Absurdistan

28 Dead Democrats

My dinner companions were an inspiration. They ate fervently. They ate with their hands. Their hands were always full. I occupied a large part of the main table, and they would reach over me, around me, past my nose, under my chin, to grab an oozing cheese pie or a warm hunk of pheasant or a stuffed grape leaf the size of a forearm. They inhaled their food into one side of the mouth while expelling Armenian anecdotes from the other. The food was good, the meat fatty and charred just right, the cheese lightly smoked, the soup dumplings coated with enough black pepper to make one cough and weep and thank our put-upon earth for all its spicy produce. I became nervous and discreetly slipped several Ativan tablets into my ram’s horn, letting them dissolve amid the strong Sevo wine. But for all the Ativan in the world, I could not quell my anxiety. I started to rock back and forth, as I always do when confronted by food of this caliber. Mr. Nanabragov took this for a sign of Hasidity and started to make a toast to Israel.

“We Sevo understand your country’s problems,” he said, mistaking Israel for my country. “We, too, are the victims of our geography. Why, just look at our neighbors. To the south, the Persians, in the other directions the Turks, farther north the Russians. And sharing our country, the apelike Svanï. What problems we have. Just imagine, Misha, what would happen if, instead of occupying and subduing the Palestinians, the Israelis found themselves reeling under the Moslem yoke. I would compare both our peoples to a beautiful white mare saddled under a loutish black brute who digs his spurs into our tender flanks. Ever since Saint Sevo the Liberator found the piece of Christ’s True Footrest delivered to us by that thieving Armenian—I’m sure my Nana has told you the story—we have been a nation apart from our neighbors, blessed by education and prosperity but cursed by our small numbers and the whip of our Svanï masters.” He pretended to raise a whip high above his head and made a whooshing sound.

“Israel must support us, Misha, don’t you think? Tell Israel that we should be as one. Tell them that we are both the last hope for Western democracy. If he were alive today, Boris Vainberg, your father of blessed memory, would be the first to run to the Israeli embassy and beg for their help on our behalf. And I know I speak for everyone around the table when I say that each of us would die for Israel as well.”

“To Israel!” the gathered toasted.

“To the friendship of the Jews and the Sevo.”

“Death to our enemies!”

“Well put!”

“Jesus was a Jew,” volunteered Bubi, Nana’s little brother, the youngest at the table.

“Certainly he was,” his father agreed, cupping the young man’s thick chin with one hand and rustling his dark mane with the other. They looked alike—Bubi was also a small, girlish-looking beauty who was doubling nicely around the edges, a victim of the Southern good life. He was free of his father’s boisterous twitches, evidently content to live within his own cotton T-shirt, which bore the likeness of the famed Latin American guitarist Carlos Santana. “Yes, Jesus was a Jew,” the father confirmed, nodding wisely at the fact.

“Alas, if you read Castaneda, you will see that he was not,” someone said.

“Hush, Volodya!” another shouted.

“Don’t mistreat the Jews,” yet another volunteered.

I momentarily put down the soup ladle I had been using to shovel grainy osetra caviar into my mouth and looked at this Volodya. He was the only ethnic Russian at the table, an inflated, red-faced man with the sad, clear eyes and droopy ears of Vladimir Putin. I later found out that, like Putin, Volodya was a former KGB agent. Disgraced from that service after stealing above and beyond his allotted quota of amphibious jeeps and shoulder-fired rockets, he now worked as a security consultant for the SCROD. I decided it was best to ignore him. “I’m not interested in this man,” I said, haughtily tapping my caviar ladle against my ram’s horn.

But this Volodya would not let up with his quietly voiced Jew-bashing. Whenever my hosts toasted to the wisdom and financial muscle of the Jews, he would say, “I’m a good friend of the Austrian nationalist Jörg Haider.”

Or: “It just so happens that some of my best friends are neo-Nazis. Good fellows, they work with their hands.”

Or, more subtly: “Of course there is only one God. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our differences.”

The father twitched, nearly pulling off his shirt, then pulling it back on again. Bubi and the others loudly denounced the Russian and threatened to eject him from the table. But I would not oblige Volodya by becoming angry. “I am not much taken with Judaism,” I announced. “I am a multiculturalist.” Except there was no Russian word for “multiculturalist,” so I had to say, “I am a man who likes others.”

