The McDonald’s was situated behind a prominent square that, during the Soviet era, must have hosted its share of May Day parades but had been turned into an ad hoc market for used remote controls. We walked past hordes of potential buyers aiming the orphaned devices at the sky, as if trying to turn off the scorching sun. Above the gleaming pile of remotes stretched an enormous mural of Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil, dancing with each other on the helicopter deck of a Chevron offshore oil platform. A large man in a bow tie and tails stood off to the side of the deck, writing something with a quill upon an ancient scroll. He was as neatly mustached as the dictator and his son, and boasted an incongruous poof of African-looking hair. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“Alexandre Dumas,” an old remote seller told me. “He came to our country in 1858. He called the Svanï people ‘the Pearls of the Caspian.’ He loved our dried beef and wet women. When he came down to the Sevo Terrace, he was robbed by ruffians and cheated by the local merchants. He hated it there.”
I looked to Sakha, who merely shrugged. “It’s an old Svanï story,” he said.
“And who are you by nationality?” the remote seller started to ask, but Sakha whisked me away to our destination.
We strode into the all-beef smell of McDonald’s, where I was regarded by the hungry customers as a kind of living embodiment of the fast-food lifestyle. “Personally I favor the slow-food movement,” I loudly announced to a family splitting the smallest McDonald’s hamburger into six parts so that each family member could savor a little taste. Poor souls. Here they were living by the Caspian Sea, surrounded by delicious fresh sturgeon and wild tomatoes, and nonetheless they came to McDonald’s. I made a mental note to check up on the diets of Misha’s Children. Hopefully the progressive Park Slope social workers had already made their way to St. Petersburg and had set to work on the little ones.
“Hey, it’s that democrat!” someone shouted at Sakha. “Hey, democrat, buy me a shake, will you? I’ll believe in anything you say.”
A tall Slavic man in his late teens approached, stiff and official in his disposable McDonald’s uniform, but with enough of a homosexual smile to make a name for himself in Petersburg’s Club 69. His Cyrillic tag labeled him a Dzhunior Manadzher. “Sir,” he said. “Are you here to see Monsieur Lefèvre?”
“Certainly I am not here to eat your criminal food,” I replied.
“Please come with me,” said the junior manager. “In the meantime, Mr. Sakha and your manservant can enjoy a free cheeseburger. No, Mr. Sakha, you may split one cheeseburger, that’s all.”
He took me past the bathrooms reeking awfully of industrial detergent, past a framed print of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and to a door that opened to a small cul-de-sac where the McDonald’s garbage was stored in vast plastic containers. It took me a while to pinpoint Jean-Michel Lefèvre of the Belgian consulate, lying atop a soiled mattress, with both hands grasping the edges, as if he were Jonah just spat out of the whale.
“Monsieur Lefèvre isn’t feeling well,” the slender Russian boy told me. “I’m going to get him something to drink.”
“Misha,” the Belgian bellowed into the mattress. “Bring vodka,” he said in Russian.
“Are you talking to me?” I said.
“I am also called Misha,” said the boy, leaving us alone.
The Belgian used his elbows to flip over onto his back, where he could get a proper look at me. “Mother of God,” he said in English. “You’re big. You’re bigger than in Captain Belugin’s photograph. You’re the biggest thing ever.”
“I am a big man, yes,” I said. Lefèvre was himself a blond, emaciated fellow likely in early middle age, stubbly, red-eyed, and nicely browned by the Absurdi arrangement of sun, water, and sand. Whatever awful thing that had happened to him must have happened quickly and irrevocably.
“So,” said Lefèvre with a smirk. “Who wants to be a Belgian?”
“I do,” I said. Was he trying to make some kind of joke? “I have paid US$240,000 to Captain Belugin. That should buy citizenship for me and a work visa for my manservant. Everything should be in order.”
“Mm-hump,” said the Belgian, throwing up a hand and letting it hang in front of him limply. “Everyone wants to be a Belgian. Well, I don’t want to be a Belgian, no, sir. I want to be a Mexican Zapatista or a Montenegrin. Something fierce.” He yawned and scratched the perfectly white bridge of his nose. I noticed his sunglasses lying broken at his feet.
