“Come in,” Nana said. “My pops is dying to meet you. Dinner’s ready. They just shot three lambs.” She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.
We strode into a vestibule the size of a good barn, four gilded mirrors reflecting the room’s emptiness, creating the kind of vacant infinity I had always associated with the afterlife. An identical room followed, and then a third and a fourth. Finally we entered a chamber that contained a leather recliner, opposite which hung a flat-screen television. I was reminded of the homes of my former neighbors, the young investment bankers I had known in New York whose downtown lofts (“loft spaces,” they proudly called them) maintained the air of a hasty wartime retreat.
“Look around you,” Nana said, reprising her job as an American Express tour guide. “This is a traditional Sevo home. The layout is similar to that of any peasant’s house, only a little bigger. In the old days, the rooms were arranged in a rectangular pattern around an open smoke hole. We’re not so primitive, so instead of a smoke hole, we have a small courtyard.” We entered the small courtyard, which properly should have been called a national forest, indeed the national forest of more than one nation, a combination of trees ranging from the palm to the mulberry, among which finches and sparrows caroled at one another, spouting their rapid, nervous gibberish like market sellers vying for a single customer.
The courtyard was so big that one often lost sight of the house enclosing it. All the empty gilded rooms we had seen before were merely a front, for the life of the house coursed solely through this warm green center, which was anchored, naturally, by a long table covered with enough aromatic food and dark red wine to stab me in all my needy places.
Nana’s father, the master of the house, was surrounded by his many guests, their warble striving to outdo that of the birds above them. Once I was espied, he shouted, “Quiet!” and reached for what appeared to be the horn of a ram, such as the Judeans use in their elaborate ceremonies. Momentarily a similar specimen, jiggling with wine, was placed in my hand by an elderly servant, while the guests, upon discovering the proportions hidden beneath my billowing outfit, began to gasp and exclaim.
“Quiet, oh you throaty Sevo people!” the master shouted with a spectacular twitch of his entire tiny body, as if he had just been jolted by electricity or branded like a head of cattle. “A great man is among us tonight! We drink now to the son of Boris Vainberg, to our young dear Misha, formerly of St. Petersburg, soon of Brussels, and always of Jerusalem. Why, everyone knows the Vainbergs have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. Misha, hear me and understand my words! When you are here among the Sevo, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, my nephew your uncle, my daughter your wife, and you will always find water in my well to drink.”
“True! True!” the gathered throng shouted, and lifted their horns, as I did mine. A peppery concoction overflowed my mouth and dribbled down my chin. I looked in wet, alcoholic incomprehension at the little man who had supplied the seed that had birthed my Nana, a man who now stared into my eyes with the same fierce possessiveness I often cast upon my morning sausage. As he reached out his arms in a futile attempt to embrace all of me, Mr. Nanabragov’s boyish body twitched yet again, nearly jumping out of his half-open linen shirt. He made a kind of peremptory snort and wiped his nose with his wrist. Another twitch followed, this one exposing part of his tanned chest, made stubbly by thick gray hairs but otherwise smooth and firm. Then he fell upon me and hugged me and kissed both my cheeks. I could feel him twitching and vibrating against me, not unlike the electric razor that denuded my chin each morning. “Mr. Nanabragov,” I said, enjoying the florid warmth of the father nearly as much as that of his daughter, “your Nana has made me so happy here. I almost wish this war would never end.”
“Me, too, dear boy,” Mr. Nanabragov whispered. “Me, too.” He let me go, then turned to his daughter. “Nanachka,” he said, “go help the women with the lambs, my treasure. Tell your mother if she overgrills the kebabs, I’ll feed her to the wolves. And we need more lipioshka, honey. Your new cavalier likes to eat, by the looks of him. How dare we leave him hungry?”
“I want to stay, Papa,” Nana said. She put her hands on her hips and glowered with a teenage obstinacy. She looked so different from her father—he a tiny nervous snowflake, and she a great wide vessel of hope and lust. Only their full red lips bore similarity, the father’s bubbly wedges endowing him with a drag queen’s pouty glamour.
“This dinner is only for the men, angel,” Papa Nanabragov said, and I noticed that indeed the courtyard was filled by exemplars of that one uninspiring gender. “Go have fun with your girlfriends in the kitchen. What nice lamb you’ll make. Just don’t overcook it. You want to keep your cavalier happy. What a fine man he is.”
“That’s so old-school,” Nana said in English to him. “That’s so, I don’t know, like, medieval.”
“What was that, my little sun?” the father said. “You know I’m not so good with the English. Even my Russian’s an embarrassment. Now go. Fly away. But wait…Give me a kiss before you leave.”
I had never seen my Nana stifle her anger before, mostly because she had never been angry with me (how can one be angry at a man of such few qualities?). She exhaled deeply, her loveliness settled from her round chestnut eyes into the vicinity of her slightly bowlegged lower half, and I thought she would soon start to cry. Instead, she went over to her papa, put her arms around him, and dutifully kissed him six times, once on each red cheek, once on each bald temple, and twice on the fleshy nose, curved downward like a comma. He tickled her. She laughed. He did his strange out-of-body twitch and simultaneously slapped her behind, imparting a squeeze. “You know, sir,” I said, “it would be nice to have Nana and her pals at the table. Women are pretty.”
“I respectfully dissent,” said Mr. Nanabragov. “There’s a time for prettiness and there’s a time for seriousness. Let’s eat!”
28
Dead Democrats
My dinner companions were an inspiration. They ate fervently. They ate with their hands. Their hands were always full. I occupied a large part of the main table, and they would reach over me, around me, past my nose, under my chin, to grab an oozing cheese pie or a warm hunk of pheasant or a stuffed grape leaf the size of a forearm. They inhaled their food into one side of the mouth while expelling Armenian anecdotes from the other. The food was good, the meat fatty and charred just right, the cheese lightly smoked, the soup dumplings coated with enough black pepper to make one cough and weep and thank our put-upon earth for all its spicy produce. I became nervous and discreetly slipped several Ativan tablets into my ram’s horn, letting them dissolve amid the strong Sevo wine. But for all the Ativan in the world, I could not quell my anxiety. I started to rock back and forth, as I always do when confronted by food of this caliber. Mr. Nanabragov took this for a sign of Hasidity and started to make a toast to Israel.
“We Sevo understand your country’s problems,” he said, mistaking Israel for my country. “We, too, are the victims of our geography. Why, just look at our neighbors. To the south, the Persians, in the other directions the Turks, farther north the Russians. And sharing our country, the apelike Svanï. What problems we have. Just imagine, Misha, what would happen if, instead of occupying and subduing the Palestinians, the Israelis found themselves reeling under the Moslem yoke. I would compare both our peoples to a beautiful white mare saddled under a loutish black brute who digs his spurs into our tender flanks. Ever since Saint Sevo the Liberator found the piece of Christ’s True Footrest delivered to us by that thieving Armenian—I’m sure my Nana has told you the story—we have been a nation apart from our neighbors, blessed by education and prosperity but cursed by our small numbers and the whip of our Svanï masters.” He pretended to raise a whip high above his head and made a whooshing sound.