The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (11 page)

One hundred and fifteen thousand rubles. A huge, but not impossible, sum. Years to save for, but within the realm of possibility, like a vacation to Belarus. I’m already scheming ways to defraud the Interior Ministry when she says, “Dollars.”

My heart spirals and crash-lands somewhere deep in my gut. At thirty-three rubles to a dollar, the number is insurmountable. Nadya reaches for her purse and pulls out an envelope.

“What I owe you for the trip. Help me count it out,” she says. For a moment her instinct to trust anyone, even me, is infuriating. Isn’t suspicion the natural condition of the blind? Haven’t I warned her, told her to be careful, that she can’t rely on anyone? But by some perversion she’s become more trusting, more willing to believe that people aren’t by nature hucksters and scoundrels, which is why, I suppose, my VHS collection is rounded out with
Gentlemen of Fortune
.

“It’s nothing,” I say.

“I’m paying you back.”

“If you want to be a martyr go join them in the woods.”

“Help me count it out,” she insists, her voice stern, cool,
serious. “I still have money left from the disability fund. I’m not a charity.”

Of course there’s no disability fund. Of course the government isn’t sending her a monthly payment or subsidizing the flat adjacent to mine. The cash sealed in the Interior Ministry envelopes I bring over on the first of the month comes from me, as does her monthly rent.

“I’m waiting,” she says. We both know this is a farce. But I sit beside her. I play my part in the lie that preserves the illusion that our friendship, our romance, whatever this is, is based on affection rather than need. I count out the bills that I will return to her in an Interior Ministry envelope on the first of the month, and when I finish we shake hands as if our business is concluded and there is nothing left that we owe each other, no debt unpaid, no obligation unfulfilled.

In bed I run my fingers through what remains of her hair, press my fingertips to her cheeks, slowly scrolling, as if I am the blinded of us, to decipher the dense Braille scrawled across her face. I slide my hand down her torso, over the bulge of her left breast, the hook of her hip bone, to thighs so smooth and unmarked they’re hers only in darkness. She rolls away.

Lying here in bed, you nearly forget the falling rockets, the collapsing museum, the air of the clean sky impossibly distant, the cinder blocks shifting like ice cubes in a glass. The Zakharov was in your hands when you found her, her face halved by burns, her teeth chattering. You nearly forget how you lifted her cheek to cool it with your breath, how her broken eyes searched for you as you held her.

You nearly forget the many times you have warned her of monsters as though they are a people apart: lurking beyond her doorway, ready to prey on the blind and vulnerable. As she turns from you, tucking the sheets beneath her hip, you nearly forget to ask yourself, “What monster have I become today?”

I
N
the morning I return to my flat and find the canvases on the floor where I left them. Daylight grants the scorch and char an odd beauty, as if the fires hadn’t destroyed the artworks, but revised them into expressions of a brutal present. I pick up the nearest canvas, a family portrait commissioned by a nobleman as a wedding present for his second son. The top third of the canvas has been incinerated, taking with it the heads of the nobleman, his wife, the first son, and the newly betrothed, but their bodies remain, dressed in soot-stained breeches and petticoats, and by their feet sits a dachshund so fat its little legs barely touch the ground, the only figure—in a canvas commissioned to convey the family’s immortal honor—to survive intact.

I hang the canvas on the wall from a bent nail and step back, marveling that here, for the first time in my career, I’ve hung a work of modern art. After pulling the furniture into the kitchen, I hang the remaining canvases throughout the living room, finally coming to the restored Zakharov, which I consider taking back to the closet, shelving in the darkness where it will exist for me alone, but my curatorial instincts win out, and I hang the Zakharov on the wall where it is meant to be. The street children long ago stole the last of my door signs.
I scrawl one more on a cardboard shingle and nail it to the door:
Grozny Museum of Regional Art
.

Now for guards. I toss a crumpled hundred-ruble note down the stairs, thinking that they, like the Sunzha trout, are too hungry to pass up a baited hook. A small hand reaches around the corner, and I grab it, yanking on the slender arm to reel in the rest of the child. He squirms wildly, biting at my wrists, until I shake him into submission and offer him a job in museum security.

