filled by exemplars of that one uninspiring gender. “Go have fun with your girlfriends in the kitchen. What nice lamb you’ll make. Just don’t overcook it. You want to keep your cavalier happy. What a fine man he is.”
“That’s so old-school,” Nana said in English to him. “That’s so, I don’t know, like, medieval.”
“What was that, my little sun?” the father said. “You know I’m not so good with the English. Even my Russian’s an embarrassment. Now go. Fly away. But wait…Give me a kiss before you leave.”
I had never seen my Nana stifle her anger before, mostly because she had never been angry with me (how can one be angry at a man of such few qualities?). She exhaled deeply, her loveliness settled from her round chestnut eyes into the vicinity of her slightly bowlegged lower half, and I thought she would soon start to cry. Instead, she went over to her papa, put her arms around him, and dutifully kissed him six times, once on each red cheek, once on each bald temple, and twice on the fleshy nose, curved downward like a comma. He tickled her. She laughed. He did his strange out-of-body twitch and simultaneously slapped her behind, imparting a squeeze. “You know, sir,” I said, “it would be nice to have Nana and her pals at the table. Women are pretty.”
“I respectfully dissent,” said Mr. Nanabragov. “There’s a time for prettiness and there’s a time for seriousness. Let’s eat!”
28
My dinner companions were an inspiration. They ate fervently. They ate with their hands. Their hands were always full. I occupied a large part of the main table, and they would reach over me, around me, past my nose, under my chin, to grab an oozing cheese pie or a warm hunk of pheasant or a stuffed grape leaf the size of a forearm. They inhaled their food into one side of the mouth while expelling Armenian anecdotes from the other. The food was good, the meat fatty and charred just right, the cheese lightly smoked, the soup dumplings coated with enough black pepper to make one cough and weep and thank our put-upon earth for all its spicy produce. I became nervous and discreetly slipped several Ativan tablets into my ram’s horn, letting them dissolve amid the strong Sevo wine. But for all the Ativan in the world, I could not quell my anxiety. I started to rock back and forth, as I always do when confronted by food of this caliber. Mr. Nanabragov took this for a sign of Hasidity and started to make a toast to Israel.
“We Sevo understand your country’s problems,” he said, mistaking Israel for my country. “We, too, are the victims of our geography. Why, just look at our neighbors. To the south, the Persians, in the other directions the Turks, farther north the Russians. And sharing our country, the apelike Svani. What problems we have. Just imagine, Misha, what would happen if, instead of occupying and subduing the Palestinians, the Israelis found themselves reeling under the Moslem yoke. I would compare both our peoples to a beautiful white mare saddled under a loutish black brute who digs his spurs into our tender flanks. Ever since Saint Sevo the Liberator found the piece of Christ’s True Footrest delivered to us by that thieving Armenian—I’m sure my Nana has told you the story —we have been a nation apart from our neighbors, blessed by education and prosperity but cursed by our small numbers and the whip of our Svani masters.” He pretended to raise a whip high above his head and made a whooshing sound.
“Israel must support us, Misha, don’t you think? Tell Israel that we should be as one. Tell them that we are both the last hope for Western democracy. If he were alive today, Boris Vainberg, your father of blessed memory, would be the first to run to the Israeli embassy and beg for their help on our behalf. And I know I speak for everyone around the table when I say that each of us would die for Israel as well.”
“To Israel!” the gathered toasted.
“To the friendship of the Jews and the Sevo.”
“Death to our enemies!”
“Well put!”
“Jesus was a Jew,” volunteered Bubi, Nana’s little brother, the youngest at the table.
“Certainly he was,” his father agreed, cupping the young man’s thick chin with one hand and rustling his dark mane with the other. They looked alike—Bubi was also a small, girlish-looking beauty who was doubling nicely around the edges, a victim of the Southern good life. He was free of his father’s boisterous twitches, evidently content to live within his own cotton T-shirt, which bore the likeness of the famed Latin American guitarist Carlos Santana. “Yes, Jesus was a Jew,” the father confirmed, nodding wisely at the fact.
“Alas, if you read Castaneda, you will see that he was not,” someone said.
“Hush, Volodya!” another shouted.
“Don’t mistreat the Jews,” yet another volunteered.
I momentarily put down the soup ladle I had been using to shovel grainy osetra caviar into my mouth and looked at this Volodya. He was the only ethnic Russian at the table, an inflated, red-faced man with the sad, clear eyes and droopy ears of Vladimir Putin. I later found out that, like Putin, Volodya was a former KGB agent. Disgraced from that service after stealing above and beyond his allotted quota of amphibious jeeps and shoulder- fired rockets, he now worked as a security consultant for the SCROD. I decided it was best to ignore him. “I’m not interested in this man,” I said, haughtily tapping my caviar ladle against my ram’s horn.
But this Volodya would not let up with his quietly voiced Jew-bashing. Whenever my hosts toasted to the wisdom and financial muscle of the Jews, he would say, “I’m a good friend of the Austrian nationalist Jorg Haider.”
Or: “It just so happens that some of my best friends are neo-Nazis. Good fellows, they work with their hands.”
Or, more subtly: “Of course there is only one God. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our differences.”
The father twitched, nearly pulling off his shirt, then pulling it back on again. Bubi and the others loudly denounced the Russian and threatened to eject him from the table. But I would not oblige Volodya by becoming angry. “I am not much taken with Judaism,” I announced. “I am a multiculturalist.” Except there was no Russian word for “multiculturalist,” so I had to say, “I am a man who likes others.”
The toasts continued. We drank to the health of the pilot who would one day fly me to Belgium. (“But you should stay with us forever!” Mr. Nanabragov added. “We won’t let you go.”) We drank to Boris Vainberg, Beloved Papa of blessed memory, and the famous eight-hundred-kilogram screw he sold to a certain American oil services company.
Finally it was time to toast to the women. Mr. Nanabragov’s hunch-backed Moslem manservant, who went by the name of Faik, was sent into the kitchen to gather the womenfolk. They emerged, greasy and sweaty and middle-aged, wiping their brows with aprons. Only my Nana and one of her school chums looked glossy and air- conditioned, as if they had spent their evening free of food preparation. (In fact, they had been toking up marijuana in Nana’s room while trying on padded bras.)
“The bee is here because it senses honey,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching and jerking and thrusting his hips. “Women, you are like bees—”
“Hurry up, Timur,” said a sallow older woman, her sparse hair coated with flour. “You’ll chatter until the sun comes up, and here we are with lamb to grill.”
“That’s my wife, everybody!” Mr. Nanabragov shouted, pointing at his spouse. “The mother of my children. Look at her carefully, perhaps for the last time, because if she overcooks the kebabs, I think I’m going to kill her tonight.” Laughter and toasting. The women glanced back at the kitchen impatiently. Nana rolled her eyes but remained standing until the master of the house shouted, “Women, go! Fly away…But wait. First, my dear wife, give me a kiss.”
Mrs. Nanabragovna sighed and approached her husband. She kissed him six times, on the cheeks, temples, and nose. She made to leave, but he got up, tipped her over, and kissed her loudly on the lips with a protracted
