Absurdistan (3 page)

Listening to the tale of the orange towel, I got a little engorged down in the circumcised purple half-
khui
department. These women of ours were so cute! Well, not my stepmother, Lyuba, obviously, who is eleven years younger than me and happens to spend her nights moaning unconvincingly under the coniferous trunk of Beloved Papa, with his impressive turtlelike
khui
(blessed memories of it swinging about in the bathtub, my curious toddler hands trying to snatch it).

And I wasn’t hot for Svetlana, either; despite her fashionable Mongol cheekbones, her clingy Italian sweater, and that profoundly calculated aloofness, the supposedly sexy posturing of the educated Russian woman, despite all that, let me tell you, I absolutely refuse to sleep with one of my co-nationals. God only knows where they’ve been.

So that leaves me with my Rouenna Sales (pronounced
Sah
-lez, in the Spanish manner), my South Bronx girlie-girl, my big-boned precious, my giant multicultural swallow, with her crinkly hair violently pulled back into a red handkerchief, with her glossy pear-shaped brown nose always in need of kisses and lotion.

“I think,” said my stepmom, Lyuba, in English for Rouenna’s benefit, “I thought,” she added. She was having trouble with her tenses. “I think, I thought…I think, I thought…”

I sink, I sought…I sink, I sought…

“What are you
sinking,
darling?” asked Svetlana, tugging on her line impatiently.

But Lyuba would not be so easily discouraged from expressing herself in a bright new language. Married for two years to the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, the dear woman was finally coming to terms with her true worth. Recently a Milanese doctor had been hired to burn out the malicious orange freckles ringing her coarse nubbin, while a Bilbao surgeon was on his way to chisel out the baby fat flapping around her tufty teenager’s cheeks (the fat actually made her look more sympathetic, like a ruined farm girl just coming out of her adolescence).

“I think, I thought,” Lyuba said, “that orange towel so ugly. For girl is nice lavender, for boy like my husband, Boris, light blue, for servant black because her hand already dirty.”

“Damn, sugar,” Rouenna said. “You’re hard-core.”

“What it is ‘harcourt’?”

“Talking shit about servants. Like they got dirty hands and all.”

“I
sink…
” Lyuba grew embarrassed and looked down at her own hands, with their tough provincial calluses. She whispered to me in Russian, “Tell her, Misha, that before I met your papa, I was unfortunate, too.”

“Lyuba was poor back in 1998,” I explained to Rouenna in English. “Then my papa married her.”

“Is that right, sister?” Rouenna said.

“You are calling me
sister
?” Lyuba whispered, her sweet Russian soul atremble. She put down her fishing line and spread open her arms. “Then I will be your sister, too, Rouennachka!”

“It’s just an African-American expression,” I told her.

“It sure is,” Rouenna said, coming over to give Lyuba a hug, which the temperate girl tearfully reciprocated. “ ’Cause, as far as I can tell, all of you Russians are just a bunch of niggaz.”

“What are you saying?” Svetlana said.

“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Rouenna said. “I mean it like a compliment.”

“It’s no compliment!” Svetlana barked. “Explain yourself.”

“Chill, honey,” Rouenna said. “All I’m saying is, you know…your men don’t got no jobs, everyone’s always doing drive-bys whenever they got beefs, the childrens got asthma, and y’all live in public housing.”

“Misha doesn’t live in public housing,” Svetlana said. “I don’t live in public housing.”

“Yeah, but you’re different from the other peeps. You’re all like OGs,” Rouenna said, making a ghetto gesture with her arm.

“We’re what?”

“Original gangsters,” Alyosha-Bob explained.

“Look at Misha,” Rouenna said. “His father killed an American businessman over some bullshit, and now he can’t get a U.S. fucking visa. That’s, like, hard-core.”

“It’s not all because of Papa,” I whispered. “It’s the American consulate. It’s the State Department. They hate me.”

