Absurdistan: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

"Oh, look! A colleague of mine wants to speak to you." An even larger man with a frilly mustache and a riot of bad teeth waddled over to me. "We must be related," he said, patting my belly.

  "Tell me, who are you by nationality?"

  I explained. He put his hand to his heart and told me that the Jewish people had a long and peaceful history in Absurdistan and that any enemy of mine was also an enemy of his, while his mother was my mother and his wife my sister. There was also water from his well to drink. "Why should a Jew have to wait in line for a visa application blank?" he wondered. "Here! Take one!"

  "You are very kind," I said.

  "You are very Jewish. In the best possible sense." Then I was told that my sister (his wife, that is) suffered from gastritis and an engorged pudendum. The US$200 I gave him would go a long way toward her medical care. "And now you must go to the processing line. But look! A colleague of mine would like to help you out." An older fat man, the skin around his eyes turned into pure leather from a lifetime's sleep apnea, came over to me and made the sounds of a steam engine. It took me a while to figure out that he was trying to communicate with me in the Russian tongue. I caught on to the part about water from his well to drink and that a Jew shouldn't have to wait in the processing line. "Let me help you fill this out," the man puffed, taking out a pen and unfurling the fearsome four-page visa application. "Last name."

  "Vainberg," I said. "Written just like it sounds. Veh . . . ah . . . eee . . ."

  "I know how to write," the older man said. "Given name." I told him. He wrote it down, then looked over his handiwork. He squinted carefully at the combination of "Vainberg" and "Mikhail." He looked at my body type and my soft red lips. "Are you the son of Boris Vainberg?" he asked.

  "Boris Vainberg, deceased," I said, my eyes watering dutifully.

  "He was blown up by a land mine on the Palace Bridge. We have a videotape and everything."

  The old man whistied to his colleagues. "It's Boris Vainberg's son!" he shouted. "It's Little Misha!"

  "Little Misha!" his colleagues shouted back. "Hurrah!" They stopped extracting money from dazed foreigners and waddled over to me, sandals slapping against fake marble. One of them kissed my hand and pressed it to his own heart.

  "He has his father's face."

  "Definitely has those big lips."

  "Massive forehead, too. Thinks about everything, this one."

  "Typical Vainberg."

  "What are you doing here, Little Misha?" I was asked. "Did you come for the oil?"

  "Why else would he come here? For the scenery?"

  "To be honest—" I started to say.

  "You know, Little Misha, your father once sold an eight-hundredkilogram screw to KBR! He was some sort of subcontractor. He took them for five million! Ha ha."

  "What's KBR?" I asked.

  "Kellogg, Brown and Root," my new companions said in unison, shocked that I wasn't aware of such an institution. "The subsidiary of Halliburton."

  "Oh," I said. But my curled upper lip betrayed my ignorance.

  "The American oil-services company," I was told. "Halliburton's KBR unit runs half the country."

  "And my father cheated them?" I asked brightly.

  "And how! He really Jewed them up!"

  "My father was a great man," I half said and half sighed. "But I'm not here for the oil."

  "Little Misha doesn't want his father's business."

  "He's a sophisticate and a melancholic."

  "That's right," I said. "How do you guys know that?"

  "We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense."

  "Are you going to buy Belgian citizenship from Jean-Michel Lefevre at the Belgian consulate? Are you going to be a Belgian, Little Misha?" I looked around apprehensively, wishing Alyosha-Bob were around to guide me. "Maybe," I said.

  "Smart man. It's no fun to have a Russian passport."

  "Did your father ever mention our little gang at the airport?" the older man inquired.

  The others looked up at me expectantly, their stomachs leaning toward mine as if trying to make its acquaintance. My instinct is to try to make everyone around me happy, so I obliged them. "He said a bunch of fat crooks were robbing Westerners at Immigration," I said.

  "That's us!" they cried. "Hurrah! Boris Vainberg remembered us!" The older man commanded his colleagues to give me back the money they had inveigled from me. Timofey and I immediately had our passport stamped with a dozen bizarre shapes and patterns, and we were ushered past the Immigration and Customs points and into the sunshine, where Alyosha-Bob awaited with his driver. The Absurdi heat surrounded me as if I had entered a lit stove. It wiped out the remaining moisture in my mouth, invisible flames working their way into the crevice between my tits, searing away the sweat and damp. My sweat glands started pumping, but they could not keep up with the requirements of a 325-pound body. I was on fire. I almost passed out before Timofey had stuffed me into the waiting German sedan. Lord help met I thought as the air-conditioning kicked in. Help me survive this Southern inferno.

