The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (20 page)

“It’s just two circles around the sun, then I’ll be back,” he said, a shaky sweetness to his voice. “The little guy will be a year and a half old by then. We’ll find a flat of our own. You and me and the little one. I’ll get a job at the smelter and you could give ballet lessons.”

She wove her fingers through his. There was such tenderness, such mercy to her lie, that Kolya took it as truth. “Of course. We will,” she said.

At the time, I was still making mixtapes. My favorite cassettes were the Assofoto MK-60s because they came in bitching grapefruit pinks and sherbet oranges; plus you’d feel like James Bond because they were so poorly made they’d disintegrate after one listen. Free advice: When purchasing a tape deck or preamp, you
want
a fake, so don’t forget to bring a knife
with you. You need to pop off the back and scrape the black paint and stenciled Cyrillic from the superconductors. If you see Asian-looking letters beneath, you’re golden. Japanese is best, but Korean, even Chinese, will do. If there’s no foreign lettering, then it really is genuine Russian-make, and it’s more likely to roast your loved ones in an electrical fire than to play Cybertron’s
Clear
all the way through.

But my prized possession was a Maxell XLII-S 90-minute cassette, still swathed in golden shrink-wrap. It took me forever to save enough pocket change to afford it—at least five weeks—and I held it like Michelangelo would a hunk of Carrara. For the longest time, I didn’t use it, didn’t even open it for fear of squandering the potential coiled within that plastic case.

I showed up at Galina’s one afternoon. Her father answered the door, his fingers tinny with model battleship paint. Galina emerged from her room a moment later in an oversized sweater and staticky hair, still so unbelievably unaware of the celebrity she’d become. “I want to make a tape for Kolya to take with him. I need your help,” I said, and showed her my Maxell. We got to work.

I gave him the mixtape the morning of his departure. We stood across the street from the military commissariat. He and Galina had said their good-byes the night before. He held the mixtape in both hands and read the label.
For Kolya, In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1.
A teary glaucoma kept clouding my eyes.

“I don’t have a tape player,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he repeated.

“Come home.” I barely got it out.

He pulled me to him. I knotted my fingers at the base of his spine and squeezed him hard enough to imprint a bruised blueprint of his bones on my flesh.

“The world is ending,” he said.

“Don’t die,” I said.

“The imperialist warheads will land soon.”

“You will have the last word.”

“Your name will be that word.” He tapped the mixtape case on my forehead. “And when my time comes, when I’m way out there in space, I’ll be listening.”

I arrived. The Grozny terminal was gray-gloss new. The airport gift shop sold knives. Women who’d left their hair bare in flight donned silky, candy-bright headscarves. The baggage claim was a closet passengers entered one by one. Judging from the well-armed luggage attendant at the door, I wasn’t at all convinced they’d reemerge. It was about ten million degrees outside and my underwear had bunched into a sweat-swamped thong. Directly across the asphalt, the midday sun poured across the golden cupolas of a mosque.

The road stretching along the airport was empty. The men lugging suitcases all wore tasseled skullcaps and slack, pajama-y things. Any one of them could’ve starred as the villain in a grainy hostage video. Maybe the souvenir knives in the airport gift shop were meant for arriving tourists. I fidgeted until a slender, clean-shaven man about my age pushed through
the exit doors. His long limbs piped through the sleeves of a tight, 1960s mod-style suit either teetering at the cutting edge of fashion or plunged somewhere far over the cliff. As a general rule, people in suits are more likely to take advantage of you than people in pajamas, but Chechnya requires you to reevaluate deeply held assumptions.

“You going into town?” I asked.

He gave me a
well-what-do-we-have-here
head tilt. His hair was slicked back into a glistening helmet. “Maybe. You’re not from around here, are you?”

Didn’t know I’d be such a dead giveaway. “Listen, I’m just looking for a lift. I thought there’d be a metro or at least a bus or taxi or something. Can I get a ride with you?”

“Are you FSB?” he asked, then examined my haircut and found his answers. “Of course not. FSB would never payroll someone with his name shaved into his head.”

“I’m growing it out. So can I come?”

