The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (21 page)

In his first tour, from ’95 to ’97, Kolya was stationed in a remote outpost near the Chechen-Dagestani border where even in peacetime telephone lines and mail routes didn’t exist. For the duration of his tour, not a single letter Galina or I wrote reached him. The world he’d left in Kirovsk froze over in his mind. In the absence of news, he imagined our lives, invented daily dramas, small triumphs, conferring on us a peace that didn’t exist for him. He couldn’t have known about the Miss Siberia Beauty Pageant or Oleg Voronov. He couldn’t have known that she made the difficult but prudent decision to end her pregnancy.

In the sigh between battle and resupply, between hitting the ground and falling asleep, he imagined Galina making a crib from an empty dresser drawer. He imagined the bizarre foods pregnancy would give her the taste for. He built and populated an alternate universe that was part memory and part the projected future that day by day he came closer to joining. The child in Kolya’s imagined realm was a boy, born on September 3, 1995, seven months to the day after Galina announced she was two months pregnant, weighing a robust three and one
quarter kilograms, and named Arkady. He announced it to his platoon, and even though they knew better, they congratulated him with handshakes and backslaps. A year later, he celebrated his son’s first birthday by wedging an upside-down matchstick into a stale biscuit.

Galina and I had repeatedly submitted written requests to the conscription center, but a clerk with no more empathy than the aluminum stool he roosted on filed our requests in the trash. No one knew when, or even if, Kolya would return, and so no one met him at the dock when he did, finally, come home.

The slushy river port was shadowless beneath a noon sun. Passengers heavy of heart, head, and suitcase disembarked, Kolya among them. He scanned the crowd for a familiar face and at last he found one: Galina’s, high in the air, on a billboard advertising
Deceit Web
. What was she doing up there? There must be another Galina who looked just like his Galina but couldn’t be his Galina because his Galina was at home with their son. His mind had so firmly wrapped around this one single idea of what awaited him that no space remained for what was actually there. He shouldered his duffel bag and kept his eyes fixed on the mud-spattered pavement, refusing to acknowledge the face he’d waited two years to see again.

But Galina was everywhere. On billboards, bus stops, and tabloid covers, advertising everything from facial cream to mineral water. The face he had searched for in Caucasian cloud formations was pixilated across kiosks. The lips that had only made sense when pressed against his own now pouted at the entire city. The nightmare of finding a missing face everywhere is no less horrifying than the nightmare of finding it nowhere,
and Kolya trudged through a hometown no less surreal or foreign than the Chechen hamlet he had left.

Most cinemas had gone bankrupt, yet the ticket line for
Deceit Web
wrapped around the block. He stopped to ask a man in a pair of slacks creased every way but the right way the name of the starring actress. The man gave a perplexed frown, and then said, “Galina Ivanova, of course.”

“Do you know if she’s seeing anyone?”

“Oleg Voronov. They’re engaged.”

Kolya nodded as if it were only natural to return home after two years to find his fiancée engaged not only to another man, but to the fourteenth richest man in Russia, the boss of Kirovsk, a man who could have any woman in the world, and so of course took the only one Kolya loved. He wanted to melt into the puddle of gray water that was slowly seeping into his boots.

“Does she have a child?” he asked quietly, but by now he knew the answer.

The man shook his head, less at the question than at the idea that anyone alive was still ignorant of the intimate details of Galina’s private life. He pulled an oil-stained bandanna from his back pocket and gave a foghorn blow of his nose. “Not yet, though what a baby those two will make. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of our Galina. Everyone knows her.”

When he arrived at the museum, I wanted to shout, leap, proclaim, but with one look at Kolya’s expression I knew we wouldn’t celebrate. He was a shaving of the person he’d been. I’d always been afraid of him—of his strength, of his disapproval—but seeing his stooped, slender figure in a doorway that had suddenly grown much wider, I realized I’d never
before felt afraid of hurting him. At the kitchen table he interrogated me about Galina and I tried to deliver the news as gently as I could, but you can’t really shatter someone’s life gently.

“It wasn’t intentional,” I said. Weak consolation. “She tried to write you. We all did. Dad practically bankrupted himself buying postage, just hoping one letter would reach you. We didn’t even know if you were alive, Kolya.”

He played with a pale little coat button that might’ve been all that fastened him to the world.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked. It was all I could do to nod to the bookshelf, where a second pickle jar had sat for more than six months.

The next day Kolya visited Pavel Petrukhin, who was to the city drug trade what Oleg Voronov was to its nickel economy. The army had well prepared Kolya for a career as a professional mercenary, and Pavel eagerly hired him. I only learned about it later, when Kolya informed me that I’d be going to university in Petersburg when I graduated from high school. A bribe to a university admissions official meant I was accepted before I even applied. By the time I’d heard about Lydia, Kolya had already disappeared back into Chechnya, this time as a contract soldier. I’d been in Petersburg for less than a year then. He didn’t even call to say good-bye.