“Again, what it is ‘harcourt’?” Lyuba asked, unsure where the conversation was heading and whether or not she and Rouenna were still sisters.

Svetlana dropped her line and turned on me and Alyosha-Bob with both hands on her negligible waist. “It’s your fault,” she seethed in Russian. “With all of your stupid rapping. With that idiot
ghetto tech.
No wonder people treat us like we’re animals.”

“We were just having fun,” Alyosha-Bob said.

“If you want to be a Russian,” Svetlana told my friend, “you have to think of what kind of
image
you want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.”

“I apologize with all my soul,” Alyosha-Bob said, his hands symbolically covering his heart. “We will not rap in front of you from now on. We will work on our image.”

“Damn, what are you niggaz going on about?” Rouenna said. “Speak English already.”

Svetlana turned to me with her fierce off-color eyes. I stepped back, nearly tipping over into the Spawning Salmon waters. My fingers were already skirting Dr. Levine’s emergency speed dial when my manservant, Timofey, ran up to us in great haste, choking on his own sour breath. “Ai,
batyushka,
” my manservant said, pausing for air. “Forgive Timofey for the interruption, why don’t you? For he is a sinner just like the rest of them. But sir, I must warn you! The police are on their way. I fear they are looking for you—”

I didn’t quite catch his meaning until a baritone yelp from the neighboring Capricious Trout pontoon caught my attention. “Police!” a gentleman was braying. The young bank workers with their American MBAs, the old czarina in her black pearls and white gown, the Pushkin-loving
biznesman
—everyone was making for the complimentary valet parking where their Land Rovers were idling. Running past them were three wide gendarmes, their snazzy blue caps embossed with the scrawny two-headed Russian eagle, followed by their leader, an older man in civilian clothing, his hands in his pockets, taking his time.

It was apparent that the pigs were headed squarely for me. Alyosha-Bob moved in to protect me, placing his hands on my back and my belly as if I were in danger of capsizing. I decided to stand my ground. Such an outrage! In civilized countries like Canada, a well-heeled man and his fishing party are left in peace by the authorities, even if they have committed a crime. The old man in civvies, who I later learned had the tasty name of Belugin (just like the caviar), gently pushed aside my friend. He placed his snout within a centimeter of my own, so that I was looking into a grizzled old man’s face, eyes yellow around the pupils, a face that in Russia bespeaks authority and incompetence both. He was staring at me with great emotion, as if he wanted my money. “Misha Vainberg?” he said.

“And what of it?” I said. The implication being:
Do you know who I am?

“Your papa has just been murdered on the Palace Bridge,” the policeman told me. “By a land mine. A German tourist filmed everything.”

2

Dedications

First I would like to fall on my knees in front of the INS headquarters in Washington, D.C., to thank the organization for all its successful work on behalf of foreigners everywhere. I’ve been welcomed by INS representatives several times upon arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport, and each time was better than the last. Once a jolly man in a turban stamped my passport after saying something incomprehensible. Another time a pleasant black lady nearly as large as myself looked appreciatively at the outer tube of my stomach and gave me the thumbs-up. What can I say? The INS people are just and fair. They are the true gatekeepers of America.

My problems, however, rest with the U.S. State Department and the demented personnel at their St. Petersburg consulate. Since I returned to Russia some two years ago, they’ve denied my visa application
nine times,
on all occasions citing my father’s recent murder of their precious Oklahoma businessman. Let me be frank: I feel sorry for the Oklahoman and his rosy-cheeked family, sorry that he got in my papa’s way, sorry that they found him at the entrance of the Dostoyevskaya metro station with a child’s amazed expression on his face and a red gurgling upside-down exclamation mark on his forehead, but after hearing of his death
nine times,
I am reminded of the guttural old Russian saying: “To the
khui,
to the
khui;
he’s dead, so he’s dead.”

