Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “I’m the Sevo Minister of Multicultural Affairs,” I sobbed, feeling the weight of humiliation settle around my shoulders, cloaking me as it had never done before. “I run a children’s charity called Misha’s Children. Won’t you please let go of my hand?”

  “Our mother is in the hospital,” the man repeated, tightening the grip around my big, squishy hand as my vision turned a new shade of purple. “Are you so heartless that you won’t help her? Do I really have to take out my kinjal and slice your stomach open?”

  “Dear God, no!” I cried. “Here! Here! Take my money! Take whatever you need!”

  But in the single opportune moment when he let go of my hand so that it could find my bulging wallet, I felt the fear fall away and the humiliation lift. It wasn’t the money. No, it wasn’t the money at all. But after thirty years with my head on the scaffold, after thirty years of cheering on the executioner, after thirty years of wearing his stifling black hood, one thing was certain: I no longer feared the ax.

  “Fuck your mother!” I said. “I hope she dies.”

  And then I ran.

  I ran with such speed that people, or what remained of people, silently fell away before me, as if I had been expected all along, like mortar rounds and destitution. I collided with burning cars and burning mules, and I felt the smoky air dissipate around me, creating the conditions for my salvation. For I wanted, more than anything, to be saved. To live and also to take vengeance for my life. To shed my weight and to be born anew.

  I ran and ran, my heart and lungs barely keeping up with the ridiculous imposition of such motion. I ran past an overturned T-72 tank propped up on its own barrel and a burnt-out chess school featuring a mosaic of children playing around an elderly master, pink dots delineating their rosy cheeks. As I looked behind me to see if the man with the dagger was still on my heels (he was not), I stumbled over something, a twisted shape with what looked like a charred paw sticking up from its torso, a pool of blood radiating in one direction like a badly drawn arrow. “Poor puppy,” I whispered, daring myself to take a closer look at the animal.

  Right away I was heaving over the red earth and chopped concrete.

  It wasn’t a puppy at all.

  I backed away from the little corpse. And then I noticed the familiar socialist edifice beneath which I had chosen to stumble.

  I walked into the moldy temple of the local Intourist Hotel, one of the concrete monstrosities where foreigners had been lightened of their hard currency during Soviet times. A dusty painting showed Lenin cheerfully disembarking at Finland Station, beneath which a banner warned in English: NO CREDIT CARDS. NO OUTSIDE PROSTITUTES, ONLY HOTEL PROSTITUTES. NO EXCEPTIONS.

  A babushka was weeping into her scarf at the reception desk, something about her poor dead Grisha. “I want a room,” I said.

  The woman wiped her eyes. “Two hundred dollars for the deluxe suite,” she said. “And there’s a whore already waiting for you.”

  “I don’t want any whore,” I mumbled. “I just want to be alone.”

  “Then it’s three hundred dollars.”

  “It’s more without the whore?”

  “Sure,” the old lady said. “Now I got to find her a place to sleep.”

  39

  Living in Shit

  I spent the next two weeks and US$42,500 at the Intourist Hotel. Each day the price of my so-called deluxe suite would go up by 50 percent (my last night alone added up to US$14,000), while two additional refugees would be pressed into my damp bicameral digs. What could one do? Outside the hotel, the situation—as it was still called—grew more absurd by the hour; gunshots and mortar rounds rhymed with my snoring at night and cleaved the daytime into shooting and nonshooting hours, the latter coinciding roughly with dinner and lunch. The only reason the Intourist Hotel remained unscathed (and insanely expensive) was the fact that nearly everyone shooting had a relative cowering between its thick concrete walls.

  The first to show up were Larry Zartarian and his mother. The old lady in charge of our floor—black socks up to the calf, followed by a bouquet of varicose veins—positioned the Mother and Child in the living room. When the Zartarians’ historical enemy, a stray Turkish oil executive with vast sums of cash, arrived, they were slotted directly beneath my bed. At night I could hear the mother cursing her progeny in some difficult language, while Larry tearfully rocked himself to sleep, his big head sending shock waves through the mattress springs.