“Make something of yourself,” he’d told me the last time I saw him, when he sent me off to Petersburg. My half-empty duffel bag slouched against my shin. Oily dock water sludged against the piers. The school year would start in ten days. I’d never been below the Arctic Circle. He put me in a loose
headlock and kissed my right ear. “Make something of yourself,” he repeated.

My legs have become rubber. Bass drum pedals thud-a-thud my temples with every heartbeat. It’s like summiting Everest, but without sherpas to carry you. The ridge falls only to rise again, up and down, a bad joke Mother Nature insists on retelling over and over. The air’s cooled and dried out at this unholy height. The stony trail’s a split scar through the short grass. I’d forswear my immortal soul for a chairlift. But I persist. The rises shorten, the drops deepen, and soon I’m in a valley of green foothills and farmland. A few unsheared sheep laze in the grasses. I wave to them. They don’t wave back.

I use the Zakharov canvas as my map, holding it to the horizon to match the topographical contours. A few times I think I’m nearly there, but no, not quite. This is a titanic waste of time. I’ll get lost and rebel bandits will chop off my head and donate my vital organs to Saudi charities.

I should probably turn around.

I really should.

But there, up ahead. An apricot tree. A boarded well. A white stone fence. An herb garden. A home. I look back and forth between the real and painted landscapes. The two shouldn’t so perfectly correspond, not after two centuries, but they do.

On the hill an adult and child are shadowed within a dissolving orange sunset. Just like the apricot tree, the stone
fence, and the herb garden, the two figures silhouetted on the hill match those of the painting.

I wave to them.

I wave again.

I wave a third time.

They wave back.

KIROVSK
, 1999

N
o one could explain why the wolves returned in the early years of the newly formed Russian Federation. Biologists arrived with honorifics and plastic binders, departed with unpaid hotel bills and findings so disparate it was a wonder they could agree a wolf had four legs, two eyes, and one nose. Some blamed an irregular cycle of population growth and decline. Some blamed global warming and intense logging of woodlands to the distant southwest. Most blamed their mothers, for one thing or another. Vera had her own theory, but no one thought to ask her.

The wolves howled in White Forest just across the colorless meadow from Vera’s house. She stood at the stove boiling water in a saucepan dented sixteen years earlier, when she’d thrown it at a telephone that kept on ringing long after she’d hung up. The kettle had been a gift from her mother-in-law, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, and Vera had sold it with a set of dull knives and what remained of her daughter’s clothes. But the saucepan boiled water as well as the kettle, the knives weren’t sharp enough to slice a slab of cold butter, and her
daughter’s clothes, well, Lydia had moved to the right side of the world and these were difficult times. She strained the
Ivan-chai
into teacups.

“I didn’t know you drank such a weak brew,” Yelena commented, in the living room, with a thin smile of insincerity stitched between her plump cheeks. Her eyebrows were plucked brown sickles. Every two months she flew business class to Moscow—always bringing a stack of airline napkins as “souvenirs” for Vera—to have her hair recolored, her skin reapplied, and the toxins leached from her body by a Tibetan healer. Not a very good Tibetan healer, Vera would think to herself. If he properly leached all the toxicity from Yelena, there would be no Yelena left.

“I prefer a subtle brew in the evenings,” Vera said. It was two in the afternoon. Any more subtle and they’d be drinking straight water. “Otherwise I’d be up all night.”

Yelena slinked her arms into her coat sleeves with a slight shiver, which she realized wasn’t even theatrical. But there was nowhere she’d rather be. How many times, as a young woman, had she come to Vera cold, hungry, impoverished? How many times had Vera subjected her to audiences no less humiliating than this? Grand Inquisitors had treated heretics with more clemency than Vera had treated her closest friend. So yes, Yelena had every right to enjoy this. She would’ve conjured more empathy for Vera’s present difficulties had they not been her own so often in the past.

The furnace glowered at Vera from her late husband’s favorite corner of the living room. Even broken it wasn’t quite as useless as he had been—if nothing else, she could hang wet
stockings over it—but for two weeks now, it had produced no more than a stray cat’s body heat.

“You know it’s been hard recently,” Vera began. She steepled her fingers to catch and shelter some vestige of fleeing dignity. “If prices keep going up at this rate they’ll look like postal codes soon. What once bought bread for a month, now buys half a loaf. My pension stays the same and even that they don’t bother paying half the time.”

