33 Ideas Away

The next day I was woken at ten in the morning by the sound of GRAD missiles being launched directly above my sleepy head. Hey! I thought, what a way to start my first day as the SCROD Minister of Multicultural Affairs. I put on my best tracksuit, had a bang-up sturgeon-and-egg fry at the Beluga Bar, then went back upstairs and flossed heavily.

The SCROD boys who had driven me to the Nanabragov residence were waiting for me in my official Volvo station wagon. I think their names were Tafa and Rafa, but that sounds rather made up. They were morons, that much I can vouch for. They spent the ride down to the Sevo Terrace addressing me in the familiar way, as if I were a greasy colleague of theirs, and chatting all the while about how a certain teenage American pop star would look with a pickle up her twat. I was ready to reach for my knout.

The State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy gathered in an old House of Soviets atop a deserted bluff overlooking the sprawling octopus of the Sevo Vatican. The building looked very much like a Rhine Valley castle, and in fact had been constructed by German POWs in the forties. Their workmanship was evident. This was the only building of the Soviet era that did not look as if it had been continuously crapped upon by a flock of seagulls for the past five decades. In the dusty square outside the building, workmen were chiseling out a statue to Sakha the Democrat, holding aloft a torch in one hand and a Sevo cross in the other. His academic beard was trimmed down to nothing, and his face was aglow and expectant, as if he had just won a Century 21 shopping spree. “Well, at least he has the torch in one hand,” I muttered to no one present. “That’s democratic.”

Mr. Nanabragov showed me to my office, a chamber the size of a barn brimming with dark wood and glass cabinets stocked with Armenian brandy, the typical privileges of a Soviet party boss. The title “Minister for Sevo-Israeli Affairs” had been crossed out on my door, and someone had written in English: “Ministry of Multiculti.” Mr. Nanabragov pointed out the fact that I had twelve completely useless rotary phones lined up on my desk, more than anyone save himself, almost as many as Brezhnev had in his day (I assume his worked). I told Nanabragov that what I really needed was a computer with a working Internet hookup. He sighed and jerked around a little. “What’s wrong, friend?” I said.

“I’m fighting with my Nana,” he said. “I want her to quit her job at the American Express office so that she can become the mother of your children.”

I had been privy to this argument when Nana had mounted me, sans condom (how wet her vagina, how flustered my khui), the previous night, bawling about her father’s simple nature with each vicious straddle. “Children are like champagne corks,” I advised Mr. Nanabragov, patting him on the back. “They should be pointed away and released.”

“I don’t understand,” my potential father-in-law said. “Why are children like champagne corks?”

“Just get me the Internet,” I told him.

We met in an airless conference room adorned with a series of warped walnut panels and a tremendous Sevo flag, a sturgeon leaping up over an oil derrick against a background of red and green—red for the blood of the Sevo martyrs and green for the color of American dollars. The men who had gathered around the conference table were the same ones who had come to Mr. Nanabragov’s dinner party, only Bubi was missing due to a hangover. They sat there in white short sleeves, gray woolen slacks, and wingtips, their mobilniki parked next to their salads and glasses of fizzy mineral water, gossiping loudly in their own language. I might have been at a Lions Club ladies’ lunch somewhere in Sinclair Lewis country if not for the bloody flag hanging above us, the oil derricks gleaming outside, and the occasional mumble of the special American word “LOGCAP.”

The meeting started with a media roll call. According to Mr. Nanabragov, since the shelling of Gorbigrad had begun, Absurdsvanï was featured in thirty-four news reports, about half of them implicitly sympathetic to the Sevo people. “CNN, check,” Mr. Nanabragov intoned, making a sweeping check mark with his twitching arm. “BBC One, check; BBC Two, check; MSNBC, check; Rai Due, check; Deutsche Welle, check…”

“What about people jumping into the Alexandre Dumas Ravine?” I asked. “Doesn’t that look bad?”

“They’re not jumping, they’re sliding down,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Which reminds me, have you talked to Israel yet? Because there’s good news on that front. Parka, tell us the good news.”

The Cultural Minister, his morning face bristling with nose hairs, was staring out the window at the Caspian’s lackluster tides. “Wake up, grandpa,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Tell Misha about the Mountain Jews.”

