Good morning, respected passenger!
Today is Monday, September 10, 2001
We are passing through northern Absurdsvanï, where today’s temperature will be a maximum of 28 degrees Celsius, with sunny conditions prevailing along the Staraushanski Valley and into the Griboedov mountain range.
Lunch in the bar car will be a caviar sampler with blini and just-picked country leeks followed by elderberry-cured roast beef (a northern Absurdi specialty) with fingerling potatoes and cavalo nero.
We will be arriving at the Red Bridge border checkpoint at 15:00 o’clock. Please have your passports ready.
My name is Oksana Petrovna, I am proud to work on this train, and I am here only just for you!
“Such a nice girl, this Oksana,” I said to Nana. “She’s even more professional than that poor Larry Zartarian.” I winced at the thought of the Hyatt manager and his mother, still trapped beneath my bed at the Intourist Hotel.
“She’s a slut,” Nana corrected me, pouring three creams into my coffee, which is how I took it.
I raised the shades. What a difference a night made! The oily sea-desert had been replaced by a near-alpine vista. Fields of yellow late-summer grass (or was it really hay in disguise?) rolled down the hills. Rills fed brooks, which nurtured distant lakes, which in turn drank from the whitecapped mountains straddling the horizon. A bird that might have been an eagle or a pigeon (my eyesight is not so strong) circled above the distant skyline of these promontories. And something was mercifully absent from this unfurling of nature’s green, blue, and white tricolor, something beaten and raw, scorched and unkempt, vulgar and blackened with rot. “Where are the people?” I asked Nana. “Why don’t they come eat all these eagles and hay instead of dying in the desert?”
“The people have been moving off the mountain for decades,” Nana said. “They follow the oil.”
“But there’s no oil left,” I said. “Right, Nana? The whole war was cooked up by your papa and Golly Burton because they ran out of oil. Isn’t that true?”
Nana shrugged. “What do I know?” she said. “I’m just a senior at NYU. You gotta try this excellent honey! It’s soooo good. And not too sweet. Taste the difference?”
I tasted it, all right. “That is really great,” I said. “Where does it come from?” We started turning over the honeypot, trying to find a label. “Ah, it’s from Turkey!”
As I was finishing up the croissants, the train came to a halt. “Yum, yum, yum,” I said, glancing out the window. Some vendors had gathered beneath my window, and the AmEx soldiers were jumping off the roof to bargain with them. The country folk had set up a wooden bench piled with cartons of Newport Lights, spinach leaves, and fresh cherries. “The lunch menu didn’t say anything about dessert,” I said to Nana. “Maybe I should buy some cherries.”
The sound of a local tongue brushed up against my window with gravelly insistence. Already voices were being raised in anger even as U.S. dollars changed hands along with cigarettes and spinach. It was then that I noticed a strange phenomenon—the vendors had little blue and white circles pinned to their dark heads. Yarmulkes? “Nana,” I said, “are these the Mountain—”
The door to our cabin slammed open. A presence almost as large as my own took up the space between Nana and me, immediately overturning our breakfast table. “Vainberg!” the creature barked. “Oh, thank God I’ve found you! You have to get off the train now! I’m a friend of your late father’s. Avram.”
I backed off into a corner and raised my hands in protest. Avram? My father? Not again! “What’s this about?” I said weakly.
The man was of late middle age, dressed in a leather cap, along with designer shirt and pants that his wife had nicely matched to his proportions. He had a pitiful and worried mien, yet the rest of his appearance was strong, sweaty, and powerful. He was clearly a Jew. And such a Jew! A prehistoric Jew, as I’ve said before, a Haimosaurus rex with the flabby little hands, the big roaring mouth, the broad muscular legs and sensual hindquarters. So this is how we all began, I thought to myself. “Mr. Vainberg,” the Jewish dinosaur was saying, “they will kill you at the border. They will take Miss Nana back to her father. We have no time. You must get off the train without delay.”
“Oh, hell,” Nana said. “My father must have found out I left with you. He probably ordered the border guards to kill you in revenge.”
