Absurdistan

23 The Sevo Vatican

If the Svanï were made whole by their remote-control market and their association with Alexandre Dumas, the Sevo boasted a stranglehold on the sea. It loitered close by, gray and muted, peeking out from behind the faded mansions of the oil aristocracy that had decamped here a century ago, when the Caspian had first announced itself as a source of seemingly endless fuel and antagonism.

Instead of looking for a place to park, Nana simply abandoned her vehicle at a busy intersection. An elderly policeman crisply saluted her and rushed over to stand at attention beside it. He whistled to a passing soldier, who took off his shirt, dipped it into a nearby fountain, and began washing down the Navigator’s sandy windshield. “You seem to be very popular,” I said to my new friend, who merely shrugged. What the hell was going on here? I wished Alyosha-Bob would appear and explain things to me in his pedantic way. I felt vulnerable—susceptible—to anything without him.

Nana walked ahead of me, relating the peculiarities of the local architecture commissioned by late-nineteenth-century oil barons. “Really?” I said when told of the original owner of a massive neo-Gothic pile. “This was built by Lord Rothschild? The Jew?”

“Are there many Jews in Belgium, Mr. Vainberg?” my tour guide asked.

“Yes, quite a few,” I said. “Personally I live in Brussels, but if you ever find yourself in Antwerp, you will see a funny sight sometimes—the local Hasids riding around on their bicycles, with their dark coats flapping along. We Belgians have quite an open society, you see.”

“So you are a balloon?” she said.

I was hurt to the stomach by her frankness, by the idea that such a sweet woman could be a fat-baiter. “I do have a fondness for food,” I admitted, “which may indeed make me in your eyes a balloon—”

“No!” She laughed. “Not a balloon. Oh, you poor man. A Walloon. A French Belgian.”

“Ah, oui,” I said. “Un Wallon. C’est moi.”

“Parce que nous parlons français.”

“Mm, no,” I stammered, for I had never bothered to learn that complicated tongue. “No French, please. Right now I am trying to practice my English. Sadly, it is the language of the world.”

Nana stopped and allowed me a nice look at her glistening body and face. If she trimmed herself just a little, she could be a chesty athlete; a swimmer, say, for I have heard that female swimmers rely on their massive bosoms for buoyancy.

“As you may have heard,” Nana coyly told me, “the Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land.”

“It is my understanding,” I said in my most flirtatious and least reprehensible voice, “that they are your brothers, and whoever is their enemy is your enemy also.”

“You say ‘they,’” Nana said.

“I mean ‘we,’” I conceded.

“It’s pretty obvious, Monsieur Vainberg,” Nana said. “I had a Jewish roommate in college.”

“Here?”

“No, at NYU.”

I must have appeared utterly blank-faced, for Nana felt the need to slowly explain. “New York University,” she said.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, of course. I know it well. You are a graduate of NYU?”

“I’ll be a senior this fall,” she said.

I breathed heavily and embraced my own stomach, my balloon, if you will. She turned away and walked ahead of me. I followed her ass, stunned and queasy at the prospect of being so close to New York, the city of my dreams. So that’s how it was! Another American cruelly trapped in a foreigner’s body. Perhaps I could come with her to NYU in September (if the war had ended by then). Perhaps the generals in charge of the INS, in their Noahlike wisdom, would make an exception for two hungry and fully consumerist post-Soviet bears.

We had started upon the Sevo Terrace’s esplanade, which extended for a good kilometer toward the gleaming octopus of the so-called Sevo Vatican. Despite the pre-lunch hour, despite this being a workday, the promenade was choked with throngs of Sevo out for a stroll, sucking up petroleum fumes and trying to re-create an old Soviet nostalgia for “the sea,” which here consisted of gray snatches of salt water lapping up to the barnacled bases of the oil derricks.

The promenade seemed to cater to the needs of the fertile fifteen-to-twenty-nine demographic, but children also mature fast these days. I witnessed a five-year-old in a bow and polka-dot dress dancing like an aged American slut to an accordion tune, as her parents angled for photographs, shouting at the accordionist to play something a bit more lively.

How different my Nana looked from her countrywomen. There was no mistaking her for anything other than a college senior, twenty-one years old, swift, determined, and carefree, her body a wide testimony to earthly pleasures sought and found, while all around, barely pubescent girls were already consigned to a brutal, dolled-up middle age spent at the hands of anxious relatives and dim-witted, controlling young husbands. Nana had been privileged to leave the former Soviet Union at just the right time in her psychosexual development. Her expectations were as enormous as my circumference.

At the end of the esplanade, the Sevo Vatican cast its eight tentacles trying to ensnare believers, the three-meter Sevo cross gleaming from its hooded dome like an aerial antenna stacked on top of a satellite dish. “You have to admit, it does look like an octopus,” I said to Nana.

“I think it looks more like an egg,” she said. “Like an egg that’s inside one of those things they put them in. Like when you order a poached egg.”

“Like you get at a diner,” I said.

“Yes, like you get at a Greek diner,” she said.

“Yes, like you get at a Greek diner in New York,” I said.

We smiled sadly at each other, bound by our use of the throwaway American “like,” and I reached out my big, squishy hands, hoping she would reciprocate. But she didn’t just yet. “Anyway,” she said, “I am a Sevo, like it or not, so I have to feed you the official Sevo line. Here goes…”

And so for the next half hour, while I stroked her body up and down with my lurid male gaze, Nana told me many, many facts about the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator. I will try to relate to the reader some of the highlights (did I mention the orange highlights in Nana’s soft brown hair?), but for a full appreciation of this weird octopuslike church, the reader should turn to the Internet.

The cathedral was built in either 1475 or 1575 or 1675; certainly there was a 75 in there somewhere. Around this time, the whole of Absurdistan suffered under the sway of the nearby Persians (or was it the Ottomans?), so naturally the Svanï claimed that the cathedral was originally a mosque, not a church, as it was built in brick rather than stone, the material of choice for those nefarious Mohammedans. But no! It was always a church, according to Nana (whose ass instinctively tilted upward whenever she exclaimed something), and anyway, who were the Svanï to talk? They had reached all kinds of accommodations with their Persian (or Ottoman) overlords during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and they had the habit of putting stones around Sevo churches to claim them for their own. I’m not sure why this was significant, but the serious way in which Nana related these preposterous things only made me hotter for her, for when she talked her hooey, she resembled an actress longing to be recognized, a veritable American starlet with a full-moon face and the readiest of lips.

We entered the cathedral, which offered a nice break from the heat. Despite this amenity, it was largely empty, save for the old women violently crossing themselves by clusters of candles and whispering angrily at their missing god. No doubt about it, the church was an afterthought. The real action was on the esplanade, where commerce and matters of the groin held sway.

The head of the cathedral’s octopus was taken up by a colossal dome, ringed by a circle of skylights that in turn lit up a fetching fresco inlaid upon the dome. “This was the original seal of the first Sevo potentate,” Nana said. “A lion with a sword is riding atop a fish. This is to show that all power is ephemeral, and that even the mightiest ruler can lose his grip on the affairs of state.”

“That’s kind of nice,” I allowed.

“It’s my favorite symbol,” Nana said. “I hate the whole business with the footrest, so I wear one of these instead.” She withdrew from between her breasts a pendant bearing the lion-surfing-on-a-fish motif. I reached out to touch it. Its sweaty warmth, a product of her natural heat, made me feel wobbly and wet. I wanted to press my nose to it, too.

“Tell me, please,” I said. “What is the difference between the Sevo and Svanï? You both look so cute to me. Why can’t we all just get along?”