Absurdistan (43 page)

Right away I was heaving over the red earth and chopped concrete.

It wasn’t a puppy at all.

I backed away from the little corpse. And then I noticed the familiar socialist edifice beneath which I had chosen to stumble.

I walked into the moldy temple of the local Intourist Hotel, one of the concrete monstrosities where foreigners had been lightened of their hard currency during Soviet times. A dusty painting showed Lenin cheerfully disembarking at Finland Station, beneath which a banner warned in English:
NO CREDIT CARDS
.
NO OUTSIDE PROSTITUTES
,
ONLY HOTEL PROSTITUTES
.
NO EXCEPTIONS
.

A
babushka
was weeping into her scarf at the reception desk, something about her poor dead Grisha. “I want a room,” I said.

The woman wiped her eyes. “Two hundred dollars for the deluxe suite,” she said. “And there’s a whore already waiting for you.”

“I don’t want any whore,” I mumbled. “I just want to be alone.”

“Then it’s three hundred dollars.”

“It’s more
without
the whore?”

“Sure,” the old lady said. “Now I got to find her a place to sleep.”

39

Living in Shit

I spent the next two weeks and US$42,500 at the Intourist Hotel. Each day the price of my so-called deluxe suite would go up by 50 percent (my last night alone added up to US$14,000), while two additional refugees would be pressed into my damp bicameral digs. What could one do? Outside the hotel, the situation—as it was still called—grew more absurd by the hour; gunshots and mortar rounds rhymed with my snoring at night and cleaved the daytime into shooting and nonshooting hours, the latter coinciding roughly with dinner and lunch. The only reason the Intourist Hotel remained unscathed (and insanely expensive) was the fact that nearly everyone shooting had a relative cowering between its thick concrete walls.

The first to show up were Larry Zartarian and his mother. The old lady in charge of our floor—black socks up to the calf, followed by a bouquet of varicose veins—positioned the Mother and Child in the living room. When the Zartarians’ historical enemy, a stray Turkish oil executive with vast sums of cash, arrived, they were slotted directly beneath my bed. At night I could hear the mother cursing her progeny in some difficult language, while Larry tearfully rocked himself to sleep, his big head sending shock waves through the mattress springs.

Timofey had the second bed in the room, a wet moldy pillow and a sheet made of wrinkled cardboard, but was soon forced to share it with Monsieur Lefèvre, the Belgian diplomat who had granted me my European passport, and Misha, his McDonald’s concubine. The two tried to have sex next to Timofey, but my moralistic manservant punched them both in the face and they bled silently onto the bedspread. Lefèvre, upon seeing my bulk spilling over the tiny Soviet bed so that each leg and arm hung suspended like a ham at a Castilian tapas bar, started laughing with every atom of his marinated red face. But the joke was on him several days later, when he committed suicide in our bathroom.

Meanwhile, well-connected Absurdis who lacked secure housing in the capital were settling the living room and threatening to burst into our private chambers as well. Uncultured and rich, dressed like flamingos on parade, they reminded me of the first Absurdis I had seen pushing their way onto the Austrian Airlines jet what seemed like a lifetime ago. Among them, they had several swaddled, dark-lipped children who teethed day and night but remained oddly quiet and mesmerized by the RPGs puncturing holes in nearby buildings with the roar of perfectly calibrated thunder. Three times a day, the ugly hotel whore—dressed every bit as piquantly as the other female occupants of our suite—made her rounds. In deference to the children, a towel was draped between two glass-covered bureaus (each containing a corroded silver bowl with the insignia of the 1980 Moscow Olympics), so that whoever was interested could squat with the whore in measured privacy. The lovemaking sounds, however, were not easy on the ears, as if the principals were making a baby out of clay. “This is how we used to live in our communal apartment when Brezhnev was still in charge,” Timofey noted nostalgically.

The whore came and went, but I was not horny. Or hungry. Or anything. From the first day—when the hot-water tap came off in my hand, releasing, instead of water, a spray of frightened baby roaches—I had been completely disinvested in my own existence. Everything was happening to others: to Timofey, to the whore, to the egofucked Larry Zartarian and his many-moled mama. “Others suffer, but does Vainberg suffer?” I asked Malik, the mysterious green spider who lived in the corner of my bedroom and whose eight silky legs terrorized Mrs. Zartarian throughout the night. The arthropod had little to say.

As for sustenance, one could still eat well in Svanï City, despite the complete collapse of everything. A shy little Moslem boy brought in sesame seeds and hunks of black bread and threatened us with a blade if we didn’t pay. Every morning Timofey crawled out of our room, ran through the gunfire, and brought back yellowish eggs just released from some contraband chicken, and creamy Russian ice-cream bars with the White Nights logo, which made me wistful for my pastel-hued St. Leninsburg, the city I had fled only two months ago, hoping never to return.

But I couldn’t bring myself to eat. To do so would have required the eventual use of the toilet, a greenish husk rising out of the cracked bathroom floor, the seat of which was home to enterprising mosslike bacteria that were trying to survive the attack of hungry roaches and the daily slap of a hundred round Absurdi bottoms. Like the toilet bacteria, I, too, had my natural enemies. My former Volvo drivers, Tafa and Rafa, had discovered my presence at the Intourist, and one bloody Sunday, when all my roommates had gone to forage for food, they woke me up to a volley of kicks aimed at my stomach and face. “
Vy
or
ty
?” the teenagers were shouting. “Polite or familiar? Who’s uncultured now, bitch?”

I grunted, more from being roused out of a rare slumber than from any actual pain. My stomach had been receding of late but could still take an assault by a pair of skinny brown feet in cheap flip-flops. “Polite,” I lowed. “You should always use the polite form of address with your betters.”

