Absurdistan

17 King Leopold’s Belgian Congo

We had driven off the Boulevard of National Unity, with its multinational skyscrapers and chain stores, and onto a broad natural platform overlooking the city. Sakha the Democrat, glowing with the pride of a know-it-all intellectual, had asked me to come out of the car and survey the landscape with him. As we left the American SUV embellished with the Hyatt logo, my manservant, Timofey, rushed up to me and unfurled a beach umbrella above my tall frame as if I were some African ruler arriving at the airport. The umbrella didn’t help. Sweat fell from me in sheets of water and steam until I smelled like a hamburger.

We looked down upon the city. “Look, Mr. Vainberg!” Sakha said. “Have you ever seen such loveliness? Perhaps it does not match your native Petersburg, or, being a Jew, your beloved Jerusalem, but all the same—the hills, the sea, the architectural ensemble wrought over the centuries…Doesn’t your heart tremble?”

But it wasn’t trembling. The Absurdi capital looked like a miniature Cairo after it had crashed into a rocky mountain. There were three populated terraces jutting out from this mountain, little serving platters of humanity clinging to the inhospitable rock and connected by a winding road. At the top, the International Terrace was home to the multinational skyscrapers, the embassies, and the major retailers (for example, Staples, Hugo Boss, the 718 Perfumery, Ferragamo, the Toys “R” Us superstore). Farther down, the Svanï Terrace, the traditional home of the majority Svanï people, had a famous used-remote-control market, along with a part of the minaret-studded Moslem quarter snug behind an ancient fortifying wall. “I knew there were Moslems here!” I exclaimed to Sakha. “Moslems live in the Orient. It’s a fact.” Finally, the Sevo Terrace, the traditional home of the minority Sevo people, was composed of art nouveau mansions built for turn-of-the-century oil barons forming a precise grid around what I later learned was called the Sevo Vatican—“Oooh, that thing looks like an octopus!” I cried to Sakha—a vast white dome with an octet of arches spreading in each direction, which, at least in my mind, resembled a pale tentacled sea creature washed up on the beach. A six-meter Sevo cross gleamed from the octopus’s head, its footrest facing in the wrong direction.

Next to the Sevo Vatican, an esplanade ran toward a small container port that quickly gave way to the real business of the city. And here it became obvious that the city formed no more than a footnote to what actually had rendered these Sevos and Svanïs first into a Soviet republic and then into a cantankerous modern state. Absurdistan was the Caspian Sea, and the Caspian was the oil it held in abundance. The oil derricks began as soon as the last speck of humanity ended. The oil refused to give the city even the briefest of respites; it denied its inhabitants the chance to look into the waters and see their own reflection. The humble derricks of Soviet construction, cheap yellow rust buckets in the ruined sea, quickly surrendered to behemoth Western oil platforms, their warning lights flashing from thirty-story rigs, their floating enormity forming a second skyline that rivaled the skyscrapers of the International Terrace. With its three descending terraces, Svanï City rushed out to meet the Caspian, and the Caspian turned it back with an oily slap of the waves.

“Don’t look at the oil industry so much,” Sakha said, following my gaze. “Look at the city. Try to imagine the sea completely free of petrol and the city standing proudly above it.”

I shifted my gaze from the oil rigs to the Sevo and Svanï terraces beneath me. I hummed John Lennon’s useful ditty “Imagine.” I imagined flying over the city in a helicopter, absorbing its many architectural flourishes and dramatic natural features, but the chopper just kept flying in a northwesterly direction until it reached the southern tip of Manhattan island, spread its helicopter shadow over the asphalt conglomerations of downtown and midtown, then streaked past the gables and dormers of the Dakota Apartments on New York’s Central Park, where Mr. Lennon once lived and died.