“Not probably. Exactly so!” the intruder cried. “I’m a Mountain Jew, Mr. Vainberg. There was a Mossad man, a Dror or a Jimmy, who came through here three days ago, and he warned us that you were coming and that there would be trouble if the Nanabragov girl was with you. We’ve set up a diversion outside with the American Express hooligans. We must get you off the train. These thugs will soon tire of bargaining for cherries, and then they’re liable to shoot us all.”
“The American Express train crew works for Nana’s father?” I said.
“Everyone works for Nana’s father in the end.”
The particulars were starting to settle around my broad shoulders. Goddammit. Another pogrom. There would be no caviar for lunch. There would be no hypoallergenic lovemaking. “Wait!” I said to Avram. “My manservant is bedding down in the service quarters. I must get him, or he’ll get the bullet at the border.”
The dinosaur tapped on his watch. “We haven’t the time.”
“He’s Jewish,” I lied.
“Your manservant? Jewish?”
I was running down the empty corridor, petite French doors swinging aside in anticipation of my arrival. Finally I stumbled upon a beautiful Russian girl rouging her considerable cheeks. This must have been the very Oksana Petrovna who had left us that thoughtful notecard. True to Nana’s words, there was something sluttish in the girl’s comportment. “Miss,” I said in English. “I need my manservant to help make my toilet. Rouse him from his slumber. And quickly!”
The girl hurriedly snapped shut her compact case, leaving one freckled cheek bare of pomade. “I am here only just for you!” she cried as she leaped into a nearby cabin, dragging out my befuddled Timofey by his ear. I thanked her, grabbed Timofey by the ear myself, and yanked him to the passenger car.
Avram had unlatched a side door and was already scurrying down with my luggage. As Nana approached with her 718 cosmetics bags, the Mountain Jew put a hand out in front of her breasts. “I know she’s your girlfriend,” he said to me, “but if we take her off the train, there might be trouble for our community. What’s left of the SCROD might attack our village. It might not be good for the Jews.”
“She’s my Nana, and she goes with me,” I said, knocking back Avram’s hand. He sighed wearily, prehistorically, and followed us out onto the golden grass. We ran down the slope of a nearby hill falling away from the railroad tracks, our urban feet struggling to make sense of the uneven and uncemented terrain. “Aif!” I cried as a mushy patch of earth nearly sent my ankle in a different direction from the rest of me. Timofey grabbed me before that fatal moment and started pushing my body with a coarse countryside vitality. “Very good, Tima,” I huffed. “In nature, I will be your manservant. Good boy.”
“Past those bushes,” the Mountain Jew instructed. Nana cried out from the sting of branches and twigs; I grabbed her behind, hoping to shield myself from the worst of the thicket’s ravages. Having cleared this chamber of horrors, we emerged onto a cool dirt path beneath a canopy of oaks. A small Daewoo sedan awaited us. The driver was a tall, skinny youth snug beneath a helmet of greasy hair. “My son, Yitzhak,” the Mountain Jew said. “My one and only. Well, drive already, you idiot!”
Yitzhak rumbled down the dirt road with teenage abandon. Nana was trying to stanch a bloody cut to her forehead, Timofey was picking brambles and berries out of my hair, and all of us were heaving with exhaustion and bewilderment. I looked back at the barely visible railroad tracks upon which the AmEx train was still idling, wishing the world were a better place.
We lapsed into a moody silence, our eyes on the road before us,
never on one another. “Are you fleeing to Israel?” Yitzhak asked me in the same accented, barely comprehensible Russian his father spoke.
“I’m going to Brussels,” I said. “Nana is flying to New York.”
“New York!” Yitzhak said. “It is the city of my dreams.”
“Really?” I said. “What a good kid you are.”
“Forget about it,” Avram said. “We have relatives in Haifa. You want to go somewhere? Go visit them. A free bed you’ll have.”
“You’ll love New York,” I said. “It’s like having the whole world on one small island.”
“I understand you can play basketball with blacks on the street,” Yitzhak said.
“Very true,” I said. “I like the way your mind works, young man.”
