Authors: Gary Shteyngart
Absurdistan (49 page)
An hour later, we are wading through a gray sludge-filled river, the failed nation of Absurdistan now entirely at our backs. In the distance, beneath the sliver of the young moon, a similar Moslem crescent flies over the sentry tower of a neighboring republic. I carry my laptop high over my head; Timofey sweats beneath my heavier luggage; Yitzhak, the nice boy who wants to play basketball with blacks in New York, waves a white flag and shouts something in the local tongue, a string of consonants that quarrel with the occasional stray vowel. When we hit dry land, we start running toward the sentry tower, waving our white flag, my Belgian passport, the recognizable gray square of my laptop.
Rouenna.
With each step I am getting closer to you. With each step I am racing toward your love and away from this irredeemable land.
Let’s be honest. Summers in New York City are not as romantic as some would think. The air is stagnant and stinks alternately of sea, clotted cream, and rained-upon dog. But early September is still warm and succulent in your arms. I’ve been thinking, Ro. We should buy one of the few remaining row houses on Vyse or Hoe Avenue, something grand and decrepit, Victorian or perhaps even American Gothic, a wide veranda beckoning the children of the nearby housing projects.
Look around us. The old men playing dominoes for money; five-year-old Bebo, Franky, Marelyn, and Aysha kicking around a dusty football; their older cousins skipping the world’s most artful double Dutch; teenage moms and dads talking sex at each other across the stoops, calling their little ones
tiguerito,
“little gangster”; the sneakers hanging off the telephone poles; the tricked-out Mitsubishi Monteros pumping salsa across the streets; the moms reading the coupon pages like newspapers; the stores with no name but
PLAY LOTTERY HERE
; the roses sticking out of the iron grilles of housing-project windows.
In our basement, the laundry machines and dryers are spinning. You pass me a rolled-up ball of baby socks, warm to the touch. Our household is large. There will be many cycles. Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the following New Yorkers: my friend Akhil Sharma for exceeding duty’s call and for his careful shearing of this manuscript; Daniel Menaker, my brilliant editor and mensch nonpareil, for shepherding me to greener pastures; Matt Kellogg, a young man who knows his words, for assisting in Dan’s shepherding; and Denise Shannon, my agent, for a keen critical eye and for keeping me solvent all these years.
The Ledig House International Writers Residency in upstate New York has always been there for me when I needed a green place to write and think.
The best parts of this book, such as they are, were written under the care of Beatrice von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, her remarkable writers’ retreat near Donnini, Italy.
About the Author
G
ARY
S
HTEYNGART
was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel,
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,
won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was also named a
New York Times
Notable Book, a best book of the year by
The Washington Post
and
Entertainment Weekly,
and one of the best debuts of the year by
The Guardian
. His fiction and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine,
and many other publications. He lives in New York.
ALSO BY GARY SHTEYNGART
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Gary Shteyngart
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were originally published, in significantly different form, in
The New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shteyngart, Gary.
Absurdistan : a novel / Gary Shteyngart.
p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-1-58836-530-9
eISBN-10: 1-58836-530-1
I. Title
PS3619.H79A63 2006
813'.6—dc22 2005054308
v1.0