Absurdistan

although we did enjoy at least five a day. If only I had treated her better, maybe she wouldn’t sleep with that bastard Jerry Shteynfarb, maybe she would have stayed with me in Russia. “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I must do… Precisely. I’ll put on my walking shorts right away.” Then, before I could stop the transference, I blurted out, “I really love you, Doctor…”

And then I started to cry.

9 One Day in the Life of Misha Borisovich

I didn’t last long in the Summer Gardens. All the shady benches were taken; the heat was abusive; pious grandmothers passing by with their young charges would use me to illustrate four of the seven deadly sins. And my Rouenna, with her zippy bravado and distaste for all things classical (“Some of these statues ain’t got no ass, Misha”), was nowhere to be found.

“To the khui with this,” I said to my Chechen driver, Mamudov, who was keeping me company on a nearby bench. “Let’s see if Alyosha is at the Mountain Eagle.”

“He can’t spend a day without his little mutton kebab,” Mamudov opined sourly of my American friend.

We drove over the Troitsky Bridge, the Neva River eager and playful on a summer day, a panorama of gray swells and treacherous seagulls. Alyosha-Bob was indeed parked behind a rickety wooden table at the Mountain Eagle, chasing a vodka bottle with a plate of pickled peppers, cabbage, and garlic. We embraced and kissed three times in the Russian manner. I was introduced to his companions, both employees of ExcessHollywood, his DVD import-export business: Ruslan the Enforcer, a man with a shaved head and a fatalistic expression who handled security for the company, and the young art director and Web designer, Valentin, a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts.

“We’re drinking to women,” Ruslan said. “Alyosha complains that his Sveta makes fun of his prowess in bed and threatens to leave him if he doesn’t move to Boston and give her a comfortable life in the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood.”

“Sad but true,” Alyosha-Bob said. “Meanwhile, Ruslan tells me that his wife cheats on him with a sergeant in the militia and that he has found stains on her hose and panties.”

“Also, when they k-k-k-k-kiss,” Valentin stammered shyly, “a suspicious manly scent comes from her mouth.”

“And as for our friend Valentin,” Ruslan the Enforcer said, gesturing to the artist, “he is not too young to know of heartache, either. He is in love with two prostitutes who work at the Alabama Father strip club on Vasilevsky Island.”

“Well, to women, then!” we said, clinking our glasses.

As if drawn by our toast, a pretty Georgian girl with furry arms dropped a fresh bottle of vodka in front of me and threw some charred mutton kebabs on our plates. We chewed on the gristle thoughtfully, slivers of onion crackling between our teeth. The sun sailed westward over the canal running past the ramshackle restaurant, past the disturbing city zoo where the once-proud lions of the Serengeti now live no better than our pensioners, and toward the greener pastures of the European Union.

A typical male Russian sadness descended upon us. “Speaking on the subject of women,” I said, “I fear my Bronx girl, Rouenna, may be the quarry of the emigre writer Jerry Shteynfarb.”

“I remember that weasel,” Alyosha-Bob said. “I saw him in New York once after he wrote that Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. He thinks he’s the Jewish Nabokov.”

Ruslan and Valentin snorted at the idea that such a person could exist. “I don’t think they should expose young people to Shteynfarb,” I said. “Especially at a school like Hunter College, where the students are poor and impressionable.”

We drank to the difficult lives of impressionable poor folk and to the end of American imperialism in the guise of Jerry Shteynfarb. Valentin the artist seemed most roused by such sentiments, knocking his glass over and casting his gaze toward the heavens. He was a lean, sallow fellow with the overearnest expression of the Slavic intellectual. All the distinguishing signs were there: flaxen goatee, bloodshot eyes, porcupine hair, uneven bottom teeth, great big potato nose, thirty-ruble sunglasses from a metro kiosk. “You don’t like American imperialism, eh?” I said to him.

“I’m a m-m-monarchist,” the fellow stammered.

“Now, there’s a popular position for a young man these days,” I said, thinking: Oh, our poor dispossessed intelligentsia, why do we even bother to teach them literature and the plastic arts? “And who’s your favorite czar, then, young man?” I asked.

“Alexander the First. No, wait…the Second.”

“The great reformer. Well, that’s very nice. And who are your whorish friends?”

“They’re a mother-daughter act,” the artist explained. “Some people derive a thrill from watching a mother and daughter touch. They’re from Kursk Province. Very cultured people. Elizaveta Ivanovna plays the accordion, and her daughter, Lyudmila Petrovna, can quote the major philosophers.”

His use of their patronymics was strangely touching—I knew immediately what he wanted to do. After all, it is the only path our young Raskolnikovs can follow. “I will save them!” he said, and I knew immediately that he would not.

“Presumably it is the daughter you fancy,” I said.

“Both are like family to me,” said Valentin. “If you meet them, you see how they cannot live without each other. They are like Naomi and Ruth.”

We drank two shots in rapid succession, one to Naomi and one to Ruth. The mood veered toward belligerence and sentimentality. I floated in and out of several conversations.

“Fuck them all,” Ruslan the Enforcer was saying at one point, although I was unsure to whom he was referring. “Throw them all under the tram! See if I care!” The Georgian girl came with more mutton and a thick loaf of khachapuri, a homey flatbread filled with soft ricottalike cheese. We drank to Georgia, the girl’s beautiful, uncontrollable, destitute country, and she nearly threw her arms around our necks and cried out of shame and gratitude.

A new set of vodka bottles came, one for each man.

“It’s emasculating,” Alyosha-Bob was saying in a dramatic voice that he had started to adopt in Russia. “How can she do this to me? How much more can I give to her? I’ve given her everything that’s in my heart. Why can’t she love me for who I am? What does she think is waiting for her in Boston?”

We drank to Alyosha-Bob’s heart. We drank to his manhood. We drank to his weak Jewish chin and billiard- ball head. We breathed out the poisonous vapors streaming down our gullets, a rainbow of alcohol floating above our heads, while the setting sun turned the spire of the nearby Peter and Paul Fortress into a flaming exclamation mark. We drank to the setting sun, our silent conspirator. We drank to the golden exclamation mark. We drank to Saints Peter and Paul.

A new set of vodka bottles came, one for each man.

“Why can’t my website be called www.ruslan-the-enforcer.com?” Ruslan was saying. “Why does it have to be ruslan-the-punisher.org?”

“Because ruslan-the-enforcer.com is already taken,” Valentin gently explained.

“But I am the Enforcer. I know Ruslan the Punisher. He lives with his mother by the Avtovo metro station. He is a nothing man. Now people will think that I am him. They won’t hire me to do the bloody work. I will be humiliated.” We drank to Ruslan’s renowned strength and his tough fists. We drank to his bad childhood. We drank to his website.

A new set of vodka bottles came, one for each man.

“I wish Russia were strong,” Valentin said, “and America weak. Then we could hold up our heads. Then my Ruth and Naomi could walk down Fifth Avenue and spit on whomever they wanted. No one would dare hit them or make them touch each other.” We drank to Russia being powerful again. We drank once more to Naomi and Ruth. We drank to America’s eventual comeuppance, which even Alyosha-Bob with his golden American passport thought