Absurdistan

“You cursed the Svani monsters,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching impatiently.

“I cursed the monsters…”

“…who killed your best friend.”

“…who killed my best friend, Sakha. True enough.”

We watched the old playwright go back to his chicken leg and nibble carefully. I felt the longing to comfort him and, by extension, the whole Sevo race. God help me, but I found their feudal mentality charming. You couldn’t fault them for their ignorance, a small, impressionable people surrounded by nations lacking in intellectual rigor. They were young and ill-formed, like showy adolescent girls trying to win the affection of adults through prancing and coquetry and the deliberate flash of a skinny ankle. Forget my Petersburg charity. These were Misha’s Children. I pledged my fealty to their sunny, prepubescent causes, their dreams of freedom and impossible happiness. “The world has heard of your plight,” I said, “and soon you will have your dictionary and your oil pipeline.”

“Oh, if only.” The men began to sigh and blow unhappily into their empty wine horns.

“A tragedy took place yesterday,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “A tragedy that will change everything.”

“It’s the end, the end,” his co-nationals agreed.

“An Italian anti-globalization protester,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “a young man, has been killed at the G8 summit in Genoa by the Italian police.”

“How sad,” I agreed. “If a pretty Mediterranean person can be robbed of his life, what chance do the rest of us have?”

“Just as our Sevo struggle for democracy was gaining some market share in the global media,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “we have been banished from the news cycle.”

“Just one dead Italian!” Bubi moaned, tugging at his T-shirt as if he wanted to join his father in a twitch. “We had sixty-five people killed last week—”

“Including your favorite, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.

“—and nobody cared,” Bubi said.

“Unlike those rich, spoiled Italians, we’re completely in tune with globalization,” Mr. Nanabragov said to me. “We want capitalism and America.”

“And Israel,” Bubi said.

“We were getting live feed on BBC One, France 2, Deutsche Welle, Rai Due, and CNN, and now, one dead European later, you turn on any channel, and everyone’s crying over the Genovese hooligan.”

“How many such hooligans do we have to kill?” Bubi said.

“Shush, sonny, we’re a peaceful nation,” Mr. Nanabragov said.

They all turned to me and tugged their shirts in unison; Parka Mook put down his chicken leg and burped elegantly into his hand. “It’s hard to define your conflict,” I suggested. “No one’s really sure what it’s about.”

“It’s about independence!” Mr. Nanabragov said.

“And Israel,” Bubi said.

“Saint Sevo the Liberator,” shouted one of the elderly men.

“Christ’s True Footrest.”

“The thieving Armenian.”

“Quietly the Leopard Rises.”

“And don’t forget Parka’s new dictionary!”

“These are all good things,” I said. “But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don’t have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora, from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don’t have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they’ll send troops.”

“We don’t want the United Nations,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “We don’t want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We’re better than that. We want America.”

“We want the big time,” Bubi said in English.

“Please, go talk to Israel,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “and then maybe they’ll recommend us to America.”

“How can I talk to Israel?” I said. “What can I say to it? I am only a private Belgian citizen.”

“Your father would know what to say,” Mr. Nanabragov told me.

We sat there quietly chewing on that fact like cud. The finches sang to the sparrows, and the sparrows returned the favor. There was a failure of the power supply. The house around us darkened, moonlit shadows appeared momentarily along the glassed-in verandas covered with trellises of grape. Finally the backup generators sprang to life. We could hear the women singing dolorously in the kitchen, my Nana’s voice noticeably absent. A dog picked up their whimper somewhere in the distance.

Mr. Nanabragov was right. My father would know what to say.

29 Bad Manservant

The toasting reached a low ebb. Plastic jugs of sweet wine were brought in, and the men started to get drunk. I had never seen natives of the Caucasus put away so much. “In Soviet days, we used to drink from love and pleasure; now we drink because we have to,” Mr. Nanabragov said, and this became the last, symptomatic toast of the evening. The men lined up to kiss me on both cheeks, their boozy, grizzly faces scratching me in a not unpleasant way. “Take care of us,” some pleaded. “Our fate is in your hands.”

“My mother will be your mother,” others assured me. “There will always be water in my well to drink.”

“Is it true,” Volodya the former KGB man whispered to me, “that most of the pornography industry is in Jewish hands?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Even I dabble in blue films now and then. Tell me if you know of any fallen Russian women. Or young girls, for that matter.”

Mr. Nanabragov kissed me six times, on the cheeks, nose, and temples, just as his wife and daughter had him. “Good Misha,” he said, slurring his words. “Good boy. Don’t leave us for Belgium, sonny. We simply won’t let you.”

Nana emerged on the balcony, then swept me inside her air-conditioned bedroom, dropping me onto one of two small beds present. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Please fuck me.”

“Now?” I said. “Here?”

“Oh, please, please, please,” she said. “Do me, daddy.”

“Pop you?”

“Just like that.”

I assumed the position on the cold white sheets. I was not immediately erect; the stairs had winded me. But the sweet brown scent of recently exhaled marijuana, along with a general NYU laxity, prodded me along. She pulled up her shirt and unhitched her bra, letting her breasts fall into position. In the relative darkness of Nana’s bedroom, which faced away from both the oil rigs and the corporate towers of the International Terrace, her teats were lit up by natural resources—the moon and stars—giving them a light gloss on top and a dark folded crease on the bottom. I squished them together and put them in my mouth. “Here goes,” I said.

She landed on top of me, sticking me inside her in one lubricated motion, without the usual series of soft cries women produce upon being entered. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the pain. I imagined Nana and then another Nana and then a third, all of them on their hands and knees, their full-moon asses pointed toward me as I prepared to take them from behind.

“Just like that, Snack Daddy,” Nana was saying, having recently learned of my college nickname. She leaned in to me and started rummaging through the curtains of back flesh as if sorting through the clothing bins of a fashionable secondhand store. Eventually she found what she was looking for.

“Please,” I said, “I’m sore tonight. And I ate too much. I might—”