Absurdistan Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1 The Night in Question

  2 Dedications

  3 Who Killed Beloved Papa?

  4 Rouenna

  5 Among the Merry Mourners

  6 Beloved Papa Is Lowered into the Ground

  7 Rouenna in Russia

  8 Only Therapy Can Save Vainberg Now

  9 One Day in the Life of Misha Borisovich

  10 [email protected]

  11 Lyuba Vainberg Invites Me to Tea

  12 Everything Has Its Limits

  13 Misha the Bear Takes to the Air

  14 The Norway of the Caspian

  15 Golly Burton, Golly Burton

  16 Gimme Freedom!

  17 King Leopold’s Belgian Congo

  18 To the Hyatt Station

  19 My Gray Reptile Heart

  20 The American Gambit

  21 The School of Gentle Persuasion

  22 My Nana

  23 The Sevo Vatican

  24 Why the Sevo and Svanï Don’t Get Along

  25 A Sturgeon for Misha

  26 Food, Decor, Service

  27 The Men from SCROD

  28 Dead Democrats

  29 Bad Manservant

  30 A Sophisticate and a Melancholic No Longer

  31 The KBR Luau

  32 The Commissar of Multicultural Affairs

  33 Ideas Away

  34 The Situation Worries Me

  35 A Modest Proposal

  36 Comidas Criollas

  37 The End

  38 My Mother Will Be Your Mother

  39 Living in Shit

  40 Talking to Israel

  41 Birds of Prey

  42 Saltines and Fresca

  43 The Faith of My Fathers

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Gary Shteyngart

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Where I’m Calling From

  This is a book about love. The next 338 pages are dedicated with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth to my Beloved Papa, to the city of New York, to my sweet impoverished girlfriend in the South Bronx, and to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

  This is also a book about too much love. It’s a book about being had. Let me say that right away: I’ve been had. They used me. Took advantage of me. Sized me up. Knew right away that they had their man. If “man” is the right word.

  Maybe this whole being-had deal is genetic. I’m thinking of my grandmother here. An ardent Stalinist and faithful contributor to Leningrad Pravda until Alzheimer’s took what was left of her senses, she penned the famous allegory of Stalin the Mountain Eagle swooping down the valley to pick off three imperialist badgers representing Britain, America, and France, their measly bodies torn to shreds in the grasp of the generalissimo’s bloody talons. There’s a picture of me as an infant crawling over Grandma’s lap. I’m drooling on her. She’s drooling on me. The year is 1972, and we both look absolutely demented. Well, look at me now, Grandma. Look at my missing teeth and dented lower stomach; look at what they did to my heart, that bruised kilogram of fat hanging off my breastbone. When it comes to being torn to shreds in the twenty-first century, I am the fourth badger.

  I’m writing this from Davidovo, a small village populated entirely by the so-called Mountain Jews near the northern frontier of the former Soviet republic of Absurdsvanï. Ah, the Mountain Jews. In their hilly isolation and single-minded devotion to clan and Yahweh, they seem to me prehistoric, premammalian even, like some clever miniature dinosaur that once schlepped across the earth, the Haimosaurus rex.

  It’s early September. The sky is an unwavering blue, its blankness and infinity reminding me, for some reason, that we are on a small round planet inching its way through a terrifying void. Roosting atop the ample redbrick manses, the village’s satellite dishes point toward the surrounding mountains, whose peaks are crowned with alpine white. Soft late-summer breezes minister to my wounds, and even the occasional stray dog wandering down the street harbors a satiated, peaceable demeanor, as if tomorrow it will emigrate to Switzerland.

  The villagers have gathered around me, the dried-out senior citizens, the oily teenagers, the heavy local gangsters with Soviet prison tattoos on their fingers (former friends of my Beloved Papa), even the confused one-eyed octogenarian rabbi who is now crying on my shoulder, whispering in his bad Russian about what an honor it is to have an important Jew like me in his village, how he would like to feed me spinach pancakes and roasted lamb, find me a good local wife who would go down on me, pump up my stomach like a beach ball in need of air.

