“Gently, gently,” she said. “Look how gently I do it. I even trimmed my nails.” And she hooked her finger into the mossy bull’s-eye of my ass, probing deeper as she went.
“Ouch,” I said, not so much in pain as in a general statement of who I was and how I lived my life. Gradually my eyes were adjusting to the darkness of the room, making out the posters on the walls—in one corner an announcement of a CUNY Graduate Center lecture by the famed Orientalist Edward Said, a very good-looking Palestinian; in another a picture of a teenage-boy rock-and-roll band, each kid tanned a perfect brown like my Nana, and as full-lipped and pouty as her brother, Bubi, or, for that matter, their father. As she continued to straddle me, I stared back and forth at these pictures, looking past one breast and then the other, until I assigned a value to each: left breast, Professor Said, right breast, boy band. What incongruous tastes my sweet Nana had, the kind of tastes that can mix only in the very young.
I heard a shallow moan, the sound of a belly too full.
I blinked. There was a second bed in the room. A girl was gently stirring upon it. It must have been the school chum I had briefly seen at dinner before Mr. Nanabragov sent the girls to the kitchen. Noticing my confusion, Nana leaned forward. “It’s okay,” she whispered into my ear. “When Sissey gets really high, she likes to watch.”
“Ak, ak, ak!” I cried. I covered my breasts, my most humiliating part (together with my baggy forearms, they form four loose sacks of flour). I wriggled my ass until Nana’s finger popped out. I tried to draw the sheets around us, but there simply weren’t enough of them.
“Don’t be scared, Snack.” Nana laughed. “We’re just bored and high, sweetie.”
I tried to lift Nana off of me, but she resisted. Her friend’s presence shamed and aroused me both. I grabbed the mattress, lifted up my ass, and started thrusting inside Nana, proactively, as they say. “Oh, shit,” she cried. “Do it, Misha. Just…like…that.”
Her friend moaned and rustled on the other bed. I liked hearing my name spoken aloud. I lifted up one knee, shifting Nana to one side, to let Sissey see what I doing to her friend’s forest-covered reproductive complex, bouncing her ass cheeks and letting them clap against each other. I wanted to make her friend holler and address me using the polite
“Faik!” Nana shouted, and suddenly she scrambled off my bulk and threw a waiting robe around her curves. She pointed to the window. The face of Mr. Nanabragov’s manservant was pressed against the glass, the crescent of his mustache floating above the puckered star of his lips. Nana waved a fist at him, and the manservant promptly disappeared, leaving only an outline of condensation and want. “That fucking Moslem piece of shit,” Nana said.
I massaged the wet stump of my
“I’m sorry?”
“Whenever Faik catches me with a boy, he wants a hundred dollars.”
“But—” I didn’t know whether to be more humiliated by the amount of money or by the fact that there were other so-called boys.
“He’s in the courtyard. Go!” Nana said as she went over to her girlfriend and hugged her. Soon enough they were whispering in French, laughing their big horsey laughs and braiding each other’s hair.
Faik was in the courtyard, sitting amid the dirty dishes pooled with punctured tomatoes and slicks of olive oil. He was casually smoking a pipe, the air filled with cloying apple-scented tobacco. I threw a US$100 bill onto his lap. He picked it up, inspected it against the moonlight, then folded it into the pocket of his checkered shirt. “I’d like another fifty dollars,” he said, “because I saw Sissey watching while Nana was riding you.”
“The next world?” Faik said, scratching at his stubbly sailor’s haircut. “You know, some people look forward to the next world, but not Faik. In the next world, they’ll ask me, ‘What did you do in the previous world?’ And I’ll say, ‘I worked like a horse to feed my family.’ And they’ll say, ‘Good, you can work like a horse to feed your family here, too.’”
“You’re lucky to be employed by such a prominent family,” I said. “Children are starving in Tajikistan.”
“A prominent family,” Faik said. “Everyone at the table tonight was former KGB. Even Parka Mook the playwright was a collaborator in the end. Sevo nationalism! They’re the same assholes who ran everything before. It took them two seconds to switch from the hammer and sickle to Christ’s True Footrest. And that cretin of a son Bubi. With his Porsche and his hookers. What a disgrace.”
I knew that Faik was right about the Nanabragovs. I knew I was getting into something ugly, or at least morally taxing, but I did nothing. I let it happen. Slowly, and then not so slowly, I was being pulled toward the SCROD. I was starting to believe in Nana and her family. I was falling in love with her father and his twitchy beliefs. I had been caught unawares by Parka Mook and his glorious Sevo dictionary.
At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self- Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of
“Would you rather live under Georgi Kanuk?” I shouted at Faik. “Gambling away the country’s oil fortune in Monte Carlo? And no freedom of speech?”
“Freedom of what?” the Moslem manservant said. He blew a barrage of smoke at a lamb’s head that served as the table’s centerpiece and was already being picked apart by a squadron of flies. “They recruited half the boys in Gorbigrad for the last war. They put my son in an APC that exploded without any explanation and burned him from the waist down. He’s twenty-three now, Bubi’s age. How am I going to marry off a cripple? Do you know how much money I’ll need to get him even a half-decent girl? Who’s going to pay for all those German salves I coat his body with? He looks like a mayonnaise sandwich, my only son. But who cares about another mangled Moslem boy? We’re all just fodder for the Kanuk family or the Sevo merchants. Maybe I should try to move to Oslo, like my cousin Adem. But what’s the use? The Europeans shit all over him. Or maybe I can drive a taxi in one of the Gulf states, like my brother Rafiq. But those sandy Arabs treat us like Negroes down there, too. And you can’t even get a decent drink because of those crazy Wahhabite mullahs. Wherever we Moslems go, it’s the same
“You should be thankful your masters are trying to give you democracy,” I said. “Freedom is going to change your son’s life. And if not his life, then the lives of his children. And if not their lives, then the lives of
Faik waved me away. “Please,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic and that you slept with your stepmother. So what can be said about you?”
What indeed?
30
