Free Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

strangle them with my very hands!”
    I turned away from her, looking instead to Sarah, the pretty Jewess, the prize of our people, proffering us a collection of her saddest smiles and also something smooth and pale and blooming in her hands. Gardenias.
    Soon it was time to bury Papa.

 
    7

    Rouenna in Russia
    Ghetto Daze, Part II
    “I didn’t come all the way to freaking Russia to look at no oily paintings, Snack,” Rouenna said. We were in the Hermitage, in front of Pissarro’s
Boulevard Montmartre on a Sunny Afternoon.
Rouenna was flying out the next day, and I had thought she might want to check out our city’s unequaled cultural patrimony.
    “You don’t want no oily…?” I stammered. We had spent five years loving each other in New York, and I still had no idea how to respond to the vagaries of Rouenna’s mind, which in my imagination resembled a gorgeous ripe sunflower being pummeled in a summer storm. “You don’t like late-nineteenth-century impressionism?” I said.
    “I came here to be with you,
bobo,
” she said.
    We kissed: a 325-pounder in a vintage Puma tracksuit and a brown woman in a push-up bra. I could feel the
babushka
guards creaking with racial and aesthetic indignation, but that only made me kiss Rouenna harder as I ran my big, squishy hand along her arched back and into the open crevice of her two-fisted ass.
    We heard a cough filled with phlegm and suffering. “Behave yourself in a cultured manner,” an old voice instructed.
    “What the bitch say?” Rouenna asked.
    “The old people will never understand us,” I sighed. “No Russian ever can.”
    “So we outie, Snack?”
    “We outie.”
    “Let’s go home and cuddle.”
    “You got it, shorty.” During her two weeks here, I had tried to show Rouenna a picture of life in St. Leninsburg in 2001. I’d bought us a motorboat and a sea captain and taken her around the canals and byways of our Venice of the North. She’d let out a few “ooohs” and “dangs” and “aw, dips” at some of the more spectacular palaces, their fading pastel coloring more appropriate for South Beach than for just south of the Arctic Circle. But, like most poor people, she was less a sightseer at heart than a dedicated economist and anthropologist. “Where the niggaz at?” she’d wanted to know.
    I assumed she meant people of modest means. “They’re everywhere,” I said.
    “But where the
real
niggaz at?”
    I didn’t want to take her to the outer suburbs, where I hear people are subsisting practically on rainwater and homegrown potatoes, so I took her to the nether reaches of the Fontanka River, the quasi-industrial area our grandparents called Kolomna. I hasten to paint a picture of this neighborhood for the reader. The windswept Fontanka River, its crooked nineteenth-century skyline interrupted by the postapocalyptic wedge of the Sovietskaya Hotel, the hotel surrounded by symmetrical rows of yellowing, waterlogged apartment houses; the apartment houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks featuring, in no particular order, a bootleg CD emporium, the ad hoc Mississippi Casino (“America Is Far, but Mississippi Is Near”), a kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab salad, and the usual Syrian shawarma hut smelling invariably of spilled vodka, spoiled cabbage, and some kind of vague, free-floating inhumanity.
    “This is what I’m talkin’ about,” Rouenna said, looking around, breathing it all in. “South Bronx. Fort Apache. Morrisania. Fuckin’ A, Misha. And you’re saying these just average folks?”
    “I guess,” I said. “I don’t talk to the common people much, really. They look at me like I’m some kind of freak. In New York, when I get on the subway and homeys see my size, they give me respect.”
    “That’s ’cause you look like a rap star,” Rouenna said, kissing me.
    “That’s ’cause I
am
a rap star,” I said, licking her lips.
    “Behave yourself in a cultured manner,” a passing
babushka
spat