Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

  Mr. Nanabragov dropped his pickle with a twitch, ran over, and kissed me on three cheeks. He had a new nautical smell about him—sea urchin, sea damp, and sea salt—and his muscular Southern nose stabbed me in all my soft places. “Dear one, dear one,” he cried. “You’ve spoken to my Nana. You’re not upset with me for not letting you stay with us? Family comes first, no? If there were more room in my house, yes? Or if you married our Nanachka, finally, hmm?”

  “I’d marry her just to get out of the Intourist,” I joked.

  “Would you?” Mr. Nanabragov said seriously. “We could have a small private ceremony. I suppose the political circumstances are not the best right now. But as you can see, we’ve regrouped a little.” He pointed to the bandits chewing on toothpicks around the half-comatose figure of Parka Mook. “We’re replenishing the SCROD coffers through the booming cigarette trade.”

  “Would you like to buy some?” a young maritime thug asked me, brandishing a carton of something called Business Class Elite, featuring an Aeroflot plane plummeting to the ground. “Eighty dollars.”

  “That’s my future son-in-law you’re talking to,” Mr. Nanabragov objected. “Give it to him for forty.”

  “Not a smoker,” I said.

  “Oh,” Nanabragov and his new friend sighed.

  “How’s the SCROD going?” I said. “Any media interest?”

  “It’s still very hard to convey our message to the world,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Of course, the Russians are all over us. Look at this!” From Parka Mook’s lap, he snatched a week-old copy of a popular Russian newspaper called Arguments and Facts. Next to a picture of Putin blandly conveying displeasure to his cowering cabinet, I spotted the grainy likeness of three Ukrainian mercenaries and the former KGB agent Volodya hanging off the terrace of the Hyatt. Their snapped necks had been tied to the charred remains of four satellite dishes, their arms spread out at modest angles like the swept-back wings of an airplane. It was a lousy likeness. The poor Ukrainians appeared heavier and more menacing than they had when they were alive, and the long shot didn’t capture the peasant-blue equanimity of their eyes.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said in English, exhausting the last thimbleful of compassion that remained.

  “The Russians are threatening to bomb us for this,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “as are the Ukrainians. Now, if only the Americans would bomb us, then we’d really be somewhere.”

  “What about the UN?”

  “They sent over some tarps. Nothing much we can steal. Listen, Misha, you should go talk to Israel. It’s time. We know exactly who you should see. There’s a Mossad agent in the Intourist Hotel. He’s pretending to be a Texas oilman named Jimbo Billings. Go chat him up. As your future father-in-law, I’m begging you on my knees.” To the contrary, he remained standing.

  “I would do anything for you, Mr. Nanabragov,” I said. “Alas, I had typed up my proposal for the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship on my laptop computer. I’m sure it was destroyed when the Svanï bombed the Hyatt.”

  “Actually, we have your laptop right here,” Mr. Nanabragov said, pulling the sleek gray device from under his chair. “Some of our boys paid a visit to your room after the attack. Just picking up some odds and ends.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. Nanabragov,” I said. “But you must know that Nana wants to leave the country. She’s a young girl. She’s got her NYU to consider.”

  “Go! Go!” Mr. Nanabragov twitched. “The SCROD first, and then our Nana.”

  I dutifully heaved my way back to the Intourist, where I was informed that indeed a Jimbo Billings was on the premises. I ascended to the top floor, outmaneuvered the portly floor attendant, and knocked on Jimbo’s door. “Excuse me.” I coughed. A perfectly Russian voice promptly sent me to the khui.

  “I am Misha Vainberg,” I said. “I come in peace.”

  “Vainberg!” the voice trilled, and then, switching to Texan English: “Well, shoot, come on in, buster!”

  The room must have been the tidiest in the entire hotel, free of giant green spiders and petulant Absurdis, save for the hotel hooker fixing up her mustache by the vanity mirror. Mr. Jimbo Billings, a short, muscular man in denims and short sleeves, looked vaguely Levantine or Greek, sun-wrinkled and drained of blood, with perfect blue and green eyes (one color each) and fast-moving hands made of fine leather. I could see how, after a fifty-hour immersion in the iconic American show Dallas, the Mossad agent could begin to pass for a middle-aged Texan. “Darlin’,” Billings said to the whore. “Do me a favor, willya? Scram.” The young lady pouted and made a show of her hips but quickly left us alone.