Misha the McDonald’s junior manager returned with a bottle of Flagman vodka and a McDonald’s paper cup. He emptied the vodka into the cup, gently tilted Lefèvre’s head, and poured the vodka into the diplomat’s mouth. There was some gagging, but mostly the alcohol found its way into the Belgian’s bloodstream, where it quickly reddened his tan.
“What are you?” Lefèvre asked me as he let Misha wipe his face with a McDonald’s paper hat. “What do you do?”
“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “I run a charity called Misha’s Children.”
“Are you some kind of pedophile?”
“What?” I fairly shrieked. “How can you? How awful! All my life I’ve wanted to help children.”
“I just thought because you’re so fat and puffy—”
“Stop insulting me. I know my rights.”
“You’re not a Belgian yet, friend,” he said. “I’m just joking. We have a problem in Belgium with pedophilia. Big scandal. Even the government and police people are implied.”
“Implicated,” I corrected him.
“I thought you should know more about your new nation before you signed on. Anything else you wanted to know?”
I considered all the things I wanted to know about Belgium. There weren’t many. “You have this queen Beatrix, no?” I asked.
“That would be Holland.”
“And you have a shameful history in the Congo. Your Leopold was a monster.”
“He’s your Leopold now, Vainberg. Our Leopold. Our Leopold of the Black Sorrows.” Lefèvre reached under the mattress and took out a business envelope that he tried to throw my way, but it landed in exactly the opposite direction, atop a plastics recycling bin. The other Misha picked it up and brought it to me.
I tried to stick my big, squishy hand inside, but to no avail. After tearing the envelope to bloody pieces, I withdrew a purple Belgian passport.
I opened it. Beneath a faint hologram of what I imagined was the Belgian Royal Palace, I saw a grainy duplicate of my Accidental College yearbook photograph, the travails of a grossly overweight twenty-two-year-old already hanging from my chin.
“For more information on Belgium, visit www.belgium.be,” Lefèvre said. “They have some information in English, too. You should at least know the name of the current prime minister. They sometimes ask that at Immigration.”
“This looks so real,” I said.
“It is real,” the diplomat told me. “According to official records, you became a citizen of Belgium in Charleroi last summer. You were granted political asylum from Russia. You’re a Chechen sympathizer or something. A Jewish Chechen sympathizer, that’s you.”
I pressed the passport to my nose, hoping to smell Europe—wine, cheese, chocolates, mussels, Belgian as opposed to McDonald’s fries. All I smelled were my own odors reflected back—a hot day, a tired man, hope tempered with sturgeon. “This is very good,” I said.
“No, it’s not very good,” said Lefèvre.
“Well, it’s very good for me,” I said. I was trying to stay positive, as they do in the States all the time.
The diplomat smiled. He gestured for the other Misha to tilt his head and administer the vodka inside the McDonald’s paper cup. In between swallows, he started singing the anthem of my new homeland:
O Belgique, ô mère chérie,
A toi nos coeurs, à toi nos bras,
A toi notre sang, ô patrie!
Nous le jurons tous, tu vivras!
Tu vivras toujours grande et belle
Et ton invincible unité
Aura pour devise immortelle:
Le roi, la loi, la liberté!
With each French word, he stared farther into the blue void of my pretty eyes, grimacing, guffawing, and willing upon me every failure of which I knew myself capable. I stood there and listened. Then I said, “You know something, Mr. Lefèvre…”
“Hmm?” he said. “What do I know?”
“Everybody hurts,” I said.
The diplomat curled his fine lips, seeming surprised for the first time. “Who hurts?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Everybody hurts,” I said once more. Despite the logistical problems posed by my weight, I lowered myself to the ground and extended my hand to take the vodka cup from his hand. Lefèvre reached over, and our hands met briefly, his as wet and vulgar as my own. I took the cup and spilled some vodka on my new passport.
“What are you doing?” shouted the diplomat. “That’s an EU passport!”
“In Russia, when one graduates from a university, he spills vodka on his diploma for good luck.”
“Yes, but that’s an EU passport!” the diplomat repeated, scrambling backward on his mattress. “You paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. You don’t want it smelling like vodka.”
