Absurdistan

14 The Norway of the Caspian

We landed at the Viennese airport, taxiing past the glassed-in main terminal where the planes always ran on time, to a problematic sideshow of a building reserved for flights to the not-quite-ready-for-Europe places like Kosovo, Tirana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and my native St. Leninsburg. There were no jetways at this diminished building; two buses came to pick us up, one for the first- and business-class passengers, another for the rest of us. I watched from my window as the wily Hasid maneuvered to be the first aboard the first-class bus, clutching his velvety tuna pouch as if it contained the diamonds he surely sold for a living. Shame, shame.

Walking down the stairs, I made sure to breathe in the fine European Union air before being bused to the cigarette-smoke-filled terminal where the rest of my YugoSovietMongol brethren waited unhappily for their flights back to Tartary. I tried to make my way to the main terminal, but you had to pass an immigration counter with a normal Western passport before you could buy cigarettes duty-free or move your bowels astride the latest model of Austrian toilet. Soon, very soon, I would have my Belgian passport. Not soon enough, let me tell you.

Alyosha-Bob whiled away the hours before our next flight laughing at my anti-Hasid campaign, making side curls out of the shaggier portions of my hair. He would run up and, like a child, throw himself on the loose hams hanging off my back. I tried to walk away from him, but he’s the faster of the two of us. By the time they started boarding our flight to Svanï City, he had curled me a nice set of payess.

As the flight was announced, the most olive-skinned people in the terminal rushed the gate, and soon a jostling mass of mustached men and their pretty dark wives, each wielding bags from Century 21, the famed New York discount emporium, had laid siege to the poor Austrian Airlines personnel. This was my first introduction to the Absurdistan mob—a faithful re-creation of the Soviet line for sausages, fueled by the natural instincts of the Oriental bazaar. “Calm down, ladies and gentlemen!” I shouted as young, hairy men bounced off me, seemingly using my mass to ricochet to the front of the line. “Do you think they’ll run out of seats on the plane? We’re in Austria, for God’s sake!”

Once aboard, the Absurdis began unwrapping their many purchases, modeling designer ties for their wives, and exchanging footwear across the aisles. Their first-class shenanigans did not manage to offend me as much as the Hasid’s had on the last flight, perhaps because the Hasid was one of my own, while the only occasion one has to meet an Absurdi in St. Petersburg is at the market, when one is searching for a gorgeous flower in the middle of winter or wants to make a pet of some exotic mongoose. I don’t mean to denigrate the Absurdis, or whatever they call themselves. They are the resourceful and clever representatives of an ancient trading culture, which, along with the massive quantities of oil lapping at their shores, helps explain why their country is the most successful of our formerly Soviet republics, the so-called Norway of the Caspian.

I turned to the window to watch our plane follow the curves of the Danube as the orderly Austrian houses with their peaked roofs and backyard swimming pools turned into the housing projects surrounding the stumpy castle of Bratislava, Slovakia, which in turn gave way to the melancholy buildup of Budapest (I could even make out the fin de siècle Parliament building on the Pest side and the old Austro-Hungarian seat of power on the Buda), which eventually surrendered to some sort of war-torn Balkan landscape, cities shelled into random organic forms, gaping bridges, the jumble of wrecked orange-tiled houses clustered together like coral reefs. “I’m taking one step backward so that I can jump clear across the board,” I consoled myself. As the West receded into another time zone, the stewardesses compensated by serving us a crispy quail salad of the first order; the drinks menu offered up some pleasant surprises as well, especially in the port category.

“I’m going to miss you, Snack,” Alyosha-Bob said as he drank a glass of forty-year-old Fonseca. “You’re my best friend.”

“I’m sentimental already,” I sighed.

“Belgium’s going to be good for you,” my friend said in English, the language we spoke when we were alone, our fooling-around language. “There’s nothing to do there. There’s no one to fight against. You won’t be such a nut job. You’ll cut back on the emotions. I can’t believe you actually started that Misha’s Children thing and hired Valentin and Svetlana to run it.”

“Remember the motto of Accidental College? ‘Think one person can change the world? So do we.’”

“Didn’t we used to make fun of that motto, like, every single day, Snack?”

“I guess I’m growing up,” I said smugly. “Maybe I’ll get a doctorate in Multicultural Studies in Brussels. Maybe that will make me look good to the generals in charge of the INS.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They love multi—”

“Shhhh,” Alyosha-Bob said, putting a finger to his lips. “It’s quiet time now, Misha.”

