Absurdistan

fingers, then making a fluttering motion with his hands.

“What about the German with the camera?” Alyosha-Bob said, pointing to the filmmaker Andi Schmid, who had taken off his PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt and was thoroughly examining his own nipples. “He’s a witness.”

“The German can disappear,” Captain Belugin said. He drew a slender Teutonic outline with his index fingers and made the fluttering motion again.

“That’s ridiculous,” Alyosha-Bob said. “You can’t just disappear an entire German.”

“There are eighty million of them, and they all look fairly alike.”

We were pressed into a brief silence by the last remark. “Maybe I should refer this matter to a lawyer,” I said at last.

“A lawyer!” Captain Belugin laughed. “Where do you think we are, dear boy? Stuttgart? New York? Your father is dead. This is sad for you. But maybe not entirely sad. Everyone knows you don’t want your father’s business. You’re a sophisticate and a melancholic. So here’s what we do. We broker a deal with Oleg the Moose. He takes over all of your father’s assets for a fair-market value of twenty-five million dollars, plus another three million for killing your papa. Twenty-eight million overall. You and Oleg shake hands. No more blood.”

Alyosha-Bob stared into the captain’s eyes with an American disgust that I hadn’t seen in years. He spat into his own hand in emulation of our lower classes. “How much is Oleg the Moose paying you?” he demanded. “And who approved Boris Vainberg’s murder? You or the governor?”

“My commission is fifteen percent,” Captain Belugin said, shrugging. “That’s the standard commission around the world. As for the second question, why talk about ugly things that will only spoil our friendship?”

Timofey emerged from the kitchen with a plate of mushroom pelmeni. I knew Tima was just trying to soothe my nerves with food, but I had no appetite and so, languidly, threw a shoe at my manservant. As the shoe knocked his temple, I saw a clear picture of my death (heart attack, naturally) at age forty-one on a high-speed train approaching Paris, an elegant Euro woman frantically dialing her mobile phone, the remains of a half-eaten train meal lumped on my crotch. Oh, dear me. Oh, dear bear cub. I did not want to die! But what could I do?

“I feel bad for the world around me,” I whispered. “Maybe I can start a program for kindergarten children with some of that twenty-eight million. We can call it Misha’s Children.”

For the first time since I had met him, Captain Belugin surveyed me with genuine pity. He turned to Alyosha-Bob, who was sweating quietly, his bald head glistening, his eyes blinking out a semaphore of useless rage. “Don’t worry yourself with ideas,” Belugin said to him. “There’s no one to turn to. There’s only one power structure in Petersburg. Boris Vainberg was a part of it. Then one day, by his own choosing, he was not. The consequences were predictable.”

“Go to sleep, Snack Daddy,” Alyosha-Bob said to me. “I will talk with the captain some more.”

I did as I was told. Back in my bedroom, I hooked my face into Rouenna’s fragrant armpit. Half asleep, she leveraged a fatty cut of my shoulder until she was in position to drool on my arm. I kissed her glossy nose with a mad urgency, like a bird plucking worms for her chicks. “Sweeeeeeet,” Rouenna exhaled between two complicated snores.

“Love you,” I whispered in English.

Meanwhile, on the walnut-trimmed Eames lounge chair where Dr. Levine used to loom behind me on Park Avenue, my manservant had placed my childhood Cheburaskha doll. Cheburashka, a star of Soviet children’s television, a cuddly asexual brown creature with his dreams of joining the Young Pioneers and building a House of Friendship for all the lonely animals in town, analyzed me with his enormous liquid eyes. His even larger ears flapped in the summer wind, straining to pick up my lament.

In a week Rouenna would be leaving me to resume her summer studies at New York’s Hunter College. And I would be left with nothing.

6 Beloved Papa Is Lowered into the Ground

I don’t remember much from the funeral. A lot of Jews came, that’s for sure. One of the big kibbutzniks from the main synagogue on Lermontov Street told me it was Papa’s most fervent wish that I marry a Jewess. He pointed one out to me—tall and skinny, with long wet eyes and a luscious full-lipped mouth—standing by the open grave with a bunch of gardenias pressed to her chest. She was the kind of Russian Jewess who could be sad all year round, who could tell you a thousand different ways in which life was a serious business. “She’s looking good,” I concurred, “but right now I have my American friend.” I bent my head toward Rouenna’s shoulder. She had dressed up in her mourning miniskirt, which highlighted her hips and ass, reminding us all of how we came into being. She reached up to fix my blue blin of a yarmulke, a likeness of the synagogue’s Moorish facade engraved on the back. Papa’s favorite.

“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