The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (14 page)

A half-moon sits low in the star-buttoned sky. An ache relays down Kolya’s vertebrae as he sits up, from his neck to the base of his spine. “We need to prepare. Need a map, provisions. More than anything we need boots,” Kolya points out.

Danilo gives Kolya a deadened stare. “I’m leaving tonight.” Without further explanation, he begins filling his body bag with handfuls of dirt. When Danilo has filled it with a narrow body of soil, he stands and assesses his work. “Good enough.
You should do the same, Kolya. They’ll think we’re just sleeping in tomorrow.”

Kolya is zipped in to his waist. He presses his head back against the white stone wall, draws meaningless shapes in the dirt floor. This well, this pit has become for him a burrow. He considers the endpoints of escape—reenlistment, death, home—and the happiest outcome he can envision is this, right here, recaptured and resentenced to work a peaceful plot of land. It’s as much as he can hope for right now. He’s lived longer than he ever expected, longer than he has any right to live, and he’s tired. His twenty-third birthday is still three weeks away.

“You’ll have to take this mission solo,” Kolya says. Danilo studies Kolya for a long moment, then pulls the photo of Kolya’s bikini-clad mother from his pocket and offers it. Kolya unfolds the two wrinkled wings where he and his brother stood, shirtless and swimsuited, arms locked around their mother’s pale, fleshy waist. He can’t remember who had taken the photo, or when, or where, or why. He can barely recall that little family, that three-citizen-republic bordered by the Polaroid frame. If he were to unbutton his pants right now, he wouldn’t feel the faintest twitch of shame.

“Don’t give that picture too much of a workout,” Danilo says. He pulls the fishing line rip cord with a dramatic flourish and the knotted yellow rope flops over the edge of the pit. Kolya folds the photo into a tight pellet and tosses it to Danilo when he reaches the top. “Send that to my brother. Tell him you’re the asshole who escaped.”

He keeps the mixtape,
For Kolya, In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1
, buttoned in his breast pocket. There’s still time, he tells himself, to hear what it has to say.

D
ANILO
catches the folded photo, gives Kolya a half-cocked salute, and wades into the India-ink night with his shirt wrapped around his leg cuffs to muffle the clatter. His escape routes are limited. He could try the hill, and whatever lies beyond its crest, but it’s mined. He could try the stone path the rebels drove up on, but that would be the first place they’d search for him. The woods, he decides, are his best bet. He’s nearly reached them when something slashes from the ground into his right foot. Pain pulsates from the ball of his foot, up his leg, through his chest, exiting through his throat in an involuntary gasp. It must be a land mine, he thinks as he buckles into the grass. But there is no explosion, no flame, just silent agony enveloping his foot. He bites down on his wrist to steady his breathing and examines his foot. Blood spits from the wound and drips down a deeply lodged trowel blade. He takes the blade in both hands. With a terrific wrench, he withdraws the blade and the void fills with an agony so searing that white light flashes on the backs of his closed eyelids. Before his adrenaline expires, he crawls to the tree line.

Under a screen of floppy green leaves, Danilo collapses. His foot has been replaced with some awful instrument whose only purpose is to hurt. A breath rises from the cellar at the center of his chest and leaves his lips in a shrill, unfamiliar cry. He lifts his hands to the trees in surrender. “I give up,” he announces,
no longer caring if the rebels hear him, no longer caring about anything. When did he begin telling people that his secondary school crush was his wife? There must have been a moment of deliberate deception, but his mind has been so jumbled for so long he can’t discern now. He can see his wedding so clearly. He wore a thirty-thousand-ruble suit. She couldn’t stop kissing him. They honeymooned in Moscow, posing for photographs in front of the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s and GUM. His father emerged from wherever he had disappeared to ten years earlier and shook Danilo’s hand saying, “I was wrong about you.”