And then I was on an IRT train headed north to East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. It was wintertime, the heat had been turned up, and in my rabbit-lined coat, I could feel the sweat gathering between the second and third folds of my neck, which, taken together, formed a fleshy sieve. I could feel the cool water dribbling down to my breastbone and irrigating the curly hairs of my groin. I was hot and cold, anxious and in love. The citizens on the trains bound for New York’s outer boroughs far exceeded the dimensions of the white people lounging around downtown. My fellow fatties were stoic, multicultural, dressed in billowing down jackets that could save an astronaut from the asphyxiation of space. They leaned against the doors for balance as they pried apart chicken wings and fried oxtails with their teeth, spitting bones and gristle into waiting plastic bags. Who were these Amsterdam Avenue Atlases? These Cypress Hills Caligulas? If I weren’t such a priss about getting my hands greasy, I would have joined them in consuming a small Saran-wrapped mammal here amid the bright deoxygenated glare of the 5 train.

And the girls! Oh, how they disturbed me. Each with a little bit of my Rouenna in her—a plushy nose, a gangsta-shaved eyebrow, a plump lower lip glistening beneath a mound of gloss—each yelling and laughing at her school friends in the Bronxian patois I was just beginning to understand. It was February, and the young ladies may have been clad in heavy down jackets, but somehow, with a warm Southern flair, they managed to be half naked at the same time, flashing me their pubic bones, the Y-shaped pre-crease of their deep posteriors. And every once in a while, in an answer to most of my dreams, their thick, fleshy armpits came into view and I squinted to discern a trail of shaved crinkly hair, the phantom of a formerly rich tuft, for I belong to the school that equates armpit hair with untrammeled sexuality.

By the Third Avenue–149th Street stop, I could already glimpse the light-handed winter sun slipping its rays down the station’s stairways. A second later, we were free of the subway tunnel and the Bronx was around us, the subway car flooded with so much brightness it seemed a second sun had been pressed into service.

I gasped at the rectangular chimneys crowned with round water tankers (lowercase i’s); at the tall housing projects forming stout consonants (uppercase L’s and T’s); at the strange Tudor-style row houses that must have wandered in from some quaint English suburb; at the faraway Gothic tower denoting several lifetimes of failed public education; at the sharp, poignant smell of cherry bubble gum and cheap shampoo; at the old man in sunglasses and earphones who boarded at Freeman Street and who sang (mostly) for his own pleasure “Ain’t no use / Cain’t help myself”; at the Moslem girls in fluorescent yellow skirts and clashing gray head scarves, huddled together for safety near the conductor’s booth; at the lives of thousands whose flats lay eye level with the elevated train like some updated Edward Hopper painting; at the budding Latina social worker who cheerlessly highlighted a textbook called But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry; at the freshly painted azure fire escapes stirring to life the faded art deco brickwork beneath; at the urban catastrophe that is the Cross Bronx Expressway (and at the trash-strewn lots that bracket it); at the 350-pound woman (my long-lost fellow traveler) who got on at 174th Street, and especially at the tube top beneath the bulletproof shell of her down jacket with the rhinestone-studded words HOT ’N’ SEXXXY; at the inquisitive child (all eyebrows and stunted teeth) who couldn’t take his eyes off the book in my lap (William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes) and who asked me, “Whatchoo be readin’, papi?”

I fell out of my New York reverie as quickly as I had once fallen into my Beloved Papa’s hazardous “new fortunes.” Sakha was still speaking and gesturing at length. I made an attempt to follow him, to return to the country around me, to make a connection with the world I now inhabited and couldn’t wait to leave. I felt the need to say something intelligent, as one frequently does around intellectuals. “So do the Sevo live on the Sevo Terrace and the Svanï on their own terrace?” I asked.

“Originally, yes. The city’s geography kept us apart during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and it hindered the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian conquerors. But in the last two centuries, people have generally lived anywhere they want. In Soviet times, half the population married outside their group. The distinctions between us are all but meaningless now.”

“Do you live on the Sevo Terrace?” I asked. I could barely pay attention to what I was saying. Part of me was still on the 5 train with the HOT ’N’ SEXXXY woman, but I willed that part to disappear.

“Oh, no.” Sakha laughed. “I am a very poor democrat. I can’t afford to live on the terraces. I live in Gorbigrad.” He gestured toward a distant mound of (what I thought was) an unpopulated orange rock jutting out into the bay, its coloring reminding me of the much-celebrated Grand Canyon in Arizona.

