Absurdistan

decided to finish my response with an appeal to Rouenna’s favorite imaginary character.] Just remember, Rouenna, that whatever you do, it is between you and God. So if you want to hurt me, go ahead. But you know that He watches every move you make.

I put down my red pen. I was thinking of the homemade sign crayoned on the door of Rouenna’s family’s apartment by one of her nineteen little nieces: NO SMOKING NO CURSING NO GAMBLING INSIDE THIS HOUSE JESUS LOVES YOU. We used to sit on a creaking bench in a weed-choked yard behind Rouenna’s housing complex, doing a bit of what she called “roughhousin’,” as beautiful brown children ran around us, engulfed by summertime happiness, yelling to each other: “When I get out, puta, I’m gonna break your fucken face, I fucken swear.”

What I wouldn’t pay for one more July night on the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse, one more chance to kiss Rouenna and cradle her in my big arms. I always dream of your arms around me and your weird kui in my mouth.

My laptop beeped demonstratively. I was worried it might be more bad news from Rouenna, but the message was from Lyuba Vainberg, my father’s widow.

Respected Mikhail Borisovich,

I have learned to use the Internet because I hear it’s how you prefer to communicate. I am lonely. It would be my pleasure to invite you for tea and zakuski tomorrow. Please tell me if you can come and if so I will send my servant girl out for meat in the morning. If you refuse me, I won’t blame you. But perhaps you will find pity for a lost soul.

With respect,

Lyuba

So that’s how it happened between us. We were both lonely and lost.

11 Lyuba Vainberg Invites Me to Tea

Lyuba lived on the English Embankment, a gorgeous pastel crush of mansions anchored by the yellow curve of the old Senate Building. The Neva River does its best to be civil around here, flowing with a majestic resolve and lapping up the granite embankment with a thousand frothy tongues.

Speaking of tongues, Lyuba had prepared one of her celebrated lamb’s tongue sandwiches, very tasty and juicy, with extra horseradish and spicy mustard and garnished with a dollop of gooseberry preserve. She even prepared it in the American manner for me, with two pieces of bread instead of one. I quickly asked for seconds, then thirds, to her immeasurable delight. “Ah, but who looks out for your diet at home?” she asked, mistakenly using the polite form of address with me, as if acknowledging the fact that I was thirty.

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I said, letting the tender tongue dissolve on my own (like making out with a sheep, I thought). “Who cooks for me? Why, Yevgenia, of course. Remember my cook? She’s round and rosy.”

“Well, I do my own cooking now,” Lyuba said proudly. “And when he was alive, I always supervised Boris’s diet. There are things to consider other than taste, you know. You have to think of your health, Misha! For example, the lamb’s tongue is widely known to possess minerals that give you energy and manly power. It’s terribly good for you, especially when you alternate it with Canadian bacon, which helps heal the skin. My servant girl gets only the best from the Yeliseyev store.” She paused and looked me up and down, enjoying my girth, my time-tested ability to expand under pressure. “Perhaps I should come over and cook for you,” she said. “Or else you’re always welcome to come here and eat with me.”

Death changes people. I had certainly changed since Beloved Papa’s decapitation, but as for Lyuba, she was positively unrecognizable. It’s no secret that Papa treated her like his daughter in many ways—several times she had called him papochka, “little father,” while doing an improvised lap dance at the kitchen table or giving him a supposedly discreet hand job during the Mariinsky Theatre’s mind-numbing performance of Giselle (she thought I had dozed off by the grape harvest scene, but I was not so lucky).

But now that our papochka was gone, Lyuba was handling self-parenting with great aplomb. Her very diction had improved. It was no longer the sloppy New Russian of her idiot friends, a gangster- influenced provincial drawl interspersed with borrowed words like “dragon roll” and “face control,” but a more reserved speech, flattened and depressive, the kind favored by our more cultured, penniless citizens.

I was also inspired by her choice of dress. Gone was her usual Leather Lyuba motif; in its place, a blouse and skirt of dark contemporary denim fastened by an oversize red plastic belt with an enormous faux-Texan buckle. It was very Williamsburg, Brooklyn, circa right now.

“I must wipe your chin,” Lyuba said, scrubbing my double grapefruit with three of her long mustard-scented fingers.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve never learned how to eat properly.” Which is the truth.

“You know, I bought an orange comforter from Stockmann,” she said, and turned away to expel her breath. I smelled the freshness of a youthful mouth, a strong British breath mint, and the sulfuric undercurrent of lamb’s tongue. She smiled, her twin cheekbones going off the scale of Eastern European cheekbones and into lovely Mongolian territory, while her pinprick nose stretched itself into nonexistence. Despite the steady drafts of central air-conditioning, your correspondent felt himself becoming warm-faced and a bit untidy beneath the armpits. The denim blouse hugged Lyuba’s frame so that when she turned around, one could see an important crease forming between the cheeks of her zhopa. Meanwhile, the talk of orange comforters both soothed and intrigued.

“Won’t you come and see it?” she said. “It’s in the bedroom,” she quickly added. “I’m worried it’s not the right one.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, feeling an unexpected jolt of ethical misgiving. This was followed by an image of Jerry Shteynfarb’s authorial goatee burrowing into the heat between Rouenna’s thighs. The ethical misgivings evaporated. I followed Lyuba.

We passed through the main quarters, a kind of gallery devoted to outrageous Italian furniture, enough glossy mirrored surfaces that I could catch the devastating sight of my own deflated posterior and the halo of my small but growing bald spot. My papa’s meter-long oil painting of a wise but grizzled Maimonides with what looked like a ten- ruble note sticking out of his pocket completed the room. Outside the windows, the gracious classical lines of the Twelve Colleges Building suspended over the Neva provided a necessary counterpoint.

“I’m throwing everything out,” Lyuba said, sweeping her hand over the ensemble of buffed mahogany monstrosities possibly entitled Neapolitan Sunrise or something of the sort (there are warehouses full of this shit in New York’s Brighton Beach, in case the intrepid reader is interested). “If you have the time,” Lyuba said, “we can drive down to the IKEA in Moscow, maybe get something in paisley.”

“What you’re doing, Lyubochka, is very healthy,” I told her. “We must all strive to be as Western as possible. That old argument between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles…It’s not much of an argument at all, is it?”

“Not if you say so,” Lyuba said. She opened the bedroom door.

I had to look away at first. Lyuba’s comforter was the most orange thing I have seen this side of the Accidental College library, which was built in 1974, possibly by the American Citrus Growers’ Association. It was…I couldn’t find the right word. An entire sun had exploded in Lyuba’s bedroom, leaving behind its afterglow for us to ponder.

“You’ve become a modern woman,” I said, and heaved myself aboard with a few difficult motions.

“Feel the smoothness,” Lyuba said as she settled in beside me. “It looks like it’s fashionable polyester from the American seventies, but it feels like cotton. I’ve got to find a good dry cleaner. Otherwise they’ll just bleed the