Absurdistan (38 page)

I turned to Parka Mook, who stood impassively, his hands folded over his crotch, his dry face and receding mustache drawn into the Russian letter
. “Is this true?” I asked him.

“What do I know?” he said. “I’m an intellectual, not an urban planner.”

I walked over to the edge of the roof and surveyed the red plains of Gorbigrad stretching into the sea, surrounded by the pinpricks of oil derricks, reminding me of a slain woolly mammoth encircled by cavemen with spears. Life could only get better for these people, I thought. How could it get any worse? There was a bit of American athletic wisdom that summed it up nicely: “No pain, no gain.” I sighed, suddenly missing American television. What a nostalgic!

“So, Mishen’ka?” Mr. Nanabragov asked, grinning and stroking my hump. “What do you think? Want to join the SCROD, little son? We’ve got an office all set up for you. And a secretary crawling around on all fours.”

“Let me think about it,” I said, yawning heartily.

It was time for my afternoon nap.

I was having a pleasant dream about the Egyptian pyramids (for some reason, I was leveling them with a sledgehammer) when Larry Zartarian woke me up. He was standing over me, shaking me by the shoulder, shedding tiny velvet hairs all over my face.

He pointed at the tinted windows with his petite man-hand. Outside, the International Terrace stretched out before me, its skyscrapers silently reflecting the hills and the sea. “What?” I said. “How did you get in here, anyway? What about my privacy?”

“Look at Gorbigrad.”

I let my gaze drop across the bay. “Yes,” I said. “Gorbigrad has many problems.”

“Look closer. That’s the Blue Bridge Pass that connects Gorbigrad to the International Terrace. There are soldiers at the checkpoints so no one can get through.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “We need checkpoints. We’re in a state of war.”

“Do you see that gray chunk of rock over there? Look right next to it. That’s the Alexandre Dumas Ravine. And see those black figures slowly going down the ravine? Like ants? Those are people. Trying to make their way down from Gorbigrad. They’re trying to get onto the terraces. Many of them falling to their deaths, no doubt.”

I examined these ants he spoke of, but I could barely make them out with my faltering, sun-blinded vision. What was he talking about? Dumas was a bad French writer. A ravine was a ravine. The Sevo and Svanï were not ants. Gorbigrad would be destroyed, then rebuilt anew. “Why would people fall to their deaths trying to leave Gorbigrad?” I said.

“Because Nanabragov and Debil Kanuk are firing GRAD missiles at them. From the roof of my fucking hotel.
Do you know what this will do to the Hyatt image?
”

“I thought the bombed-out people would go live with their friends in the countryside.”

“The countryside is completely under siege. The borders are sealed off by federal and SCROD forces. Your so-called bombed-out people are going to starve.”

“How do you know all this?” I said.

Zartarian turned away from me. I focused on everything wrong with him—his premature baldness, the tight slacks outlining his monkey ass, and the small curves of his thighs. From this angle, stooped and small-shouldered, he looked even less suited for physical life than I was.

“Alyosha-Bob told me about you, Misha,” he said. “He told me about your childhood. About your father.”

I snorted. “I had a fine childhood. My papa made boats out of shoes. We pissed on a dog. Leave my childhood alone.”

“You need to stop, Misha,” he said. “You need to forget about trying to make things better here. You need to forget about the SCROD.”

“Get the hell out of here, Zartarian,” I said. But after he was gone, I took out my
mobilnik
and aimed it at the sky. I needed to talk to Alyosha-Bob. I needed to hear about my childhood. A lighthouse beacon revolved around the phone’s screen, desperately looking for a signal. Finally the beacon stopped. “Respected mobile phone user,” a hoarse Russian woman said, “your attempt to make a connection has failed. There is nothing more to be done. Please hang up.” I shivered and hiccuped. The particular world of the Park Hyatt Svanï City floated around me—buffalo wings drumming against whiskey bottles, floral duvet covers suffused in CNN’s lunar glow, and in the distance the people, threadbare and heat-stricken, playing out their imponderable dramas.

I wanted Alyosha-Bob back. I wanted to hold hands together, the way Arab men do, as we walked down the Boulevard of National Unity past perfumeries and Irish pubs, empty KBR trucks and armored personnel carriers.

But the hoarse Russian woman was wrong. There was definitely more to be done.

33

Ideas Away

The next day I was woken at ten in the morning by the sound of GRAD missiles being launched directly above my sleepy head.
Hey!
I thought,
what a way to start my first day as the SCROD Minister of Multicultural Affairs.
I put on my best tracksuit, had a bang-up sturgeon-and-egg fry at the Beluga Bar, then went back upstairs and flossed heavily.

The SCROD boys who had driven me to the Nanabragov residence were waiting for me in my official Volvo station wagon. I think their names were Tafa and Rafa, but that sounds rather made up. They were morons, that much I can vouch for. They spent the ride down to the Sevo Terrace addressing me in the familiar way, as if I were a greasy colleague of theirs, and chatting all the while about how a certain teenage American pop star would look with a pickle up her twat. I was ready to reach for my knout.

The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy gathered in an old House of Soviets atop a deserted bluff overlooking the sprawling octopus of the Sevo Vatican. The building looked very much like a Rhine Valley castle, and in fact had been constructed by German POWs in the forties. Their workmanship was evident. This was the only building of the Soviet era that did not look as if it had been continuously crapped upon by a flock of seagulls for the past five decades. In the dusty square outside the building, workmen were chiseling out a statue to Sakha the Democrat, holding aloft a torch in one hand and a Sevo cross in the other. His academic beard was trimmed down to nothing, and his face was aglow and expectant, as if he had just won a Century 21 shopping spree. “Well, at least he has the torch in one hand,” I muttered to no one present. “That’s democratic.”

