The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (19 page)

He handed us a brown attaché case and dismissed us with a quick flick of his cigarette. We duckling-waddled behind the bouncer as he left the room.

“Can you introduce me to a woman?” I asked him.

“Which one?”

Let’s be honest: It didn’t matter. The heat-seeking desire flowing from my heart via my south-lands was indiscriminate in its aim. A woman needed only acknowledge my existence to become the love of my life. I was twelve years old.

“Her.” I pointed vaguely to the crowd.

He buckled with laughter. He had to clasp my shoulder to keep himself from falling. I was no more than a serf allowed to glimpse the Winter Palace ballroom before being shoved into the open arms of the communal night. But beneath it all, the bouncer was a deep and empathetic soul. Before he escorted us
to the exit by our elbows, he grabbed a black mixtape from the DJ booth and stuffed it in my sagging coat pocket.

The next morning I woke to the sharp scent of vinegar—my father had long been an amateur pickler—and wondered if the previous night had been a mirage baked in slumber. But there, right beside me, on the rickety nightstand, the mixtape soaked in a pool of honeyed daylight.

Kolya was still asleep. I dove beneath his bed and rooted through his library of sexual congress: peach-flesh magazines for every perversion, lusty paperbacks, bodies clothed only in unmarked VHS cases, stalagmites of used tissue, unsent love letters to Galina, and, floating on that sordid sea, a tiny one-shot-size vodka bottle filled with my mother’s ashes, which he’d stolen from the jar-urn right after the funeral to save some small part of her from the Black Sea. I unearthed and flung it all behind me until I found his cassette player.

For waking him at that unholy hour, he walloped me with his boot, the first in a migrating flock of projectiles aimed at me over the course of the next few minutes. I sat in bed, facing the wall with my blanket sprawled tent-like over me, locked in the stereophonic groove, oblivious to the storm breaking over my back.

For the rest of my adolescence, the visions promised by
D
ANCE
P
ARTY
P
LACE
!
and other dance party places formed the bank into which I deposited the loose change of dreams. The headphones, volume cranked to ten, formed a cocoon nothing could pierce: not Kolya’s bullying, not my father’s deepening depression, not even my mother’s memory, which could sharpen suddenly at the sight of soapsuds, and leave me
impaled on sorrow. As if I could just die for the length of a track, slipping into sweet oblivion as my heart took a rest and the bass circulated my blood. I surrendered to the Dictatorship of Dance, the Supreme Soviet of Sound.

I jury-rigged two ancient gramophones into turntables that flaked green gunk in time with the drums. Mixtapes and LPs from Moscow, Petersburg, and Minsk flooded through the post, and alone in my room, I studied track lists like a techno-loving Tatyana Larina. Due to my lacking status and surplus acne, I couldn’t hope to pass the face control of a place like
D
ANCE
P
ARTY
P
LACE
!
, so I tried crappy discos, basement raves, summer field sets, bad scenes, worse scenes, scenes where contact highs were unavoidable, where you felt way more liquid than solid, where you’d enter a free soul and leave eight hours later having exchanged your shoelaces and short-term memory for bruises on your knees, elbows, and stomach that no one could properly explain. I waited outside the finer venues, bumming cigarettes from DJs and club kids on break. Cigarettes were all I asked for, but they gave me so much more: spare change (sometimes they thought I was a vagrant), the last spittly sips of shared vodka, the mobile numbers of drug dealers and petty criminals, conversations that conveyed the illusion that I was a peripheral star in their cosmos.

Sometime around then, I started making mixtapes of my own.

I said good-bye to Galina, hung up the phone, and re-bubble-wrapped the Zakharov before the urgency knifing into my back lost its point. I packed it in the duffel along with a half-dozen mixtapes, my Walkman, toiletries. On further inspection, I added a pair of socks, lucky blue underwear, and a secondhand Speedo.

