Absurdistan (16 page)

Alyosha-Bob and his Svetlana were sitting beneath a statue of Adonis, watching a submarine captain trying to sell his young crew to a gay German tour group. The seventeen-year-old boys were awkwardly trying to cover their nakedness, while their drunken captain barked at them to let go of their precious goods and “shake them around like a wet dog.” I suppose civil society has its limits, too.

“I’ve got to get out of Russia,” I said to Alyosha-Bob. “Everything has its limits.”

“Yes, fine,” Alyosha-Bob said. “But why now, exactly?”

I saw my future with Lyuba. Picking out paisley furniture in Moscow’s IKEA. Being called little father as I mounted her. Supper beneath the meter-long oil painting of Maimonides; dinner next to Papa’s censorious black-and-white gaze. Eventually two rich, unhappy children: a five-year-old boy in a Dolce & Gabbana gangster suit, his younger sister lost beneath an alligator’s worth of leather accessories. Everywhere around us snickering servants, collapsed infrastructure, sniveling grandmothers…Russia, Russia, Russia…

But how could I explain all this to Alyosha-Bob? St. Leninsburg was his playground. His drunken dream come true.

“Are you running away because you fucked Lyuba today?” Svetlana asked.

“Is it true?” Alyosha-Bob asked. “You gave it to Boris Vainberg’s old lady?”

“Do you see what kind of a city we live in?” I said. “I gave it to her just three hours ago. We should never hand out
mobilniki
to the servants. It’s probably the talk of the Internet by now.”

“I agree with you, Misha,” Svetlana said. “You
should
leave. I keep telling this idiot”—she pointed to Alyosha-Bob—“that we have to get out of here, too. There’s a one-year master’s in public relations program at Boston University. They have this practice lab where you can work as an account executive for local nonprofits. I could work for the Boston Ballet! I could be cultured and clever and earn a respectable living. I’d show the Americans that not every Russian woman is a whore.”

“Listen to her,” Alyosha-Bob said. “The Boston Ballet. And what’s wrong with our Kirov? It was good enough for Baryshnikov, no?”

“You just want to spend your whole life here, Alyosha,” Sveta said, “because back in America you’re a nothing man.”

“Shh! Look who’s here,” Alyosha-Bob said. “The murderer.”

Captain Belugin, wiping his hoary face with the sleeve of his green Armani shirt, ambled over to our table. He looked older than when I’d seen him at Papa’s funeral, his ears drooping down like cabbage leaves. “
Allo,
brothers,” he said, crashing down on a stool. “Sveta. How are you, pretty one?
Nu,
we’re all aficionados of Club 69, I see. And what of it? It’s a good business to be queer. Sometimes I like a little boy beside me. They’re more hairless than my wife. More feminine, too. Hey, Seryozha.” He waved to a cherubic young fellow in a thong, dishing out vodka from a slop pail. “Give it here, good lad.”

“Well, my Alyosha’s not a pederast,” Svetlana said. “He merely comes to Club 69 for the atmosphere. And to make connections.”

“Hi, Seryozha,” I said to the friendly boy. “How’s life, cucumber?”

“Seryozha number one, true love forever, I am only just for you,” Seryozha said in English, blowing me a professional kiss.

“Seryozha’s going to Thailand with a rich Swede,” Captain Belugin announced as Seryozha smiled at us like a shy albino marmoset. He scooped the vodka out with a beaker, pouring us a hundred grams a head. “Better watch out for the cockroaches there,” said Belugin. “They’re like this…” He spread out his arms, favoring us with his briny armpits.

“Cirrus, Europay, ATM, one-stop banking…Super Dollar, why you lonely?” Seryozha said. He wiggled his tush for us and left.

“Good boy,” Belugin said. “We could use him on the force. They’re so clean here. Hygiene. Morality starts with hygiene. Just look at the Germans.” We glanced over to the middle-aged members of the German tour group throwing deutsche marks at our teenage countrymen, bringing us tidings of an advanced civilization. We heard an enormous cheer from downstairs. The floor show was about to start—the pioneer songs of our youth bellowed out by muscular drag queens in full Soviet regalia. I found it very nostalgic.

“I wish I could leave this stupid country just like Seryozha,” I said.

