,” Nanabragov said. “But we can certainly build a statue to Sevo-Jewish friendship. Imagine a hundred-meter version of Misha and the dead democrat Sakha bent over a Torah scroll. And from the Torah scroll, an eternal flame comes shooting out.”

  “Fine idea! Let’s build a Misha!” the gathered shouted.

  “It’ll take half the granite in the Dumas Ravine just for his head,” some wise guy said.

  I joined my fellow ministers in laughing politely at my unchecked gluttony. “But seriously,” I said, “if you want to look good with the Holocaust, you have to do something original. Or if not original, then at least educational. Like a museum. And it has to be of the latest fashion, so every time a child taps a computer screen with his finger, some poignant fact about Jew-Sevo friendship pops up. Tap, tap, tap, fact, fact, fact.”

  “Can we build such a thing?” Mr. Nanabragov turned to the Minister of Finance.

  The minister was nearly my size and likewise lived amid a tornado of hair and food particles. “Boys,” he grunted, wiping sweat off his forehead and flicking it jauntily at the chipped mahogany table before us, “let me tell you about the state of our treasury.” He proceeded to outline the rapidly decreasing state of a dozen offshore accounts, along with more informal financial institutions with names like “Big Sasha’s Stash” and “Boris’s Itty-Bitty Bank.”

  “What about all that oil you have?” I asked. “What about Figa-6?”

  The room fell silent. The Minister of Tourism and Leisure to my right let out a series of short, difficult breaths. “How about this, Misha,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Why don’t you ask the American Jewish community for some money?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to ask the American Jews for money so that I can please the American State Department by making an overture to Israel?”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “What’s the American phrase? ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ Hopefully they’ll appreciate our initiative.”

  I considered my knowledge of American Jews. They always seemed to feel alone and unloved when, in truth, most of the American populace just wanted to kiss them on their shiny noses, bake them a casserole, shoot them some one-liners over dinner, and possibly convert them so as to hasten the Second Coming. Would these Jews respond favorably to a love letter from a small oppressed people somewhere between Russia and Iran? And what form would such a love letter take?

  “I guess I can write some grant proposals,” I said.

  “We don’t know what those are, but anything you do must be blessed by God,” Mr. Nanabragov replied to general applause.

  I took out my Hyatt pen and pad and wrote in moist excited letters:

  MISHA’S TO-DO LIST

  1) Get Internet installed in office.

  2) Write grant proposals to build Holocaust Museum.

  3) Encourage multiculturalism in everything I do.

  “You see how hard Misha’s working,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “You see how organized he is. That’s because he has an American education, like my Nana and Bubi. We old Soviet black-asses, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

  The men around me were yawning and stretching. The lunchtime hour was knocking, and there were mistresses to spread at the Hyatt and steaks to dispatch at the new Tuscan Steak & Bean Company. Cigars were lit, followed by soft coughing and sleepy belches. Leave these good men to their idle pursuits. I, on the other hand, would return to my office to work out their country’s future. Like the 3.94 student I once was at Accidental College, I would prove myself yet again.

  34

  The Situ
ation Worries Me

  Dear The Guest,

  Please Your attention. Due to the worst-ening political situation, we are sad to inform You that many items on the Sushi/Sashimi menu will no longer be possible for You. (In particular we are out of mackerel.) We humbly beg You—forgive us!

  Your Faithful Slave, Larry Zartarian, General Manager, Park Hyatt Svanï City.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but Zartarian was right. And not only about the mackerel. The political situation was “worst-ening.” I couldn’t get from one terrace to another in Nana’s Navigator without getting stuck in a crush of Gorbigrad refugees. The faces of the blighted brushed up against our windows—I tried to spot members of the intelligentsia among them, maybe to offer them a ride, but all were coated with the grime of several days’ travel, while the tinted windows of the Navigator erased any discernible signs of intelligence. The men, women, and children in front of me were tied to one another by invisible strings of kin and clan; they were stoic in their exile and loss, but they moved forward hand in hand as if their destinations were fixed, elders hanging on to the backs of their sons, sons cradling little daughters, the war veterans and the demented crouched ferally within wheelbarrows.