  Timofey had the second bed in the room, a wet moldy pillow and a sheet made of wrinkled cardboard, but was soon forced to share it with Monsieur Lefèvre, the Belgian diplomat who had granted me my European passport, and Misha, his McDonald’s concubine. The two tried to have sex next to Timofey, but my moralistic manservant punched them both in the face and they bled silently onto the bedspread. Lefèvre, upon seeing my bulk spilling over the tiny Soviet bed so that each leg and arm hung suspended like a ham at a Castilian tapas bar, started laughing with every atom of his marinated red face. But the joke was on him several days later, when he committed suicide in our bathroom.

  Meanwhile, well-connected Absurdis who lacked secure housing in the capital were settling the living room and threatening to burst into our private chambers as well. Uncultured and rich, dressed like flamingos on parade, they reminded me of the first Absurdis I had seen pushing their way onto the Austrian Airlines jet what seemed like a lifetime ago. Among them, they had several swaddled, dark-lipped children who teethed day and night but remained oddly quiet and mesmerized by the RPGs puncturing holes in nearby buildings with the roar of perfectly calibrated thunder. Three times a day, the ugly hotel whore—dressed every bit as piquantly as the other female occupants of our suite—made her rounds. In deference to the children, a towel was draped between two glass-covered bureaus (each containing a corroded silver bowl with the insignia of the 1980 Moscow Olympics), so that whoever was interested could squat with the whore in measured privacy. The lovemaking sounds, however, were not easy on the ears, as if the principals were making a baby out of clay. “This is how we used to live in our communal apartment when Brezhnev was still in charge,” Timofey noted nostalgically.

  The whore came and went, but I was not horny. Or hungry. Or anything. From the first day—when the hot-water tap came off in my hand, releasing, instead of water, a spray of frightened baby roaches—I had been completely disinvested in my own existence. Everything was happening to others: to Timofey, to the whore, to the egofucked Larry Zartarian and his many-moled mama. “Others suffer, but does Vainberg suffer?” I asked Malik, the mysterious green spider who lived in the corner of my bedroom and whose eight silky legs terrorized Mrs. Zartarian throughout the night. The arthropod had little to say.

  As for sustenance, one could still eat well in Svanï City, despite the complete collapse of everything. A shy little Moslem boy brought in sesame seeds and hunks of black bread and threatened us with a blade if we didn’t pay. Every morning Timofey crawled out of our room, ran through the gunfire, and brought back yellowish eggs just released from some contraband chicken, and creamy Russian ice-cream bars with the White Nights logo, which made me wistful for my pastel-hued St. Leninsburg, the city I had fled only two months ago, hoping never to return.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to eat. To do so would have required the eventual use of the toilet, a greenish husk rising out of the cracked bathroom floor, the seat of which was home to enterprising mosslike bacteria that were trying to survive the attack of hungry roaches and the daily slap of a hundred round Absurdi bottoms. Like the toilet bacteria, I, too, had my natural enemies. My former Volvo drivers, Tafa and Rafa, had discovered my presence at the Intourist, and one bloody Sunday, when all my roommates had gone to forage for food, they woke me up to a volley of kicks aimed at my stomach and face. “Vy or ty?” the teenagers were shouting. “Polite or familiar? Who’s uncultured now, bitch?”

  I grunted, more from being roused out of a rare slumber than from any actual pain. My stomach had been receding
of late but could still take an assault by a pair of skinny brown feet in cheap flip-flops. “Polite,” I lowed. “You should always use the polite form of address with your betters.”

  Predictably, the next kick worked its way right into my mouth, which quickly filled with the taste of metal and nutrients. “Baargh,” I spat. “Not the mouth! Oh, you ruffians.”

  I would have come to a bad end if Timofey hadn’t shown up with a Daewoo ink-jet printer he had stolen somewhere. Centimeter for centimeter, the device was a perfect match for Tafa’s (or Rafa’s) head, which cracked (informally, I should say) beneath it. After his companion fled, Timofey sat down to nurse my poor mouth.

  While he ministered to me, I stroked my manservant’s balding head, the kindest thing I had ever done for him. “You stiw wike me, don’t you?” I said to Timofey through a slightly remodeled row of front teeth.

  “When my master is down, I only love him more,” Timofey said, dabbing and bandaging.

