The Wild Child Part 27

"Everyone works for Nana's father in the end."

The particulars were starting to settle around my broad shoulders. G.o.ddammit. Another pogrom. There would be no caviar for lunch. There would be no hypoallergenic lovemaking. "Wait!" I said to Avram. "My manservant is bedding down in the service quarters. I must get him, or he'll he'll get the bullet at the border." get the bullet at the border."

The dinosaur tapped on his watch. "We haven't the time."

"He's Jewish," I lied.

"Your manservant manservant? Jewish?"

I was running down the empty corridor, pet.i.te French doors swinging aside in antic.i.p.ation of my arrival. Finally I stumbled upon a beautiful Russian girl rouging her considerable cheeks. This must have been the very Oksana Petrovna who had left us that thoughtful notecard. True to Nana's words, there was something s.l.u.ttish in the girl's comportment. "Miss," I said in English. "I need my manservant to help make my toilet. Rouse him from his slumber. And quickly!"

The girl hurriedly snapped shut her compact case, leaving one freckled cheek bare of pomade. "I am here only just for you!" she cried as she leaped into a nearby cabin, dragging out my befuddled Timofey by his ear. I thanked her, grabbed Timofey by the ear myself, and yanked him to the pa.s.senger car.

Avram had unlatched a side door and was already scurrying down with my luggage. As Nana approached with her 718 cosmetics bags, the Mountain Jew put a hand out in front of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I know she's your girlfriend," he said to me, "but if we take her off the train, there might be trouble for our community. What's left of the SCROD might attack our village. It might not be good for the Jews."

"She's my Nana, and she goes with me," I said, knocking back Avram's hand. He sighed wearily, prehistorically, and followed us out onto the golden gra.s.s. We ran down the slope of a nearby hill falling away from the railroad tracks, our urban feet struggling to make sense of the uneven and uncemented terrain. "Aif!" I cried as a mushy patch of earth nearly sent my ankle in a different direction from the rest of me. Timofey grabbed me before that fatal moment and started pus.h.i.+ng my body with a coa.r.s.e countryside vitality. "Very good, Tima," I huffed. "In nature, I I will be will be your your manservant. Good boy." manservant. Good boy."

"Past those bushes," the Mountain Jew instructed. Nana cried out from the sting of branches and twigs; I grabbed her behind, hoping to s.h.i.+eld myself from the worst of the thicket's ravages. Having cleared this chamber of horrors, we emerged onto a cool dirt path beneath a canopy of oaks. A small Daewoo sedan awaited us. The driver was a tall, skinny youth snug beneath a helmet of greasy hair. "My son, Yitzhak," the Mountain Jew said. "My one and only. Well, drive already, you idiot!"

Yitzhak rumbled down the dirt road with teenage abandon. Nana was trying to stanch a b.l.o.o.d.y cut to her forehead, Timofey was picking brambles and berries out of my hair, and all of us were heaving with exhaustion and bewilderment. I looked back at the barely visible railroad tracks upon which the AmEx train was still idling, wis.h.i.+ng the world were a better place.

We lapsed into a moody silence, our eyes on the road before us, never on one another. "Are you fleeing to Israel?" Yitzhak asked me in the same accented, barely comprehensible Russian his father spoke.

"I'm going to Brussels," I said. "Nana is flying to New York."

"New York!" Yitzhak said. "It is the city of my dreams."

"Really?" I said. "What a good kid you are."

"Forget about it," Avram said. "We have relatives in Haifa. You want to go somewhere? Go visit them. A free bed you'll have."

"You'll love New York," I said. "It's like having the whole world on one small island."

"I understand you can play basketball with blacks on the street," Yitzhak said.

"Very true," I said. "I like the way your mind works, young man."

"Don't encourage his stupid dreams," the Mountain Jew said. "Several times it has happened to us-the young people leave for L.A. or Brooklyn, they marry an outsider, and after a few years they won't come home for Pesach seder. Pesach seder. They won't even fly back to p.i.s.s on their grandfathers' graves. But when things go bad with their gentile wives or with their half-breed children, they run back to us. 'Papa, They won't even fly back to p.i.s.s on their grandfathers' graves. But when things go bad with their gentile wives or with their half-breed children, they run back to us. 'Papa, papochka, papochka, what have I done? I've forsaken my people.' And we welcome them back, and kiss them, and love them like they haven't stabbed us through the heart. Because for us it's simple. If you're a Jew, even if you're a sophisticate and a melancholic, you will always find a home here." what have I done? I've forsaken my people.' And we welcome them back, and kiss them, and love them like they haven't stabbed us through the heart. Because for us it's simple. If you're a Jew, even if you're a sophisticate and a melancholic, you will always find a home here."