  “So,” I said, “my sources tell me we share a certain religion in common. Although I’m fairly lapsed and modern. In any case, shalom.”

  “Sources?” Billings said. “Sha-lome? Shoo, doggie! That’s some imagination you got on you, boy.” His mood rapidly shifted downward; he shook his gray head and said, “Hot damn, what we gon’ do with you, Vainberg?”

  “Nuthin’,” I said, falling for some reason into his ridiculous accent. “I’m all fine and dandy right here.”

  “How you reckon?” Billings asked.

  “I got somethin’ for you,” I said. “It’s good for Israel, good for the Jews. A Holocaust museum. Gonna make some old-fashion’ synergy happen. Gonna make people believe again.” I held out my laptop for him to examine.

  “ ‘The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies,’ ” Jimbo read, “ ‘aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.’ ” He pursed his thick sunburned Sabra lips and read on a bit longer. “You know what ain’t good for the Jews, Vainberg?” he said after a while. “You ain’t.”

  “Screw you,” I said. “I’m just tryin’ to help.”

  “You tryin’ to help Nanabragov and his daughter, so don’t play me the fool, son,” Billings said.

  “And so what?” I said. “So what if I want to help an oppressed people other than my own? I’m a new kind of man. And you better hope, for everyone’s sake, there are more like me.”

  “A new man? And what kind of man that be?”

  “A man that ain’t got no racial memory.”

  “Sure you do. You the biggest Jew of us all. You cain’t help yerself. You cain’t help where you come from. Just lookit your papa. He had you cut by Hasids when you were eighteen. Goddamn, son.”

  “My papa loved Israel.”

  “Your papa…” Billings stopped. He looked into my eyes, lifted his shoulders, then lowered them to reveal himself a man of very small stature and a generation older than I had thought. “You can call me Dror,” he said in a Mid-Atlantic accent tinged with something phlegmy and Hebrew. “Although that’s not my name.”

  “What were you saying about my papa?” I said.

  Jimbo-Dror shook his head. “Look, Misha,” he said. “In the seventies, a drunk, charming refusenik was sort of poignant. Shabbat Shalom in Leningrad and all that. But by the nineties, your father was just another Russian gangster…an antisocial personality with limited impulse control. I’m quoting from his file now.”

  The official Mossad characterization of my papa—so small-minded and bleak—did little to provoke me. The dried patch of snakeskin that had been my toxic hump was depleted of toxins. The anger was gone. My papa was long dead, relegated to Israeli files and the receding nighttime shadow play of his hands upon me.

  “Maybe he was what you say,” I told Jimbo-Dror, “but I doubt he loved Israel one shekel less than any of you Mossadniks. He gave three million dollars to some rabbi who wanted to drive the Arabs into the sea.”

  “We’re not required to love it,” Dror said of Israel. “Just to make sure it exists.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of wire-rims, looking like a tired Indian merchant relentlessly pushing his stock of goods across the oceans. He unfolded a piece of paper. “There’s an American Express train that leaves Svanï City September seventh, arriving at the border on the eighth. AmEx has bribed the border guards so that passengers can get ou
t of the country. I’ll be on that train, if you need my help. The next train leaves on September ninth, arriving on September tenth. I suggest very strongly that you get out while you can, certainly before the Russians start bombing next week. You can get your Nana to help you with the ticketing. I think it’s fifty thousand a person. But don’t take her with you! Her father will kill you if you take her away from him. You know how these black-asses are about their daughters.”

  “You’re leaving, too?” I said. “Goddammit, Dror. Nobody cares about this country at all. And the Sevo support you against the Palestinians, you know. Doesn’t Israel need friends?”

  “This requires a two-part answer,” said Jimbo-Dror. “Yes, we need friends. And no, we really don’t care about this country at all.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But what about the oil? Don’t you at least care about the oil?”