“Don’t encourage his stupid dreams,” the Mountain Jew said. “Several times it has happened to us—the young people leave for L.A. or Brooklyn, they marry an outsider, and after a few years they won’t come home for Pesach seder. They won’t even fly back to piss on their grandfathers’ graves. But when things go bad with their gentile wives or with their half-breed children, they run back to us. ‘Papa, papochka, what have I done? I’ve forsaken my people.’ And we welcome them back, and kiss them, and love them like they haven’t stabbed us through the heart. Because for us it’s simple. If you’re a Jew, even if you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic, you will always find a home here.”
“Thank you for saving us,” Nana said, putting her hand on Avram’s shoulder. “You’ve risked your own lives. We won’t soon forget your kindness.”
Avram shrugged her off. “Well, who else would do it?” he said. “The Mossad man came and said, ‘There’s a Jew in danger.’ We knew exactly what to do. A Jew in danger, so let’s save him. This is how our minds work.”
I sighed wearily. An anger was developing inside me, the anger of a man with a growing debt. I tried to position my face in the rearview mirror so that I could smile in encouragement to the nice Yitzhak. His curious brown face smiled back at me. We were passing a ramshackle village populated solely by stray dogs and scruffy chickens past childbearing age, a barber sitting lifelessly by his shack, the word “barber” misspelled in English and Russian and possibly a third language. We noticed the paisley domes of three similar mosques and the sharp bayonets of their minarets aiming at the innocent sky. “Do you get along with the Moslems?” Nana asked in her new supplicant’s voice. “You live in such close proximity.”
“We’re fine with them,” Avram said, doffing his leather cap and fixing his comb-over. “They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them. They’re not very bright, that’s for certain. Just look at how they live. These houses haven’t been painted in decades. Is that supposed to be a market? Just turnips and radishes and nothing imported? Wait until you see our village.”
“Now, Avram—” I started to say sharply, but Nana was already pressing her elbow into my hide.
“Don’t you dare, Misha,” she whispered in English. “Don’t you realize what he’s done for us?”
“What he’s done for me,” I whispered back. “I’m the Jew.”
“Who cares why he did it. I was gonna get sent back to my father. I was going to miss another semester at NYU. So shut it, willya?”
We were driving down a steep gravel path lined with gilded Soviet statues of supple female volleyball players and fierce badminton gods groaning in midswing. “They were going to build an Olympic training center here,” Yitzhak said. “But someone stole all the money.”
“Yeah, someone,” I murmured to myself. The gravel path ended in a smarmy river of unknown provenance. Beyond it lay a clump of newly built towers capped by silver spires and satellite dishes, along with enormous redbrick manses, some surrounded by miniature cranes hoisting fourth and fifth stories or the gleaming skylights that covered them, a kind of storybook village with a relentless microwave sheen.
“Our humble hamlet, Davidovo,” Avram said. “Our little paradise.”
After the desolation of the Moslem town, we found ourselves on a modern thoroughfare lined with crowded storefronts labeled HOUSE OF FASHION and PALACE OF HAPPINESS and 24 HOUR INTERNET CLUB, their parking lots gridlocked with Toyotas and Land Rovers. In a nearby residential area, old people, withered and Oriental-seeming, sat impassively on wood-carved front porches, their bodies slowly drying out in the sun while children of every age scrambled around them in a flurry of tanned legs and glistening Versace belt buckles. “Where are all the grown-ups?” Nana asked.
“Trading,” Avram said. “In Israel or in Moscow. All kinds of goods and household products. We import half the things you find in Svanï City. We even have our own 718 perfume shop.”
“So you’re a merchant people,” I said, my words sour with distaste.
We were coming up to the village square, at which point I squinted in disbelief. A sunlit replica of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem took up an entire side of the square, green moss authentically growing from between the cracks in the equally genuine brickwork, a set of Israeli date palms arrayed in front.
“And what the hell are those?” Nana said. She was pointing at two statues made out of some kind of fiberglass, one a strange mishmash of three men dancing over what looked like a broken airplane and the other of a man with a torch holding on to his belly, as if stricken with gas.
