Absurdistan
Page 24
“You know,” I said to Mr. Nanabragov, “I have a funny American friend who tells me this whole war is about oil. That it’s all about whether a pipeline to Europe should run through Sevo or Svanï territory and who gets to profit from the kickbacks.”
Mr. Nanabragov vibrated for a while. “You call that a funny friend?” he said. “Well, let me tell you, there’s a difference between humor and cynicism. Do you think the Russian poet Lermontov was funny? Why, he probably thought so. But then he publicly humiliated an old school chum who challenged him to a duel and then shot him dead! Not so funny anymore…” He twitched silently and glared at me.
“I have another funny friend,” I pressed on, “who says the Figa-6 oil field will never happen. He says the American airlift was just an old switcheroo and now there are all these new Halliburton people running around Svanï City for no reason at all. What’s going on, Mr. Nanabragov?”
“You know,” Nana’s father said, “that Alexandre Dumas called the Sevo the Pearls of the Caspian. Now, there’s a writer we respect. A Frenchman. Much better than Lermontov. He was funny but not cynical. See the difference?”
I was confused. Weren’t the Svanï called the Pearls of the Caspian? And why was Mr. Nanabragov bashing poor melancholy Lermontov and praising that overripe Dumas? Who cared about literature, anyway? Petroleum and hip-hop were the topics of my generation.
“Fine,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “maybe some of us in the SCROD were upset that the Svanï had control of the oil pipeline when traditionally we’re the people of the sea, and they’re the sheep-bangers of the interior. But we don’t want to steal the oil like the dictator Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil. We don’t want to spend the national patrimony in a Monte Carlo casino. We want to use the oil money to build a democracy. That’s the operative word we all love here. Democracy. What do we call ourselves? The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy.”
“I love democracy, too,” I said. “It’s great to have one, no question—”
“And democracy means Israel,” said Bubi, winning himself another pat from his father.
“Even Primo Levi admitted the Holocaust figures were inflated,” Volodya said.
“A few weeks ago,” I said, ignoring the former KGB agent, “I witnessed the terrible murder of a group of democrats by Colonel Svyokla and the Svanï forces. One of them had become a good friend of mine. His name was Sakha.”
Upon mention of Sakha, the courtyard fell silent. The men began to open and close their mobilniki. Bubi quietly whistled “Black Magic Woman.” A finch landed on a pile of lamb and began to sing to us about its golden life. “And,” said Mr. Nanabragov, “you liked this Sakha?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “He had just gotten back from New York, from the Century 21 department store, and they shot him. Right in front of the Hyatt. In cold blood, as they say.”
Mr. Nanabragov slapped his hands together and twitched three times, as if sending a coded signal to a satellite nervously circling the table. “We admired Sakha, too,” he said. “Didn’t we?”
“True! True!” the assembled sang into their cupped hands.
“See, Misha, the Svanï sheep-bangers think that by killing Sevo democrats, they can silence our aspirations. Oh, where are Israel and America when you need them?”
“But they weren’t just Sevo democrats,” I said. “They were Sevo and Svanï. A little of each. A democratic cocktail.”
“You know who you should talk to?” said Mr. Nanabragov. “Our esteemed Parka here. Ai, Parka! Speak to us.”
The gathered moved their chairs either forward or back until I saw a small, intelligent-looking senior citizen in a rumpled dress shirt holding on to a chicken leg. He turned his double-jointed nose at me and sniffed the air sadly. “This is Parka Mook,” Mr. Nanabragov announced. “He spent many years in a Soviet prison for his dissident views, just like your dear papa. He is our most famous playwright, the man who penned Quietly the Leopard Rises, which indeed made the Sevo people rise up and pump their fists in the air. You could say he’s the moral consciousness of our independence movement. Now he’s working on a Sevo dictionary, which will show conclusively how much more authentic our language is when compared to Svanï, which is really just a bastardization of Persian.”
Parka Mook opened his mouth, revealing two rows of poorly made silver teeth. Now I recalled where I had seen him: his image had flanked that of Mr. Nanabragov on the Sevo billboard by the esplanade. He seemed even more tired and depressed in person. “Happy to make your acquaintance,” he said in slow, ponderous Russian that couldn’t hide his thick Caucasus accent.
“Quietly the Leopard Rises,” I said, “that sounds very familiar. Was it performed in Petersburg recently?”
“Perhaps,” Parka Mook said as he regretfully let go of his chicken leg. “But it’s not very good. When you put a Shakespeare or a Beckett or even a Pinter next to me, you will see how very small I am.”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” the gathered shouted.
“You’re very modest,” I told the playwright.
He smiled and waved me away. “It’s nice to do something for your country,” he said. “But soon I will die and my work will disappear forever. Oh, well. Death should be a pleasant release for me. I can hardly wait to drop dead. Maybe tomorrow the sweet day will come. Now, what did you ask me?”
“Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.
“Oh, yes. I knew your friend Sakha. He was a fellow anti-Soviet agitator. We did not share the same opinions as of late—”
“But you were still best friends,” Mr. Nanabragov interrupted.
