Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

“What will it cost? Nothing, nothing.” Captain Belugin waved it off. “Well, almost nothing. A hundred thousand U.S. for my Belgian friend, and a hundred thousand for me as an introduction fee.”

  “I want my manservant to come with me,” I said. “I need a Belgian work visa for my Timofey.”

  “You’re bringing your manservant?” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re quite a Westerner, Count Vainberg.”

  “Go to the khui,” I said. “I’d like to see you wash your own socks the way I once washed mine with my working-class girlfriend in New York.”

  “Boys.” Captain Belugin put a hand between us. “A work visa is the height of simplicity. Another twenty thousand for me, and twenty thousand for Monsieur Lefèvre of the Belgian embassy. You’ll be fast friends with Jean-Michel. He likes to run over the locals with his Peugeot.”

  “Has Oleg the Moose’s money been moved to Misha’s offshore accounts?” Alyosha-Bob asked.

  “Misha’s got about thirty-five million dollars in Cyprus,” Belugin said, looking over his yellow fingernails, obviously not too impressed by the remainder of Beloved Papa’s carefully hoarded fortune, a long trail of wrecked factories, misappropriated natural gas concessions, the much-talked-about VainBergAir (an airline without any airplanes but with plenty of stewardesses), and, of course, the infamous graveyard for New Russian Jews.

  It didn’t sound like much money to me, either, to be honest. Let’s do the math. I was thirty, and the official life expectancy for a Russian male is fifty-six, so I probably had another twenty-six or so years to live. Thirty-five million divided by twenty-six years equals about US$1,350,000 a year. That wasn’t much for Europe, but I could survive. Hell, I got by on a mere US$200,000 a year in New York when I was young, though I didn’t have a manservant to support, and I often denied myself certain pleasures (never have I owned a hot-air balloon or a Long Island bungalow).

  But who cares about my poverty! For the first time in an eternity, I felt a current of pure pleasure wend itself around my beleaguered liver and up my bloated lungs. Freedom was upon me.

  I remembered my childhood escapes from Leningrad, the annual summer train trip to the Crimea. Blessed memories of little Misha leaning out the carriage window, the Russian countryside crawling up to the train tracks, an occasional aspen whipping Misha’s curious face. I always knew that summer was drawing near when my mother came over with my crumpled Panama hat and sang an improvised tune for me:

  Misha the Bear

  Is leaving his lair

  He’s had enough

  Of winter’s despair

  Yes, I’ve had enough of it, mamochka! I smiled and hiccuped into my shot glass. There was something oddly fetching about the prospect of being alive today, knowing that next week I would follow Peter the Great’s bronze steed. I would fulfill every educated young Russian’s dream. I would go beyond the cordon.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” Captain Belugin said. “As soon as you land in Absurdistan, go to the Park Hyatt Svanï City and talk to Larry Zartarian, the manager. He’ll make all the necessary arrangements. You’ll be a Belgian in no time.”

  “Belgium,” Sveta said wistfully. “You’re a very lucky man.”

  “You’re a great big cosmopolitan whore,” Alyosha-Bob said, “but I love you.”

  “You’re a traitor to your country, but what can be done?” Captain Belugin said.

  I reflected upon their words and raised a toast to myself. “Yes, what can be done?” I said. “Everything has its limits.”

  The glasses clinked. My future was set. I drank vodka and felt ennobled. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you now: I was wrong about everything. Family, friendship, coitus, the future, the past, even the present, my mainstay…even that I managed to get wrong.

  13

  Misha the Bear Takes to the Air

  I assembled my household staff and told them they were free of my service. They immediately started crying into their aprons and tearing at their hair. “Don’t you have some province you can go to?” I asked them. “Aren’t you tired of city life? Be free!” The problem, it turned out, was that they had no money, and their provincial relatives had all but forsaken them; soon enough they would face homelessness and starvation, then the onset of the terrible Russian winter. So I gave each US$5,000, and they all threw themselves around my neck and wept.

  Moved by my own largesse, I summoned Svetlana and the artist Valentin, who was still camped out in my library along with his Naomi and Ruth. “I’m starting a charity called Misha’s Children,” I said. “I have allocated US$2,000,000 to benefit the children of the city I was born in.”

  They looked at me sideways.

  “That’s St. Petersburg,” I clarified.

