“Turning into a Jew is not a good idea,” I told her, my grave tone likening it to turning into a dung beetle. “Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. It’s a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check. It’s a losing proposition for everyone involved, the Jew, his friend, even his enemy in the end.”
Lyuba was not convinced. “You and your father are the only good people in my life,” she said. “And I want to be tied to both of you by something substantial. Think how great it would be if we could pray to the same God”—she turned her matted blond head into her armpit—“and if we could share a life together.”
The second part of that sentence I decided to put aside for the moment, because all the lies and evasions in the world were not going to erase her plaintive, impossible plea from my waxy ears. So I wanted to disabuse her of the first part, at least. “Lyuba,” I said in my most even (and most detestable) voice, “you must understand that there is no God.”
Lyuba turned her pink face to me and smiled gratuitously, favoring me with one of her laminated thirty-one-tooth salutes (a prominent incisor had to be retired last summer after she misjudged the strength of a walnut).
“Of course there is a God,” she said.
“No, there is not,” I said. “In fact, the part of our soul we reserve for God is a kind of negative space where our worst sentiments reside, our jealousy, our ire, our justification for violence and spite. If you are indeed interested in Judaism, Lyuba, you should carefully read the Old Testament. You should pay particular attention to the character of the Hebrew God and His utter contempt for all things democratic and multicultural. I think the Old Testament makes my point rather forcefully, page by page.”
Lyuba laughed at my little tirade. “I think you believe in God in your own way,” she said. Then she added, “You’re a funny man.”
Ah, the impudence of youth! The easy manner of their speech! Who was she, this Lyuba, this girl my father had rescued from some Astrakhan collective farm a few years ago, all covered in hog shit and bruises? This sullen teenager he had adopted like the daughter he wished he had fathered instead of me—skinny, loyal, and without a tantalizing purple khui he could swipe at. I had always thought of Lyuba as a contemporary version of Fenechka in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the peasant housekeeper, obtuse and limited, who falls into the arms of the kindly minor noble Kirsanov, to be played in the movie version by Beloved Papa. My capacity for misunderstanding the range of people is truly astonishing. Lyuba was no Fenechka. She was more like a modern-day Anna Karenina or that silly brat Natasha in War and the Other Thing.
“Hey,” she said. “It’s my favorite part of the song. When Humungous G…how do you say it? When he busts.”
“When Humungous G busts some rhymes,” I said.
She stood up on the bed, and with her hands making jabbing urban motions, her hips thrusting like those of a fertile American university student, Lyuba sang:
“That’s very pretty,” I said. “Your English is improving.”
“And another great thing about Judaism,” she said, “is how old it is. Boris told me that by the Jew calendar, we’re in the year 5760!”
“It just doesn’t stop, does it?” I said. “But what is the past, Lyuba? The past is murky and distant, while the future we can only guess at. The present! Now, that’s something to believe in. If you want to know what I worship, Lyuba, it is the sanctity of the present moment.”
Words have consequences. For at this point Lyuba jumped up from the bed, unhooked her Texas-style belt, and, in an Olympic moment, catapulted the hem of her long denim dress over her knees, her brown wiry pizda, her taut belly, the long pale oval of her face—until, momentarily, she stood there naked before me.
She was staring furtively into some incidental part of me, my abdomen, say, her hands by her sides. After a while, she lowered her gaze still farther, until it fell onto her own breasts, two little white baggies that lay peaceably atop her tanned ribs.
She picked up one breast, squeezed it, and then did likewise with the other.
“Well, that’s how it is,” she told me with a shrug. “I’m very hot for you inside.”
I lay there, half a meter away from this young Russian woman, trying to remember who I was, exactly, and whether sympathy could masquerade for arousal or the other way around. There was reason for both. Lyuba had a lean, athletic body (especially for someone who did nothing all day), interrupted only by a swatch of shiny, hardened skin running along one hip and dipping toward her genitals, where a relative had set fire to her when she was twelve. Beloved Papa had always claimed that this was the part he kissed most gently, but it was hard to tease this simple image—Papa’s fish lips puckered atop Lyuba’s disfigurement, his everyday rage tempered by compassion—out of my already put-upon imagination.
Events were taking place that made me feel somehow peripheral. Lyuba was lying down on the bed once more, her legs hanging in the air, her pizda a cozy brown-fur pelt between them. “I have to prepare myself,” she said. She took out a plastic tube and, with a most unpleasant sound, squirted something onto her fingers. She then inserted the fingers inside herself. “This makes it easier for me,” she explained.
It was impolite to just sit there and stare. I began to take off my pants so that I could present my purple half-khui, my abused iguana, to Lyuba. It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. And so I was compelled to act like a man, though in reality I had long ago floated right through the ceiling, past the ocher jumble of Leninsburg roofs, over and around the golden prick of the Admiralty, and onto the dark blue expanse of the Gulf of Finland, where I used to believe my dead mother’s essence hovered about in a happy, cultured limbo above the topiary of one of the czars’ summer palaces (though, as I’ve said before, nothing of our personality survives after death).
Meanwhile, in a surprise move, my mercurial genital had already engorged itself and was positioned for love, proof that one doesn’t actually have to be present to consummate the sex act. It dawned upon me that Lyuba had set “Busting My Nut Tonight” on repeat play, and that Humungous G’s urban missive was helping me focus on the task at hand. Busting my nut when? Why, tonight, of course. I crawled on my knees along the orange comforter toward Lyuba, bringing the khui toward her.
“My khui,” I announced sadly.
“Yes, it’s your khuichik,” Lyuba said, tilting her head for a better view.
“It is possible to touch it now,” I whispered, letting Lyuba tug at my much-maligned khui-knob with a cold hand. I turned it sideways so that she could see the long scar running along its underbelly, the clumps of skin attached at improvised angles like the fragmented bits of a car bumper following a head-on collision.
“Ai, what happened?” Lyuba asked.
I took a deep breath and blurted out my story in one long sentence, digressing only to explain the words “mitzvah mobile.”