“You live alone on a barren rock?” I said.

“Look closer,” Sakha said. As I squinted and shielded my face against the sun, I made out a stacked anthill of thousands of yellowing Khrushchev-era apartment buildings, along with what looked like vast quantities of housing possibly made out of burlap and tarp. “The Gorbigrad favelas,” Sakha said. “Home to over half of the city’s population. Named after Gorbachev, the man the locals still blame for everything that happened.”

“Wait, so this is not a rich country?” I said. “What about all the oil?”

“The UN Human Development Index ranks us slightly below Bangladesh. In terms of infant mortality—”

“Oh, you poor people,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Welcome to the Norway of the Caspian.”

“I wish I could open an outpost of Misha’s Children here, Mr. Sakha. I wish I had more money and time to spare.”

“You’re a very kind man,” Sakha said. “They really gave you and Josh Weiner a priceless education at that Accidental College.”

“ ‘Think one person can change the world?’” I said in English. “ ‘So do we.’”

“What’s that?”

“The motto of Misha’s Children.”

“I wish it were my motto as well,” Sakha said. He sighed and put his hands on his hips, an unacademic and frankly surprising gesture. “I can’t complain, Mr. Vainberg,” he said. “The Americans have really been helping us out. Xerox machines, free use of the fax lines after nine P.M., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary, five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan. We know what democracy looks like. We’ve read about it. We’ve been to Century 21. But how do we make it happen here? Because frankly, Mr. Vainberg, once the oil runs dry, who in the world is going to know we even exist?”

I considered telling him that no one knew they existed anyway but thought it might be tactless.

“Maybe you should move your daughters to Belgium,” I said. “I’ll pay for their plane tickets.”

“You are thoughtful and sincere,” Sakha said, and then, in all contravention of the rules of the manly Caucasus, he turned away and made a tearful gurgle with his sickle-shaped nose.

“You can’t choose where you’re born,” I said, and immediately felt like an asshole for saying it.

Sakha looked back from the derrick-studded horizon to my own sweltering frame. “Are you hot, Mr. Vainberg?” he said, laying his hand on one of my wet shoulders. “Let’s get back in the car. Monsieur Lefèvre is waiting for us by the McDonald’s dumpster.”

I nodded in agreement. But as we turned toward the car, Sakha looked back once more at the city beneath us. “Did I mention,” he said, “that the Sevo Vatican was originally covered by hexagonal tiles made of gold leaf that were given to us as a tribute by the khan of Bukhara and that the hexagonal motif represents the six great cities of Sevo antiquity?”

“I think you did mention that, yes,” I said.

“And I told you the names of all six cities?” Sakha said. “Maybe I forgot to mention them.”

“Yes, you told me, Mr. Sakha,” I said. “Your country has a proud history. I understand that.”

Sakha nodded and pulled at his orange Zegna tie. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

Journeying from the International Terrace to the Svanï one, we had left a fledgling Portland, Oregon, and arrived in Kabul. Gone were the Hyatts and fake Irish bars. Here the local business scene consisted of middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and gossiping around idled taxis. Rounding out the economy, younger men and boys ran around with buckets of sunflower seeds that they would wrap in a paper cone and sell for five thousand absurdis a portion (about US$.05, I later found out).

The McDonald’s was situated behind a prominent square that, during the Soviet era, must have hosted its share of May Day parades but had been turned into an ad hoc market for used remote controls. We walked past hordes of potential buyers aiming the orphaned devices at the sky, as if trying to turn off the scorching sun. Above the gleaming pile of remotes stretched an enormous mural of Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil, dancing with each other on the helicopter deck of a Chevron offshore oil platform. A large man in a bow tie and tails stood off to the side of the deck, writing something with a quill upon an ancient scroll. He was as neatly mustached as the dictator and his son, and boasted an incongruous poof of African-looking hair. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Alexandre Dumas,” an old remote seller told me. “He came to our country in 1858. He called the Svanï people ‘the Pearls of the Caspian.’ He loved our dried beef and wet women. When he came down to the Sevo Terrace, he was robbed by ruffians and cheated by the local merchants. He hated it there.”

