Absurdistan (8 page)

“When you’re ready to be with a real woman, call me at the
shul,
” said the Jew. “There’s no reason to be all alone in the world.”

“Well, I’m not all alone,” I said. I put my arm around Rouenna and pressed her close, but he wasn’t buying it.

“Act quickly, little son!” he said, apropos of the sad Jewess. “Her name is Sarah, and she has many suitors.” He went over to Lyuba, my father’s widow, and wiped her tiny nose for her.

Lyuba was a wreck, her usually demonstrative blond hair matted over her delicate skull, her black see-through blouse torn in the traditional Jewish sign of mourning (since when was
she
one of the tribe?), her arms thrown up to the heavens as if begging for the Lord to take her as well. She was howling about how “no one in the world [could] love her like [Beloved Papa]” and falling limp in the arms of fellow mourners.

Papa had wanted to be buried next to my mother, who was interred in an old graveyard in the wretched southeastern section of the city. The graveyard abutted a suburban station, rails littered with the morning’s first half-conscious
alkashy,
each trying to suck the last drop out of yesterday’s bottle of Golden Barrel beer, the platform stacked with two overturned cylindrical freight cars, one sporting the stenciled legend
POLY
, the other
MERS
.

The graves had been vandalized with cunning precision. Even the gold engraving was missing from my mother’s tombstone. I could barely make out
YULIA ISAKOVNA VAINBERG
, 1939–1983, not to mention the golden harp that Papa had added, a reference, I suppose, to her being so cultured. (At least, unlike neighboring gravestones, hers hadn’t been crowned with a swastika by the local hooligans.) Oh, my poor
mamochka.
The soft flesh behind her earlobe, perfect for hiding a child’s warm nose. Gray sweater torn at the elbow, despite the rat-a-tat of her American sewing machine. Nineteen thirty-nine to 1983. From Stalin to Andropov. What a pathetic time to have been alive.

If only she could have seen me in New York. I would have made her proud. I’d have taken her to a simple clothing shop and bought her a middle-class sweater in some bright new color. That was part of my mother’s beauty—she would have had no need for Botox or marabou-covered mules, not like all the visiting New Russian trash. See, when you’re cultured, being middle class is enough.

Meanwhile, the haughty Northern sun had assumed its noontime perch and was doing its best to set our skullcaps ablaze. In Russia, even the sun has a distinctly anti-Semitic disposition. Gusts of wind smelling of something Soviet and unkind—polymers?—coated us with empty candy wrappers roused up from the garbage pit of a nearby housing complex, which was, like so many other things, partly collapsed and partly on fire. Gooey with chocolate and spit, the wrappers stuck to us like leeches, turning us into advertisements for such homegrown delicacies as
SNEAKERS
and
TRI MUSHKETEERS
.

It was a
shtetl
funeral, in many ways, a kind of impromptu klezmer act minus the musical instruments. Lots of wailing and feigned heart attacks, the pressing of young faces to old bosoms. “Comfort the child!” some putz was screaming in my direction. “The poor orphan! May God watch over him!”

“I’m fine!” I shouted back, waving weakly at the excited mourner, one of my idiot relatives, no doubt. They were all sticking their business cards into my pocket, in hopes of an eventual handout (Papa had left them nothing), and wondering why I was so estranged from the lot of them, why I wasn’t friends with my harebrained cousins or slutty young nieces and predatory nephews, who spent their Friday nights tearing down Nevsky in their cheap Russian Niva jeeps, trying to pick up malnourished girls in tight synthetic duds or working-class boys with primitive greaser haircuts. The number of Vainbergs, young and old, still haunting the earth amazed me. During the thirties and forties, Stalin had killed half my family. Arguably the wrong half.

My manservant followed two steps behind me, carrying a leather pouch in which was interred a pair of pork-and-chicken roulettes from the famed Yeliseyev food shop, a bottle of Ativan, and a slug of Johnnie Walker Black, all in case I felt faint and started to teeter over. My only friends, Alyosha-Bob and Rouenna, huddled together in a corner, their relative Western beauty and steady demeanor giving them the air of American movie stars. I spent half the funeral walking toward them but was constantly waylaid by supplicants.

