Absurdistan (41 page)

I tried to imitate a swashbuckling American oilman. “Up your ass?” I said. “I know somethin’ else I can put up there!”

The girls exploded with mirth. They lifted their legs in the air like dying bugs and convulsed rhythmically. As they were all lying on the same bed, opposite the one that supported me, I could see
their
young asses, all in jeans, forming a tight row: in this pantheon, Nana’s was the biggest, spilling over and beyond the Miss Sixty label, then came that of her dark-haired friend Sissey, with a passable half-moon, then the pert, tiny cantaloupe of the Russian’s behind. “Fat Uncle on the bed,” Sissey shouted to me. “Fat Uncle on the bed! Come on over and visit us, Fat Uncle!”

I rolled right over and into their waiting arms, and they grasped me the way young girls tackle a puppy. “Fat Uncle loves you,” I croaked, and we all started giggling. I eased into the mass around me; there were breasts and a piece of earlobe, not Nana’s. We breathed in and out together. The breasts were warm and the earlobe needed sucking. It struck me: we were high.

The idyll was interrupted by a knocking. I looked up. Faik the manservant had pressed his ugly mug to the windowpane. “Oh, go give him some money,” Nana said.

It was a terrible imposition, and yet I could hardly care less. Doing one thing was as good as doing another. I decided to put on my legs, but they were already attached, rather roundly, to my thighs. Now it was time for my feet. There they were! “There’s a lucky break,” I said. “I have two feets and two leggies.” The girls started giggling once more, their laughter dissipating into breathy French sentences that I could not understand.

Man, was I high.

Outside, Faik was perched on a unicycle. A tuba was attached to the handlebars in place of a horn, and his sailor’s cut had given way to a spotted leopard’s scalp. In fact, he may have been a leopard-man of sorts, Faik. Who knows with the Moslems—they really are different from us. “I saw you and Nana and Sissey and the Russian girl, and you were all touching each other,” he said.

“Oh, God,” I said, “you’re right. We
were
touching each other. Ears and breasts. It was so loving and tender. I wish the rest of this fucking country were more like that. Those girls are just so great. You’re so great, Faik. Yes, you are. A great,
great
leopard.”

“I want three hundred dollars,” Faik said.

“See, that’s great, too,” I said, ladling out the money. “Other people would have asked for four hundred.”

“Are you drunk?” Faik asked. “Did you and the girls smoke
lanza
? Then I want another hundred dollars.”

“That’s absolutely fair,” I said in English. “I can do business with a leopard-man like you.”

I noticed, in a kind of roundabout way, that I was losing verticality. “Are you following me?” Faik said. I looked around. I had apparently walked him down the stairs and into the inner courtyard.

“Oh,” I said. There was a palm tree and a plane tree in the courtyard. Which tree would win in a race? I wished I were an environmentalist. “Hey, Faik,” I shouted, but he was quickly pedaling away on his unicycle. “Where are the girls? I want to go back to the girls. Where are you going, you leopard? Take me with you!”

“Wow,” I said to myself. “This is turning into one Sergeant Pepper’s kind of day.” I whistled a few bars of “Lovely Rita.” Maybe I was back in the States already, but this time armed with a journalist’s visa. Now I just needed to write everything down and file my story before the deadline. “I wonder where the grown-ups are, anyway?” I said to the palm tree. “You can talk to me. I won’t use your real name.”

The palm tree wasn’t talking. Probably protecting the plane tree. “I want girls,” I said, and with the fair sex in mind, I started knocking on the heavy wooden doors around the courtyard. No one answered. I walked into one of the rooms and saw a dying middle-aged woman spread out over a golden duvet. It was my mother. “Oh, poor girl,” I said. “Poor girl.” I couldn’t believe I was calling my mother a girl, but there it was, the feeling that she was younger than me and in need of my help. I cradled her face, trying to make out the familiar features, but her entire head was covered by a giant tube sock, two blue stripes around where her mouth should have been. “Good,” I said. “You got the American socks. The search is over.” My mother put her cool white fingers between my neck folds and made a quizzical sound through the tube sock. “Last eighteen years?” I said. “Many things happened. First, communism died. Then Papa got rich. We went to the Alps. I got circumcised something bad. Then they put Papa into the ground. A pretty Jewess brought gardenias. Then I ended up here.” The alabaster hand wiped my mouth and skirted the edges of my lonely nose. A gust of sock air emerged out of my mother’s neck and formed a series of inverted Cyrillic letters, like when Americans try to learn Russian. “What?” I said. “Sure, I’ve got a girl, but she’s nothing like you, Mommy. I mean, it’s like you always said: you get what you pay for.”