  “Oil?” Jimbo-Dror took off his glasses and looked me over with his keen polymorphic eyes. “Are you joking with me, Vainberg?”

  “What joking?” I pointed a bloated index finger at the window, beyond which I assumed the Caspian seabed toiled and bubbled. “The oil,” I said. “Figa-6. The Chevron/BP consortium. KBR. Golly Burton.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Dror said. “Son of a bitch. I thought Nanabragov would let you in on the secret. You know, sometimes, after all these years of playing urban cowboy, I still have the capacity to be amazed.”

  “What secret? Tell me!”

  “Misha, you poor fat shmegegge of a man. There is no oil.”

  41

  Birds of Prey

  “No oil,” I said. To make sure I had understood correctly, I repeated the words in Russian. “Nyefti nyetu.” I felt as if something dear had been taken away from me, as if a flotilla of my papa’s rubber-sole boats were sailing away from me and over the horizon. I had gotten so used to the oil; one could almost say I had gotten close to it. Everywhere and everything was nyeft’. The modern world was composed entirely of petrol.

  I walked away from Jimbo-Dror and toward his window to look at the stubby, sea-lapped orange legs of the nearby oil platforms and the skeletal derricks idling above them.

  “Empty,” he said.

  “But what about Figa-6?”

  “Let me give you the big picture,” the Mossadnik said. “There are supposed to be fifty billion barrels of oil reserves in the Absurdi sector of the Caspian. In truth, there isn’t one percent of that left. Figa-6 will run out by the end of the year. It doesn’t make sense to start pumping it. The Absurdis have been lying to the investors from the start. Most of their hydrocarbon reserves were tapped out during Soviet times.”

  “But how can that be?” I said. “What about the KBR luau? What about the pipeline to Europe? Wasn’t that the reason for this whole Sevo-Svanï war? Wasn’t that why they shot down Georgi Kanuk’s plane?”

  “Georgi Kanuk’s plane was never shot down,” Dror said. “The old man’s living in a villa near Zurich, quite nicely, from what I’ve heard. Kellogg, Brown and Root bribed him with two-point-four million dollars and gave Nanabragov the same. And that was just a down payment. There was supposed to be plenty more once the LOGCAP contract got started.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When they realized the oil was almost finished, Kanuk and Nanabragov needed something else. The sturgeon’s nearly extinct, and the only thing this country grows is grapes. Awful grapes. Now, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, they understood they’d been taken for a ride, and they started cutting back on what was left of production, but they did it slowly, so as not to scare off their shareholders. Just look at all those fancy skyscrapers they built.” The Israeli gestured toward the extinguished skyline. “But then the Absurdis and their friends at Golly Burton had a better idea. Let’s get a massive U.S. Army presence in here. We’ll do support services, build marble outhouses, overcharge the hell out of the Department of Defense, ‘cost plus’ all the way, and all we have to do is get our oil services staff out and replace them with our military support people.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Just shut up and listen. So now all KBR, Kanuk, and Nanabragov need is a reason for the American army to pull in. This place is strategically located. Iran is next door. What about an air force base? Well, you’ve got a problem. The Russians still see Absurdistan as their backyard. They might get mad. And anyway, how much can you skim off a little base like that? You need something big. You need a huge U.S. Army presence doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work. Now, KBR was set to score a ten-year LOGCAP contract starting in 2002, but what good is all that if there’s no heart-wrenching genocide around the corner? ‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

  I took a deep breath. There was a bottle of Hennessy on the counter, and I helped myself without asking. Jimbo-Dror motioned for a glass as well. “And so,” he continued after a taste of the cognac, “the so-called civil war began. Only two things went wrong. The war got completely out of hand. These glue-sniffing True Footrest Posses really started blowing the crap out of the place, which may be good for a civilian engineering outfit like Bechtel, but it scares away all the Western workers, and more importantly, it scares away the Department of Defense. And then something much worse happened. Nobody cared.”

  “You mean the Western media.”

  “I mean the American people. See, we knew this was going to happen. We did a focus group—”

  “The Mossad does focus groups?”

