Absurdistan (14 page)

Lyuba Vainberg Invites Me to Tea

Lyuba lived on the English Embankment, a gorgeous pastel crush of mansions anchored by the yellow curve of the old Senate Building. The Neva River does its best to be civil around here, flowing with a majestic resolve and lapping up the granite embankment with a thousand frothy tongues.

Speaking of tongues, Lyuba had prepared one of her celebrated lamb’s tongue sandwiches, very tasty and juicy, with extra horseradish and spicy mustard and garnished with a dollop of gooseberry preserve. She even prepared it in the American manner for me, with two pieces of bread instead of one. I quickly asked for seconds, then thirds, to her immeasurable delight. “Ah, but who looks out for your diet at home?” she asked, mistakenly using the polite form of address with me, as if acknowledging the fact that I was thirty.

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I said, letting the tender tongue dissolve on my own (
like making out with a sheep,
I thought). “Who cooks for me? Why, Yevgenia, of course. Remember my cook? She’s round and rosy.”

“Well, I do my
own
cooking now,” Lyuba said proudly. “And when he was alive, I always supervised Boris’s diet. There are things to consider other than taste, you know. You have to think of your health, Misha! For example, the lamb’s tongue is widely known to possess minerals that give you energy and manly power. It’s terribly good for you, especially when you alternate it with Canadian bacon, which helps heal the skin. My servant girl gets only the best from the Yeliseyev store.” She paused and looked me up and down, enjoying my girth, my time-tested ability to expand under pressure. “Perhaps I should come over and cook for you,” she said. “Or else you’re always welcome to come here and eat with me.”

Death changes people. I had certainly changed since Beloved Papa’s decapitation, but as for Lyuba, she was positively unrecognizable. It’s no secret that Papa treated her like his daughter in many ways—several times she had called him
papochka,
“little father,” while doing an improvised lap dance at the kitchen table or giving him a supposedly discreet hand job during the Mariinsky Theatre’s mind-numbing performance of
Giselle
(she thought I had dozed off by the grape harvest scene, but I was not so lucky).

But now that our
papochka
was gone, Lyuba was handling self-parenting with great aplomb. Her very diction had improved. It was no longer the sloppy New Russian of her idiot friends, a gangster-influenced provincial drawl interspersed with borrowed words like “dragon roll” and “face control,” but a more reserved speech, flattened and depressive, the kind favored by our more cultured, penniless citizens.

I was also inspired by her choice of dress. Gone was her usual Leather Lyuba motif; in its place, a blouse and skirt of dark contemporary denim fastened by an oversize red plastic belt with an enormous faux-Texan buckle. It was very Williamsburg, Brooklyn, circa right now.

“I must wipe your chin,” Lyuba said, scrubbing my double grapefruit with three of her long mustard-scented fingers.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve never learned how to eat properly.” Which is the truth.

“You know, I bought an orange comforter from Stockmann,” she said, and turned away to expel her breath. I smelled the freshness of a youthful mouth, a strong British breath mint, and the sulfuric undercurrent of lamb’s tongue. She smiled, her twin cheekbones going off the scale of Eastern European cheekbones and into lovely Mongolian territory, while her pinprick nose stretched itself into nonexistence. Despite the steady drafts of central air-conditioning, your correspondent felt himself becoming warm-faced and a bit untidy beneath the armpits. The denim blouse hugged Lyuba’s frame so that when she turned around, one could see an important crease forming between the cheeks of her
zhopa.
Meanwhile, the talk of orange comforters both soothed and intrigued.

“Won’t you come and see it?” she said. “It’s in the bedroom,” she quickly added. “I’m worried it’s not the right one.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, feeling an unexpected jolt of ethical misgiving. This was followed by an image of Jerry Shteynfarb’s authorial goatee burrowing into the heat between Rouenna’s thighs. The ethical misgivings evaporated. I followed Lyuba.

We passed through the main quarters, a kind of gallery devoted to outrageous Italian furniture, enough glossy mirrored surfaces that I could catch the devastating sight of my own deflated posterior and the halo of my small but growing bald spot. My papa’s meter-long oil painting of a wise but grizzled Maimonides with what looked like a ten-ruble note sticking out of his pocket completed the room. Outside the windows, the gracious classical lines of the Twelve Colleges Building suspended over the Neva provided a necessary counterpoint.