“I can do as I please!” I began to shout, my anger suddenly matched by the sound of crashing china and cutlery behind me. We looked to McDonald’s, aware that the restaurant offered only plastic and paper service.
“What are these idiots doing now?” Lefèvre said.
Several middle-aged women with very full lungs were screaming inside the McDonald’s. Almost immediately, the women’s roar was joined by a distant counterpart, issuing presumably from the Sevo Terrace below. A strange sonic displacement seemed to be taking place all around us, as if the summer heat with its layers of shimmering, highly sulfuric air were taking on an acoustic quality. “Shit,” Lefèvre said as the recycling bins started to shake violently, which I surmised could not have been the result of the female screaming alone. “Oh, fuck me,” he said.
Sakha ran out of McDonald’s, his hands trembling with the yellow remains of a cheeseburger, his Zegna tie stained with a trail of ketchup. He tried to speak but could only sputter and whinny in an impotent intellectual way. It took the McDonald’s junior manager, Misha, to make the situation clear for us.
“Georgi Kanuk’s plane has just been shot down by Sevo rebels,” he said.
18
To the Hyatt Station
“I predict,” said Lefèvre, “that we’re all going to die here in Absurdistan.”
A lone MiG-29 punched a hole through the stratosphere above us and swooped alarmingly over the gray bowl of the Caspian. The Svanï Terrace rumbled in its wake.
“We’re Belgians,” I shouted at the diplomat, brandishing my new passport at him. “Who would want to hurt us?”
“I predict that before this ends, we will all be dead,” repeated Lefèvre.
“What the hell, Jean-Michel?” Misha the junior manager said. “You told me there wasn’t going to be a civil war until August. You said everything would be quiet through July. We would get the Vainberg money and leave. We were going to be on a plane to Brussels next week.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” the diplomat said. “They’ve shut down the airport by now. That’s for certain.”
“How could this have happened?” the junior manager shouted, one hand raised in anger, the other draped passionately over his hip. “And what about that luxury American Express train that runs across the border? The one that costs five thousand dollars a ride. How could they cancel that?”
“I’m sure it’s all finished,” Lefèvre said. “They lied to me.”
“Who lied to you?” the junior manager said.
“Everyone,” Lefèvre said. “Sevo, Svanï, Golly Burton…”
I turned to Sakha, who looked as discarded as a burger wrapper. “Sakha, what’s happening?” I said. “They don’t shoot Belgians, do they?”
“Vainberg,” Lefèvre said, “you have to do something important.”
“I’m always ready to do something important!” I cried, scrambling over a recycling bin to get to my feet.
“You have to get the democrat to the Hyatt immediately. Put him under Larry Zartarian’s protection. It’s not safe for him out here.”
My heart beat like that of a young girl in love. I was blissful and manic at the same time. Think one person can save a democrat? So do I. “We have a Hyatt jeep out front,” I said. “But are you going to be okay, Monsieur Lefèvre? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Just get the fuck out of here,” Lefèvre said. “Everybody hurts, Misha. But some hurt more than others.”
“What?”
“Godspeed, Gargantua! Go!”
The starchy McDonald’s was filled with the sounds of women and children whimpering, the men contributing an undignified stream of curses revolving around the all-purpose Russian swear word blyad, or “whore.” The people had hidden beneath the greasy square tables and behind the counter, as if a robbery were in progress. Cardboard versions of the McDonald’s mascots, a scary American clown and some kind of purple blob, had been commandeered as “human” shields by several armed customers.
“They think this is a multinational space,” Sakha said. “They think they’ll be safe here. The only safe places are the embassies, the Hyatt, and the Radisson.”
“Yes, yes!” I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to but thoroughly enjoying every second of it. “We’ll get you to the Hyatt, Mr. Sakha. You have my word as a Vainberg.”
Outside, we became aware of what had accounted for the initial noise of crashing china and cutlery. The used-remote-control market was being pulverized beneath the tread of the advancing heavy infantry. I was looking at a convoy of stubby caterpillars outfitted with battering rams, which I realized were Soviet T-62 tanks, followed by a ring of equally obsolete BTR-152 armored personnel carriers, forests of anti-aircraft cannon poking out of the roof hatches. (When I was a child, the Red Army was one of my main pre-masturbatory obsessions.)