“We did not share the same opinions of late,” Parka Mook resumed, “but when I saw his body on television, lying in the dirt, I had to shut my eyes. There was so much brightness that day. These infernal summer months. On some afternoons, when there is that much brightness—how should I put it—the very sunlight becomes false. So I closed the curtains and lost myself in memories of better days.”
“And he cursed the Svanï monsters who had killed his best friend, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov prompted the playwright.
Parka Mook sighed. He looked longingly at his abandoned chicken leg. “That’s correct,” he muttered, “I cursed…” He looked up at me with depleted eyes. “I cursed…”
“You cursed the Svanï monsters,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching impatiently.
“I cursed the monsters…”
“…who killed your best friend.”
“…who killed my best friend, Sakha. True enough.”
We watched the old playwright go back to his chicken leg and nibble carefully. I felt the longing to comfort him and, by extension, the whole Sevo race. God help me, but I found their feudal mentality charming. You couldn’t fault them for their ignorance, a small, impressionable people surrounded by nations lacking in intellectual rigor. They were young and ill-formed, like showy adolescent girls trying to win the affection of adults through prancing and coquetry and the deliberate flash of a skinny ankle. Forget my Petersburg charity. These were Misha’s Children. I pledged my fealty to their sunny, prepubescent causes, their dreams of freedom and impossible happiness. “The world has heard of your plight,” I said, “and soon you will have your dictionary and your oil pipeline.”
“Oh, if only.” The men began to sigh and blow unhappily into their empty wine horns.
“A tragedy took place yesterday,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “A tragedy that will change everything.”
“It’s the end, the end,” his co-nationals agreed.
“An Italian anti-globalization protester,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “a young man, has been killed at the G8 summit in Genoa by the Italian police.”
“How sad,” I agreed. “If a pretty Mediterranean person can be robbed of his life, what chance do the rest of us have?”
“Just as our Sevo struggle for democracy was gaining some market share in the global media,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “we have been banished from the news cycle.”
“Including your favorite, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.
“—and nobody cared,” Bubi said.
“Unlike those rich, spoiled Italians, we’re completely in tune with globalization,” Mr. Nanabragov said to me. “We want capitalism and America.”
“And Israel,” Bubi said.
“We were getting live feed on BBC One, France 2, Deutsche Welle, Rai Due, and CNN, and now, one dead European later, you turn on any channel, and everyone’s crying over the Genovese hooligan.”
“How many such hooligans do we have to kill?” Bubi said.
“Shush, sonny, we’re a peaceful nation,” Mr. Nanabragov said.
They all turned to me and tugged their shirts in unison; Parka Mook put down his chicken leg and burped elegantly into his hand. “It’s hard to define your conflict,” I suggested. “No one’s really sure what it’s about.”
“It’s about independence!” Mr. Nanabragov said.
“And Israel,” Bubi said.
“Saint Sevo the Liberator,” shouted one of the elderly men.
“Christ’s True Footrest.”
“The thieving Armenian.”
“Quietly the Leopard Rises.”
“And don’t forget Parka’s new dictionary!”
“These are all good things,” I said. “But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don’t have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora, from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don’t have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they’ll send troops.”
“We don’t want the United Nations,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “We don’t want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We’re better than that. We want America.”
“We want the big time,” Bubi said in English.
“Please, go talk to Israel,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “and then maybe they’ll recommend us to America.”
“How can I talk to Israel?” I said. “What can I say to it? I am only a private Belgian citizen.”
“Your father would know what to say,” Mr. Nanabragov told me.
We sat there quietly chewing on that fact like cud. The finches sang to the sparrows, and the sparrows returned the favor. There was a failure of the power supply. The house around us darkened, moonlit shadows appeared momentarily along the glassed-in verandas covered with trellises of grape. Finally the backup generators sprang to life. We could hear the women singing dolorously in the kitchen, my Nana’s voice noticeably absent. A dog picked up their whimper somewhere in the distance.
Mr. Nanabragov was right. My father would know what to say.
29
Bad Manservant
The toasting reached a low ebb. Plastic jugs of sweet wine were brought in, and the men started to get drunk. I had never seen natives of the Caucasus put away so much. “In Soviet days, we used to drink from love and pleasure; now we drink because we have to,” Mr. Nanabragov said, and this became the last, symptomatic toast of the evening. The men lined up to kiss me on both cheeks, their boozy, grizzly faces scratching me in a not unpleasant way. “Take care of us,” some pleaded. “Our fate is in your hands.”
“My mother will be your mother,” others assured me. “There will always be water in my well to drink.”
“Is it true,” Volodya the former KGB man whispered to me, “that most of the pornography industry is in Jewish hands?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Even I dabble in blue films now and then. Tell me if you know of any fallen Russian women. Or young girls, for that matter.”
Mr. Nanabragov kissed me six times, on the cheeks, nose, and temples, just as his wife and daughter had him. “Good Misha,” he said, slurring his words. “Good boy. Don’t leave us for Belgium, sonny. We simply won’t let you.”
Nana emerged on the balcony, then swept me inside her air-conditioned bedroom, dropping me onto one of two small beds present. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Please fuck me.”
“Now?” I said. “Here?”