  “What a kind Wussian soul you have,” I said. I thought of Faik, the Nanabragovs’ Moslem manservant. “These Southern types are weally woothless,” I said. “You awen’t woothless at all, huh, Tima?”

  “I try to live like it says in the Bible,” my manservant told me. “Other than that, I don’t really know.”

  “Intwesting,” I said. I realized I knew next to nothing about my manservant, despite two years of having him clothe and feed me every day. (He had been a homecoming present from Beloved Papa.) What was wrong with me? Suddenly I was overcome by a surge of universal man-love. “Why don’t you tell me ewything about yo wife fwom the beginning,” I said. “Fwom when you wuh just a wittle wad.”

  Timofey reddened. “There’s nothing to tell, really,” he said. His Polish polyester sport jacket was missing half a lapel and had been stained by a bowl of tomato soup. I resolved to buy him a brilliant suit at the earliest possible date.

  “Oh, pwease,” I said. “I’m cuwious.”

  “What’s to say?” Timofey said. “I was born in Bryansk Province, village of Zakabyakino, in 1943. My father, Matvei Petrovich, died in a tank battle with the fascists under Kursk in the same year. In 1945 my mother, Aleluya Sergeyevna, contracted tuberculosis and soon met her end. I was moved to my aunt Anya’s house. She was nice to me, but she died of an untreatable case of shingles in 1949, and my uncle Seryozha beat me until 1954. Then he died from drink, and I was sent to an orphanage in the city of Bryansk, province of Bryansk. I was beaten there, too. In 1960 I sinned terribly and murdered a man with my bare hands after drinking. I was sent to a labor camp in the Solovki Islands from 1960 to 1972. There a warden was kind to me and found me a job in a town in Karelia in the cafeteria of the executive committee of the local Communist Party. My life was happy until 1991. I had my son, Slava, and we played soccer and gorodki. I continued to drink and was hospitalized. After communism, I lost my job but discovered God Almighty. I stopped drinking. In 1992 the party cafeteria became an expensive gym, but I had a spare key and slept beneath the basement in a warm ditch. Your father found me in 1997. He told me he was happy to see such a sober Russian face. In 1998 he took me home with him. And so this is my story.”

  Timofey had clearly become tired after giving the longest speech of his life. I, too, felt woozy from the mouth pain and from the sharp pangs of incredulous love. He leaned his head on the pillow, while I leaned mine against the hard, bitter-smelling half-lapel of his Polish sport jacket, and in this way we went to sleep.

  40

  Talking to Israel

  September came, and with it my Nana bearing apologies. “Where the hell have you been?” I scolded her. “I was frightened to death for you.”

  According to Nana, the Nanabragov manse was filled top to bottom with relatives and fellow clansmen fleeing the countryside, leaving no room for me and my manservant. Mr. Nanabragov had told her that once we were married, I would be entitled to take up residence with them, but at this stage the actual Nanabragov family took precedence. “Oh, my poor Misha,” she cried, throwing her hands around my neck. “Yew,” she said. “You smell like you work at the enamel factory.”

  “There is no hot water, and roaches live in the showerhead,” I explained to her, working my wounded mouth around the r’s and the single l.

  “And you’ve lost so much weight,” Nana said, feeling up my new fat-free pouches and the nascent outlines of actual body parts—one stomach, individualized compartments for lungs and a heart, the ironwork of ribs coming to the foreground. Despite the escalation of hostilities, Nana herself was as thick and glossy as an otter.

  “Do you like my new skinny look?” I asked, rubbing my hands all over her booming chest, my toes curling from excitement, as I made a mental note to commence masturbation the moment she left. “I’m like that famous actor. Something-von-something.”

  “To be honest, I liked you better when you were a big prime rib,” Nana said. “Fat is the new look for guys.”

  “No limits,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” She reached over and cupped my genitals. I cried out in happiness, but an elderly snort brought me short.

  “We mustn’t,” I said. “The Hyatt manager and his mother are under my bed.”

  “Oh,” Nana whispered. “How disgusting. Listen, Misha, my father would like to talk to you. He eats a long lunch at the Lady with Lapdog every single day. My mother says he no longer loves us.”

  “Is it safe for him to be out there?” I asked. “What about the war?”