“And why can’t you?” Belugin asked.

“The Americans won’t give me a visa because they say my papa killed that Oklahoman fellow. And the European Union won’t let any Vainbergs in, either.”

“Ach,” Belugin said to me. “Why do you want to move to the West, young man? Things will improve for our people, just you wait. In a mere fifty years, I predict, life here will be brighter than even in Yugoslavia. You know, Misha, I’ve been to Europe. The streets are cleaner, but there’s no Russian
soul.
Do you know what I’m talking about here? You can’t just sit down with a man in Copenhagen and look him in the eye over a shot glass and then—
boof!
—you are brothers forever.”

“Please…” I said. “I want to…I want—”

“Well, of course you
want,
” said the captain. “What kind of a young man would you be if you didn’t
want
? I understand you implicitly. We old men were once young, too, don’t forget!”

“Yes,” I said, following his logic. “I’m young. So I want.”

“Then let me help you, Misha. You see, I am originally from the Republic of Absurdsvanï, land of oil and grapes. Absurdistan, as we like to call it. I’m a Russian by blood, but I also know the way of the infamous Svanï people, those lusty Southern black-asses, those Cretins of the Caucasus. Now, one of my friends in Svanï City is a counselor at the Belgian embassy. A European of great learning and propriety. I wonder if, for a small sum, he could arrange for your citizenship in the Flemish kingdom…”

“That sounds like a sensible idea,” Alyosha-Bob said. “What about it, Misha? If you get a Belgian passport, you can travel all over the continent.”

“Maybe Rouenna will come live with me,” I said. “Maybe I can tempt her away from Jerry Shteynfarb. Belgium is full of chocolate and fries, right?”

“We could fly down to Absurdistan next week,” Alyosha-Bob said. “I own a branch of ExcessHollywood there. There’s a direct Aeroflot flight on Monday.”

“I’m
not
flying Aeroflot,” I told my friend. “I don’t want to die just yet. We’ll take Austrian Airlines through Vienna. I’ll pay for everything.”

I pictured myself sitting at a zippy Belgian café watching a multicultural woman in a thong eating a frankfurter. Did such things happen in Brussels? In New York they happened all the time.

“So, Belugin,” Alyosha-Bob said to the captain. “What’s it going to cost for Misha to get his Belgian passport?”

“What will it cost? Nothing, nothing.” Captain Belugin waved it off. “Well, almost nothing. A hundred thousand U.S. for my Belgian friend, and a hundred thousand for me as an introduction fee.”

“I want my manservant to come with me,” I said. “I need a Belgian work visa for my Timofey.”

“You’re bringing your manservant?” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re quite a Westerner, Count Vainberg.”

“Go to the
khui,
” I said. “I’d like to see you wash your own socks the way I once washed mine with my working-class girlfriend in New York.”

“Boys.” Captain Belugin put a hand between us. “A work visa is the height of simplicity. Another twenty thousand for me, and twenty thousand for Monsieur Lefèvre of the Belgian embassy. You’ll be fast friends with Jean-Michel. He likes to run over the locals with his Peugeot.”

“Has Oleg the Moose’s money been moved to Misha’s offshore accounts?” Alyosha-Bob asked.

“Misha’s got about thirty-five million dollars in Cyprus,” Belugin said, looking over his yellow fingernails, obviously not too impressed by the remainder of Beloved Papa’s carefully hoarded fortune, a long trail of wrecked factories, misappropriated natural gas concessions, the much-talked-about VainBergAir (an airline without any airplanes but with plenty of stewardesses), and, of course, the infamous graveyard for New Russian Jews.

It didn’t sound like much money to me, either, to be honest. Let’s do the math. I was thirty, and the official life expectancy for a Russian male is fifty-six, so I probably had another twenty-six or so years to live. Thirty-five million divided by twenty-six years equals about US$1,350,000 a year. That wasn’t much for Europe, but I could survive. Hell, I got by on a mere US$200,000 a year in New York when I was young, though I didn’t have a manservant to support, and I often denied myself certain pleasures (never have I owned a hot-air balloon or a Long Island bungalow).

But who cares about my poverty! For the first time in an eternity, I felt a current of pure pleasure wend itself around my beleaguered liver and up my bloated lungs. Freedom was upon me.

