Absurdistan (47 page)

The Faith of My Fathers

I was rightfully hungover the next day, whiskey being one of my more problematic tipples. Something was blocking the busy neural pathway where my neck had set up a Customs post with my head. “Oh, dear,” I moaned, kissing Rouenna’s face, or, as it turned out, the doughy pillow where she had left her scents. Did I say Rouenna? I meant Nana, of course. And then I realized I had been dreaming of Rouenna all night long, about the time she and I, along with her little cousin Mercedes, had taken a tour of Hunter College. As we passed through the library, the lively ten-year-old Mercedes had said, “Ai,
mami,
look at all them fucken books!” And Rouenna, who had misguidedly dressed herself in a business suit for the informal college tour, very solemnly replied, “Why you cursin’ in an educated place, Mercedes?”

Was it the word “educated” that was scraping away at my heart? The respect for book learning from a woman who, up till that point, had thought Dickens was a porn star? Was it the cheap business suit that could barely contain Ro’s figure? Why did I miss her so much all of a sudden, my traitorous Bronx girl with the tough hands and the bleeding gums?

“Breakfast is here,
bobo,
” Nana said. “Get it while it’s hot.” The train crew had set up a small table for us upon which a heap of croissants and muffins exuded the nauseating smells of butter and cranberries. I propelled myself to the table, nearly knocking over a silver tray bearing a notecard with the AmEx logo. A train happily chugged past an indifferent sun; below, a message written in a woman’s dainty, practiced hand:

Good morning, respected passenger!

Today is Monday, September 10, 2001

We are passing through northern Absurdsvanï, where today’s temperature will be a maximum of 28 degrees Celsius, with sunny conditions prevailing along the Staraushanski Valley and into the Griboedov mountain range.

Lunch in the bar car will be a caviar sampler with blini and just-picked country leeks followed by elderberry-cured roast beef (a northern Absurdi specialty) with fingerling potatoes and
cavalo nero.

We will be arriving at the Red Bridge border checkpoint at 15:00 o’clock. Please have your passports ready.

My name is Oksana Petrovna, I am proud to work on this train, and I am here only just for you!

“Such a nice girl, this Oksana,” I said to Nana. “She’s even more professional than that poor Larry Zartarian.” I winced at the thought of the Hyatt manager and his mother, still trapped beneath my bed at the Intourist Hotel.

“She’s a slut,” Nana corrected me, pouring three creams into my coffee, which is how I took it.

I raised the shades. What a difference a night made! The oily sea-desert had been replaced by a near-alpine vista. Fields of yellow late-summer grass (or was it really hay in disguise?) rolled down the hills. Rills fed brooks, which nurtured distant lakes, which in turn drank from the whitecapped mountains straddling the horizon. A bird that might have been an eagle or a pigeon (my eyesight is not so strong) circled above the distant skyline of these promontories. And something was mercifully absent from this unfurling of nature’s green, blue, and white tricolor, something beaten and raw, scorched and unkempt, vulgar and blackened with rot. “Where are the people?” I asked Nana. “Why don’t they come eat all these eagles and hay instead of dying in the desert?”

“The people have been moving off the mountain for decades,” Nana said. “They follow the oil.”

“But there’s no oil left,” I said. “Right, Nana? The whole war was cooked up by your papa and Golly Burton because they ran out of oil. Isn’t that true?”

Nana shrugged. “What do I know?” she said. “I’m just a senior at NYU. You gotta try this excellent honey! It’s soooo good. And not too sweet. Taste the difference?”

I tasted it, all right. “That is really great,” I said. “Where does it come from?” We started turning over the honeypot, trying to find a label. “Ah, it’s from Turkey!”

As I was finishing up the croissants, the train came to a halt. “Yum, yum, yum,” I said, glancing out the window. Some vendors had gathered beneath my window, and the AmEx soldiers were jumping off the roof to bargain with them. The country folk had set up a wooden bench piled with cartons of Newport Lights, spinach leaves, and fresh cherries. “The lunch menu didn’t say anything about dessert,” I said to Nana. “Maybe I should buy some cherries.”