The toasts continued. We drank to the health of the pilot who would one day fly me to Belgium. (“But you should stay with us forever!” Mr. Nanabragov added. “We won’t let you go.”) We drank to Boris Vainberg, Beloved Papa of blessed memory, and the famous eight-hundred-kilogram screw he sold to a certain American oil services company.

Finally it was time to toast to the women. Mr. Nanabragov’s hunch-backed Moslem manservant, who went by the name of Faik, was sent into the kitchen to gather the womenfolk. They emerged, greasy and sweaty and middle-aged, wiping their brows with aprons. Only my Nana and one of her school chums looked glossy and air-conditioned, as if they had spent their evening free of food preparation. (In fact, they had been toking up marijuana in Nana’s room while trying on padded bras.)

“The bee is here because it senses honey,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching and jerking and thrusting his hips. “Women, you are like bees—”

“Hurry up, Timur,” said a sallow older woman, her sparse hair coated with flour. “You’ll chatter until the sun comes up, and here we are with lamb to grill.”

“That’s my wife, everybody!” Mr. Nanabragov shouted, pointing at his spouse. “The mother of my children. Look at her carefully, perhaps for the last time, because if she overcooks the kebabs, I think I’m going to kill her tonight.” Laughter and toasting. The women glanced back at the kitchen impatiently. Nana rolled her eyes but remained standing until the master of the house shouted, “Women, go! Fly away…But wait. First, my dear wife, give me a kiss.”

Mrs. Nanabragovna sighed and approached her husband. She kissed him six times, on the cheeks, temples, and nose. She made to leave, but he got up, tipped her over, and kissed her loudly on the lips with a protracted shoooo sound while she whimpered and swung her arms about. “Papa,” Nana said, “you’re embarrassing her.” Nana looked at me with brown-eyed despair, as if she wanted me to either separate her parents or inflict the same assault upon her. I was incapable of either. Meanwhile, the ravishing of Mrs. Nanabragovna continued.

“O-ho!” the gathered cried. “True love!” “They’re inseparable.” “Like something out of a movie.” “Fred and Ginger.”

Mr. Nanabragov let go of his wife, who fell to the ground and had to be helped up by her girlfriends. She shook the dirt off her skirt, bowed shyly to the men gathered at the table, and ran off to the kitchen, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. Nana grabbed her friend’s arm and, with an exaggerated male swagger, followed the older women inside.

The excitement brought forth by the women abated. The lamb arrived, and its gristly, fatty consistency kept our mouths working hard. Faik the manservant, a half-visible Mohammedan gnome, appeared at our elbow to carve up new chunks of a giant kebab. “Eat, eat, masters,” he said. “If you spit out some of the gristle, perhaps Faik will make a meal for himself. That’s right, spit your gristle at me, excellencies. Am I not a man? Apparently not.”

I could not believe a manservant could speak so brashly to his masters, and I almost expressed outrage on behalf of my host. But Mr. Nanabragov said only, “Faik, we are at your disposal, brother. Eat what you wish and drink as your faith allows.” With that, Faik cut himself a few choice morsels and absconded with someone’s wine horn.

Gradually the men began to regain some of their speech faculties. After they were done masticating the lamb and gargling their dessert wine, they picked up their mobilniki and started snarling orders across town or cooing to their mistresses. A group of older men who were clearly styling themselves after Mr. Nanabragov, with their half-open linen shirts and improvised nervous twitches, were having the same endless discussion that dominated the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg that summer: whether a Mercedes 600S (a so-called shestyorka) was better than a BMW 375i. There was little I could add to that debate, other than my preference for a Land Rover, whose seats squished around me so pleasantly. Other men, including the taciturn anti-Semite Volodya, were talking about the oil industry in terms I could not follow—“light, sweet crude,” “OPEC benchmark,” things of that sort.

“You know,” I said to Mr. Nanabragov, “I have a funny American friend who tells me this whole war is about oil. That it’s all about whether a pipeline to Europe should run through Sevo or Svanï territory and who gets to profit from the kickbacks.”

Mr. Nanabragov vibrated for a while. “You call that a funny friend?” he said. “Well, let me tell you, there’s a difference between humor and cynicism. Do you think the Russian poet Lermontov was funny? Why, he probably thought so. But then he publicly humiliated an old school chum who challenged him to a duel and then shot him dead! Not so funny anymore…” He twitched silently and glared at me.