  Still no reaction.

  “Sveta,” I said, “you’ve mentioned how you want to work for a nonprofit agency. This is your chance. You will be the executive director. You will airlift twenty progressive social workers from Park Slope, Brooklyn, and set them to work on the most incorrigible of our children. Valentin, you will be the artistic director, teaching the young ones that redemption lies in Web design as well as clinical social work. Your salaries will be US$80,000 per annum.” (To give the reader a sense of scale, the average Petersburg annual salary is US$1,800.)

  Sveta asked to see me in private. “I am most honored,” she said, “but I think it is foolish to entrust Valentin with such responsibility. I know he works for Alyosha and is designing a website for him, but he’s also quite a superfluous man, wouldn’t you say?”

  “We’re all fairly superfluous men,” I said, pace Turgenev. I shook her hand, kissed the weeping Valentin three times on the cheeks, bade farewell to his whores, then summoned my driver for the last time. It was early Monday morning, the population still working through a collective hangover, but Petersburg, when free of the human element, looks especially fine. The palaces on Nevsky Prospekt, wishing to properly say goodbye to me, dusted themselves off and bowed their chipped baldachinos in my direction; the canals flowed most romantically, hoping to outdo one another; the moon fell and the sun rose to demonstrate the nocturnal and diurnal lay of the land; but I would not be moved. “Forward, not a step backward,” I said, washing my hands clean of Peter the Great’s creation. We pulled into the ridiculous airport, a monstrous beige fort where Western tourists were abused in a hundred different ways, a tiny shat-upon redoubt more suited to Montgomery, Alabama, than a city of five million souls. At Customs there was a sad scene as Timofey’s son, Slava, wept on his father’s neck. “I’ll send for you, sonny,” my manservant said, patting the young man’s balding head. “You’ll join me in Brussels, and we’ll be merry together. Take my Daewoo steam iron.”

  “I don’t need any Brussels,” Slava said, spitting into his own hand. From the way he pronounced the name of the Belgian capital, it was clear he had never heard of it. “I need my papa.”

  I could commiserate with him—I needed my papa, too.

  The Austrian Airlines plane timidly pulled up to the gate. By a quirk of geography, Petersburg is only a forty-minute flight from the ultra-modern city of Helsinki, Finland, the northeastern bastion of the European Union. After we’d boarded and the plane had hobbled down the rutted runway and ascended, we looked down at the country beneath us, at the strange shapes of superannuated factories squatting below. I considered composing a proper fare-thee-well to the nation that had nursed me with sour milk and a cold nipple, then held me in her thick, freckled arms for too long. But before we knew it, Russia was gone.

  Timofey was sent to economy, while Alyosha-Bob and I enjoyed the first-class cabin. It was still morning, so we limited ourselves to Irish coffees and a light snack of Scottish salmon and crepes. Grabbing my stomach in two hands, I rolled the toxic hump against the wide lumbar-supporting seat, gasping with pleasure. I don’t think any man has ever been as excited to fly over Poland in an Airbus jet. I grabbed a butter knife and challenged Alyosha-Bob to a mock duel; we clanged utensils for a w
hile, my friend clearly sharing in my joy, but it seemed the other first-class passengers were not amused by our exuberance. Even this early in the day, the multinational businessmen were clacking away on their laptops with one hand and spreading Nutella over their crepes with the other, whispering to their companions on how best to carve up Russia’s dwindling industry and win favor with some American mutual fund.

  Then I noticed the Hasid.

  Be good, I told myself, knowing that in the end, it would not be possible to hold my tongue. He was in his thirties, scraggly-bearded and pimpled, as are they all, with red eyes round as coins. He did not wear the usual top hat, just a jaunty fedora, beneath which peeked out the half-moon of his yarmulke. I doubted he had actually bought a first-class ticket, this citizen of the Eternal Shtetl, so perhaps some kind of upgrade scheme was in effect. You never know with these people.

  A stewardess was bent over the Hasid, trying to coax him into accepting a kosher meal of chicken livers on toast points that they had prepared especially for him. The Hasid blinked repeatedly at the hostess’s young Austrian bosom, but on the subject of the livers, he would not yield. “It has to be certified,” he kept saying, nasally and dourly. “There are many ginds of gosher. Where’s the certifigation?”

