Absurdistan

in two.

The baby-child quietly choking on my lap was starting to smell unnaturally, and my lap wasn’t doing any better. I stole some perfume from one of the sleeping Absurdi dames and, thus scented, walked out into the sunshine.

A pall had settled over the city. Looking up, one could discern a scrim of dust particles above the ravages of the International Terrace. This dust, which one hoped would have deflected the sun, instead locked in its heat so that the atmosphere sizzled with instant brush fires, magenta oil slicks, and the deep blue waft of office chemicals. The air was so alive and full of instantaneous reactions that the city’s remaining citizens looked beaten and lost by comparison. A few of the more active men crawled out of the rubble and offered me packs of Russian cigarettes for US$10 apiece. “Not a smoker,” I let them down gently.

The rest of the populace was too tired to shoot at me, too tired even to acknowledge such a large presence among them. For the first time since my arrival in Svani City, no one appreciatively followed my stomach with their hungry eyes, no one silently congratulated me on my good fortune. Walking in this peaceful manner, I soon crossed over to the waterfront esplanade, whose grassy medians had assumed the look of an urgent Red Cross appeal. Hectares of tents made out of blue United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tarp lined the former strolling ground; the graying grass and the sickly palm trees had been eaten by man and mule; the Turkish bumper cars had been stripped down to the chassis, their crude mechanical essence exposed.

I looked around apprehensively. Satisfied that Yulia and her dastardly mother were nowhere in sight, I walked down the pier toward the pink clamshell of the Lady with Lapdog. Mr. Nanabragov and Parka Mook were lunching beneath a faded SCROD poster that featured their faces along with the threatening tagline THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE PEOPLE WILL SOON BE REALIZED! At present, the two friends looked even more satiated than their own beaming visages above them—Mr. Nanabragov, lost in concentration, was spearing a sturgeon kebab with one fork and brandishing a green pepper with another, while the playwright dabbed his chin in a raspberry compote, his hooded eyes half closed. They were surrounded by men in black T-shirts with blue-veined biceps, their hands crisscrossed in Soviet prison tattoos. A speedboat bearing the Russian tricolor bowed and scraped along the pier, her hold being emptied of enough cigarette cartons to kill off the remaining population.

Mr. Nanabragov dropped his pickle with a twitch, ran over, and kissed me on three cheeks. He had a new nautical smell about him—sea urchin, sea damp, and sea salt—and his muscular Southern nose stabbed me in all my soft places. “Dear one, dear one,” he cried. “You’ve spoken to my Nana. You’re not upset with me for not letting you stay with us? Family comes first, no? If there were more room in my house, yes? Or if you married our Nanachka, finally, hmm?”

“I’d marry her just to get out of the Intourist,” I joked.

“Would you?” Mr. Nanabragov said seriously. “We could have a small private ceremony. I suppose the political circumstances are not the best right now. But as you can see, we’ve regrouped a little.” He pointed to the bandits chewing on toothpicks around the half-comatose figure of Parka Mook. “We’re replenishing the SCROD coffers through the booming cigarette trade.”

“Would you like to buy some?” a young maritime thug asked me, brandishing a carton of something called Business Class Elite, featuring an Aeroflot plane plummeting to the ground. “Eighty dollars.”

“That’s my future son-in-law you’re talking to,” Mr. Nanabragov objected. “Give it to him for forty.”

“Not a smoker,” I said.

“Oh,” Nanabragov and his new friend sighed.

“How’s the SCROD going?” I said. “Any media interest?”

“It’s still very hard to convey our message to the world,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Of course, the Russians are all over us. Look at this!” From Parka Mook’s lap, he snatched a week-old copy of a popular Russian newspaper called Arguments and Facts. Next to a picture of Putin blandly conveying displeasure to his cowering cabinet, I spotted the grainy likeness of three Ukrainian mercenaries and the former KGB agent Volodya hanging off the terrace of the Hyatt. Their snapped necks had been tied to the charred remains of four satellite dishes, their arms spread out at modest angles like the swept-back wings of an airplane. It was a lousy likeness. The poor Ukrainians appeared heavier and more menacing than they had when they were alive, and the long shot didn’t capture the peasant-blue equanimity of their eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” I said in English, exhausting the last thimbleful of compassion that remained.

