Absurdistan

beautiful home on the embankment of the River Moika…or one of those gorgeous Stalin buildings on Moskovsky Prospekt.”

“Misha is the son of Boris Vainberg, a famous and recently deceased businessman,” Valentin announced. “He has offered to take us to a restaurant called the Noble’s Nest.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” said the mother, “but it sounds just grand.”

“It’s in the teahouse of the Yusupov Mansion,” I said with a pedantic air, knowing that the mansion where the loony monk Rasputin was poisoned would not make much of an impression on the ladies. Valentin managed a slight, historic smile and tried to nuzzle up to the daughter, who favored him with a chaste kiss on the forehead.

The Noble’s Nest is really quite a place. They normally don’t allow whores or low-earning people like Valentin, but because of my fine reputation, the management was quick to relent.

Now, it is no secret that St. Petersburg is a backwater, lost in the shadow of our craven capital, Moscow, which itself is but a third-world megalopolis teetering on the edge of some spectacular extinction. And yet the Noble’s Nest has one of the most divine restaurants I have ever seen—dripping with more gold plating than the dome of St. Isaac’s, yes; covered with floor-to-ceiling paintings of dead nobles, to be sure. And yet, somehow, against the odds, the place carries off the excesses of the past with the dignified luster of the Winter Palace.

I knew that a fellow like Valentin would rejoice. For people like him, this restaurant is one of the two Russias they can understand. For people like Valentin, it’s either the marble and malachite of the Hermitage or a crumbling communal flat in the Kolomna district.

Valentin’s tarts wept when they saw the menu. They couldn’t even name the dishes, such was their excitement and money lust. They had to refer to them by their prices: “Let’s split the sixteen dollars for an appetizer and then I’ll have the twenty-eight dollars and you can split the thirty-two…Is that all right, Mikhail Borisovich?”

“For God’s sake, have what you wish!” I said. “Four dishes, ten dishes, what is money when you’re among your brothers and sisters?” And to set the mood for the evening, I ordered a bottle of Rothschild for US$1,150.

“So let’s talk some more about your art, little brother,” I said to Valentin. I was having some kind of Dostoyevsky moment. I wanted to redeem everyone in sight. They could all be Misha’s Children, every last harlot and intellectual with flaxen goatee.

“You see…you see…” said Valentin to his women friends. “We’re talking about art now. Isn’t it nice, ladies, to sit in a pretty space and talk like gentlemen about the greater subjects?” A whole slew of emotions, ranging from an innate distrust of kindness to some latent homosexuality, was playing itself out on the artist’s red face. He pressed his palm down on my hand and left it there for a good time.

“Valya is doing some nice sketches for us,” the mama said to me, “and he’s helping us design our Web page. We’re going to have a Web page for our services, don’t you know?”

“Oh, look, Mama, I believe the two sixteen dollars are here!” Elizaveta Ivanovna cried as the two appetizers of pelmeni stuffed with deer and crab arrived, both dishes covered by immense silver domes. The waiters, two gorgeous young kids, a boy and a girl, looked at one another, mouthed one, two, three, and then, in tandem, pulled off the lids to reveal the horrid appetizers beneath.

“We’re talking about art like gentlemen,” Valentin said.

The evening progressed as expected. We drove to my apartment beneath a confusing cross section of the summer sky—the deep blue of the North Sea at the top, followed by the indeterminate gray of the Neva River, and, at the very bottom, a brilliant ribbon of modern orange that hung like a fluorescent mist over the dueling spires of the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Along the way, we took turns hitting the driver with birch twigs, ostensibly to improve his circulation, but in reality because it is impossible to end an evening in Russia without assaulting someone. “Now I feel as if we’re in an old-fashioned hansom cab,” said Valentin, “and we’re hitting the driver for going too slow…Faster, driver! Faster!”

“Please, sir,” pleaded Mamudov, “it is already difficult to drive on these roads, even without being whipped.”

“No one has ever called me ‘sir’ before,” Valentin spoke in wonderment. “Opa, you scoundrel!” he screamed, flailing the driver once more.

I took them around my apartment, a gorgeous art nouveau lair built in 1913 (generally acknowledged as the last good year in Russia’s history), rife with pale ceramic tile and prized oriel windows that captured and teased what remained of the evening light. With each passing room, Valentin and the whores would experience a mild seizure, the young monarchist Web designer whispering, “So this is how it is…So this is how they live.”

I parked them in my library, the bookshelves creaking with my dead papa’s books, the collected texts of the great rabbis, the Cayman Islands Banking Regulations, Annotated in Three Volumes, and the ever-popular A Hundred and One Tax Holidays. Servants appeared with carafes of vodka. Elizaveta Ivanovna was threatening to play the accordion for us, and Valentin was inciting the daughter to quote at will from the major philosophers, but by the time an accordion was finally produced and a copy of Voltaire cracked open, my guests had fallen asleep on top of each other. Valentin had stuck his big potato nose inside Lyudmila Petrovna’s substantial cleavage and placed his arms around her hips as if they were dancing a nocturnal waltz.

I had never seen a man cry in his sleep before.

10 [email protected]

I left my guests and entered the dimly lit replica of Dr. Levine’s office, fished my laptop out from under my Mies van der Rohe daybed, and fired Rouenna an electronic message across the ether:

hi pretty baby. its misha. wondering why u haven’t written back 2 me 4 so long. tonite chillin with some russian homies (remember how we used to chill?). you’d like 2 of these girlz, they real ghetto. remember how u used to roll up our socks at the laundromat. i miss u.

much luv (4 real)

misha aka snack dad aka porky russian lover

p.s. hope u r doing good in school. anybody special in yr life? lemme know

p.p.s. maybe you can come to p-burg 4 xmas break. maybe u+i can chill?!

I was about to enjoy my nightly single malt fired up with 2.5 milligrams of Ativan when an incoming message pinged across the screen. I let out a happy little yelp when I saw the overseas sender: [email protected]. I thought of saving the message until the next day, knowing I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep with Rouenna’s words lodged like dum-dum bullets in my brain.

Rouenna’s missive was as shocking in style as in content. Gone were the hip-hop numeric abbreviations that we used to “conversate” with each other. Rouenna was trying to write like an educated young American woman, although her spelling and grammar were as arbitrary as anything on the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse.

Dear Misha,

First off, I’m really sorry it took me so long to answer your sweet, sweet letters to me. Your a good Boyfriend and I owe you everything, my hunter education, my dentalwork, all my Hopes and Dreams. I want you to know that I love you and I will never take you for granite. Second off, I’m sorry to be writing this letter right after your tragety with your father. I know it really effected you mentally. Who wouldnt feel Sad when someone so close to you gets killed like a dog.