The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (16 page)

Kolya lodged his fist in his mouth to hold in his laughter, then he took me by the shoulder and led me home.

W
E SAT
between our two beds on legless chairs propped on book boxes (our father had used the screws that had held together the legs to mount a clock). Rugs draped over the wallpapered walls. Sometimes they slipped from their nails in the middle of the night, falling over us as we slept as second, stifling blankets. A poster of the periodic table hung between our two beds. I had changed my socks and washed my feet. My insides felt pureed.

Kolya hunched forward with his elbows pinned to his knees and his mouth drawn into a tight expression of concentration. Whenever he thought deeply, he looked constipated.

“What’s it like being dead when everyone else is still alive?” I asked.

“Like being alive when everyone else is dead,” Kolya answered. His back stiffened. He shot to his feet. “That’s it! One of the exhibits can be about the last person alive. You know how Dad told us he’d foiled an American plan to nuke Kirovsk? That wasn’t the whole story.”

He dropped to a knee beside me.

“Tell me,” I pleaded.

Kolya leaned back and his shoulders sank into the blubbery mattress. “Dad didn’t tell you about the backup plan. The last resort. The answer to the question: What if the world ends today?”

“He told you?”

“Of course. I’m his favorite son. See, after the Americans took the moon, Khrushchev came to Dad and was like, ‘Look, Dad, we’re fucked. The Yanks are playing baseball and building shopping malls on the moon. What do we do?’ And Dad told him his plan.”

“Tell me,” I pleaded.

“Dad’s idea was to build a capsule that could keep a man alive for twenty years. The Americans might kill all life on earth with a nuclear war, but the last living man would be a Soviet citizen, up there, in space. Khrushchev had one of those expansive Russian souls novelists are always writing about. He loved it. But Brezhnev put him in an old folks’ home before he could authorize Dad to build the thing. So we’ve got to do it.”

We rushed to the ticket office to tell our father.

“My true heirs,” he said. “Born scientists. You’ll go far.”

When the museum closed for cleaning that Sunday, my father towed the rusted skeleton of a lorry cabin onto the warehouse floor. “The capsule!” he declared. I examined it from various vantage points. It didn’t resemble a lorry cabin, much less a capsule. More like a decapitated whale’s head that had spent several years on the ocean floor first as food, then as shelter, for an extended family of eels. “It needs a little work,” my father admitted, but his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis.

We transformed the lorry cabin into a capsule with tinfoil. Kolya taped one end of foil to the hood, slid the roll onto a broomstick, and circled the lorry as the silvery scroll unfurled behind him. It took sixteen rolls and hundreds of revolutions. Kolya orbited, until the cabin became a fully bannered capsule.
With black shoe polish, we carefully drew
USSR
across the bow. A maroon dentist’s chair became the pilot’s seat. We used a fishbowl for the portal window, a rusted desk fan for an air filter, a busted radio for communications, a cassette-tape deck for last messages.

The summer was a twenty-four-hour afternoon. For three months the river thawed enough for ships to pass, and newly canned goods and sugary cookie-like lumps replenished
produkti
shelves. It warmed enough to walk outside with only a heavy coat, scarf, mittens, and fur hat, so warm that drivers held tar-soaked torches beneath their cars for a scant two minutes before the sludgy gas tanks thawed. Ah, summer!

We played in the museum when there were no visitors, which was nearly always. The sun streamed through sooty windows spaced along the second story.

“Cosmonaut Kolya,” I murmured, descending to the basement of my vocal range. “The moment we have feared has arrived. Reagan declared on American television that rather than surrender, he would destroy the entire earth. He was facing the wrong camera. We doubt his sanity.”

And Kolya would snap to attention, clucking his tongue as he clicked his silent rubber heels. “Comrade Alexei, I am prepared to venture into the vastness and bring the wisdom of Lenin to all alien life.” He marched to the capsule and gave a stern-faced salute to an invisible flag before hunching inside. I secured him to the dentist’s chair with straps cut from a rucksack and set a motorcycle helmet on his head.

“One final thing, Cosmonaut,” I said, flipping up the helmet visor. I would give him a cassette tape, or a notebook, or
a file containing instruction on further adventures to be had in deep space. “Open this only in case of emergency.”

I counted down from ten as Kolya hummed the national anthem. Sometimes he’d clasp my hand to his chest and as his pulse throbbed against my palm the act seemed less like make-believe than the rehearsal for a final good-bye.

