Absurdistan (5 page)

A mask was clasped over my face. “Count backward, Moses,” an American voice told me.

“Nyet!”
I tried to say, but of course no one could hear me. The world broke in pieces and failed to reassemble. When I woke up, the men in black hats were praying over me, and I could feel nothing below the carefully tucked folds of flesh that formed my waistline. I raised my head. I was dressed in a green hospital gown, a round hole cut in its lower region, and there, between the soft pillows of my thighs, a
crushed purple bug
lay motionless, its chitinous shell oozing fluids, the skin-rendering pain of its demise held at bay by anesthesia.

For some reason, my co-religionists thought that my vomiting was a sign of recovery, and they wiped my chin and laughed and said
mazel tov
and
tsimmus tov
and
hey, hey, Yisroel.

The infection set in that night.

3

Who Killed Beloved Papa?

Who did it? Who murdered the 1,238th-richest man in Russia? Whose hands are stained with a martyr’s blood? I’ll tell you who: Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora. How do we know? Because the entire episode was videotaped by Andi Schmid, a nineteen-year-old tourist from Stuttgart, Germany.

On the night in question, Herr Schmid happened to be steaming alongside St. Petersburg’s Palace Bridge on a pleasure boat, enjoying the synthetic drug MDMA and tinny house music from the boat’s speakers while videotaping a Russian seagull as it attacked an English teenager, a big-eared kipper of a boy, and his pale, lovely mama.

“I have never seen such an angry seagull before,” Herr Schmid told me and the police inspectors the next day, resplendent before us in his fuzzy steel-wool pants and
PHUCK STUTTGART
T-shirt, his boxy Selima Optique glasses casting a penumbra of intelligence around his dull young eyes. “It just kept
biting
the poor kid,” Schmid complained. “In Germany the birds are much friendlier.”

On Schmid’s tape, we see the snow-white seagull snapping its bloody beak as it ascends for another attack on the British family, the Britishers pleading to the gull for mercy, the ship’s crew pointing and laughing at the foreigners…Now we see the colossal stone piers of the Palace Bridge, followed by its cast-iron lampposts. (Once, in the eighties, during that nice Gorbachev perestroika time, Papa and I went fishing off the Palace Bridge. We caught a perch that looked just like Papa. In five years, when my eyes completely glaze over with Russian life, I will resemble it, too.)

Next Schmid pans 360 degrees to reveal St. Petersburg on a warm summer night, the sky lit up a false cerulean, the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress bathed in gold floodlights, the Winter Palace moored on its embankment like a ship gently undulating in the perpetual twilight, the darkened hulk of St. Isaac’s dome officiating over the proceedings…Ah! What did Mandelstam write? “Leninsburg! I don’t want to die yet!”

And now, as the seagull embarks upon its predatory swoop, making some sort of Slavic bird squawk, we see a Mercedes 300 M-Class jeep—the one that looks like a futuristic, rounded version of the Soviet militia jeeps that used to haul Papa away to the drunk tank—cross the bridge, followed by one of those antic, armor-plated Volga sedans that remind me, for some reason, of the American armadillo. If you look closer, you can almost see Papa’s yellow pumpkin head inside the Volga, a squiggle of gray hair forming a childish signature above his otherwise bald pate…Oh, my papa, my dead, murdered
papochka,
my mentor, my keeper, my boyhood friend. Remember, Papa, how we used to trap the neighbor’s anti-Semitic dog in a milk crate and take turns peeing on it? If only I could believe that you’re in a better place now, that “other world” you kept rambling about whenever you woke up at the kitchen table, your elbows swimming in herring juice, but clearly nothing of us survives after death, there’s no
other world
except for New York, and the Americans won’t give me a visa, Papa. I’m stuck in this horrible country because you killed a businessman from Oklahoma, and all I can do is remember how you once were; to commemorate the life of a near-saint, this is the burden of your only child.

All right, back to the videotape. Here comes the second Mercedes jeep, the last vehicle in Papa’s convoy, rumbling over the Palace Bridge, and now we see a motorcycle with two riders passing the jeep, the doughy form of syphilitic Zhora (may he die from his syphilis just like Lenin!) visible behind Oleg the Moose’s distinctive fifties pompadour…The motorcycle zooms by the Volga, and the land mine, or at least a dark cylinder that must be a land mine—I mean, has anyone actually
seen
a land mine? Ours is not the kind of family that gets sent to fight in Chechnya with the blue-eyed kids—the land mine is thrown onto the Volga’s roof, five more frames, and then
a flash of electric lightning
draws the seagull’s attention away from the cowering English folk, and the roof of the Volga is lifted off (along with, we later learn, Papa’s head), followed by a plume of cheap smoke…
Ba-ba-boom.

And that, in so many words, is how I became an orphan. May I be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Amen.

4

Rouenna

When I graduated from Accidental College with all the honors they could bestow on a fat Russian Jew, I decided that, like many young people, I should move to Manhattan. American education aside, I was still a Soviet citizen at heart, afflicted with a kind of Stalinist gigantamania, so that when I looked at the topography of Manhattan, I naturally settled my gaze on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, those emblematic honeycombed 110-story giants that glowed white gold in the afternoon sun. They looked to me like the promise of socialist realism fulfilled, boyhood science fiction extended into near-infinity. You could say I was in love with them.

