Absurdistan

I’ll tell you something else. When I was four or five years old, my parents used to rent this wooden hut for the summer. The hut was about a hundred kilometers north of Leningrad, close to the Finnish frontier. It was perched on a yellowish hill featuring all kinds of decrepit vegetation and this rotting hornbeam tree that would take up human form and chase after me in dreams. At the bottom of the hill was a brook that made this characteristic pshhhh sound that I think all brooks make (they don’t really burble, per se), and if you followed the brook around innumerable bends and cataracts, you’d emerge into this gray socialist village—which wasn’t really a village anymore but some kind of depot for trucks bearing benzene or kerosene or another highly flammable gas.

Oh boy. Where am I going with this? Right. So Beloved Papa and I had this nautical theme going. He’d get these old beat-up shoes and he’d rip the tops off, so all you’d have was the rubber sole, and then he did some other things to the shoe—he made a kind of improvised sail out of paper and twigs—and we’d sail these shoe-boats down the brook. I think we ran alongside our sea-shoes, cheering them on, singing songs about ants and caterpillars and Mommy in her apron baking poppy cakes, my papa’s face a jaunty combination of sparkling black eyes and wind- whipped bushy goatee. And if I try hard with my mind I can ascribe some kind of daily heroism or gentleness or even filial love to the scene of father and son following their rubber-sole regatta down the stream to a former village, now a base camp for idling benzene trucks, their sides stenciled with the fair warning: KEEP YOUR DISTANCE—TRUCK MAY EXPLODE.

Now, tell me, what was the point of all that? What am I trying to do here? Why is it so hard to come up with a solid block of grief for a deceased parent? Why can’t I rehabilitate my papa the way Gorbachev rehabilitated Stalin’s victims? See, what I’m going for is a kind of totalitarian triumph-over-adversity story with Beloved Papa cast in the role of wise, fun-loving, middle-class parent. I’m trying here, Papa. I’m doing my best. But the truth always seems to dampen my best instincts.

The truth is this: the damn shoe-boats never made it down the brook, they sank within ten seconds of becoming waterlogged or else were eaten by a hungry Soviet beaver. The truth is this: after a while, we ran out of shoes, and Beloved Papa would make boats out of walnut shells (same concept but much smaller boat), and these we would sail around our rusticated bathtub, only they also became waterlogged and sank pretty quickly, too. The truth is this: Beloved Papa had a very dim knowledge of flotation, a very faulty understanding of how physical objects are kept aloft by water, this despite the fact that, like every other Soviet Jew, he was a mechanical engineer by training.

The truth is this: on some level, Beloved Papa could not believe he had played his part in giving birth to a living, bumbling, farting, sentient creature such as me, and he would grab me fiercely enough to leave bruises on my arms and stare into my eyes with a kind of helpless fury, his budding love for me hemmed in on all four sides by fear. And self-knowledge.

He didn’t want to hit me. He didn’t want to swipe at my khui. Not this early on. But hitting young boys was the done thing (“If you don’t hit, you don’t love,” his idiot relatives used to say), else they grew up cretins who couldn’t pummel their way through grade school. Papa’s stepfather had beaten him with a poker when he was seven, and by the time he was thirteen, Papa had celebrated his manhood by beating his stepfather half to death with the same poker. He then clocked some relatives pretty hard and also disfigured a local drunk suspected of ravishing children. He really went nuts with the poker. There was a nice kind of closure to that, although a few years later Beloved Papa had to spend some time in a sanatorium.

The truth is this: Beloved Papa had no idea what the hell to do with me. He lived in an abstract world where the highest form of good was not child rearing but the state of Israel. To move there, to grow oranges, to build ritual baths for menstruating women, and to shoot at Arabs—this was his lonely goal. Of course, after socialism collapsed and he finally got a chance to get drunk and happy-fisted on a Tel Aviv beach, he discovered a goofy, unsentimental little country, its sustaining mission nearly as banal and eroded as our own. I guess the lesson is— freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

Meanwhile, back at the Park Hyatt Svani City, I was as free as I had ever been. I took my own ritual baths mornings, afternoons, and evenings, liberating my body from its degrading fat man’s smells. I could not recall the last time I was so clean. The size of the Hyatt’s tub (an artifact of Roman proportions) encouraged me to take to the water. Splish, splash, goes an American ditty. And I can’t remember the rest.