“I’m throwing everything out,” Lyuba said, sweeping her hand over the ensemble of buffed mahogany monstrosities possibly entitled Neapolitan Sunrise or something of the sort (there are
warehouses
full of this shit in New York’s Brighton Beach, in case the intrepid reader is interested). “If you have the time,” Lyuba said, “we can drive down to the IKEA in Moscow, maybe get something in paisley.”

“What you’re doing, Lyubochka, is very healthy,” I told her. “We must all strive to be as Western as possible. That old argument between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles…It’s not much of an argument at all, is it?”

“Not if you say so,” Lyuba said. She opened the bedroom door.

I had to look away at first. Lyuba’s comforter was the most
orange
thing I have seen this side of the Accidental College library, which was built in 1974, possibly by the American Citrus Growers’ Association. It was…I couldn’t find the right word. An entire sun had exploded in Lyuba’s bedroom, leaving behind its afterglow for us to ponder.

“You’ve become a modern woman,” I said, and heaved myself aboard with a few difficult motions.

“Feel the smoothness,” Lyuba said as she settled in beside me. “It looks like it’s fashionable polyester from the American seventies, but it feels like cotton. I’ve got to find a good dry cleaner. Otherwise they’ll just bleed the orange out.”

“That mustn’t happen,” I said. “You’ve really got something here.” Above her dresser I noticed a framed photograph of Beloved Papa unveiling a tombstone shaped like a giant Nokia mobile phone at his graveyard for New Russian Jews, sacrilegious laughter gathering in his clever eyes.

“But wait, there’s more,” Lyuba announced. She ran into the bathroom and came out with a pair of orange towels. “This is what you and Svetlana were talking about at the Home of the Russian Fisherman!” she said. “See, I listen to everything you say!”

I squinted at the towels, feeling a spectacular headache gathering steam somewhere in my sinuses. “Maybe you should mix the orange with some other Western color,” I suggested. “Lime, maybe.”

Lyuba bit her smooth lower lip. “Perhaps,” she said. She looked doubtfully at the towels in her hands. “It’s hard to know these things, Misha…Sometimes I think I’m such a fool…Ah, but listen to
this
!” She turned on a little stereo with the flick of one lacquered nail. It didn’t take me long to recognize the Humungous G’s gorgeous urban love ballad “I’m Busting My Nut Tonight.” Lyuba laughed and sang along with the soulful R&B chorus, moving her hands in front of her torso in a sad Russian approximation of slow jamming. “I’m
baaaaasting
my nut tonight / Your
pusseeeee
feels so tight,” she sang in a tired but hospitable voice.

“Uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh,” I grunted along with the chorus. “Uhhhh, shit,” I added.

“I know you and Alyosha love this song,” she said. “I’ve been playing it over and over. It’s so much better than techno and Russian pop.”

“In terms of popular music”—I spoke now with the authority of a former Multicultural Studies major—“you should listen mainly to East Coast hip-hop and ghetto tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically. Even so-called progressive house! Do you hear me, Lyuba?”

“Categorically!” Lyuba said. She looked at me with her soft, vacant gray eyes. She pressed both hands into the formidable ridge of her breastbone. “Mikhail,” she said, using my formal name, which, for as long as I’ve lived, usually means some form of punishment is at hand. I looked up expectantly.

“Help me convert to Judaism,” she said. She plopped down on the orange comforter, pressed her skinny legs into her tummy, and beamed the inquisitive look of youth in my direction. There was some tenderness there, a warmth in my belly, and I could feel it start spreading below. I looked at her beside me—little Lyuba in her too-tight denim dress, the two firm potato dumplings of her
zhopa
rubbing against my milky outer thigh. I needed to concentrate on the conversation at hand. Now, what was she saying? Jews? Conversion? I had much to say on the matter.

“Turning into a Jew is not a good idea,” I told her, my grave tone likening it to turning into a dung beetle. “Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. It’s a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check. It’s a losing proposition for everyone involved, the Jew, his friend, even his enemy in the end.”