  “It’s just a temporary situation,” I whispered to them. “Soon the international community will step in.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. Panic was slowly creeping up the Boulevard of National Unity. Cases of Ghettomän aftershave from the 718 Perfumery and boxes of scruffy-looking Muppets with excited American googly eyes from the Toys “R” Us superstore were being pillaged left and right, squeezed into armored personnel carriers and waiting jeeps. For the first time since my arrival in Absurdistan, the armed forces actually seemed involved in their duties, officers calmly directing the looting, jotting dollar figures upon clipboards, and shouting at their inferiors to hurry their black asses up and load the fucking APCs already. A slow-motion military retreat seemed to be taking place, set to the occasional roar of GRAD missiles departing the roof of the Hyatt, followed by patches of rising gray dust and smoke at the line of the horizon. Only the KBR trucks stood silent and empty along the boulevard.

  But mostly I was concerned about the gang activity. They called themselves the True Footrest Posses and they seemed to be on every street corner, hanging loosely like their Compton counterparts, some of them armed with sausage-thick Makarov pistols and AK-47s, others with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and light mortars that they listlessly dragged behind them, like some bothersome cleaning chore their parents had pressed upon them. They were kids, few over the age of consent, sunburned, depressed, malnourished, dressed in jerseys and sweatpants bearing the logos of the National Basketball Association. One had a blue Crips bandanna around his neck, another sweated terribly beneath a wool ski cap, a third had capped most of his teeth with gold and was bleeding around the gums. Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation. Occasionally I would hear them rap in English about the violent, sexy life they wanted to lead in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and about what they would do to their Svanï or Sevo counterparts once their enemies were disarmed and bent over. One popular ditty I heard on the Sevo Terrace started like this:

  Rollin’ down Sunset

  What do I see?

  A bunch of hoey-ass bitches

  Lookin’ at me.

  They got Christ’s footrest all wrong

  ’Cause they asses are Svanï.

  I’m like, “Wassup, ho?”

  She like, “My name is Lani.”

  That’s an American name,

  ’Cause she got no pride.

  Nut-draining Svanï bitches,

  They livin’ the lie.

  I line ’em up in front

  O’ they brothers

  Put a gun to they head.

  Svanï bitch, you betta give it up anal

  Or your brothers be dead.

  The brothers cryin’ like girls

  While they sistas I’m fuckin’

  I’m, like, slippin’ and slidin’

  They, like, flippin’ and buckin’.

  All this talk about forced anal sex worried me. This was not how you gained market share on MSNBC or even on the FOX network, and certainly not how you won the love of the world. It was time to take action. It was time to “talk to Israel.”

  And then a modern miracle happened. Nanabragov’s men finally installed a high-speed Internet connection in my office. I whipped out my laptop, jammed its little dickey into a wall socket, and powered up the World Wide Web.

  Reams of information eagerly floated onto my screen. Several dull websites demonstrated rather clearly what a grant proposal looked like. I learned about the soul-searching expeditions of contemporary American Jews from the banks of Poland’s Vistula River to the extinguished shtetls of Bessarabia. I learned about the average American Jew’s curious if misplaced interest in something called “kabbalah.” As for the Holocaust, few genocides were better documented. I drank some coffee, touched myself, and began my duties as the Minister of Multicultural Affairs.

  35

  A Modest Proposal

  Project Name

  The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.

  Project Overview

  The greatest danger facing American Jewry is our people’s eventual assimilation into the welcoming American fold and our subsequent extinction as an organized community. Due to the overabundance of presentable non-Jewish partners in a country as tantalizingly diverse and half naked as America, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to convince young Jews to engage in reproductive sex with each other. Efforts to connect Jews of reproductive age through professional social networks and alcohol-fueled “meat markets” have had limited success. Israel, once a source of pride and inspiration, is now populated largely by an aggressive Middle Eastern people whose bizarre lifestyle is thoroughly incompatible with our own (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, “Why Does Hummus Leave a Bitter Taste in My Mouth?,” Annals of Modern Jewry, Indiana University Press). It is time to turn to the most effective, time-tested, and target-specific arrow in our quiver—the Holocaust.

