Absurdistan (34 page)

“Is it true,” Volodya the former KGB man whispered to me, “that most of the pornography industry is in Jewish hands?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Even
I
dabble in blue films now and then. Tell me if you know of any fallen Russian women. Or young girls, for that matter.”

Mr. Nanabragov kissed me six times, on the cheeks, nose, and temples, just as his wife and daughter had him. “Good Misha,” he said, slurring his words. “Good boy. Don’t leave us for Belgium, sonny. We simply won’t let you.”

Nana emerged on the balcony, then swept me inside her air-conditioned bedroom, dropping me onto one of two small beds present. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Please fuck me.”

“Now?” I said. “Here?”

“Oh, please, please, please,” she said. “Do me, daddy.”

“Pop you?”

“Just like that.”

I assumed the position on the cold white sheets. I was not immediately erect; the stairs had winded me. But the sweet brown scent of recently exhaled marijuana, along with a general NYU laxity, prodded me along. She pulled up her shirt and unhitched her bra, letting her breasts fall into position. In the relative darkness of Nana’s bedroom, which faced away from both the oil rigs and the corporate towers of the International Terrace, her teats were lit up by natural resources—the moon and stars—giving them a light gloss on top and a dark folded crease on the bottom. I squished them together and put them in my mouth. “Here goes,” I said.

She landed on top of me, sticking me inside her in one lubricated motion, without the usual series of soft cries women produce upon being entered. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the pain. I imagined Nana and then another Nana and then a third, all of them on their hands and knees, their full-moon asses pointed toward me as I prepared to take them from behind.

“Just like that, Snack Daddy,” Nana was saying, having recently learned of my college nickname. She leaned in to me and started rummaging through the curtains of back flesh as if sorting through the clothing bins of a fashionable secondhand store. Eventually she found what she was looking for.

“Please,” I said, “I’m sore tonight. And I ate too much. I might—”

“Gently, gently,” she said. “Look how gently I do it. I even trimmed my nails.” And she hooked her finger into the mossy bull’s-eye of my ass, probing deeper as she went.

“Ouch,” I said, not so much in pain as in a general statement of who I was and how I lived my life. Gradually my eyes were adjusting to the darkness of the room, making out the posters on the walls—in one corner an announcement of a CUNY Graduate Center lecture by the famed Orientalist Edward Said, a very good-looking Palestinian; in another a picture of a teenage-boy rock-and-roll band, each kid tanned a perfect brown like my Nana, and as full-lipped and pouty as her brother, Bubi, or, for that matter, their father. As she continued to straddle me, I stared back and forth at these pictures, looking past one breast and then the other, until I assigned a value to each: left breast, Professor Said, right breast, boy band. What incongruous tastes my sweet Nana had, the kind of tastes that can mix only in the very young.

I heard a shallow moan, the sound of a belly too full.

I blinked. There was a second bed in the room. A girl was gently stirring upon it. It must have been the school chum I had briefly seen at dinner before Mr. Nanabragov sent the girls to the kitchen. Noticing my confusion, Nana leaned forward. “It’s okay,” she whispered into my ear. “When Sissey gets really high, she likes to watch.”

“Ak, ak, ak!” I cried. I covered my breasts, my most humiliating part (together with my baggy forearms, they form four loose sacks of flour). I wriggled my ass until Nana’s finger popped out. I tried to draw the sheets around us, but there simply weren’t enough of them.

“Don’t be scared, Snack.” Nana laughed. “We’re just bored and high, sweetie.”

I tried to lift Nana off of me, but she resisted. Her friend’s presence shamed and aroused me both. I grabbed the mattress, lifted up my ass, and started thrusting inside Nana, proactively, as they say. “Oh, shit,” she cried. “Do it, Misha. Just…like…that.”

Her friend moaned and rustled on the other bed. I liked hearing my name spoken aloud. I lifted up one knee, shifting Nana to one side, to let Sissey see what I doing to her friend’s forest-covered reproductive complex, bouncing her ass cheeks and letting them clap against each other. I wanted to make her friend holler and address me using the polite
vy
in Russian. I wanted to make them both pregnant and then, for some reason, to leave them and go far away.

“Faik!” Nana shouted, and suddenly she scrambled off my bulk and threw a waiting robe around her curves. She pointed to the window. The face of Mr. Nanabragov’s manservant was pressed against the glass, the crescent of his mustache floating above the puckered star of his lips. Nana waved a fist at him, and the manservant promptly disappeared, leaving only an outline of condensation and want. “That fucking Moslem piece of shit,” Nana said.

I massaged the wet stump of my
khui,
hoping Nana’s second mouth would come back to swallow it. I turned to her friend Sissey, who had brushed aside her copious hair to reveal two beautiful gray eyes, pupils dilated to match the scope of the Absurdi sun. “You’re going to have to go pay him now,” Nana said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Whenever Faik catches me with a boy, he wants a hundred dollars.”

“But—” I didn’t know whether to be more humiliated by the amount of money or by the fact that there were other so-called boys.

“He’s in the courtyard. Go!” Nana said as she went over to her girlfriend and hugged her. Soon enough they were whispering in French, laughing their big horsey laughs and braiding each other’s hair.

Faik was in the courtyard, sitting amid the dirty dishes pooled with punctured tomatoes and slicks of olive oil. He was casually smoking a pipe, the air filled with cloying apple-scented tobacco. I threw a US$100 bill onto his lap. He picked it up, inspected it against the moonlight, then folded it into the pocket of his checkered shirt. “I’d like another fifty dollars,” he said, “because I saw Sissey watching while Nana was riding you.”