He stops squirming, perhaps out of shock, and I close his hand around the hundred-ruble note. His fingernails look rusted on. His shirt is no thicker than stitched-together soot.

“Bandits are stealing the signs from my door,” I tell him. “I’ll pay you and your friends three hundred rubles a week to keep watch.”

Over the following weeks, I bring all my tours through the museum. A delegation from the Red Cross. More Chinese oilmen. A heavyweight boxing champ. A British journalist.
This is what remains
, the charred canvases cry.
You cannot burn ash! You cannot raze rubble!
As the only museum employee besides the street children, I give myself a long overdue promotion. No longer am I deputy. As of today, I am director of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.

T
HE
newly installed phone rings one morning and the gloomy Interior minister greets me. “We’re properly fucked.”

“Nice to hear from you, sir,” I reply. I’m still in my sleeping
clothes and even for a phone conversation I feel unsuitably dressed.

“The Chinese are out. They traded their drilling right to Rosneft for a few dozen Russian fighter jets.”

I nod. It explains why China hadn’t sent their most shrewd or sober representatives. “So this means Rosneft will drill?”

“Yes, and it gets even worse,” he heaves. “I may well be demoted to deputy minister.”

“I was a deputy for many years. It’s not as bad as you think.”

“When the world takes a dump, it lands on a deputy’s forehead.”

I couldn’t deny that. “What does this mean for the Tourist Bureau?”

“You’ll have one more tour, then it’s safe to say you’ll need to find new employment. Oleg Voronov. From Rosneft.”

It took a beat for the name to register. “The fourteenth richest man in Russia?”

“Thirteenth now.”

“With respect, sir, I give tours to human rights activists and print journalists, people of no power or importance. I’m not qualified to give a tour to a man of his stature. Why does he even want a tour?”

“My question precisely! Apparently his wife, Galina Something-or-other-ova, the actress, has heard of this art museum you’ve cobbled together. What’ve you been up to?”

“It’s a long story, sir.”

“You know I hate stories.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, do show him our famed Chechen hospitality. Be sure to offer him a glass of unboiled tap water. Let’s give the thirteenth richest man in Russia an intestinal parasite!”

“Don’t worry, sir. I’m a limo driver.”

“I’ll land on my feet, Ruslan. Don’t lose too much sleep over my future. Perhaps I’ll visit America. I’d like to see Muskegon while I’m still young and healthy enough to really experience it.”

T
HREE
weeks pass and here he is, Oleg Voronov sitting in the backseat of the Mercedes with his wife, the actress Galina Ivanova. Up front is his assistant, a bleached-blond parcel of productivity who takes notes even when no one is speaking. But try as I might, I’m unable to properly hate Voronov. So far he’s been untalkative, inattentive, and uncurious; in short, a perfect tourist. Galina, on the other hand, has read Khassan Geshilov’s
The Origins of Chechen Civilization
and recites historical trivia unfamiliar to me. The office doors of dead administrators clatter beneath us and she asks thoughtful questions, treating me not as a servant, or even a tour guide, but as a scholar. I casually mention the land mines, the street children, the rape and torture and indiscriminate suffering, but Voronov and his wife shake their heads with sympathy. Nothing I say will turn them into the masks of evil I want them to be.

The tour concludes at my flat. I’m hesitant to allow a man of his stature into the small world of my museum, but his wife insists. As we ascend the stairwell, Voronov checks his watch,
a cheap plastic piece of crap, and in that moment I know I will not hate him as he deserves to be hated.

“This is what remains of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art,” I say as I open the door. Voronov and his assistant circle the room. I glance to the kitchen sink, but a glass of unboiled tap water is a fate I wouldn’t wish upon even a Russian oligarch.

Voronov and Galina pass the burned-out frames to the pasture painting. “Is this the one?” he asks her. She nods.

“A Zakharov, no?” he asks, fingering his lapel as he turns to me. “There was an exhibit of his at the Tretyakov, if memory serves.”

Only now do I see clearly the animals I have invited into my home. “The fires destroyed most of the original collection when the museum was bombed. We sent what was saved to the Tretyakov.”

“But not this?”

“Not this.”

“Rather reckless, don’t you think, to leave such a treasure on an apartment wall guarded only by street urchins?”