“The economic shock treatment has hurt the weakest members of society,” Yelena pointed out. “Not just you. Also the enfeebled and alcoholic.”

The shadow of her collected Gorky was dust-etched into the empty bookshelf. The leather-bound set had gone for less than the kettle. “Please, Yelena. Can your son help me?”

“Pavel?” She only had one son. “I wouldn’t want to bother him with something like this. You know how busy he gets.”

They both knew that in the end she would help Vera. In the end, they always helped each other. Yelena relented. “I’m going to Pavel’s for dinner this Sunday. If the subject comes up, I’ll ask if he has work.”

“Thank you.” Vera said it as nicely as she could, but the cold condensed her gratitude into a curse. After Yelena left, she washed up. She’d been born in this house sixty-three years earlier and intended to die here: It was one of her few life goals that she still had time to achieve. There was coherence in exiting by the same door through which you entered, bookending with order this senselessly churning existence.

In bed, she prayed for that mercy. One night as a girl, huddled in that same bed with her parents for warmth, she’d seen
them bow their heads and speak a formal language whose wide vowels yawned with wanting. They had thought she was asleep. A half-century had passed—and with it the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism, the infallible tenets of communism that had undergirded her faith—and now she found herself the citizen of a nation politically enfeebled and spiritually desolated enough to permit prayer to an authority more omnipotent than its government. But how do you trade your gods so late in life? Six decades of Soviet-speak had left her vocabulary crowded with slogans. She had little practice articulating the complexities of individual desire.

Now Vera closed her eyes and imagined the sound of wolves carrying her to sleep. Before there had been a gulag, a mine, a city, there had been wolves. An early scientific expedition had reported multiple encounters with a roving pack that had never before encountered prey as portly and pusillanimous as academics. Ten of the thirty-two geologists who had discovered the first nickel vein had been killed by wolves in 1928. In the late 1930s, when engineers had hastily assembled a gulag around the nickel mine, the Red Army had hunted the wolves nearly to extinction. It became well established in university biology departments that wolves were the capitalist imperialists of the animal kingdom, and so the army went to great lengths to be rid of them. But the wolves had returned during the Great Patriotic War, when all Red Army units had been sent southwest to face encroaching panzer divisions. Wages had been paid in hunks of bread measured to the grain and gram. Vera had watched her parents and neighbors scavenge to
survive. After the war, people had resumed killing wolves and Kirovsk had returned to silence.

Now, curled beneath heavy blankets, Vera remembered when the howling of wolves had signaled a coming hunger.

T
HE
year of the German invasion had been the high point of Vera’s life. That year she was extolled in schools, newspapers, and radio broadcasts from Minsk to Vladivostok. In the official version, Vera had witnessed her mother break into the commissariat canteen, pledge loyalty to Trotsky, and abscond with a hundred kilos of flour and a dozen live chickens stuffed in a sack.
Pravda
praised Vera for immediately reporting her mother’s treason to a commissar. “My mother is an enemy of the state and an enemy of the people,” she said, to which the commissar replied, “Though the state and the people are one and the same, you are the hero of both.”

In reality, the hoard was no more than a pouch of powdered eggs, a palmful of flour, and a cube of butter. The collaboration was not with the fascist enemy, but with Vera herself, who had dwindled to a bony thing made of stool legs and billiard cues. Despite swearing secrecy, Vera had boasted to Yelena about the small pie her mother had baked for Vera’s birthday. There had been no sugar in it, but nothing in her young life had ever tasted sweeter. Yelena had whispered it to another girl and soon the story had swept through the class, then the school, then the city, a rumor that grew more virulent with each host it infected. Kirovsk had only one mailbox for postal
mail, but several hundred mailboxes for denunciations. To send a letter, you’d have to walk to the central post office and wait in line for the better part of a morning; to send a denunciation, you wouldn’t need to leave your factory, school, or apartment block.

By the time the tale had reached the town commissar, it seemed perfectly plausible for a starving woman to carry off a hundred kilos of flour and a dozen live chickens that never existed, all while reciting Trotsky speeches verbatim. The commissar, of course, knew such a story was sheer lunacy, but he’d ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.

“You really believe I used a hundred kilos of flour for a single pie?” Vera’s mother asked in her defense at the trial.

“Profligacy,” the commissar replied, “is characteristic of the fascist.” Five years later, when the commissar was stripped of his rank and sentenced to the mines, he learned for himself that a malnourished body is incapable of carrying a hundred kilograms of anything, including the nourishment it needs. A certain amount of flour had in fact gone missing from the gulag reserves over the course of several months; had Vera investigated the town archives during glasnost, she would have learned that it had all gone to the commissar’s wife. The archives give no evidence of chickens, alive or dead, in Kirovsk in the summer of 1941.

