Absurdistan

“O-ho!” the gathered cried. “True love!” “They’re inseparable.” “Like something out of a movie.” “Fred and Ginger.”

Mr. Nanabragov let go of his wife, who fell to the ground and had to be helped up by her girlfriends. She shook the dirt off her skirt, bowed shyly to the men gathered at the table, and ran off to the kitchen, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. Nana grabbed her friend’s arm and, with an exaggerated male swagger, followed the older women inside.

The excitement brought forth by the women abated. The lamb arrived, and its gristly, fatty consistency kept our mouths working hard. Faik the manservant, a half-visible Mohammedan gnome, appeared at our elbow to carve up new chunks of a giant kebab. “Eat, eat, masters,” he said. “If you spit out some of the gristle, perhaps Faik will make a meal for himself. That’s right, spit your gristle at me, excellencies. Am I not a man? Apparently not.”

I could not believe a manservant could speak so brashly to his masters, and I almost expressed outrage on behalf of my host. But Mr. Nanabragov said only, “Faik, we are at your disposal, brother. Eat what you wish and drink as your faith allows.” With that, Faik cut himself a few choice morsels and absconded with someone’s wine horn.

Gradually the men began to regain some of their speech faculties. After they were done masticating the lamb and gargling their dessert wine, they picked up their mobilniki and started snarling orders across town or cooing to their mistresses. A group of older men who were clearly styling themselves after Mr. Nanabragov, with their half-open linen shirts and improvised nervous twitches, were having the same endless discussion that dominated the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg that summer: whether a Mercedes 600S (a so- called shestyorka) was better than a BMW 375i. There was little I could add to that debate, other than my preference for a Land Rover, whose seats squished around me so pleasantly. Other men, including the taciturn anti-Semite Volodya, were talking about the oil industry in terms I could not follow—“light, sweet crude,” “OPEC benchmark,” things of that sort.

“You know,” I said to Mr. Nanabragov, “I have a funny American friend who tells me this whole war is about oil. That it’s all about whether a pipeline to Europe should run through Sevo or Svani territory and who gets to profit from the kickbacks.”

Mr. Nanabragov vibrated for a while. “You call that a funny friend?” he said. “Well, let me tell you, there’s a difference between humor and cynicism. Do you think the Russian poet Lermontov was funny? Why, he probably thought so. But then he publicly humiliated an old school chum who challenged him to a duel and then shot him dead! Not so funny anymore…” He twitched silently and glared at me.

“I have another funny friend,” I pressed on, “who says the Figa-6 oil field will never happen. He says the American airlift was just an old switcheroo and now there are all these new Halliburton people running around Svani City for no reason at all. What’s going on, Mr. Nanabragov?”

“You know,” Nana’s father said, “that Alexandre Dumas called the Sevo the Pearls of the Caspian. Now, there’s a writer we respect. A Frenchman. Much better than Lermontov. He was funny but not cynical. See the difference?”

I was confused. Weren’t the Svani called the Pearls of the Caspian? And why was Mr. Nanabragov bashing poor melancholy Lermontov and praising that overripe Dumas? Who cared about literature, anyway? Petroleum and hip-hop were the topics of my generation.

“Fine,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “maybe some of us in the SCROD were upset that the Svani had control of the oil pipeline when traditionally we’re the people of the sea, and they’re the sheep-bangers of the interior. But we don’t want to steal the oil like the dictator Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil. We don’t want to spend the national patrimony in a Monte Carlo casino. We want to use the oil money to build a democracy. That’s the operative word we all love here. Democracy. What do we call ourselves? The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy.”

“I love democracy, too,” I said. “It’s great to have one, no question—”

“And democracy means Israel,” said Bubi, winning himself another pat from his father.

“Even Primo Levi admitted the Holocaust figures were inflated,” Volodya said.

“A few weeks ago,” I said, ignoring the former KGB agent, “I witnessed the terrible murder of a group of democrats by Colonel Svyokla and the Svani forces. One of them had become a good friend of mine. His name was Sakha.”

Upon mention of Sakha, the courtyard fell silent. The men began to open and close their mobilniki. Bubi quietly whistled “Black Magic Woman.” A finch landed on a pile of lamb and began to sing to us about its golden life. “And,” said Mr. Nanabragov, “you liked this Sakha?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “He had just gotten back from New York, from the Century 21 department store, and they shot him. Right in front of the Hyatt. In cold blood, as they say.”

Mr. Nanabragov slapped his hands together and twitched three times, as if sending a coded signal to a satellite nervously circling the table. “We admired Sakha, too,” he said. “Didn’t we?”

“True! True!” the assembled sang into their cupped hands.

“See, Misha, the Svani sheep-bangers think that by killing Sevo democrats, they can silence our aspirations. Oh, where are Israel and America when you need them?”

“But they weren’t just Sevo democrats,” I said. “They were Sevo and Svani. A little of each. A democratic cocktail.”

“You know who you should talk to?” said Mr. Nanabragov. “Our esteemed Parka here. Ai, Parka! Speak to us.”

The gathered moved their chairs either forward or back until I saw a small, intelligent-looking senior citizen in a rumpled dress shirt holding on to a chicken leg. He turned his double-jointed nose at me and sniffed the air sadly. “This is Parka Mook,” Mr. Nanabragov announced. “He spent many years in a Soviet prison for his dissident views, just like your dear papa. He is our most famous playwright, the man who penned Quietly the Leopard Rises, which indeed made the Sevo people rise up and pump their fists in the air. You could say he’s the moral consciousness of our independence movement. Now he’s working on a Sevo dictionary, which will show conclusively how much more authentic our language is when compared to Svani, which is really just a bastardization of Persian.”

Parka Mook opened his mouth, revealing two rows of poorly made silver teeth. Now I recalled where I had seen him: his image had flanked that of Mr. Nanabragov on the Sevo billboard by the esplanade. He seemed even more tired and depressed in person. “Happy to make your acquaintance,” he said in slow, ponderous Russian that couldn’t hide his thick Caucasus accent.

“Quietly the Leopard Rises,” I said, “that sounds very familiar. Was it performed in Petersburg recently?”

“Perhaps,” Parka Mook said as he regretfully let go of his chicken leg. “But it’s not very good. When you put a Shakespeare or a Beckett or even a Pinter next to me, you will see how very small I am.”

“Nonsense, nonsense!” the gathered shouted.

“You’re very modest,” I told the playwright.

He smiled and waved me away. “It’s nice to do something for your country,” he said. “But soon I will die and my work will disappear forever. Oh, well. Death should be a pleasant release for me. I can hardly wait to drop dead. Maybe tomorrow the sweet day will come. Now, what did you ask me?”

“Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.

“Oh, yes. I knew your friend Sakha. He was a fellow anti-Soviet agitator. We did not share the same opinions as of late—”

“But you were still best friends,” Mr. Nanabragov interrupted.

“We did not share the same opinions of late,” Parka Mook resumed, “but when I saw his body on television, lying in the dirt, I had to shut my eyes. There was so much brightness that day. These infernal summer months. On some afternoons, when there is that much brightness—how should I put it—the very sunlight becomes false. So I closed the curtains and lost myself in memories of better days.”

“And he cursed the Svani monsters who had killed his best friend, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov prompted the playwright.

Parka Mook sighed. He looked longingly at his abandoned chicken leg. “That’s correct,” he muttered, “I cursed…” He looked up at me with depleted eyes. “I cursed…”