“You will have the last human thought,” I whispered.

“You will be that thought,” he said.

“You will have the last word.”

“Your name will be the last word.”

When the countdown plummeted to zero, the rocket launchers crackled into ignition. Blue heat seared the oxygen from the air. An instant inferno engulfed the surrounding two square kilometers of land, ripping a crater into the tarmac. The blaze incinerated my nerves before they could transmit the agony to my brain. In a millisecond I became the echo of a scream rising through smoke. All around American warheads fell from wispy chutes. The sky bruised with fire. This is it. The end. The thrusters kicked in, lifting the capsule through blossoming mushroom clouds. Cataracts of light carried Kolya from this world. Through the portal window, he watched the decimated horizon become Earth, become nothing.

I shared a compartment on the night train back with a father traveling to Petersburg with his daughter for her orthodontia work.

“She’s stumped half the dentists in Moscow,” the father
explained with obvious delight. The spotlight of paternal pride is fickle and faint, but when it shines on you with its full wattage, it’s as warm as a near sun. “My little prodigy.”

Tree trunks flicked over the cabin window. I wanted to be loved as much as he loved his daughter’s bad teeth.

“Go on, show him,” he urged.

She gave a great yawn. Her open mouth was a dolomite cavern. Only divine intercession or satanic bargaining could save her. “Just a little bit crooked,” I said, then gave a wide
ahh
of my own. “Mine are a little crooked too.”

“Mine are in a dental textbook,” she declared.

She had me there. Couldn’t have been older than twelve and already she’d accomplished more in her life than I had. Rotten little overachiever. I pulled the Polaroid Galina had given me from my wallet.

Pale fold lines graphed over the photographic surface that had lost its luster years earlier. But there we were, Kolya and me, wearing leopard-print bikini bottoms, flanking our mother. None of us had ever worn a swimsuit before. Clouds foamed from the Twelve Apostles in the background. Lake Mercury lapped at our toes. Splashes glinted from our calves in points of molten light. I showed the Polaroid to the girl and her father.

“My brother and mother. And that’s me when I was your age,” I said. It felt urgent that I share this with them, that they know that even though my teeth weren’t so disfigured, I was worthy of inclusion in their family. The girl’s lips didn’t open when she smiled. Then her father told her to get ready for bed. I carefully folded the Polaroid into my wallet.

In the morning, we’d leave the train together and they’d be so charmed by my small talk they’d ask me to the dentist with them. They’d fix me, starting with my teeth. The girl would think of me as a much older brother. Her father would think of me as a much younger brother. They’d invite me to move in with them in their titanic Moscow mansion. I’d consider the offer. It’d cramp my free-wheeling bohemian lifestyle, but they’d plead and offer me great sums of money. I’d turn down the money. I’m not for sale. But I’d accept the invitation to join their family, for their sakes obviously. I’m a Samaritan. I’d teach the girl all about growing up, and teach the divorced father how to forget his first marriage and find a new one. I’d only stay a few months because I won’t be held down. They’d talk about me in reverent tones for years.

The following morning the cabin attendant yanked me by my ear from a restful slumber. This was to be expected, given the only required experience for Russian Railways employment is a history of anger issues. The father and daughter had already gone. Must’ve forgotten to leave their names and phone number. They’d probably regret it the rest of their lives.

In July 1990, when the warmest month in Kirovsk’s fifty-three-year history coincided with the collapsing of Soviet authority, the elderly began swimming in Lake Mercury. In the mornings they gathered on the gravelly banks with their gray hair bunched beneath fur hats and they stripped to their undergarments. When they raised their hands, their triceps sagged
from the bone. One man gazing at the waters patted his potbelly tenderly. Maybe he’d spent the last fifty years wondering if it could be deployed as a flotation device, and now, finally, would find the answer. There’s nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.

“Why are you swimming here?” I asked one of the women. She stood beside a rusted sign that warned off swimmers. She was no taller than me—which is not to say I was short, just short for a biped. Her hazel eyes held my fuzzy reflection. Her generation had journeyed through hell so we could grow up in purgatory.

