I did my best, but the air had gone out of me. His fingers were covered by a jumble of numerical tattoos, testifying to a life spent in Soviet prisons. “Yes, I’ve been to jail,” he said, noticing my gaze, “but not for thieving or killing. I’m an honest man. You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you,” I whispered.
“Any enemy of yours in Svani City is an enemy of mine,” the man said. “What did I tell you about my mother?”
“That she’s my mother also,” I stammered. I could feel fat bloody pain in my right hand, and the world tilted toward the left, as if to compensate. If I was going to die, I wanted my Rouenna near me.
“My mother…no,
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“Just hear me out,” the man said. “I could have done wrong by you. I could have called my friends who are waiting around the corner with their
“I’m the Sevo Minister of Multicultural Affairs,” I sobbed, feeling the weight of humiliation settle around my shoulders, cloaking me as it had never done before. “I run a children’s charity called Misha’s Children. Won’t you please let go of my hand?”
“Our mother is in the hospital,” the man repeated, tightening the grip around my big, squishy hand as my vision turned a new shade of purple. “Are you so heartless that you won’t help her? Do I really have to take out my
“Dear God, no!” I cried. “Here! Here! Take my money! Take whatever you need!”
But in the single opportune moment when he let go of my hand so that it could find my bulging wallet, I felt the fear fall away and the humiliation lift. It wasn’t the money. No, it wasn’t the money at all. But after thirty years with my head on the scaffold, after thirty years of cheering on the executioner, after thirty years of wearing his stifling black hood, one thing was certain: I no longer feared the ax.
“Fuck your mother!” I said. “I hope she dies.”
And then I ran.
I ran with such speed that people, or what remained of people, silently fell away before me, as if I had been expected all along, like mortar rounds and destitution. I collided with burning cars and burning mules, and I felt the smoky air dissipate around me, creating the conditions for my salvation. For I wanted, more than anything, to be saved. To live and also to take vengeance for my life. To shed my weight and to be born anew.
I ran and ran, my heart and lungs barely keeping up with the ridiculous imposition of such motion. I ran past an overturned T-72 tank propped up on its own barrel and a burnt-out chess school featuring a mosaic of children playing around an elderly master, pink dots delineating their rosy cheeks. As I looked behind me to see if the man with the dagger was still on my heels (he was not), I stumbled over something, a twisted shape with what looked like a charred paw sticking up from its torso, a pool of blood radiating in one direction like a badly drawn arrow. “Poor puppy,” I whispered, daring myself to take a closer look at the animal.
Right away I was heaving over the red earth and chopped concrete.
It wasn’t a puppy at all.
I backed away from the little corpse. And then I noticed the familiar socialist edifice beneath which I had chosen to stumble.
I walked into the moldy temple of the local Intourist Hotel, one of the concrete monstrosities where foreigners had been lightened of their hard currency during Soviet times. A dusty painting showed Lenin cheerfully disembarking at Finland Station, beneath which a banner warned in English: NO CREDIT CARDS. NO OUTSIDE PROSTITUTES, ONLY HOTEL PROSTITUTES. NO EXCEPTIONS.
A
The woman wiped her eyes. “Two hundred dollars for the deluxe suite,” she said. “And there’s a whore already waiting for you.”
“I don’t want any whore,” I mumbled. “I just want to be alone.”
“Then it’s three hundred dollars.”
“It’s more
“Sure,” the old lady said. “Now I got to find her a place to sleep.”
39
I spent the next two weeks and US$42,500 at the Intourist Hotel. Each day the price of my so-called deluxe suite would go up by 50 percent (my last night alone added up to US$14,000), while two additional refugees would be pressed into my damp bicameral digs. What could one do? Outside the hotel, the situation—as it was still called—grew more absurd by the hour; gunshots and mortar rounds rhymed with my snoring at night and cleaved the daytime into shooting and nonshooting hours, the latter coinciding roughly with dinner and lunch. The only reason the Intourist Hotel remained unscathed (and insanely expensive) was the fact that nearly everyone shooting had a relative cowering between its thick concrete walls.
The first to show up were Larry Zartarian and his mother. The old lady in charge of our floor—black socks up to the calf, followed by a bouquet of varicose veins—positioned the Mother and Child in the living room. When the Zartarians’ historical enemy, a stray Turkish oil executive with vast sums of cash, arrived, they were slotted directly beneath my bed. At night I could hear the mother cursing her progeny in some difficult language, while Larry tearfully rocked himself to sleep, his big head sending shock waves through the mattress springs.
Timofey had the second bed in the room, a wet moldy pillow and a sheet made of wrinkled cardboard, but was soon forced to share it with Monsieur Lefevre, the Belgian diplomat who had granted me my European passport, and Misha, his McDonald’s concubine. The two tried to have sex next to Timofey, but my moralistic manservant punched them both in the face and they bled silently onto the bedspread. Lefevre, upon seeing my bulk spilling over the tiny Soviet bed so that each leg and arm hung suspended like a ham at a Castilian tapas bar, started laughing with every atom of his marinated red face. But the joke was on him several days later, when he committed suicide in our bathroom.
Meanwhile, well-connected Absurdis who lacked secure housing in the capital were settling the living room and threatening to burst into our private chambers as well. Uncultured and rich, dressed like flamingos on parade, they reminded me of the first Absurdis I had seen pushing their way onto the Austrian Airlines jet what seemed like a lifetime ago. Among them, they had several swaddled, dark-lipped children who teethed day and night but remained oddly quiet and mesmerized by the RPGs puncturing holes in nearby buildings with the roar of perfectly calibrated thunder. Three times a day, the ugly hotel whore—dressed every bit as piquantly as the other female occupants of our suite—made her rounds. In deference to the children, a towel was draped between two glass- covered bureaus (each containing a corroded silver bowl with the insignia of the 1980 Moscow Olympics), so that whoever was interested could squat with the whore in measured privacy. The lovemaking sounds, however, were not easy on the ears, as if the principals were making a baby out of clay. “This is how we used to live in our communal apartment when Brezhnev was still in charge,” Timofey noted nostalgically.
The whore came and went, but I was not horny. Or hungry. Or anything. From the first day—when the hot- water tap came off in my hand, releasing, instead of water, a spray of frightened baby roaches—I had been completely disinvested in my own existence. Everything was happening to others: to Timofey, to the whore, to the egofucked Larry Zartarian and his many-moled mama. “Others suffer, but does Vainberg suffer?” I asked Malik, the mysterious green spider who lived in the corner of my bedroom and whose eight silky legs terrorized Mrs. Zartarian throughout the night. The arthropod had little to say.
As for sustenance, one could still eat well in Svani City, despite the complete collapse of everything. A shy little Moslem boy brought in sesame seeds and hunks of black bread and threatened us with a blade if we didn’t pay. Every morning Timofey crawled out of our room, ran through the gunfire, and brought back yellowish eggs just released from some contraband chicken, and creamy Russian ice-cream bars with the White Nights logo, which