  “We’re open to all kinds of methodologies. And we’re very interested in how genocides are perceived by the American electorate. So we did a focus group in suburban Maryland. Right away I knew KBR was in trouble. We do a sample space of three troubled countries: Congo, Indonesia, and Absurdsvanï. Okay, first part. We give these American schmendricks a map of the world and say, ‘Point to the general area where you think Congo is located.’ Nineteen percent point to the continent of Africa. Another twenty-three percent point to either India or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa, India, and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the bottom. So, for our purposes, forty-two percent of respondents sort of know where Congo is.

  “Then we do Indonesia. Eight percent get the actual country. Another eight percent hit the Philippines. Fourteen percent go for New Zealand. A surprising nine percent aim for the Canadian Maritimes. We count all those as correct answers, because the respondents essentially know that Indonesia is an archipelago or at least that there are islands involved.

  “Finally we do Absurdistan. Nobody gets it right. We start offering clues. ‘It’s near Iran,’ we say. Huh? ‘It’s on the Caspian.’ Whuh? ‘Alexandre Dumas wrote about it after he visited Russia.’ Yuh? Complete disaster. We show pictures of Absurdis, Congolese, and Indonesians at play, picking fruits, frying goats, and so on. More problems. The Congolese are clearly black, so that strikes a chord with all the respondents. Like them or not, you got plenty of blacks in America. The Indonesians have funny eyes, so they’re Asian. Probably work hard and raise dutiful children. Good for them. Then you get the Absurdis. They’re sort of dark, but not really black. They look a little Indonesian, but they’ve got round eyes. Are they Arabs? Italians? Persians? We finally settle on ‘taller Mexicans,’ which is another way of saying we’re fucked.

  “Then we really let the cat out of the bag. We tell them, ‘Look, there’s a genocide happening, and the U.S. can invade one of the following ten countries.’ We give them a list of countries, real and imaginary. We’ve got Djibouti, Yolanda, Costa Rica, Eastern Tuchusland, Absurdsvanï, and so forth. Guess what came in dead last, even behind the reviled Homoslavia? That’s right. See, the way ‘Absurdsvanï’ is pronounced and spelled, it’s utterly impossible for an American to feel anything for it. You have to be able to use a country as a child�
�s first name to get anywhere. Rwanda Jones. Somalia Cohen. Timor Jackson. Bosnia Lewis-Wright. And then you got this Republika Absurdsvanï. Hopeless.

  “So I call my friend Dick Cheney—he was still CEO of Halliburton back then—and I say, ‘Hamoodi, this isn’t going to work. This country’s a complete zero. You can maybe do Iraq in a few years, depending on who wins the U.S. election, or blow up Panama one more time, but stay the hell out of the Caspian.’ But Cheney, you know, he doesn’t listen to no one. It’s ‘LOGCAP this’ and ‘LOGCAP that.’ Well, look out the window! There’s LOGCAP for you!”

  I took another sip of cognac. I looked out the window at the sterile Figa-6 oil fields and the false industrial sunset breaking out across the water. I scratched myself in a place where I had no itch, somewhere between my lower stomach and infinity. And then I understood. I’d been had. Utterly. Completely. They’d used me. Taken advantage of me. Sized me up. Known right away that they had their man. If “man” is the right word.

  “Do you think…” I started to say. “Do you think Nana Nanabragovna knew about this all along?” But before the Israeli could answer, I was already out the door, heaving myself down the pockmarked esplanade toward the Lady with Lapdog.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have talked to this Jimbo-Dror,” Mr. Nanabragov said, jerking severely, one hand angrily pulling on the gray tuft of hair between his still-muscular tits. A dead sheep was being hoisted from a newly docked speedboat and into the waiting arms of the Lady with Lapdog staff. It was nearly dinnertime at the Lapdog, and the menu promised mutton. “This Jew seems to be a propagandist for the other side.”

  “Which other side?” I said.

  “Who knows?” Nanabragov shrugged. “Some other side. Everyone has always been against us. The Russians. The Armenians. The Iranians. The Turks. Look who we’re surrounded by. We have no friends here. We thought maybe Israel would like us and then the American public would be our friends. That’s why we reached out to you.”