Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan

“So you’re a merchant people,” I said, my words sour with distaste.

We were coming up to the village square, at which point I squinted in disbelief. A sunlit replica of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem took up an entire side of the square, green moss authentically growing from between the cracks in the equally genuine brickwork, a set of Israeli date palms arrayed in front.

“And what the hell are those?” Nana said. She was pointing at two statues made out of some kind of fiberglass, one a strange mishmash of three men dancing over what looked like a broken airplane and the other of a man with a torch holding on to his belly, as if stricken with gas.

“That’s Sakha the Democrat holding the torch of freedom after being shot at the Hyatt,” Yitzhak explained. “And the other one is Georgi Kanuk ascending to heaven after his plane was shot down, with his son Debil and Alexandre Dumas holding on to his legs, trying to keep him here on earth. See, if any renegade Sevo or Svanï gangs attack us, we’re good either way.”

“And here comes the welcoming committee,” Avram said. We were surrounded by a bunch of playful children. A little kid in a too-large yarmulke and an acid-washed T-shirt that said NAUGHTY 4EVER ran up to the car and started knocking on my door.

“Vainberg! Vainberg! Vainberg!” he shouted.

“Help me out of the car, young man,” I said. “There’s a dollar in it for you.” As the child’s prepubescent compatriots made their dervish circles around me while shouting my family name, I ambulated toward a gaggle of men smoking fiercely in the shadow of the Wailing Wall. Upon inspection, half of them were no more than teenagers, their heads draped in silken white yarmulkes, their uncombed black hair reaching down to their eyes, their gangly bodies slack from village life. “Is that your girlfriend?” one of them asked, pointing to Nana, bouncing ambivalently toward us. “Is she Jewish?”

“What, are you crazy?” I cried. “That’s Nana Nanabragovna!”

“We can get you a nice local girl,” another recommended. “A Mountain Jew. Pretty like Queen Esther, sexy like Madonna. After you marry her, she’ll do all kinds of things. Half of them on her knees.”

“Dirty little kids.” I sniffed. “What do I care for religion? All women are equally good on their knees.”

“Suit yourself,” the teens replied, parting deferentially before an old man who was leaning against Avram, his dark face drowning in the white fuzz of a beard gone awry; one of his eyes was forever closed to the world, the other blinking a bit too insistently, his mouth producing squirts of slobber and happiness with the speed of an American soda fountain. “Vaaaainberg,” he crooned.

“This is our rabbi,” Avram said. “He wants to tell you something.”

The rabbi gently spat at me for a few seconds in some incomprehensible local patter. “Speak in Russian, grandfather,” Avram said. “He doesn’t know our tongue.”

“Whooo,” the rabbi said, confused. He rubbed the yellowing sponge that covered his brain and made an effort at the Russian language. “Your fardur woooze a great persons,” he said. “A great persons. He help us get built this wall. Looka how big.”

“My father helped build this wall?”

“Give us moneys for brick. Buy palm from Askhelon. No problem. He hate Arabs. So we make plaque.”

One of the smoking men by the wall moved aside and tapped an index finger at a handsome brown sign upon which I could immediately discern the eagle swoop of my father’s strong nose, the unhappy hieroglyphics that the artist had shaped into his left eye, the bramble of crosshatching that outlined the joy and sarcasm of his thick lower lip. TO BORIS ISAAKOVICH VAINBERG, the plaque read. KING OF ST. PETERSBURG, DEFENDER OF ISRAEL, FRIEND TO THE MOUNTAIN JEWS. And below that, a quote from my father, in English: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

The smoker extended his hand. I noticed his fingers were covered with faded blue-green tattoos, testifying to many lengthy Soviet prison terms. “I’m Moshe,” he said. “I spent many years with your fardur in the Big House. To us Jews inside, he was like our fardur, too. He was always love you, Misha. He talk only about you. He was your first lover. And nobody will love you like that never again.”

I sighed. I was feeling wobbly and teary and overcome. To find my father’s face looking down at me in this antediluvian outpost of Hebraity… Look, Papa. Look how much weight I’ve shed in the last few weeks! Look how much we resemble each other now in profile. There’s nothing of my mommy left in me anymore. I’m all you now, Papa. I wanted to trace the outline of his face with my finger but was intercepted by several of the middle-aged Jews, who also wanted to shake my hands and tell me in their broken Russian what gay, thoughtful times they shared with my Beloved Papa, both inside and outside the Big House, and how, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, they worked together to make “bigger and bigger moneys day after day.”

We heard a strange teakettle sound from the rabbi, the rumble of phlegm trying to pass through a nose bent by age. “He’s crying,” Avram explained. “He’s crying because he’s honored to see such an important Jew here in his village. There, grandfather. It’s all right now. Soon everything will pass. Don’t cry.”

“The rabbi’s getting a little lost in the head,” one of my father’s friends explained to me. “We sent for a new one from Canada. Twenty-eight years old. Fresh as a radish.”

“Vaaaainberg,” the rabbi sang once more, touching my face with his hand, a clump of earth and garlic.

“This poor man lived through Stalin and Hitler,” Avram said of the rabbi. “The Sevo had him sent to a labor camp in Kamchatka when he was twenty. Seven of his eight sons were shot.”

“I thought the Sevo tried to save the Jews,” I said. “Parka Mook told me—”

“Are you going to listen to that fascist?” Avram said. “After the war, the Sevo tried to have all of our men sent to the gulags so they could take over our villages. We had the plumpest cows, and our women are freckled and have very thick thighs.”

Nana had clasped her hands around the rabbi’s crinkly, fragrant body and was happily interrogating the old man in Russian: “Is it true, sir, that the Mountain Jews are the descendants of the original Babylonian exile?”

“We are-a?”

“Well, that’s one theory. Don’t you keep a written record, Rabbi?”

“A what-a?”

“Aren’t you Jews supposed to be the People of the Book?”

“A who-a?”

“Don’t bother the old man,” Avram said. “We Mountain Jews, we’re not known for our learning. Originally we raised livestock, and now we trade goods in bulk.”

The rabbi resumed sniffling, the criminals smoked down their Newport Lights, the teenagers gossiped about the world’s sexiest Jewesses. I looked at my father’s profile. I looked at his former prisonmates ( He was your first lover ), at the kind, flummoxed old man clinging to my elbow, at the sacred brick wall in front of us, and at the last quote my Beloved Papa had left for the Mountain Jews. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Had my papa known that he was plagiarizing Malcolm X? Papa’s racism was a thing to behold, impenetrable, subsuming, all-encompassing, an epic poem. Could he have independently reached the same conclusion as a black leader of the Nation of Islam? I thought of what my father had told me when I returned to St. Leninsburg. “You have to lie, cheat, and steal just to make it in this world, Misha,” he had said. “And until you learn that for a fact, until you forget everything they taught you at that Accidental College of yours, I’m going to have to keep working as hard as I can.” I thought of my Rouenna, piling all her hopes upon my warm fat body, and then, after I had been imprisoned in Russia, trying to make a life with Jerry Shteynfarb. I thought of the Mountain Jews and their side-by-side statues of Georgi Kanuk and Sakha the Democrat, the murderer and the murdered. I thought of all that I had seen and done in my last two months in Absurdistan.