Lyuba was not convinced. “You and your father are the only good people in my life,” she said. “And I want to be tied to both of you by something substantial. Think how great it would be if we could pray to the same God”—she turned her matted blond head into her armpit—“and if we could share a life together.”

The second part of that sentence I decided to put aside for the moment, because all the lies and evasions in the world were not going to erase her plaintive, impossible plea from my waxy ears. So I wanted to disabuse her of the first part, at least. “Lyuba,” I said in my most even (and most detestable) voice, “you must understand that there is no God.”

Lyuba turned her pink face to me and smiled gratuitously, favoring me with one of her laminated thirty-one-tooth salutes (a prominent incisor had to be retired last summer after she misjudged the strength of a walnut).

“Of course there is a God,” she said.

“No, there is not,” I said. “In fact, the part of our soul we reserve for God is a kind of negative space where our worst sentiments reside, our jealousy, our ire, our justification for violence and spite. If you are indeed interested in Judaism, Lyuba, you should carefully read the Old Testament. You should pay particular attention to the character of the Hebrew God and His utter contempt for all things democratic and multicultural. I think the Old Testament makes my point rather forcefully, page by page.”

Lyuba laughed at my little tirade. “I think you believe in God in your own way,” she said. Then she added, “You’re a funny man.”

Ah, the impudence of youth! The easy manner of their speech! Who was she, this
Lyuba,
this girl my father had rescued from some Astrakhan collective farm a few years ago, all covered in hog shit and bruises? This sullen teenager he had adopted like the daughter he wished he had fathered instead of me—skinny, loyal, and without a tantalizing purple
khui
he could swipe at. I had always thought of Lyuba as a contemporary version of Fenechka in Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons,
the peasant housekeeper, obtuse and limited, who falls into the arms of the kindly minor noble Kirsanov, to be played in the movie version by Beloved Papa. My capacity for misunderstanding the range of people is truly astonishing. Lyuba was no Fenechka. She was more like a modern-day Anna Karenina or that silly brat Natasha in
War and the Other Thing.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s my favorite part of the song. When Humungous G…how do you say it? When he
busts.
”

“When Humungous G busts some rhymes,” I said.

She stood up on the bed, and with her hands making jabbing urban motions, her hips thrusting like those of a fertile American university student, Lyuba sang:

Seexty-inch plasma screen

Bitch, you never seen

Such mad expensive shit

Poot my fingers on your clit

Uh, sex in the Lex

Check my dzhenuine Rolex

Vaiping cum off your tits

I’m busting phat beats

Right past yo’ shoulder

It’s over

Now go coook for my kids

“That’s very pretty,” I said. “Your English is improving.”

“And another great thing about Judaism,” she said, “is how old it is. Boris told me that by the Jew calendar, we’re in the year 5760!”

“It just doesn’t stop, does it?” I said. “But what is the past, Lyuba? The past is murky and distant, while the future we can only guess at. The present! Now, that’s something to believe in. If you want to know what I worship, Lyuba, it is the sanctity of the present moment.”

Words have consequences. For at this point Lyuba jumped up from the bed, unhooked her Texas-style belt, and, in an Olympic moment, catapulted the hem of her long denim dress over her knees, her brown wiry
pizda,
her taut belly, the long pale oval of her face—until, momentarily, she stood there naked before me.

She was staring furtively into some incidental part of me, my abdomen, say, her hands by her sides. After a while, she lowered her gaze still farther, until it fell onto her own breasts, two little white baggies that lay peaceably atop her tanned ribs.

She picked up one breast, squeezed it, and then did likewise with the other.

“Well, that’s how it is,” she told me with a shrug. “I’m very hot for you inside.”

I lay there, half a meter away from this young Russian woman, trying to remember who I was, exactly, and whether sympathy could masquerade for arousal or the other way around. There was reason for both. Lyuba had a lean, athletic body (especially for someone who did nothing all day), interrupted only by a swatch of shiny, hardened skin running along one hip and dipping toward her genitals, where a relative had set fire to her when she was twelve. Beloved Papa had always claimed that this was the part he kissed most gently, but it was hard to tease this simple image—Papa’s fish lips puckered atop Lyuba’s disfigurement, his everyday rage tempered by compassion—out of my already put-upon imagination.