Absurdistan

That wasn’t too bright, Misha.

The curtains of consciousness were being lowered around me, gray and gold-sequined like a fading summer day here in our crappy Venice of the North.

Not too bright, you stepmother-fucking, father-hating joke of a man.

12 Everything Has Its Limits

Two hours later, outside her bedroom door, Lyuba’s servants had fallen asleep, much like their mistress. Their ears were pressed to the door; even in their evening stupor, they were listening for sounds of our bed creaking. “Scoundrels,” I hissed at the mess of bleary-eyed bodies. “You like to hear your mistress fucking hard, eh? May the devil take you! Well, enough! Everything has its limits, don’t you know!”

Out on the English Embankment, Timofey and my driver, Mamudov, were sitting on the hood of the Land Rover drinking shots of vodka, blasting the Spartak-Zenit football match on the speakers, and hugging each other in a warm drunken embrace. “Hullo, gentlemen!” I shouted to them in English. “Do you want to hear something? I’ll tell you, then! Everything has its limits!”

And I walked off down the embankment like a supercilious transvestite bitch, swinging my hands in the air and my hips below. I passed by the Bronze Horseman, the statue of the curly-haired asshole Peter the Great charging up a steep rock, galloping northward, abandoning the ruined city he founded for the fair shores of Finland, leaving those of us without an EU visa nothing but the tail end of his fat bronze mare.

“Everything has its limits!” I shouted to a wedding party posing beneath Peter, skinny-ass twenty-year-olds who could not grasp the empty terror of the rest of their lives.

“Hurrah, strange one!” they shouted at me, vodka bottles raised, drunk as all get-out.

One of their grandmothers stood guard over their wedding car, a crushed Lada micro-sedan festooned with blue and white ribbons. “That’s what I thought, too,” she happily told me through her two teeth. “That everything has its limits. But each year I’m proven wrong!”

“Rejoice, babushka!” I shouted. “Soon things will change. There will be limits! To everything!”

“Yes, limits or labor camps,” the grandmother said. “Either way, I’m happy.”

By this point Timofey and Mamudov were following behind me in the Land Rover, Timofey leaning out his window, yelling, “Come back, young master! All will be well! We’ll go to the American Clinic. Dr. Yegorov, your favorite, has walk-in appointments today. A new supply of Celexa just came in.”

I turned around, one hand on my hip, one giant fist in the air. “Won’t you acknowledge, dear Timofey, that everything has its limits?” I shouted. “That I am not just some educated, Westernized animal you can kick in the mug?”

“I acknowledge!” Timofey yelled. “I acknowledge! What more do you want?”

But I wanted more. Oh, did I ever want more. I took off down the embankment, my buttery thighs slapping against each other, until I hit the green confectionery of the Winter Palace, one of its lesser buildings draped with the sign THIS YEAR’S WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT TO YOU BY DAEWOO. I stopped and breathed in the cheap diesel fuel and burning tar, the heavy air of a third-world metropolis misplaced five thousand kilometers to the north, but lacking the rich scent of burning goat and honey cakes.

Even the evocative stench of poverty we couldn’t get right.

Turning on the Palace Bridge, I counted three of the cast-iron lampposts, until I reached the stretch of asphalt where my father was executed. There was nothing there. Just a traffic jam of old Ladas, with one lone Land Rover bringing up the rear. “Batyushka, come back,” I could hear Timofey screaming in the distance. “There’s no need to panic! We have Ativan in the car. Ativan!”

I sat down by the third lamppost. The city’s horizons were crowding me in; the fortresses and domes and spires were meant for either a smaller person than me or a greater one. But understand me: I was looking for something in the middle. I was looking for a normal life. “Everything has its limits,” I said to the crush of passing Ladas and their haggard occupants. “Everything has its limits,” I whispered to a teenage boy writhing in a Polish hatchback rigged up as a municipal ambulance, its broken siren emitting the wrong squawk, more a dirge than a warning.

Timofey had quit the Land Rover and was running toward me with two bottles of meds in each hand. I took out my mobilnik and dialed Alyosha-Bob. It was Monday evening, and I knew I would hear the motley sounds of Club 69 on the other end.

“Yo!” Alyosha shouted past the din.

Club 69 is a gay club, but anyone who can afford the three-dollar cover charge—in other words, the richest 1 percent of our city—shows up there at some point during the week. Homosexuality aside, this is without a doubt the most normal place in Russia, no low-level thugs in leather parkas, no skinheads in jackboots, just friendly gay guys and the rich housewives who love them. It brings to mind that popular phrase bandied about by expatriate Americans over their bagels and cream cheese: civil society.

Alyosha-Bob and his Svetlana were sitting beneath a statue of Adonis, watching a submarine captain trying to sell his young crew to a gay German tour group. The seventeen-year-old boys were awkwardly trying to cover their nakedness, while their drunken captain barked at them to let go of their precious goods and “shake them around like a wet dog.” I suppose civil society has its limits, too.

“I’ve got to get out of Russia,” I said to Alyosha-Bob. “Everything has its limits.”

“Yes, fine,” Alyosha-Bob said. “But why now, exactly?”

I saw my future with Lyuba. Picking out paisley furniture in Moscow’s IKEA. Being called little father as I mounted her. Supper beneath the meter-long oil painting of Maimonides; dinner next to Papa’s censorious black- and-white gaze. Eventually two rich, unhappy children: a five-year-old boy in a Dolce & Gabbana gangster suit, his younger sister lost beneath an alligator’s worth of leather accessories. Everywhere around us snickering servants, collapsed infrastructure, sniveling grandmothers…Russia, Russia, Russia…

But how could I explain all this to Alyosha-Bob? St. Leninsburg was his playground. His drunken dream come true.

“Are you running away because you fucked Lyuba today?” Svetlana asked.

“Is it true?” Alyosha-Bob asked. “You gave it to Boris Vainberg’s old lady?”

“Do you see what kind of a city we live in?” I said. “I gave it to her just three hours ago. We should never hand out mobilniki to the servants. It’s probably the talk of the Internet by now.”

“I agree with you, Misha,” Svetlana said. “You should leave. I keep telling this idiot”—she pointed to Alyosha-Bob—“that we have to get out of here, too. There’s a one-year master’s in public relations program at Boston University. They have this practice lab where you can work as an account executive for local nonprofits. I could work for the Boston Ballet! I could be cultured and clever and earn a respectable living. I’d show the Americans that not every Russian woman is a whore.”

“Listen to her,” Alyosha-Bob said. “The Boston Ballet. And what’s wrong with our Kirov? It was good enough for Baryshnikov, no?”

“You just want to spend your whole life here, Alyosha,” Sveta said, “because back in America you’re a nothing man.”

“Shh! Look who’s here,” Alyosha-Bob said. “The murderer.”

Captain Belugin, wiping his hoary face with the sleeve of his green Armani shirt, ambled over to our table. He looked older than when I’d seen him at Papa’s funeral, his ears drooping down like cabbage leaves. “Allo, brothers,” he said, crashing down on a stool. “Sveta. How are you, pretty one? Nu, we’re all aficionados of Club 69, I see. And what of it? It’s a good business to be queer. Sometimes I like a little boy beside me. They’re more hairless than my wife. More feminine, too. Hey, Seryozha.” He waved to a cherubic young fellow in a thong, dishing out vodka from a slop pail. “Give it here, good lad.”