Predictably, the next kick worked its way right into my mouth, which quickly filled with the taste of metal and nutrients. “Baargh,” I spat. “Not the mouth! Oh, you ruffians.”

I would have come to a bad end if Timofey hadn’t shown up with a Daewoo ink-jet printer he had stolen somewhere. Centimeter for centimeter, the device was a perfect match for Tafa’s (or Rafa’s) head, which cracked (informally, I should say) beneath it. After his companion fled, Timofey sat down to nurse my poor mouth.

While he ministered to me, I stroked my manservant’s balding head, the kindest thing I had ever done for him. “You stiw wike me, don’t you?” I said to Timofey through a slightly remodeled row of front teeth.

“When my master is down, I only love him more,” Timofey said, dabbing and bandaging.

“What a kind Wussian soul you have,” I said. I thought of Faik, the Nanabragovs’ Moslem manservant. “These Southern types are weally woothless,” I said. “You awen’t woothless at all, huh, Tima?”

“I try to live like it says in the Bible,” my manservant told me. “Other than that, I don’t really know.”

“Intwesting,” I said. I realized I knew next to nothing about my manservant, despite two years of having him clothe and feed me every day. (He had been a homecoming present from Beloved Papa.) What was wrong with me? Suddenly I was overcome by a surge of universal man-love. “Why don’t you tell me ewything about yo wife fwom the beginning,” I said. “Fwom when you wuh just a wittle wad.”

Timofey reddened. “There’s nothing to tell, really,” he said. His Polish polyester sport jacket was missing half a lapel and had been stained by a bowl of tomato soup. I resolved to buy him a brilliant suit at the earliest possible date.

“Oh, pwease,” I said. “I’m cuwious.”

“What’s to say?” Timofey said. “I was born in Bryansk Province, village of Zakabyakino, in 1943. My father, Matvei Petrovich, died in a tank battle with the fascists under Kursk in the same year. In 1945 my mother, Aleluya Sergeyevna, contracted tuberculosis and soon met her end. I was moved to my aunt Anya’s house. She was nice to me, but she died of an untreatable case of shingles in 1949, and my uncle Seryozha beat me until 1954. Then he died from drink, and I was sent to an orphanage in the city of Bryansk, province of Bryansk. I was beaten there, too. In 1960 I sinned terribly and murdered a man with my bare hands after drinking. I was sent to a labor camp in the Solovki Islands from 1960 to 1972. There a warden was kind to me and found me a job in a town in Karelia in the cafeteria of the executive committee of the local Communist Party. My life was happy until 1991. I had my son, Slava, and we played soccer and
gorodki.
I continued to drink and was hospitalized. After communism, I lost my job but discovered God Almighty. I stopped drinking. In 1992 the party cafeteria became an expensive gym, but I had a spare key and slept beneath the basement in a warm ditch. Your father found me in 1997. He told me he was happy to see such a sober Russian face. In 1998 he took me home with him. And so this is my story.”

Timofey had clearly become tired after giving the longest speech of his life. I, too, felt woozy from the mouth pain and from the sharp pangs of incredulous love. He leaned his head on the pillow, while I leaned mine against the hard, bitter-smelling half-lapel of his Polish sport jacket, and in this way we went to sleep.

40

Talking to Israel

September came, and with it my Nana bearing apologies. “Where the hell have you been?” I scolded her. “I was frightened to death for you.”

According to Nana, the Nanabragov manse was filled top to bottom with relatives and fellow clansmen fleeing the countryside, leaving no room for me and my manservant. Mr. Nanabragov had told her that once we were married, I would be entitled to take up residence with them, but at this stage the actual Nanabragov family took precedence. “Oh, my poor Misha,” she cried, throwing her hands around my neck. “Yew,” she said. “You smell like you work at the enamel factory.”

“There is no hot water, and roaches live in the showerhead,” I explained to her, working my wounded mouth around the r’s and the single l.

“And you’ve lost so much weight,” Nana said, feeling up my new fat-free pouches and the nascent outlines of actual body parts—one stomach, individualized compartments for lungs and a heart, the ironwork of ribs coming to the foreground. Despite the escalation of hostilities, Nana herself was as thick and glossy as an otter.

“Do you like my new skinny look?” I asked, rubbing my hands all over her booming chest, my toes curling from excitement, as I made a mental note to commence masturbation the moment she left. “I’m like that famous actor. Something-von-something.”

“To be honest, I liked you better when you were a big prime rib,” Nana said. “Fat is the new look for guys.”

“No limits,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She reached over and cupped my genitals. I cried out in happiness, but an elderly snort brought me short.

“We mustn’t,” I said. “The Hyatt manager and his mother are under my bed.”

“Oh,” Nana whispered. “How disgusting. Listen, Misha, my father would like to talk to you. He eats a long lunch at the Lady with Lapdog every single day. My mother says he no longer loves us.”

“Is it safe for him to be out there?” I asked. “What about the war?”

“He’s got a whole new posse to protect him,” Nana said, tapping at my privates with an index finger while I impotently flared my hips at her. “But listen, Misha. No matter what he says to you, remember—we have to get out of this place. I’m already missing a whole semester at NYU. How’s that going to look on my transcript?” She leaned in closer to make sure the somnolent Zartarians couldn’t overhear. She had eaten mutton kebabs for lunch, mutton kebabs with the gristle still on, dunked into a dish of dill yogurt sauce. “I know a way out of Absurdistan,” she whispered. “American Express is gonna start running that luxury train to the border again. Now go to the Lady with Lapdog and talk to my father. Tell him ‘Goodbye, already.’ Tell him ‘We’re out of here.’ ”