My mother snorted her assent. I tried to cradle her head in my hands, remembering how, as a five-year-old, I used to braid her hair while she napped, trying to make her look like a little girl whom I could cuddle and kiss with impunity. I noticed that her smells had changed, that there was a lustier, dirtier aroma about her: the scent of an unclean kitchen. And it wasn’t a tube sock over her face, but rather an onion skin, beneath which an alien face hissed and contorted. She started speaking in a coarse Southern tongue. A thin ribbon of hate flitted through my heart. Why didn’t you protect me from him? The frying pan! Nothing made sense. Why did you feed me so much? Bowls of condensed milk for breakfast, midnight snacks of raw pig fat spread over black bread, cold veal and mayonnaise salads in the hot afternoons, poppy seed cakes crowned with clotted cream, rounds of cervelat smoked sausage and cheese squares atop slices of butter as thick as my thumbs. Why did you let me get so fat, Mommy? So that he wouldn’t roll around with me anymore? So that he would stop loving me? I was all alone after you died.
Saddened, I left the mysterious Mother Room. The sun burned me like an ant under a telescope. Tired of stalking the premises, I let the house do the walking—it pivoted around me, dozens of empty, sunlit rooms flashing past, until I was standing by the front gate, nudging it open with two disembodied hands. I was free!
I walked down the street. The two imbecilic boys assigned to me, Tafa and Rafa, were sitting in my Volvo station wagon soaking up precious air-conditioning. I knocked on one of the windows. “Vy or ty?” I shouted to the boys. “Polite or familiar? Ach, I ought to knock your heads together.” To my surprise, my adjutants actually did have hairy brown coconuts on their shoulders. “I ought to buy myself a hovercraft,” I opined to them rather loudly. “New technology. Gonna invest in.”
The road followed a curvy downward path toward the sea, past the pretty Sevo houses with their carved balconies, their overgrown front gardens rustling with barberry shrubs and creamy milk flowers. I caught sight of a broken rosebush peering out of a chain-link fence and was swiftly dispossessed of all my fundamental worries. “It’s like being back in Yalta,” I shouted. “With my mamochka!” The winds of that particular resort town, with their Chekhovian overtones, side-swiped my ass. I hopped and skipped down the road (not really possible, but so it seemed at the time) until I found myself at a kind of border crossing. Armed men in tight sweaters stitched with the word DYNCORP were blocking the path. I imagined what it would be like to try to tear the assault rifles out of their hands, hundreds of bullets piercing me, ouch, ouch, ouch a hundred times over. “Watchoo doing?” I asked them.
“Protecting the neighborhood,” they said in these South African–sounding accents. “From the looters. You live here?”
“I’m Nana Nanabragovna’s boyfriend.”
“Really? What are you called?”
“Fat Uncle. Snack Daddy. Misha Vainberg. Call me what you like, but please let me through.”
“Be careful out there, sir. The people have lost their senses.”
“That’s the people for you.” I pressed on toward a gallery of heat and sound. After a few solitary meters, I was accepted into a crowd of around a million persons gang-pressed into the dust bowl of the Sevo Terrace. Hands burrowed into me; little hands, big hands, sea-wet hands, sun-dried hands. Everyone was looking for my wallet but kept coming up with my balls. “They look and feel almost alike,” I hinted to my friendly assailants. “Keep looking. Ooh, you’re very warm. No, no, no. I don’t like tickling.”
The crowd passed me around, squeezing and poking. This is what Jesus must have felt like on a good day. I was relayed under the tentacle-arches of the Sevo Vatican and toward the sad greenery of the waterfront. There was rumbling above us. A deep groaning sound. Then a couple of pop-pop-pops. Small-arms fire. I looked up, hoping to catch sight of my favorite GRAD missiles. Nothing doing. The teenage members of one of the True Footrest Posses were scrambling up a hill with their mortars and surface-to-air missiles. Good luck, kids! I hit something hard and stony. An old woman was laid out on an enormous marble conch shell, part of some defunct art nouveau fountain. Her whole family was crying over her, children by her feet, grown-ups at the head. “Is she dead?” I asked them.
“We’ll never forget her,” the relatives wailed.
“Don’t be so sure,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “What may seem like a terrible loss today may be just an uncomfortable memory tomorrow. She was old. Hard to carry. Use this opportunity to move to America.” But after I spoke, the sobbing only increased. A fist waved through the air attached to some glandular epithets. I moved away, shaking my head. The people had lost their senses. It was all just jungle emotions now. They couldn’t wait to start mourning one another. That was the one thing they knew backward and forward. Death from above, death from within. Tyrants and heart attacks. The three most popular words in the Russian language: “Stalin. Gitler. Infarkt.”
What the hell? Everyone was screaming at me now. I turned this way and that, toward the sea, away from the sea, and wherever I turned, I saw gleaming gold teeth and infected tonsils ululating in hatred and terror. “I didn’t do anything,” I said, looking at my feet. “Just let me be,” I told them. But the screaming only grew louder. And then the deep groaning sound resumed, and I heard a steel drum played over a second-rate loudspeaker. Pop, someone said. Pop pop pop. Shhhheeeeeouuuuuuu!
I looked up. The people had put up their fists and were crouching fearfully on the ground. And then I understood. They weren’t angry with me. I wasn’t the problem. I looked into the people’s eyes. Their eyes, it would seem, were watching God. I followed them up to the Svanï Terrace. Nothing. Then upward to the International Terrace. Nothing still. No, wait. Something. Something unusual was happening up on the International Terrace. Something not quite right but beautiful still.
The skyscrapers were dancing.
Not with each other, but with each other in mind, like flirtatious poor folk sizing up each other’s hips across an equatorial dance floor. The Hyatt danced. The Radisson danced. So did Bechtel. BP was practically making a fool of itself. Only ExxonMobil stood aloof, nodding its head a fraction, tapping its feet, barely keeping up with the beat.