  From the start, I was supremely uninterested in the country around me, which looked pretty much the way I felt. Tired. The landscape consisted of gray-brown lakes surrounded by the skeletons of oil derricks and the modern spheres of refineries. There was barbed wire everywhere, along with signs promising death to anyone who veered off the highway. Trailer-trucks bearing the logo of Kellogg, Brown & Root swerved ahead of our car, the drivers honking at us maniacally. Even with the car windows up, Absurdistan smelled like the moist armpit of an orangutan.

  I snoozed for a bit, the leather seats doing right by my hump. We passed a church of charming Eastern simplicity, square and compact, as if carved out of a single piece of stone. "I thought this was a Moslem country," I said to Alyosha-Bob.

  "Orthodox Christian," Alyosha-Bob explained.

  " N o kidding. I always pictured them on their knees before Allah."

  " T w o ethnic groups, the Sevo and the Svani. Both Christian. That's a Svani church right there."

  " H o w can you tell, Professor?"

  "You know what a standard Orthodox cross looks like." He drew a cross in the air: ^. "Well, that's the Svani cross. But the Sevo cross has the footrest reversed. Like this." He drew a different cross in the air: f .

  "That's pretty stupid," I said.

  "You're pretty stupid," Alyosha-Bob said. We horsed around for a bit, Alyosha-Bob painfully pinning one of my thigh flaps between his two sharp elbows. " T h e master suffers from thigh pains," Timofey cautioned my friend as he gently pulled him o f f me.

  " T h e master suffers from a lot of things," Alyosha-Bob said. I looked out the window, taking note of a billboard advertising a housing development callcd STONEPAY. An Aston Martin idled in the circular driveway of a mortar-and-glass insta-mansion. A Canadian flag flew from the mansion's portico to denote stability. This was followed by a billboard featuring three near-naked brown women dripping with gold and filled with silicone leaning over the crotch of a black man in prison stripes. 718 PERFUMERY: THE ODOUR

  OF THE BRONX IN SVANI CITY.

  I sighed loudly and looked away, snuggling my head into the crux o f my arm.

  " W h a t now?" Alyosha-Bob asked.

  " N u t h i n ' . "

  "Is this about the 7 1 8 Perfumery?" Alyosha-Bob said. "You're still thinking about Rouenna and Jerry Shteynfarb, aren't you?" We sat in the car quietly, watching the iridescent landscape bubble and stew before us. Feeling my pain, Timofey sang a song he had made up to celebrate my new nationality. Here's the only stanza I remember: My sweet batyushka, kind batyushka,

  Off to Belgium he will go . . .

  My sweet batyushka, bright batyushka,

  He likes to play in Belgian snow . . .

  Svani City clung wearily to a small mountain range. We took an ascending road away from the gray curve of the Caspian Sea until we reached something called the Boulevard of National Unity. We found ourselves, in a manner of speaking, o
n the primary thoroughfare of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., where I had once misspent a couple of weeks in my youth. We passed shops of unmistakable wealth, if somewhat curious provenance—an outlet that sold the nightmare products of the American conglomerate Disney, an espresso emporium named Caspian Joe's (a bright green rip-off of a famous American chain), a side-by-side presentation of the popular American stores the Gap and the Banana Republic, the above-mentioned 718 Perfumery, rife with the odors of the Bronx, and an Irish theme pub named Molly Malloy's crouching drunkenly behind imported ivy and a giant shamrock.