  I’m a deeply secular Jew who finds no comfort in either nationalism or religion. But I can’t help feeling comfortable among this strange offshoot of my race. The Mountain Jews coddle and cosset me; their hospitality is overwhelming; their spinach is succulent and soaks up their garlic and freshly churned butter.

  And yet I yearn to take to the air.

  To soar across the globe.

  To land at the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse, where she is waiting for me.

  My Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Dr. Levine, has almost disabused me of the idea that I can fly. “Let’s keep our feet on the ground,” he likes to say. “Let’s stick to what’s actually possible.” Wise words, Doctor, but maybe you’re not quite hearing me.

  I don’t think I can fly like a graceful bird or like a rich American superhero. I think I can fly the way I do everything else—in fits and starts, with gravity constantly trying to thrash me against the narrow black band of the horizon, with sharp rocks scraping against my tits and stomachs, with rivers filling my mouth with mossy water and deserts plying my pockets with sand, with every hard-won ascent brokered by the possibility of a sharp fall into nothingness. I’m doing it now, Doctor. I’m soaring away from the ancient rabbi clinging warmly to the collar of my tracksuit, over the village’s leafy vegetables and preroasted lambs, over the green-dappled overhang of two colliding mountain ranges that keep the prehistoric Mountain Jews safe from the distressing Moslems and Christians around them, over flattened Chechnya and pockmarked Sarajevo, over hydroelectric dams and the empty spirit world, over Europe, that gorgeous polis on the hill, a blue starry flag atop its fortress walls, over the frozen deadly calm of the Atlantic which would like nothing better than to drown me once and for all, over and over and over and finally toward and toward and toward, toward the tip of the slender island…

  I am flying northward toward the woman of my dreams. I’m staying close to the ground, just like you said, Doctor. I’m trying to make out individual shapes and places. I’m trying to piece my life together. Now I can spot the Pakistani place on Church Street where I cleaned out the entire kitchen, drowning myself in ginger and sour mangoes, spicy lentils and cauliflower, as the gathered taxi drivers cheered me along, broadcasting news of my gluttony to their relatives in Lahore. Now I am over the little skyline that has gathered to the east of Madison Park, the kilometer-high replica of St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice, the golden tip of the New York Life Building, these stone symphonies, these modernist arrangements the Americans must have carved out from rocks the size of moons, these last stabs at godless immortality. Now I am above the clinic on Twenty-fourth Street, where a social worker once told me I had tested negative for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, forcing me into the bathroom to cry guiltily over the skinny, beautiful boys whose scared glances I had deflected in the waiting room. Now I am over the dense greenery of Central Park, tracing the shadows cast by young matrons walking their bite-sized Oriental dogs toward the communal redemption of the Great Lawn. The murky Harlem River flies past me; I skirt the silvery t
op of the slowly chugging IRT train and continue northeast, my body tired and limp, begging for ground fall.

  I am over the South Bronx now, no longer sure if I am soaring or hitting the tarmac at Olympic speed. My girlfriend’s world reaches out and envelops me. I am privy to the relentless truths of Tremont Avenue—where, according to the graceful loop of graffito, BEBO always LOVES LARA, where the neon storefront of Brave Fried Chicken begs me to sample its greasy-sweet aromas, where the Adonai Beauty Salon threatens to take my limp curly hairdo and turn it upward, set it aflame like Liberty’s orange torch.

  I pass like a fat beam of light through dollar stores selling T-shirts from the eighties and fake Rocawear sweatpants, through the brown hulks of housing projects warning OPERATION CLEAN HALLS and TRESPASSERS SUBJECT TO ARREST, over the heads of boys in gang bandannas and hairnets jousting with one another astride their monster bikes, over the three-year-old Dominican girls in tank tops and fake diamond earrings, over the tidy front yard where the weeping brown Virgin is perpetually stroking the rosary round her blushing neck.