“That’s Sakha the Democrat holding the torch of freedom after being shot at the Hyatt,” Yitzhak explained. “And the other one is Georgi Kanuk ascending to heaven after his plane was shot down, with his son Debil and Alexandre Dumas holding on to his legs, trying to keep him here on earth. See, if any renegade Sevo or Svanï gangs attack us, we’re good either way.”
“And here comes the welcoming committee,” Avram said. We were surrounded by a bunch of playful children. A little kid in a too-large yarmulke and an acid-washed T-shirt that said NAUGHTY 4EVER ran up to the car and started knocking on my door.
“Vainberg! Vainberg! Vainberg!” he shouted.
“Help me out of the car, young man,” I said. “There’s a dollar in it for you.” As the child’s prepubescent compatriots made their dervish circles around me while shouting my family name, I ambulated toward a gaggle of men smoking fiercely in the shadow of the Wailing Wall. Upon inspection, half of them were no more than teenagers, their heads draped in silken white yarmulkes, their uncombed black hair reaching down to their eyes, their gangly bodies slack from village life. “Is that your girlfriend?” one of them asked, pointing to Nana, bouncing ambivalently toward us. “Is she Jewish?”
“What, are you crazy?” I cried. “That’s Nana Nanabragovna!”
“We can get you a nice local girl,” another recommended. “A Mountain Jew. Pretty like Queen Esther, sexy like Madonna. After you marry her, she’ll do all kinds of things. Half of them on her knees.”
“Dirty little kids.” I sniffed. “What do I care for religion? All women are equally good on their knees.”
“Suit yourself,” the teens replied, parting deferentially before an old man who was leaning against Avram, his dark face drowning in the white fuzz of a beard gone awry; one of his eyes was forever closed to the world, the other blinking a bit too insistently, his mouth producing squirts of slobber and happiness with the speed of an American soda fountain. “Vaaaainberg,” he crooned.
“This is our rabbi,” Avram said. “He wants to tell you something.”
The rabbi gently spat at me for a few seconds in some incomprehensible local patter. “Speak in Russian, grandfather,” Avram said. “He doesn’t know our tongue.”
“Whooo,” the rabbi said, confused. He rubbed the yellowing sponge that covered his brain and made an effort at the Russian language. “Your fardur woooze a great persons,” he said. “A great persons. He help us get built this wall. Looka how big.”
“My father helped build this wall?”
“Give us moneys for brick. Buy palm from Askhelon. No problem. He hate Arabs. So we make plaque.”
&nb
sp; One of the smoking men by the wall moved aside and tapped an index finger at a handsome brown sign upon which I could immediately discern the eagle swoop of my father’s strong nose, the unhappy hieroglyphics that the artist had shaped into his left eye, the bramble of crosshatching that outlined the joy and sarcasm of his thick lower lip. TO BORIS ISAAKOVICH VAINBERG, the plaque read. KING OF ST. PETERSBURG, DEFENDER OF ISRAEL, FRIEND TO THE MOUNTAIN JEWS. And below that, a quote from my father, in English: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
The smoker extended his hand. I noticed his fingers were covered with faded blue-green tattoos, testifying to many lengthy Soviet prison terms. “I’m Moshe,” he said. “I spent many years with your fardur in the Big House. To us Jews inside, he was like our fardur, too. He was always love you, Misha. He talk only about you. He was your first lover. And nobody will love you like that never again.”
I sighed. I was feeling wobbly and teary and overcome. To find my father’s face looking down at me in this antediluvian outpost of Hebraity…Look, Papa. Look how much weight I’ve shed in the last few weeks! Look how much we resemble each other now in profile. There’s nothing of my mommy left in me anymore. I’m all you now, Papa. I wanted to trace the outline of his face with my finger but was intercepted by several of the middle-aged Jews, who also wanted to shake my hands and tell me in their broken Russian what gay, thoughtful times they shared with my Beloved Papa, both inside and outside the Big House, and how, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, they worked together to make “bigger and bigger moneys day after day.”
We heard a strange teakettle sound from the rabbi, the rumble of phlegm trying to pass through a nose bent by age. “He’s crying,” Avram explained. “He’s crying because he’s honored to see such an important Jew here in his village. There, grandfather. It’s all right now. Soon everything will pass. Don’t cry.”
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