Absurdistan

“Austrian,” I said. “I know. It’s fine. I absolve you of your terrible guilt. But this is not about you, it’s about us. It’s good Jew versus bad Jew. It’s mainstream versus intolerance, and by supporting the Hasid, you’re perpetuating your own hate crime.”

“Eggs-cuse me,” the Hasid was saying as he stood on his hind legs to a tremendous Hasidic length of almost seven feet. “I goudln’t help overhearing—”

“Please, sir, sit down,” the purser said. “We’re taking care of this.”

“Yes, sure, coddle the Hasid,” I said, and then rose myself, smacking the purser lightly with my stomach. “If this is how you run your first class, then I will go to economy to sit with my manservant.”

“Your seat is here, sir,” said the stewardess. “You have paid for it.” The purser, meanwhile, fluttered his dainty hands to indicate that I should keep walking right out of his gilded realm. Alyosha- Bob was laughing at my foolishness, tapping his head with his fist to indicate that I was not all well.

And he was right: I wasn’t all well.

“Because of you, I am not a man,” I spat at the Hasid as I walked past his row. “You took the best part of me. You took what mattered.” Before leaving, I turned around to address the first-class passengers: “Beware of their mitzvah mobiles, fellow Jews among you. Beware of circumcisions late in life. Beware of easy faith. The Hasids are not like us. Don’t even think it.” With those words, I pulled back the curtain into steerage. I will not risk humanizing the first-class Hasid by writing down in detail the medieval horror upon his pale face, the cyclical, never-ending fright that so distorts our people.

In the cramped economical quarters, by a reeking bathroom, in the midst of a wildly discordant color scheme drawn to make poor folk feel better about their travel, I found a seat next to my Timofey. “What are you doing, batyushka?” he whispered. “Why are you here? This place is not for you!” Indeed, it was difficult to reach a rapprochement between my girth and the Austrian concept of an economy seat; I ended up with my ass where my back should have been, palms pressed into the seat in front of me.

“I am here out of principle,” I told my manservant, reaching over to pat his spongy old head with its thick womanlike hairs. “I am here because a Yid tried to take my honor.”

“There are Jews and there are Yids,” Timofey said. “Everyone knows this.”

“It’s not easy to be a cultured man nowadays,” I told him. “But I’ll be fine. Look out the window, Tima. Those mountains could be the Alps. Would you like to see the Alps someday? You could go with your son and have a little picnic.”

A look of such transcendent disbelief came over Timofey that I could only feel grief for him. And grief for me, too. There was enough grief on the plane for both of us.

Good grief, as the Americans say.

14 The Norway of the Caspian

We landed at the Viennese airport, taxiing past the glassed-in main terminal where the planes always ran on time, to a problematic sideshow of a building reserved for flights to the not-quite-ready-for-Europe places like Kosovo, Tirana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and my native St. Leninsburg. There were no jetways at this diminished building; two buses came to pick us up, one for the first- and business-class passengers, another for the rest of us. I watched from my window as the wily Hasid maneuvered to be the first aboard the first-class bus, clutching his velvety tuna pouch as if it contained the diamonds he surely sold for a living. Shame, shame.

Walking down the stairs, I made sure to breathe in the fine European Union air before being bused to the cigarette-smoke-filled terminal where the rest of my YugoSovietMongol brethren waited unhappily for their flights back to Tartary. I tried to make my way to the main terminal, but you had to pass an immigration counter with a normal Western passport before you could buy cigarettes duty-free or move your bowels astride the latest model of Austrian toilet. Soon, very soon, I would have my Belgian passport. Not soon enough, let me tell you.

Alyosha-Bob whiled away the hours before our next flight laughing at my anti-Hasid campaign, making side curls out of the shaggier portions of my hair. He would run up and, like a child, throw himself on the loose hams hanging off my back. I tried to walk away from him, but he’s the faster of the two of us. By the time they started boarding our flight to Svani City, he had curled me a nice set of payess.

As the flight was announced, the most olive-skinned people in the terminal rushed the gate, and soon a jostling mass of mustached men and their pretty dark wives, each wielding bags from Century 21, the famed New York discount emporium, had laid siege to the poor Austrian Airlines personnel. This was my first introduction to the Absurdistan mob—a faithful re-creation of the Soviet line for sausages, fueled by the natural instincts of the Oriental bazaar. “Calm down, ladies and gentlemen!” I shouted as young, hairy men bounced off me, seemingly using my mass to ricochet to the front of the line. “Do you think they’ll run out of seats on the plane? We’re in Austria, for God’s sake!”

Once aboard, the Absurdis began unwrapping their many purchases, modeling designer ties for their wives, and exchanging footwear across the aisles. Their first-class shenanigans did not manage to offend me as much as the Hasid’s had on the last flight, perhaps because the Hasid was one of my own, while the only occasion one has to meet an Absurdi in St. Petersburg is at the market, when one is searching for a gorgeous flower in the middle of winter or wants to make a pet of some exotic mongoose. I don’t mean to denigrate the Absurdis, or whatever they call themselves. They are the resourceful and clever representatives of an ancient trading culture, which, along with the massive quantities of oil lapping at their shores, helps explain why their country is the most successful of our formerly Soviet republics, the so-called Norway of the Caspian.

I turned to the window to watch our plane follow the curves of the Danube as the orderly Austrian houses with their peaked roofs and backyard swimming pools turned into the housing projects surrounding the stumpy castle of Bratislava, Slovakia, which in turn gave way to the melancholy buildup of Budapest (I could even make out the fin de siecle Parliament building on the Pest side and the old Austro-Hungarian seat of power on the Buda), which eventually surrendered to some sort of war-torn Balkan landscape, cities shelled into random organic forms, gaping bridges, the jumble of wrecked orange-tiled houses clustered together like coral reefs. “I’m taking one step backward so that I can jump clear across the board,” I consoled myself. As the West receded into another time zone, the stewardesses compensated by serving us a crispy quail salad of the first order; the drinks menu offered up some pleasant surprises as well, especially in the port category.

“I’m going to miss you, Snack,” Alyosha-Bob said as he drank a glass of forty-year-old Fonseca. “You’re my best friend.”

“I’m sentimental already,” I sighed.

“Belgium’s going to be good for you,” my friend said in English, the language we spoke when we were alone, our fooling-around language. “There’s nothing to do there. There’s no one to fight against. You won’t be such a nut job. You’ll cut back on the emotions. I can’t believe you actually started that Misha’s Children thing and hired Valentin and Svetlana to run it.”

“Remember the motto of Accidental College? ‘Think one person can change the world? So do we.’”

“Didn’t we used to make fun of that motto, like, every single day, Snack?”

“I guess I’m growing up,” I said smugly. “Maybe I’ll get a doctorate in Multicultural Studies in Brussels. Maybe that will make me look good to the generals in charge of the INS.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They love multi—”

“Shhhh,” Alyosha-Bob said, putting a finger to his lips. “It’s quiet time now, Misha.”

Our plane began its approach to Svani City. The light of early evening revealed a green mountainous terrain skirted by pockets of desert, which were, in turn, filled in with pockets of something partially liquid resembling a sick man’s gastric misadventures. The farther we descended, the more pronounced became the battle between mountain and desert, the latter pockmarked by lakes iridescent with industry and on occasion surrounded by blue domes that could have been either giant mosques or small oil refineries.

It took me some time to realize that we had reached the shores of a major body of water, that the brown, alkaline vistas of the corroded desert now brushed up against a dull band of gray that was, in fact, the Caspian Sea.