I spent the next two weeks and US$42,500 at the Intourist Hotel. Each day the price of my so-called deluxe suite would go up by 50 percent (my last night alone added up to US$14,000), while two additional refugees would be pressed into my damp bicameral digs. What could one do? Outside the hotel, the situation—as it was still called—grew more absurd by the hour; gunshots and mortar rounds rhymed with my snoring at night and cleaved the daytime into shooting and nonshooting hours, the latter coinciding roughly with dinner and lunch. The only reason the Intourist Hotel remained unscathed (and insanely expensive) was the fact that nearly everyone shooting had a relative cowering between its thick concrete walls.
The first to show up were Larry Zartarian and his mother. The old lady in charge of our floor—black socks up to the calf, followed by a bouquet of varicose veins—positioned the Mother and Child in the living room. When the Zartarians’ historical enemy, a stray Turkish oil executive with vast sums of cash, arrived, they were slotted directly beneath my bed. At night I could hear the mother cursing her progeny in some difficult language, while Larry tearfully rocked himself to sleep, his big head sending shock waves through the mattress springs.
Timofey had the second bed in the room, a wet moldy pillow and a sheet made of wrinkled cardboard, but was soon forced to share it with Monsieur Lefèvre, the Belgian diplomat who had granted me my European passport, and Misha, his McDonald’s concubine. The two tried to have sex next to Timofey, but my moralistic manservant punched them both in the face and they bled silently onto the bedspread. Lefèvre, upon seeing my bulk spilling over the tiny Soviet bed so that each leg and arm hung suspended like a ham at a Castilian tapas bar, started laughing with every atom of his marinated red face. But the joke was on him several days later, when he committed suicide in our bathroom.
Meanwhile, well-connected Absurdis who lacked secure housing in the capital were settling the living room and threatening to burst into our private chambers as well. Uncultured and rich, dressed like flamingos on parade, they reminded me of the first Absurdis I had seen pushing their way onto the Austrian Airlines jet what seemed like a lifetime ago. Among them, they had several swaddled, dark-lipped children who teethed day and night but remained oddly quiet and mesmerized by the RPGs puncturing holes in nearby buildings with the roar of perfectly calibrated thunder. Three times a day, the ugly hotel whore—dressed every bit as piquantly as the other female occupants of our suite—made her rounds. In deference to the children, a towel was draped between two glass-covered bureaus (each containing a corroded silver bowl with the insignia of the 1980 Moscow Olympics), so that whoever was interested could squat with the whore in measured privacy. The lovemaking sounds, however, were not easy on the ears, as if the principals were making a baby out of clay. “This is how we used to live in our communal apartment when Brezhnev was still in charge,” Timofey noted nostalgically.
The whore came and went, but I was not horny. Or hungry. Or anything. From the first day—when the hot-water tap came off in my hand, releasing, instead of water, a spray of frightened baby roaches—I had been completely disinvested in my own existence. Everything was happening to others: to Timofey, to the whore, to the egofucked Larry Zartarian and his many-moled mama. “Others suffer, but does Vainberg suffer?” I asked Malik, the mysterious green spider who lived in the corner of my bedroom and whose eight silky legs terrorized Mrs. Zartarian throughout the night. The arthropod had little to say.
As for sustenance, one could still eat well in Svanï City, despite the complete collapse of everything. A shy little Moslem boy brought in sesame seeds and hunks of black bread and threatened us with a blade if we didn’t pay. Every morning Timofey crawled out of our room, ran through the gunfire, and brought back yellowish eggs just released from some contraband chicken, and creamy Russian ice-cream bars with the White Nights logo, which made me wistful for my pastel-hued St. Leninsburg, the city I had fled only two months ago, hoping never to return.
