Absurdistan: A Novel Read online

  "I need you to do something for me, Mishka," Papa said, wiping his eyes.

  I sighed again, slipping the salami peel into my mouth with my free hand. I knew what was required of me. "Don't worry, Papa, I won't eat any more," I said, "and I'll do exercises with the big ball you bought for me. I'll be thin again, I swear. And once I get to Accidental, I'll study hard how to become an American."

  "Idiot," Papa said, shaking his double-jointed nose at me. "You'll never be an American. You'll always be a Jew. How can you forget who you are? You haven't even left yet. Jew, Jew, Jew." I had heard from a distant cousin in California that one could be both an American and a Jew and even a practicing homosexual in the bargain, but I didn't argue. "I'll try to be a rich Jew," I said. "Like a Spielberg or a Bronfman."

  "That's fine," my papa said. "But there's another reason you're going to America." He produced a smudged piece of graph paper scribbled with outlandish English script. "Once you land in New York, go to this address. Some Hasids will meet you there, and they will circumcise you."

  "Papa, no!" I cried, blinking rapidly, for already the pain was clouding my eyes, the pain of having the best part of me touched and handled and peeled like an orange. Since becoming gigantic, I had gotten used to a kind of physical inviolability. No longer did the classroom bullies bang my head against the board until I was covered with chalk as they shouted, "Dandruffy Yid!" (According to Russian mythology, Jews suffer from excessive flakiness.) No one dared touch me now. Or wanted to touch me, for that matter. "I'm eighteen years old," I said. "My khui will hurt terribly if they cut it now. And I like my foreskin. It flaps."

  "Your mama wouldn't let you get circumcised when you were a little boy," Papa said. "She was afraid of how it would look to the district committee. 'Too Jewish,' they would say. 'Zionist behavior.' She was afraid of everyone except me, that woman. Always calling me

  'shit eater' in public. Always hitting me over the head with that frying pan." He looked toward the cupboard where the dreaded frying pan once lived. "Well, now you're my responsibility, popka. And what I say, you will do. That's what it means to be a man. To listen to your father."

  My hands were now shaking rhythmically along with Papa's, and we were both covered in sweat, steam rising in invisible white batches from our oily heads. I tried to focus on my father's love for me, and on my duty to him, but one question remained. "What's a Hasid?" I said.

  "That's the best kind of Jew there is," Papa said. "All he does is learn and pray all day."

  "Why don't you become a Hasid, then?" I asked him.

  "I have to work hard now," Papa said. "The more money I make, the more I can be sure no one will ever hurt you. You're my whole life, you know? Without you, I would cut my throat from one ear to the other. And all I ask you to do, Mishka, is get snipped by these Hasids. Don't you want to please me? I loved you so much when you were small and thin . . . "

  I recalled how my little body felt when encased in his, his wise brown eagle eyes eating me up, the worsted bristles of his mustache giving my cheeks a manly rash I would treasure for days. Some wags say that men spend their entire lives trying to return to their mother's womb, but I am not one of those men. The trickle of Papa's deep vodka breath against my neck, the hairy obstinate arms pressing me into his carpet-thick chest, the animal smells of survival and decay—

  this is my womb.

  • • •

  Several months later, I found myself in a livery cab, roaring through a terrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. In the Soviet Union, we were told that people of African descent—Negroes and Negresses, as we called them—were our brothers and sisters, but to the newly arriving Soviet Jews at the time, they were as frightening as armies of Cossacks billowing across the plains. I, however, fell in love with these colorful people at first blush. There was something blighted, equivocal, and downright Soviet about the sight of underemployed men and women arranged along endless stretches of broken porch-front and unmowed lawn—it seemed that, like my Soviet compatriots, they were making an entire lifestyle out of their defeat. The Oblomov inside me has always been fascinated by people who are just about ready to give up on life, and in 1990, Brooklyn was an Oblomovian paradise. Not to mention the fact that some of the young girls, already as tall and thick as baobab trees, their breasts perfectly shaped gourds that they regally carried down the street, were the most beautiful creatures I'd seen in my life. Gradually, the African neighborhood gave way to a Spanish-speaking section, equally disheveled but pleasantly coated with the smell of roasted garlic, and that in turn gave way to a promised land of my Jewish co-religionists—men bustling around with entire squirrels'

