Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  “His martyred friend Sakha. The democrat—”

  “Truthfully, he wasn’t much of a friend,” Parka said. “I met him briefly at a wedding, and then he was shot to death by someone or other. I knew him for maybe two hours.”

  “We’re going to build a statue of Sakha the Democrat,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “And use his likeness in our promotional materials. See, we’re getting plenty of marketing ideas from you, Misha. You really are an inspiration. And there’s another aspect to your becoming a SCROD minister. Everyone knows how much you love New York. Perhaps, after we have secured complete control over the country, we can appoint you our ambassador to the United Nations in New York. Then you can live there with Nana. How would you like that?”

  I opened my mouth. The cold Hyatt air tickled my throat and dried out my tongue. “You’d do that for me?” I blathered.

  Mr. Nanabragov smiled. Parka Mook, eyes closed, had started whistling “New York, New York.” The whistles turned to snores, and the playwright gracefully tipped to the side, resting his warm gray head on a piece of my shoulder. “He likes you,” Mr. Nanabragov whispered. “We should always honor the old.”

  I tilted my head so that I wouldn’t scratch Parka Mook with my unshaven lower chin. An ambassadorship to the United Nations? Would the Sevo really take over the entire country? They seemed much more suited for leadership than those sheep-banging Svanï. Or was that just propaganda I had picked up at the dinner table? “You know the Americans have a visa moratorium against the whole Vainberg family,” I said. “They won’t let me in.”

  “We can get you diplomatic immunity,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “And after you talk to Israel in your new role as Minister for Sevo-Israeli Affairs, the Americans will see you as golden. They’ll do anything for Israel.”

  I was still confused by this “talking to Israel” business. How could I talk to anyone when my mobilnik couldn’t even dial out of Absurdistan?

  “You know, Mr. Nanabragov,” I said, “Israel isn’t really my country. New York is. I am very proud to be a Jew, but I am a secular Jew, like Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein, or Sigmund Freud. Indeed, the very best of Jews have always been assimilated and free thinking. The bearded Jews you see at the Wailing Wall, rocking back and forth, cowering before their god, those are fairly second-rate Jews.”

  Mr. Nanabragov accepted this fact with adult equanimity. “Fine,” he said. “You’re proud to be godless. But then tell me, Misha, who would you like to be?”

  Who would I like to be when I grew up? This was a question that haunted people of my generation well into their forties. Momentarily I thought of Mr. Nanabragov’s daughter, of her mottled brown breasts tickling my nose. “What about Minister of Multicultural Affairs?” I said.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “I would be in charge of minority relations. I would unite all the different people living in Absurdsvanï. And together we would hold festivals and conferences almost every day. We’d celebrate our identities. It would look very good in the eyes of the world. I would be a uniter.”

  “Hey, Parka, wake up!” Mr. Nanabragov said. “We’re talking about the future here.”

  Parka stirred, wiping his mouth. He looked at the sleek gray surfaces around him and shrank farther into the sofa’s distressed leather. “Where am I?” he said.

  “You’re in the land of the young and the fashionable,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Now, listen to what our Misha’s going to be. He’s going to be the Commissar for the Nationalities Question.”

  “Minister of Multicultural Affairs,” I lightly corrected him.

  “Mul-ti-cul-tu-ral. What a nice word, Parka, you should add that to your new Sevo dictionary.”

  “I add only real words,” Parka said, rubbing his nose.

  “Shush, old man,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Don’t outlive your usefulness. Speaking of the young and the fashionable, Misha, do you know we Sevo have our own rap group? Would rap prove helpful to your new work?”

  “Rap empowers everyone it touches,” I said in English. “Tell me about this group.”

  “They’re called the True Footrest Posse. Even I like their lyrics. Hey, maybe I’m multicultural, too!”

  “It’s easy to be—” I started to say, but my sentence would remain unfinished. An oddly personal boom, a rifle discharged past my head, shook the penthouse, then another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another. The windows reverberated in their frames, the flat-screen television slapped against the wall, and the sun itself was blinded by ten successive vapor trails, followed by ten distant bolts of thunder. Our lightweight skyscraper registered a weak sigh of exasperation as a veil of heavy smoke settled over the tinted windows with the grandeur of rolling fog.

