Absurdistan

orange out.”

“That mustn’t happen,” I said. “You’ve really got something here.” Above her dresser I noticed a framed photograph of Beloved Papa unveiling a tombstone shaped like a giant Nokia mobile phone at his graveyard for New Russian Jews, sacrilegious laughter gathering in his clever eyes.

“But wait, there’s more,” Lyuba announced. She ran into the bathroom and came out with a pair of orange towels. “This is what you and Svetlana were talking about at the Home of the Russian Fisherman!” she said. “See, I listen to everything you say!”

I squinted at the towels, feeling a spectacular headache gathering steam somewhere in my sinuses. “Maybe you should mix the orange with some other Western color,” I suggested. “Lime, maybe.”

Lyuba bit her smooth lower lip. “Perhaps,” she said. She looked doubtfully at the towels in her hands. “It’s hard to know these things, Misha…Sometimes I think I’m such a fool…Ah, but listen to this!” She turned on a little stereo with the flick of one lacquered nail. It didn’t take me long to recognize the Humungous G’s gorgeous urban love ballad “I’m Busting My Nut Tonight.” Lyuba laughed and sang along with the soulful R&B chorus, moving her hands in front of her torso in a sad Russian approximation of slow jamming. “I’m baaaaasting my nut tonight / Your pusseeeee feels so tight,” she sang in a tired but hospitable voice.

“Uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh,” I grunted along with the chorus. “Uhhhh, shit,” I added.

“I know you and Alyosha love this song,” she said. “I’ve been playing it over and over. It’s so much better than techno and Russian pop.”

“In terms of popular music”—I spoke now with the authority of a former Multicultural Studies major—“you should listen mainly to East Coast hip-hop and ghetto tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically. Even so-called progressive house! Do you hear me, Lyuba?”

“Categorically!” Lyuba said. She looked at me with her soft, vacant gray eyes. She pressed both hands into the formidable ridge of her breastbone. “Mikhail,” she said, using my formal name, which, for as long as I’ve lived, usually means some form of punishment is at hand. I looked up expectantly.

“Help me convert to Judaism,” she said. She plopped down on the orange comforter, pressed her skinny legs into her tummy, and beamed the inquisitive look of youth in my direction. There was some tenderness there, a warmth in my belly, and I could feel it start spreading below. I looked at her beside me—little Lyuba in her too-tight denim dress, the two firm potato dumplings of her zhopa rubbing against my milky outer thigh. I needed to concentrate on the conversation at hand. Now, what was she saying? Jews? Conversion? I had much to say on the matter.

“Turning into a Jew is not a good idea,” I told her, my grave tone likening it to turning into a dung beetle. “Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. It’s a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check. It’s a losing proposition for everyone involved, the Jew, his friend, even his enemy in the end.”

Lyuba was not convinced. “You and your father are the only good people in my life,” she said. “And I want to be tied to both of you by something substantial. Think how great it would be if we could pray to the same God”— she turned her matted blond head into her armpit—“and if we could share a life together.”

The second part of that sentence I decided to put aside for the moment, because all the lies and evasions in the world were not going to erase her plaintive, impossible plea from my waxy ears. So I wanted to disabuse her of the first part, at least. “Lyuba,” I said in my most even (and most detestable) voice, “you must understand that there is no God.”

Lyuba turned her pink face to me and smiled gratuitously, favoring me with one of her laminated thirty-one- tooth salutes (a prominent incisor had to be retired last summer after she misjudged the strength of a walnut).

“Of course there is a God,” she said.

“No, there is not,” I said. “In fact, the part of our soul we reserve for God is a kind of negative space where our worst sentiments reside, our jealousy, our ire, our justification for violence and spite. If you are indeed interested in Judaism, Lyuba, you should carefully read the Old Testament. You should pay particular attention to the character of the Hebrew God and His utter contempt for all things democratic and multicultural. I think the Old Testament makes my point rather forcefully, page by page.”

Lyuba laughed at my little tirade. “I think you believe in God in your own way,” she said. Then she added, “You’re a funny man.”

Ah, the impudence of youth! The easy manner of their speech! Who was she, this Lyuba, this girl my father had rescued from some Astrakhan collective farm a few years ago, all covered in hog shit and bruises? This sullen teenager he had adopted like the daughter he wished he had fathered instead of me—skinny, loyal, and without a tantalizing purple khui he could swipe at. I had always thought of Lyuba as a contemporary version of Fenechka in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the peasant housekeeper, obtuse and limited, who falls into the arms of the kindly minor noble Kirsanov, to be played in the movie version by Beloved Papa. My capacity for misunderstanding the range of people is truly astonishing. Lyuba was no Fenechka. She was more like a modern-day Anna Karenina or that silly brat Natasha in War and the Other Thing.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s my favorite part of the song. When Humungous G…how do you say it? When he busts.”

“When Humungous G busts some rhymes,” I said.

She stood up on the bed, and with her hands making jabbing urban motions, her hips thrusting like those of a fertile American university student, Lyuba sang:

Seexty-inch plasma screen
Bitch, you never seen
Such mad expensive shit
Poot my fingers on your clit
Uh, sex in the Lex
Check my dzhenuine Rolex
Vaiping cum off your tits
I’m busting phat beats
Right past yo’ shoulder
It’s over
Now go coook for my kids

“That’s very pretty,” I said. “Your English is improving.”

“And another great thing about Judaism,” she said, “is how old it is. Boris told me that by the Jew calendar, we’re in the year 5760!”

“It just doesn’t stop, does it?” I said. “But what is the past, Lyuba? The past is murky and distant, while the future we can only guess at. The present! Now, that’s something to believe in. If you want to know what I worship, Lyuba, it is the sanctity of the present moment.”

Words have consequences. For at this point Lyuba jumped up from the bed, unhooked her Texas-style belt, and, in an Olympic moment, catapulted the hem of her long denim dress over her knees, her brown wiry pizda, her taut belly, the long pale oval of her face—until, momentarily, she stood there naked before me.

She was staring furtively into some incidental part of me, my abdomen, say, her hands by her sides. After a while, she lowered her gaze still farther, until it fell onto her own breasts, two little white baggies that lay peaceably atop her tanned ribs.

She picked up one breast, squeezed it, and then did likewise with the other.

“Well, that’s how it is,” she told me with a shrug. “I’m very hot for you inside.”

I lay there, half a meter away from this young Russian woman, trying to remember who I was, exactly, and whether sympathy could masquerade for arousal or the other way around. There was reason for both. Lyuba had a