Parka Mook fell out of his morning stupor and fixed me with his yellow eyes. He sniffed in my direction as if ascertaining my genus and specie. “Mr. Vainberg,” he said, “good morning. How are you? Well rested? That’s very nice. Now, allow me to play the fool’s fool and tell you about our latest brilliant idea. Do you know who the Mountain Jews are? No? You don’t? What a delightful man you are! How easy it must be not to know or care about your own people. Well, briefly, the Mountain Jews have lived among us probably since the time of the Babylonian exile. In the mountains, you see. Their mother has always been our mother, and they have always had water from our well to drink. And believe me, they drank and drank. They drank until our wells ran dry.”

“Parka!” Mr. Nanabragov cautioned.

“In 1943 the fascist troops were headed directly for Svanï City, hoping to take control of the oil and the strategic port. The Mountain Jews turned to the local Sevo and Svanï leaders, asking to be hid among them in case the Germans came, or at least to secure their passage across the Caspian. I have found evidence, anecdotal evidence from several village elders, that the Svanï were lukewarm to the idea of saving the Jews, while the Sevo were mildly enthusiastic. So there you have it. Let the truth be known.”

“But the Germans never reached Absurdsvanï,” I said.

“Unfortunately not,” Parka Mook said dryly.

“So who cares if the Sevo might have helped them. In truth, they didn’t.”

“Still, it’s a beautiful story,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “One minority willing to die for another. You should be shouting about it from a rooftop, Mr. Minister of Multicultural Affairs.”

Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and Leisure was shamelessly picking at my salad. I gave him such a look, he nearly stabbed himself with his own fork. I reached in with one of my two big squishies and palmed a wedge of ripe, bleeding tomato. “The Holocaust is a serious business,” I said. “It requires very expert branding or we’ll all look like a bunch of idiots.”

“Branding I don’t know about,” Nanabragov said. “But we can certainly build a statue to Sevo-Jewish friendship. Imagine a hundred-meter version of Misha and the dead democrat Sakha bent over a Torah scroll. And from the Torah scroll, an eternal flame comes shooting out.”

“Fine idea! Let’s build a Misha!” the gathered shouted.

“It’ll take half the granite in the Dumas Ravine just for his head,” some wise guy said.

I joined my fellow ministers in laughing politely at my unchecked gluttony. “But seriously,” I said, “if you want to look good with the Holocaust, you have to do something original. Or if not original, then at least educational. Like a museum. And it has to be of the latest fashion, so every time a child taps a computer screen with his finger, some poignant fact about Jew-Sevo friendship pops up. Tap, tap, tap, fact, fact, fact.”

“Can we build such a thing?” Mr. Nanabragov turned to the Minister of Finance.

The minister was nearly my size and likewise lived amid a tornado of hair and food particles. “Boys,” he grunted, wiping sweat off his forehead and flicking it jauntily at the chipped mahogany table before us, “let me tell you about the state of our treasury.” He proceeded to outline the rapidly decreasing state of a dozen offshore accounts, along with more informal financial institutions with names like “Big Sasha’s Stash” and “Boris’s Itty-Bitty Bank.”

“What about all that oil you have?” I asked. “What about Figa-6?”

The room fell silent. The Minister of Tourism and Leisure to my right let out a series of short, difficult breaths. “How about this, Misha,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Why don’t you ask the American Jewish community for some money?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to ask the American Jews for money so that I can please the American State Department by making an overture to Israel?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “What’s the American phrase? ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ Hopefully they’ll appreciate our initiative.”

I considered my knowledge of American Jews. They always seemed to feel alone and unloved when, in truth, most of the American populace just wanted to kiss them on their shiny noses, bake them a casserole, shoot them some one-liners over dinner, and possibly convert them so as to hasten the Second Coming. Would these Jews respond favorably to a love letter from a small oppressed people somewhere between Russia and Iran? And what form would such a love letter take?

“I guess I can write some grant proposals,” I said.

“We don’t know what those are, but anything you do must be blessed by God,” Mr. Nanabragov replied to general applause.

I took out my Hyatt pen and pad and wrote in moist excited letters:

MISHA’S TO-DO LIST

1) Get Internet installed in office.

2) Write grant proposals to build Holocaust Museum.

3) Encourage multiculturalism in everything I do.

“You see how hard Misha’s working,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “You see how organized he is. That’s because he has an American education, like my Nana and Bubi. We old Soviet black-asses, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

The men around me were yawning and stretching. The lunchtime hour was knocking, and there were mistresses to spread at the Hyatt and steaks to dispatch at the new Tuscan Steak & Bean Company. Cigars were lit, followed by soft coughing and sleepy belches. Leave these good men to their idle pursuits. I, on the other hand, would return to my office to work out their country’s future. Like the 3.94 student I once was at Accidental College, I would prove myself yet again.

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