This is a book about love. The next 338 pages are dedicated with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth to my Beloved Papa, to the city of New York, to my sweet impoverished girlfriend in the South Bronx, and to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
This is also a book about too much love. It’s a book about being had. Let me say that right away: I’ve been had. They used me. Took advantage of me. Sized me up. Knew right away that they had their man. If “man” is the right word.
Maybe this whole being-had deal is genetic. I’m thinking of my grandmother here. An ardent Stalinist and faithful contributor to Leningrad Pravda until Alzheimer’s took what was left of her senses, she penned the famous allegory of Stalin the Mountain Eagle swooping down the valley to pick off three imperialist badgers representing Britain, America, and France, their measly bodies torn to shreds in the grasp of the generalissimo’s bloody talons. There’s a picture of me as an infant crawling over Grandma’s lap. I’m drooling on her. She’s drooling on me. The year is 1972, and we both look absolutely demented. Well, look at me now, Grandma. Look at my missing teeth and dented lower stomach; look at what they did to my heart, that bruised kilogram of fat hanging off my breastbone. When it comes to being torn to shreds in the twenty-first century, I am the fourth badger.
I’m writing this from Davidovo, a small village populated entirely by the so-called Mountain Jews near the northern frontier of the former Soviet republic of Absurdsvanï. Ah, the Mountain Jews. In their hilly isolation and single-minded devotion to clan and Yahweh, they seem to me prehistoric, premammalian even, like some clever miniature dinosaur that once schlepped across the earth, the Haimosaurus rex.
It’s early September. The sky is an unwavering blue, its blankness and infinity reminding me, for some reason, that we are on a small round planet inching its way through a terrifying void. Roosting atop the ample redbrick manses, the village’s satellite dishes point toward the surrounding mountains, whose peaks are crowned with alpine white. Soft late-summer breezes minister to my wounds, and even the occasional stray dog wandering down the street harbors a satiated, peaceable demeanor, as if tomorrow it will emigrate to Switzerland.
The villagers have gathered around me, the dried-out senior citizens, the oily teenagers, the heavy local gangsters with Soviet prison tattoos on their fingers (former friends of my Beloved Papa), even the confused one-eyed octogenarian rabbi who is now crying on my shoulder, whispering in his bad Russian about what an honor it is to have an important Jew like me in his village, how he would like to feed me spinach pancakes and roasted lamb, find me a good local wife who would go down on me, pump up my stomach like a beach ball in need of air.
I’m a deeply secular Jew who finds no comfort in either nationalism or religion. But I can’t help feeling comfortable among this strange offshoot of my race. The Mountain Jews coddle and cosset me; their hospitality is overwhelming; their spinach is succulent and soaks up their garlic and freshly churned butter.
And yet I yearn to take to the air.
To soar across the globe.
To land at the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse, where she is waiting for me.
My Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Dr. Levine, has almost disabused me of the idea that I can fly. “Let’s keep our feet on the ground,” he likes to say. “Let’s stick to what’s actually possible.” Wise words, Doctor, but maybe you’re not quite hearing me.
I don’t think I can fly like a graceful bird or like a rich American superhero. I think I can fly the way I do everything else—in fits and starts, with gravity constantly trying to thrash me against the narrow black band of the horizon, with sharp rocks scraping against my tits and stomachs, with rivers filling my mouth with mossy water and deserts plying my pockets with sand, with every hard-won ascent brokered by the possibility of a sharp fall into nothingness. I’m doing it now, Doctor. I’m soaring away from the ancient rabbi clinging warmly to the collar of my tracksuit, over the village’s leafy vegetables and preroasted lambs, over the green-dappled overhang of two colliding mountain ranges that keep the prehistoric Mountain Jews safe from the distressing Moslems and Christians around them, over flattened Chechnya and