I remembered my childhood escapes from Leningrad, the annual summer train trip to the Crimea. Blessed memories of little Misha leaning out the carriage window, the Russian countryside crawling up to the train tracks, an occasional aspen whipping Misha’s curious face. I always knew that summer was drawing near when my mother came over with my crumpled Panama hat and sang an improvised tune for me:

Misha the Bear

Is leaving his lair

He’s had enough

Of winter’s despair

Yes, I’ve had enough of it,
mamochka
! I smiled and hiccuped into my shot glass. There was something oddly fetching about the prospect of being alive today, knowing that next week I would follow Peter the Great’s bronze steed. I would fulfill every educated young Russian’s dream. I would go
beyond the cordon.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Captain Belugin said. “As soon as you land in Absurdistan, go to the Park Hyatt Svanï City and talk to Larry Zartarian, the manager. He’ll make all the necessary arrangements. You’ll be a Belgian in no time.”

“Belgium,” Sveta said wistfully. “You’re a very lucky man.”

“You’re a great big cosmopolitan whore,” Alyosha-Bob said, “but I love you.”

“You’re a traitor to your country, but what can be done?” Captain Belugin said.

I reflected upon their words and raised a toast to myself. “Yes, what can be done?” I said. “Everything has its limits.”

The glasses clinked. My future was set. I drank vodka and felt ennobled. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you now: I was wrong about everything. Family, friendship, coitus, the future, the past, even the present, my mainstay…even that I managed to get wrong.

13

Misha the Bear Takes to the Air

I assembled my household staff and told them they were free of my service. They immediately started crying into their aprons and tearing at their hair. “Don’t you have some province you can go to?” I asked them. “Aren’t you tired of city life? Be free!” The problem, it turned out, was that they had no money, and their provincial relatives had all but forsaken them; soon enough they would face homelessness and starvation, then the onset of the terrible Russian winter. So I gave each US$5,000, and they all threw themselves around my neck and wept.

Moved by my own largesse, I summoned Svetlana and the artist Valentin, who was still camped out in my library along with his Naomi and Ruth. “I’m starting a charity called Misha’s Children,” I said. “I have allocated US$2,000,000 to benefit the children of the city I was born in.”

They looked at me sideways.

“That’s St. Petersburg,” I clarified.

Still no reaction.

“Sveta,” I said, “you’ve mentioned how you want to work for a nonprofit agency. This is your chance. You will be the executive director. You will airlift twenty progressive social workers from Park Slope, Brooklyn, and set them to work on the most incorrigible of our children. Valentin, you will be the artistic director, teaching the young ones that redemption lies in Web design as well as clinical social work. Your salaries will be US$80,000 per annum.” (To give the reader a sense of scale, the average Petersburg annual salary is US$1,800.)

Sveta asked to see me in private. “I am most honored,” she said, “but I think it is foolish to entrust Valentin with such responsibility. I know he works for Alyosha and is designing a website for him, but he’s also quite a superfluous man, wouldn’t you say?”

“We’re all fairly superfluous men,” I said, pace Turgenev. I shook her hand, kissed the weeping Valentin three times on the cheeks, bade farewell to his whores, then summoned my driver for the last time. It was early Monday morning, the population still working through a collective hangover, but Petersburg, when free of the human element, looks especially fine. The palaces on Nevsky Prospekt, wishing to properly say goodbye to me, dusted themselves off and bowed their chipped baldachinos in my direction; the canals flowed most romantically, hoping to outdo one another; the moon fell and the sun rose to demonstrate the nocturnal and diurnal lay of the land; but I would not be moved. “Forward, not a step backward,” I said, washing my hands clean of Peter the Great’s creation. We pulled into the ridiculous airport, a monstrous beige fort where Western tourists were abused in a hundred different ways, a tiny shat-upon redoubt more suited to Montgomery, Alabama, than a city of five million souls. At Customs there was a sad scene as Timofey’s son, Slava, wept on his father’s neck. “I’ll send for you, sonny,” my manservant said, patting the young man’s balding head. “You’ll join me in Brussels, and we’ll be merry together. Take my Daewoo steam iron.”