The night is a sweat-slick fever dream. His wife stands at the well-scrubbed sink, wearing the paisley apron he bought her one spring day four and a half months after New Year’s and four and a half months before her birthday, the day of the year when she was farthest from presents, and thus, the day Danilo most wanted to give her one. She’s wearing the paisley apron that had made her flush with happiness when she unwrapped it from pink tissue paper, not that the paisley apron was itself responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks, no apron wrapped in pink tissue paper has ever brought anything but disappointment to the recipient, rather Danilo was responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks because he had counted the days from New Year’s and then counted the days to her birthday, and calculated the day in her annual orbit at which she was farthest from presents, and surprised her with a paisley apron that on New Year’s or her birthday would have disappointed her, but on that particular day, in that particular pink tissue paper, made her feel unbelievably loved. She’s wearing the paisley apron and she’s standing at the well-scrubbed sink
and her back is to him so he cannot see her face. She’s standing at the sink in an apron and carving dark bruises from a potato with a paring knife. She carves away the dark bruises until so little potato remains it could fit in a teaspoon. “Even these rotten ones have a little good in them,” she says and tosses the nub into the boiling pot, standing at the well-scrubbed sink, her back to him so he cannot see her face, wearing the paisley apron all the while.

A single gunshot launches him from dreams of his wife and into stark morning light. His pulse leaps with jungle-cat acceleration. He’s just behind the tree line, where he passed out in the night. When he figures out that the gunfire isn’t directed toward him, he examines his foot. The wound has clotted into a black slit from toes to arch. Another spurt of gunfire. He drags himself until he can see a half-dozen rebels standing at the bottom of the mined hill. The spindly one angles his Kalashnikov skyward and fires another shot. Beside him, the old man smooths his rebellious mustache with one hand and holds a large, unwieldy book in the other. Marooned alone in the middle of the hill, thirty meters up, Kolya kneels.

For a moment, Danilo assumes the rebels are firing at Kolya, but the gunman has his rifle pointed at the morning sun and shoots to encourage Kolya, rather than kill him. On his knees, Kolya claws at the ground. He seems to take direction from the old man, who uses the fat art book as a map. They’re making him dig for mines, Danilo realizes. But no, that’s not it either, because Kolya pulls a handful of something from his pocket—dill seeds?—sprinkles them over the holes he’s dug, and begins repacking the dirt.

A cement-thick heaviness hardens in Danilo’s stomach as he realizes that Kolya is being made to extend the herb garden up the mined hill. As punishment for Danilo’s escape? He doesn’t want to know. He bandages his foot with folded green leaves. During the next spray of gunfire, he slams the trowel head into his leg cuffs. The rusted metal chain snaps on his third try. He spreads his legs for the first time in months and a wonderful relief seeps along his tendons. The undergrowth cushions his wounded foot and he hobbles away as fast as the pain allows. The scent of butter-fried potatoes hangs sweetly in the air. His wife is setting the table for lunch. An explosion echoes from the mined hill and enters the forest, but it’s nothing, only a plate falling from the table. Little pieces of flowery porcelain lie everywhere. His wife tucks in her apron and drops to one knee. With open arms she gathers them all.

ST. PETERSBURG
, 2010;
KIROVSK
, 1990
S

G
alina called to say she had bought me a first-class ticket to Moscow, and then she said that my brother was dead. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d never even received first-class mail since the postal service introduced it six years ago, let alone a first-class train compartment. As for Kolya, well, he’d been dead for years.

She lived in a top-floor penthouse with a chest-tightening view, lined with thick white carpets that may have been polar bear pelts. Wealth announces itself with what’s easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises. Jasmine and plum perfumed the air. A crooning tenor went into histrionics on the Bose. Dozy bronze Buddhas meditated on the bookshelf. I was wondering if artsy-fartsy types in Tibet fetishize crucifixes when Galina returned, her loosely tied kimono yawning at the chest and knees.

“My. God.
Who
is your hairstylist?” she asked.

