Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan

“You also getting dick cut?”

“We’re redeeming the captive.”

“Who is captive?”

“You’re a captive of the Soviet Union. We are making a Jew out of you.” And with that, they helped me to several more oniony vodkas until the room fairly blared at me with its twirling diorama of top hats and flying sweat.

“To the mitzvah mobile!” the youngest shouted in unison, and soon I was enveloped in a dozen velvety coats, snug within the outer layers of my own race, while gently herded out into the Hasidic summer night, where even the yellow-faced moon wore side curls and crickets sang in the deep melodious language of our ancestors.

I was laid out sideways on a soft American van seat, several young men still plying me with vodkas that I dutifully drank, because for a Russian it is impolite to refuse. “Are we driving back to the hotel, mister?” I said as the van careened madly through the populated streets.

“A humus tov, a mazel tov, ” my companions sang to me.

“You want to redeem the captive!” I struggled in English, through my tears. “Look at me! I am captive! By you!”

“So now you will be redeemed!” the logic followed, a cup of vodka tipped into my face.

Eventually I was deposited into the overlit waiting room of a poor municipal hospital where Spanish babies cried for milk while my companions pressed themselves against an ad hoc wailing wall, their pale faces red with prayer. “Your father will be so proud,” someone whispered into my ear. “Look what a brave man you are!”

“Eighteen is too old for cutting the dick,” I whispered back. “Everybody knows this.”

“Abraham was ninety-nine when he performed the bris with his own hands!”

“But he was biblical hero.”

“And so are you! From now on, your Hebrew name will be Moshe, which means Moses.”

“I am called Misha. That is the Russian name my beautiful mother call me.”

“But you are like Moses, because you’re helping lead the Soviet Jews out of Egypt.” I could almost smell the plastic of the cup pressed to my lips. I drank like the teenage alcoholic I had already become. A piece of rye bread was presented to me, but I spat on it. Then I was on top of a rolling bed wearing a kind of backward dress; then the rolling bed stopped; green smocks billowed all around me; my pants were being roughly lowered by a pair of cold hands. “Papa, make them stop!” I cried in Russian.

A mask was clasped over my face. “Count backward, Moses,” an American voice told me.

“Nyet!” I tried to say, but of course no one could hear me. The world broke in pieces and failed to reassemble. When I woke up, the men in black hats were praying over me, and I could feel nothing below the carefully tucked folds of flesh that formed my waistline. I raised my head. I was dressed in a green hospital gown, a round hole cut in its lower region, and there, between the soft pillows of my thighs, a crushed purple bug lay motionless, its chitinous shell oozing fluids, the skin-rendering pain of its demise held at bay by anesthesia.

For some reason, my co-religionists thought that my vomiting was a sign of recovery, and they wiped my chin and laughed and said mazel tov and tsimmus tov and hey, hey, Yisroel.

The infection set in that night.

Who did it? Who murdered the 1,238th-richest man in Russia? Whose hands are stained with a martyr’s blood? I’ll tell you who: Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora. How do we know? Because the entire episode was videotaped by Andi Schmid, a nineteen-year-old tourist from Stuttgart, Germany.

On the night in question, Herr Schmid happened to be steaming alongside St. Petersburg’s Palace Bridge on a pleasure boat, enjoying the synthetic drug MDMA and tinny house music from the boat’s speakers while videotaping a Russian seagull as it attacked an English teenager, a big-eared kipper of a boy, and his pale, lovely mama.

“I have never seen such an angry seagull before,” Herr Schmid told me and the police inspectors the next day, resplendent before us in his fuzzy steel-wool pants and PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt, his boxy Selima Optique glasses casting a penumbra of intelligence around his dull young eyes. “It just kept biting the poor kid,” Schmid complained. “In Germany the birds are much friendlier.”

On Schmid’s tape, we see the snow-white seagull snapping its bloody beak as it ascends for another attack on the British family, the Britishers pleading to the gull for mercy, the ship’s crew pointing and laughing at the foreigners…Now we see the colossal stone piers of the Palace Bridge, followed by its cast-iron lampposts. (Once, in the eighties, during that nice Gorbachev perestroika time, Papa and I went fishing off the Palace Bridge. We caught a perch that looked just like Papa. In five years, when my eyes completely glaze over with Russian life, I will resemble it, too.)

Next Schmid pans 360 degrees to reveal St. Petersburg on a warm summer night, the sky lit up a false cerulean, the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress bathed in gold floodlights, the Winter Palace moored on its embankment like a ship gently undulating in the perpetual twilight, the darkened hulk of St. Isaac’s dome officiating over the proceedings…Ah! What did Mandelstam write? “Leninsburg! I don’t want to die yet!”

And now, as the seagull embarks upon its predatory swoop, making some sort of Slavic bird squawk, we see a Mercedes 300 M-Class jeep—the one that looks like a futuristic, rounded version of the Soviet militia jeeps that used to haul Papa away to the drunk tank—cross the bridge, followed by one of those antic, armor-plated Volga sedans that remind me, for some reason, of the American armadillo. If you look closer, you can almost see Papa’s yellow pumpkin head inside the Volga, a squiggle of gray hair forming a childish signature above his otherwise bald pate…Oh, my papa, my dead, murdered papochka, my mentor, my keeper, my boyhood friend. Remember, Papa, how we used to trap the neighbor’s anti-Semitic dog in a milk crate and take turns peeing on it? If only I could believe that you’re in a better place now, that “other world” you kept rambling about whenever you woke up at the kitchen table, your elbows swimming in herring juice, but clearly nothing of us survives after death, there’s no other world except for New York, and the Americans won’t give me a visa, Papa. I’m stuck in this horrible country because you killed a businessman from Oklahoma, and all I can do is remember how you once were; to commemorate the life of a near-saint, this is the burden of your only child.

All right, back to the videotape. Here comes the second Mercedes jeep, the last vehicle in Papa’s convoy, rumbling over the Palace Bridge, and now we see a motorcycle with two riders passing the jeep, the doughy form of syphilitic Zhora (may he die from his syphilis just like Lenin!) visible behind Oleg the Moose’s distinctive fifties pompadour…The motorcycle zooms by the Volga, and the land mine, or at least a dark cylinder that must be a land mine—I mean, has anyone actually seen a land mine? Ours is not the kind of family that gets sent to fight in Chechnya with the blue-eyed kids—the land mine is thrown onto the Volga’s roof, five more frames, and then a flash of electric lightning draws the seagull’s attention away from the cowering English folk, and the roof of the Volga is lifted off (along with, we later learn, Papa’s head), followed by a plume of cheap smoke… Ba-ba-boom.