Accidental
Odysseus
A Novel
By Mark Budman
Synopsis:
Piotr,
a Russian immigrant in
If this is not enough, his Aunt stuffed a family diamond, the Ziggurat, in one of seven throw pillows, and they are lost, dispersed all over the country. The lovable con man Vadim, a former compatriot, offers to help him find the diamond. Piotr agrees, because he is desperate, and because Vadim has earned his trust by saving his life. In their quest, the mismatched fellowship of the diamond meets vegans and Rabbis, students and rednecks, farmers and poets, unemployed and millionaires. In the end the Ziggurat loses some of its luster, but Piotr and Vadim find courage, friendship, self-sacrifice, and, above all, unconditional love from two American women, a love they hope they deserve.
Wry,
observant, and charming, "Accidental Odysseus" is a satire of
American life as newcomers to this country see it. The novel is a modern riff
on the classic Russian novel THE TWELVE CHAIRS known to the American audience
by its Mel Brooks' screen adaptation. The tone of "Accidental
Odysseus" brings to mind Aleksandar Hemon’s NOWHERE MAN and Gary
Shteyngart’s THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE’S HANDBOOK, as well as John Kennedy Toole's
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Cinematographically, it’s similar to Guy Ritchie’s
movie “Snatch.”
This is the opening of the
novel:
On the very day that spring morphed into summer, Piotr
Osipovich Voronin, Russian by birth, American by necessity,
stood holding onto the street light
pole on a busy corner of
language, “Ground Turkey: Dollar a
pound,” called to him from
across the street. Perhaps it was
an urban mirage, the bending
of light rays, an illusion
generated over a long stretch of
pavement heated by intense
sunshine. Even so, he could not
refuse it. Not only because he was
a trusting soul, an indelible
quality despite a lifetime of best
efforts, but also because his
stomach spoke loudly and
shamelessly to anyone willing to
listen. Piotr let go of the pole and stepped onto the pavement.
Two heartbeats later, he heard a loud screech of an angry
downtown deity that someone else,
more down-to-earth than Piotr,
would have recognized as an old
model Dodge. He turned toward
it, and saw what looked like the
object of his soul’s lust, his
diamond, his Ziggurat, gaining on
him, firing the sun’s
reflection into his eyes. Another mirage? Impossible! A grin
split Piotr’s face, and he raised
his hands to catch his
treasure.
A strong hand grabbed the collar of his stained tweed
jacket and pulled him back to the
sidewalk. The top button of
Piotr’s wrinkled blue shirt popped off and his tie tightened
uncomfortably. He lost his breath
and the ability to reason.
“Easy, buddy,” a pleasant voice said in English, in an
accent
that Piotr instantly recognized.
“Watch the traffic.”
A car idled a foot or two away from
them, and a teenage driver
in a tilted baseball cap that said
“Instant Idiot. Just Add
Alcohol” was shouting obscenities at Piotr. The
diamond-shaped
ornament on the hood, or at least
what looked like a diamond to
Piotr, shone in the bright
and a most American one at that.
Piotr’s muscles turned as soft as ground turkey. He offered
a
courtly nod to the finger-flipping
teenager, watched him drive
away, and turned to face his
savior. The man was almost as tall
as Piotr, perhaps a hundred
eighty-eight centimeters, or,
speaking in American terms,
six-two, a muscular individual with
olive skin, pomaded black hair and
green eyes that seemed to
extract Piotr’s brain from his
skull for careful examination. He
was a youngster, under thirty. His
face consisted of sharp
angles except for his square chin.
He wore a black turtleneck
under a gray
diamond stud pierced his left ear.
He had the charisma of a
animal magnetism. The Russians call
it simpatichny.
While Piotr’s eyes were absorbing details, his brain was
busy
imagining his body shoved into an
ambulance, dead on arrival at
the hospital, and then lying, even
thinner and paler than usual,
in a casket made of the cheapest
wood. Piotr hugged himself with
both hands, as if he had had
already been dumped into the grave.
“Don’t thank me,” the stranger said. “I find roadkill a waste.”
Piotr didn’t know what ‘roadkill’ meant in English. His
tongue barely moved in his dry
mouth. He was very wet on his
back and forehead.
“I have to thank you, Monsieur,” Piotr addressed the man in
Russian, in the tradition of a well-bred 19th century gentleman.
Piotr was, after all, the descendant of a prince. “You saved my
life,” he said.