Our plane began its approach to Svanï City. The light of early evening revealed a green mountainous terrain skirted by pockets of desert, which were, in turn, filled in with pockets of something partially liquid resembling a sick man’s gastric misadventures. The farther we descended, the more pronounced became the battle between mountain and desert, the latter pockmarked by lakes iridescent with industry and on occasion surrounded by blue domes that could have been either giant mosques or small oil refineries.

It took me some time to realize that we had reached the shores of a major body of water, that the brown, alkaline vistas of the corroded desert now brushed up against a dull band of gray that was, in fact, the Caspian Sea. A circuit board of oil derricks strung together the coastline and desert, while farther out to sea, massive oil platforms were connected to one another by slivers of pipeline and, in some places, maritime roads upon which tanker-trucks left vapor trails of yellow exhaust.

We descended rapidly into this apocalypse. Apparently I had misjudged not only the borders of the sea but the depth of the local sky, which collapsed before our advance, as if estimating correctly that another planeload of money had arrived from Europe and that dollar bills and euros would soon fall like snowflakes upon the ruling class.

As the plane touched down, the yokels in economy clapped in typical third-world fashion, cheering our safe arrival, while we in first chose to keep our hands in our laps. We taxied past a billboard. Three stylish teenagers, a redheaded beauty, an Asian beauty, and a young black man in dreadlocks (a feminine beauty in his own right), critically regarded us with their handsome, expressionless eyes. THE UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON WELCOME YOU TO SVANÏ CITY, the billboard read.

In keeping with the progressive theme, the arrivals terminal was newly built to resemble a post-Mongolian yurt made of tinted glass, corrugated steel, and the occasional exposed pipe—the kind of generic design favored by mineral-rich nations teetering between Eastern exotica and Western anonymity. Inside, we found a cool, open metallic shed layered with the smells of perfume counters and stores dispensing freshly baked baguettes along with the most cultured of yogurts, the small flags of the world’s countries and the oversize flag of Microsoft Windows NT limply hanging from the rafters to remind us that we were all global citizens who loved to travel and compute.

But the Absurdi citizens were not yet accustomed to the new world order. Despite the trappings of modernity around them, they rushed toward Passport Control, shouting in their incomprehensible local tongue and hitting one another with their Century 21 bags. Alyosha-Bob had a multiple-entry Absurdi visa that entitled him to join an expedited lane, while Timofey and I stood in an endless queue for foreigners, waiting to get our visa photos taken.

Help was on the way. A group of fat men in blue shirts and brick-sized epaulets on their shoulders were soon circling around me, eyeing my bulk with warm Southern eyes. Just so you know, I’m an attractive kind of obese person, with a head that is proportionally sized to my torso and the rest of my fat distributed evenly (save for my deflated ass). On the other hand, these Absurdi fellows, like most overweight people, resembled huge moving tents, tiny heads wedded to larger and still-larger girth. One of them had a camera tied around his chest. “Excuse me,” he said in Russian, the lingua franca of the former Soviet empire, “who are you by nationality?”

I sadly held up my Russian passport. “No, no,” the fatty laughed. “I mean by nationality.”

I saw what he was after. “Jew,” I said, patting my nose.

The photographer put his hand to his heart. “I am very honored,” he said. “The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. When you are in Absurdsvanï, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said.

“A Jew shouldn’t have to wait in line to have his picture taken. Let me do it for you right away. Smile, mister!”

“Please get my manservant, too,” I said.

“Smile, manservant!”

Timofey sighed and crossed himself. I was handed two small photos. “Remember what I said about my mother being your mother?” the photographer asked. “Well, sadly, our mother is in the hospital with a collapsed liver and a keloid scar on the left ear. Would it be possible—”

I had already prepared several US$100 bills for this kind of eventuality, one of which I handed to the photographer. “Now we must go to the line for the visa application blank,” the photographer said. “Oh, look! A colleague of mine wants to speak to you.”

An even larger man with a frilly mustache and a riot of bad teeth waddled over to me. “We must be related,” he said, patting my belly. “Tell me, who are you by nationality?”

I explained. He put his hand to his heart and told me that the Jewish people had a long and peaceful history in Absurdistan and that any enemy of mine was also an enemy of his, while his mother was my mother and his wife my sister. There was also water from his well to drink. “Why should a Jew have to wait in line for a visa application blank?” he wondered. “Here! Take one!”