  “No, this is kosher, sir,” the stewardess insisted. “Many Jews have eaten it. I’ve seen them eat it.”

  “I need proof,” the Hasid whined. “Where’s my proof? Where’s the certifigate? I need the rabbinigal supervision. Show me the proof and I’ll eat it.” Eventually the stewardess left, and when she did, the Hasidic cretin reached into a velvety black pouch to produce a can of tuna, some mayo, and a slice of matzoh. Licking his fat lips, he hunched his shoulders and, with some effort, pried the lid off the tuna can. Then, as if lost in one of his interminable Baruch, Baruch prayers, the Hasid began to thoughtfully mix the mayonnaise and the tuna together, rocking slowly as he did so. I watched him for about four hundred kilometers of airspace, mixing his mayo and tuna, then spreading it carefully on the brittle matzoh. Each time the stewardess passed, he would shield his creation from the gentile passage of her Teutonic behind. “A firm Austrian ass,” he seemed to be saying to himself, “does not mix with my kosher tuna fish.”

  Would it be eliminationist of me to say that I wanted to kill him? Are there certain feelings that, as a Jew, I may safely harbor in my fat heart that a non-Jew may not? Would it really be self-hatred to despise this man with whom I shared nothing more than a squirrelly strand of DNA?

  The Hasid lowered his mouth into his beard to murmur a few words of thanks to his god for this pathetic bounty, then, with a crackle, bit into his store-bought tuna and glorified cracker. Thinking about the cheap fish combined with the foul inner lining of his mouth nearly turned my stomach. Since I was four rows away, it would not have been possible to smell the pungent Hasid, but the mind creates its own scents. I could no longer keep silent.

  “Fräulein,” I called to the stewardess, who ambled over and gave me, at best, a business-class smile, front teeth only. “I am horribly offended by the gentleman Hasid,” I said, “and I would like you to ask him to put away his awful food. This is first class. I expect a civilized ambience, not a trip to Galicia circa 1870.”

  The stewardess fully opened her mouth. She held her hands before her in some kind of protective gesture. I noticed the little poky hips stretching her uniform: sexy, in a childbearing way. “Sir,” she whispered, “we allow our passengers to bring their meals on the plane. It is to accommodate their religion, yes?”

  “I am a Hebrew,” I said, showing her my big, squishy hands. “I share the same faith as that man. But I would never eat such a meal in first class. This is barbarity!” I was raising my voice, and the Hasid craned his neck to look at me. He was a sweaty sight, eyes moist, as if he had just emerged from his prayer house.

  “Easy, Snack Daddy,” Alyosha-Bob said. “Chill.”

  “No, I will not chill,” I said to my homey. And then to the stewardess: “I am a patron of multiculturalism more than anyone on this plane. By turning away your chicken livers, this man is practicing a most sanctimonious form of racism. He is spitting in all our faces! Chiefly mine.”

  “Here we go,” Alyosha-Bob murmured. “Put our Misha in a Western setting, and he starts acting out.”

  “This is not acting out,” I hissed. “You’ll know when I act out.”

  The stewardess apologized for my distress and told me she would bring around a higher authority. A tall, homosexual Austrian man soon appeared and told me he was the chief purser, or something of the sort. I explained my predicament. “This is a very awkward situation,” the purser began, staring at his feet. “We are—”

  “Austrian,” I said. “I know. It’s fine. I absolve you of your terrible guilt. But this is not about you, it’s about us. It’s good Jew versus bad Jew. It’s mainstream versus intolerance, and by supporting the Hasid, you’re perpetuating your own hate crime.”

  “Eggs-cuse me,” the Hasid was saying as he stood on his hind legs to a tremendous Hasidic length of almost seven feet. “I goudln’t help overhearing—”

  “Please, sir, sit down,” the purser said. “We’re taking care of this.”

  “Yes, sure, coddle the Hasid,” I said, and then rose myself, smacking the purser lightly with my stomach. “If this is how you run your first class, then I will go to economy to sit with my manservant.”

  “Your seat is here, sir,” said the stewardess. “You have paid for it.” The purser, meanwhile, fluttered his dainty hands to indicate that I should keep walking right out of his gilded realm. Alyosha-Bob was laughing at my foolishness, tapping his head with his fist to indicate that I was not all well.

  And he was right: I wasn’t all well.

  “Because of you, I am not a man,” I spat at the Hasid as I walked past his row. “You took the best part of me. You took what mattered.” Before leaving, I turned around to address the first-class passengers: “Beware of their mitzvah mobiles, fellow Jews among you. Beware of circumcisions late in life. Beware of easy faith. The Hasids are not like us. Don’t even think it.” With those words, I pulled back the curtain into steerage. I will not risk humanizing the first-class Hasid by writing down in detail the medieval horror upon his pale face, the cyclical, never-ending fright that so distorts our people.

  In the cramped economical quarters, by a reeking bathroom, in the midst of a wildly discordant color scheme drawn to make poor folk feel better about their travel, I found a seat next to my Timofey. “What are you doing, batyushka?” he whispered. “Why are you here? This place is not for you!” Indeed, it was difficult to reach a rapprochement between my girth and the Austrian concept of an economy seat; I ended up with my ass where my back should have been, palms pressed into the seat in front of me.

  “I am here out of principle,” I told my manservant, reaching over to pat his spongy old head with its thick womanlike hairs. “I am here because a Yid tried to take my honor.”

  “There are Jews and there are Yids,” Timofey said. “Everyone knows this.”

  “It’s not easy to be a cultured man nowadays,” I told him. “But I’ll be fine. Look out the window, Tima. Those mountains could be the Alps. Would you like to see the Alps someday? You could go with your son and have a little picnic.”

  A look of such transcendent disbelief came over Timofey that I could only feel grief for him. And grief for me, too. There was enough grief on the plane for both of us.

  Good grief, as the Americans say.

  14

  The Norway of the Caspian

  We landed at the Viennese airport, taxiing past the glassed-in main terminal where the planes always ran on time, to a problematic sideshow of a building reserved for flights to the not-quite-ready-for-Europe places like Kosovo, Tirana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and my native St. Leninsburg. There were no jetways at this diminished building; two buses came to pick us up, one for the first- and business-class passengers, another for the rest of us. I w
atched from my window as the wily Hasid maneuvered to be the first aboard the first-class bus, clutching his velvety tuna pouch as if it contained the diamonds he surely sold for a living. Shame, shame.

  Walking down the stairs, I made sure to breathe in the fine European Union air before being bused to the cigarette-smoke-filled terminal where the rest of my YugoSovietMongol brethren waited unhappily for their flights back to Tartary. I tried to make my way to the main terminal, but you had to pass an immigration counter with a normal Western passport before you could buy cigarettes duty-free or move your bowels astride the latest model of Austrian toilet. Soon, very soon, I would have my Belgian passport. Not soon enough, let me tell you.

  Alyosha-Bob whiled away the hours before our next flight laughing at my anti-Hasid campaign, making side curls out of the shaggier portions of my hair. He would run up and, like a child, throw himself on the loose hams hanging off my back. I tried to walk away from him, but he’s the faster of the two of us. By the time they started boarding our flight to Svanï City, he had curled me a nice set of payess.

  As the flight was announced, the most olive-skinned people in the terminal rushed the gate, and soon a jostling mass of mustached men and their pretty dark wives, each wielding bags from Century 21, the famed New York discount emporium, had laid siege to the poor Austrian Airlines personnel. This was my first introduction to the Absurdistan mob—a faithful re-creation of the Soviet line for sausages, fueled by the natural instincts of the Oriental bazaar. “Calm down, ladies and gentlemen!” I shouted as young, hairy men bounced off me, seemingly using my mass to ricochet to the front of the line. “Do you think they’ll run out of seats on the plane? We’re in Austria, for God’s sake!”

  Once aboard, the Absurdis began unwrapping their many purchases, modeling designer ties for their wives, and exchanging footwear across the aisles. Their first-class shenanigans did not manage to offend me as much as the Hasid’s had on the last flight, perhaps because the Hasid was one of my own, while the only occasion one has to meet an Absurdi in St. Petersburg is at the market, when one is searching for a gorgeous flower in the middle of winter or wants to make a pet of some exotic mongoose. I don’t mean to denigrate the Absurdis, or whatever they call themselves. They are the resourceful and clever representatives of an ancient trading culture, which, along with the massive quantities of oil lapping at their shores, helps explain why their country is the most successful of our formerly Soviet republics, the so-called Norway of the Caspian.