As I soon found out that I couldn’t rent an apartment in the actual World Trade Center, I decided to settle for an entire floor in a nearby turn-of-the-century skyscraper. My loft had a startling view of Miss Liberty greening the harbor on one side and the World Trade Center obliterating the rest of the skyline on another. I spent my evenings hopping from one end of my lily pad to the other: as the sun fell on top of the statue, the Twin Towers became a fascinating checkerboard of lit and unlit windows, looking, after several puffs of marijuana, like a Mondrian painting come to life. To complement my sleek art deco apartment, I got an internship at a nearby art foundation run out of a certain munificent bank. The whole thing was set up through the career office at Accidental College, which specialized in finding socially uplifting and highly unpaid internships for young gentlemen and ladies. And so every morning, around ten, my morning gown bedecked with glistening medals from the Accidental College Department of Multicultural Studies (my academic major), I would roll over three blocks to the bank’s filigreed skyscraper and perform my filing duties for a few hours.

My colleagues regarded me as something of an oddity, but nothing compared to the young man who dressed up as a hamster during lunch and wept violently in the bathroom for exactly one hour and fifteen minutes (a fellow alumnus of Accidental, needless to say). Whenever the wisdom of having a sleepy Russian Gargantua clattering around the already tight quarters came up, I merely had to say something like “Malevich!” or “Tarkofsky!,” letting the reflected sheen of my countrymen’s accomplishments glisten off my Multicultural Studies medals.

Eventually the hamster got fired.

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. My own life was similarly sweet and free of complexities, with only one need unaccounted for: I had no girlfriend, no buxom hardworking ethnic girl to urge me off the couch, no exotic Polynesian to fill my monochrome life with her browns and yellows. So every weekend night I would trudge up to these rooftops where Accidental College graduates would huddle together next to groups of students from similar colleges, their conversations forming barbed networks of privileged fact and speculation stretching from the Napa Valley to Gstaad. I basked in this information, making witty observations and absurdist jokes, but my real purpose was more traditional: I was looking for a woman who would accept me for what I was, for every last pound of me, and for the crushed purple insect between my legs.

There weren’t any takers, but I was beloved in my own way. “Snack Daddy!” the boys and girls would shout as I ascended the narrow stairways to their rooftops. Back then the girls drank buckets of bitter champagne through straws, and the boys swilled forty-ounce containers of malt liquor, wiping their mouths with the back of their skinny ties. We were trying to be as “urban” as possible without passing into caricature, our eyes briefly skirting the darkened constellations of housing projects pressed menacingly against the distant horizons. I would stand to the side of the snack table, letting my fat settle around me in protective layers as I jabbed a long carrot into a bowl of spinach feta dip. The girls regarded me as a safe confidant, as if my weight had rendered me a beloved uncle. They hoisted buckets of champagne to my lips while complaining of their passing boyfriends, those diffident young
schlemiels
who were also my close friends but whom I would readily betray for just one occidental kiss tasting of spinach and feta.

Filled with champagne, I would return alone to my endless Wall Street loft, take off my clothes, and press myself against the windows, letting the city lights flicker deep inside me. On occasion I would wail this deep-sea arctic wail invented specifically for my exile. I cupped what remained of my
khui
and cried for my papa five thousand miles to the east and north. How could I have abandoned the only person who had ever truly loved me? The Neva River sprang, unprompted, from the Gulf of Finland, the Nile from its Delta, the Hudson from some prosperous American source, and I sprang from my father.

Feeling lonely, I would talk out loud to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which I had nicknamed Lionya and Gavril, begging those two iconic hulks to make me more like them: lean, glassy-eyed, silent, and invincible. Sometimes, when a helicopter passed overhead, I would get on my knees and beg to be rescued—to be hoisted beyond the party-filled rooftops and billowing deck umbrellas onto a secret landscape, an inverted New York whose buildings were dug deep into the ground, the water towers and mansard roofs striking through the center of the earth, much as I wished to strike between the sweaty thighs of my former classmates—those infinitely clever and unflappable girls carved out of soft Californian rock and Roman tufa who breathed more inspiration into my life than all the pale Marxian offerings of the Accidental College Library combined.

And then one day I got lucky. Here’s how it happened. During my lunch break, I often liked to take a couple of chicken parmigiana sandwiches and a gallon of caramel fudge into a bar on Nassau Street, which, for those unfamiliar with this part of Manhattan, runs parallel to Lower Broadway into an uncharted fourth dimension, one part Melville, two parts Céline. There, I would round out my meal with a few vodka shots while talking to my lunchtime friend, a spindly middle-aged Jewish stockbroker from Long Island who had long given up on ever encountering human warmth or arousing the love of a woman. His name was Max, of course.

This bar had something of a gimmick, and an effective one at that—its barmaids wore nothing but bikinis. If you bought yourself a specially priced tequila, they would pour lime juice into their considerable cleavage, sprinkle some salt on top of that, and invite you to lick up this mess (after which you downed your shot). Today the “body shot” is an integral part of American courtship, but back then it seemed to me and Max like the height of depravity.