The sound of a local tongue brushed up against my window with gravelly insistence. Already voices were being raised in anger even as U.S. dollars changed hands along with cigarettes and spinach. It was then that I noticed a strange phenomenon—the vendors had little blue and white circles pinned to their dark heads.
Yarmulkes?
“Nana,” I said, “are these the Mountain—”

The door to our cabin slammed open. A presence almost as large as my own took up the space between Nana and me, immediately overturning our breakfast table. “Vainberg!” the creature barked. “Oh, thank God I’ve found you! You have to get off the train now! I’m a friend of your late father’s. Avram.”

I backed off into a corner and raised my hands in protest. Avram? My father? Not again! “What’s this about?” I said weakly.

The man was of late middle age, dressed in a leather cap, along with designer shirt and pants that his wife had nicely matched to his proportions. He had a pitiful and worried mien, yet the rest of his appearance was strong, sweaty, and powerful. He was clearly a Jew. And such a Jew! A prehistoric Jew, as I’ve said before, a
Haimosaurus rex
with the flabby little hands, the big roaring mouth, the broad muscular legs and sensual hindquarters.
So this is how we all began,
I thought to myself. “Mr. Vainberg,” the Jewish dinosaur was saying, “they will kill you at the border. They will take Miss Nana back to her father. We have no time. You must get off the train without delay.”

“Oh, hell,” Nana said. “My father must have found out I left with you. He probably ordered the border guards to kill you in revenge.”

“Not
probably.
Exactly so!” the intruder cried. “I’m a Mountain Jew, Mr. Vainberg. There was a Mossad man, a Dror or a Jimmy, who came through here three days ago, and he warned us that you were coming and that there would be trouble if the Nanabragov girl was with you. We’ve set up a diversion outside with the American Express hooligans. We must get you off the train. These thugs will soon tire of bargaining for cherries, and then they’re liable to shoot us all.”

“The American Express train crew works for Nana’s father?” I said.

“Everyone works for Nana’s father in the end.”

The particulars were starting to settle around my broad shoulders. Goddammit. Another pogrom. There would be no caviar for lunch. There would be no hypoallergenic lovemaking. “Wait!” I said to Avram. “My manservant is bedding down in the service quarters. I must get him, or
he’ll
get the bullet at the border.”

The dinosaur tapped on his watch. “We haven’t the time.”

“He’s Jewish,” I lied.

“Your
manservant
? Jewish?”

I was running down the empty corridor, petite French doors swinging aside in anticipation of my arrival. Finally I stumbled upon a beautiful Russian girl rouging her considerable cheeks. This must have been the very Oksana Petrovna who had left us that thoughtful notecard. True to Nana’s words, there was something sluttish in the girl’s comportment. “Miss,” I said in English. “I need my manservant to help make my toilet. Rouse him from his slumber. And quickly!”

The girl hurriedly snapped shut her compact case, leaving one freckled cheek bare of pomade. “I am here only just for you!” she cried as she leaped into a nearby cabin, dragging out my befuddled Timofey by his ear. I thanked her, grabbed Timofey by the ear myself, and yanked him to the passenger car.

Avram had unlatched a side door and was already scurrying down with my luggage. As Nana approached with her 718 cosmetics bags, the Mountain Jew put a hand out in front of her breasts. “I know she’s your girlfriend,” he said to me, “but if we take her off the train, there might be trouble for our community. What’s left of the SCROD might attack our village. It might not be good for the Jews.”

“She’s my Nana, and she goes with me,” I said, knocking back Avram’s hand. He sighed wearily, prehistorically, and followed us out onto the golden grass. We ran down the slope of a nearby hill falling away from the railroad tracks, our urban feet struggling to make sense of the uneven and uncemented terrain. “Aif!” I cried as a mushy patch of earth nearly sent my ankle in a different direction from the rest of me. Timofey grabbed me before that fatal moment and started pushing my body with a coarse countryside vitality. “Very good, Tima,” I huffed. “In nature,
I
will be
your
manservant. Good boy.”

“Past those bushes,” the Mountain Jew instructed. Nana cried out from the sting of branches and twigs; I grabbed her behind, hoping to shield myself from the worst of the thicket’s ravages. Having cleared this chamber of horrors, we emerged onto a cool dirt path beneath a canopy of oaks. A small Daewoo sedan awaited us. The driver was a tall, skinny youth snug beneath a helmet of greasy hair. “My son, Yitzhak,” the Mountain Jew said. “My one and only. Well, drive already, you idiot!”