Vera’s mother sent letters from her cell that eventually became a history classroom where the curiosity and childish wonder of several generations of Kirovsk schoolchildren would asphyxiate in the leaden air. The letters, which went by way
of the commissar’s office, took more than a week to cross the three hundred meters to Vera’s home. Each was folded into a triangle and let in the cold air as it fell through the mail slot. A censor’s marker striped her mother’s crimped handwriting. Piecing together meaning from the few uncensored words became an exacting lesson in how little she knew her mother.

On October 21, 1941, soldiers young enough to still check their cheeks each morning for pimples marched her mother into the wilderness, where she received her sentence from the barrel of a gun.

Vera’s father, a prison guard demoted to custodian after his wife’s arrest, led Vera into what would become White Forest. He wasn’t a cruel or vindictive man—he would later be eulogized by former inmates as a prison guard whose kindnesses had saved dozens of lives—but he felt he had the responsibility as a father and bereaved widower to show Vera the repercussions of her careless words. They wandered for two hours without speaking. He’d nearly given up, nearly turned for home, when his hands dropped to his sides. There she was, his wife, his dear. Cigarette ends lay among snowy paw prints. Wolves had already found the body. Vera hid before the scene in a bony crouch as her father buried the remains. When he finished, he collected the cigarette ends. Those ends would haunt him more forcefully than the bits of viscera he had gathered from as far as fifty meters from the execution site and buried in an unmarked grave. He would never smoke again.

The mail slot clattered a week later and Vera found a letter. For a brief, spectacular moment, she was able to believe that her mother was still in jail, that the sentence hadn’t been
carried out yet, that the corpse ringed by paw prints belonged to someone else’s mother. The letter was dated ten days prior. In it, her mother wrote:
I have been given—years without—to correspondence
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗
the last
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗
receive
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗.
Ten years
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗
and when
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗
you will—old, a woman
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗
children and
˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗.

Various journalists approached Vera over the years and she parroted lines about duty, sacrifice, and patriotism. She accepted honors from the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol, the electricians’ and ironworkers’ trade union, despising all, refusing none. “The world will give you pig shit,” her mother had once told her. “The secret to a happy life is learning to accept it as pork sausage.” On account of her heroism in defense of the people, Vera was upgraded to a commissar’s rations and her father was reinstated to his former position. She didn’t have to worry about hunger for many years.

Y
ELENA’S
son found work for Vera. Once a week Pavel’s men arrived with two duffel bags and Vera left for the day. That was it, just leave for the day and don’t ask questions. She’d expected jewel-festooned thugs, but Pavel’s wiry underlings looked like boys adrift in the seas of their fathers’ rumpled shirts. Between them they had a combined spoken vocabulary of perhaps two dozen non-scatological words. Vera used the time for errands: the town pharmacy for arthritis medicine, the post office to send letters to her daughter in America, the Leninsky Prospekt kiosk for chocolate bars so aerated they could be used as packing material. As winter neared, she felt
herself drawn across the meadow stretching from her house to White Forest.

Sheaves of plastic foliage drooped from metal branches, giving the impression that, despite the chill, she stood at the threshold of a melting realm. She followed the tree line for a kilometer. When her knees ached, she spread a shawl on the ground and sat to draft a letter to Lydia. She spoke the sentences aloud to see in her frozen breath their dissipating shapes. If each was perfect she could live in her daughter’s imagination more prosperously than she ever could in the new Russia. There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion. To that end, she invented stories, built town rumors into fortresses of truth. She wrote that her pension increased each month to keep pace with the hyperinflation, leaving enough in her budget to afford a Korean television. She wrote of compensation, reparations to the victims of state-sponsored terror, that she would finally be compensated for the loss she had, however inadvertently, inflicted upon herself. Justice would prevail in the fertile fantasyland of her Americanized daughter’s mind. Daylight had flattened into burgundies across the horizon.

White flour packed the nicks and divots of the kitchen table where the envelope of money lay waiting for Vera when she returned. Pavel’s men must be bakers, making good use of her spacious kitchen. A few days later she found powdered infant formula and quinine beneath the sink. Yes, she had an idea of what went on in her absence, but better to not think about those things. One evening she returned to find a man still sitting at the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said, rankled by having to apologize for entering her own home unannounced. “Am I early?”

“No, I’ll be going,” the man replied. A boy, really, though these days anyone who hadn’t lived through Stalin was a child to her. Early twenties, the same age as her daughter, the thin gray work shirt and unevenly barbered hair of someone recently released from a grim state institution. The musk of extinguished cigarettes percolated in the heavy air. He sat in a weary slump.