  On the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse Avenue, on a brick housing-project stoop riddled with stray cheese puffs and red licorice sticks, my girl has draped her naked lap with Hunter College textbooks. I plow straight into the bounty of her caramelized summertime breasts, both covered by a tight yellow tee that informs me in chunky uppercase script that G IS FOR GANGSTA. And as I cover her with kisses, as the sweat of my transatlantic flight soaks her in my own brand of salt and molasses, I am struck stupid by my love for her and my grief for nearly everything else. Grief for my Beloved Papa, the real “gangsta” in my life. Grief for Russia, the distant land of my birth, and for Absurdistan, where the calendar will never pass the second week of September 2001.

  This is a book about love. But it’s also a book about geography. The South Bronx may be low on signage, but everywhere I look, I see the helpful arrows declaring YOU ARE HERE.

  I Am Here.

  I Am Here next to the woman I love. The city rushes out to locate and affirm me.

  How can I be so fortunate?

  Sometimes I can’t believe that I am still alive.

  1

  The Night in Question

  June 15, 2001

  I am Misha Borisovich Vainberg, age thirty, a grossly overweight man with small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the most distinguished breed of parrot, and lips so delicate you would want to wipe them with the naked back of your hand.

  For many of my last years, I have lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, neither by choice nor by desire. The City of the Czars, the Venice of the North, Russia’s cultural capital…forget all that. By the year 2001, our St. Leninsburg has taken on the appearance of a phantasmagoric third-world city, our neoclassical buildings sinking into the crap-choked canals, bizarre peasant huts fashioned out of corrugated metal and plywood colonizing the broad avenues with their capitalist iconography (cigarette ads featuring an American football player catching a hamburger with a baseball mitt), and what is worst of all, our intelligent, depressive citizenry has been replaced by a new race of mutants dressed in studied imitation of the West, young women in tight Lycra, their scooped-up little breasts pointing at once to New York and Shanghai, with men in fake black Calvin Klein jeans hanging limply around their caved-in asses.

  The good news is that when you’re an incorrigible fatso like me—325 pounds at last count—and the son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, all of St. Leninsburg rushes out to service you: the drawbridges lower themselves as you advance, and the pretty palaces line up alongside the canal banks, thrusting their busty friezes in your face. You are blessed with the rarest treasure to be found in this mineral-rich land. You are blessed with respect.

  On the night of June 15 in the catastrophic year 2001, I was getting plenty of respect from my friends at a restaurant called the Home of the Russian Fisherman on Krestovskiy Island, one of the verdant islands caught in the delta of the Neva River. Krestovskiy is where we rich people pretend to be living in a kind of post-Soviet Switzerland, trudging along the manicured bike paths built ’round our kottedzhes and town khauses, and filling our lungs with parcels of atmosphere seemingly imported from the Alps.

  The Fisherman’s gimmick is that you catch your own fish out of a man-made lake, and then for about US$50 per kilo, the kitchen staff will smoke it for you or bake it on coals. On what the police would later call “the night in question,” we were standing around the Spawning Salmon pontoon, yelling at our servants, drinking down carafes of green California Riesling, our Nokia mobilniki ringing with the social urgency that comes only when the White Nights strangle the nighttime, when the inhabitants of our ruined city are kept permanently awake by the pink afterglow of the northern sun, when the best you can do is drink your friends into the morning.

  Let me tell you something: without good friends, you might as well drown yourself in Russia. After decades of listening to the familial agitprop of our parents (“We will die for you!” they sing), after surviving the criminal closeness of the Russian family (“Don’t leave us!” they plead), after the crass socialization foisted upon us by our teachers and factory directors (“We will staple your circumcised khui to the wall!” they threaten), all that’s left is that toast between two failed friends in some stinking outdoor beer kiosk.

  “To your health, Misha Borisovich.”

  “To your success, Dimitry Ivanovich.”

  “To the army, the air force, and the whole Soviet fleet…Drink to the bottom!”