The aforementioned synagogue crew was on hand, old men with shaky hands, moist eyes, and big loose bellies—many mentions of Papa being the moral consciousness of our city by the Neva, a human pillar holding up the Lermontov synagogue like some demented Hebraic Atlas. And, by the way, look at that sad Jewess by the grave! Quiet Sarah! With the gardenias pressed to her heart!
To her very heart!
For no heart beats stronger (or faster) than a Jewish heart! Ah, what a couple we would make! The rebirth of Leninsburg’s Jewish community! Why should I be alone for even one more hour? Take this day of sadness, Misha, and make it one of renewal! Listen to your elders! Show the heartless swine who did this to your papa, show them that…

Well, the only problem with such a gesture was that the heartless swine in question, Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora, had actually been
invited
to Beloved Papa’s funeral. After Alyosha-Bob had convinced him that I could survive in Europe only with a minimum of thirty-five million dollars, Captain Belugin had dragged them along as a sign of our budding rapprochement. In fact, tall, pale-faced Oleg the Moose and his rosy, horizontal cousin—their shapes roughly approximating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—were already ambling over to me to share their condolences, my idiot relatives quietly parting before them, cowed by their murderous zeal, the fact that Oleg and Zhora had actually done to Boris Vainberg what each relative had long dreamed of doing.

I backed away, clutching a passing candy wrapper with both of my big, squishy hands, but they were soon upon me. “Your father was a great man,” said Oleg the Moose, nervously combing back his pompadour, his trademark single antler. “A righteous man. A leader. He loved his people. I still have that 1989 article about him from the American magazine, the one where he’s dancing around with a jug of moonshine. What was it called? ‘
Shabbat Shalom
in Leningrad.’ You know, it wasn’t always easy between us, but all our disagreements to the very last were just fights between brothers. I think, in some measure, we’re all sort of responsible for his death. So Zhora and I are going to pledge a hundred
shtukas
each to the synagogue. Maybe they’ll buy some extra Torahs or something. We’re going to call it the Boris Vainberg Judaica Renaissance Fund.”

A
shtuka
was a
thing,
or US$1,000, the basic unit of measurement in my dead papa’s universe. A hundred
shtukas
was not very much, a week of whoring on the Riviera. I looked down at my pricey German shoes, both covered with a fine iridescent film. What the fuck? Damn polymers floating in from the railroad, likely. I pledged right then and there to donate at least one thousand
shtukas,
US$1,000,000, to Misha’s Children.

“You know what, let’s make it two hundred
shtukas
each,” said syphilitic Zhora, picking violently at a back tooth with his pinkie, looking like the bald Chernobyl porcupine they joked about on television. “The cantor said the synagogue needs a new ark. That’s where they stash the Torahs after they’re done singing from them.”

I stood there listening to my father’s killers. Oleg and Zhora were of Papa’s generation. All three had been made fatherless by the Great Patriotic War. All three had been raised by the men who had managed to avoid battle, the violent, dour, second-tier men their mothers had brought home with them out of brutal loneliness. Standing before the menfolk of my father’s generation, I could do nothing. Before their rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could only shudder and feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and complicity. These miscreants were our country’s rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats—perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I could do a little of each.

“How’s your health?” I asked syphilitic Zhora.

He made a circular motion around his crotch. “Eh, you know, a little better, a little worse. Every day something new. The key is to catch it at the early stage. There’s a new venereal clinic on Moskovsky Prospekt—”

“If you don’t want to end up like Zhora, better put a sock on your gherkin,” Oleg the Moose said with fatherly solicitude. We laughed quietly. “By the way, how’s it going with your visa situation?” he asked. “I think you’ll have better luck with the American consulate now that your father is gone. Even the worst tragedies often bring with them something positive.”

“Hey, if you go to Washington, tell my son to stop diddling Spanish girls and tend to his studies,” said Zhora. “Hold on a minute! I’m going to give you his e-mail address at the university.” He handed me a scrap on which he had written, with curly Cyrillic flourishes, [email protected]. “And tell him nothing less than Michigan for law school, that little
popka.
”

We laughed again, the prickly voltage of fraternity coursing through our triumvirate, leaving me a little shocked. “There’s a funny anecdote about three Jews—” I started to say, but was interrupted by a starchy, provincial scream.