His shrug said he didn’t much care either way. I followed him to his Lada. I went to put on my seat belt. “This is Chechnya,” he said, in a tone of bafflement, pity, and maybe even a little wonder. “You don’t need seat belts.”

“You’re coming from Petersburg too?” I asked. I knew I wasn’t actually in danger of abduction. I also knew it’s important to build a rapport with your captor.

“Just connecting through. I live in London.”

“London?”

“Yeah, I’m getting my master’s at LSE.”

“That’s the London airport?”

He smiled. “London School of Economics.” Suddenly I was
the yak-humping bumpkin from the Republic of Whogivesafuckistan and he was, well, the kind of person I wanted to be.

“I’m Alexei, by the way.”

“Akim.”

“So in London, have you seen the queen?” I asked.

“Only in my wallet.”

The road doglegged, as if the paver billed by the meter and was deeply in debt. Our fellow drivers took the lane markers as well-intended but misguided suggestions they freely ignored. I don’t know how we managed to a) stay alive, and b) make such good time, given we were mainly headed into oncoming traffic.

An owlish man walked along the roadside with closed eyes and leathery beak aimed sunward. His jagged grin was a pink miniature of the half-eaten watermelon slice in his hand. Speed-chilled air flooded through the cracked window, wonderful on my face.

We passed a massive billboard with a stern and puffy-chested Vladimir Putin standing beside a younger guy with a cropped beard. The two stood in a misty mantle of white, blue, and red patriotism.

“Didn’t think I’d see him down here,” I said, pointing to Putin.

“To the victor go the advertisements.”

“So it seems. I can’t even tell what’s being advertised. Steely resolve?”

“You can’t go out for an ice cream without passing two dozen posters of Putin.” He said it like he’d really kept count. “Even a Magnate Gold sours under a dictator’s glassy gaze. Ridiculous,
really. Imagine going to Baghdad and finding George Bush’s weaselly mug on every street corner?”

The guy next to Putin was Ryan Gosling from a parallel universe where instead of becoming a famous actor, he smoked too much weed, ate potato chips for breakfast, and was dressed by his grandmother. “Who’s he?”

“I take it you’re not a journalist?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he actually wanted to know. A question mark can turn any innocent sentence into an accusation.

“I’m a university student, technically.”

“That’s President Kadyrov. Very popular. He received a hundred and two percent of the vote last election.”

“I’ve never been good at math.”

“You might have a future as an election overseer.” We swerved out of the broad headlights of an oncoming truck. “You haven’t seen his Instagram?”

“That’s where I recognize him from! He’s the one with all the photos posing with tiger cubs and ducklings and kittens!”

His brows bunched over dirty-copper irises. Never seen such a grim response to baby animals. Maybe petting a duckling’s the final taboo down here.

“You’re not from around here either, are you?” I asked.

A tractor towing bushels of green-sheathed corn cobs trundled along the shoulder.

“Yes and no.” His volume knob in his throat had dialed down to movie-theater whisper. “I was born just outside of Grozny. But in 1994, just a kid, I was sent to Holland as a refugee. A lot of tea glasses had to be sweetened to make it happen. My parents could only afford to send one of us and I
was the youngest. Lived there a long while, and even now I speak Dutch much better than Chechen.”

“So are you staying in London after you graduate or going back to Holland?”

A low wind peeled a gauze strip from the underbelly of a cloud.

“Of course I’m moving back here.”

Fifteen minutes later, he nodded to an empty field. Shards of concrete grew where grass should’ve been. “I lived there,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said.

Another few minutes passed, and he said, “All I’m trying to say is don’t trust someone who posts photos of himself playing with puppies and kittens online. Chances are, they’re sociopaths. You know who loved little animals?”

“You want me to name names?”

“Adolf bloody Hitler,” he snapped. “He was even a vegetarian. And look at the mess he made.”

White-orange flapped atop a flare stack.

A blackbird cursored across the blue screen of sky.

I made a note to more carefully curate my Facebook profile pics.