My mother snorted her assent. I tried to cradle her head in my hands, remembering how, as a five-year-old, I used to braid her hair while she napped, trying to make her look like a little girl whom I could cuddle and kiss with impunity. I noticed that her smells had changed, that there was a lustier, dirtier aroma about her: the scent of an unclean kitchen. And it wasn’t a tube sock over her face, but rather an onion skin, beneath which an alien face hissed and contorted. She started speaking in a coarse Southern tongue. A thin ribbon of hate flitted through my heart.
Why didn’t you protect me from him?
The frying pan! Nothing made sense.
Why did you feed me so much?
Bowls of condensed milk for breakfast, midnight snacks of raw pig fat spread over black bread, cold veal and mayonnaise salads in the hot afternoons, poppy seed cakes crowned with clotted cream, rounds of cervelat smoked sausage and cheese squares atop slices of butter as thick as my thumbs.
Why did you let me get so fat, Mommy? So that he wouldn’t roll around with me anymore? So that he would stop loving me? I was all alone after you died.

Saddened, I left the mysterious Mother Room. The sun burned me like an ant under a telescope. Tired of stalking the premises, I let the house do the walking—it pivoted around me, dozens of empty, sunlit rooms flashing past, until I was standing by the front gate, nudging it open with two disembodied hands. I was free!

I walked down the street. The two imbecilic boys assigned to me, Tafa and Rafa, were sitting in my Volvo station wagon soaking up precious air-conditioning. I knocked on one of the windows. “
Vy
or
ty
?” I shouted to the boys. “Polite or familiar? Ach, I ought to knock your heads together.” To my surprise, my adjutants actually did have hairy brown coconuts on their shoulders. “I ought to buy myself a hovercraft,” I opined to them rather loudly. “New technology. Gonna invest in.”

The road followed a curvy downward path toward the sea, past the pretty Sevo houses with their carved balconies, their overgrown front gardens rustling with barberry shrubs and creamy milk flowers. I caught sight of a broken rosebush peering out of a chain-link fence and was swiftly dispossessed of all my fundamental worries. “It’s like being back in Yalta,” I shouted. “With my
mamochka
!” The winds of that particular resort town, with their Chekhovian overtones, side-swiped my ass. I hopped and skipped down the road (not really possible, but so it seemed at the time) until I found myself at a kind of border crossing. Armed men in tight sweaters stitched with the word
DYNCORP
were blocking the path. I imagined what it would be like to try to tear the assault rifles out of their hands, hundreds of bullets piercing me,
ouch, ouch, ouch
a hundred times over. “Watchoo doing?” I asked them.

“Protecting the neighborhood,” they said in these South African–sounding accents. “From the looters. You live here?”

“I’m Nana Nanabragovna’s boyfriend.”

“Really? What are you called?”

“Fat Uncle. Snack Daddy. Misha Vainberg. Call me what you like, but please let me through.”

“Be careful out there, sir. The people have lost their senses.”

“That’s the people for you.” I pressed on toward a gallery of heat and sound. After a few solitary meters, I was accepted into a crowd of around a million persons gang-pressed into the dust bowl of the Sevo Terrace. Hands burrowed into me; little hands, big hands, sea-wet hands, sun-dried hands. Everyone was looking for my wallet but kept coming up with my balls. “They look and feel almost alike,” I hinted to my friendly assailants. “Keep looking. Ooh, you’re very warm. No, no, no. I don’t like tickling.”

