Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan

The older Scots were trying to teach the Texans the chorus to one of their bagpipe songs, soused with melancholy cheer and the impossibility of ever really saying farewell. Potato chips flew out of mouths and beer steins clanked together as the Tatar barman tried to keep the beat with a pair of coasters.

The sun had set entirely, and the AmEx men were shining their flashlights at a yellow corpse stumbling alongside the tracks, its hands waving madly for a moment’s notice. We pulled down the shades before the gunshots began.

I was rightfully hungover the next day, whiskey being one of my more problematic tipples. Something was blocking the busy neural pathway where my neck had set up a Customs post with my head. “Oh, dear,” I moaned, kissing Rouenna’s face, or, as it turned out, the doughy pillow where she had left her scents. Did I say Rouenna? I meant Nana, of course. And then I realized I had been dreaming of Rouenna all night long, about the time she and I, along with her little cousin Mercedes, had taken a tour of Hunter College. As we passed through the library, the lively ten-year-old Mercedes had said, “Ai, mami, look at all them fucken books!” And Rouenna, who had misguidedly dressed herself in a business suit for the informal college tour, very solemnly replied, “Why you cursin’ in an educated place, Mercedes?”

Was it the word “educated” that was scraping away at my heart? The respect for book learning from a woman who, up till that point, had thought Dickens was a porn star? Was it the cheap business suit that could barely contain Ro’s figure? Why did I miss her so much all of a sudden, my traitorous Bronx girl with the tough hands and the bleeding gums?

“Breakfast is here, bobo, ” Nana said. “Get it while it’s hot.” The train crew had set up a small table for us upon which a heap of croissants and muffins exuded the nauseating smells of butter and cranberries. I propelled myself to the table, nearly knocking over a silver tray bearing a notecard with the AmEx logo. A train happily chugged past an indifferent sun; below, a message written in a woman’s dainty, practiced hand:

Good morning, respected passenger!

Today is Monday, September 10, 2001

We are passing through northern Absurdsvanï, where today’s temperature will be a maximum of 28 degrees Celsius, with sunny conditions prevailing along the Staraushanski Valley and into the Griboedov mountain range.

Lunch in the bar car will be a caviar sampler with blini and just-picked country leeks followed by elderberry-cured roast beef (a northern Absurdi specialty) with fingerling potatoes and cavalo nero.

We will be arriving at the Red Bridge border checkpoint at 15:00 o’clock. Please have your passports ready.

My name is Oksana Petrovna, I am proud to work on this train, and I am here only just for you!

“Such a nice girl, this Oksana,” I said to Nana. “She’s even more professional than that poor Larry Zartarian.” I winced at the thought of the Hyatt manager and his mother, still trapped beneath my bed at the Intourist Hotel.

“She’s a slut,” Nana corrected me, pouring three creams into my coffee, which is how I took it.

I raised the shades. What a difference a night made! The oily sea-desert had been replaced by a near-alpine vista. Fields of yellow late-summer grass (or was it really hay in disguise?) rolled down the hills. Rills fed brooks, which nurtured distant lakes, which in turn drank from the whitecapped mountains straddling the horizon. A bird that might have been an eagle or a pigeon (my eyesight is not so strong) circled above the distant skyline of these promontories. And something was mercifully absent from this unfurling of nature’s green, blue, and white tricolor, something beaten and raw, scorched and unkempt, vulgar and blackened with rot. “Where are the people?” I asked Nana. “Why don’t they come eat all these eagles and hay instead of dying in the desert?”

“The people have been moving off the mountain for decades,” Nana said. “They follow the oil.”

“But there’s no oil left,” I said. “Right, Nana? The whole war was cooked up by your papa and Golly Burton because they ran out of oil. Isn’t that true?”

Nana shrugged. “What do I know?” she said. “I’m just a senior at NYU. You gotta try this excellent honey! It’s soooo good. And not too sweet. Taste the difference?”

I tasted it, all right. “That is really great,” I said. “Where does it come from?” We started turning over the honeypot, trying to find a label. “Ah, it’s from Turkey!”

As I was finishing up the croissants, the train came to a halt. “Yum, yum, yum,” I said, glancing out the window. Some vendors had gathered beneath my window, and the AmEx soldiers were jumping off the roof to bargain with them. The country folk had set up a wooden bench piled with cartons of Newport Lights, spinach leaves, and fresh cherries. “The lunch menu didn’t say anything about dessert,” I said to Nana. “Maybe I should buy some cherries.”

The sound of a local tongue brushed up against my window with gravelly insistence. Already voices were being raised in anger even as U.S. dollars changed hands along with cigarettes and spinach. It was then that I noticed a strange phenomenon—the vendors had little blue and white circles pinned to their dark heads. Yarmulkes? “Nana,” I said, “are these the Mountain—”

The door to our cabin slammed open. A presence almost as large as my own took up the space between Nana and me, immediately overturning our breakfast table. “Vainberg!” the creature barked. “Oh, thank God I’ve found you! You have to get off the train now! I’m a friend of your late father’s. Avram.”

I backed off into a corner and raised my hands in protest. Avram? My father? Not again! “What’s this about?” I said weakly.

The man was of late middle age, dressed in a leather cap, along with designer shirt and pants that his wife had nicely matched to his proportions. He had a pitiful and worried mien, yet the rest of his appearance was strong, sweaty, and powerful. He was clearly a Jew. And such a Jew! A prehistoric Jew, as I’ve said before, a Haimosaurus rex with the flabby little hands, the big roaring mouth, the broad muscular legs and sensual hindquarters. So this is how we all began, I thought to myself. “Mr. Vainberg,” the Jewish dinosaur was saying, “they will kill you at the border. They will take Miss Nana back to her father. We have no time. You must get off the train without delay.”

“Oh, hell,” Nana said. “My father must have found out I left with you. He probably ordered the border guards to kill you in revenge.”

“Not probably. Exactly so!” the intruder cried. “I’m a Mountain Jew, Mr. Vainberg. There was a Mossad man, a Dror or a Jimmy, who came through here three days ago, and he warned us that you were coming and that there would be trouble if the Nanabragov girl was with you. We’ve set up a diversion outside with the American Express hooligans. We must get you off the train. These thugs will soon tire of bargaining for cherries, and then they’re liable to shoot us all.”

“The American Express train crew works for Nana’s father?” I said.

“Everyone works for Nana’s father in the end.”

The particulars were starting to settle around my broad shoulders. Goddammit. Another pogrom. There would be no caviar for lunch. There would be no hypoallergenic lovemaking. “Wait!” I said to Avram. “My manservant is bedding down in the service quarters. I must get him, or he’ll get the bullet at the border.”