"Thank you for saving us," Nana said, putting her hand on Avram's shoulder. "You've risked your own lives. We won't soon forget your kindness."

Avram shrugged her off. "Well, who else would do it?" he said. "The Mossad man came and said, 'There's a Jew in danger.' We knew exactly what to do. A Jew in danger, so let's save him. This is how our minds work."

I sighed wearily. An anger was developing inside me, the anger of a man with a growing debt. I tried to position my face in the rearview mirror so that I could smile in encouragement to the nice Yitzhak. His curious brown face smiled back at me. We were pa.s.sing a ramshackle village populated solely by stray dogs and scruffy chickens past childbearing age, a barber sitting lifelessly by his shack, the word "barber" misspelled in English and Russian and possibly a third language. We noticed the paisley domes of three similar mosques and the sharp bayonets of their minarets aiming at the innocent sky. "Do you get along with the Moslems?" Nana asked in her new supplicant's voice. "You live in such close proximity."

"We're fine with them," Avram said, doffing his leather cap and fixing his comb-over. "They don't bother us, and we don't bother them. They're not very bright, that's for certain. Just look at how they live. These houses haven't been painted in decades. Is that supposed to be a market? Just turnips and radishes and nothing imported? Wait until you see our our village." village."

"Now, Avram-" I started to say sharply, but Nana was already pressing her elbow into my hide.

"Don't you dare, Misha," she whispered in English. "Don't you realize what he's done for us?"

"What he's done for me, me," I whispered back. "I'm the Jew."

"Who cares why he did it. I was gonna get sent back to my father. I was going to miss another semester at NYU. So shut it, w.i.l.l.ya?"

We were driving down a steep gravel path lined with gilded Soviet statues of supple female volleyball players and fierce badminton G.o.ds groaning in midswing. "They were going to build an Olympic training center here," Yitzhak said. "But someone stole all the money."

"Yeah, someone," I murmured to myself. The gravel path ended in a smarmy river of unknown provenance. Beyond it lay a clump of newly built towers capped by silver spires and satellite dishes, along with enormous redbrick manses, some surrounded by miniature cranes hoisting fourth and fifth stories or the gleaming skylights that covered them, a kind of storybook village with a relentless microwave sheen.

"Our humble hamlet, Davidovo," Avram said. "Our little paradise."

After the desolation of the Moslem town, we found ourselves on a modern thoroughfare lined with crowded storefronts labeled HOUSE OF FAs.h.i.+ON HOUSE OF FAs.h.i.+ON and and PALACE OF HAPPINESS PALACE OF HAPPINESS and 24 and 24 HOUR INTERNET CLUB HOUR INTERNET CLUB, their parking lots gridlocked with Toyotas and Land Rovers. In a nearby residential area, old people, withered and Oriental-seeming, sat impa.s.sively on wood-carved front porches, their bodies slowly drying out in the sun while children of every age scrambled around them in a flurry of tanned legs and glistening Versace belt buckles. "Where are all the grown-ups?" Nana asked.

"Trading," Avram said. "In Israel or in Moscow. All kinds of goods and household products. We import half the things you find in Svani City. We even have our own 718 perfume shop."

"So you're a merchant people," I said, my words sour with distaste.

We were coming up to the village square, at which point I squinted in disbelief. A sunlit replica of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem took up an entire side of the square, green moss authentically growing from between the cracks in the equally genuine brickwork, a set of Israeli date palms arrayed in front.

"And what the h.e.l.l are those?" Nana said. She was pointing at two statues made out of some kind of fibergla.s.s, one a strange mishmash of three men dancing over what looked like a broken airplane and the other of a man with a torch holding on to his belly, as if stricken with gas.

"That's Sakha the Democrat holding the torch of freedom after being shot at the Hyatt," Yitzhak explained. "And the other one is Georgi Kanuk ascending to heaven after his plane was shot down, with his son Debil and Alexandre Dumas holding on to his legs, trying to keep him here on earth. See, if any renegade Sevo or Svani gangs attack us, we're good either way."