  I’m a modest person bent on privacy and lonely sadness, so I have very few friends. My best buddy in Russia is a former American I like to call Alyosha-Bob. Born Robert Lipshitz in the northern reaches of New York State, this little bald eagle (not a single hair on his dome by age twenty-five) flew to St. Leninsburg eight years ago and was transformed, by dint of alcoholism and inertia, into a successful Russian biznesman renamed Alyosha, the owner of ExcessHollywood, a riotously profitable DVD import-export business, and the swain of Svetlana, a young Petersburg hottie. In addition to being bald, Alyosha-Bob has a pinched face ending in a reddish goatee, wet blue eyes that fool you with their near-tears, and enormous flounder lips cleansed hourly by vodka. A skinhead on the metro once described him as a gnussniy zhid, or a “vile-looking Yid,” and I think most of the populace sees him that way. I certainly did when I first met him as a fellow undergraduate at Accidental College in the American Midwest a decade ago.

  Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as the Gentlemen Who Like to Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old-school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with “Ass-N-Titties” by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre.

  On the night in question, I got the action started with a Detroit ditty I enjoy on summer days:

  Aw, shit

  Heah I come

  Shut yo mouf

  And bite yo tongue.

  Alyosha-Bob, in his torn Helmut Lang slacks and Accidental College sweatshirt, picked up the tune:

  Aw, girl,

  You think you bad?

  Let me see you

  Bounce dat ass.

  Our melodies rang out over the Russian Fisherman’s four pontoons (Spawning Salmon, Imperial Sturgeon, Capricious Trout, and Sweet Little Butterfish), over this whole tiny man-made lake, whatever the hell it’s called (Dollar Lake? Euro Pond?), over the complimentary-valet-parking-lot where one of the oafish employees just dented my new Land Rover.

  Heah come dat bitch

  From round de way

  Box my putz

  Like Cassius Clay.

  “Sing it, Snack Daddy!” Alyosha-Bob cheered me on, using my Accidental College nickname.

  My name is Vainberg

  I like ho’s

  Sniff ’em o
ut

  Wid my Hebrew nose

  Pump that shit

  From ’round the back

  Big-booty ho

  Ack ack ack

  This being Russia, a nation of busybody peasants thrust into an awkward modernity, some idiot will always endeavor to spoil your good fun. And so the neighboring biznesman, a sunburned midlevel killer standing next to his pasty girlfriend from some cow-filled province, starts in with “Now, fellows, why do you have to sing like African exchange students? You both look so cultured”—in other words, like vile-looking Yids—“why don’t you declaim some Pushkin instead? Didn’t he have some nice verses about the White Nights? That would be very seasonal.”

  “Hey, if Pushkin were alive today, he’d be a rapper,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Alyosha-Bob said. “He’d be M.C. Push.”

  “Fight the power!” I said in English.

  Our Pushkin-loving friend stared at us. This is what happens when you don’t learn English, by the way. You’re always at a loss for words. “God help you children,” he finally said, taking his lady friend by one diminutive arm and guiding her over to the other side of the pontoon.

  Children? Was he talking about us? What would an Ice Cube or an Ice-T do in this situation? I reached for my mobilnik, ready to dial my Park Avenue analyst, Dr. Levine, to tell him that once again I had been insulted and injured, that once again I had been undermined by a fellow Russian.

  And then I heard my manservant, Timofey, ringing his special hand bell. The mobilnik fell out of my hand, the Pushkin lover and his girlfriend disappeared from the pontoon, the pontoon itself floated off into another dimension, even Dr. Levine and his soft American ministrations were reduced to a distant hum.

  It was feeding time.

  With a low bow, manservant Timofey presented me with a tray of blackened sturgeon kebabs and a carafe of Black Label. I fell down on a hard plastic chair that twisted and torqued beneath my weight like a piece of modern sculpture. I bent over the sturgeon, sniffing it with closed eyes as if offering a silent prayer. My feet were locked together, my ankles grinding into each other with expectant anxiety. I prepared for my meal in the usual fashion: fork in my left hand; my dominant right clenched into a fist on my lap, ready to punch anyone who dared take away my food.