  Presently a sprinkler system activated, its high-pitched alarm reassuring me with its cloying, repetitive warble. Water was flowing somewhere, possibly on top of us. A good sign. In the end, I thought, civilization would win out.

  “Well, how’s that for you?” Mr. Nanabragov said, shaking his head and smiling. “The GRAD missiles work. The Ukrainian lads are bombing Gorbigrad!”

  “GRAD missiles?” I said. “Those were GRAD missiles? Fired from the roof? We’re shelling our own city?”

  Dazed but excited, we strolled past the neighboring penthouse, which contained a Malaysian diplomat who was now screaming gutturally in his language. We hailed the elevator and pressed the button for the roof terrace. Everything worked in proper Hyatt fashion, bell tones rang to indicate the closing door, an LCD registered our ascent from 40 to ROOF TERR.

  We emerged into the humidity. The vapor trails had dissipated, leaving us with nothing but a perfect, scorching summer day to admire. The sprinklers refreshed us with steady cold showers, evoking amusement parks and cheap excitement. All signs of the rollicking Halliburton luau had been cleared away. A row of singed satellite dishes pointed accusingly toward some faraway mecca. They gave off an acrid burnt-rubber odor that I would soon learn to accept. The spent rocket fuel, on the other hand, smelled like any other fuel, sweet and sickly and masculine. The GRAD launcher was a slender container sitting on a series of jury-rigged metal surfaces evocative of a cheaply made bed frame. A half-dozen rockets were strewn about the launcher, looking like loose crayons in an American kindergarten. In the distance, we saw an F-shape of smoke rising over Gorbigrad. It was hard to distinguish the fires that surely raged across the blighted neighborhood; the sun itself painted Gorbigrad various incendiary shades of orange and red.

  Three tall, beautiful lads in camouflage uniforms were busy twiddling with a portable generator. Something inside me, greedy and childish, broke loose. Despite the violence at hand, I wanted to talk to these young Ukrainian mercenaries, to make myself known and liked by them. All of us who grew up in the Red Army’s shadow became lifelong aficionados of destruction, enthralled by anything that could bring swift ruin to the enemy. Like any empire in decline, ours was becoming ever more brilliant at knocking things apart, at raising palls of smoke over cratered school yards and charred market stalls. “What have you got going here?” I said to the boys. “If this is a GRAD BM-21 rocket system, why isn’t it mounted on a Ural truck chassis?”

  A hale-looking, blue-eyed fellow, his torso almost as wide as mine, only layered with young muscles instead of lard, put down his wrench and looked me over with measured surprise. “This is our own modified GRAD,” he said. “It’s not a BM-21, exactly. We couldn’t bring up an entire Ural truck to the roof, obviously, so we’ve reassembled the basic chassis with two stabilizing jacks. Instead of four rows of ten missiles, we’ve got two rows. But the basic firing capability is the same—a fixed half-second interval. And we only need a three-man crew instead of five.”

  “You brought all this up to the roof by yourselves?” I said, hopping from foot to foot with manly excitement. “In one day?” How competent these boys were! How well they handled themselves, whether trying to raise a family of four on eighty dollars a month or
firing GRAD missiles off the roof of a Hyatt. “How clever, how very clever of you,” I said. “And since you don’t have a Ural truck, where do you operate the system from? Tell me everything!”

  The fellow scratched at his armpits erotically and slapped on a khaki KBR baseball cap. “We’ve got a remote-firing device attached to a sixty-four-meter-long cable,” he said. “We can fire from downstairs, from the thirty-ninth floor. And reloading time is less than five minutes, even with three people working. How do you know so much about GRAD missile launchers? Did you serve in the army?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. I tapped instinctively at my Jewish proboscis to show how unlikely army service would have been for me. “Sadly, that’s not the case. I’m just an enthusiast.”

  “Our Misha knows everything about everything,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “A burning intelligence.”

  “I’m called Vyacheslav,” the mercenary said. We shook hands. His wrist was taut and narrow, like a leek.