“Oh, please, please, please,” she said. “Do me, daddy.”
“Pop you?”
“Just like that.”
I assumed the position on the cold white sheets. I was not immediately erect; the stairs had winded me. But the sweet brown scent of recently exhaled marijuana, along with a general NYU laxity, prodded me along. She pulled up her shirt and unhitched her bra, letting her breasts fall into position. In the relative darkness of Nana’s bedroom, which faced away from both the oil rigs and the corporate towers of the International Terrace, her teats were lit up by natural resources—the moon and stars—giving them a light gloss on top and a dark folded crease on the bottom. I squished them together and put them in my mouth. “Here goes,” I said.
She landed on top of me, sticking me inside her in one lubricated motion, without the usual series of soft cries women produce upon being entered. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the pain. I imagined Nana and then another Nana and then a third, all of them on their hands and knees, their full-moon asses pointed toward me as I prepared to take them from behind.
“Just like that, Snack Daddy,” Nana was saying, having recently learned of my college nickname. She leaned in to me and started rummaging through the curtains of back flesh as if sorting through the clothing bins of a fashionable secondhand store. Eventually she found what she was looking for.
“Please,” I said, “I’m sore tonight. And I ate too much. I might—”
“Gently, gently,” she said. “Look how gently I do it. I even trimmed my nails.” And she hooked her finger into the mossy bull’s-eye of my ass, probing deeper as she went.
“Ouch,” I said, not so much in pain as in a general statement of who I was and how I lived my life. Gradually my eyes were adjusting to the darkness of the room, making out the posters on the walls—in one corner an announcement of a CUNY Graduate Center lecture by the famed Orientalist Edward Said, a very good-looking Palestinian; in another a picture of a teenage-boy rock-and-roll band, each kid tanned a perfect brown like my Nana, and as full-lipped and pouty as her brother, Bubi, or, for that matter, their father. As she continued to straddle me, I stared back and forth at these pictures, looking past one breast and then the other, until I assigned a value to each: left breast, Professor Said, right breast, boy band. What incongruous tastes my sweet Nana had, the kind of tastes that can mix only in the very young.
I heard a shallow moan, the sound of a belly too full.
I blinked. There was a second bed in the room. A girl was gently stirring upon it. It must have been the school chum I had briefly seen at dinner before Mr. Nanabragov sent the girls to the kitchen. Noticing my confusion, Nana leaned forward. “It’s okay,” she whispered into my ear. “When Sissey gets really high, she likes to watch.”
“Ak, ak, ak!” I cried. I covered my breasts, my most humiliating part (together with my baggy forearms, they form four loose sacks of flour). I wriggled my ass until Nana’s finger popped out. I tried to draw the sheets around us, but there simply weren’t enough of them.
“Don’t be scared, Snack.” Nana laughed. “We’re just bored and high, sweetie.”
I tried to lift Nana off of me, but she resisted. Her friend’s presence shamed and aroused me both. I grabbed the mattress, lifted up my ass, and started thrusting inside Nana, proactively, as they say. “Oh, shit,” she cried. “Do it, Misha. Just…like…that.”
Her friend moaned and rustled on the other bed. I liked hearing my name spoken aloud. I lifted up one knee, shifting Nana to one side, to let Sissey see what I doing to her friend’s forest-covered reproductive c
omplex, bouncing her ass cheeks and letting them clap against each other. I wanted to make her friend holler and address me using the polite vy in Russian. I wanted to make them both pregnant and then, for some reason, to leave them and go far away.
“Faik!” Nana shouted, and suddenly she scrambled off my bulk and threw a waiting robe around her curves. She pointed to the window. The face of Mr. Nanabragov’s manservant was pressed against the glass, the crescent of his mustache floating above the puckered star of his lips. Nana waved a fist at him, and the manservant promptly disappeared, leaving only an outline of condensation and want. “That fucking Moslem piece of shit,” Nana said.
I massaged the wet stump of my khui, hoping Nana’s second mouth would come back to swallow it. I turned to her friend Sissey, who had brushed aside her copious hair to reveal two beautiful gray eyes, pupils dilated to match the scope of the Absurdi sun. “You’re going to have to go pay him now,” Nana said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Whenever Faik catches me with a boy, he wants a hundred dollars.”
“But—” I didn’t know whether to be more humiliated by the amount of money or by the fact that there were other so-called boys.
“He’s in the courtyard. Go!” Nana said as she went over to her girlfriend and hugged her. Soon enough they were whispering in French, laughing their big horsey laughs and braiding each other’s hair.
Faik was in the courtyard, sitting amid the dirty dishes pooled with punctured tomatoes and slicks of olive oil. He was casually smoking a pipe, the air filled with cloying apple-scented tobacco. I threw a US$100 bill onto his lap. He picked it up, inspected it against the moonlight, then folded it into the pocket of his checkered shirt. “I’d like another fifty dollars,” he said, “because I saw Sissey watching while Nana was riding you.”
Riding me. “If I ever caught my manservant doing what you’re doing, I would have personally sent him into the next world,” I said, letting a smaller denomination descend toward Faik’s waiting hands. “I would have garroted him with my own hands, I swear.”