“Murderers! Animals! Swine!” Lyuba was shrieking from the open grave. “You took my Boris! You took my prince!”

Before we knew what was what, she made a run for Oleg and his cousin, her skinny arms windmilling past the large patriarchal Vainbergs and all the small fry with their orange perms and leather fanny packs. Tear-streaked and crimson, with a child’s delicate pink lips, Lyuba’s face looked uncharacteristically young, so young that I instinctively extended a hand to her, because this kind of youth does not survive long in our Leninsburg; it’s burned out like those malicious orange freckles that had once ringed her nose.

“Lyuba!” I shouted.

Captain Belugin acted quickly, shoving the poor widow under his blazer and gently herding her away from the funeral party, toward the railroad track with its overturned polymer cars. He was chanting comforting mantras above her cries (“All is normal…it’s only nerves”), although I could hear her last muffled words: “Help me, Mishen’ka! Help me strangle them with my very hands!”

I turned away from her, looking instead to Sarah, the pretty Jewess, the prize of our people, proffering us a collection of her saddest smiles and also something smooth and pale and blooming in her hands. Gardenias.

Soon it was time to bury Papa.

7

Rouenna in Russia

Ghetto Daze, Part II

“I didn’t come all the way to freaking Russia to look at no oily paintings, Snack,” Rouenna said. We were in the Hermitage, in front of Pissarro’s
Boulevard Montmartre on a Sunny Afternoon.
Rouenna was flying out the next day, and I had thought she might want to check out our city’s unequaled cultural patrimony.

“You don’t want no oily…?” I stammered. We had spent five years loving each other in New York, and I still had no idea how to respond to the vagaries of Rouenna’s mind, which in my imagination resembled a gorgeous ripe sunflower being pummeled in a summer storm. “You don’t like late-nineteenth-century impressionism?” I said.

“I came here to be with you,
bobo,
” she said.

We kissed: a 325-pounder in a vintage Puma tracksuit and a brown woman in a push-up bra. I could feel the
babushka
guards creaking with racial and aesthetic indignation, but that only made me kiss Rouenna harder as I ran my big, squishy hand along her arched back and into the open crevice of her two-fisted ass.

We heard a cough filled with phlegm and suffering. “Behave yourself in a cultured manner,” an old voice instructed.

“What the bitch say?” Rouenna asked.

“The old people will never understand us,” I sighed. “No Russian ever can.”

“So we outie, Snack?”

“We outie.”

“Let’s go home and cuddle.”

“You got it, shorty.” During her two weeks here, I had tried to show Rouenna a picture of life in St. Leninsburg in 2001. I’d bought us a motorboat and a sea captain and taken her around the canals and byways of our Venice of the North. She’d let out a few “ooohs” and “dangs” and “aw, dips” at some of the more spectacular palaces, their fading pastel coloring more appropriate for South Beach than for just south of the Arctic Circle. But, like most poor people, she was less a sightseer at heart than a dedicated economist and anthropologist. “Where the niggaz at?” she’d wanted to know.

I assumed she meant people of modest means. “They’re everywhere,” I said.

“But where the
real
niggaz at?”

I didn’t want to take her to the outer suburbs, where I hear people are subsisting practically on rainwater and homegrown potatoes, so I took her to the nether reaches of the Fontanka River, the quasi-industrial area our grandparents called Kolomna. I hasten to paint a picture of this neighborhood for the reader. The windswept Fontanka River, its crooked nineteenth-century skyline interrupted by the postapocalyptic wedge of the Sovietskaya Hotel, the hotel surrounded by symmetrical rows of yellowing, waterlogged apartment houses; the apartment houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks featuring, in no particular order, a bootleg CD emporium, the ad hoc Mississippi Casino (“America Is Far, but Mississippi Is Near”), a kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab salad, and the usual Syrian shawarma hut smelling invariably of spilled vodka, spoiled cabbage, and some kind of vague, free-floating inhumanity.