This book, then, is my love letter to the generals in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A love letter as well as a plea:
Gentlemen, let me back in!
I am an American impounded in a Russian’s body. I have been educated at Accidental College, a venerable midwestern institution for young New York, Chicago, and San Francisco aristocrats where the virtues of democracy are often debated at teatime. I have lived in New York for eight years, and I have been an exemplary American, contributing to the economy by spending over US$2,000,000 on legally purchased goods and services, including the world’s most expensive dog leash (I briefly owned two poodles). I have dated my Rouenna Sales—no, “dated” is the wrong term—I have
roused
her from the Bronx working-class nightmare of her youth and deposited her at Hunter College, where she is studying to become an executive secretary.

Now, I am certain that everyone at the Immigration and Naturalization Service is deeply familiar with Russian literature. As you read about my life and struggles in these pages, you will see certain similarities with Oblomov, the famously large gentleman who refuses to stir from his couch in the nineteenth-century novel of the same name. I won’t try to sway you from this analogy (I haven’t the energy, for one thing), but may I suggest another possibility: Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot.
Like the prince, I am something of a holy fool. I am an innocent surrounded by schemers. I am a puppy deposited in a den of wolves (only the soft blue glint of my eyes keeps me from being torn to shreds). Like Prince Myshkin, I am not perfect. In the next 318 pages, you may occasionally see me boxing the ears of my manservant or drinking one Laphroaig too many. But you will also see me attempt to save an entire race from genocide; you will see me become a benefactor to St. Petersburg’s miserable children; and you will watch me make love to fallen women with the childlike passion of the pure.

How did I become such a holy fool? The answer lies rooted in my first American experience.

Back in 1990, Beloved Papa decided that his only child should study to become a normal prosperous American at Accidental College, located deep in the country’s interior and safe from the gay distractions of the eastern and western seaboards. Papa was merely
dabbling
in criminal oligarchy then—the circumstances were not yet right for the wholesale plunder of Russia—and yet he had made his first million off a Leningrad car dealership that sold many wretched things but thankfully no cars.

The two of us were living alone in a tight, humid apartment in Leningrad’s southern suburbs—Mommy had died of cancer—and were staying mostly out of each other’s way, because neither of us could understand what the other was becoming. One day I was masturbating fiercely on the sofa, my legs splayed apart so that I looked like an overweight flounder cut precisely down the middle, when Papa stumbled in from the winter cold, his dark bearded head bobbing above his silky new Western turtleneck, his hands shaking from the continual shock of handling so much green American money. “Put that thing away,” he said, scowling at my
khui
with red-rimmed eyes. “Come to the kitchen. Let’s talk man-to-man.”

I hated the sound of “man-to-man,” because it reminded me once more that Mommy was dead, and I had no one to wrap me up in a blanket at bedtime and tell me I was still a good son. I pocketed my
khui,
sadly letting go of the image that was driving me to pleasure (Olga Makarovna’s enormous ass hanging over the wooden chair in front of me, our classroom rank with the farmer’s-cheese smell of unattained sex and wet galoshes). I sat down across the kitchen table from my papa, sighing at the imposition, as would any teenager.

“Mishka,” my papa said, “soon you’ll be in America, studying interesting subjects, sleeping with the local Jewish girls, and enjoying the life of the young. And as for your papa…well, he’ll be all alone here in Russia, with no one to care if he is dead or alive.”

I nervously squeezed at my thick left breast, funneling it into a new oblong shape. I noticed a stray piece of salami peel on the table and wondered if I could eat it without Papa noticing. “It was your idea that I should go to Accidental College,” I said. “I’m only doing as you say.”

“I’m letting you go because I love you,” said my father. “Because there’s no future in this country for a little
popka
like you.” He grabbed the floating dirigible of my right hand, my masturbatory hand, and held it tight between his two little ones. The broken capillaries of his cheek stood out beneath his graying stubble. He was crying silently. He was drunk.