  After Molly's, the boulevard turned into a canyon of recently built glass skyscrapers bearing the corporate logos of ExxonMobil, BP, ChevronTexaco, Kellogg, Brown & Root, Bechtel, and Daewoo Heavy Industries (Timofey grunted happily at the makers of his beloved steam iron), and finally the identical Radisson and Hyatt skyscrapers staring each other down from the opposite ends of a windswept plaza. The Hyatt lobby was an endless skylit atrium where multinational men buzzed from one corner to another with the hungry, last-ditch exasperation of late-summer flies. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be little corners of ad hoc commerce, plastic tables and chairs clumped together under signs with strange legends such as HAIL, HAIL BRITANNIA—THE PUB. One of these hives was a golden-lit affair called RECEPTION. There a smiling boy of seemingly Scandinavian origin spoke to us in smooth business-school English. "Welcome to the Park Hyatt Svani City," he said, beaming. "My name is Aburkharkhar. How can I help you gentlemen today?" Alyosha-Bob ordered a penthouse suite for the two of us and a lit-tie shed behind the pool for Timofey. A glassed-in elevator hoisted us forty stories through the sunny atrium, so the next thing I knew, I was looking at a happy Western parody of a modern home, with marble countertop on everything from the desks to the nightstand to the bathroom sink to the coffee table. For a second I thought I had actually arrived in Europe, so I muttered the word "Belgium," fell to my knees, doubled over, enjoyed immensely the feeling of plush carpeting enveloping my breasts and cradling my stomach, and bade the waking world goodbye.

  15

  Golly Burton, Golly Burton

  Rouenna came to me in a dream. She stood in a field of autumnal grass, backlit by a nearly extinguished sun, the locks of her scrappy dark hair alternating yellow and brown. Instead of her usual celebration of everything tight and pushed up, she wore simple blue coveralls that made her body hard to fathom. Her skin had a pink, childlike quality that made me think she was already pregnant by Shteynfarb. In the distance, a neon sign hoisted between a pair of birch trees flickered with different words, EVROPA. Then AMERIKA. Then RASHA. Rouenna held out a shiny green apple to me. "It's eight dollars," she said.

  "I'm not paying eight dollars for an apple," I said. "You're not doing right by me, Rouenna."

  "This is the best apple in the world," she said. "It tastes like a pear." She spoke in an educated Mid-Atlantic accent, her face radiant but impassive, as if she were suddenly rich. She brought the apple close to my chest, where it floated out of her hand. Dry air-conditioned air swept into my face, making my teeth chatter. I looked around, trying to pinpoint the source of the cold, but all I saw was an eternity of matted yellow grass.

  "I'm trying to cut out the trans fats," I said. "No more partially hydrogenated oils. I'm going to eat only slow food from now on. I'll lose weight. You'll see."

  "Eight dollars," Rouenna insisted.

  I stuck my hand inside my heart and took out precisely eight U.S. dollars, which I handed to her. Our hands barely touched. "What's going to make you love me again?" I asked.

  "Take a bite," she said.

  The apple flooded my mouth with freshness, as if I were biting the color green. I tasted pear, as promised, but also rosewater and white wine and my beautiful mother's sweet cheek. The roof of my mouth froze in wonder, as if stroked by an invisible ice cube. I tried to speak but only gurgling came out. I wanted to hug Rouenna, but she lifted up her hand to stop me.

  "Be a man," she said.

  I gurgled some more, flapping my arms in front of me.

  "Make me proud," she said.

  I woke up with puddles of drool flowing down both cheeks. I was still on the floor of our Hyatt penthouse, my arms spread out as if I were Jesus at the end of his life. "I flipped you over on your back," Alyosha-Bob said. "You were gagging."

  Apparently it was morning the next day, our wood-and-marble suite flooded with light as if we were living inside a golden humidor. Timofey was in my bedroom, sorting out my vintage Puma tracksuits and my collection of anxiety medication. Alyosha-Bob had already unpacked his own things on top of a dresser in a careful American manner, underwear folded into quarters, T-shirts neatly squared.

  "You've got a message from Zartarian, the hotel manager," he said.

  "This is the guy Captain Belugin told you to look up." Dear The Respectable Misha Vainberg,

  We are dripping with delight now that you have choosen to stay with us at Park Hyatt Svani City. Tour father was big lover for us. Now he is dead, our ship has run aground. Kindly visit the lobby when you are convenient and ask for Tour Faithful Servant, Larry Sarkisovich Zartarian.

  I read the note aloud to Alyosha-Bob, imitating the hotel manager's no doubt thick accent with a hint of childish cruelty. "When am I going to become a Belgian, already?" I asked.

  "Go talk to Zartarian," Alyosha-Bob said, waving me out the door.

  As I stepped into the corridor, I was waylaid by a tall, tanned beauty with electric lips, a clingy camisole reaching down to her hot pants. "Golly Burton, Golly Burton!" she said. "You Golly Burton?" She poked at me with an audacious finger. Her face was as powdered as an American doughnut.