“You are very kind,” I said.

“You are very Jewish. In the best possible sense.” Then I was told that my sister (his wife, that is) suffered from gastritis and an engorged pudendum. The US$200 I gave him would go a long way toward her medical care. “And now you must go to the processing line. But look! A colleague of mine would like to help you out.”

An older fat man, the skin around his eyes turned into pure leather from a lifetime’s sleep apnea, came over to me and made the sounds of a steam engine. It took me a while to figure out that he was trying to communicate with me in the Russian tongue. I caught on to the part about water from his well to drink and that a Jew shouldn’t have to wait in the processing line. “Let me help you fill this out,” the man puffed, taking out a pen and unfurling the fearsome four-page visa application. “Last name.”

“Vainberg,” I said. “Written just like it sounds. Veh… ah… eee…”

“I know how to write,” the older man said. “Given name.”

I told him. He wrote it down, then looked over his handiwork. He squinted carefully at the combination of “Vainberg” and “Mikhail.” He looked at my body type and my soft red lips. “Are you the son of Boris Vainberg?” he asked.

“Boris Vainberg, deceased,” I said, my eyes watering dutifully. “He was blown up by a land mine on the Palace Bridge. We have a videotape and everything.”

The old man whistled to his colleagues. “It’s Boris Vainberg’s son!” he shouted. “It’s Little Misha!”

“Little Misha!” his colleagues shouted back. “Hurrah!” They stopped extracting money from dazed foreigners and waddled over to me, sandals slapping against fake marble. One of them kissed my hand and pressed it to his own heart.

“He has his father’s face.”

“Definitely has those big lips.”

“Massive forehead, too. Thinks about everything, this one.”

“Typical Vainberg.”

“What are you doing here, Little Misha?” I was asked. “Did you come for the oil?”

“Why else would he come here? For the scenery?”

“To be honest—” I started to say.

“You know, Little Misha, your father once sold an eight-hundred-kilogram screw to KBR! He was some sort of subcontractor. He took them for five million! Ha ha.”

“What’s KBR?” I asked.

“Kellogg, Brown and Root,” my new companions said in unison, shocked that I wasn’t aware of such an institution. “The subsidiary of Halliburton.”

“Oh,” I said. But my curled upper lip betrayed my ignorance.

“The American oil-services company,” I was told. “Halliburton’s KBR unit runs half the country.”

“And my father cheated them?” I asked brightly.

“And how! He really Jewed them up!”

“My father was a great man,” I half said and half sighed. “But I’m not here for the oil.”

“Little Misha doesn’t want his father’s business.”

“He’s a sophisticate and a melancholic.”

“That’s right,” I said. “How do you guys know that?”

“We’re people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don’t know, we can sense.”

“Are you going to buy Belgian citizenship from Jean-Michel Lefèvre at the Belgian consulate? Are you going to be a Belgian, Little Misha?”

I looked around apprehensively, wishing Alyosha-Bob were around to guide me. “Maybe,” I said.

“Smart man. It’s no fun to have a Russian passport.”

“Did your father ever mention our little gang at the airport?” the older man inquired.

The others looked up at me expectantly, their stomachs leaning toward mine as if trying to make its acquaintance. My instinct is to try to make everyone around me happy, so I obliged them. “He said a bunch of fat crooks were robbing Westerners at Immigration,” I said.

“That’s us!” they cried. “Hurrah! Boris Vainberg remembered us!” The older man commanded his colleagues to give me back the money they had inveigled from me. Timofey and I immediately had our passport stamped with a dozen bizarre shapes and patterns, and we were ushered past the Immigration and Customs points and into the sunshine, where Alyosha-Bob awaited with his driver.

The Absurdi heat surrounded me as if I had entered a lit stove. It wiped out the remaining moisture in my mouth, invisible flames working their way into the crevice between my tits, searing away the sweat and damp. My sweat glands started pumping, but they could not keep up with the requirements of a 325-pound body. I was on fire. I almost passed out before Timofey had stuffed me into the waiting German sedan. Lord help me! I thought as the air-conditioning kicked in. Help me survive this Southern inferno.

From the start, I was supremely uninterested in the country around me, which looked pretty much the way I felt. Tired. The landscape consisted of gray-brown lakes surrounded by the skeletons of oil derricks and the modern spheres of refineries. There was barbed wire everywhere, along with signs promising death to anyone who veered off the highway. Trailer-trucks bearing the logo of Kellogg, Brown & Root swerved ahead of our car, the drivers honking at us maniacally. Even with the car windows up, Absurdistan smelled like the moist armpit of an orangutan.