"And here comes the welcoming committee," Avram said. We were surrounded by a bunch of playful children. A little kid in a too-large yarmulke and an acid-washed T-s.h.i.+rt that said NAUGHTY NAUGHTY 4 4EVER ran up to the car and started knocking on my door. ran up to the car and started knocking on my door.

"Vainberg! Vainberg! Vainberg!" he shouted.

"Help me out of the car, young man," I said. "There's a dollar in it for you." As the child's prep.u.b.escent compatriots made their dervish circles around me while shouting my family name, I ambulated toward a gaggle of men smoking fiercely in the shadow of the Wailing Wall. Upon inspection, half of them were no more than teenagers, their heads draped in silken white yarmulkes, their uncombed black hair reaching down to their eyes, their gangly bodies slack from village life. "Is that your girlfriend?" one of them asked, pointing to Nana, bouncing ambivalently toward us. "Is she Jewish?"

"What, are you crazy?" I cried. "That's Nana Nanabragovna!"

"We can get you a nice local girl," another recommended. "A Mountain Jew. Pretty like Queen Esther, s.e.xy like Madonna. After you marry her, she'll do all kinds of things. Half of them on her knees."

"Dirty little kids." I sniffed. "What do I care for religion? All women are equally good on their knees."

"Suit yourself," the teens replied, parting deferentially before an old man who was leaning against Avram, his dark face drowning in the white fuzz of a beard gone awry; one of his eyes was forever closed to the world, the other blinking a bit too insistently, his mouth producing squirts of s...o...b..r and happiness with the speed of an American soda fountain. "Vaaaainberg," he crooned.

"This is our rabbi," Avram said. "He wants to tell you something."

The rabbi gently spat at me for a few seconds in some incomprehensible local patter. "Speak in Russian, grandfather," Avram said. "He doesn't know our tongue."

"Whooo," the rabbi said, confused. He rubbed the yellowing sponge that covered his brain and made an effort at the Russian language. "Your fardur woooze a great persons," he said. "A great persons. He help us get built this wall. Looka how big."

"My father helped build this wall?"

"Give us moneys for brick. Buy palm from Askhelon. No problem. He hate Arabs. So we make plaque."

One of the smoking men by the wall moved aside and tapped an index finger at a handsome brown sign upon which I could immediately discern the eagle swoop of my father's strong nose, the unhappy hieroglyphics that the artist had shaped into his left eye, the bramble of crosshatching that outlined the joy and sarcasm of his thick lower lip. TO BORIS ISAAKOVICH VAINBERG TO BORIS ISAAKOVICH VAINBERG, the plaque read. KING OF ST KING OF ST. PETERSBURG PETERSBURG, DEFENDER OF ISRAEL DEFENDER OF ISRAEL, FRIEND TO THE MOUNTAIN JEWS FRIEND TO THE MOUNTAIN JEWS. And below that, a quote from my father, in English: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

The smoker extended his hand. I noticed his fingers were covered with faded blue-green tattoos, testifying to many lengthy Soviet prison terms. "I'm Moshe," he said. "I spent many years with your fardur in the Big House. To us Jews inside, he was like our fardur, too. He was always love you, Misha. He talk only about you. He was your first lover. And n.o.body will love you like that never again."

I sighed. I was feeling wobbly and teary and overcome. To find my father's face looking down at me in this antediluvian outpost of Hebraity...Look, Papa. Look how much weight I've shed in the last few weeks! Look how much we resemble each other now in profile. There's nothing of my mommy left in me anymore. I'm all you now, Papa. I wanted to trace the outline of his face with my finger but was intercepted by several of the middle-aged Jews, who also wanted to shake my hands and tell me in their broken Russian what gay, thoughtful times they shared with my Beloved Papa, both inside and outside the Big House, and how, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, they worked together to make "bigger and bigger moneys day after day." I wanted to trace the outline of his face with my finger but was intercepted by several of the middle-aged Jews, who also wanted to shake my hands and tell me in their broken Russian what gay, thoughtful times they shared with my Beloved Papa, both inside and outside the Big House, and how, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, they worked together to make "bigger and bigger moneys day after day."

We heard a strange teakettle sound from the rabbi, the rumble of phlegm trying to pa.s.s through a nose bent by age. "He's crying," Avram explained. "He's crying because he's honored to see such an important Jew here in his village. There, grandfather. It's all right now. Soon everything will pa.s.s. Don't cry."

"The rabbi's getting a little lost in the head," one of my father's friends explained to me. "We sent for a new one from Canada. Twenty-eight years old. Fresh as a radish."