The rubles in my pocket couldn’t get me three Babaevsky bars, so I crept into the hallway to see what I could steal. The stereo rattled the hinges of the closed WC door. A thin thread of smoke unraveled from its keyhole. I centimetered past. A worn leather wallet was passed out on the nightstand in the bedroom the two brothers shared when they weren’t sharing the WC. So much money in there it barely fit in my front pocket. I know it’s wrong to steal, but it’s also wrong to prohibit your lodger from using your bathroom, and everybody knows that wrongs cancel each other out. That’s why it’s called moral arithmetic.

Back in my room, I scanned my modest belongings. Bottles filled with dusk light stood in the corner. The long-rotting carcass of my academic career sprawled across the desk. A few flyers for raves long past were crumpled in the corner. The whole scene should’ve made me properly depressed. All I was leaving behind was a mess someone else would have to clean up. Not much of a legacy. There I was, Napoleon’s height and I couldn’t even conquer the apartment WC. I slipped the two pickle jars into the duffel, the Polaroid into my pocket, and then slipped myself out the door.

I chose the airport over the train station. Trains have too many stops, too many points to turn around. I took a gypsy cab to Pulkovo and for the first time in my life accepted the fare without protest. My blood felt twice as thin and my heart twice as strong as I stepped up to the counter and bought a ticket for the morning flight to Grozny. I spent the night in the terminal between a husband and wife no longer on speaking terms.

The next morning, I waited beside the gangway as boarding began. The harsh fluorescent lighting made everyone look like they’d just donated a liter of plasma. The men, mainly Chechens, ignored the gate agent’s increasingly frustrated instructions and stood to one side until all the women had boarded, before boarding themselves, and only then in order of age. Bunch of maniacs. Who’d ever want to wage war against people so insistent on independence they’d rebel against airline boarding procedure? I was seated between a child who mistook my shirtsleeve for a handkerchief and a man who called me a collaborator for complying with the fasten-seat-belt sign. My duffel was safely stowed overhead.

The engines whirled throaty whispers.

The airport smeared gray in the fogged glass.

The tarmac, then the city, then the earth peeled away.

Liftoff.

Kolya and Galina met on weekends and after school, using errands, clubs, sports teams, and youth organizations to excuse their absences. Friends believed them deeply involved
with family life and family believed them deeply involved with friends, but they were only involved with one another. They shielded the infatuation between them as a secret that would evaporate if exposed to the ultraviolet scrutiny of their peers. They snuck into alleyways, stole kisses beneath staircases, slowed their courtship to a pace of demure caution last seen when frock coats were in fashion. Each clandestine meeting was a new discovery. The nebula of who they were when they were together shifted and reshaped. When Galina learned she could make Kolya laugh so hard he seized with violent hiccups, cured only by drinking water from the far side of the glass, she felt she had fallen down the barrel of a microscope into an intimacy invisible to the naked eye. He hunched over the glass between his knees and made watery chirps as she patted his back. And when he discovered she prepared for bed as if sleep were a contact sport—hair braided, herb mask applied, ground-down mouth guard inserted, ears plugged—he teased her mercilessly, and she slid the sheet over her face in embarrassment, and he didn’t stop, and she laughed so hard the sheet dampened with tears, and then he started hiccuping.

One summer night, when the twilight sunbathed the Arctic in a dull white wonder, they hitched a ride south on a departing river ferry. A biological dead zone, sixty kilometers in diameter, encircled the Twelve Apostles, but once they crossed the sixty-kilometer threshold, the bleached land gave way to dried grasses listing in the breeze. They disembarked to a long wooden dock. They peered through the gaps left by rotted planks and found their river-washed faces fragmented, dispersed, and reassembled in ripples. They crossed the bank
and climbed a slope studded with the twiggy skeletons of dead shrubs. On the far side the land plateaued into a field of wildflowers peeking through thawed tundra.

“I love Galina!” Kolya yelled. Without buildings, walls, or topographical rises to echo his call, the words passed over the bulging blue flower heads and disappeared over the horizon.

She reflexively glanced behind her, fearing someone, anyone, might hear Kolya’s declaration. She had grown up in a city where history did not exist, where you kept secret what was real to prevent its erasure. But no one stood behind them.

