Absurdistan

know we even exist?”

I considered telling him that no one knew they existed anyway but thought it might be tactless.

“Maybe you should move your daughters to Belgium,” I said. “I’ll pay for their plane tickets.”

“You are thoughtful and sincere,” Sakha said, and then, in all contravention of the rules of the manly Caucasus, he turned away and made a tearful gurgle with his sickle-shaped nose.

“You can’t choose where you’re born,” I said, and immediately felt like an asshole for saying it.

Sakha looked back from the derrick-studded horizon to my own sweltering frame. “Are you hot, Mr. Vainberg?” he said, laying his hand on one of my wet shoulders. “Let’s get back in the car. Monsieur Lefevre is waiting for us by the McDonald’s dumpster.”

I nodded in agreement. But as we turned toward the car, Sakha looked back once more at the city beneath us. “Did I mention,” he said, “that the Sevo Vatican was originally covered by hexagonal tiles made of gold leaf that were given to us as a tribute by the khan of Bukhara and that the hexagonal motif represents the six great cities of Sevo antiquity?”

“I think you did mention that, yes,” I said.

“And I told you the names of all six cities?” Sakha said. “Maybe I forgot to mention them.”

“Yes, you told me, Mr. Sakha,” I said. “Your country has a proud history. I understand that.”

Sakha nodded and pulled at his orange Zegna tie. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

* * *

Journeying from the International Terrace to the Svani one, we had left a fledgling Portland, Oregon, and arrived in Kabul. Gone were the Hyatts and fake Irish bars. Here the local business scene consisted of middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and gossiping around idled taxis. Rounding out the economy, younger men and boys ran around with buckets of sunflower seeds that they would wrap in a paper cone and sell for five thousand absurdis a portion (about US$.05, I later found out).

The McDonald’s was situated behind a prominent square that, during the Soviet era, must have hosted its share of May Day parades but had been turned into an ad hoc market for used remote controls. We walked past hordes of potential buyers aiming the orphaned devices at the sky, as if trying to turn off the scorching sun. Above the gleaming pile of remotes stretched an enormous mural of Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil, dancing with each other on the helicopter deck of a Chevron offshore oil platform. A large man in a bow tie and tails stood off to the side of the deck, writing something with a quill upon an ancient scroll. He was as neatly mustached as the dictator and his son, and boasted an incongruous poof of African-looking hair. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Alexandre Dumas,” an old remote seller told me. “He came to our country in 1858. He called the Svani people ‘the Pearls of the Caspian.’ He loved our dried beef and wet women. When he came down to the Sevo Terrace, he was robbed by ruffians and cheated by the local merchants. He hated it there.”

I looked to Sakha, who merely shrugged. “It’s an old Svani story,” he said.

“And who are you by nationality?” the remote seller started to ask, but Sakha whisked me away to our destination.

We strode into the all-beef smell of McDonald’s, where I was regarded by the hungry customers as a kind of living embodiment of the fast-food lifestyle. “Personally I favor the slow-food movement,” I loudly announced to a family splitting the smallest McDonald’s hamburger into six parts so that each family member could savor a little taste. Poor souls. Here they were living by the Caspian Sea, surrounded by delicious fresh sturgeon and wild tomatoes, and nonetheless they came to McDonald’s. I made a mental note to check up on the diets of Misha’s Children. Hopefully the progressive Park Slope social workers had already made their way to St. Petersburg and had set to work on the little ones.

“Hey, it’s that democrat!” someone shouted at Sakha. “Hey, democrat, buy me a shake, will you? I’ll believe in anything you say.”

A tall Slavic man in his late teens approached, stiff and official in his disposable McDonald’s uniform, but with enough of a homosexual smile to make a name for himself in Petersburg’s Club 69. His Cyrillic tag labeled him a Dzhunior Manadzher. “Sir,” he said. “Are you here to see Monsieur Lefevre?”

“Certainly I am not here to eat your criminal food,” I replied.

“Please come with me,” said the junior manager. “In the meantime, Mr. Sakha and your manservant can enjoy a free cheeseburger. No, Mr. Sakha, you may split one cheeseburger, that’s all.”

He took me past the bathrooms reeking awfully of industrial detergent, past a framed print of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and to a door that opened to a small cul-de-sac where the McDonald’s garbage was stored in vast plastic containers. It took me a while to pinpoint Jean-Michel Lefevre of the Belgian consulate, lying atop a soiled mattress, with both hands grasping the edges, as if he were Jonah just spat out of the whale.

“Monsieur Lefevre isn’t feeling well,” the slender Russian boy told me. “I’m going to get him something to drink.”

“Misha,” the Belgian bellowed into the mattress. “Bring vodka,” he said in Russian.

“Are you talking to me?” I said.

“I am also called Misha,” said the boy, leaving us alone.

The Belgian used his elbows to flip over onto his back, where he could get a proper look at me. “Mother of God,” he said in English. “You’re big. You’re bigger than in Captain Belugin’s photograph. You’re the biggest thing ever.”

“I am a big man, yes,” I said. Lefevre was himself a blond, emaciated fellow likely in early middle age, stubbly, red-eyed, and nicely browned by the Absurdi arrangement of sun, water, and sand. Whatever awful thing that had happened to him must have happened quickly and irrevocably.

“So,” said Lefevre with a smirk. “Who wants to be a Belgian?”

“I do,” I said. Was he trying to make some kind of joke? “I have paid US$240,000 to Captain Belugin. That should buy citizenship for me and a work visa for my manservant. Everything should be in order.”

“Mm-hump,” said the Belgian, throwing up a hand and letting it hang in front of him limply. “Everyone wants to be a Belgian. Well, I don’t want to be a Belgian, no, sir. I want to be a Mexican Zapatista or a Montenegrin. Something fierce.” He yawned and scratched the perfectly white bridge of his nose. I noticed his sunglasses lying broken at his feet.

Misha the McDonald’s junior manager returned with a bottle of Flagman vodka and a McDonald’s paper cup. He emptied the vodka into the cup, gently tilted Lefevre’s head, and poured the vodka into the diplomat’s mouth. There was some gagging, but mostly the alcohol found its way into the Belgian’s bloodstream, where it quickly reddened his tan.

“What are you?” Lefevre asked me as he let Misha wipe his face with a McDonald’s paper hat. “What do you do?”

“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “I run a charity called Misha’s Children.”

“Are you some kind of pedophile?”

“What?” I fairly shrieked. “How can you? How awful! All my life I’ve wanted to help children.”

“I just thought because you’re so fat and puffy—”

“Stop insulting me. I know my rights.”

“You’re not a Belgian yet, friend,” he said. “I’m just joking. We have a problem in Belgium with pedophilia. Big scandal. Even the government and police people are implied.”

“Implicated,” I corrected him.

“I thought you should know more about your new nation before you signed on. Anything else you wanted to know?”

I considered all the things I wanted to know about Belgium. There weren’t many. “You have this queen Beatrix, no?” I asked.

“That would be Holland.”

“And you have a shameful history in the Congo. Your Leopold was a monster.”

“He’s your Leopold now, Vainberg. Our Leopold. Our Leopold of the Black Sorrows.” Lefevre reached under the mattress and took out a business envelope that he tried to throw my way, but it landed in exactly the opposite direction, atop a plastics recycling bin. The other Misha picked it up and brought it to me.