“It’s a minor work.”

“Believe it or not, my wife has been looking for this painting. It has special meaning for her. I know, I know. I married a sentimentalist.”

“Could I offer you a glass of water?”

“You could offer me the painting.”

I force a laugh. He laughs too. We are laughing. Ha-ha! Ha-ha! It’s all a joke. “The painting is not for sale,” I say.

He stops laughing. “It is if I want to buy it.”

“This is a museum. You can’t have a painting just because you want it. The director of the Tretyakov wouldn’t sell you art from his walls just because you can afford it.”

“You are only a deputy director and this isn’t the Tretyakov.” There’s real pity in his voice as he surveys the ash flaking from the canvases, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, and yes, now, at last, I hate him.

“Come now, I have a penthouse gallery in Moscow. Temperature and moisture controlled. First-rate security. No one but Galina, and a few guests, and I will ever see it. You must realize I’m being more than reasonable.” In a less than subtle threat he nods out the window to the street where his three armed Goliaths skulk beside their Land Rover. “What is the painting worth?”

“It’s worth,” I begin, but how can I finish? What price can I assign to the last Zakharov in Chechnya, to the last image of my home? One sum comes to mind, but it terrifies me. Wouldn’t that be the worst of all outcomes, to lose both the Zakharov and Nadya in the same transaction? “Just take it,” I say. “You took everything else. Take this too.”

Voronov bristles. “I’m not a thief. Tell me what it’s worth.”

My gaze floats and lands upon the bumper sticker of
WWJCD?
inscribed within the body of a fish. What would he do? Jim Carrey would be brave. In the end, no matter how hard, Jim Carrey does the right thing. I close my eyes. I don’t want to say it. “One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. U.S.”

“One-fifteen?”

I nod.

“That’s what, three-point-seven, three-point-eight million
rubles? Let’s make it an even four,” Voronov says with a single fleshy clap. His wife still hasn’t looked away from the painting. He turns to his assistant who has followed him around the room, taking notes all the while. The assistant unyokes herself from a mammoth purse, pulls out eight stacks of banded five-thousand-ruble bills, and lays them on the floor. “Never trust banks,” Voronov says. “You can have that advice for free. It’s been a pleasure.” He slaps my back, tells the assistant to bring the canvas down with her, and heads for the door.

Then he’s gone. Galina remains at the Zakharov. Even now as I’m losing it, I’m proud my painting can elicit such sustained attention.

She nods to the stick-figure silhouettes of my wife and child, smiling as she dabs the corners of her eyes. “You wouldn’t understand, but someone I once loved died in this field.”

She pats my shoulder and walks to the door.

Then she’s gone and I’m left alone with the assistant whose saccharine perfume smells of vaporized cherubs. I close my eyes and try to imagine the darkness extending into permanent night, to imagine our lives as dreams we tumble through, but I can’t imagine, because even at night I know morning will come, and even with my eyes clamped I know I will open them. What will Nadya see when she opens hers? Who will she see when she sees me?

“And you’ll have to give us a curatorial description,” the assistant says. “Something we can mount on a placard.”

She passes me the notepad and I stand before my painting for a long while before I begin.
Notice how the shadows in the meadow mirror the clouds in the sky
, I write.
Or the way the leaves of
the apricot tree blow in the same direction as the grass on the far side of the meadow. For such a master, no verisimilitude is excluded. Notice the wall of white stones cutting an angle across the composition. It both gives depth and offsets the horizon line. On the left side of the canvas, running up the hill, you will see channels of turned soil. One could assume they are freshly dug graves, or recently buried land mines, but look closer and see they are the furrows of a newly planted herb garden. The first shoots of rosemary already peek out. In this painting, Zakharov portrays all the peace and tranquility of a spring day. The sun shines comfortably and hours remain before nightfall. Toward the crest of the hill, nearing the horizon, you may notice what look to be the ascending figures of a woman and a boy. Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist. They are no more than his shadows. They are not there.

