Absurdistan (15 page)

Events were taking place that made me feel somehow peripheral. Lyuba was lying down on the bed once more, her legs hanging in the air, her
pizda
a cozy brown-fur pelt between them. “I have to prepare myself,” she said. She took out a plastic tube and, with a most unpleasant sound, squirted something onto her fingers. She then inserted the fingers inside herself. “This makes it easier for me,” she explained.

It was impolite to just sit there and stare. I began to take off my pants so that I could present my purple half-
khui,
my abused iguana, to Lyuba. It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. And so I was compelled to act like a man, though in reality I had long ago floated right through the ceiling, past the ocher jumble of Leninsburg roofs, over and around the golden prick of the Admiralty, and onto the dark blue expanse of the Gulf of Finland, where I used to believe my dead mother’s essence hovered about in a happy, cultured limbo above the topiary of one of the czars’ summer palaces (though, as I’ve said before, nothing of our personality survives after death).

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, my mercurial genital had already engorged itself and was positioned for love, proof that one doesn’t actually have to be present to consummate the sex act. It dawned upon me that Lyuba had set “Busting My Nut Tonight” on repeat play, and that Humungous G’s urban missive was helping me focus on the task at hand. Busting my nut
when
? Why, tonight, of course. I crawled on my knees along the orange comforter toward Lyuba, bringing the
khui
toward her.

“My
khui,
” I announced sadly.

“Yes, it’s your
khuichik,
” Lyuba said, tilting her head for a better view.

“It is possible to touch it now,” I whispered, letting Lyuba tug at my much-maligned
khui-
knob with a cold hand. I turned it sideways so that she could see the long scar running along its underbelly, the clumps of skin attached at improvised angles like the fragmented bits of a car bumper following a head-on collision.

“Ai, what happened?” Lyuba asked.

I took a deep breath and blurted out my story in one long sentence, digressing only to explain the words “
mitzvah
mobile.”

She put the purple thing in her mouth to silence me. No matter how often it happens, it is always surprising to find a woman’s wet mouth drawing tight around my
khui.

“Mm,” she said.

“What?” I said.

She took the
khui
out. “It tastes fine,” she said. “You’re very clean.”

“Well, I’m not worried about the taste,” I said.

“Lie down on me,” Lyuba said.

I did as she said. Her body was cold underneath mine, and even the inside of her
pizda
was barely at room temperature, probably because she had overlubricated with what must have been a very cold gel. I kept slipping out and getting angry, but I used the anger to poke her all the harder. We were in the traditional baby-making position, and from my vantage point I could barely make out the contours of her small Slavic breasts. Lyuba’s eyes were closed, and she seemed to be moving her hips from left to right to the sound of Humungous’s phat beats, which was not the rhythm I had in mind. “We should be either dancing or fucking,” I complained.

Either dancing or fucking.
That was pure Beloved Papa. I even had that idiotic Odessa gangster accent he used when he thought he was being suave.

“Sorry,” she said, and moved her hips in a more accommodating up-and-down fashion, cupping her breasts to give them more shape. I dutifully tucked into each sturdy nipple with my big American-made teeth, then moved my face up to look into Lyuba’s. She was wincing in rhythm to our quiet humping (my weight is an impossible thing to bear), her eyes wet and focused on the ceiling. She squeezed my ass, perhaps to encourage me. She seemed to want me to say something. To commiserate with her. But it’s hard to know what to say when you’re
khui
-deep inside your father’s young wife.

So instead I tried to be gentle. I looked deep into the hollows beside her nose, where a herd of teenage orange freckles once roamed. The surgery that had removed them was not perfect, and I could still see, beneath the initial layer of skin, the afterimage of the burnt-out orange spots. I kissed these blemishes, her childhood’s last bequest, drawing a forced smile from Lyuba. I carefully touched the hardened skin where her relative had charred her. It was the consistency of warm cellophane, and it was frightening.

