Mr. Nanabragov came up to me. He raised his hands as if to embrace me, but they twitched out of position. He stood there jerking silently. “Misha,” he said. “Don’t take my Nana away from me.”
“What?”
His eyes were filling up with water and rainbows. “You don’t understand what it has been like without her,” he said, sniffling. “When she was at NYU and my Bubi was studying Ethnic Musicology at UCLA, there was nothing for me…nothing to live for. People like your father and me, we’re of a different generation. Family is what we know. We can’t live the way people do now, one child in San Diego, one in Torrance, one in the Valley.” He wiped at his eyes.
“Surely you don’t mean to leave her here,” I said.
“You can both stay. Get married. After the Russian bombing next week, things will settle down. You’ll see. I’ll give you a piece of the cigarette action, not that you need a piece of anything.”
“But we’ll die here,” I said, wiping my raw nose.
“Not necessarily. Don’t you understand? I’ll do anything to keep her. You’re your father’s son. He killed an American just to make sure you wouldn’t leave him.”
Seagulls were circling low over the dead sheep, and the Lapdog waiters were fingering their pistols. I remembered the seagull attacking the British kid on the videotape of my father getting decapitated. Everywhere I went, birds of prey were looking for an in. I stared at the smoke-gray sky above us, black smoke from the Lapdog grill, the haze wafting from the still-burning city. “Misha,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Misha. How can you fault me? Your father killed an Oklahoman to make sure you couldn’t go back to New York.”
“I know,” I said simply.
“He wanted to keep you near him. He missed you so much. Is there anything more important than a father’s embrace?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
And then Mr. Nanabragov was around my neck, crying and jerking and humping my leg. They still couldn’t stop smelling of rancid sweat, our old men. All those French colognes and moisture gels, but that fundamental rank still lingered in their armpits. “Misha!” Mr. Nanabragov cried. “You have to promise me that you won’t take my Nana away from me.”
I felt him contracting around me, twitching in time with the slowing thump of my own heart. “I would be very angry if you did, Misha,” he said. “So you have to promise me she won’t leave.”
I felt his bitter drool on the back of my neck. “I promise,” I said.
42
Saltines and Fresca
We left a few days later. It was September 9. The day was light and airy and spoke of deliverance from the summer’s heat. The train station was on the Svanï Terrace, but we didn’t bother with any precautions. The SCROD and federal checkpoints had disappeared completely, and Svanï and Sevo citizens staggered around without hindrance, free to die on any terrace they chose.
We stood in the waiting room beneath a fading picture of the Svanï dictator Georgi Kanuk, upon whose grave octogenarian visage one commentator had written #1 TERRORIST and another FATHER OF THE NATION. Nana’s mother had sneaked out of the house to say goodbye to us. Removed from the courtyard and the kitchen, she was a surprisingly different creature, feisty and emotional. The afternoon sun had touched her pale homebound cheeks. While she wept prodigiously at her daughter’s departure, she did so with an almost reticent delight. “God will bless you,” she kept saying to me and Nana. “In Brussels, in New York, wherever it is that you go, God will follow your footsteps with a father’s eye.”
“Tell Papa my heart is breaking,” Nana said. “Tell him I’ll come back as soon as the war is over, so maybe they should try to wrap it up by the Christmas break. By the way, is there any money in the Citibank account? I still haven’t paid the bursar.”
Mrs. Nanabragovna wiped her tears. “Now you’re with Misha,” she said, pointing to the general area around my wallet. “Misha will be your father, and there will always be water in his well for you to drink.” Mother and daughter smiled and embraced each other.
I was angry and disgusted with the Nanabragovs, but I couldn’t help being moved by their parting. “Be careful, little mother,” I said to Mrs. Nanabragovna. “The Russians are planning to bomb the city next week. You must take shelter in your basement.”
“Oh, they’ll never bomb our house,” Mrs. Nanabragovna said with a dismissive wave. “They’ll just make a loop around Gorbigrad.”
We were escorted onto the train by an army of men wearing homemade fatigues with the words AMERICAN EXPRESS RAPID REACTION FORCE. Our self-appointed protectors handled us roughly, like the soldiers they were, banging our laptops against the gravel and pulling us by our sleeves. We cursed their mothers under our breath and yet rejoiced at the presence of their formidable armaments, in particular the tank-busting cannon being dragged ahead of us.
The platforms were deserted. All the rail lines had been bombed into torqued ellipses of the kind made popular by a certain American sculptor, save for one upon which the American Express locomotive and two wagons idled. They were old wide-gauge Soviet cars brought up to gleaming Western snuff. The locomotive sported a silk-screened AmEx logo. Absurdi children had painted the wagons with scenes of a better life for themselves, earnest depictions of dark-haired boys and girls wearing Svanï and Sevo crosses, flying happily between the Eiffel Tower, the Houses of Parliament in London, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. YOU’VE GOT TO PLAY TO WIN, the children had written in large green English letters beneath their impossible fantasies. The roofs of the train cars were occupied by more members of the American Express Rapid Reaction Force nailing down their RPG launchers and waving a Colorado’s worth of small arms at the sky.
We were handed over to a relatively pleasant group of Nana’s former American Express colleagues, who immediately told us that the soldiers were merely “volunteers” and not affiliated at all with the American Express company. We were given a stack of documents to sign, denying the company’s responsibility for our likely deaths at the hands of desperate starving folk marauding along the train tracks.
One of the wagons had been converted into a plush Irish pub called Molly Malloy’s, a branch of which used to service multinational oil execs on the International Terrace (its taps, in retrospect, had gushered better than the oil wells). The wood paneling had been artificially aged and warped; only the authenticating smells of piss and meat pies were missing. The bartender, an imported Tatar in a jolly green hat, bade us to return for happy hour at six, when top-shelf drinks were reduced to US$20.
I sent Timofey off to bed down in the service quarters, then retired to our compartment. The comforters and pillows were plush and hypoallergenic, the overhead racks had a built-in DVD player, a plasma screen, and a docking station for our laptops with Internet access that actually worked. “This is better than the Hyatt!” I told Nana as we fondled each other beneath a tasteful print of Svanï City at the turn of the last century, a wooden tram running past an onion-domed church, men in crisp czarist uniforms bidding each other good morning.
I had nearly removed her bra and liberated one nipple when the conductor meekly came a-calling. “I’m paying for both of us,” I told the old man trembling in his AmEx regalia and visored cap. “And for my manservant, too.”