  nests on their heads, side curls flapping in the early-summer wind, velvety coats that harbored a precious summer stink. I counted six tiny boys, probably between three and eight years of age, their blond untrimmed locks making them look like infant rock stars, running around a deeply tired penguin of a woman as she pattered down the street behind a scrim of grocery bags. What the hell kind of Jewish woman has six children ? In Russia, you had one, two, maybe three if you didn't care for constant abortions and were very very promiscuous. The cab stopped in front of an old but grand house whose bulk was noticeably sinking into its front columns the way an elderly fellow sinks into his walker. A pleasant young Hasid with an intelligent expression (I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind) welcomed me in with a handshake and, upon ascertaining that I spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, began to explain to me the concept of a mitzvah, meaning "a good deed." Apparently I was about to perform a very important mitzvah. "I sure hope so, mister," I said in my burgeoning but imperfect English. "Because pain of dick-cutting must be intolerable."

  "It's not so bad," my new friend said. "And you're so big, you won't even notice it!" Upon seeing my still-frightened expression, he said, "They'll put you under for the surgery, anyway."

  "Under?" I said. "Under where? Oh, no, mister. I must go back to my hotel room immediately."

  "Come, come, come," said the Hasid, adjusting his thick glasses with a worn-out index finger. "I've got something I know you're going to like."

  I followed him into the bowels of his house with my head hung low. After the typical drabness of the one-room Soviet apartment with the bulbous refrigerator shuddering in the corner like an ICBM

  before launch, I found the Hasidic home to be a veritable explosion of color and light, especially the framed plastic pictures of Jerusalem's golden Dome of the Rock and the crushed blue pillows embroidered with cooing doves. (Later, at Accidental College, I was taught to look down on these things.) Everywhere there were books in Hebrew with beautiful golden spines, which I erroneously imagined to be translations of Chekhov and Mandelstam. The smell of buckwheat kasha and used underwear proved homey and inviting. As we progressed from the front of the house to the back, little boys ran between the tree stumps of my legs, and a young chesty woman with her head wrapped in a handkerchief popped out of a bathroom. I tried to shake her wet hand, but she ran away screaming. It was all very interesting, and I almost forgot the painful reason behind my visit.

  Then I heard a low, guttural hum, like the sound of a hundred octogenarians brooding at once. The hum gradually resolved itself into a chorus of male voices singing what sounded like: "A humus tov, a tsimmus tov, a mazel tov, a tsimmus tov, a humus tov, a mazel tov, a humus tov, a tsimmus tov, hey hey, Tisroel." Several terms I recog-nized: mazel tov is a form of congratulation, tsimmus is a dish of sugary crushed carrots, and Yisroel is a small, heavily Jewish country on the Mediterranean coast. What all these words were doing together, I couldn't begin to fathom. (Later, in fact, I found out those weren't the words to the song at all.)

  Ducking beneath a low frame, we entered the house's back annex, which was filled with young fedora-wearing men hoisting plastic cups along with slices of rye bread and pickles. I was speedily given one such cup, slapped on the back, told mazel tov!, then pointed toward an old bathtub reclining in the middle of the room on two sets of
clawed feet. "What's this?" I asked my new friend in the thick glasses.

  "A tsimmus tov, a mazel tov" he sang, urging me forward. Vodka does not have a smell, but it didn't take long for an eighteen-year-old Russian to register that the bathtub was indeed filled with that substance, along with floating bits of onion. " Now do you feel at home?" the happy Hasids shouted to me as I swigged from the plastic cup and chased the drink with a sour pickle. "A tsim- mus tov, a humus tov" they sang, the men branching their arms and kicking up their feet, their remarkably blue eyes drunkenly ablaze from behind their black getups.

  "Your father told us you might need to drink some vodka before the bris," the lead Hasid explained. "So we~decided to have a party."

  "Party? Where are the girls?" I asked. My first American joke. The Hasids laughed nervously. "Here's to your mitzvahl" one of them shouted. "Today you will enter a covenant with Hashem."

  "What is that?" I asked.

  "God," they whispered.