  “He’s got a whole new posse to protect him,” Nana said, tapping at my privates with an index finger while I impotently flared my hips at her. “But listen, Misha. No matter what he says to you, remember—we have to get out of this place. I’m already missing a whole semester at NYU. How’s that going to look on my transcript?” She leaned in closer to make sure the somnolent Zartarians couldn’t overhear. She had eaten mutton kebabs for lunch, mutton kebabs with the gristle still on, dunked into a dish of dill yogurt sauce. “I know a way out of Absurdistan,” she whispered. “American Express is gonna start running that luxury train to the border again. Now go to the Lady with Lapdog and talk to my father. Tell him ‘Goodbye, already.’ Tell him ‘We’re out of here.’ ”

  From a chink in the cardboard blocking my hotel window, I watched her squeeze in behind the wheel of her American Express–flagged Navigator (the passenger seat had been taken up by a man in a fine V-neck, hunched over a Kalashnikov) and speed off toward the part of the Sevo Terrace that best resembled Santa Monica. She was so beautiful when in motion, tough and bejeweled like a poor Mediterranean woman just come into money. I had been angry at her for neglecting me, yet every time I saw her, I fell in love again. The air around me was light and feminine, filled with the promise of mango-scented moisturizers and duty-free.

  I sat on the living room divan, letting a mysterious male baby-child crawl over my legs, farting profusely and making a desperate hacking sound out the other end. Better him than the roaches that used my body like a caravanserai all night. I poured myself a glass of somebody’s contraband Hennessy and lit up a contraband cheroot. My hands trembled, and not only from the hunger.

  I had a problem. I wanted to do right by Nana, but I didn’t want to go to the pier to see Mr. Nanabragov. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the gunfire and the mortar shelling but the prospect of seeing that little girl whose mother I had clocked, that little Yulia. Did I do right by leaving her with her momma? Should I have taken her with me? Are we best off with abusive parents or no parents at all? Some days, I tell you, I just want to break this world in two.

  The baby-child quietly choking on my lap was starting to smell unnaturally, and my lap wasn’t doing any better. I stole some perfume from one of the sleeping Absurdi dames and, thus scented, walked out into the sunshine.

  A pall had settled over the city. Looking up, one could discern a scrim of dust particles above the ravages of the International Terrace. This dust, which one hoped would have deflected the sun, instead locked i
n its heat so that the atmosphere sizzled with instant brush fires, magenta oil slicks, and the deep blue waft of office chemicals. The air was so alive and full of instantaneous reactions that the city’s remaining citizens looked beaten and lost by comparison. A few of the more active men crawled out of the rubble and offered me packs of Russian cigarettes for US$10 apiece. “Not a smoker,” I let them down gently.

  The rest of the populace was too tired to shoot at me, too tired even to acknowledge such a large presence among them. For the first time since my arrival in Svanï City, no one appreciatively followed my stomach with their hungry eyes, no one silently congratulated me on my good fortune. Walking in this peaceful manner, I soon crossed over to the waterfront esplanade, whose grassy medians had assumed the look of an urgent Red Cross appeal. Hectares of tents made out of blue United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tarp lined the former strolling ground; the graying grass and the sickly palm trees had been eaten by man and mule; the Turkish bumper cars had been stripped down to the chassis, their crude mechanical essence exposed.

  I looked around apprehensively. Satisfied that Yulia and her dastardly mother were nowhere in sight, I walked down the pier toward the pink clamshell of the Lady with Lapdog. Mr. Nanabragov and Parka Mook were lunching beneath a faded SCROD poster that featured their faces along with the threatening tagline THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE PEOPLE WILL SOON BE REALIZED! At present, the two friends looked even more satiated than their own beaming visages above them—Mr. Nanabragov, lost in concentration, was spearing a sturgeon kebab with one fork and brandishing a green pepper with another, while the playwright dabbed his chin in a raspberry compote, his hooded eyes half closed. They were surrounded by men in black T-shirts with blue-veined biceps, their hands crisscrossed in Soviet prison tattoos. A speedboat bearing the Russian tricolor bowed and scraped along the pier, her hold being emptied of enough cigarette cartons to kill off the remaining population.