“I have another funny friend,” I pressed on, “who says the Figa-6 oil field will never happen. He says the American airlift was just an old switcheroo and now there are all these new Halliburton people running around Svanï City for no reason at all. What’s going on, Mr. Nanabragov?”

“You know,” Nana’s father said, “that Alexandre Dumas called the Sevo the Pearls of the Caspian. Now, there’s a writer we respect. A Frenchman. Much better than Lermontov. He was funny but not cynical. See the difference?”

I was confused. Weren’t the Svanï called the Pearls of the Caspian? And why was Mr. Nanabragov bashing poor melancholy Lermontov and praising that overripe Dumas? Who cared about literature, anyway? Petroleum and hip-hop were the topics of my generation.

“Fine,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “maybe some of us in the SCROD were upset that the Svanï had control of the oil pipeline when traditionally we’re the people of the sea, and they’re the sheep-bangers of the interior. But we don’t want to steal the oil like the dictator Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil. We don’t want to spend the national patrimony in a Monte Carlo casino. We want to use the oil money to build a democracy. That’s the operative word we all love here. Democracy. What do we call ourselves? The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy.”

“I love democracy, too,” I said. “It’s great to have one, no question—”

“And democracy means Israel,” said Bubi, winning himself another pat from his father.

“Even Primo Levi admitted the Holocaust figures were inflated,” Volodya said.

“A few weeks ago,” I said, ignoring the former KGB agent, “I witnessed the terrible murder of a group of democrats by Colonel Svyokla and the Svanï forces. One of them had become a good friend of mine. His name was Sakha.”

Upon mention of Sakha, the courtyard fell silent. The men began to open and close their mobilniki. Bubi quietly whistled “Black Magic Woman.” A finch landed on a pile of lamb and began to sing to us about its golden life. “And,” said Mr. Nanabragov, “you liked this Sakha?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “He had just gotten back from New York, from the Century 21 department store, and they shot him. Right in front of the Hyatt. In cold blood, as they say.”

Mr. Nanabragov slapped his hands together and twitched three times, as if sending a coded signal to a satellite nervously circling the table. “We admired Sakha, too,” he said. “Didn’t we?”

“True! True!” the assembled sang into their cupped hands.

“See, Misha, the Svanï sheep-bangers think that by killing Sevo democrats, they can silence our aspirations. Oh, where are Israel and America when you need them?”

“But they weren’t just Sevo democrats,” I said. “They were Sevo and Svanï. A little of each. A democratic cocktail.”

“You know who you should talk to?” said Mr. Nanabragov. “Our esteemed Parka here. Ai, Parka! Speak to us.”

The gathered moved their chairs either forward or back until I saw a small, intelligent-looking senior citizen in a rumpled dress shirt holding on to a chicken leg. He turned his double-jointed nose at me and sniffed the air sadly. “This is Parka Mook,” Mr. Nanabragov announced. “He spent many years in a Soviet prison for his dissident views, just like your dear papa. He is our most famous playwright, the man who penned Quietly the Leopard Rises, which indeed made the Sevo people rise up and pump their fists in the air. You could say he’s the moral consciousness of our independence movement. Now he’s working on a Sevo dictionary, which will show conclusively how much more authentic our language is when compared to Svanï, which is really just a bastardization of Persian.”

Parka Mook opened his mouth, revealing two rows of poorly made silver teeth. Now I recalled where I had seen him: his image had flanked that of Mr. Nanabragov on the Sevo billboard by the esplanade. He seemed even more tired and depressed in person. “Happy to make your acquaintance,” he said in slow, ponderous Russian that couldn’t hide his thick Caucasus accent.

“Quietly the Leopard Rises,” I said, “that sounds very familiar. Was it performed in Petersburg recently?”

“Perhaps,” Parka Mook said as he regretfully let go of his chicken leg. “But it’s not very good. When you put a Shakespeare or a Beckett or even a Pinter next to me, you will see how very small I am.”

“Nonsense, nonsense!” the gathered shouted.

“You’re very modest,” I told the playwright.

He smiled and waved me away. “It’s nice to do something for your country,” he said. “But soon I will die and my work will disappear forever. Oh, well. Death should be a pleasant release for me. I can hardly wait to drop dead. Maybe tomorrow the sweet day will come. Now, what did you ask me?”

“Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.