Yitzhak rumbled down the dirt road with teenage abandon. Nana was trying to stanch a bloody cut to her forehead, Timofey was picking brambles and berries out of my hair, and all of us were heaving with exhaustion and bewilderment. I looked back at the barely visible railroad tracks upon which the AmEx train was still idling, wishing the world were a better place.

We lapsed into a moody silence, our eyes on the road before us, never on one another. “Are you fleeing to Israel?” Yitzhak asked me in the same accented, barely comprehensible Russian his father spoke.

“I’m going to Brussels,” I said. “Nana is flying to New York.”

“New York!” Yitzhak said. “It is the city of my dreams.”

“Really?” I said. “What a good kid you are.”

“Forget about it,” Avram said. “We have relatives in Haifa. You want to go somewhere? Go visit them. A free bed you’ll have.”

“You’ll love New York,” I said. “It’s like having the whole world on one small island.”

“I understand you can play basketball with blacks on the street,” Yitzhak said.

“Very true,” I said. “I like the way your mind works, young man.”

“Don’t encourage his stupid dreams,” the Mountain Jew said. “Several times it has happened to us—the young people leave for L.A. or Brooklyn, they marry an outsider, and after a few years they won’t come home for
Pesach seder.
They won’t even fly back to piss on their grandfathers’ graves. But when things go bad with their gentile wives or with their half-breed children, they run back to us. ‘Papa,
papochka,
what have I done? I’ve forsaken my people.’ And we welcome them back, and kiss them, and love them like they haven’t stabbed us through the heart. Because for us it’s simple. If you’re a Jew, even if you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic, you will always find a home here.”

“Thank you for saving us,” Nana said, putting her hand on Avram’s shoulder. “You’ve risked your own lives. We won’t soon forget your kindness.”

Avram shrugged her off. “Well, who else would do it?” he said. “The Mossad man came and said, ‘There’s a Jew in danger.’ We knew exactly what to do. A Jew in danger, so let’s save him. This is how our minds work.”

I sighed wearily. An anger was developing inside me, the anger of a man with a growing debt. I tried to position my face in the rearview mirror so that I could smile in encouragement to the nice Yitzhak. His curious brown face smiled back at me. We were passing a ramshackle village populated solely by stray dogs and scruffy chickens past childbearing age, a barber sitting lifelessly by his shack, the word “barber” misspelled in English and Russian and possibly a third language. We noticed the paisley domes of three similar mosques and the sharp bayonets of their minarets aiming at the innocent sky. “Do you get along with the Moslems?” Nana asked in her new supplicant’s voice. “You live in such close proximity.”

“We’re fine with them,” Avram said, doffing his leather cap and fixing his comb-over. “They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them. They’re not very bright, that’s for certain. Just look at how they live. These houses haven’t been painted in decades. Is that supposed to be a market? Just turnips and radishes and nothing imported? Wait until you see
our
village.”

“Now, Avram—” I started to say sharply, but Nana was already pressing her elbow into my hide.

“Don’t you dare, Misha,” she whispered in English. “Don’t you realize what he’s done for us?”

“What he’s done for
me,
” I whispered back. “I’m the Jew.”

“Who cares why he did it. I was gonna get sent back to my father. I was going to miss another semester at NYU. So shut it, willya?”

We were driving down a steep gravel path lined with gilded Soviet statues of supple female volleyball players and fierce badminton gods groaning in midswing. “They were going to build an Olympic training center here,” Yitzhak said. “But someone stole all the money.”

“Yeah, someone,” I murmured to myself. The gravel path ended in a smarmy river of unknown provenance. Beyond it lay a clump of newly built towers capped by silver spires and satellite dishes, along with enormous redbrick manses, some surrounded by miniature cranes hoisting fourth and fifth stories or the gleaming skylights that covered them, a kind of storybook village with a relentless microwave sheen.

“Our humble hamlet, Davidovo,” Avram said. “Our little paradise.”

After the desolation of the Moslem town, we found ourselves on a modern thoroughfare lined with crowded storefronts labeled
HOUSE OF FASHION
and
PALACE OF HAPPINESS
and 24
HOUR INTERNET CLUB
, their parking lots gridlocked with Toyotas and Land Rovers. In a nearby residential area, old people, withered and Oriental-seeming, sat impassively on wood-carved front porches, their bodies slowly drying out in the sun while children of every age scrambled around them in a flurry of tanned legs and glistening Versace belt buckles. “Where are all the grown-ups?” Nana asked.