  Even among the most thoroughly secular and unaffiliated young Jews, the Holocaust enjoys great name recognition. When asked to identify the following eight components central to Jewish identity—Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Holocaust, Mikvah, Whitefish, Israel, Kabbalah—only Whitefish scored higher than Holocaust in a survey of thirty drunk Jews at a nightclub in suburban Maryland (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, “Oy! What a Feeling, I’m Jewish,” Annals of Modern Jewry, Indiana University Press). The Holocaust, when harnessed properly as a source of guilt, shame, and victimhood, can serve as a remarkable tool for Jewish Continuity. The problem is the over-saturation of the Holocaust brand in media and academe, creating the need for a fresh, vibrant, and sexy (yes, sexy—let’s keep our eyes on the prize) approach to the mother of all genocides.

  The newly independent Sevo Republic, run under the democratic and Israel-friendly auspices of the State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy (SCROD), is a small but attractive nation-state on the shores of the beautiful Caspian Sea. The history of Sevo-Jewish friendship runs as deep as the waters of the Caspian. Both are educated, entrepreneurial, and maligned people fighting with their much larger oxlike neighbors for their share of love, recognition, and adequate living space. In 1943, as Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa thundered toward the peaceful oil reserves of the Caspian, the Sevo populace began a voluntary campaign to transport the native Jewish population out of the Republic and toward safety in Stalin’s Siberia. Today the country remains easily the most Jew-tolerant place on earth outside of Brookline, Massachusetts. This philo-Semitism, combined with an exotic location, the chance to enjoy the hospitality of a righteous people (finally an entire nation of tzadikim), and the opportunities of a temperate, beach-filled
landscape most reminiscent of Cancún, Mexico (only cheaper, much cheaper), creates the perfect environment for an education-based initiative that is a world apart from the hackneyed death marches of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Yad Vashem.

  Methodology

  A Striking Architectural Design

  Some of the world’s most remarkable recent architecture has been built in commemoration of the Holocaust, but much of it is too abstract and cerebral to inspire immediate Continuity in the loins of a frigid Jewish woman in her thirties. The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies will take the shape of a giant broken matzoh, in reference to the tragedy that befell our people and as a reminder of the Passover meal, which, among all the traumas of a Jewish upbringing, consistently rates as the “least scarring” (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, “Why on This Night of All Nights Do I Take Only One Milligram of Lorazepam?,” Annals of Modern Jewry, Indiana University Press). The main exhibition space of the broken matzoh will lead to a titanium-clad lamb shank (hint: Frank Gehry) symbolizing both the forearm of the Almighty and our own newly found brute strength.

  The New Tribalism

  Identity politics are a great boon to our quest for Continuity. Identity is born almost exclusively out of a nation’s travails. For us—a prosperous, unmolested people safely nuzzled in the arms of the world’s last superpower (as of this writing, anyway)—this means Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. The twin halves of broken matzoh will be infused with the spirit of the New Tribalism that is captivating young people across the Western world as an angry response to global homogenization. The first half will show the past travails of the Jewish people (a parallel series of walk-in closets will do the same for the Sevo), and the second half will show how easily we forget how much they hate us (ditto, Sevo). To be a bit reductive: first half, unpronounceable—Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, Kraków ghetto, Chernowitz, Wadowice, Drohobycz; second half, guilt-inducing—towering videos of Jewish college boys at fraternity mixers hitting up demure Korean girls, while pretty suburban Jewish maideleh fetishize their urbanized African American counterparts at a Smith Barney softball game. Subtext: six million died and you’re twirling around a bar stool with some hazzar?