“Ai,” she said. “You’re tickling me. Will you finish soon?”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I was sweating all over her. The room was stale and tropical, filled with the odor of an unhealthy male body suddenly pressed into service.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s this lubricant—”

“No, it’s my fault,” I said. “I’m taking all these medications, so it’s hard to—Oh! Ah, wait, Lyubochka! Oofa!”

And so it was over. I pulled out of Lyuba and looked at my wet knob. One of my testicles was missing. It had apparently risen up into my abdomen. “Fuck, Lyuba,” I said. “I’m missing an egg here. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“You’re not satisfied with me,” Lyuba said.

I poked around there for a bit, worried that the nonexistent God was taking His Freudian revenge on me. The testicle descended. My hands were shaking. Humungous G was still singing “I’m Busting My Nut Tonight.” Never in my life had I found hip-hop to be so detestable. Plus there was something else to consider. Lyuba. Intercourse. Nature’s remorseless path. “Oh, the devil take it,” I said. “We didn’t use a
prezervatiff.
”

“It’s Monday,” Lyuba said. “I never get pregnant on a Monday.”

She was making a fort for herself out of the fringes of the comforter, sinking her whitish body into its orange ramparts with many postcoital sighs, preparing herself for a fine afternoon nap. What did she say? No pregnancies on Mondays. Wonderful. Now, why was Humungous G still rapping? I went over to the stereo and punched it with my big, squishy hand, but the fat urban motherfucker just kept on
bangin’
.

“You’re not satisfied with me,” Lyuba repeated, clicking off the stereo with a remote control. “Boris usually made a special sound. Like he was happy.”

“No, it was very nice,” I said. I tried to think from a goal-oriented perspective, just as they taught us at Accidental College. “I finished inside you.”

I looked up at the photograph of my father happily unveiling the Nokia-phone tombstone, three Soviet-era gold teeth glinting in the sun, a combed-over black curl forming a Spanish ¿ across his forehead. I felt myself losing my precarious hold on consciousness and set myself down on the bed. Lyuba yawned widely, and I smelled her lamb-tongue breath once more, which reminded me quickly of every Russian person I had ever known—from my dead grandmothers, who took me for stroller rides along the English embankment, to Timofey, my loyal manservant, who was presently waiting for me with the Land Rover on the very spot where I was once strolled. All of us had enjoyed a lamb’s tongue in our lifetime. How droll!

“Let’s get some sleep, then,” Lyuba said. “Our bed is very comfortable. It’s like staying at the Marriott in Moscow.”

Our
bed, indeed, was very comfortable. Her
zhopa
rubbed at me from behind, the way Rouenna’s used to rub me when I couldn’t fall asleep during anxious nights. Lyuba seemed to want me to put my arms around her little body. Her hair smelled musty and yet artificial, like nothing I had encountered before. I imagined Lyuba as a woman in her thirties, her hair hennaed a popular aquamarine color, her posture stooped like that of so many of our premature
babushkas.
Would she even be alive then?

“I hope we make lots of love together, little father,” she whispered.

I tried to go to sleep, but there was nothing to dream about, except the usual Eastern European nonsense about a man sailing an inflatable Fanta bottle around the world looking for happiness. But one thought remained and would not be extinguished.

That wasn’t too bright, Misha.

The curtains of consciousness were being lowered around me, gray and gold-sequined like a fading summer day here in our crappy Venice of the North.

Not too bright, you stepmother-fucking, father-hating joke of a man.

12

Everything Has Its Limits

Two hours later, outside her bedroom door, Lyuba’s servants had fallen asleep, much like their mistress. Their ears were pressed to the door; even in their evening stupor, they were listening for sounds of our bed creaking. “Scoundrels,” I hissed at the mess of bleary-eyed bodies. “You like to hear your mistress fucking hard, eh? May the devil take you! Well, enough! Everything has its limits, don’t you know!”