"Vaaaainberg," the rabbi sang once more, touching my face with his hand, a clump of earth and garlic.

"This poor man lived through Stalin and Hitler," Avram said of the rabbi. "The Sevo had him sent to a labor camp in Kamchatka when he was twenty. Seven of his eight sons were shot."

"I thought the Sevo tried to save the Jews," I said. "Parka Mook told me-"

"Are you going to listen to that fascist?" Avram said. "After the war, the Sevo tried to have all of our men sent to the gulags so they could take over our villages. We had the plumpest cows, and our women are freckled and have very thick thighs."

Nana had clasped her hands around the rabbi's crinkly, fragrant body and was happily interrogating the old man in Russian: "Is it true, sir, that the Mountain Jews are the descendants of the original Babylonian exile?"

"We are-a?"

"Well, that's one theory. Don't you keep a written record, Rabbi?"

"A what-a?"

"Aren't you Jews supposed to be the People of the Book?"

"A who-a?"

"Don't bother the old man," Avram said. "We Mountain Jews, we're not known for our learning. Originally we raised livestock, and now we trade goods in bulk."

The rabbi resumed sniffling, the criminals smoked down their Newport Lights, the teenagers gossiped about the world's s.e.xiest Jewesses. I looked at my father's profile. I looked at his former prisonmates (He was your first lover), at the kind, flummoxed old man clinging to my elbow, at the sacred brick wall in front of us, and at the last quote my Beloved Papa had left for the Mountain Jews. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Had my papa known that he was plagiarizing Malcolm X? Papa's racism was a thing to behold, impenetrable, subsuming, all-encompa.s.sing, an epic poem. Could he have independently reached the same conclusion as a black leader of the Nation of Islam? I thought of what my father had told me when I returned to St. Leninsburg. "You have to lie, cheat, and steal just to make it in this world, Misha," he had said. "And until you learn that for a fact, until you forget everything they taught you at that Accidental College of yours, I'm going to have to keep working as hard as I can." I thought of my Rouenna, piling all her hopes upon my warm fat body, and then, after I had been imprisoned in Russia, trying to make a life with Jerry Shteynfarb. I thought of the Mountain Jews and their side-by-side statues of Georgi Kanuk and Sakha the Democrat, the murderer and the murdered. I thought of all that I had seen and done in my last two months in Absurdistan.

A shard of crystal broke in me. I fell to the ground and threw myself around one of Avram's prehistoric ankles. The Jews turned to look into my dumb blue eyes, and my dumb blue eyes looked back at them. "Thank you," I was trying to say, although nothing came out. And then, with increasing levels of pleading and helplessness: "Oh,

EPILOGUE.

The Corner of 173rd Street and Vyse Our hosts put us up in a half-built mansion that resembled a four-story crenellated doghouse with a satellite dish hanging off the roof. Our bedroom was cavernous and empty, like a train station right before dawn. Nana's face lay against my shoulder-despite her youth, she was already suffering from the mild stages of sleep apnea, her throat muscles clenching, her pretty face vainly biting at pockets of cold mountain air.

In a corner of the room, a lime-green musical insect was starting up Stravinsky's Symphony in C. Otherwise all was silent. I crawled to my stomach, then crawled to my knees, then crawled to my feet. I walked out of the house. The cobblestone alleys were empty of all creatures. The lights in the modernistic synagogue had been extinguished, and the flag of the 718 Perfumery beat silently against the store's weathered facade. The main street was also devoid of life except for the 24 Hour Internet Club. Inside the club, as one would find in a similar establishment in Helsinki or Hong Kong or So Paulo, a dozen overweight teenage nerds typed away on their keyboards, one hand held tight against a carbonated beverage or a meat pie, their thick oversize gla.s.ses aquariums of gray, green, and blue. I said shalom shalom to my fallen brethren, but they barely grunted, not willing to interrupt their electronic adventures. I bought an aromatic crepe rolled with cabbage, parsley, and leek and tore it to shreds with my teeth. to my fallen brethren, but they barely grunted, not willing to interrupt their electronic adventures. I bought an aromatic crepe rolled with cabbage, parsley, and leek and tore it to shreds with my teeth.

Dear Rouenna, I typed when my turn came. I typed when my turn came.

I'm coming for you, baby girl. I don't know how I'll do it, I don't know what terrible things I will have to perpetrate against others to achieve my goal, but I will come to New York City and I will marry you and we will be "2gether 4ever," as they say.