When they entered their last year of secondary school, Galina came up with a list of potential career choices: schoolteacher, cashier, secretary. Beauty queen wasn’t on the list.
Beautiful
wasn’t an adjective she attached to herself. Okay, she was tall and thin, that she would admit, but she had feet that could fill clown shoes and broad eyebrows sloped into an obtuse angle of cartoon disappointment. Some days she felt her face was the caricature of someone else’s. She took self-portraits with a rust-rimmed Zenit rented by the hour from the proprietor of the city’s sole darkroom. The camera timer gave Galina ten seconds to cross the room and drape herself liquidly across the divan. The desire to pose in every angle and light arose not from vanity, but from the vacuum where vanity should be. She lay supine and the shutter snapped. She stood high-cheeked, pouty, and the shutter snapped. She seduced the aperture, but when studying the developed photographs, she couldn’t seduce herself. The photographs confirmed what she already believed: All that was admirable in her lay between her neck and her ankles.

Kolya tried to convince her otherwise. Every Saturday morning he climbed six flights of ash-stained stairs to her flat. Those few
A.M.
hours, when her father was at work, were the only hours of the week they spent alone together in a flat with a bed. She left the front door unlocked for him and he pushed it gently. Model battleships crowded the living room bookshelves. He crossed the threadbare carpet scripted in faded flowers. Galina stood at the kitchen sink, her hair aloft in a messy bun, her fingers ten splinters of heat in the frigid air. Window light washed out her skin into a peroxided canvas on which she would later apply her features with eyeliner and lipstick. He stood behind her and felt the whole of himself contract around the shiver of her voice. She was wrist-deep in soapsuds. He ran his hands down her forearms, through the blinking bubbles, finding hers in the gray dishwater. Entire minutes passed in a gentle sway.

Then, later, her bedroom. Old rugs hung from the walls for insulation. The floor was twice carpeted, once with rugs, and again with their scattered clothes. Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can’t trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We’re not gaseous no matter how we wish to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.

They rarely used prophylactics. Galina was two months pregnant when a white postcard striped with a red, declarative diagonal arrived for Kolya. As far as I know, it was the first piece of mail he’d ever received. It ordered him to report to the Department of Conscripts and New Recruits for his physical within three days.

What followed in the days leading to his deployment: carousels of conversation that never stopped moving forward and never arrived anywhere; professions of fidelity; self-pity shaping to every vessel it filled; the kind of reassurances that promise everything and therefore mean nothing. One afternoon, Kolya proposed to Galina in the vegetable aisle of the
produkti
. He dropped to one knee, pulled a rubber band from his pocket, and wrapped it around her ring finger. She said yes, not because it was something she wanted, but because he was on his knees, begging her.

A half an hour at the civil registration office was all that was necessary; in those days, marriage and divorce didn’t take much time or effort. But they postponed it until no time remained. He spent the Saturday morning before his deployment at her flat. The bedsheets nested at their feet. They projected hypotheticals that hardened to reality in Kolya’s mind over the coming months: a shared family, a shared future.

“It will only be two years and I’ll be back,” Kolya said, staring up at the paint-fissured ceiling. “Two years is nothing. And if you have twins, that’s an automatic deferment.”

“You say that like a grandfather would say it.”

“What do you mean?” He rolled over and pulled the sheet over their heads so they lay in semi-darkness with the freckles
on their noses nearly touching. If they could just stay like this, sealed from the world beneath a pink cotton bedsheet. If they could just hit pause and cocoon themselves in this moment. They passed back and forth a single breath that grew heavier with each exhalation.

“I mean if we were sixty or seventy years old, two years would be nothing. You’re eighteen. Two years is forever. If we get married, have the child, get divorced as soon as it’s born, you might get a deferment.”

“You might have twins. Then we wouldn’t have to get divorced at all.”

“Either way, there’d be a child.”

“What are you trying to say?”

She sighed. “You hear what I’m saying, even if you’re not listening.”