I snoozed for a bit, the leather seats doing right by my hump. We passed a church of charming Eastern simplicity, square and compact, as if carved out of a single piece of stone. “I thought this was a Moslem country,” I said to Alyosha-Bob.

“Orthodox Christian,” Alyosha-Bob explained.

“No kidding. I always pictured them on their knees before Allah.”

“Two ethnic groups, the Sevo and the Svanï. Both Christian. That’s a Svanï church right there.”

“How can you tell, Professor?”

“You know what a standard Orthodox cross looks like.” He drew a cross in the air: . “Well, that’s the Svanï cross. But the Sevo cross has the footrest reversed. Like this.” He drew a different cross in the air: .

“That’s pretty stupid,” I said.

“You’re pretty stupid,” Alyosha-Bob said. We horsed around for a bit, Alyosha-Bob painfully pinning one of my thigh flaps between his two sharp elbows. “The master suffers from thigh pains,” Timofey cautioned my friend as he gently pulled him off me.

“The master suffers from a lot of things,” Alyosha-Bob said.

I looked out the window, taking note of a billboard advertising a housing development called STONEPAY. An Aston Martin idled in the circular driveway of a mortar-and-glass insta-mansion. A Canadian flag flew from the mansion’s portico to denote stability.

This was followed by a billboard featuring three near-naked brown women dripping with gold and filled with silicone leaning over the crotch of a black man in prison stripes. 718 PERFUMERY: THE ODOUR OF THE BRONX IN SVANÏ CITY.

I sighed loudly and looked away, snuggling my head into the crux of my arm.

“What now?” Alyosha-Bob asked.

“Nuthin’.”

“Is this about the 718 Perfumery?” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re still thinking about Rouenna and Jerry Shteynfarb, aren’t you?”

We sat in the car quietly, watching the iridescent landscape bubble and stew before us. Feeling my pain, Timofey sang a song he had made up to celebrate my new nationality. Here’s the only stanza I remember:

Svanï City clung wearily to a small mountain range. We took an ascending road away from the gray curve of the Caspian Sea until we reached something called the Boulevard of National Unity. We found ourselves, in a manner of speaking, on the primary thoroughfare of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., where I had once misspent a couple of weeks in my youth. We passed shops of unmistakable wealth, if somewhat curious provenance—an outlet that sold the nightmare products of the American conglomerate Disney, an espresso emporium named Caspian Joe’s (a bright green rip-off of a famous American chain), a side-by-side presentation of the popular American stores the Gap and the Banana Republic, the above-mentioned 718 Perfumery, rife with the odors of the Bronx, and an Irish theme pub named Molly Malloy’s crouching drunkenly behind imported ivy and a giant shamrock.

After Molly’s, the boulevard turned into a canyon of recently built glass skyscrapers bearing the corporate logos of ExxonMobil, BP, ChevronTexaco, Kellogg, Brown & Root, Bechtel, and Daewoo Heavy Industries (Timofey grunted happily at the makers of his beloved steam iron), and finally the identical Radisson and Hyatt skyscrapers staring each other down from the opposite ends of a windswept plaza.

The Hyatt lobby was an endless skylit atrium where multinational men buzzed from one corner to another with the hungry, last-ditch exasperation of late-summer flies. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be little corners of ad hoc commerce, plastic tables and chairs clumped together under signs with strange legends such as HAIL, HAIL BRITANNIA—THE PUB. One of these hives was a golden-lit affair called RECEPTION. There a smiling boy of seemingly Scandinavian origin spoke to us in smooth business-school English. “Welcome to the Park Hyatt Svanï City,” he said, beaming. “My name is Aburkharkhar. How can I help you gentlemen today?”

Alyosha-Bob ordered a penthouse suite for the two of us and a little shed behind the pool for Timofey. A glassed-in elevator hoisted us forty stories through the sunny atrium, so the next thing I knew, I was looking at a happy Western parody of a modern home, with marble countertop on everything from the desks to the nightstand to the bathroom sink to the coffee table. For a second I thought I had actually arrived in Europe, so I muttered the word “Belgium,” fell to my knees, doubled over, enjoyed immensely the feeling of plush carpeting enveloping my breasts and cradling my stomach, and bade the waking world goodbye.