I looked to Sakha, who merely shrugged. “It’s an old Svanï story,” he said.

“And who are you by nationality?” the remote seller started to ask, but Sakha whisked me away to our destination.

We strode into the all-beef smell of McDonald’s, where I was regarded by the hungry customers as a kind of living embodiment of the fast-food lifestyle. “Personally I favor the slow-food movement,” I loudly announced to a family splitting the smallest McDonald’s hamburger into six parts so that each family member could savor a little taste. Poor souls. Here they were living by the Caspian Sea, surrounded by delicious fresh sturgeon and wild tomatoes, and nonetheless they came to McDonald’s. I made a mental note to check up on the diets of Misha’s Children. Hopefully the progressive Park Slope social workers had already made their way to St. Petersburg and had set to work on the little ones.

“Hey, it’s that democrat!” someone shouted at Sakha. “Hey, democrat, buy me a shake, will you? I’ll believe in anything you say.”

A tall Slavic man in his late teens approached, stiff and official in his disposable McDonald’s uniform, but with enough of a homosexual smile to make a name for himself in Petersburg’s Club 69. His Cyrillic tag labeled him a Dzhunior Manadzher. “Sir,” he said. “Are you here to see Monsieur Lefèvre?”

“Certainly I am not here to eat your criminal food,” I replied.

“Please come with me,” said the junior manager. “In the meantime, Mr. Sakha and your manservant can enjoy a free cheeseburger. No, Mr. Sakha, you may split one cheeseburger, that’s all.”

He took me past the bathrooms reeking awfully of industrial detergent, past a framed print of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and to a door that opened to a small cul-de-sac where the McDonald’s garbage was stored in vast plastic containers. It took me a while to pinpoint Jean-Michel Lefèvre of the Belgian consulate, lying atop a soiled mattress, with both hands grasping the edges, as if he were Jonah just spat out of the whale.

“Monsieur Lefèvre isn’t feeling well,” the slender Russian boy told me. “I’m going to get him something to drink.”

“Misha,” the Belgian bellowed into the mattress. “Bring vodka,” he said in Russian.

“Are you talking to me?” I said.

“I am also called Misha,” said the boy, leaving us alone.

The Belgian used his elbows to flip over onto his back, where he could get a proper look at me. “Mother of God,” he said in English. “You’re big. You’re bigger than in Captain Belugin’s photograph. You’re the biggest thing ever.”

“I am a big man, yes,” I said. Lefèvre was himself a blond, emaciated fellow likely in early middle age, stubbly, red-eyed, and nicely browned by the Absurdi arrangement of sun, water, and sand. Whatever awful thing that had happened to him must have happened quickly and irrevocably.

“So,” said Lefèvre with a smirk. “Who wants to be a Belgian?”

“I do,” I said. Was he trying to make some kind of joke? “I have paid US$240,000 to Captain Belugin. That should buy citizenship for me and a work visa for my manservant. Everything should be in order.”

“Mm-hump,” said the Belgian, throwing up a hand and letting it hang in front of him limply. “Everyone wants to be a Belgian. Well, I don’t want to be a Belgian, no, sir. I want to be a Mexican Zapatista or a Montenegrin. Something fierce.” He yawned and scratched the perfectly white bridge of his nose. I noticed his sunglasses lying broken at his feet.

Misha the McDonald’s junior manager returned with a bottle of Flagman vodka and a McDonald’s paper cup. He emptied the vodka into the cup, gently tilted Lefèvre’s head, and poured the vodka into the diplomat’s mouth. There was some gagging, but mostly the alcohol found its way into the Belgian’s bloodstream, where it quickly reddened his tan.

“What are you?” Lefèvre asked me as he let Misha wipe his face with a McDonald’s paper hat. “What do you do?”

“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “I run a charity called Misha’s Children.”

“Are you some kind of pedophile?”

“What?” I fairly shrieked. “How can you? How awful! All my life I’ve wanted to help children.”

“I just thought because you’re so fat and puffy—”

“Stop insulting me. I know my rights.”

“You’re not a Belgian yet, friend,” he said. “I’m just joking. We have a problem in Belgium with pedophilia. Big scandal. Even the government and police people are implied.”