In truth, I’ve never had a haircut that’s fit my head. One-Eyed Onegin used to give my head the once-over with the clippers, but depth perception isn’t his strong suit. Plus I’m pretty sure he uses them to shave his pubes.

“I don’t really have one.”

“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Very avant-garde.”

If a stopped clock is right twice a day, a bad haircut is right twice a decade.

It had been longer than that since I’d last seen Galina, since my brother left for his first tour and she became a celebrity and they never saw each other again. It’s easy to forget what someone really looks like when you see them everywhere. On billboards her face is airbrushed as smooth and shiny as an inner organ, and she has a bust-waist-hips ratio that is found in nature only inside the mind of a Dr. Frankenstein with Adobe Photoshop training. But the Galina standing there in a slab of noon light, made up and manicured, in a fancy kimono that ten million silkworms gave their lives for, looked more person-like than the Galina of the billboard, tabloid, or screen.

“It’s been the most brutal morning, Alexei,” she said. People who have it easy are always telling you how hard it is.

“You’ve been following the earthquake in Indonesia?” I asked.

“What? No, a trollop from the Royal Shakespeare Company landed the Russian seductress-spy role in the new Bond film. Probably shagged Leo the Lion to get the part.”

“I’m sure you’d have gotten it if anyone in Hollywood had seen
Deceit Web
,” I offered encouragingly. Her gaze dive-bombed to the floor. Some people you just can’t cheer up.

“I know I should count my blessings, but that’s what accountants are for.”

“Must be weird being you.”

“It’s a strange thing, Alexei. When we were teenagers, I’d never even imagined living in a penthouse with a chauffeur and a chef and a butler. But now that I have it, it’s nothing. Am I
aw
ful for saying that?”

“Just a little.”

“Life’s a little awful, I’m afraid. Pitiful creatures spinning on a senseless rock around a dying sun in a cold and uncaring cosmos and they
still
won’t give me the Bond movie. Fighting over matches while the world burns, no?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was trying to decide if it was rude to take a fifth
konfeti
when she still hadn’t taken one. Nope, definitely not.

“So how’ve you been? You’re not still in university, are you?”

“I am,” I beamed. Through sheer grit and tireless effort, I’d managed to stretch a five-year philology degree into its tenth annum. It was a loaves-and-fishes variety of miracle. The universe may be cold, dark, and indifferent, but in university you get to take club drugs all night and sleep all day. “I’m working on my thesis paper. On
Odessa Tales
. I have my title, ‘Babel’s Babbles,’ but that’s about it.”

“Any good?”

“I haven’t read it,” I said. “I don’t want the text to influence my interpretation.”

A sixth confection dissolved into a starchy paste that sopped the saliva from my tongue. We were quiet for a little while.

“You heard about Lydia?” I finally asked.

All the blush in a beauty box wouldn’t’ve brightened Galina’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said. Her eyes fixed on a safe, vacant patch of wall over my left shoulder. “Alina told me about her and her mother, and of course your brother. Then Olga told me. Then Lara. Then Darya. Then Zlata. And Tamara must’ve told me a dozen times”—the six-member gaggle that feasted on crumbs fallen from the table of Galina’s celebrity; Lydia had been their seventh member—“I don’t even know how they get my number. I change it every few months, mainly to avoid them, and they still somehow find it. The Americans should hire them to track down Al Qaeda. Ten minutes on the phone with Tamara is enough to make anyone disavow their most sacred beliefs”—she lit an incense stick that smelled of lavender fields doused in sunshine— “but anyway, Lydia. Let’s be honest, never the sharpest bayonet in the battalion, was she? I’m not saying she should’ve known better than to confide in them. But, come
on
. You could confide a secret to a megaphone and it would stay quieter. I’ve tried to make a film of her murder, but it’s easier coaxing a mouse down a cat’s throat than a decent script into production.”