But I couldn’t bring myself to eat. To do so would have required the eventual use of the toilet, a greenish husk rising out of the cracked bathroom floor, the seat of which was home to enterprising mosslike bacteria that were trying to survive the attack of hungry roaches and the daily slap of a hundred round Absurdi bottoms. Like the toilet bacteria, I, too, had my natural enemies. My former Volvo drivers, Tafa and Rafa, had discovered my presence at the Intourist, and one bloody Sunday, when all my roommates had gone to forage for food, they woke me up to a volley of kicks aimed at my stomach and face. “Vy or ty?” the teenagers were shouting. “Polite or familiar? Who’s uncultured now, bitch?”
I grunted, more from being roused out of a rare slumber than from any actual pain. My stomach had been receding of late but could still take an assault by a pair of skinny brown feet in cheap flip-flops. “Polite,” I lowed. “You should always use the polite form of address with your betters.”
Predictably, the next kick worked its way right into my mouth, which quickly filled with the taste of metal and nutrients. “Baargh,” I spat. “Not the mouth! Oh, you ruffians.”
I would have come to a bad end if Timofey hadn’t shown up with a Daewoo ink-jet printer he had stolen somewhere. Centimeter for centimeter, the device was a perfect match for Tafa’s (or Rafa’s) head, which cracked (informally, I should say) beneath it. After his companion fled, Timofey sat down to nurse my poor mouth.
While he ministered to me, I stroked my manservant’s balding head, the kindest thing I had ever done for him. “You stiw wike me, don’t you?” I said to Timofey through a slightly remodeled row of front teeth.
“When my master is down, I only love him more,” Timofey said, dabbing and bandaging.
“What a kind Wussian soul you have,” I said. I thought of Faik, the Nanabragovs’ Moslem manservant. “These Southern types are weally woothless,” I said. “You awen’t woothless at all, huh, Tima?”
“I try to live like it says in the Bible,” my manservant told me. “Other than that, I don’t really know.”
“Intwesting,” I said. I realized I knew next to nothing about my manservant, despite two years of having him clothe and feed me every day. (He had been a homecoming present from Beloved Papa.) What was wrong with me? Suddenly I was overcome by a surge of universal man-love. “Why don’t you tell me ewything about yo wife fwom the beginning,” I said. “Fwom when you wuh just a wittle wad.”
Timofey reddened. “There’s nothing to tell, really,” he said. His Polish polyester sport jacket was missing half a lapel and had been stained by a bowl of tomato soup. I resolved to buy him a brilliant suit at the earliest possible date.
“Oh, pwease,” I said. “I’m cuwious.”
“What’s to say?” Timofey said. “I was born in Bryansk Province, village of Zakabyakino, in 1943. My father, Matvei Petrovich, died in a tank battle with the fascists under Kursk in the same year. In 1945 my mother, Aleluya Sergeyevna, contracted tuberculosis and soon met her end. I was moved to my aunt Anya’s house. She was nice to me, but she died of an untreatable case of shingles in 1949, and my uncle Seryozha beat me until 1954. Then he died from drink, and I was sent to an orphanage in the city of Bryansk, province of Bryansk. I was beaten there, too. In 1960 I sinned terribly and murdered a man with my bare hands after drinking. I was sent to a labor camp in the Solovki Islands from 1960 to 1972. There a warden was kind to me and found me a job in a town in Karelia in the cafeteria of the executive committee of the local Communist Party. My life was happy until 1991. I had my son, Slava, and we played soccer and gorodki. I continued to drink and was hospitalized. After communism, I lost my job but discovered God Almighty. I stopped drinking. In 1992 the party cafeteria became an expensive gym, but I had a spare key and slept beneath the basement in a warm ditch. Your father found me in 1997. He told me he was happy to see such a sober Russian face. In 1998 he took me home with him. And so this is my story.”
Timofey had clearly become tired after giving the longest speech of his life. I, too, felt woozy from the mouth pain and from the sharp pangs of incredulous love. He leaned his head on the pillow, while I leaned mine against the hard, bitter-smelling half-lapel of his Polish sport jacket, and in this way we went to sleep.