  “It is so wonderful to work with these boys,” Mr. Nanabragov said as the soldier went back to his generator. “And look at the smoke over Gorbigrad! Now we’ve got a real war going. Smoke over the city! Take that, Genoa!”

  I shielded my eyes to better discern the smoke, slowly shifting from a letter F into a series of O’s and drifting toward the Absurdi interior. Another, unbidden series of letters was forming in my brain, starting with the letter C and continuing on to U, L, P, A, B, I, L, I, T, and Y. “Oh, God,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re shelling Gorbigrad because I told you your war wasn’t exciting enough?”

  “No,” Mr. Nanabragov said, laughing and twitching at my silliness. “Well, fine, yes,” he amended his answer. “But it’s a harmless procedure. We’ve evacuated the areas to be shelled, so they’re just blowing up empty houses. If you can even call those things houses. You know how awful it is over there. The whole place is a disaster. There’s not even running water in some parts.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “No one should have to live like that,” Nanabragov said. “So we blow up a few neighborhoods, draw some attention to our war, and then we’ll get USAID, or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or maybe even the Japanese to pay for a new Gorbigrad. We’ve already got all the engineering firms we need, all those Bechtels and whatnot. Everyone wins. You should tell Israel about it.”

  “But it makes the Sevo look terrible,” I said. “Like you’re the aggressors.”

  “Do you think we have shit for brains?” Mr. Nanabragov said. “It’s all worked out with the federal forces. In the morning our Ukrainian friends shell the Svanï parts of Gorbigrad, and in the afternoon they go for the Sevo districts. We take turns, see? But to outsiders, it looks like a real war. Like we’re tearing each other apart. Help, help, U.S.A. Save our oil.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But what happens to all the people whose flats you’ve destroyed? Where do they go until the Americans rebuild their houses?”

  Mr. Nanabragov shrugged. “We’re in the Caucasus,” he said. “Everyone has an extended family in the countryside. They can go live with their relatives.”

  I turned to Parka Mook, who stood impassively, his hands folded over his crotch, his dry face and receding mustache drawn into the Russian letter . “Is this true?” I asked him.

  “What do I know?” he said. “I’m an intellectual, not an urban planner.”

  I walked over to the edge of the roof and surveyed the red plains of Gorbigrad stretching into the sea, surrounded by the pinpricks of oil derricks, reminding me of a slain woolly mammoth encircled by cavemen with spears. Life could only get better for these people, I thought. How could it get any worse? There was a bit of American athletic wisdom that summed it up nicely: “No pain, no gain.” I sighed, suddenly missing American television. What a nostalgic!

  “So, Mishen’ka?” Mr. Nanabragov asked, grinning and stroking my hump. “What do you think? Want to join the SCROD, little son? We’ve got an office all set up for you. And a secretary crawling around on all fours.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said, yawning heartily.

  It was time for my afternoon nap.

  I was having a pleasant dream about the Egyptian pyramids (for some reason, I was leveling them with a sledgehammer) when Larry Zartarian woke me up. He was standing over me, shaking me by the shoulder, shedding tiny velvet hairs all over my face.

  He pointed at the tinted windows with his petite man-hand. Outside, the International Terrace stretched out before me, its skyscrapers silently reflecting the hills and the sea. “What?” I said. “How did you get in here, anyway? What about my privacy?”

  “Look at Gorbigrad.”

  I let my gaze drop across the bay. “Yes,” I said. “Gorbigrad has many problems.”

  “Look closer. That’s the Blue Bridge Pass that connects Gorbigrad to the International Terrace. There are soldiers at the checkpoints so no one can get through.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “We need checkpoints. We’re in a state of war.”

  “Do you see that gray chunk of rock over there? Look right next to it. That’s the Alexandre Dumas Ravine. And see those black figures slowly going down the ravine? Like ants? Those are people. Trying to make their way down from Gorbigrad. They’re trying to get onto the terraces. Many of them falling to their deaths, no doubt.”

  I examined these ants he spoke of, but I could barely make them out with my faltering, sun-blinded vision. What was he talking about? Dumas was a bad French writer. A ravine was a ravine. The Sevo and Svanï were not ants. Gorbigrad would be destroyed, then rebuilt anew. “Why would people fall to their deaths trying to leave Gorbigrad?” I said.

