24 Why the Sevo and Svanï Don’t Get Along

The Sevo and Svanï started out as one people, much maligned and forever in the shadows of the Persians, Turks, Slavs, and Mongols, who in different periods would come over to plunder and rape them pretty hard. And then along came Saint Sevo (the Liberator, mind you!), who, in the time-honored tradition of so many other religious personages, had a vision. What made this Liberator’s vision particularly funny, not to mention oddly contemporary, was that he suffered it while high on a local herb called lanza. A fresco in one of the octopus’s pre-tentacle alcoves showed a wiry peasant bent over a stone pot, nasally inhaling three strands of pasta, really the vapors of the lanza herb, which transported him temporarily into the next world (the ceremony of lanza-sniffing is performed by Sevo monks to this day), where he met, of course, Jesus.

Jesus, rendered in the fresco as a spectral, bleary-eyed figure nearly as stoned as Saint Sevo himself, told our visionary that all was not right with his people, particularly the priests who had just last year excommunicated the saint for sleeping with their teenage daughters and forced him to live along the parched saltwater-blasted strip that would one day be known as the Sevo Terrace. “Look,” said Jesus. “I’m a good guy, right? But enough is enough. After you come down from your lanza high, I want you to get your homeys together, get your pointiest utensils, and spear the bejesus out of all your enemies. And when you’re through spearing, I want you to fuck every underage cutie in town. I’m talking, like, sodomy here. Right in the dumpster. Capiche?”

“Muh-huh,” Saint Sevo replied. “So saith the Lord. And believe me, I’m all over it. But, Jeez, can you give me a sign? Something I can show my homeys. So that they know I’m, like, legit.”

“Goeth you,” said Jesus, “to the highest rise of the lowest terrace of your city. And then digeth you. Digeth and digeth, night and day, mornings and afternoons, skippeth you the lunchtime, and then you shall uncovereth that which you seeketh.”

So the very next morning, Sevo the Liberator brushed off his hangover and ran to the highest rise of the lowest terrace—this, by the way, is where the octopus of the Sevo Vatican is presently located—and started digging. For many grueling days: nothing. And then, holy shit! A little piece of wood or something. But clearly very holy. The saint-to-be went back to his wretched hut, gathered a fortnight’s stash of lanza from the backyard, and, with the piece of holy wood before him, got terrifically high. Oy vei, how many visions he had! Eighteen, to be exact, each represented in the cathedral by a primitive fresco (where did these poor, constantly pillaged people find the time for frescoes?). The most important vision of all, the one that would give birth to the entire Sevo nation, featured Christ on the cross, bloody and spent, whispering for Saint Sevo to get down on his knees like a doggie and lick the spilt blood pooling on the footrest. This our boy did gladly, only as he was lapping up the sacred corpuscles and pulling the resulting splinters from his tongue, a dirty, thieving Armenian crept up to the cross and chipped for himself a hefty chunk of Christ’s footrest, tilting it to the position thereafter found on the Sevo cross.

Now, Christ is crucified along with two so-called thieves—a Good Thief, who defends him and is promised eternal salvation by the Son, and the Bad Thief, who pretty much goes straight to hell. The footrest of the Svanï cross, like the standard Orthodox cross, is slanted with the part on Christ’s right pointing upward, so that Jesus is leaning toward the Good Thief. But in Sevo mythology, after the dirty Armenian chips away at the footrest, Christ leans in the opposite direction, that is, toward the Bad Thief. This has all sorts of crucial theological implications, none of which I can remember.

Anyway, back to the story. So the Armenian, chunk of footrest in hand, ran back to his native land, hoping to bless his co-nationals with the glory of the Footrest of the Lord. But God much detested the Armenians, clever bastards that they are, and He laid for the fellow a trail of golden coins, which the greedy Armenian naturally followed all the way to what is now the Sevo Terrace. Lost in that arid, inhospitable clime, the Armenian offered all his gold to Yahweh in exchange for His mercy, but the ever-mercurial Judeo-Christian God struck him down instead (and took back all His money to boot). The chunk of footrest was buried there in the sand alongside the Caspian, to await the day when a certain stoned Liberator would appear, pick up the holy wood, gather his homeys, and spear-fuck half the land. Those chosen homeys and their newly raped betrothed would become the Sevos of today.

I have laid out the tale of the Sevo-Svanï schism in a hopefully entertaining hip-hop fashion, but it was related to me by my Nana in a less joyful manner. She used complex terms to describe the religious differences, such as “dyophysitism” and “monophysitism,” along with frequent allusions to some Holy Council of Aardvark that rocked the region in A.D. 518, not to mention that whole Good Thief, Bad Thief hullabaloo. I do not wish to disparage her considerable knowledge of local prejudices, nor the faith to which she nominally belonged. I believe that when confronted with the irrational, we must not laugh, even when laughter is richly deserved.

We stepped out of the cathedral and onto the broad series of steps that connected the Cathedral of Saint Sevo the Liberator with the half-naked esplanade before it. “Look around you,” Nana said. “Forget the religion crap. Look at the geography. We Sevo live along the coastline, and the Svanï live in the mountains, the valleys, and the desert. For a thousand years, the Svanï have been farmers and herders, and we’ve been the traditional merchant class. That’s why there’s the stuff about the Armenian in the tale of Christ’s footrest—because the Armenians, not the Svanï, are our traditional competitors. We’re cosmopolitans trying to cuddle up to the West, while the Svanï screw sheep and pray for salvation. That’s why our churches are empty and theirs are full. That’s why ever since trading became more important than farming, we’re the ones with the big bucks.”

“Good for you,” I said. “I’m proud of you people. Merchants are more evolved than agriculturalists. That’s a fact.”

She ignored my comment, staring out into the oil fields silently tapping the seabed from the edge of the esplanade to the inky line of the horizon. She stared as far out as the violet-dappled halls of New York University, and, with one big, squishy hand shielding my blue eyes from the sun’s glare, I stared along with her to the classrooms and cafeterias, the modern African-dance recitals and poetry slams, past the bustle of Broadway and Lafayette Street to the cast-iron triangle of Astor Place.

“Now, as part of your tour, Mr. Vainberg,” Nana said, “I will take you out to a traditional Sevo lunch. Do you have any dietary restrictions?”

“Are you freaking kidding me?” I said, pointing to my stomach.

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