G
ROZNY
was the cleanest city I’d ever seen. Its walls weren’t old enough to have seen a hoodlum’s paint can. The mortar between bricks was still white. The streets must’ve been swept hourly. Sapling-shaded promenades unfurled down
wide boulevards. A Japanese sushi bar called Mafia advertised a
bizniz
lunch of pho, Thai green curry, and a fortune cookie. In 1995 when Kolya was deployed for the first time, then in 2000 when he returned as a contract soldier, I’d read every newspaper and magazine feature on the war I could find. The Grozny in those photos was a 1944 Dresden look-alike. The Grozny in the windshield was Dubai. In the city center five glass skyscrapers huddled together.

“I didn’t think it would look, well, so city-like,” I said.

“What did you expect?” Akim asked. Before I could answer, he nodded to a squat gray building of vaguely defined bureaucratic provenance. “First floor’s the art museum,” he said.

On the ride in, I’d told Akim about my brother and the painting, altering the details just slightly (in my version, Kolya was a human rights worker). Risky move, maybe, but I hadn’t thought any of this through and he seemed about as trustworthy a character as I could hope to find. He’d just nodded with the glazed-over indifference of someone subjected to detailed narration of another person’s dream. I guess our lives are all dreams—as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. He said he’d help, until four o’clock at least.

We parked and entered the museum. It was clogged with paintings and empty of patrons. The docent’s face bathed in the glow of her blocky Nokia cell phone. Her narrow brown eyes met ours when we walked in. I remembered those long winter afternoons at the ticket counter of the Kirovsk Cosmonautics Museum when the sudden appearance of a museum visitor was cause for celebration and alarm.

“Yes?” Her voice rose a half octave toward suspicion. She couldn’t’ve been older than eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was covered in an electric-pink headscarf that obeyed the letter of the law while exorcizing its spirit.

“I have something to return,” I began and pulled the canvas from the duffel bag. She inhaled sharply. She looked from me to the canvas and then back as if we were two mismatched puzzle pieces she couldn’t fit together.

“You’ve seen this before?” I asked.

Her Nokia buzzed on the table in a universe far from us. She nodded.

I pointed to the dacha in the painting. “Do you know where this plot of land is?”

“The man this belongs to, he lives there now.”

While she showed Akim the route on a Yandex map, I circled the museum. The earliest date I found etched into the display placard thingies was 2003. Most were portraits of the family Kadyrov. In several, the president cuddled calico kittens.

T
HE
Lada’s rear tires ejected dusty rooster tails, but the car wouldn’t budge. I checked my phone. Zero bars. Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God. The roads had broken, disintegrated, and washed away the farther from Grozny we’d come. Here, somewhere in the southern mountains, what we referred to as “road” was in fact “impending landslide.” The wide green bowl of valley stretched down the ridge. Akim floored the accelerator. The motor
vhroooooomed
but gravity pulled harder than the engine pushed.

“I think this is it,” Akim said. A clear sheen of perspiration mustached his upper lip. He still hadn’t loosened his thickly striped ash and navy necktie.

“I can’t believe we made it this far.” And I couldn’t. Given the state of the car I was surprised it didn’t explode into a Michael Bay finale every time Akim punched the accelerator.

“This”—he glanced to the line of white rocks weaving up the ridge—“whatever this is, isn’t on the map. But I reckon we’re only four or five kilometers away. You start walking now, you’ll probably get there in a few hours.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And thank you for taking me around, particularly when you’re just getting home.”

“It’s nothing. It’s been nice, actually. No one’s met me at that airport before.”

“It’s not nothing. I’m sure you’re busy and have family to see and everything.”

He looked away from me. His voice was flat and inflectionless. “That field we passed where I said I’d grown up? That’s the last place I saw any of them.”

He slid his Ray-Bans up the cliff of his nose. I should’ve asked for his phone number or email, or even just his last name to look him up on Facebook or VK. I should’ve told him that my family was gone too. But I was afraid. Even though Kolya had been killed, he wasn’t a victim, and neither was I, not really. There was a pause, five seconds when I felt him looking at me as Kolya had in those rare moments when we’d worn through our deceptions. I could’ve described the loneliness of living far from home, among people you don’t know. I could’ve shown
him the jars containing my parents’ ashes and he would’ve understood me entirely. Maybe we would’ve become lifelong friends. Maybe he was the person I came to Chechnya to meet. I won’t know. I just thanked him again, stepped out of the car, and watched him navigate the long, broken road in reverse.