“Oh, yes. I knew your friend Sakha. He was a fellow anti-Soviet agitator. We did not share the same opinions as of late—”

“But you were still best friends,” Mr. Nanabragov interrupted.

“We did not share the same opinions of late,” Parka Mook resumed, “but when I saw his body on television, lying in the dirt, I had to shut my eyes. There was so much brightness that day. These infernal summer months. On some afternoons, when there is that much brightness—how should I put it—the very sunlight becomes false. So I closed the curtains and lost myself in memories of better days.”

“And he cursed the Svanï monsters who had killed his best friend, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov prompted the playwright.

Parka Mook sighed. He looked longingly at his abandoned chicken leg. “That’s correct,” he muttered, “I cursed…” He looked up at me with depleted eyes. “I cursed…”

“You cursed the Svanï monsters,” Mr. Nanabragov said, twitching impatiently.

“I cursed the monsters…”

“…who killed your best friend.”

“…who killed my best friend, Sakha. True enough.”

We watched the old playwright go back to his chicken leg and nibble carefully. I felt the longing to comfort him and, by extension, the whole Sevo race. God help me, but I found their feudal mentality charming. You couldn’t fault them for their ignorance, a small, impressionable people surrounded by nations lacking in intellectual rigor. They were young and ill-formed, like showy adolescent girls trying to win the affection of adults through prancing and coquetry and the deliberate flash of a skinny ankle. Forget my Petersburg charity. These were Misha’s Children. I pledged my fealty to their sunny, prepubescent causes, their dreams of freedom and impossible happiness. “The world has heard of your plight,” I said, “and soon you will have your dictionary and your oil pipeline.”

“Oh, if only.” The men began to sigh and blow unhappily into their empty wine horns.

“A tragedy took place yesterday,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “A tragedy that will change everything.”

“It’s the end, the end,” his co-nationals agreed.

“An Italian anti-globalization protester,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “a young man, has been killed at the G8 summit in Genoa by the Italian police.”

“How sad,” I agreed. “If a pretty Mediterranean person can be robbed of his life, what chance do the rest of us have?”

“Just as our Sevo struggle for democracy was gaining some market share in the global media,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “we have been banished from the news cycle.”

“Just one dead Italian!” Bubi moaned, tugging at his T-shirt as if he wanted to join his father in a twitch. “We had sixty-five people killed last week—”

“Including your favorite, Sakha,” Mr. Nanabragov reminded him.

“—and nobody cared,” Bubi said.

“Unlike those rich, spoiled Italians, we’re completely in tune with globalization,” Mr. Nanabragov said to me. “We want capitalism and America.”

“And Israel,” Bubi said.

“We were getting live feed on BBC One, France 2, Deutsche Welle, Rai Due, and CNN, and now, one dead European later, you turn on any channel, and everyone’s crying over the Genovese hooligan.”

“How many such hooligans do we have to kill?” Bubi said.

“Shush, sonny, we’re a peaceful nation,” Mr. Nanabragov said.

They all turned to me and tugged their shirts in unison; Parka Mook put down his chicken leg and burped elegantly into his hand. “It’s hard to define your conflict,” I suggested. “No one’s really sure what it’s about.”

“It’s about independence!” Mr. Nanabragov said.

“And Israel,” Bubi said.

“Saint Sevo the Liberator,” shouted one of the elderly men.

“Christ’s True Footrest.”

“The thieving Armenian.”

“Quietly the Leopard Rises.”

“And don’t forget Parka’s new dictionary!”

“These are all good things,” I said. “But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don’t have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora, from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don’t have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they’ll send troops.”

“We don’t want the United Nations,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “We don’t want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We’re better than that. We want America.”

“We want the big time,” Bubi said in English.

“Please, go talk to Israel,” Mr. Nanabragov said, “and then maybe they’ll recommend us to America.”

“How can I talk to Israel?” I said. “What can I say to it? I am only a private Belgian citizen.”

“Your father would know what to say,” Mr. Nanabragov told me.

We sat there quietly chewing on that fact like cud. The finches sang to the sparrows, and the sparrows returned the favor. There was a failure of the power supply. The house around us darkened, moonlit shadows appeared momentarily along the glassed-in verandas covered with trellises of grape. Finally the backup generators sprang to life. We could hear the women singing dolorously in the kitchen, my Nana’s voice noticeably absent. A dog picked up their whimper somewhere in the distance.

Mr. Nanabragov was right. My father would know what to say.