Out on the English Embankment, Timofey and my driver, Mamudov, were sitting on the hood of the Land Rover drinking shots of vodka, blasting the Spartak-Zenit football match on the speakers, and hugging each other in a warm drunken embrace. “Hullo, gentlemen!” I shouted to them in English. “Do you want to hear something? I’ll tell you, then! Everything has its limits!”

And I walked off down the embankment like a supercilious transvestite bitch, swinging my hands in the air and my hips below. I passed by the Bronze Horseman, the statue of the curly-haired asshole Peter the Great charging up a steep rock, galloping northward, abandoning the ruined city he founded for the fair shores of Finland, leaving those of us without an EU visa nothing but the tail end of his fat bronze mare.

“Everything has its limits!” I shouted to a wedding party posing beneath Peter, skinny-ass twenty-year-olds who could not grasp the empty terror of the rest of their lives.

“Hurrah, strange one!” they shouted at me, vodka bottles raised, drunk as all get-out.

One of their grandmothers stood guard over their wedding car, a crushed Lada micro-sedan festooned with blue and white ribbons. “That’s what I thought, too,” she happily told me through her two teeth. “That everything has its limits. But each year I’m proven wrong!”

“Rejoice,
babushka
!” I shouted. “Soon things will change. There will be limits! To everything!”

“Yes, limits or labor camps,” the grandmother said. “Either way, I’m happy.”

By this point Timofey and Mamudov were following behind me in the Land Rover, Timofey leaning out his window, yelling, “Come back, young master! All will be well! We’ll go to the American Clinic. Dr. Yegorov, your favorite, has walk-in appointments today. A new supply of Celexa just came in.”

I turned around, one hand on my hip, one giant fist in the air. “Won’t you acknowledge, dear Timofey, that everything has its limits?” I shouted. “That I am not just some educated, Westernized animal you can kick in the mug?”

“I acknowledge!” Timofey yelled. “I acknowledge! What more do you want?”

But I wanted more. Oh, did I ever want more. I took off down the embankment, my buttery thighs slapping against each other, until I hit the green confectionery of the Winter Palace, one of its lesser buildings draped with the sign
THIS YEAR
’
S WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT TO YOU BY DAEWOO
. I stopped and breathed in the cheap diesel fuel and burning tar, the heavy air of a third-world metropolis misplaced five thousand kilometers to the north, but lacking the rich scent of burning goat and honey cakes.

Even the evocative stench of poverty we couldn’t get right.

Turning on the Palace Bridge, I counted three of the cast-iron lampposts, until I reached the stretch of asphalt where my father was executed. There was nothing there. Just a traffic jam of old Ladas, with one lone Land Rover bringing up the rear. “
Batyushka,
come back,” I could hear Timofey screaming in the distance. “There’s no need to panic! We have Ativan in the car. Ativan!”

I sat down by the third lamppost. The city’s horizons were crowding me in; the fortresses and domes and spires were meant for either a smaller person than me or a greater one. But understand me: I was looking for something in the middle. I was looking for a normal life. “Everything has its limits,” I said to the crush of passing Ladas and their haggard occupants. “Everything has its limits,” I whispered to a teenage boy writhing in a Polish hatchback rigged up as a municipal ambulance, its broken siren emitting the wrong squawk, more a dirge than a warning.

Timofey had quit the Land Rover and was running toward me with two bottles of meds in each hand. I took out my
mobilnik
and dialed Alyosha-Bob. It was Monday evening, and I knew I would hear the motley sounds of Club 69 on the other end.

“Yo!” Alyosha shouted past the din.

Club 69 is a gay club, but anyone who can afford the three-dollar cover charge—in other words, the richest 1 percent of our city—shows up there at some point during the week. Homosexuality aside, this is without a doubt the most normal place in Russia, no low-level thugs in leather parkas, no skinheads in jackboots, just friendly gay guys and the rich housewives who love them. It brings to mind that popular phrase bandied about by expatriate Americans over their bagels and cream cheese:
civil society.