  I drank several cups' worth, marveling at how the onion helped improve the mixture, and yet the idea of entering into a covenant with God did not go down as easily as the 80-proof swill. What did God have to do with it? I just wanted my father to love me. "Maybe you should take me to hotel, mister," I stammered. "I give you seventeen dollars in my pocket. Please tell my papa I got cut already. He never look down there anymore, because now I am so fat." The Hasids were not buying my suggestion. "You have to think of us, too," they chanted. "This is a mitzvah for us."

  "You also getting dick cut?"

  "We're redeeming the captive."

  "Who is captive?"

  "You're a captive of the Soviet Union. We are making a Jew out of you." And with that, they helped me to several more oniony vodkas until the room fairly blared at me with its twirling diorama of top hats and flying sweat.

  "To the mitzvah mobile!" the youngest shouted in unison, and soon I was enveloped in a dozen velvety coats, snug within the outer layers of my own race, while gently herded out into the Hasidic summer night, where even the yellow-faced moon wore side curls and crickets sang in the deep melodious language of our ancestors. I was laid out sideways on a soft American van seat, several young men still plying me with vodkas that I dutifully drank, because for a Russian it is impolite to refuse. "Are we driving back to the hotel, mister?" I said as the van careened madly through the populated streets.

  "A humus tov, a mazel tov," my companions sang to me.

  "You want to redeem the captive!" I struggled in English, through my tears. "Look at me! I am captive! By you!"

  "So now you will be redeemed!" the logic followed, a cup of vodka tipped into my face.

  Eventually I was deposited into the overlit waiting room of a poor municipal hospital where Spanish babies cried for milk while my companions pressed themselves against an ad hoc wailing wall, their pale faces red with prayer. "Your father will be so proud," someone whispered into my ear. "Look what a brave man you are!"

  "Eighteen is too old for cutting the dick," I whispered back.

  "Everybody knows this."

  "Abraham was ninety-nine when he performed the bris with his own hands!"

  "But he was biblical hero."

  "And so are you! From now on, your Hebrew name will be Moshe, which means Moses."

  "I am called Misha. That is the Russian name my beautiful mother call me."

  "But you are like Moses, because you're helping lead the Soviet Jews out of Egypt." I could almost smell the plastic of the cup pressed to my lips. I drank like the teenage alcoholic I had already become. A piece of rye bread was presented to me, but I spat on it. Then I was on top of a rolling bed wearing a kind of backward dress; then the rolling bed stopped; green smocks billowed all around me; my pants were being roughly lowered by a pair of cold hands. "Papa, make them stop!" I cried in Russian.

  A mask was clasped over my face. "Count backward, Moses," an American voice told me.

  ccNyet!" I tried to say, but of course no one could hear me. The world broke in pieces and failed to reassemble. When I woke up, the men in black hats were praying over me, and I could feel nothing below the carefully tucked folds of flesh that formed my waistline. I raised my head. I was dressed in a green hospital gown, a round hole cut in its lower region, and there, between the soft pillows of my thighs, a crushed purple bug lay motionless, its chitinous shell oozing fluids, the skin-rendering pain of its demise held at bay by anesthesia. For some reason, my co-religionists thought that my vomiting was a sign of recovery, and they wiped my chin and laughed and said mazel tov and tsimmus tov and hey, hey, Tisroel. The infection set in that night.

  Who Killed Beloved Papa?

  Who did it? Who murdered the l,238th-richest man in Russia?

  Whose hands are stained with a martyr's blood? I'll tell you who: Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora. How do we know? Because the entire episode was videotaped by Andi Schmid, a nineteenyear-old tourist from Stuttgart, Germany. On the night in question, Herr Schmid happened to be steaming alongside St. Petersburg's Palace Bridge on a pleasure boat, enjoying the synthetic drug MDMA and tinny house music from the boat's speakers while videotaping a Russian seagull as it attacked an English teenager, a big-eared kipper of a boy, and his pale, lovely mama.

  "I have never seen such an angry seagull before," Herr Schmid told me and the police inspectors the next day, resplendent before us in his fuzzy steel-wool pants and PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt, his boxy Selima Optique glasses casting a penumbra of intelligence around his dull young eyes. "It just kept biting the poor kid," Schmid complained. "In Germany the birds are much friendlier." On Schmid's tape, we see the snow-white seagull snapping its bloody beak as it ascends for another attack on the British family, the Britishers pleading to the gull for mercy, the ship's crew pointing and laughing at the foreigners . . . Now we see the colossal stone piers of the Palace Bridge, followed by its cast-iron lampposts. (Once, in the eighties, during that nice Gorbachev perestroika time, Papa and I went fishing off the Palace Bridge. We caught a perch that looked just like Papa. In five years, when my eyes completely glaze over with Russian life, I will resemble it, too.)

