Absurdistan

I turned to the dark Nana Nanabragovna (plucking her name from the pewter tag on her bosom), who was assessing me with her chestnut eyes and wry little mouth. I guessed that she had a robust sense of humor, or at least liked to laugh, and that once we were in bed I could provoke some ticklish giggles out of her. I could see myself kissing the warm, flat bulb of her nose and saying, “Funny girl! Who’s my funny girl now?” This is what I used to do to Rouenna when the mood struck me.

Having been put in the position of choosing between the two American Express ladies, or at least between their ethnicities, I had to proceed diplomatically, lest feelings be hurt. “Where is the church that looks like an octopus?” I said, knowing full well that it was on the Sevo Terrace.

“That’s the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator,” Nana said. Her English, I noted, was authoritative and fully American, with a hint of consonant-free Brooklynese. Sain’ Sevah duh Lih-buh-rai-tah, accent on the penultimate syllable.

I gave my regrets and a roll of cash to the blonde. Nana got her car keys.

Once she was in motion, it became clear to me that my new friend was a big girl. Not Misha Vainberg big, of course, but in the 70-kilogram (150-pound) range, factored into a height of about sixty-six inches. Despite the healthy country girl’s body, urban fashion had not passed her by. She wore her denims lower than a Lower East Side mami and to the same devastating effect. Her tight tan-colored T-shirt canoodled her breasts. The space between her low-slung denims and high-slung T-shirt was taken up with a band of glossy sun- stroked flesh prickled here and there with dark hairs that stood on end, reminding me of the imported cypresses lining the Boulevard of National Unity. Remarkably, the transition from spine to posterior showed few color gradations—her entire dorsal area approximate to the hue of her upper arms, a solid gold tone. Her denims bifurcated a nice big ass. Her face was wide and emotive enough to accommodate the loves and losses of a dozen aristocratic Persian women, the particular nationality she most resembled. She had the barest of feminine mustaches, which, when covered with cream or froth, would remind me of myself as a twelve-year-old boy. The heat, which smothered me and made a sour borscht of my genitals, kept its distance from her, seemingly angling for a quick passing rub against her bosom. She drove a shiny black Lincoln Navigator decorated with a white-and- blue American Express flag, which, from a distance, resembled the less powerful standard of the United Nations.

When we were both locked into her truck, we turned to each other and smiled. There we were, two people, one a continent of flesh, the other a mere Madagascar, maneuvering onto leather, sliding our seats forward and back, folding ourselves into the car while mumbling things in Middle-Atlantic English, grunting and sighing like an old couple. We seemed, at least to me, inevitable.

I recited by heart the last e-mail Rouenna had sent me before the Internet was shut off:

Dear Misha, I am sorry you are in a dangerous place and people are dying but 1) your email was once again all about you, you, you (how about asking me about MY life for a change?) and 2) when are you NOT in a dangerous place where people are dying? Anyway, I’m sure you’ll get out of your predigament just fine, because your a survivor.

P.S. You really should’nt hate Proffessor Shteynfarb who likes you a lot and has lots of wity and interesting things to say about you.

P.S.S. I should have told you earlier but I think your shrink is a real idiot.

In other words, I thought I was ready for a new love. I was ready to feel safe again in someone else’s arms. I was ready to forget my Rouenna, at least for a while.

Nana and I drove down the Boulevard of National Unity, eyeing the commerce around us and sneaking looks at each other. A half-dozen empty KBR flatbed trucks idled in the middle of the thoroughfare, charged with some mysterious purpose we could only guess at.

“I thought the road between the terraces was impassable,” I said.

“You are an important person, Mr. Vainberg,” Nana said, smiling and showing off her lipstick-stained incisors, “and we are a hospitable people. My mother will be your mother, and there’s plenty of water in my well for you to drink.”

“If you say so, Miss Nanabragovna,” I said. But as we approached a roadblock of jeeps and armored personnel carriers, I reached for the familiar plumpness of my wallet and felt up several US$100 bills, ready to be doled out to any teenager with a gun.

The soldiers manning the roadblock were taking an afternoon siesta beneath a tarp they had rigged between two of the APCs. I expected my tour guide to reach between her breasts and produce a Sevo cross for the soldiers to inspect, a prospect that made me dizzy with excitement, but instead Nana honked her powerful Navigator horn until a few rumpled youths languidly emerged from beneath the tarp.

Nana opened her window and leaned out as far as she could, in the meantime letting me look deep into the beginning of her ass crease and the tightness of denim against her caramel thighs. MISS SIXTY, read the label on her jeans, a new brand I was sure would catch on with the middle class.

“Boys, let me through,” Nana shouted in Russian, the word “boys” sounding both coquettish and imperious.

“Yes, mistress!” The soldiers saluted and stood at attention. They ran back and started moving aside the tarp and their vehicles, cursing at one another to hurry along.

The salutes and ceremony were repeated at the Svani Terrace checkpoint. I wondered aloud as to why Svani soldiers would so honor a Sevo woman. “It is because we are flying the American Express flag,” Nana said, although her ripe young voice sounded uncharacteristically false as she said it. She turned away from me, then put on her sunglasses, cursing as one of its hinges caught in the tangle of her arm hairs.

“We’re almost there,” she said, waving away the pain.

Our Navigator plunged down the winding road, and I soon found myself at the bottom of the world.

23 The Sevo Vatican

If the Svani were made whole by their remote-control market and their association with Alexandre Dumas, the Sevo boasted a stranglehold on the sea. It loitered close by, gray and muted, peeking out from behind the faded mansions of the oil aristocracy that had decamped here a century ago, when the Caspian had first announced itself as a source of seemingly endless fuel and antagonism.

Instead of looking for a place to park, Nana simply abandoned her vehicle at a busy intersection. An elderly policeman crisply saluted her and rushed over to stand at attention beside it. He whistled to a passing soldier, who took off his shirt, dipped it into a nearby fountain, and began washing down the Navigator’s sandy windshield. “You seem to be very popular,” I said to my new friend, who merely shrugged. What the hell was going on here? I wished Alyosha-Bob would appear and explain things to me in his pedantic way. I felt vulnerable—susceptible—to anything without him.

Nana walked ahead of me, relating the peculiarities of the local architecture commissioned by late- nineteenth-century oil barons. “Really?” I said when told of the original owner of a massive neo-Gothic pile. “This was built by Lord Rothschild? The Jew?”

“Are there many Jews in Belgium, Mr. Vainberg?” my tour guide asked.

“Yes, quite a few,” I said. “Personally I live in Brussels, but if you ever find yourself in Antwerp, you will see a funny sight sometimes—the local Hasids riding around on their bicycles, with their dark coats flapping along. We Belgians have quite an open society, you see.”

“So you are a balloon?” she said.

I was hurt to the stomach by her frankness, by the idea that such a sweet woman could be a fat-baiter. “I do have a fondness for food,” I admitted, “which may indeed make me in your eyes a balloon—”

“No!” She laughed. “Not a balloon. Oh, you poor man. A Walloon. A French Belgian.”