“The cease-fire is holding,” I said. “They’ll reopen the airport soon and get this Figa-6 thing going. This luau is a positive sign, Larry. Don’t be such a worrywart. You’re letting your mother affect your mood. I know what that’s like, to have a parent. It’s not easy.” I gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“Do me a favor, willya?” Zartarian said. “Nana’s father pretty much runs the SCROD. See what he thinks about all this. Try to get a handle at dinner tonight.”
“Okay, Larry,” I humored him. “I’ll try to get a handle. You try to get some rest. You’re working too hard.”
“Hey, if I survive this war, they’re going to post me someplace big.”
“If,” I said, maliciously.
Zartarian’s cell phone rang, and the Armenian mumbled something in the local tongue. “The SCROD men are here to pick you up,” he said. “Remember, Misha, we’re all in this together.”
“Hey,” I said. “How did you get your phone to work?”
“You can still dial inside the country,” Zartarian explained. “It’s the rest of the world that’s verboten.”
“Ah, so we’re back in the USSR.”
The SCROD men were actually two teenage boys in adjutants’ uniforms. They were over by the glass elevator playing with a pair of submachine guns, pretending to mow each other down, then falling on the floor and grasping their stomachs, moaning in English, “Officer down, officer down.”
“Boys, don’t shoot anything,” Zartarian admonished them. “We’ve got important guests here.”
I was hoping for a BTR-70 armored personnel carrier, but the boys drove a Volvo station wagon, rusty around the edges. Feeling like an American high school student departing for the senior prom, I waved goodbye to Zartarian and his mother, who looked sternly at her watch, her bewhiskered countenance reminding me to return at a decent hour and to keep my nose clean.
We drove at an ungodly speed down the Boulevard of National Unity—jammed with sweaty bodies on a summer Friday night—and then plummeted down to the Sevo Terrace. The boys sat up front, chattering in their language and occasionally leaning out the Volvo’s windows to shoot rounds into the still night air, a fearsome rat-a-tat that almost made me dip into my Ativan stash. “Boys,” I said. “Act a little cultured, why don’t you?”
“Sorry, boss,” one of the lads mumbled in a farcical Russian. “We’re just happy it Friday night. Everybody go dancing. Maybe you dance with a Sevo girl?” The other boy hit him lightly with his submachine gun and told him to shut up.
“I don’t know how it is in your language, but when you talk to your elders in Russian, it is important to use the polite vy form of address,” I instructed them. “Or at least you should ask if it’s possible to switch to the familiar ty.”
“May we switch to the familiar ty, boss?”
“No,” I said.
The boys lapsed into a quiet moodiness for a few minutes and then went back to their barbarian chatter. I was not unhappy to be left alone. The rolled-down windows permitted a delightful breeze to enter the Volvo’s cabin, thankfully skirting the young brutes up front with their leather-and-semen odors and instead tickling my nostrils with the smells of ocean and tropical trees—the tang of jacaranda, say. I took out my Belgian passport and, as I often did these days, pressed it to the hard nipple that stood sentinel over my heart. I was happy at the chance to see my Nana in her parents’ house. For reasons all too complex and murky, the sight of children and their parents together aroused me.
The Sevo Terrace esplanade was ablaze with the flash and fizzle of makeshift fireworks aimed at the broad front of the Caspian. Most often these missiles failed to reach their watery target and fell instead upon the crowds of Sevo who had assembled by the edge of the sea and who now beat a panicked retreat from the aerial assault, children and elderly strapped to the backs of the working-age. “There’s a war on,” I said, “and these people gather to be shelled by fireworks. Unbelievable!”
“They just want to have fun, boss,” one of my escorts told me. “We Sevo people like to roast the lamb and have a good time.”
“There are many ways to spend an enjoyable evening,” I said, “without getting maimed. In my day we drank port wine and talked well into the night about our hopes and dreams.”
“We only hope and dream of moving to Los Angeles one day, boss. So what’s there to talk about?”
“Yes—mm,” I said, but I could not come up with an equally damning reply.
We circled the floodlit octopus of the Sevo Vatican and took a narrow road that led beneath the so-called Founders’ Wall and into the oldest part of the city. Each terrace had its own Old Town, built at the time of either the Persian occupation or the Ottoman incursion, I cannot remember which. On the Sevo and International terraces, these were settled by the original Moslems whose beehive baths and stubby minarets had created two miniature Istanbuls quietly removed from the rest of the city.
But the Sevo Old Town was free of Moslems. Rising on a slight ridge, it was trellised by a set of winding roads, each charting a route between mountain and sea, and each eventually leading to a dead-end bluff upon which a formidable old house, squatting on timber chicken legs, reproached the driver for disturbing its solitude. The choicest homes were bored directly into the ridge and wore the frippery and ostentation of two centuries past. Their exteriors paraded soft colors, pale yellows and greens, and a ghostly azure that may have once mirrored the now-gray sea below. The houses were graced by long wooden balconies, intricate apertures that often hung from all three sides and were engraved with the lions and fishes of Sevo mythology. They were as beautiful as anything I had seen since landing in the country.
We were headed for a house that eclipsed the others in scale, a broad white structure punctured by the occasional skylight, while some of its neighbors were dilapidated to the point of lacking windows and roof tiles. As we neared the Nanabragov manse, it became clear that the house had been built of poured concrete. It was merely an expensive parody of the traditional Sevo home, a shell of cement that had grown balconies and winding staircases with the same cold resolve as it had sprouted the satellite dishes lining its roof.
My escorts had gone silent and slack as we pulled up to the house. They touched their weapons and breathed slowly through their noses. They craned their heads to better see the satellite dishes on the roof. They thought in tandem of their Los Angeles destiny, a fate that could not be articulated in words, only in gunfire and the hot-tub embrace of naked women.
A circular driveway surrounded a copy of Bernini’s Fontana del Moro, the portly Moorish sea god at its center made out of marble several grades too shiny. I saw my Nana run out of the house, dressed in her usual fashion—tightness and youth, puckered flesh and hoop earrings, the hood of her clitoris clearly visible inside a pair of black sweatpants.
“Hey you,” she said.
I trembled in response. “Hi-hi.”
“Don’t you look nice?” she said. I was wearing my tent-sized polo shirt and a pair of khaki pantaloons that I had bought on Dr. Levine’s advice. “Yum,” she said. “Gimme that sweet face.” She kissed me long and hard, squeezing the nonentity of my ass, the pleats of my khakis billowing like two zeppelins in response. I glanced back at my stunned escorts as if to say, “See, this is what happens to cultured people who use the vy form of address.”