The crowd passed me around, squeezing and poking.
This is what Jesus must have felt like on a good day.
I was relayed under the tentacle-arches of the Sevo Vatican and toward the sad greenery of the waterfront. There was rumbling above us. A deep groaning sound. Then a couple of
pop-pop-pop
s. Small-arms fire. I looked up, hoping to catch sight of my favorite GRAD missiles. Nothing doing. The teenage members of one of the True Footrest Posses were scrambling up a hill with their mortars and surface-to-air missiles.
Good luck, kids!
I hit something hard and stony. An old woman was laid out on an enormous marble conch shell, part of some defunct art nouveau fountain. Her whole family was crying over her, children by her feet, grown-ups at the head. “Is she dead?” I asked them.

“We’ll never forget her,” the relatives wailed.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “What may seem like a terrible loss today may be just an uncomfortable memory tomorrow. She was old. Hard to carry. Use this opportunity to move to America.” But after I spoke, the sobbing only increased. A fist waved through the air attached to some glandular epithets. I moved away, shaking my head. The people
had
lost their senses. It was all just jungle emotions now. They couldn’t wait to start mourning one another. That was the one thing they knew backward and forward. Death from above, death from within. Tyrants and heart attacks. The three most popular words in the Russian language: “
Stalin. Gitler. Infarkt.
”

What the hell? Everyone was screaming at me now. I turned this way and that, toward the sea, away from the sea, and wherever I turned, I saw gleaming gold teeth and infected tonsils ululating in hatred and terror. “I didn’t do anything,” I said, looking at my feet. “Just let me be,” I told them. But the screaming only grew louder. And then the deep groaning sound resumed, and I heard a steel drum played over a second-rate loudspeaker.
Pop,
someone said.
Pop pop pop. Shhhheeeeeouuuuuuu!

I looked up. The people had put up their fists and were crouching fearfully on the ground. And then I understood. They weren’t angry with me. I wasn’t the problem. I looked into the people’s eyes. Their eyes, it would seem, were watching God. I followed them up to the Svanï Terrace. Nothing. Then upward to the International Terrace. Nothing still. No, wait. Something. Something unusual was happening up on the International Terrace. Something not quite right but beautiful still.

The skyscrapers were dancing.

Not with each other, but with each other in mind, like flirtatious poor folk sizing up each other’s hips across an equatorial dance floor. The Hyatt danced. The Radisson danced. So did Bechtel. BP was practically making a fool of itself. Only ExxonMobil stood aloof, nodding its head a fraction, tapping its feet, barely keeping up with the beat.

And then the Hyatt decided to cut loose. She—for there was a slender femininity about her—lowered her hazel eyes, ignored the spaghetti strap that had fallen promiscuously off her pretty shoulder, and then, in a move of such dazzling brilliance that the enraptured sun turned rainbow every glittering piece of her broken heart, she jumped across the sea.

38

My Mother Will Be Your Mother

Someone was fondling me, and I didn’t like it at all. I turned over on one side and felt a moist clam crunch beneath me. A disgusting male mouth, all turmeric and bad teeth, was breathing down my nose. “My hand!” the mouth said. I opened my eyes to face a man I can only describe as polluted. And in pain.

“Sorry, fellow,” I said. I rolled off his hand and he clutched it, crying and trying to unbend the fingers, which, in my dazed state, seemed as green and squirmy as the legs of a grasshopper. “Ooofah,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my intact pale squishies. Was I still on the Sevo Terrace? What the hell had happened? The
lanza,
for one thing. And then…Some strange memories swished about, filling my head with vapor trails. But the trails all led to one place: to the tentacles of the Sevo Vatican unfurling outward, as if to embrace me, one orange clump of stucco in particular somersaulting toward my happy, stoned, unflinching face. I raised my hand toward the bridge of my nose and felt a dark, deep, caved-in nasal pain. A hump had swollen on one part of it, but there was also a new emptiness underneath, a concavity, making me feel, in some ways, like a gentile. I stopped playing with my nose and looked upward at the city around me.