Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “The rabbi’s getting a little lost in the head,” one of my father’s friends explained to me. “We sent for a new one from Canada. Twenty-eight years old. Fresh as a radish.”

  “Vaaaainberg,” the rabbi sang once more, touching my face with his hand, a clump of earth and garlic.

  “This poor man lived through Stalin and Hitler,” Avram said of the rabbi. “The Sevo had him sent to a labor camp in Kamchatka when he was twenty. Seven of his eight sons were shot.”

  “I thought the Sevo tried to save the Jews,” I said. “Parka Mook told me—”

  “Are you going to listen to that fascist?” Avram said. “After the war, the Sevo tried to have all of our men sent to the gulags so they could take over our villages. We had the plumpest cows, and our women are freckled and have very thick thighs.”

  Nana had clasped her hands around the rabbi’s crinkly, fragrant body and was happily interrogating the old man in Russian: “Is it true, sir, that the Mountain Jews are the descendants of the original Babylonian exile?”

  “We are-a?”

  “Well, that’s one theory. Don’t you keep a written record, Rabbi?”

  “A what-a?”

  “Aren’t you Jews supposed to be the People of the Book?”

  “A who-a?”

  “Don’t bother the old man,” Avram said. “We Mountain Jews, we’re not known for our learning. Originally we raised livestock, and now we trade goods in bulk.”

  The rabbi resumed sniffling, the criminals smoked down their Newport Lights, the teenagers gossiped about the world’s sexiest Jewesses. I looked at my father’s profile. I looked at his former prisonmates (He was your first lover), at the kind, flummoxed old man clinging to my elbow, at the sacred brick wall in front of us, and at the last quote my Beloved Papa had left for the Mountain Jews. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

  Had my papa known that he was plagiarizing Malcolm X? Papa’s racism was a thing to behold, impenetrable, subsuming, all-encompassing, an epic poem. Could he have independently reached the same conclusion as a black leader of the Nation of Islam? I thought of what my father had told me when I returned to St. Leninsburg. “You have to lie, cheat, and steal just to make it in this world, Misha,” he had said. “And until you learn that for a fact, until you forget everything they taught you at that Accidental College of yours, I’m going to have to keep working as hard as I can.” I thought of my Rouenna, piling all her hopes upon my warm fat body, and then, after I had been imprisoned in Russia, trying to make a life with Jerry Shteynfarb. I thought of the Mountain Jews and their side-by-side statues of Georgi Kanuk and Sakha the Democrat, the murderer and the murdered. I thought of all that I had seen and done in my last two months in Absurdistan.

  A shard of crystal broke in me. I fell to the ground and threw myself around one of Avram’s prehistoric ankles. The Jews turned to look into my dumb blue eyes, and my dumb blue eyes looked back at them. “Thank you,” I was trying to say, although nothing came out. And then, with increasing levels of pleading and helplessness: “Oh, thank you.

  Oh,

  thank you.

  Oh,

  thank you!”

  EPILOGUE

  The Corner of 173rd Street and Vyse

  Our hosts put us up in a half-built mansion that resembled a four-story crenellated doghouse with a satellite dish hanging off the roof. Our bedroom was cavernous and empty, like a train station right before dawn. Nana’s face lay against my shoulder—despite her youth, she was already suffering from the mild stages of sleep apnea, her throat muscles clenching, her pretty face vainly biting at pockets of cold mountain air.

  In a corner of the room, a lime-green musical insect was starting up Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. Otherwise all was silent. I crawled to my stomach, then crawled to my knees, then crawled to my feet. I walked out of the house. The cobblestone alleys were empty of all creatures. The lights in the modernistic synagogue had been extinguished, and the flag of the 718 Perfumery beat silently against the store’s weathered facade. The main street was also devoid of life except for the 24 Hour Internet Club. Inside the club, as one would find in a similar establishment in Helsinki or Hong Kong or São Paulo, a dozen overweight teenage nerds typed away on their keyboards, one hand held tight against a carbonated beverage or a meat pie, their thick oversize glasses aquariums of gray, green, and blue. I said shalom to my fallen brethren, but they barely grunted, not willing to interrupt their electronic adventures. I bought an aromatic crepe rolled with cabbage, parsley, and leek and tore it to shreds with my teeth.

  Dear Rouenna, I typed when my turn came.

  I’m coming for you, baby girl. I don’t know how I’ll do it, I don’t know what terrible things I will have to perpetrate against others to achieve my goal, but I will come to New York City and I will marry you and we will be “2gether 4ever,” as they say.