“It’s a tragedy,” I said. “For Lydia, for Vera, for Kolya, for—”

“You don’t need to tell me. It’s a national embarrassment, really, our film industry. If there is an afterlife, then the circle of hell just below the Satan-Judas-Brutus gang bang is reserved for development executives, I mean—”

“Why am I here?” I shrank a little in the crosshairs of her narrowed eyes. She wasn’t used to being interrupted.

“A good question, Little Radish, taking us to the heart of the matter—though why those with the most free time are the
stingiest with it, I’ll never know.” She scooted her chair toward my side of the table. She even made
scooting
sound sexy. I was pretty sure she wanted me to become her paramour. I’m flattered, I’d tell her, but I can’t do that to my brother, Kolya, even if he’s dead. She’d dissolve into inconsolable weeping, saying if she couldn’t have me she had no reason to go on. Buck up, I’d tell her. I’d kiss her right on the lips—
with
tongue—and she’d swoon, obviously. Then I’d walk out the door without looking back.

“So listen,” she said, sliding her hand across the table until the space between her fingers and mine was as thin as a butterfly wing. “I went to Chechnya a few years back. With Oleg. He had some business there, drilling oil and his assistant. The tart. While he was out doing that, I visited a few army hospitals and bases. I thought starring in a Great Patriotic War biopic was enough, but no, my publicist
insisted
that I had to actually talk to the poor devils. A pair of jackboots away from being a
wunderbar
stormtrooper himself, my publicist. Anyway, I asked an army official about your brother.”

“I’ve asked after Kolya with every army official in every army office with a listed address and phone number. No one knows anything.”

“You’re just the sweetest, aren’t you?” Her eyes iced over. “When you’re an important person, you can ask a question and even an army bureaucrat will answer.”

She reached across the table and sealed my fingers within the warm envelope of her hand. Her pulse clicked against my wrist like a telegraph message her heart had sent me to decode. My nerve endings gasped.

“I was told that he was taken prisoner and died on that field”—she nodded to the wall where a frame of golden dollops and curlicues wrapped around a simple painting of a pasture—“The field is something of a local landmark because it was the subject of this painting by some nineteenth-century artist. Rather dreary place if
this
is its most majestic vista. But it used to hang in a museum, so it must be important. I bought it.”

I left a trail of footprints in the plush white carpet as I approached the painting. It wasn’t much to look at, which is about all you can do with a painting. An empty pasture cresting into a hill. A small house. An herb garden. A waist-high wall of white stone meandering at a diagonal. But in a patch of plugged-in canvas the size of a halved playing card, two slender shadows ran up the hill. One was a head and a half taller than the other. A slender bar of green grass separated their dark hands, and I couldn’t tell if they were reaching for each other or letting go.

“Kolya died here? On this hill?” I asked.

“That’s what the army adjutant said.”

I turned back to the painting, to the two stick figures running up the hill, limbs unfurled. “Who are they?”

“I’m really not sure. I should’ve asked the prior owner when he called last year, asking for it back for a retrospective on Zakharov. Up in your stretch of the forest, actually. The Teplov Gallery, in Petersburg? I told them precisely where they could stick their request, and it wasn’t in their mailbox, mind you. The nerve. Sell you a painting one day, then ask you to donate it back the next. No more than vipers in ascots, these academics.”

A placard hung to the side of the painting. The final lines
read
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
.

My palms had dampened when I returned to the table. “You remember the mixtape we made for Kolya, before he went to Chechnya the first time?” I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but I’ve often thought about that tape.

She gave the widest smile. It was the first genuine sentiment she’d expressed that morning. “Devil, I’d forgotten. Then again, I try to forget about everything from Kirovsk. I was a mess back then, wasn’t I?”

She wanted me to say
no
, so I said, “Yes.”

“Let’s hope there’re no extant copies. If that made it online, I’m not sure I’d ever live it down. Probably as damaging as a sex tape, that.”

Nothing demystifies the glamour of celebrity like hearing one talk. I plopped an eighth confection onto my saucer. “He told me that he’d put off listening to the mixtape as long as possible. That he’d wait until he really needed it, like the last sip of water in his canteen. Do you think he ever heard it before, you know?”