I was a changed man. A sophisticate and a melancholic no longer, no matter what Faik would say. I loved my physicality, and I wanted to share it with the world, or at least the illiterate young maids who would stumble upon me, scream blehlebhlebhhebhhhhheh! or some other local expression, put up their skinny arms in protest, and run for the door. “Come back, little dopes,” I would shout, throwing a wet sponge after their tails, “all is forgiven!”

The steam rose off my flanks as if emulating the incense crowding the dome of the Sevo Vatican. The water took responsibility for my sins. It absorbed the enormity of my dead skin, sloughing it off in reptilian layers, the sum of which, miraculously, did not clog the drain but evaporated to form a rainbow above the toilet. It buoyed parts of me I had long scorned, my necks, my chests, buoyed them one by one and made them brilliant and holy in the reduced, foggy light. It floated my legs upward until they naturally assumed the position of the pregnant Virgin in stirrups, until I could feel the smooth underwater kicks of the Son in my stomach. Overall, I found myself both beautiful and blessed. The mirrors arrayed above the bathtub showed me as I truly was—a tall man with a round, wide face, small blue eyes deeply set, the nose of a smart, predatory bird, a thicket of elegantly graying hair that had recently aged me into a long-denied maturity.

“What do you think of your son, eh?” I ask Beloved Papa, whose imaginary breakfast table I had placed directly beside my tub.

Papa was chewing a piece of hunter’s kielbasa atop a piece of buttered bread, a morning treat his Swiss doctors had erroneously guessed would kill him. With the unsandwiched hand, he held his mobilnik, tipping it into his meaty mouth as if he meant to swallow it, too. “No,” he said, eyes boring through the near-infinity of his billfold, dry alcoholic mouth puckering on every heavy word. “No, that’s not it at all. If he dares…Why, I’ll fuck him good. We’ve got everyone down—Sukharchik in Customs, Sashen’ka at Agricultural Import, Mirsky in Moscow, Captain Belugin at the precinct. Who does he have? Next time he comes up empty-handed, I’ll throw his mother under the tram!”

“Papa! Look at me! Look how fine I’ve grown. Look how the water makes me so pretty and young.”

Papa grabbed a teacup and drank down the hot liquid without so much as a snort of pain. He liked to think he was as strong as the bulls with the shaved heads and bad childhoods whom he had gathered around him. He liked to think of himself as a man for all seasons, as long as the seasons were dusty and dry. “Just wait a minute, Misha,” he said. “I’m talking on the phone, right?”

How little use he had for me. But then why did you send for me, Papa? Why did you interrupt my life? Why did you put me through all this? Why did you have my khui snipped? I have a religion, too, Papa, only it celebrates what’s real. “Asparagus,” Papa said into his mobilnik. “If they’re from Germany, the white ones, they’ll sell. Just do what needs to be done this time or you’ll get it in the pizda from me and mine.”

“Get it in the pizda, Papa? That’s not very nice. Children have ears, you know.”

He shut off the mobilnik with an exaggerated click, the way he’d seen it done on television shows. He wiped the kielbasa and butter off his fingers with one of Lyuba’s Hermes scarves. He walked over to the bathtub and stood over me, so that I shuddered and felt my nakedness before him. Is this why Isaac is always naked in the paintings while Abraham is safe and warm in his robe?

“Remember how you used to bathe me, Papa?” I said. “You bathed me until I was twelve. Until I got big, eh, Papa? And then you stopped. Too much work, you said. Too much to wash.”

“I’m a busy man now, Misha,” Papa told me. “The times have changed. Now everyone’s got work to do. Everyone except you, it seems.”

“I had an art internship in New York,” I reminded him. “And a nice loft. I had my Rouenna to do laundry with. Why did you kidnap me, Papa? Why did you kill that poor Roger Daltrey from Oklahoma?”

“Fine,” Papa said. “You want me to wash you? Where’s the sponge?”

He put his hand on my neck. It was coarse and warm. He smelled reassuringly of garlic. As he cupped one of