  You’ve done me wrong, Rouenna. It’s okay. I’ll do you wrong, too. I can’t change the world, much less myself. But I know that we are not meant to live apart. I know that you’re the one for me. I know that the only time I feel safe is when my little purple half-khui is in your tender, tangy mouth.

  You’re touching your belly as you read this. If you want to have Shteynfarb’s child, go ahead. He will be my child, too. They are all my children as far as I’m concerned.

  What else can I tell you, baby bird? Study hard. Work late. Don’t despair. Get your teeth cleaned and don’t forget to see your gyno regularly. Whatever happens to you now, boo, whether you carry to term or not, you will never be alone.

  Your porky russian lover,

  Misha

  Back in the mansion, I tried to stir Timofey to his senses, but he refused to let go of his precious sleep. I slapped him lightly. He looked at me with sleep-crusted eyes. His breath tickled my nose. “At your service, batyushka,” he said.

  “We’re leaving Nana behind,” I said. “She can cross the border the next day. We’re flying out of here without her.”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Timofey said.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I don’t want her. And I don’t want her people. We’re not going to Belgium, Timofey. We’re going to New York. By any means necessary.”

  “Yes, batyushka,” Timofey said. “As you wish.” We sneaked into the bedroom to fetch my laptop and tracksuits. I looked at Nana’s contorted face, her plump tongue rolling back into her throat, her arms spread out like the Good Thief on his cross. I still loved her very much. But I wouldn’t bend down to kiss her.

  An hour later, we are wading through a gray sludge-filled river, the failed nation of Absurdistan now entirely at our backs. In the distance, beneath the sliver of the young moon, a similar Moslem crescent flies over the sentry tower of a neighboring republic. I carry my laptop high over my head; Timofey sweats beneath my heavier luggage; Yitzhak, the nice boy who wants to play basketball with blacks in New York, waves a white flag and shouts something in the local tongue, a string of consonants that quarrel with the occasional stray vowel. When we hit dry land, we start running toward the sentry tower, waving our white flag, my Belgian passport, the recognizable gray square of my laptop.

  Rouenna. With each step I am getting closer to you. With each step I am racing toward your love and away from this irredeemable land.

  Let’s be honest. Summers in New York City are not as romantic as some would think. The air is stagnant and stinks alternately of sea, clotted cream, and rained-upon dog. But early September is still warm and succulent in your arms. I’ve been thinking, Ro. We should buy one of the few remaining row houses on Vyse or Hoe Avenue, something grand and decrepit, Victorian or perhaps even American Gothic, a wide veranda beckoning the children of the nearby housing projects.

  Look around us. The old men playing dominoes for money; five-year-old Bebo, Franky, Marelyn, and Aysha kicking around a dusty football; their older cousins skipping the world’s most artful double Dutch; teenage moms and dads talking sex at each other across the stoops, calling the
ir little ones tiguerito, “little gangster”; the sneakers hanging off the telephone poles; the tricked-out Mitsubishi Monteros pumping salsa across the streets; the moms reading the coupon pages like newspapers; the stores with no name but PLAY LOTTERY HERE; the roses sticking out of the iron grilles of housing-project windows.

  In our basement, the laundry machines and dryers are spinning. You pass me a rolled-up ball of baby socks, warm to the touch. Our household is large. There will be many cycles. Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank the following New Yorkers: my friend Akhil Sharma for exceeding duty’s call and for his careful shearing of this manuscript; Daniel Menaker, my brilliant editor and mensch nonpareil, for shepherding me to greener pastures; Matt Kellogg, a young man who knows his words, for assisting in Dan’s shepherding; and Denise Shannon, my agent, for a keen critical eye and for keeping me solvent all these years.

  The Ledig House International Writers Residency in upstate New York has always been there for me when I needed a green place to write and think.

  The best parts of this book, such as they are, were written under the care of Beatrice von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, her remarkable writers’ retreat near Donnini, Italy.

  About the Author

  GARY SHTEYNGART was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in New York.

  ALSO BY GARY SHTEYNGART

  The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Gary Shteyngart

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were originally published, in significantly different form, in The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shteyngart, Gary.

  Absurdistan : a novel / Gary Shteyngart. p. cm.

  I. Title

  PS3619.H79A63 2006

  813'.6—dc22

  2005054308

  www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-530-9

  v3.0