She glanced to the rusted sign. It depicted a grapefruit-headed man made of forty-five-degree angles falling into the open jaws of a shark. Perhaps before she was arrested and condemned to Kirovsk, she had grown up by a lake where her father had taught her to float by keeping his hand beneath her arched spine so she knew she wouldn’t sink, that he would be there, until one day she lay on the calm surface, her back parabolic, her arms crucified on the water, her brown hair sieving algae, and she flitted her father a look and he raised his hands as if her glance was a loaded gun, and for a second she floundered, terrified she would sink to the lake bottom without him to hold her, but she stilled her arms, gulped the air, she was doing it, all by herself, she was floating. Perhaps she wanted to tell me that if she had outlived Stalin, the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Empire, a little dirty water wouldn’t kill her. Instead, she glared at the sign. “I’ve fried scarier fish with just a sliver of butter.”

She joined the other grandmothers. Clad in nothing but
discolored undergarments, they hobbled to the gravel bank. All around, smoke blabbered endlessly from the smelter stacks. A woman with a noose of scar tissue carried her wooden cane right into the water. The others followed, and all together, they waded in. After a half-century drought, they remember how to swim.

A husband and wife backstroked across the lake, water glistening toward shoulders, legs splashing in unison. A rope, lashed around their waists, tied them together, in case one began to sink.

A one-legged man paddled with slow thrusts of his arms. Both real and phantom legs were weightless in the water below.

A man with a mustache as wide as his waistline, whom all the world had nicknamed Walrus, took his first tentative strokes, marveling at the cool rush against his skin, the freedom of movement, and began weeping right there in the water for the countless times he had given up hope, the countless times he had prayed for death in the mines, in the prison camp, and now, now gratitude cracked him open, and he thanked God for ignoring his prayers, for letting him live long enough to learn to swim.

And in the middle of the lake the woman I’d spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.

A
UGUST
grew warmer. Centrally planned weather patterns were in open revolt. To everyone’s surprise, the bathing babushkas didn’t turn lime color, or grow third ears; if anything,
the chemical mélange restored to them a long-ago dissipated vitality. Soon grandparents in their sixties joined the geriatric swimmers, followed by people in their fifties, then forties, and so on until the youngest children of the youngest families dipped their baby-prawn toes into the water. No one believed the state-sponsored propaganda:
The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism predicts the inevitable contours of history, the individual is significant only in his submission to the collective, the chemicals in the water cause cancer
. Our revolution was a Sunday swim.

My mother, as I’ve said, wanted no more from life than an afternoon at the Black Sea. That August, my father came home with leopard-print bikinis.

“What’re we supposed to do with these?” Kolya asked, eyeing the two-piece.

“It’s a swimsuit. I’ll give you one guess.”

“It’s a bikini.”

My father grabbed the top piece from Kolya’s hands and tossed it in the trash. “Now it’s a Speedo.”

This summer Lake Mercury, the next the Black Sea, my father promised. But contrary to his plans, by the next summer the pain in my mother’s chest would have already taken her to the doctor, then the hospital, then the crematorium, and finally the living room bookshelf, where her ashes still rest, and will likely spend eternity, in a pickle jar between a can of spare buttons and two phone books, despite my father’s promises to someday scatter them in waters off Sochi.

But before all that, we went as a family to Lake Mercury, my mother in her leopard-print bikini, my brother and I in our leopard-print bikini bottoms, and we splashed in the lake, the
water a mouthful of dirty change, my open eyes burning as I watched the flailing limbs of the decapitated swimmers, and at the end of the day, when everyone was sun drunk, or punch drunk, or just drunk, that hour in summer when falling inhibition and rising permissibility intersect, my father chased my mother across the gravel bank. With leaping strides he lunged for her in her leopard-print bikini, claiming he was a leopardopterist, that he would pin and mount her, and my brother and I chased them, two cubs protecting our leopardess. We bared our teeth and snarled, we clawed and growled, we were wild, we didn’t care, and all the while my father chased and my mother fled, her laughter held by the stadium of smoke rising from the Twelve Apostles, never had I seen her so happy, never so loved, so wanted, never had I seen her as a sexual being, as desired quarry, as anything but a taciturn and dissatisfied figure at the kitchen sink who occasionally walloped me over the head with a soup ladle; and even though my father had no appreciation for metaphor, or feline biology, or the sunbathers he hurdled over, even though he was my father and she my mother and we were all a few steps from the precipice, I look back at that moment, that afternoon, with flooded longing, and think:
We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste
.