You've done me wrong, Rouenna. It's okay. I'll do you wrong, too. I can't change the world, much less myself. But I know that we are not meant to live apart. I know that you're the one for me. I know that the only time I feel safe is when my little purple half-khui is in your tender, tangy mouth. is in your tender, tangy mouth.

You're touching your belly as you read this. If you want to have Shteynfarb's child, go ahead. He will be my child, too. They are all my children as far as I'm concerned.

What else can I tell you, baby bird? Study hard. Work late. Don't despair. Get your teeth cleaned and don't forget to see your gyno regularly. Whatever happens to you now, boo, whether you carry to term or not, you will never be alone.

Your porky russian lover, Misha

Back in the mansion, I tried to stir Timofey to his senses, but he refused to let go of his precious sleep. I slapped him lightly. He looked at me with sleep-crusted eyes. His breath tickled my nose. "At your service, batyushka, batyushka," he said.

"We're leaving Nana behind," I said. "She can cross the border the next day. We're flying out of here without her."

"I don't understand, sir," Timofey said.

"I've changed my mind," I said. "I don't want her. And I don't want her people. We're not going to Belgium, Timofey. We're going to New York. By any means necessary."

"Yes, batyushka, batyushka," Timofey said. "As you wish." We sneaked into the bedroom to fetch my laptop and tracksuits. I looked at Nana's contorted face, her plump tongue rolling back into her throat, her arms spread out like the Good Thief on his cross. I still loved her very much. But I wouldn't bend down to kiss her.

An hour later, we are wading through a gray sludge-filled river, the failed nation of Absurdistan now entirely at our backs. In the distance, beneath the sliver of the young moon, a similar Moslem crescent flies over the sentry tower of a neighboring republic. I carry my laptop high over my head; Timofey sweats beneath my heavier luggage; Yitzhak, the nice boy who wants to play basketball with blacks in New York, waves a white flag and shouts something in the local tongue, a string of consonants that quarrel with the occasional stray vowel. When we hit dry land, we start running toward the sentry tower, waving our white flag, my Belgian pa.s.sport, the recognizable gray square of my laptop.

Rouenna. With each step I am getting closer to you. With each step I am racing toward your love and away from this irredeemable land. With each step I am getting closer to you. With each step I am racing toward your love and away from this irredeemable land.

Let's be honest. Summers in New York City are not as romantic as some would think. The air is stagnant and stinks alternately of sea, clotted cream, and rained-upon dog. But early September is still warm and succulent in your arms. I've been thinking, Ro. We should buy one of the few remaining row houses on Vyse or Hoe Avenue, something grand and decrepit, Victorian or perhaps even American Gothic, a wide veranda beckoning the children of the nearby housing projects.

Look around us. The old men playing dominoes for money; five-year-old Bebo, Franky, Marelyn, and Aysha kicking around a dusty football; their older cousins skipping the world's most artful double Dutch; teenage moms and dads talking s.e.x at each other across the stoops, calling their little ones tiguerito, tiguerito, "little gangster"; the sneakers hanging off the telephone poles; the tricked-out Mitsubis.h.i.+ Monteros pumping salsa across the streets; the moms reading the coupon pages like newspapers; the stores with no name but "little gangster"; the sneakers hanging off the telephone poles; the tricked-out Mitsubis.h.i.+ Monteros pumping salsa across the streets; the moms reading the coupon pages like newspapers; the stores with no name but PLAY LOTTERY HERE PLAY LOTTERY HERE; the roses sticking out of the iron grilles of housing-project windows.

In our bas.e.m.e.nt, the laundry machines and dryers are spinning. You pa.s.s me a rolled-up ball of baby socks, warm to the touch. Our household is large. There will be many cycles. Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I want to thank the following New Yorkers: my friend Akhil Sharma for exceeding duty's call and for his careful shearing of this ma.n.u.script; Daniel Menaker, my brilliant editor and mensch nonpareil, for shepherding me to greener pastures; Matt Kellogg, a young man who knows his words, for a.s.sisting in Dan's shepherding; and Denise Shannon, my agent, for a keen critical eye and for keeping me solvent all these years.

The Ledig House International Writers Residency in upstate New York has always been there for me when I needed a green place to write and think.

The best parts of this book, such as they are, were written under the care of Beatrice von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, her remarkable writers' retreat near Donnini, Italy.