  “Because Nanabragov and Debil Kanuk are firing GRAD missiles at them. From the roof of my fucking hotel. Do you know what this will do to the Hyatt image?”

  “I thought the bombed-out people would go live with their friends in the countryside.”

  “The countryside is completely under siege. The borders are sealed off by federal and SCROD forces. Your so-called bombed-out people are going to starve.”

  “How do you know all this?” I said.

  Zartarian turned away from me. I focused on everything wrong with him—his premature baldness, the tight slacks outlining his monkey ass, and the small curves of his thighs. From this angle, stooped and small-shouldered, he looked even less suited for physical life than I was.

  “Alyosha-Bob told me about you, Misha,” he said. “He told me about your childhood. About your father.”

  I snorted. “I had a fine childhood. My papa made boats out of shoes. We pissed on a dog. Leave my childhood alone.”

  “You need to stop, Misha,” he said. “You need to forget about trying to make things better here. You need to forget about the SCROD.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Zartarian,” I said. But after he was gone, I took out my mobilnik and aimed it at the sky. I needed to talk to Alyosha-Bob. I needed to hear about my childhood. A lighthouse beacon revolved around the phone’s screen, desperately looking for a signal. Finally the beacon stopped. “Respected mobile phone user,” a hoarse Russian woman said, “your attempt to make a connection has failed. There is nothing more to be done. Please hang up.” I shivered and hiccuped. The particular world of the Park Hyatt Svanï City floated around me—buffalo wings drumming against whiskey bottles, floral duvet covers suffused in CNN’s lunar glow, and in the distance the people, threadbare and heat-stricken, playing out their imponderable dramas.

  I wanted Alyosha-Bob back. I wanted to hold hands together, the way Arab men do, as we walked down the Boulevard of National Unity past perfumeries and Irish pubs, empty KBR trucks and armored personnel carriers.

  But the hoarse Russian woman was wrong. There was definitely more to be done.

  33

  Ideas Away

  The next day I was woken at ten in the morning by the sound of GRAD missiles being launched directly above my sleepy head. Hey! I thought, what a way to start my first day as t
he SCROD Minister of Multicultural Affairs. I put on my best tracksuit, had a bang-up sturgeon-and-egg fry at the Beluga Bar, then went back upstairs and flossed heavily.

  The SCROD boys who had driven me to the Nanabragov residence were waiting for me in my official Volvo station wagon. I think their names were Tafa and Rafa, but that sounds rather made up. They were morons, that much I can vouch for. They spent the ride down to the Sevo Terrace addressing me in the familiar way, as if I were a greasy colleague of theirs, and chatting all the while about how a certain teenage American pop star would look with a pickle up her twat. I was ready to reach for my knout.

  The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy gathered in an old House of Soviets atop a deserted bluff overlooking the sprawling octopus of the Sevo Vatican. The building looked very much like a Rhine Valley castle, and in fact had been constructed by German POWs in the forties. Their workmanship was evident. This was the only building of the Soviet era that did not look as if it had been continuously crapped upon by a flock of seagulls for the past five decades. In the dusty square outside the building, workmen were chiseling out a statue to Sakha the Democrat, holding aloft a torch in one hand and a Sevo cross in the other. His academic beard was trimmed down to nothing, and his face was aglow and expectant, as if he had just won a Century 21 shopping spree. “Well, at least he has the torch in one hand,” I muttered to no one present. “That’s democratic.”

  Mr. Nanabragov showed me to my office, a chamber the size of a barn brimming with dark wood and glass cabinets stocked with Armenian brandy, the typical privileges of a Soviet party boss. The title “Minister for Sevo-Israeli Affairs” had been crossed out on my door, and someone had written in English: “Ministry of Multiculti.” Mr. Nanabragov pointed out the fact that I had twelve completely useless rotary phones lined up on my desk, more than anyone save himself, almost as many as Brezhnev had in his day (I assume his worked). I told Nanabragov that what I really needed was a computer with a working Internet hookup. He sighed and jerked around a little. “What’s wrong, friend?” I said.