Absurdistan

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