“The Russians are threatening to bomb us for this,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “as are the Ukrainians. Now, if only the Americans would bomb us, then we’d really be somewhere.”

“What about the UN?”

“They sent over some tarps. Nothing much we can steal. Listen, Misha, you should go talk to Israel. It’s time. We know exactly who you should see. There’s a Mossad agent in the Intourist Hotel. He’s pretending to be a Texas oilman named Jimbo Billings. Go chat him up. As your future father-in-law, I’m begging you on my knees.” To the contrary, he remained standing.

“I would do anything for you, Mr. Nanabragov,” I said. “Alas, I had typed up my proposal for the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship on my laptop computer. I’m sure it was destroyed when the Svani bombed the Hyatt.”

“Actually, we have your laptop right here,” Mr. Nanabragov said, pulling the sleek gray device from under his chair. “Some of our boys paid a visit to your room after the attack. Just picking up some odds and ends.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Nanabragov,” I said. “But you must know that Nana wants to leave the country. She’s a young girl. She’s got her NYU to consider.”

“Go! Go!” Mr. Nanabragov twitched. “The SCROD first, and then our Nana.”

I dutifully heaved my way back to the Intourist, where I was informed that indeed a Jimbo Billings was on the premises. I ascended to the top floor, outmaneuvered the portly floor attendant, and knocked on Jimbo’s door. “Excuse me.” I coughed. A perfectly Russian voice promptly sent me to the khui.

“I am Misha Vainberg,” I said. “I come in peace.”

“Vainberg!” the voice trilled, and then, switching to Texan English: “Well, shoot, come on in, buster!”

The room must have been the tidiest in the entire hotel, free of giant green spiders and petulant Absurdis, save for the hotel hooker fixing up her mustache by the vanity mirror. Mr. Jimbo Billings, a short, muscular man in denims and short sleeves, looked vaguely Levantine or Greek, sun-wrinkled and drained of blood, with perfect blue and green eyes (one color each) and fast-moving hands made of fine leather. I could see how, after a fifty-hour immersion in the iconic American show Dallas, the Mossad agent could begin to pass for a middle-aged Texan. “Darlin’,” Billings said to the whore. “Do me a favor, willya? Scram.” The young lady pouted and made a show of her hips but quickly left us alone.

“So,” I said, “my sources tell me we share a certain religion in common. Although I’m fairly lapsed and modern. In any case, shalom.”

“Sources?” Billings said. “Sha-lome? Shoo, doggie! That’s some imagination you got on you, boy.” His mood rapidly shifted downward; he shook his gray head and said, “Hot damn, what we gon’ do with you, Vainberg?”

“Nuthin’,” I said, falling for some reason into his ridiculous accent. “I’m all fine and dandy right here.”

“How you reckon?” Billings asked.

“I got somethin’ for you,” I said. “It’s good for Israel, good for the Jews. A Holocaust museum. Gonna make some old-fashion’ synergy happen. Gonna make people believe again.” I held out my laptop for him to examine.

“ ‘The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies,’” Jimbo read, “ ‘aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.’” He pursed his thick sunburned Sabra lips and read on a bit longer. “You know what ain’t good for the Jews, Vainberg?” he said after a while. “You ain’t.”

“Screw you,” I said. “I’m just tryin’ to help.”

“You tryin’ to help Nanabragov and his daughter, so don’t play me the fool, son,” Billings said.

“And so what?” I said. “So what if I want to help an oppressed people other than my own? I’m a new kind of man. And you better hope, for everyone’s sake, there are more like me.”

“A new man? And what kind of man that be?”

“A man that ain’t got no racial memory.”

“Sure you do. You the biggest Jew of us all. You cain’t help yerself. You cain’t help where you come from. Just lookit your papa. He had you cut by Hasids when you were eighteen. Goddamn, son.”