Three tall, beautiful lads in camouflage uniforms were busy twiddling with a portable generator. Something inside me, greedy and childish, broke loose. Despite the violence at hand, I wanted to talk to these young Ukrainian mercenaries, to make myself known and liked by them. All of us who grew up in the Red Army’s shadow became lifelong aficionados of destruction, enthralled by anything that could bring swift ruin to the enemy. Like any empire in decline, ours was becoming ever more brilliant at knocking things apart, at raising palls of smoke over cratered school yards and charred market stalls. “What have you got going here?” I said to the boys. “If this is a GRAD BM-21 rocket system, why isn’t it mounted on a Ural truck chassis?”
A hale-looking, blue-eyed fellow, his torso almost as wide as mine, only layered with young muscles instead of lard, put down his wrench and looked me over with measured surprise. “This is our own modified GRAD,” he said. “It’s not a BM-21, exactly. We couldn’t bring up an entire Ural truck to the roof, obviously, so we’ve reassembled the basic chassis with two stabilizing jacks. Instead of four rows of ten missiles, we’ve got two rows. But the basic firing capability is the same—a fixed half-second interval. And we only need a three-man crew instead of five.”
“You brought all this up to the roof by yourselves?” I said, hopping from foot to foot with manly excitement. “In one day?” How competent these boys were! How well they handled themselves, whether trying to raise a family of four on eighty dollars a month or firing GRAD missiles off the roof of a Hyatt. “How clever, how very clever of you,” I said. “And since you don’t have a Ural truck, where do you operate the system from? Tell me everything!”
The fellow scratched at his armpits erotically and slapped on a khaki KBR baseball cap. “We’ve got a remote-firing device attached to a sixty-four-meter-long cable,” he said. “We can fire from downstairs, from the thirty-ninth floor. And reloading time is less than five minutes, even with three people working. How do you know so much about GRAD missile launchers? Did you serve in the army?”
“Oh, no,” I said. I tapped instinctively at my Jewish proboscis to show how unlikely army service would have been for me. “Sadly, that’s not the case. I’m just an enthusiast.”
“Our Misha knows everything about everything,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “A burning intelligence.”
“I’m called Vyacheslav,” the mercenary said. We shook hands. His wrist was taut and narrow, like a leek.
“It is so wonderful to work with these boys,” Mr. Nanabragov said as the soldier went back to his generator. “And look at the smoke over Gorbigrad! Now we’ve got a real war going. Smoke over the city! Take that, Genoa!”
I shielded my eyes to better discern the smoke, slowly shifting from a letter F into a series of O’s and drifting toward the Absurdi interior. Another, unbidden series of letters was forming in my brain, starting with the letter C and continuing on to U, L, P, A, B, I, L, I, T, and Y. “Oh, God,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re shelling Gorbigrad because I told you your war wasn’t exciting enough?”
“No,” Mr. Nanabragov said, laughing and twitching at my silliness. “Well, fine, yes,” he amended his answer. “But it’s a harmless procedure. We’ve evacuated the areas to be shelled, so they’re just blowing up empty houses. If you can even call those things houses. You know how awful it is over there. The whole place is a disaster. There’s not even running water in some parts.”
“Yes. But—”
“No one should have to live like that,” Nanabragov said. “So we blow up a few neighborhoods, draw some attention to our war, and then we’ll get USAID, or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or maybe even the Japanese to pay for a new Gorbigrad. We’ve already got all the engineering firms we need, all those Bechtels and whatnot. Everyone wins. You should tell Israel about it.”
“But it makes the Sevo look terrible,” I said. “Like you’re the aggressors.”
“Do you think we have shit for brains?” Mr. Nanabragov said. “It’s all worked out with the federal forces. In the morning our Ukrainian friends shell the Svanï parts of Gorbigrad, and in the afternoon they go for the Sevo districts. We take turns, see? But to outsiders, it looks like a real war. Like we’re tearing each other apart. Help, help, U.S.A. Save our oil.”
“Fine,” I said. “But what happens to all the people whose flats you’ve destroyed? Where do they go until the Americans rebuild their houses?”
Mr. Nanabragov shrugged. “We’re in the Caucasus,” he said. “Everyone has an extended family in the countryside. They can go live with their relatives.”
I turned to Parka Mook, who stood impassively, his hands folded over his crotch, his dry face and receding mustache drawn into the Russian letter Д. “Is this true?” I asked him.
“What do I know?” he said. “I’m an intellectual, not an urban planner.”
I walked over to the edge of the roof and surveyed the red plains of Gorbigrad stretching into the sea, surrounded by the pinpricks of oil derricks, reminding me of a slain woolly mammoth encircled by cavemen with spears. Life could only get better for these people, I thought. How could it get any worse? There was a bit of American athletic wisdom that summed it up nicely: “No pain, no gain.” I sighed, suddenly missing American television. What a nostalgic!
“So, Mishen’ka?” Mr. Nanabragov asked, grinning and stroking my hump. “What do you think? Want to join the SCROD, little son? We’ve got an office all set up for you. And a secretary crawling around on all fours.”
“Let me think about it,” I said, yawning heartily.
It was time for my afternoon nap.
I was having a pleasant dream about the Egyptian pyramids (for some reason, I was leveling them with a sledgehammer) when Larry Zartarian woke me up. He was standing over me, shaking me by the shoulder, shedding tiny velvet hairs all over my face.
He pointed at the tinted windows with his petite man-hand. Outside, the International Terrace stretched out before me, its skyscrapers silently reflecting the hills and the sea. “What?” I said. “How did you get in here, anyway? What about my privacy?”
“Look at Gorbigrad.”
I let my gaze drop across the bay. “Yes,” I said. “Gorbigrad has many problems.”
“Look closer. That’s the Blue Bridge Pass that connects Gorbigrad to the International Terrace. There are soldiers at the checkpoints so no one can get through.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “We need checkpoints. We’re in a state of war.”
“Do you see that gray chunk of rock over there? Look right next to it. That’s the Alexandre Dumas Ravine. And see those black figures slowly going down the ravine? Like ants? Those are people. Trying to make their way down from Gorbigrad. They’re trying to get onto the terraces. Many of them falling to their deaths, no doubt.”
I examined these ants he spoke of, but I could barely make them out with my faltering, sun-blinded vision. What was he talking about? Dumas was a bad French writer. A ravine was a ravine. The Sevo and Svanï were not ants. Gorbigrad would be destroyed, then rebuilt anew. “Why would people fall to their deaths trying to leave Gorbigrad?” I said.
“Because Nanabragov and Debil Kanuk are firing GRAD missiles at them. From the roof of my fucking hotel. Do you know what this will do to the Hyatt image?”