  Next Schmid pans 360 degrees to reveal St. Petersburg on a warm summer night, the sky lit up a false cerulean, the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress bathed in gold floodlights, the Winter Palace moored on its embankment like a ship gently undulating in the perpetual twilight, the darkened hulk of St. Isaac's dome officiating over the proceedings . . . Ah! What did Mandelstam write? "Leninsburg!

  I don't want to die yet!"

  And now, as the seagull embarks upon its predatory swoop, making some sort of Slavic bird squawk, we see a Mercedes 300 M-Class jeep—the one that looks like a futuristic, rounded version of the Soviet militia jeeps that used to haul Papa away to the drunk tank—

  cross the bridge, followed by one of those antic, armor-plated Volga sedans that remind me, for some reason, of the American armadillo. If you look closer, you can almost see Papa's yellow pumpkin head inside the Volga, a squiggle of gray hair forming a childish signature above his otherwise bald pate . . . Oh, my papa, my dead, murdered papochka, my mentor, my keeper, my boyhood friend. Remember, Papa, how we used to trap the neighbor's anti-Semitic dog in a milk crate and take turns peeing on it? If only I could believe that you're in a better place now, that "other world" you kept rambling about whenever you woke up at the kitchen table, your elbows swimming in herring juice, but clearly nothing of us survives after death, there's no other world except for New York, and the Americans won't give me a visa, Papa. I'm stuck in this horrible country because you killed a businessman from Oklahoma, and all I can do is remember how you once were; to commemorate the life of a near-saint, this is the burden of your only child.

  All right, back to the videotape. Here comes the second Mercedes jeep, the last vehicle in Papa's convoy, rumbling over the Palace Bridge, and now we see a motorcycle with two riders passing the jeep, the doughy form of syphilitic Zhora (may he die from his syphi
lis just like Lenin!) visible behind Oleg the Moose's distinctive fifties pompadour . . . The motorcycle zooms by the Volga, and the land mine, or at least a dark cylinder that must be a land mine—I mean, has anyone actually seen a land mine? Ours is not the kind of family that gets sent to fight in Chechnya with the blue-eyed kids—

  the land mine is thrown onto the Volga's roof, five more frames, and then a flash of electric lightning draws the seagull's attention away from the cowering English folk, and the roof of the Volga is lifted off (along with, we later learn, Papa's head), followed by a plume of cheap smoke . . . Ba-ba-boom.

  And that, in so many words, is how I became an orphan. May I be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Amen.

  Rouenna

  When I graduated from Accidental College with all the honors they could bestow on a fat Russian Jew, I decided that, like many young people, I should move to Manhattan. American education aside, I was still a Soviet citizen at heart, afflicted with a kind of Stalinist gigantamania, so that when I looked at the topography of Manhattan, I naturally settled my gaze on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, those emblematic honeycombed 110-story giants that glowed white gold in the afternoon sun. They looked to me like the promise of socialist realism fulfilled, boyhood science fiction extended into near-infinity. You could say I was in love with them. As I soon found out that I couldn't rent an apartment in the actual World Trade Center, I decided to settle for an entire floor in a nearby turn-of-the-century skyscraper. My loft had a startling view of Miss Liberty greening the harbor on one side and the World Trade Center obliterating the rest of the skyline on another. I spent my evenings hopping from one end of my lily pad to the other: as the sun fell on top of the statue, the Twin Towers became a fascinating checkerboard of lit and unlit windows, looking, after several puffs of marijuana, like a Mondrian painting come to life. To complement my sleek art deco apartment, I got an internship at a nearby art foundation run out of a certain munificent bank. The whole thing was set up through the career office at Accidental College, which specialized in finding socially uplifting and highly unpaid internships for young gentlemen and ladies. And so every morning, around ten, my morning gown bedecked with glistening medals from the Accidental Col-lege Department of Multicultural Studies (my academic major), I would roll over three blocks to the bank's filigreed skyscraper and perform my filing duties for a few hours.