Mr. Nanabragov showed me to my office, a chamber the size of a barn brimming with dark wood and glass cabinets stocked with Armenian brandy, the typical privileges of a Soviet party boss. The title “Minister for Sevo-Israeli Affairs” had been crossed out on my door, and someone had written in English: “Ministry of Multiculti.” Mr. Nanabragov pointed out the fact that I had twelve completely useless rotary phones lined up on my desk, more than anyone save himself, almost as many as Brezhnev had in his day (I assume his worked). I told Nanabragov that what I really needed was a computer with a working Internet hookup. He sighed and jerked around a little. “What’s wrong, friend?” I said.

“I’m fighting with my Nana,” he said. “I want her to quit her job at the American Express office so that she can become the mother of your children.”

I had been privy to this argument when Nana had mounted me, sans condom (how wet her vagina, how flustered my
khui
), the previous night, bawling about her father’s simple nature with each vicious straddle. “Children are like champagne corks,” I advised Mr. Nanabragov, patting him on the back. “They should be pointed away and released.”

“I don’t understand,” my potential father-in-law said. “Why are children like champagne corks?”

“Just get me the Internet,” I told him.

We met in an airless conference room adorned with a series of warped walnut panels and a tremendous Sevo flag, a sturgeon leaping up over an oil derrick against a background of red and green—red for the blood of the Sevo martyrs and green for the color of American dollars. The men who had gathered around the conference table were the same ones who had come to Mr. Nanabragov’s dinner party, only Bubi was missing due to a hangover. They sat there in white short sleeves, gray woolen slacks, and wingtips, their
mobilniki
parked next to their salads and glasses of fizzy mineral water, gossiping loudly in their own language. I might have been at a Lions Club ladies’ lunch somewhere in Sinclair Lewis country if not for the bloody flag hanging above us, the oil derricks gleaming outside, and the occasional mumble of the special American word “LOGCAP.”

The meeting started with a media roll call. According to Mr. Nanabragov, since the shelling of Gorbigrad had begun, Absurdsvanï was featured in thirty-four news reports, about half of them implicitly sympathetic to the Sevo people. “CNN, check,” Mr. Nanabragov intoned, making a sweeping check mark with his twitching arm. “BBC One, check; BBC Two, check; MSNBC, check; Rai Due, check; Deutsche Welle, check…”

“What about people jumping into the Alexandre Dumas Ravine?” I asked. “Doesn’t that look bad?”

“They’re not jumping, they’re sliding down,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Which reminds me, have you talked to Israel yet? Because there’s good news on that front. Parka, tell us the good news.”

The Cultural Minister, his morning face bristling with nose hairs, was staring out the window at the Caspian’s lackluster tides. “Wake up, grandpa,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Tell Misha about the Mountain Jews.”

Parka Mook fell out of his morning stupor and fixed me with his yellow eyes. He sniffed in my direction as if ascertaining my genus and specie. “Mr. Vainberg,” he said, “good morning. How are you? Well rested? That’s very nice. Now, allow me to play the fool’s fool and tell you about our latest brilliant idea. Do you know who the Mountain Jews are? No? You don’t? What a delightful man you are! How easy it must be not to know or care about your own people. Well, briefly, the Mountain Jews have lived among us probably since the time of the Babylonian exile. In the mountains, you see. Their mother has always been our mother, and they have always had water from our well to drink. And believe me, they drank and drank. They drank until our wells ran dry.”

“Parka!” Mr. Nanabragov cautioned.

“In 1943 the fascist troops were headed directly for Svanï City, hoping to take control of the oil and the strategic port. The Mountain Jews turned to the local Sevo and Svanï leaders, asking to be hid among them in case the Germans came, or at least to secure their passage across the Caspian. I have found evidence, anecdotal evidence from several village elders, that the Svanï were lukewarm to the idea of saving the Jews, while the Sevo were mildly enthusiastic. So there you have it. Let the truth be known.”

“But the Germans never reached Absurdsvanï,” I said.

“Unfortunately not,” Parka Mook said dryly.

“So who cares if the Sevo
might
have helped them. In truth, they didn’t.”

“Still, it’s a beautiful story,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “One minority willing to die for another. You should be shouting about it from a rooftop, Mr. Minister of Multicultural Affairs.”

Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and Leisure was shamelessly picking at my salad. I gave him such a look, he nearly stabbed himself with his own fork. I reached in with one of my two big squishies and palmed a wedge of ripe, bleeding tomato. “The Holocaust is a serious business,” I said. “It requires very expert branding or we’ll all look like a bunch of idiots.”

“Branding I don’t know about,” Nanabragov said. “But we can certainly build a statue to Sevo-Jewish friendship. Imagine a hundred-meter version of Misha and the dead democrat Sakha bent over a Torah scroll. And from the Torah scroll, an eternal flame comes shooting out.”

“Fine idea! Let’s build a Misha!” the gathered shouted.

“It’ll take half the granite in the Dumas Ravine just for his head,” some wise guy said.

I joined my fellow ministers in laughing politely at my unchecked gluttony. “But seriously,” I said, “if you want to look good with the Holocaust, you have to do something original. Or if not original, then at least educational. Like a museum. And it has to be of the latest fashion, so every time a child taps a computer screen with his finger, some poignant fact about Jew-Sevo friendship pops up. Tap, tap, tap, fact, fact, fact.”