Riding me.
“If I ever caught my manservant doing what you’re doing, I would have personally sent him into the next world,” I said, letting a smaller denomination descend toward Faik’s waiting hands. “I would have garroted him with my own hands, I swear.”

“The next world?” Faik said, scratching at his stubbly sailor’s haircut. “You know, some people look forward to the next world, but not Faik. In the next world, they’ll ask me, ‘What did you do in the previous world?’ And I’ll say, ‘I worked like a horse to feed my family.’ And they’ll say, ‘Good, you can work like a horse to feed your family here, too.’ ”

“You’re lucky to be employed by such a prominent family,” I said. “Children are starving in Tajikistan.”

“A prominent family,” Faik said. “Everyone at the table tonight was former KGB. Even Parka Mook the playwright was a collaborator in the end. Sevo nationalism! They’re the same assholes who ran everything before. It took them two seconds to switch from the hammer and sickle to Christ’s True Footrest. And that cretin of a son Bubi. With his Porsche and his hookers. What a disgrace.”

I knew that Faik was right about the Nanabragovs. I knew I was getting into something ugly, or at least morally taxing, but I did nothing. I let it happen. Slowly, and then not so slowly, I was being pulled toward the SCROD. I was starting to believe in Nana and her family. I was falling in love with her father and his twitchy beliefs. I had been caught unawares by Parka Mook and his glorious Sevo dictionary.
Quietly the Vainberg Rises.

At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of
The Little Mermaid
or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch. We all wanted to soar high above the city, take on the earthly powers below, and champion the rights of somebody,
anybody.
The Sevo people would do just fine, thank you. Democracy, it turned out, had the makings of the best Disney cartoon ever made.

“Would you rather live under Georgi Kanuk?” I shouted at Faik. “Gambling away the country’s oil fortune in Monte Carlo? And no freedom of speech?”

“Freedom of what?” the Moslem manservant said. He blew a barrage of smoke at a lamb’s head that served as the table’s centerpiece and was already being picked apart by a squadron of flies. “They recruited half the boys in Gorbigrad for the last war. They put my son in an APC that exploded without any explanation and burned him from the waist down. He’s twenty-three now, Bubi’s age. How am I going to marry off a cripple? Do you know how much money I’ll need to get him even a half-decent girl? Who’s going to pay for all those German salves I coat his body with? He looks like a mayonnaise sandwich, my only son. But who cares about another mangled Moslem boy? We’re all just fodder for the Kanuk family or the Sevo merchants. Maybe I should try to move to Oslo, like my cousin Adem. But what’s the use? The Europeans shit all over him. Or maybe I can drive a taxi in one of the Gulf states, like my brother Rafiq. But those sandy Arabs treat us like Negroes down there, too. And you can’t even get a decent drink because of those crazy Wahhabite mullahs. Wherever we Moslems go, it’s the same
khui.
What’s the use of living?”

“You should be thankful your masters are trying to give you democracy,” I said. “Freedom is going to change your son’s life. And if not his life, then the lives of his children. And if not their lives, then the lives of
their
children. By the way, I run a charity in Petersburg called Misha’s Children—”

Faik waved me away. “Please,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic and that you slept with your stepmother. So what can be said about you?”

What indeed?

30

A Sophisticate and a Melancholic No Longer

I’ll tell you something else. When I was four or five years old, my parents used to rent this wooden hut for the summer. The hut was about a hundred kilometers north of Leningrad, close to the Finnish frontier. It was perched on a yellowish hill featuring all kinds of decrepit vegetation and this rotting hornbeam tree that would take up human form and chase after me in dreams. At the bottom of the hill was a brook that made this characteristic
pshhhh
sound that I think all brooks make (they don’t really burble, per se), and if you followed the brook around innumerable bends and cataracts, you’d emerge into this gray socialist village—which wasn’t really a village anymore but some kind of depot for trucks bearing benzene or kerosene or another highly flammable gas.

Oh boy. Where am I going with this? Right. So Beloved Papa and I had this nautical theme going. He’d get these old beat-up shoes and he’d rip the tops off, so all you’d have was the rubber sole, and then he did some other things to the shoe—he made a kind of improvised sail out of paper and twigs—and we’d sail these shoe-boats down the brook. I think we ran alongside our sea-shoes, cheering them on, singing songs about ants and caterpillars and Mommy in her apron baking poppy cakes, my papa’s face a jaunty combination of sparkling black eyes and wind-whipped bushy goatee. And if I try hard with my mind I can ascribe some kind of daily heroism or gentleness or even filial love to the scene of father and son following their rubber-sole regatta down the stream to a former village, now a base camp for idling benzene trucks, their sides stenciled with the fair warning:
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
—
TRUCK MAY EXPLODE
.

Now, tell me, what was the point of all that? What am I trying to do here?
Why is it so hard to come up with a solid block of grief for a deceased parent?
Why can’t I rehabilitate my papa the way Gorbachev rehabilitated Stalin’s victims? See, what I’m going for is a kind of totalitarian triumph-over-adversity story with Beloved Papa cast in the role of wise, fun-loving, middle-class parent. I’m trying here, Papa. I’m doing my best. But the truth always seems to dampen my best instincts.

The truth is this: the damn shoe-boats never made it down the brook, they sank within ten seconds of becoming waterlogged or else were eaten by a hungry Soviet beaver. The truth is this: after a while, we ran out of shoes, and Beloved Papa would make boats out of walnut shells (same concept but much smaller boat), and these we would sail around our rusticated bathtub, only they also became waterlogged and sank pretty quickly, too. The truth is this: Beloved Papa had a very dim knowledge of flotation, a very faulty understanding of how physical objects are kept aloft by water, this despite the fact that, like every other Soviet Jew, he was a mechanical engineer by training.