I gasped at the rectangular chimneys crowned with round water tankers (lowercase i’s); at the tall housing projects forming stout consonants (uppercase L’s and T’s); at the strange Tudor-style row houses that must have wandered in from some quaint English suburb; at the faraway Gothic tower denoting several lifetimes of failed public education; at the sharp, poignant smell of cherry bubble gum and cheap shampoo; at the old man in sunglasses and earphones who boarded at Freeman Street and who sang (mostly) for his own pleasure “Ain’t no use / Cain’t help myself”; at the Moslem girls in fluorescent yellow skirts and clashing gray head scarves, huddled together for safety near the conductor’s booth; at the lives of thousands whose flats lay eye level with the elevated train like some updated Edward Hopper painting; at the budding Latina social worker who cheerlessly highlighted a textbook called But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry; at the freshly painted azure fire escapes stirring to life the faded art deco brickwork beneath; at the urban catastrophe that is the Cross Bronx Expressway (and at the trash-strewn lots that bracket it); at the 350-pound woman (my long-lost fellow traveler) who got on at 174th Street, and especially at the tube top beneath the bulletproof shell of her down jacket with the rhinestone-studded words HOT ’N’ SEXXXY; at the inquisitive child (all eyebrows and stunted teeth) who couldn’t take his eyes off the book in my lap (William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes) and who asked me, “Whatchoo be readin’, papi?”
I fell out of my New York reverie as quickly as I had once fallen into my Beloved Papa’s hazardous “new fortunes.” Sakha was still speaking and gesturing at length. I made an attempt to follow him, to return to the country around me, to make a connection with the world I now inhabited and couldn’t wait to leave. I felt the need to say something intelligent, as one frequently does around intellectuals. “So do the Sevo live on the Sevo Terrace and the Svanï on their own terrace?” I asked.
“Originally, yes. The city’s geography kept us apart during the Three Hundred Year War of the Footrest Secession, and it hindered the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian conquerors. But in the last two centuries, people have generally lived anywhere they want. In Soviet times, half the population married outside their group. The distinctions between us are all but meaningless now.”
“Do you live on the Sevo Terrace?” I asked. I could barely pay attention to what I was saying. Part of me was still on the 5 train with the HOT ’N’ SEXXXY woman, but I willed that part to disappear.
“Oh, no.” Sakha laughed. “I am a very poor democrat. I can’t afford to live on the terraces. I live in Gorbigrad.” He gestured toward a distant mound of (what I thought was) an unpopulated orange rock jutting out into the bay, its coloring reminding me of the much-celebrated Grand Canyon in Arizona.
“You live alone on a barren rock?” I said.
“Look closer,” Sakha said. As I squinted and shielded my face against the sun, I made out a stacked anthill of thousands of yellowing Khrushchev-era apartment buildings, along with what looked like vast quantities of housing possibly made out of burlap and tarp. “The Gorbigrad favelas,” Sakha said. “Home to over half of the city’s population. Named after Gorbachev, the man the locals still blame for everything that happened.”
“Wait, so this is not a rich country?” I said. “What about all the oil?”
“The UN Human Development Index ranks us slightly below Bangladesh. In terms of infant mortality—”
“Oh, you poor people,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“Welcome to the Norway of the Caspian.”
“I wish I could open an outpost of Misha’s Children here, Mr. Sakha. I wish I had more money and time to spare.”
“You’re a very kind man,” Sakha said. “They really gave you and Josh Weiner a priceless education at that Accidental College.”
“ ‘Think one person can change the world?’” I said in English. “ ‘So do we.’”
“What’s that?”
“The motto of Misha’s Children.”
“I wish it were my motto as well,” Sakha said. He sighed and put his hands on his hips, an unacademic and frankly surprising gesture. “I can’t complain, Mr. Vainberg,” he said. “The Americans have really been helping us out. Xerox machines, free use of the fax lines after nine P.M., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary, five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan. We know what democracy looks like. We’ve read about it. We’ve been to Century 21. But how do we make it happen here? Because frankly, Mr. Vainberg, once the oil runs dry, who in the world is going to know we even exist?”
I considered telling him that no one knew they existed anyway but thought it might be tactless.
“Maybe you should move your daughters to Belgium,” I said. “I’ll pay for their plane tickets.”
“You are thoughtful and sincere,” Sakha said, and then, in all contravention of the rules of the manly Caucasus, he turned away and made a tearful gurgle with his sickle-shaped nose.
“You can’t choose where you’re born,” I said, and immediately felt like an asshole for saying it.
Sakha looked back from the derrick-studded horizon to my own sweltering frame. “Are you hot, Mr. Vainberg?” he said, laying his hand on one of my wet shoulders. “Let’s get back in the car. Monsieur Lefèvre is waiting for us by the McDonald’s dumpster.”
I nodded in agreement. But as we turned toward the car, Sakha looked back once more at the city beneath us. “Did I mention,” he said, “that the Sevo Vatican was originally covered by hexagonal tiles made of gold leaf that were given to us as a tribute by the khan of Bukhara and that the hexagonal motif represents the six great cities of Sevo antiquity?”
“I think you did mention that, yes,” I said.
“And I told you the names of all six cities?” Sakha said. “Maybe I forgot to mention them.”
“Yes, you told me, Mr. Sakha,” I said. “Your country has a proud history. I understand that.”
Sakha nodded and pulled at his orange Zegna tie. “All right, let’s go,” he said.
Journeying from the International Terrace to the Svanï one, we had left a fledgling Portland, Oregon, and arrived in Kabul. Gone were the Hyatts and fake Irish bars. Here the local business scene consisted of middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and gossiping around idled taxis. Rounding out the economy, younger men and boys ran around with buckets of sunflower seeds that they would wrap in a paper cone and sell for five thousand absurdis a portion (about US$.05, I later found out).
The McDonald’s was situated behind a prominent square that, during the Soviet era, must have hosted its share of May Day parades but had been turned into an ad hoc market for used remote controls. We walked past hordes of potential buyers aiming the orphaned devices at the sky, as if trying to turn off the scorching sun. Above the gleaming pile of remotes stretched an enormous mural of Georgi Kanuk and his son Debil, dancing with each other on the helicopter deck of a Chevron offshore oil platform. A large man in a bow tie and tails stood off to the side of the deck, writing something with a quill upon an ancient scroll. He was as neatly mustached as the dictator and his son, and boasted an incongruous poof of African-looking hair. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“Alexandre Dumas,” an old remote seller told me. “He came to our country in 1858. He called the Svanï people ‘the Pearls of the Caspian.’ He loved our dried beef and wet women. When he came down to the Sevo Terrace, he was robbed by ruffians and cheated by the local merchants. He hated it there.”