I looked to Sakha, who merely shrugged. “It’s an old Svanï story,” he said.
“And who are you by nationality?” the remote seller started to ask, but Sakha whisked me away to our destination.
We strode into the all-beef smell of McDonald’s, where I was regarded by the hungry customers as a kind of living embodiment of the fast-food lifestyle. “Personally I favor the slow-food movement,” I loudly announced to a family splitting the smallest McDonald’s hamburger into six parts so that each family member could savor a little taste. Poor souls. Here they were living by the Caspian Sea, surrounded by delicious fresh sturgeon and wild tomatoes, and nonetheless they came to McDonald’s. I made a mental note to check up on the diets of Misha’s Children. Hopefully the progressive Park Slope social workers had already made their way to St. Petersburg and had set to work on the little ones.
“Hey, it’s that democrat!” someone shouted at Sakha. “Hey, democrat, buy me a shake, will you? I’ll believe in anything you say.”
A tall Slavic man in his late teens approached, stiff and official in his disposable McDonald’s uniform, but with enough of a homosexual smile to make a name for himself in Petersburg’s Club 69. His Cyrillic tag labeled him a Dzhunior Manadzher. “Sir,” he said. “Are you here to see Monsieur Lefèvre?”
“Certainly I am not here to eat your criminal food,” I replied.
“Please come with me,” said the junior manager. “In the meantime, Mr. Sakha and your manservant can enjoy a free cheeseburger. No, Mr. Sakha, you may split one cheeseburger, that’s all.”
He took me past the bathrooms reeking awfully of industrial detergent, past a framed print of California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and to a door that opened to a small cul-de-sac where the McDonald’s garbage was stored in vast plastic containers. It took me a while to pinpoint Jean-Michel Lefèvre of the Belgian consulate, lying atop a soiled mattress, with both hands grasping the edges, as if he were Jonah just spat out of the whale.
“Monsieur Lefèvre isn’t feeling well,” the slender Russian boy told me. “I’m going to get him something to drink.”
“Misha,” the Belgian bellowed into the mattress. “Bring vodka,” he said in Russian.
“Are you talking to me?” I said.
“I am also called Misha,” said the boy, leaving us alone.
The Belgian used his elbows to flip over onto his back, where he could get a proper look at me. “Mother of God,” he said in English. “You’re big. You’re bigger than in Captain Belugin’s photograph. You’re the biggest thing ever.”
“I am a big man, yes,” I said. Lefèvre was himself a blond, emaciated fellow likely in early middle age, stubbly, red-eyed, and nicely browned by the Absurdi arrangement of sun, water, and sand. Whatever awful thing that had happened to him must have happened quickly and irrevocably.
“So,” said Lefèvre with a smirk. “Who wants to be a Belgian?”
“I do,” I said. Was he trying to make some kind of joke? “I have paid US$240,000 to Captain Belugin. That should buy citizenship for me and a work visa for my manservant. Everything should be in order.”
“Mm-hump,” said the Belgian, throwing up a hand and letting it hang in front of him limply. “Everyone wants to be a Belgian. Well, I don’t want to be a Belgian, no, sir. I want to be a Mexican Zapatista or a Montenegrin. Something fierce.” He yawned and scratched the perfectly white bridge of his nose. I noticed his sunglasses lying broken at his feet.
Misha the McDonald’s junior manager returned with a bottle of Flagman vodka and a McDonald’s paper cup. He emptied the vodka into the cup, gently tilted Lefèvre’s head, and poured the vodka into the diplomat’s mouth. There was some gagging, but mostly the alcohol found its way into the Belgian’s bloodstream, where it quickly reddened his tan.
“What are you?” Lefèvre asked me as he let Misha wipe his face with a McDonald’s paper hat. “What do you do?”
“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “I run a charity called Misha’s Children.”
“Are you some kind of pedophile?”
“What?” I fairly shrieked. “How can you? How awful! All my life I’ve wanted to help children.”
“I just thought because you’re so fat and puffy—”
“Stop insulting me. I know my rights.”
“You’re not a Belgian yet, friend,” he said. “I’m just joking. We have a problem in Belgium with pedophilia. Big scandal. Even the government and police people are implied.”
“Implicated,” I corrected him.
“I thought you should know more about your new nation before you signed on. Anything else you wanted to know?”
I considered all the things I wanted to know about Belgium. There weren’t many. “You have this queen Beatrix, no?” I asked.
“That would be Holland.”
“And you have a shameful history in the Congo. Your Leopold was a monster.”
“He’s your Leopold now, Vainberg. Our Leopold. Our Leopold of the Black Sorrows.” Lefèvre reached under the mattress and took out a business envelope that he tried to throw my way, but it landed in exactly the opposite direction, atop a plastics recycling bin. The other Misha picked it up and brought it to me.
I tried to stick my big, squishy hand inside, but to no avail. After tearing the envelope to bloody pieces, I withdrew a purple Belgian passport.
I opened it. Beneath a faint hologram of what I imagined was the Belgian Royal Palace, I saw a grainy duplicate of my Accidental College yearbook photograph, the travails of a grossly overweight twenty-two-year-old already hanging from my chin.
“For more information on Belgium, visit www.belgium.be,” Lefèvre said. “They have some information in English, too. You should at least know the name of the current prime minister. They sometimes ask that at Immigration.”
“This looks so real,” I said.
“It is real,” the diplomat told me. “According to official records, you became a citizen of Belgium in Charleroi last summer. You were granted political asylum from Russia. You’re a Chechen sympathizer or something. A Jewish Chechen sympathizer, that’s you.”
I pressed the passport to my nose, hoping to smell Europe—wine, cheese, chocolates, mussels, Belgian as opposed to McDonald’s fries. All I smelled were my own odors reflected back—a hot day, a tired man, hope tempered with sturgeon. “This is very good,” I said.
“No, it’s not very good,” said Lefèvre.
“Well, it’s very good for me,” I said. I was trying to stay positive, as they do in the States all the time.
The diplomat smiled. He gestured for the other Misha to tilt his head and administer the vodka inside the McDonald’s paper cup. In between swallows, he started singing the anthem of my new homeland:
With each French word, he stared farther into the blue void of my pretty eyes, grimacing, guffawing, and willing upon me every failure of which I knew myself capable. I stood there and listened. Then I said, “You know something, Mr. Lefèvre…”
“Hmm?” he said. “What do I know?”
“Everybody hurts,” I said.
The diplomat curled his fine lips, seeming surprised for the first time. “Who hurts?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Everybody hurts,” I said once more. Despite the logistical problems posed by my weight, I lowered myself to the ground and extended my hand to take the vodka cup from his hand. Lefèvre reached over, and our hands met briefly, his as wet and vulgar as my own. I took the cup and spilled some vodka on my new passport.