I wanted her to say
yes
, so she said, “No.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Confections nine and ten landed on the saucer in tiny detonations of powdered sugar. I swear I just didn’t want them to go to waste.

“Oh, one other thing,” she said, crossing the living room to an antique desk constructed of a jillion drawers too small to hold anything larger than paper clips and stamps. She returned with a folded Polaroid I’d given to Kolya before he left for his
first tour. I couldn’t risk unfolding it in front of her. “The army adjutant in Grozny gave me that.”

“Why’d you wait so long to tell me all this?”

She gazed at her dim reflection in the teacup, and then quickly broke it with the turn of the spoon. “I didn’t invite you here to talk about your brother. You see…my husband is divorcing me. Some people think I’ve been a bit too frank in my public comments on the state of modern Russia in recent interviews. You begin criticizing the casting choice of a certain director, and you end up comparing Putin, unfavorably, to Lord Voldemort. Who knows how these things happen?”

“What’s this have to do with me?”

“The painting, you idiot. The Zakharov. Oleg’s hired suit-jacketed leeches for lawyers. They’d claim my toes if they weren’t attached to my feet.”

I still didn’t understand.

She stared dismally. “I’m giving you the painting. Better you have it than the lawyers.”

Then I understood.

I wrapped the painting in enough bubble wrap to mummify a mastiff. She followed me into the hall. I’d sweep her off her feet and we’d waltz out the door. Never mind the daughter sleeping in the other room. The tabloids would call me heartless, but I won’t raise another man’s child as my own. We’d buy a mansion on the Riviera, and I’d learn how to do all the things the nouveau riche do, like buy cuff links and belittle the work ethic of the poor. I’d leave her heartbroken in Marseilles. She’d never recover. The tabloids would call me a cad, but I wouldn’t
play by society’s rules. Everything in my life would be different. I just had to kiss her.

I shook her hand.

“It’s been good to see you, Alexei,” she said as she closed the door, and I knew she meant it. She’s not a very good actor.

A parachute of yellow smoke, tethered by thick billows to the smokestacks, hangs permanently over Kirovsk. The twelve smokestacks, the tallest edifices for five hundred kilometers, are known locally as the Twelve Apostles. They encircle Lake Mercury, a man-made lake of industrial runoff whose silvered waters are so veined with exotic chemicals they lap against the gravel-pocked banks year-round, unfrozen even in February. Behind the brainy folds of smoke, the moon is a dim ghost. Kirovsk is in annual competition with Linfen, China, to hold the title of the world’s most polluted city. When the nickel burns, it produces sulfuric soot so dense it stains the ground, accumulating in such concentrations that snowdrifts are mineable. And surrounding Kirovsk is White Forest. Constructed at the behest of the party boss’s wife to counter Kirovsk’s reputation as a frozen cesspool, the forest looks very fine in photographs circulated among engineering departments in Moscow and Leningrad to deceive their most promising students into taking jobs with the nickel combine. In person, however, you realize this is an unusual forest. The trees keep their leaves through winter. They neither grow nor die. No animals hibernate in
their trunks. In a triumph over reality, the city commissioned an entire forest of fake trees. Over time the wind has stripped much of the plastic foliage from the steel limbs, and now White Forest is a field of rusted antennas, harboring the city’s de facto garbage dump beneath its naked branches. It is in White Forest, where Lydia’s story ends, that mine begins.

I must have been ten, Kolya thirteen, on the afternoon we watched two men kill a third. But I’ll come back to that. We woke in the room we shared to the dueling cries of my father and the teakettle. Kolya climbed from bed. His hair was a typographical error someone had scribbled out. He hit me, as he did most mornings, to toughen me for my own good, but it’s difficult to muster much brotherly gratitude while getting slapped. We skated across the floorboards and into the kitchen in our woolen socks.