CHECHEN HIGHLANDS
, 2000

T
hey crest the ridge with a thump and roll onto a green terrace as the Shishiga engine gasps twice and dies. Danilo, a contract soldier, body built like a flour sack and brain wired like a bargain firecracker, curses the Shishiga, then Jesus’s mother, and doubles down on both by shooting three at the engine block and three at the clouds. Their bad luck began years before they broke down in rebel-controlled territory, but no luck is so bad that Danilo can’t make it worse: Flames flutter through the hood’s bullet holes. Still, part of Kolya is relieved to climb down from the truck and that part is his stomach. The closest paved road lies fifty kilometers behind them, and the boulder-strewn path they’ve summited has more dips and swells than a tempest. Three thousand meters above ocean level and Kolya’s doubled over with seasickness.

“You are a disgrace to your people!” Danilo shouts as he upends his canteen on the smoking engine block. “Engines like this, engines made of tin cans and sheep shit, are the reason Putin drives a Kraut car.” He ticks off Teutonic inhumanities inflicted on western civilization: Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler,
Claudia Schiffer. “A country whose main export is bad ideas and they still manage to build better engines than us.”

Folded at the waist in mid–dry heave, Kolya watches the scene upside-down through his spread legs. It’s the only way to look at the world that makes much sense to him these days. Danilo, son of a mechanic, has a history of abusive relationships with most of the unit’s vehicles, so Kolya isn’t surprised when he begins sweet-talking the shot-up engine. With no small effort, Kolya rights himself and looks around. A green staircase of terraces ascends the ridge. Far below, a ragged trail of white rocks tapers into a backwash of muddied branches. They’re in fuck-knows-where Chechnya, on an operation that might be the stupidest Kolya has ever encountered in a career that’s been a highlight reel of futility. Behind one of these jade lumps is a block-headed colonel in need of body bags. Not in itself an unreasonable request. But Kolya knows the colonel wants to build a
banya
and in terms of insulation, nothing invented by God, man, or Germany can contain steam better than the heavy black plastic of a Federal Army body bag.

Kolya returns to the truck. Danilo moves back behind the wheel. He coaxes the ignition, pumps the gas. The starter motor gags. Danilo gives Kolya a slow shake of his head. “It won’t start.”

“Because you shot it,” Kolya says.

“Your point?”

“No point,” Kolya sighs. Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points. It’s as comforting as believing in Ded Moroz, but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he
either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence. “No point at all.”

“Once I got shot while I was jerking off and you know what I did?”

“Depends where you got shot.”

Danilo gives him a don’t-doubt-me glare. “I manned up and I finished, Kolya. It was easy with that photo of your mom in the leopard-print bikini.”

Kolya elbows him in the kidney.

“Don’t worry,” Danilo says. “I folded it so you and your little bro were out of view. And I didn’t get a drop of blood on it.”

“It’s not blood I’m worried about.”

“Point is, I finished my mission. Unlike this goddamn engine.” Danilo slams his fist into the steering column and Kolya waits it out before suggesting they reevaluate their options. They climb out from the truck and unfold their map on the ground. Kolya had made it by taping sheets of notepaper over command’s computer monitor, tracing pictures of antique maps of Chechnya, and then pasting the sheets together in what he hoped was the right order.

“Which way’s north?” Danilo asks.

Kolya pulls out a compass that points north no matter which direction he holds it. “Which way do you want it to be?”

“We should check the map,” Danilo surmises.

They check the map. Having forgotten to include a legend within the map itself, they examine the map, squint at the horizon, quarter-turn the map, frown at the horizon, and repeat a half-dozen more times without discovering any of the map on the land or any of the land on the map.

“We can’t find north on the map and we can’t find north where we are. We are more than fucked,” Kolya says.

“The map’s fucked. We’re fine.” Danilo scans the ridge. “That fat old bastard’s got to be here somewhere. It’s supposed to be a day’s drive, right? We’ve been driving, what, five hours? That’s a day, right?”

Kolya’s from the wrong side of the Arctic Circle, from Kirovsk, where a winter day is a fifteen-minute glow on the horizon. “Sure,” he says.

It’s clear they’ll have to set out on foot. They have a radio, but it hasn’t worked in several years and they carry it as a good luck charm more than anything; even in that capacity, it isn’t working. They pack up as many of the body bags as they’re able, to prove they aren’t deserters in case a patrol picks them up. With two body-bag-stuffed parachute duffels, and whatever provisions and extra ammo they can pocket, they set off.

They only make it fifty meters when Danilo drops his parachute bag. “Hold up,” he says and jogs back to the Shishiga to empty the rest of his clip into the engine block. The eight staccato blasts multiply off the valley walls in a brief but thunderous applause for Danilo’s coup de grâce. When Danilo returns, he looks much more chipper.

“Was that necessary?” Kolya asks. He should be irate with Danilo for wasting the ammo, but more seriously, for announcing themselves to any rebel in a ten-kilometer radius. It’s April 2000 and the army has sealed the bulk of the Chechen insurgents within the topographical confines of the southern mountains, an area into which generals issue demands with the ineffectual bluster of zookeepers shouting into a cage. But Kolya
can’t summon the appropriate anger. Whatever life-preserving instincts evolution endowed him with have been war-blunted to an amused disregard for all mortality, particularly his own.

“Don’t you worry yourself,” Danilo says. “We know two things about our revered colonel. First, that he loves his
banyas
. Second, that he’s a cur-hearted coward less likely to see action than my left hand. If he’s around here, then here is as safe as my grandmother’s lap.”

Kolya wouldn’t put much trust in anyone involved with raising Danilo. But he shoulders his parachute duffel and his Kalashnikov and follows Danilo into the valley.

T
HEY
spend the night zipped inside the body bags. In the morning Kolya drinks from a stream that runs clearer than any faucet he’s ever known. Upon closer inspection, it’s not a stream but an ancient irrigation canal that continues to water the terraces a century after the soil was last tilled. They decide to march downhill and Kolya points the busted compass toward the valley to officially make it the right direction. Trees prosper on the valley floor and dwindle to waist-high grasses as they climb another ridge. Vertical seams of white stone split the green slopes at haphazard intervals. The soreness in Kolya’s heels is less a physical pain than a physical fact he’s as familiar with as the color of his eyes.

Beyond the next ridge an emerald field gradually unrolls, dead-ending into trees. With binos, Danilo scans the straightedge of woodland cutting across the meadow. They go quickly and somewhat ridiculously, bent at the waist in a crouched
shuffle as if the open field has been rolled into a tight tunnel. Discrete packets of panic burst in Kolya each time the wind shifts the grass, or the shadow of a bird cuts over the ground. He focuses on his breathing to delay an oncoming anxiety attack. Over the past year he’s developed a deep mistrust of open spaces and now can’t cross anything wider than a doorframe without wondering if he’s walking into a sniper’s scope.

When they reach the tree line, Danilo snaps up his arm with tight-lipped alarm.

Kolya freezes.

Danilo farts.

“Devil,” Kolya mutters, cuffing Danilo on the shoulder. “You’ll give me a heart attack before the rebels ever get me.”

“Oh no,” Danilo says. His face, often formed of diagonals—slanted eyebrows, sneered lips, sloped cheeks that together resemble a crudely drawn demon—completely wilts.

“Fuck off,” Kolya says.

“It won’t be a heart attack.” Danilo nods into the forest, where Kolya catches sight of a dozen rebels gathered around the remains of a campfire. They hold their rifles in their right hands, bowls of kasha in their left, apparently alerted by Danilo’s flatulence. Twelve barrels stare up at Kolya, and the fear that had loosened its grip in his chest since he crossed the field now crushes his heart with both hands.

They drop their parachute bags and raise their arms as they are relieved of their weapons, ammo, and boots. The man patting Kolya down misses the cassette tape buttoned into his shirt pocket. The rebels sport full beards, slender waists, and mud-spattered plastic and leather sandals. One wears a green
headband squirming with Arabic script. The one patting Kolya’s calves for concealed sidearms has the straightest, whitest teeth he’s ever seen. The scrawny kid with almond eyes doesn’t have the beard of an insurgent yet, but Kolya knows that’s what he is, deep down, just as he’d feared himself capable of murder long before he ever picked up a gun.

“
Kontraktniki
,” the rebels whisper. From their tattoos and black sleeveless shirts, Danilo and Kolya are obviously mercenaries rather than conscripts. The rebels deal with captured conscripts—all poorly trained and terrified teenagers—more leniently than contract soldiers, who collectively conduct themselves like Russian Rambos with less discriminate aim.

A tall, silent man in a Tesco T-shirt kicks Kolya’s legs from under him and binds his wrists from behind with wire. He lies on the ground beside Danilo. Behind them, younger insurgents sift through their belongings. The tall one doesn’t leave their sides. We’ll die today, Kolya realizes, but rather than horror or surprise, the realization hits him like the first breath after a long, dark dive under water.

The tall man spreads open two body bags in front of Kolya and Danilo. “Get in,” he orders.

Danilo begins to protest, but a swift rifle butt to his temple interrupts the plea. Kolya watches two younger rebels fold Danilo into the black plastic body bag like a poorly tailored suit into a garment bag. The second bag lies open on the ground, and with a sigh, he climbs in legs first and is zipped up.

They lie there for an indeterminate interval while the rebels talk in Chechen. The body bag traps all of Kolya’s heat. The whole goddamn thing smells like the inside of his boot. There’s
a two-centimeter gap in the zipper and he puts his mouth to it as if to a nipple and sucks. He keeps waiting for the sifting of dirt, the ring of spade on rock, and when several strong hands lift the corners of the body bag, his throat clenches and he thinks:
this is it, this is it, this is it
. But rather than falling, he is raised. Rather than dirt, he feels the ribbed plastic of a truck bed slide under him.

The ignition thrums to life. German make, no doubt. The truck jolts forward.

The seconds unspool and in the dank darkness Kolya finds himself wondering what Danilo’s wife is doing at that moment. Where she is, what she’s wearing, what thoughts are dreaming their way through her mind. Only four men in the unit are married and their wives have become communal. In small Siberian towns, those four wives will never know that in Chechnya they’re polygamous, that soldiers they’ll never meet yearn for and wish after them. Some compose long love letters, never sent. Others rewrite their wills to bequeath their modest possessions—a hunting knife, an ammo belt—to women known only in their imaginations. Danilo’s wife had grown up in Irkutsk as the granddaughter of a barber rumored to have once trimmed Stalin’s mustache. As a child she’d wanted to play the violin, but the violin teacher had taken one look at her cigar-stub fingers and told her to take up the trombone instead, even though she was a girl. That trombone might’ve saved her life when grain shortages hit the city: Party bigwigs wanted a healthy horn section on call for fanfares in case someone from Moscow visited, so she received upgraded ration coupons while the violin teacher went hungry. She has wet-grass green eyes
and a Prometheus disco light set. All throughout childhood her father told her that only a mousetrap offers free cheese, but she’d already left home and couldn’t repeat the proverb back to him when he decided to invest his life’s savings in a bank account that promised a five-hundred-percent annual return. She can still perform patriotic fanfares when required, but prefers big-band jazz, and when she plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” her single trombone sounds like a twelve-piece band. From the raw materials of Danilo’s stories, Kolya has built himself a life with her. Believing in the unconditional love of a woman he’s never seen, never met, is the closest he’s ever felt to God’s grace.

He rolls over and speaks through the two-centimeter gap. “You there?”

Danilo rolls over too. They’re lying side by side, bagged bodies nearly touching, passing a single breath back and forth through the small slit in their zippers. The truck lurches beneath them.

“I guess I am,” Danilo answers. They both know better than to speculate on what’s to come.

“Hum that song about the marching saints for me,” Kolya whispers. But whatever Danilo hums is lost in the wind-whipped velocity of the accelerating truck.

They don’t speak again, but the muggy lightless coffin becomes less oppressive to Kolya when he thinks of Danilo suffering too. Minutes and hours lose their edges inside the body bag, and Kolya has no idea how much time has passed when the truck stops. With a heave, Kolya is carried thirty paces. “One, two, three,” a voice counts in Chechen, and then Kolya
is weightless, aloft, and falling. Two seconds later the impact knocks the breath from his lungs and his left shoulder from its socket. His breath finds its way back a few moments before his shoulder. He lies there in the body bag, paralyzed with pain, waiting for the first clump of dirt to scatter over him. A descending scream and a hard thump announces Danilo’s arrival. Kolya goes to work on the zipper with his teeth and eventually pulls it far enough to fit his head through.