Absurdistan

“My papa loved Israel.”

“Your papa…” Billings stopped. He looked into my eyes, lifted his shoulders, then lowered them to reveal himself a man of very small stature and a generation older than I had thought. “You can call me Dror,” he said in a Mid-Atlantic accent tinged with something phlegmy and Hebrew. “Although that’s not my name.”

“What were you saying about my papa?” I said.

Jimbo-Dror shook his head. “Look, Misha,” he said. “In the seventies, a drunk, charming refusenik was sort of poignant. Shabbat Shalom in Leningrad and all that. But by the nineties, your father was just another Russian gangster…an antisocial personality with limited impulse control. I’m quoting from his file now.”

The official Mossad characterization of my papa—so small-minded and bleak—did little to provoke me. The dried patch of snakeskin that had been my toxic hump was depleted of toxins. The anger was gone. My papa was long dead, relegated to Israeli files and the receding nighttime shadow play of his hands upon me.

“Maybe he was what you say,” I told Jimbo-Dror, “but I doubt he loved Israel one shekel less than any of you Mossadniks. He gave three million dollars to some rabbi who wanted to drive the Arabs into the sea.”

“We’re not required to love it,” Dror said of Israel. “Just to make sure it exists.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of wire-rims, looking like a tired Indian merchant relentlessly pushing his stock of goods across the oceans. He unfolded a piece of paper. “There’s an American Express train that leaves Svani City September seventh, arriving at the border on the eighth. AmEx has bribed the border guards so that passengers can get out of the country. I’ll be on that train, if you need my help. The next train leaves on September ninth, arriving on September tenth. I suggest very strongly that you get out while you can, certainly before the Russians start bombing next week. You can get your Nana to help you with the ticketing. I think it’s fifty thousand a person. But don’t take her with you! Her father will kill you if you take her away from him. You know how these black-asses are about their daughters.”

“You’re leaving, too?” I said. “Goddammit, Dror. Nobody cares about this country at all. And the Sevo support you against the Palestinians, you know. Doesn’t Israel need friends?”

“This requires a two-part answer,” said Jimbo-Dror. “Yes, we need friends. And no, we really don’t care about this country at all.”

“Fine,” I said. “But what about the oil? Don’t you at least care about the oil?”

“Oil?” Jimbo-Dror took off his glasses and looked me over with his keen polymorphic eyes. “Are you joking with me, Vainberg?”

“What joking?” I pointed a bloated index finger at the window, beyond which I assumed the Caspian seabed toiled and bubbled. “The oil,” I said. “Figa-6. The Chevron/BP consortium. KBR. Golly Burton.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Dror said. “Son of a bitch. I thought Nanabragov would let you in on the secret. You know, sometimes, after all these years of playing urban cowboy, I still have the capacity to be amazed.”

“What secret? Tell me!”

“Misha, you poor fat shmegegge of a man. There is no oil.”

41 Birds of Prey

“No oil,” I said. To make sure I had understood correctly, I repeated the words in Russian. “Nyefti nyetu.” I felt as if something dear had been taken away from me, as if a flotilla of my papa’s rubber-sole boats were sailing away from me and over the horizon. I had gotten so used to the oil; one could almost say I had gotten close to it. Everywhere and everything was nyeft’. The modern world was composed entirely of petrol.

I walked away from Jimbo-Dror and toward his window to look at the stubby, sea-lapped orange legs of the nearby oil platforms and the skeletal derricks idling above them.

“Empty,” he said.

“But what about Figa-6?”

“Let me give you the big picture,” the Mossadnik said. “There are supposed to be fifty billion barrels of oil reserves in the Absurdi sector of the Caspian. In truth, there isn’t one percent of that left. Figa-6 will run out by the end of the year. It doesn’t make sense to start pumping it. The Absurdis have been lying to the investors from the start. Most of their hydrocarbon reserves were tapped out during Soviet times.”

“But how can that be?” I said. “What about the KBR luau? What about the pipeline to Europe? Wasn’t that the reason for this whole Sevo-Svani war? Wasn’t that why they shot down Georgi Kanuk’s plane?”

“Georgi Kanuk’s plane was never shot down,” Dror said. “The old man’s living in a villa near Zurich, quite nicely, from what I’ve heard. Kellogg, Brown and Root bribed him with two-point-four million dollars and gave Nanabragov the same. And that was just a down payment. There was supposed to be plenty more once the LOGCAP contract got started.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When they realized the oil was almost finished, Kanuk and Nanabragov needed something else. The sturgeon’s nearly extinct, and the only thing this country grows is grapes. Awful grapes. Now, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, they understood they’d been taken for a ride, and they started cutting back on what was left of production, but they did it slowly, so as not to scare off their shareholders. Just look at all those fancy skyscrapers they built.” The Israeli gestured toward the extinguished skyline. “But then the Absurdis and their friends at Golly Burton had a better idea. Let’s get a massive U.S. Army presence in here. We’ll do support services, build marble outhouses, overcharge the hell out of the Department of Defense, ‘cost plus’ all the way, and all we have to do is get our oil services staff out and replace them with our military support people.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Just shut up and listen. So now all KBR, Kanuk, and Nanabragov need is a reason for the American army to pull in. This place is strategically located. Iran is next door. What about an air force base? Well, you’ve got a problem. The Russians still see Absurdistan as their backyard. They might get mad. And anyway, how much can you skim off a little base like that? You need something big. You need a huge U.S. Army presence doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work. Now, KBR was set to score a ten-year LOGCAP contract starting in 2002, but what good is all that if there’s no heart-wrenching genocide around the corner? ‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

I took a deep breath. There was a bottle of Hennessy on the counter, and I helped myself without asking. Jimbo-Dror motioned for a glass as well. “And so,” he continued after a taste of the cognac, “the so-called civil war began. Only two things went wrong. The war got completely out of hand. These glue-sniffing True Footrest Posses really started blowing the crap out of the place, which may be good for a civilian engineering outfit like Bechtel, but it scares away all the Western workers, and more importantly, it scares away the Department of Defense. And then something much worse happened. Nobody cared.”

“You mean the Western media.”

“I mean the American people. See, we knew this was going to happen. We did a focus group—”

“The Mossad does focus groups?”

“We’re open to all kinds of methodologies. And we’re very interested in how genocides are perceived by the American electorate. So we did a focus group in suburban Maryland. Right away I knew KBR was in trouble. We do a sample space of three troubled countries: Congo, Indonesia, and Absurdsvani. Okay, first part. We give these American schmendricks a map of the world and say, ‘Point to the general area where you think Congo is located.’ Nineteen percent point to the continent of Africa. Another twenty-three percent point to either India or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa, India, and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the bottom. So, for our purposes, forty-two percent of respondents sort of know where Congo is.