Absurdistan Read Online Free PDF Page B

diorama of top hats and flying sweat.
    “To the
mitzvah
mobile!” the youngest shouted in unison, and soon I was enveloped in a dozen velvety coats, snug within the outer layers of my own race, while gently herded out into the Hasidic summer night, where even the yellow-faced moon wore side curls and crickets sang in the deep melodious language of our ancestors.
    I was laid out sideways on a soft American van seat, several young men still plying me with vodkas that I dutifully drank, because for a Russian it is impolite to refuse. “Are we driving back to the hotel, mister?” I said as the van careened madly through the populated streets.
    “A
humus tov,
a
mazel tov,
” my companions sang to me.
    “You want to redeem the captive!” I struggled in English, through my tears. “Look at me! I am captive! By you!”
    “So now you will be redeemed!” the logic followed, a cup of vodka tipped into my face.
    Eventually I was deposited into the overlit waiting room of a poor municipal hospital where Spanish babies cried for milk while my companions pressed themselves against an ad hoc wailing wall, their pale faces red with prayer. “Your father will be so proud,” someone whispered into my ear. “Look what a brave man you are!”
    “Eighteen is too old for cutting the dick,” I whispered back. “Everybody knows this.”
    “Abraham was ninety-nine when he performed the
bris
with his own hands!”
    “But he was biblical hero.”
    “And so are you! From now on, your Hebrew name will be Moshe, which means Moses.”
    “I am called Misha. That is the Russian name my beautiful mother call me.”
    “But you
are
like Moses, because you’re helping lead the Soviet Jews out of Egypt.” I could almost smell the plastic of the cup pressed to my lips. I drank like the teenage alcoholic I had already become. A piece of rye bread was presented to me, but I spat on it. Then I was on top of a rolling bed wearing a kind of backward dress; then the rolling bed stopped; green smocks billowed all around me; my pants were being roughly lowered by a pair of cold hands. “Papa, make them stop!” I cried in Russian.
    A mask was clasped over my face. “Count backward, Moses,” an American voice told me.
    “Nyet!”
I tried to say, but of course no one could hear me. The world broke in pieces and failed to reassemble. When I woke up, the men in black hats were praying over me, and I could feel nothing below the carefully tucked folds of flesh that formed my waistline. I raised my head. I was dressed in a green hospital gown, a round hole cut in its lower region, and there, between the soft pillows of my thighs, a
crushed purple bug
lay motionless, its chitinous shell oozing fluids, the skin-rendering pain of its demise held at bay by anesthesia.
    For some reason, my co-religionists thought that my vomiting was a sign of recovery, and they wiped my chin and laughed and said
mazel tov
and
tsimmus tov
and
hey, hey, Yisroel.
    The infection set in that night.

 
    3

    Who Killed Beloved Papa?
    Who did it? Who murdered the 1,238th-richest man in Russia? Whose hands are stained with a martyr’s blood? I’ll tell you who: Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora. How do we know? Because the entire episode was videotaped by Andi Schmid, a nineteen-year-old tourist from Stuttgart, Germany.
    On the night in question, Herr Schmid happened to be steaming alongside St. Petersburg’s Palace Bridge on a pleasure boat, enjoying the synthetic drug MDMA and tinny house music from the boat’s speakers while videotaping a Russian seagull as it attacked an English teenager, a big-eared kipper of a boy, and his pale, lovely mama.
    “I have never seen such an angry seagull before,” Herr Schmid told me and the police inspectors the next day, resplendent before us in his fuzzy steel-wool pants and PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt, his boxy Selima Optique glasses casting a penumbra of intelligence around his dull young eyes. “It just kept
biting
the poor