Circuit boards, batteries, and infrared bulbs rained down on us in batches of crushed civilization. The remote sellers tried to salvage their wares, dumping the choicest models into their burlap sacks and then slaloming between the slow-moving vehicles to the relative safety of the Moorish-style opera house adjoining McDonald’s. Alexandre Dumas looked down upon them silently from his mural, recording everything on his scroll.
The sound of heavy machine-gun fire reverberated throughout the city. I searched excitedly for the telltale plumes of smoke that to me define a war zone, but the sky was given over entirely to the treacherous sun. It was time to do something manly and American. “Go, go, go, motherfuckers!” I yelled to Sakha and Timofey, pushing them toward our car. The jeep’s alarm was blaring and a rear window had been partly smashed, but the imperious Hyatt logo had apparently scared off the thieving locals. “You have to drive this thing,” I said to Sakha, goading him into the driver’s seat. “I have no idea how to do it, and my manservant’s no better.”
Sakha was hyperventilating. He kept pointing at his mobilnik and gesturing toward Gorbigrad, meaning, I suppose, that he wanted to call his family. I reached for my fanny pack and took out a bottle of Ativan. “What is that?” Sakha wheezed. “Valerian root?”
“Hardly,” I said. I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. “This is going to take effect immediately,” I lied. “Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? ‘My name is Luka,’ ” I sang. “ ‘I live on the second floor.’ ”
“Stop,” Sakha said. “Stop singing, please. I need to think positive thoughts. I want to see my girls again.”
A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends. “Drive!” I shouted to Sakha.
We careened th
rough the McDonald’s parking lot and toward a half-assed side street. Wretched balconies groaned beneath laundry lines, terrified occupants peered out their windows, from every direction televisions cackled in the local tongue announcing imminent disaster. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared. We ran through a gauntlet of terrified city cats and swerved onto yet another narrow street, this one dominated by the stone face of a Svanï church.
Soldiers had formed a checkpoint by the road leading up to the International Terrace. We found ourselves at the end of a long queue of stalled Zhigulis and Ladas. The cars ahead of us were being searched by short, skinny youths wearing dark mustaches in full bloom and fatigues stitched only with the Russian word soldat (“soldier”). Grenades hung from their belts. Some of them were flopping about in pink beach sandals.
“If they see that I’m a big democrat, they’ll shoot me,” Sakha said. “Georgi Kanuk’s son is worse than his father. He ran the special forces. His hands are covered with blood. He’ll want revenge for his father’s death.”
“You’re with me,” I said. “I’m a Vainberg. A Belgian. A Jew. A rich man. You’re taking me to the Hyatt. We’re important people, Sakha. Have faith in yourself.”
“I’m calling my family,” Sakha said, unholstering his phone. He started to cry as soon as the connection was made. He spoke in the local tongue and partly in Russian. “Did you take the girls to ExcessHollywood?” I heard him sob. “Did they have Toy Story 2? Tell them I’ll be home tomorrow and we can watch it together. Or maybe they can come to the Hyatt and we’ll watch it on Larry Zartarian’s big screen. Would they like that? Oh, my sweet little monkeys. Never let them go. Never let them out of your sight. I should have known this would happen. I should have applied for that fellowship at Harvard. I’ve been listening to Josh Weiner for too long.”
“That’s enough!” I commanded. “Wipe your eyes and turn off the phone. It’s almost our turn. Be strong!”
A barely pubescent soldier tapped on our window. He stared at my heavy tits and then at the shaking Sakha and my benighted Timofey, trying to comprehend our menagerie. “Who are you by nationality?” he barked at the democrat, filling our car with the stench of garlic and alcohol, along with the familiar scent of something pubic and male. Sakha started mooing to him hopelessly. The soldier ignored him and, with one dark long paw, reached into his shirt and took out a small golden cross hanging from a chain. He examined the Sevo footrest, then threw the cross back into Sakha’s face. “Get out of the car, blyad,” he said to Sakha.
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