“Monsieur?” The stranger also
switched to the language of
Tolstoy and V. I. Lenin. “What’s
wrong with sir, man? Or how
about just plain old tovarisch?”
Piotr opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” the man said. “You’re kind of
pale.”
He took Piotr’s wrist and checked his pulse. The stranger’s
hand
was warm, strong and confident. A
thin snake was tattooed on his
index finger.
“I’m grateful to you for saving my life,” Piotr managed to
repeat. He wished to leave, but he
had no place to go and he
didn’t want to insult his
rescuer.
“How grateful?” The man let go of
Piotr’s hand and stared
into his eyes.
“Pardon me?”
“My favorite type of
gratitude is money. It’s meaningful and
precise.”
A train passing on the rails above the street drowned out
his
last words. Then a thunderclap engulfed even that sound.
Piotr didn’t know how to react. Though the man looked
benign, Piotr was reasonably sure
that
well-dressed, charismatic robbers,
kidnappers and scam artists.
He had to be careful. A gypsy had told him once that he
would
have a long life, but Piotr never
trusted foreigners.
“Don’t be alarmed, Monsieur,” the man said with a disarming
smile. “I’d settle for you buying me lunch.”
The rain began, forcing Piotr to make up his mind.
Flanked by sad-eyed men in cloth caps, plump women
slathered in makeup, and crew-cut
hoodlums shielded by leather
jackets, Piotr and his rescuer
walked the asphalt of the
Rollerblading teenagers in torn jeans zoomed by. They passed by
the entrance of the apteka, a
pharmacy, which advertised
cucumber oil, psychic healing
(bring a color photograph), and
Canadian drugs. They passed by the
window of a shoe boutique,
with its mannequins clad in
metallic sandals, leather mules and
nothing else. They passed by a
video store displaying a poster
of a Russian actress in a bikini
and a space helmet, her crimson
nails tight around the long barrel of a raygun.
By the time they entered Odessa Mama, Piotr was soaked,
but his savior seemed to repel the
water. The air-conditioning
breathed asthmatically and music
blared in their native tongue.
It smelled of stale tobacco smoke, sour cabbage and spilled
alcohol. Photographs of a man with
the rosy face of an aging
piglet posing with various
dignitaries, adorned the walls. The
wall under the photograph next to
Piotr’s table was dented. A
bullet hole? He didn’t care
anymore.
The only other customers were two chattering teenaged girls.
They were heavily made up, pierced
and tattooed, and annoying as
the soup-of-the-day pitch. They
spoke a mixture of Russian and
English, and even familiar words
sounded oddly inflected to
Piotr.
The waitress stood by with her
hands folded on her chest.
As Piotr and his new acquaintance crawled through the menu,
her
lips stretched into a resigned
smile of Sisyphus who just had
rolled up the stone on the top on
the hill and waited for it to
fall.
They ordered and the waitress left
the table, moving her hips
with the precision of a misaligned
machine. Piotr followed her
with his eyes, more from instinct
than desire.
“I’m Vadim Belkin,” the savior said. “And you are?”
“I’m Piotr Osipovich Voronin,” Piotr said, separating his
bottom
from the sticky vinyl seat of the
chair—forcing it to emit a
sound half way between a moan and
breaking wind—and bowing. He
didn’t offer his hand, afraid that
Vadim would squeeze it too
hard, and instead adjusted the tie
he had bought on his arrival
to
stranger’s hands were most probably
unclean. Then he realized
that Vadim had already touched him.
In the pocket of his jacket,
Piotr had a bottle of tea tree oil, a potent germ killer,
and he
would apply it to his hand
liberally as soon as possible.
“Still using patronymics, Piotr Osipovich? How long have you
been here?”
“Seven months and three
days.” Piotr leaned back and
scratched his carefully combed
brown-gray hair. He had only one
hundred thirty dollars and a few
rubles in his pocket, his
entire capital, and he wasn’t eager
to part with a single dime
or kopeck. Yet a gentleman
had to do what a gentleman had to do.
Stepping off the path of reciprocal altruism was worse than
poverty and death.
“Ah, a veteran. I’ve only been here
for half a year. How is your
English?”
Piotr smiled politely. Around
with only a few English words, but
Piotr knew several hundred,
and generally wasn’t hesitant to
string them together in front
of a native speaker. It helped that
many words had crept into
the lexicon of New Russia in the
last twenty years: “buck,”
“killer,” “weekend,” “show,”
“fitness,” “center,” “yuppie,”
“login” and “hacker.” Still, this
Vadim spoke better English
than he did.