“Typical Vainberg.”
“What are you doing here, Little Misha?” I was asked. “Did you come for the oil?”
“Why else would he come here? For the scenery?”
“To be honest—” I started to say.
“You know, Little Misha, your father once sold an eight-hundred-kilogram screw to KBR! He was some sort of subcontractor. He took them for five million! Ha ha.”
“What’s KBR?” I asked.
“Kellogg, Brown and Root,” my new companions said in unison, shocked that I wasn’t aware of such an institution. “The subsidiary of Halliburton.”
“Oh,” I said. But my curled upper lip betrayed my ignorance.
“The American oil-services company,” I was told. “Halliburton’s KBR unit runs half the country.”
“And my father cheated them?” I asked brightly.
“And how! He really Jewed them up!”
“My father was a great man,” I half said and half sighed. “But I’m not here for the oil.”
“Little Misha doesn’t want his father’s business.”
“He’s a sophisticate and a melancholic.”
“That’s right,” I said. “How do you guys know that?”
“We’re people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don’t know, we can sense.”
“Are you going to buy Belgian citizenship from Jean-Michel Lefèvre at the Belgian consulate? Are you going to be a Belgian, Little Misha?”
I looked around apprehensively, wishing Alyosha-Bob were around to guide me. “Maybe,” I said.
“Smart man. It’s no fun to have a Russian passport.”
“Did your father ever mention our little gang at the airport?” the older man inquired.
The others looked up at me expectantly, their stomachs leaning toward mine as if trying to make its acquaintance. My instinct is to try to make everyone around me happy, so I obliged them. “He said a bunch of fat crooks were robbing Westerners at Immigration,” I said.
“That’s us!” they cried. “Hurrah! Boris Vainberg remembered us!” The older man commanded his colleagues to give me back the money they had inveigled from me. Timofey and I immediately had our passport stamped with a dozen bizarre shapes and patterns, and we were ushered past the Immigration and Customs points and into the sunshine, where Alyosha-Bob awaited with his driver.
The Absurdi heat surrounded me as if I had entered a lit stove. It wiped out the remaining moisture in my mouth, invisible flames working their way into the crevice between my tits, searing away the sweat and damp. My sweat glands started pumping, but they could not keep up with the requirements of a 325-pound body. I was on fire. I almost passed out before Timofey had stuffed me into the waiting German sedan. Lord help me! I thought as the air-conditioning kicked in. Help me survive this Southern inferno.
From the start, I was supremely uninterested in the country around me, which looked pretty much the way I felt. Tired. The landscape consisted of gray-brown lakes surrounded by the skeletons of oil derricks and the modern spheres of refineries. There was barbed wire everywhere, along with signs promising death to anyone who veered off the highway. Trailer-trucks bearing the logo of Kellogg, Brown & Root swerved ahead of our car, the drivers honking at us maniacally. Even with the car windows up, Absurdistan smelled like the moist armpit of an orangutan.
I snoozed for a bit, the leather seats doing right by my hump. We passed a church of charming Eastern simplicity, square and compact, as if carved out of a single piece of stone. “I thought this was a Moslem country,” I said to Alyosha-Bob.
“Orthodox Christian,” Alyosha-Bob explained.
“No kidding. I always pictured them on their knees before Allah.”
“Two ethnic groups, the Sevo and the Svanï. Both Christian. That’s a Svanï church right there.”
“How can you tell, Professor?”
“You know what a standard Orthodox cross looks like.” He drew a cross in the air: 
. “Well, that’s the Svanï cross. But the Sevo cross has the footrest reversed. Like this.” He drew a different cross in the air: 
.
“That’s pretty stupid,” I said.
“You’re pretty stupid,” Alyosha-Bob said. We horsed around for a bit, Alyosha-Bob painfully pinning one of my thigh flaps between his two sharp elbows. “The master suffers from thigh pains,” Timofey cautioned my friend as he gently pulled him off me.
“The master suffers from a lot of things,” Alyosha-Bob said.
I looked out the window, taking note of a billboard advertising a housing development called STONEPAY. An Aston Martin idled in the circular driveway of a mortar-and-glass insta-mansion. A Canadian flag flew from the mansion’s portico to denote stability.
This was followed by a billboard featuring three near-naked brown women dripping with gold and filled with silicone leaning over the crotch of a black man in prison stripes. 718 PERFUMERY: THE ODOUR OF THE BRONX IN SVANÏ CITY.
I sighed loudly and looked away, snuggling my head into the crux of my arm.
“What now?” Alyosha-Bob asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“Is this about the 718 Perfumery?” Alyosha-Bob said. “You’re still thinking about Rouenna and Jerry Shteynfarb, aren’t you?”
We sat in the car quietly, watching the iridescent landscape bubble and stew before us. Feeling my pain, Timofey sang a song he had made up to celebrate my new nationality. Here’s the only stanza I remember:
Svanï City clung wearily to a small mountain range. We took an ascending road away from the gray curve of the Caspian Sea until we reached something called the Boulevard of National Unity. We found ourselves, in a manner of speaking, on the primary thoroughfare of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., where I had once misspent a couple of weeks in my youth. We passed shops of unmistakable wealth, if somewhat curious provenance—an outlet that sold the nightmare products of the American conglomerate Disney, an espresso emporium named Caspian Joe’s (a bright green rip-off of a famous American chain), a side-by-side presentation of the popular American stores the Gap and the Banana Republic, the above-mentioned 718 Perfumery, rife with the odors of the Bronx, and an Irish theme pub named Molly Malloy’s crouching drunkenly behind imported ivy and a giant shamrock.
After Molly’s, the boulevard turned into a canyon of recently built glass skyscrapers bearing the corporate logos of ExxonMobil, BP, ChevronTexaco, Kellogg, Brown & Root, Bechtel, and Daewoo Heavy Industries (Timofey grunted happily at the makers of his beloved steam iron), and finally the identical Radisson and Hyatt skyscrapers staring each other down from the opposite ends of a windswept plaza.
The Hyatt lobby was an endless skylit atrium where multinational men buzzed from one corner to another with the hungry, last-ditch exasperation of late-summer flies. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be little corners of ad hoc commerce, plastic tables and chairs clumped together under signs with strange legends such as HAIL, HAIL BRITANNIA—THE PUB. One of these hives was a golden-lit affair called RECEPTION. There a smiling boy of seemingly Scandinavian origin spoke to us in smooth business-school English. “Welcome to the Park Hyatt Svanï City,” he said, beaming. “My name is Aburkharkhar. How can I help you gentlemen today?”
Alyosha-Bob ordered a penthouse suite for the two of us and a little shed behind the pool for Timofey. A glassed-in elevator hoisted us forty stories through the sunny atrium, so the next thing I knew, I was looking at a happy Western parody of a modern home, with marble countertop on everything from the desks to the nightstand to the bathroom sink to the coffee table. For a second I thought I had actually arrived in Europe, so I muttered the word “Belgium,” fell to my knees, doubled over, enjoyed immensely the feeling of plush carpeting enveloping my breasts and cradling my stomach, and bade the waking world goodbye.