“Implicated,” I corrected him.

“I thought you should know more about your new nation before you signed on. Anything else you wanted to know?”

I considered all the things I wanted to know about Belgium. There weren’t many. “You have this queen Beatrix, no?” I asked.

“That would be Holland.”

“And you have a shameful history in the Congo. Your Leopold was a monster.”

“He’s your Leopold now, Vainberg. Our Leopold. Our Leopold of the Black Sorrows.” Lefèvre reached under the mattress and took out a business envelope that he tried to throw my way, but it landed in exactly the opposite direction, atop a plastics recycling bin. The other Misha picked it up and brought it to me.

I tried to stick my big, squishy hand inside, but to no avail. After tearing the envelope to bloody pieces, I withdrew a purple Belgian passport.

I opened it. Beneath a faint hologram of what I imagined was the Belgian Royal Palace, I saw a grainy duplicate of my Accidental College yearbook photograph, the travails of a grossly overweight twenty-two-year-old already hanging from my chin.

“For more information on Belgium, visit www.belgium.be,” Lefèvre said. “They have some information in English, too. You should at least know the name of the current prime minister. They sometimes ask that at Immigration.”

“This looks so real,” I said.

“It is real,” the diplomat told me. “According to official records, you became a citizen of Belgium in Charleroi last summer. You were granted political asylum from Russia. You’re a Chechen sympathizer or something. A Jewish Chechen sympathizer, that’s you.”

I pressed the passport to my nose, hoping to smell Europe—wine, cheese, chocolates, mussels, Belgian as opposed to McDonald’s fries. All I smelled were my own odors reflected back—a hot day, a tired man, hope tempered with sturgeon. “This is very good,” I said.

“No, it’s not very good,” said Lefèvre.

“Well, it’s very good for me,” I said. I was trying to stay positive, as they do in the States all the time.

The diplomat smiled. He gestured for the other Misha to tilt his head and administer the vodka inside the McDonald’s paper cup. In between swallows, he started singing the anthem of my new homeland:

With each French word, he stared farther into the blue void of my pretty eyes, grimacing, guffawing, and willing upon me every failure of which I knew myself capable. I stood there and listened. Then I said, “You know something, Mr. Lefèvre…”

“Hmm?” he said. “What do I know?”

“Everybody hurts,” I said.

The diplomat curled his fine lips, seeming surprised for the first time. “Who hurts?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Everybody hurts,” I said once more. Despite the logistical problems posed by my weight, I lowered myself to the ground and extended my hand to take the vodka cup from his hand. Lefèvre reached over, and our hands met briefly, his as wet and vulgar as my own. I took the cup and spilled some vodka on my new passport.

“What are you doing?” shouted the diplomat. “That’s an EU passport!”

“In Russia, when one graduates from a university, he spills vodka on his diploma for good luck.”

“Yes, but that’s an EU passport!” the diplomat repeated, scrambling backward on his mattress. “You paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. You don’t want it smelling like vodka.”

“I can do as I please!” I began to shout, my anger suddenly matched by the sound of crashing china and cutlery behind me. We looked to McDonald’s, aware that the restaurant offered only plastic and paper service.

“What are these idiots doing now?” Lefèvre said.

Several middle-aged women with very full lungs were screaming inside the McDonald’s. Almost immediately, the women’s roar was joined by a distant counterpart, issuing presumably from the Sevo Terrace below. A strange sonic displacement seemed to be taking place all around us, as if the summer heat with its layers of shimmering, highly sulfuric air were taking on an acoustic quality. “Shit,” Lefèvre said as the recycling bins started to shake violently, which I surmised could not have been the result of the female screaming alone. “Oh, fuck me,” he said.

Sakha ran out of McDonald’s, his hands trembling with the yellow remains of a cheeseburger, his Zegna tie stained with a trail of ketchup. He tried to speak but could only sputter and whinny in an impotent intellectual way. It took the McDonald’s junior manager, Misha, to make the situation clear for us.

“Georgi Kanuk’s plane has just been shot down by Sevo rebels,” he said.