“But the Germans never reached Absurdsvanï,” I said.
“Unfortunately not,” Parka Mook said dryly.
“So who cares if the Sevo might have helped them. In truth, they didn’t.”
“Still, it’s a beautiful story,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “One minority willing to die for another. You should be shouting about it from a rooftop, Mr. Minister of Multicultural Affairs.”
Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and Leisure was shamelessly picking at my salad. I gave him such a look, he nearly stabbed himself with his own fork. I reached in with one of my two big squishies and palmed a wedge of ripe, bleeding tomato. “The Holocaust is a serious business,” I said. “It requires very expert branding or we’ll all look like a bunch of idiots.”
“Branding I don’t know about,” Nanabragov said. “But we can certainly build a statue to Sevo-Jewish friendship. Imagine a hundred-meter version of Misha and the dead democrat Sakha bent over a Torah scroll. And from the Torah scroll, an eternal flame comes shooting out.”
“Fine idea! Let’s build a Misha!” the gathered shouted.
“It’ll take half the granite in the Dumas Ravine just for his head,” some wise guy said.
I joined my fellow ministers in laughing politely at my unchecked gluttony. “But seriously,” I said, “if you want to look good with the Holocaust, you have to do something original. Or if not original, then at least educational. Like a museum. And it has to be of the latest fashion, so every time a child taps a computer screen with his finger, some poignant fact about Jew-Sevo friendship pops up. Tap, tap, tap, fact, fact, fact.”
“Can we build such a thing?” Mr. Nanabragov turned to the Minister of Finance.
The minister was nearly my size and likewise lived amid a tornado of hair and food particles. “Boys,” he grunted, wiping sweat off his forehead and flicking it jauntily at the chipped mahogany table before us, “let me tell you about the state of our treasury.” He proceeded to outline the rapidly decreasing state of a dozen offshore accounts, along with more informal financial institutions with names like “Big Sasha’s Stash” and “Boris’s Itty-Bitty Bank.”
“What about all that oil you have?” I asked. “What about Figa-6?”
The room fell silent. The Minister of Tourism and Leisure to my right let out a series of short, difficult breaths. “How about this, Misha,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Why don’t you ask the American Jewish community for some money?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to ask the American Jews for money so that I can please the American State Department by making an overture to Israel?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “What’s the American phrase? ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ Hopefully they’ll appreciate our initiative.”
I considered my knowledge of American Jews. They always seemed to feel alone and unloved when, in truth, most of the American populace just wanted to kiss them on their shiny noses, bake them a casserole, shoot them some one-liners over dinner, and possibly convert them so as to hasten the Second Coming. Would these Jews respond favorably to a love letter from a small oppressed people somewhere between Russia and Iran? And what form would such a love letter take?
“I guess I can write some grant proposals,” I said.
“We don’t know what those are, but anything you do must be blessed by God,” Mr. Nanabragov replied to general applause.
I took out my Hyatt pen and pad and wrote in moist excited letters:
MISHA’S TO-DO LIST
1) Get Internet installed in office.
2) Write grant proposals to build Holocaust Museum.
3) Encourage multiculturalism in everything I do.
“You see how hard Misha’s working,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “You see how organized he is. That’s because he has an American education, like my Nana and Bubi. We old Soviet black-asses, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”
The men around me were yawning and stretching. The lunchtime hour was knocking, and there were mistresses to spread at the Hyatt and steaks to dispatch at the new Tuscan Steak & Bean Company. Cigars were lit, followed by soft coughing and sleepy belches. Leave these good men to their idle pursuits. I, on the other hand, would return to my office to work out their country’s future. Like the 3.94 student I once was at Accidental College, I would prove myself yet again.
34
The Situation Worries Me
Dear The Guest,
Please Your attention. Due to the worst-ening political situation, we are sad to inform You that many items on the Sushi/Sashimi menu will no longer be possible for You. (In particular we are out of mackerel.) We humbly beg You—forgive us!
I didn’t want to admit it, but Zartarian was right. And not only about the mackerel. The political situation was “worst-ening.” I couldn’t get from one terrace to another in Nana’s Navigator without getting stuck in a crush of Gorbigrad refugees. The faces of the blighted brushed up against our windows—I tried to spot members of the intelligentsia among them, maybe to offer them a ride, but all were coated with the grime of several days’ travel, while the tinted windows of the Navigator erased any discernible signs of intelligence. The men, women, and children in front of me were tied to one another by invisible strings of kin and clan; they were stoic in their exile and loss, but they moved forward hand in hand as if their destinations were fixed, elders hanging on to the backs of their sons, sons cradling little daughters, the war veterans and the demented crouched ferally within wheelbarrows.
“It’s just a temporary situation,” I whispered to them. “Soon the international community will step in.”
But I wasn’t so sure. Panic was slowly creeping up the Boulevard of National Unity. Cases of Ghettomän aftershave from the 718 Perfumery and boxes of scruffy-looking Muppets with excited American googly eyes from the Toys “R” Us superstore were being pillaged left and right, squeezed into armored personnel carriers and waiting jeeps. For the first time since my arrival in Absurdistan, the armed forces actually seemed involved in their duties, officers calmly directing the looting, jotting dollar figures upon clipboards, and shouting at their inferiors to hurry their black asses up and load the fucking APCs already. A slow-motion military retreat seemed to be taking place, set to the occasional roar of GRAD missiles departing the roof of the Hyatt, followed by patches of rising gray dust and smoke at the line of the horizon. Only the KBR trucks stood silent and empty along the boulevard.
But mostly I was concerned about the gang activity. They called themselves the True Footrest Posses and they seemed to be on every street corner, hanging loosely like their Compton counterparts, some of them armed with sausage-thick Makarov pistols and AK-47s, others with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and light mortars that they listlessly dragged behind them, like some bothersome cleaning chore their parents had pressed upon them. They were kids, few over the age of consent, sunburned, depressed, malnourished, dressed in jerseys and sweatpants bearing the logos of the National Basketball Association. One had a blue Crips bandanna around his neck, another sweated terribly beneath a wool ski cap, a third had capped most of his teeth with gold and was bleeding around the gums. Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation. Occasionally I would hear them rap in English about the violent, sexy life they wanted to lead in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and about what they would do to their Svanï or Sevo counterparts once their enemies were disarmed and bent over. One popular ditty I heard on the Sevo Terrace started like this: