The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (12 page)

“Where are we?” Danilo asks. They’re in a pit, what might have once been a wide well. The stone walls rise six or seven meters to a tight circle of sky. It’s wide for a well, but not wide for a prison, two and a half meters across, he guesses. He squirms out of the body bag and unzips Danilo’s. Sitting back to back, they untie each other’s wrists.

T
HE
weeks shrink from seven days to five, counted first on Kolya’s left hand, then his right, then Danilo’s left hand, then his right. Each morning a pair of sun-browned hands appears at the lip of the pit to lower jugs of water that become latrines by noon. Disks of bread fall from the sky and plop into the dirt with disorienting irregularity. At two weeks, Kolya and Danilo are nearly as bearded as the rebels who tossed them in here. At three weeks, a matchbook-size soap bar drops. It’s from a Saudi hotel. Kolya dips it in a water jug but can’t summon a single bubble from the stupid thing. Danilo grabs it from him. Peeling off his shirt, Danilo shows Kolya the bullet hole in his left shoulder where he’d been shot mid-jerk. It’s hardened to a pink coin of scar tissue. Danilo has six others scattered over his
torso and legs and surrounding each are homemade tattoos of irises, lids, and lashes. When Danilo bends to try the bone-dry bar on his feet, his back stares up at Kolya.

On cold nights Kolya climbs into his body bag and zips it to his chin. Although the two body bags are demonstrably identical, Kolya has grown attached to his. He’s tried to personalize it, to tear through the sealed seams, to write his name in mud on the canvas carry handles, all token efforts to inflict enough change on his one possession to convince himself that he’s actually alive, that this isn’t some metaphysical holding pen, because a few days in the bottom of a pit with Danilo has taught him all he needs to know about eternity. Sometimes Kolya thinks of his captain, Feofan, a man who always wears his uniform, even to sleep. Behind his back the soldiers would joke that he’d collapse on the ground like loose straw without his fatigues to give him shape. The body bag has begun to feel to Kolya what the uniform must feel to Feofan.

When he’s exhausted all other memories, he thinks of home. The lake of industrial runoff ringed by gravel where one summer he had sunbathed with his mother and younger brother, pretending they were on a Black Sea vacation. The nickel furnaces blurting endless exclamation marks of smoke. The pollution so dense nickel is extractable from snowdrifts. The raw-fish pinks and reds of dusk, where clouds of sulfur and palladium clot the sky. Here starlight domes the open pit. Kolya was eighteen when he saw stars for the first time. It had been his first night in Chechnya.

He still has the mixtape his brother gave him before his first tour.
For Kolya. In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1.
Searching
for a cassette player down here is as pointless as hoping for an electrical outlet on the moon, but he keeps the gift close, wondering what his brother has spooled on its gears. It’s the only question he has that he might someday answer, his reminder to live long enough to hit play.

One morning the leathery hands appear at the pit lip, this time holding a yellow rope knotted with handholds. In training, Kolya climbed a rope twice its length in thirty seconds. It takes him two minutes to summit this one. The two brown hands that mean to Kolya both captivity and nourishment are attached to a squat elderly man with a ferocious mustache. In one hand he holds a black Makarov, the handgun favored by Kolya’s own superiors. In the other he holds two sets of leg cuffs.

“A gift from one of your generals,” the old man says, eyeing the gun proudly. He tosses the leg cuffs between them. Kolya closes his eyes and focuses on the sun’s saturating warmth. The bottom of the pit receives only a half hour of direct sunlight a day and Kolya feels he has emerged from a long Arctic winter and stepped directly into June’s bright beam.

The old man leads them past a white stone house, past a collapsed toolshed, to a sloping field. Without boots, the field is their best avenue for escape. “Land mines,” the old man says, snuffing Kolya’s dim hope. A blast hole is sunken halfway up the hill. “You’re welcome to try.”

He takes them to a bed of weeds a little way off where two shovels angle from the ground. “Begin,” he commands.

This is it, Kolya thinks. We’re digging our graves. Should they run? Should they try to overpower the old man? They
could hit him in the face with the shovel before he could shoot them both. He tries to catch Danilo’s eye, but Danilo harbors no great zeal for staying alive, and come to think of it, neither does Kolya. The leg cuffs make it difficult to get much leverage on the shovel, but he manages to get three decent scoops before the old man stops him.

“Russian,” the old man mutters as if the language, culture, and people are a curse word. He takes the shovel from Kolya, kicks it into the ground, and goes to one knee to yank weeds from the loosened soil. He extracts the green clumps and then sifts through the dirt for their white veiny roots. When finished, he pulls a few seeds from his tunic and scatters them in the hole. Realizing that only seeds will be buried here, Kolya sighs, loud enough for the old man to glance up and smile.

That night, Kolya gets hard for the first time in weeks. “Did your wife send you any photos of her yet?” Kolya asks Danilo, pointing to his crotch with both index fingers. Some mornings Kolya sizes Danilo’s wife’s nipples to the coins in his pocket, and then slips the one- or two-ruble coin between his lips, closing his eyes and tonguing the coin vertical against his front teeth while he jerks off, hearing Danilo’s wife moan, telling him to lick faster, suck harder, and he always complies, because this is the closest he will ever come to the woman he loves, and the sharp brass sweating from the coin is a taste to remind him of who he is, to remind him that he is loved, a taste to savor and preserve by forgoing food and water for the rest of the day. Kolya has never seen Danilo’s wife, but Danilo claims she’s pretty enough to do porn, which as far as Kolya knows is the highest compliment you could pay someone from Irkutsk.

“Nope, but I still got that picture of your mom in the leopard-print bikini,” Danilo says.

Kolya looks to the pyramid in his lap. His dick feels like the densest of all his calcium-starved bones. It’s been so long since he’s seen a woman that any would do. Danilo passes Kolya the wrinkled photograph, still folded so Kolya and his younger brother are out of view. Kolya shakes his head. If someone had told him he’d one day be living in a pit and jerking off to a photograph of his mother, well, he’d probably have tried harder in school. In fact, he’d rethink just about all the choices he’d made if only to ensure access to a clean bed and some decent pornography.

“No shame to it,” Danilo says, seeing Kolya’s hesitation. “The ancient Greeks were always trying to fuck their own mothers. And those sickos invented civilization.”

For a moment Kolya feels so far gone he could do it. But he’s two hundred clicks from anywhere he’d call civilization and the moment passes. He folds the photograph and slips it into his pocket. “Tell me a story about your wife instead,” he says.

“I’m not telling you about my wife while you get off. We’ve got to have some kind of boundaries.”

“No, tell me something nice. Tell me again about when you met her.”

Danilo sighs and tells the story Kolya’s heard so many times it’s become a song he knows by heart. Danilo had already dropped out of his final year of school when he met the young woman who would one day become his wife. She was with one group of friends, he with another, and their quick glances were
invitations to an event both were too nervous to attend. After she left, Danilo learned that she’d moved to Irkutsk from some corner of Siberia even colder and more remote. He started going back to school just to talk to her. He kept asking her out and she kept saying, “Another time,” and he kept going to school to keep asking her. Danilo had wanted a date and ended up with a high school diploma. She said, “Yes,” just before the graduation ceremony. Kolya is there beneath the auditorium’s shadow-faded heights. Kolya follows her onstage. The audience applauds. He smiles, bows, and falls into a dreamless sleep.

A
S THE
weeks pass, Kolya and Danilo wire-walk the line between captives and guests. The leg cuffs they donned the first time out of the pit are still fastened, though looser given the weight they’ve lost, and brittle enough to break with a good hammer strike. But the old man has granted them greater freedom. In the mornings they work the garden, weeding, planting, fertilizing, according to the old man’s instruction. They sow the herb garden that extends to the base of the mined hill. The single crater, halfway up the hill, sucks into it lingering fantasies of flight. Sometimes Kolya seats his hand in an unearthed clump of soil and watches earthworms and roller-upper bugs, an unnameable underworld of blind little bastards that rise through the dirt to promenade on his open palm, and he’s drawn back to that time in his life when he still had the chance to become someone else and is momentarily freed from who he is. At midday the old man brings him a bucket of water and greasy flatbread. Sometimes they talk for a few minutes,
finding common ground in the institutional incompetence of both their respective armies.

In the afternoons, he and Danilo rebuild the collapsed shed or the white stone fence. The evenings are theirs. Escape is a vague, undefinable goodness, and they discuss it abstractly, as they would God. Sure, they could easily handle the old man, but then what? Then they’re just two bootless idiots lost in the mountains. At least with the old man alive, they’re prisoners of war. Danilo finds a length of fishing line among the debris of the shed and fastens it to the end of the yellow rope. When the old man pulls up the rope each evening, the fishing line dangles into the pit like a rip cord they’d only use in a genuine emergency.

One day while harvesting
kalina
berries for the old man’s sore throat, they spot a Shishiga trundling through the forest toward the dacha. As it approaches, they make out the bullet holes in the hood where Danilo had shot it. They sprint for it, as much as one can sprint in leg cuffs. When the old man emerges from the dacha with his hands raised not in surrender but in greeting, Kolya’s ballooning hope ruptures. When a soldier jumps from the truck and clasps the old man in friendship, it deflates entirely.

“Vova?” Danilo calls when they’re close enough to recognize the soldier. The soldier takes two steps forward, cocks his head, and frowns. Behind him the old man fiddles with his prayer beads, unconcerned.

“It’s me. Danilo.”

Vova is the type of Omskman remembered for his weak chin and little else. He’d started as a conscript, leaping to contract soldier only six months earlier, which made him the runt
of the unit and the target of Danilo’s bullying. Vova smiles. “That’s you under all that beard, Danilo?”

“What is this? You’re here to rescue us, right?” Danilo asks.

“No, not this time,” Vova says with so much pleasure he turns to the truck bed to conceal it. There he hoists a bucket of bullets. “We didn’t know what happened to you. Found the truck, but no Danilo or Kolya. Give me a hand with these, will you?”

Kolya and Danilo each carry two buckets of loose ammo to the shed they’ve rebuilt over the past several weeks. They’re Russian army bullets, manufactured in Russia, where they’ll one day return sealed first inside dead Russian soldiers, then inside black body bags.

After watching them hump rifles and red petrol jugs to the shed with a cheerful smirk, the old man gives Vova an envelope stuffed with green currency. Vova quickly counts the bills. “Anything you’d like me to pass on to Captain Feofan?”

Danilo stares, dumbfounded. “Tell him to get us the fuck out of here!” He pauses, for a moment unable to find the words to liberate them from the curlicue of logic that imprisons as totally as their ankle cuffs. “The captain can’t evacuate his bowels without first putting in paperwork to Moscow. You better contact my wife too.”

While Danilo writes his wife’s details on one of the mint U.S. bills, Vova asks the old man for a ransom price. The old man leans against his cane, stroking his mustache thoughtfully. He looks to Kolya. “This one is very good in the garden. He works with care and diligence. The garlic will be wonderful this year. A thousand U.S. for him. As for the imbecile,” he
says, turning to Danilo, “you can have him for a barrel of cooking oil.”

Danilo raises his index finger in objection to the price disparity before thinking better of it. “Can you lend us the money, Vova? So we can buy ourselves now?”

The weak-chinned Omskman beams. Apparently he hasn’t forgotten the drunken night when Danilo made him wear a dead woman’s dress. “The slave trade is unlawful,” he says. “As your comrade, I cannot allow you to engage in it.”

“W
E DIDN
’
T
ask Vova if the colonel ever got his
banya
,” Kolya says that evening at the bottom of the well.

“I bet they sent two more idiots in a truck full of body bags the day we didn’t arrive. He’s probably steaming the fat from his ass right now.”

“Why did you sign the contract?” Kolya asks, a few minutes later. Danilo frowns at the question. With reason. You don’t ask questions about life before the war unless you already know the answer, and the answer better involve drunken antics and irresponsible sex.

“First time was to get out of jail,” Danilo answers plainly. “Ten years in prison or two down here. After those first two years, my wife and I married and moved into this tiny studio flat. I wanted to stay up late drinking and she wanted to get up early to practice trombone. You just can’t do both well in a studio flat. So I signed on a second time. I told her it was so we’d have enough to afford a place with two rooms, but really I just
wanted some peace and quiet. Don’t know why I thought I’d find it in a war. Never the brightest pennant in the parade, as my dad liked to remind me.” Danilo closes his eyes and a quiet expression of yearning irons the wrinkles from his face. “I told myself so long as she insists on blowing her horn before noon, I’ll keep signing whatever these brass-button motherfuckers push in front of me. That’s just how love works.”