  "Eh?" I said.

  "Golly Burton? KBR? Thirty percent discount for you." She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her wet forehead. "Ooofa, I have such hot temperature for Golly Burton. Thirty percent discount. You so aroused, mister. You bust a nut right now, maybe."

  "I don't understand this 'Golly Burton,' " I said in Russian.

  "Do you mean Halliburton? Thirty percent discount for Halliburton?" The woman spat on the floor. "You're a Russian?" she hissed.

  "Fat, dirty Russian! Don't touch me! Disgusting Russian!" She stomped away on her impossible high heels.

  "That's racism, miss!" I yelled after her. "Come back and apologize, you stupid black-ass . . . " In my golden, glassed-in elevator, I fell like Icarus from my lofty penthouse to the busy hotel lobby, where the local merchants promptly sold me a Gillette Mach3 razor, a bottle of Turkish Efes beer, and a box of Korean condoms. Upon hearing the name Misha Vainberg, reception steered me to Larry Zartarian's office. Zartarian sprinted from behind his desk and gave one of my big, squishy hands a sweaty workout with both of his. "Now our humble hotel has a guest worthy of the name Hyatt," he said in accented but presentable Russian.

  The Armenian (as I deduced from his last name) manager reminded me of my old college friend Vladimir Girshkin. Girshkin was a fellow Russian Jew who emigrated to the States at age twelve and became perhaps the least remarkable Russian emigre at Accidental College, a quiet foil for that bastard Jerry Shteynfarb. Like Girshkin, Zartarian was a short, unattractive man with a sporty, receding hairline compensated for by an outrageously thick goatee. Given all his nervous pleasantness, one got the sense that his endlessly aggrieved mother lived beneath his desk, shining his shoes and tying the laces into double knots. These kinds of lost, overeducated mama's boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER. The last time I read about Vladimir Girshkin in the Accidental College alumni magazine, he was running a pyramid scheme somewhere in Eastern Europe. Managing the Park Hyatt Svani City was probably not a dissimilar calling.

  "Sit, Mr. Vainberg, sit." The Armenian pushed me into a sumptuous leather container. "Is there enough room for you in there?

  Should my girl fetch you an ottoman?"

  I grunted approval and looked around. The manager's office was dom
inated by an oil portrait of a dapper white-haired gentleman handing an oddly shaped cake to what looked like his porkv, mustached son. Both men were smiling slyly at the viewer, as if inviting the beholder to share in their cake. Two Orthodox crosses loomed in the background, their footrests tilted in different directions, the Kellogg, Brown & Root logo floating between them in a blurry supernatural haze. I had to moo in bewilderment.

  "The old guy's the local dictator," Larry Zartarian explained. "His name is Georgi Kanuk. He's giving Absurdistan to his son Debil for his upcoming thirtieth birthday. KBR completes the trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Halliburton."

  "So the cake represents the country," I said. The misshapen torte was indeed studded with candles shaped like miniature oil derricks. To judge from the evidence presented, the Absurdsvani Republic resembled a fierce bird dipping its tail into the Caspian Sea. "What does it all mean?" I asked.

  "Georgi Kanuk, the dictator, is about to croak," Larry Zartarian informed me. "They're gearing the people up for a family dynasty. Kanuk and his son Debil are of the Svani' persuasion, so the Sevo aren't too happy with that."

  "Enlighten me," I said. "The Sevo are the ones who have Christ's footrest going in the wrong direction, right?"

  "Sevo, Svani, they're all identical half-witted ignoramuses," the manager said, switching to perfect American English. "These people aren't called the Cretins of the Caucasus for nothing."

  "Aren't you going to ask me who I am by nationality?"

  "It is clear to both of us who we are," Zartarian said, bowing his muscular nose toward my equally prominent proboscis.

  I offered Zartarian my Turkish beer, but he politely refused, tapping at his watch to indicate that a Western man did not imbibe in the daytime. "How did you perfect your English?" I asked him.

  "I got lucky," the manager said. "I was born in California. Grew up in Glendale."

  "So you're an American!" I said. "An Armenian-American. And a Valley boy, too. How blessed your life must be. But how did you end up here?"

  Zartarian sighed and put his head in his hands. "I went to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration," he said. "It was the only Ivy League school I could get into. My mother forced me to go. I just wanted to work in film, like everyone else."