The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (22 page)

“Stay for a cup of tea,” Vera suggested. He looked as surprised to receive the invitation as she felt offering it. Associating with characters of ill repute, at her age! But there was a forlornness about the young man she recognized, a heavy-lidded exhaustion to his expression mirrored in her own.

“I should go.” He stood, stretched his limber arms.

“Stay. Have some tea. I have cake.”

The man glanced to the front door as if hoping a momentary variance in air pressure might suck him out into the night, then sat down. He’d never know why this woman with eyes too wide for her head and pens sticking from her pockets had shown him insistent, if self-serving, kindness that cool autumn evening. And Vera would never know that eleven hours earlier, the man had watched
Deceit Web
for the one hundred and fifty-eighth time. He’d long ago memorized the dialogue and camera cuts, could replicate the film beat by beat in his mind, was less an audience than a second screen for the film to keep on playing after the final credits rolled. He missed his brother more than he’d ever thought he could miss someone he hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids with. He’d bribed a university official, secured his brother a seat at Saint Petersburg State University,
saved him from mandatory military service and the unrest in Chechnya. But as he’d waded through snow soup that morning, he had considered his brother, parents, ex-fiancée. Each had taken different exits from his life for which he couldn’t reasonably be blamed. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he was the architect of a city made entirely of off-ramps, all leading away from him.

Vera climbed the stool her father had climbed, and had then stepped from, some thirty-seven years earlier, with a noose around his neck. She rooted through the cupboard, a largely symbolic performance since the cake sat in plain view on the otherwise empty shelf, but she wanted the man to think her pantry was so prosperous a cake could get lost in it. The cake was a thin pedestal on which a monument of pink-striped chocolate frosting towered.

She cut two slices with a spoon. He accepted the pink parade warily.

“Good, isn’t it? Would you like some more?” She still took orders from the sweet tooth—an actual tooth, she imagined, her right canine, the only one of her thirty-two natural teeth without a cavity—she’d developed even before she was upgraded to a commissar’s rations.

He thanked her as she plopped another massive wedge on his plate. She wanted to ask his name. To have a man for tea and cake without knowing his name was indecorous. Then again, so was renting her house to drug dealers, but she had long ago learned to ignore her largest moral failures by attending to the smallest social proprieties.

“Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“Pets?”

“A brother.”

“What’s his story?”

“His story, well, it’s all beginnings,” the man said, glancing down. “Still finding his way. Do you have pets?”

“I have a daughter. She lives in America. Married to a man named Gilbert. He is Glendale, California’s preeminent
pi-an
—” and here, after the second syllable, the word would normally veer away from reality, but talking to a petty criminal, she felt liberated from the need to lie “—piano tuner.”

The man whistled enviously—and the envy of others was the closest she came to feeling proud of Lydia. When asked about her daughter, Vera added rooms to Gilbert’s modest condo, added zeros to his salary. She recounted her daughter’s life in America just as she wrote of her own in the carefully constructed letters she mailed each month at the city post office—with aggrandized half-truths, little lies that had grown beyond her control. But she didn’t fear the judgment of this man sitting before her, licking pink frosting from the back of his spoon.

“She was a mail-order bride,” Vera said.

“In a catalog?”

“A catalog. Several websites. She had to pose for pictures in a bikini. A shameful thing.”

“Does she eat cheeseburgers and watch basketball?”

“I don’t know,” Vera admitted. Lonely American men reading Lydia’s marriage website profile had had greater access to her daughter’s inner life. “She’s not particularly forthcoming
with me. She’s sent six letters in the last year. Mainly to tell me about the weather. Do you know how many types of clouds there are in Glendale? Three. She’s described them all.”

“America’s far away and the only mailman I’ve ever known would need a map to find his own feet. Many letters must get lost along the way.”

“I’ve told myself that.”

“Tell me about this husband. What sort of man is he?”

Vera shook her head. “What sort of man finds his wife in an Internet catalog and still calls himself a man?”

“A trailblazer. In a few years, we’ll all be embarrassing ourselves on the Internet.”

“You must be around her age. Did you know her?”

“In passing,” the man admitted. “I dated one of her friends. Galina Ivanova.”

Vera had, like everyone, watched Galina’s ascent into stardom. She might’ve been the only soul in Kirovsk to pity Galina’s good fortune. “And do you have a wife?”

“Only a brother.”

When the man left the house that evening, he lit a cigarette. He’d wanted one for hours. A few days earlier he’d beaten the gold teeth from an unlucky but persistent gambler who possessed no other form of payment, yet he found himself too sheepish to ask Vera for an ashtray. Snowdrifts darkened in the shadows. The end of his cigarette was the closest thing to a working streetlamp for eight blocks. Behind Vera’s house, White Forest loomed. A decade had passed since he’d last walked through it. He’d been a child then, but when he’d shielded his brother’s eyes from the execution they had
stumbled upon, he’d felt like a father for the first but not the final time in his brief life. His name was Kolya and not long ago he’d returned from Chechnya. In less than a year, he would be back there, where he would spend his final moments planting dill seeds on a mined hill.

E
ACH
week Kolya slunk into Vera’s house as wordless and grim-faced as his associates. But when she returned eight hours later, she found her new kettle humming with steam, two teacups on the kitchen table, Kolya singing quietly to himself as he cut thick cake slices at the counter. He told her about his brother, the games they had played, rooftop leaps into snowdrifts, the outer-space museum their father had run, which Vera admitted she’d visited several times over the years. He described the heroin trade like a market analyst, cloaking the brutal business in the hazy virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. The cultivation of poppy fields in Afghanistan, the refinement into opium and overland transport through Tajikistan, the whole greased chute of corruption on which heroin simply slid northward, from Kandahar to the Arctic. The Ecuadorian birds Yelena’s son collected in his private aviary. The money paid for police protection. When Vera asked, cautiously, why such a big-brained and convivial young person had gotten into this business, he smiled, and said he could ask the same of her. Regardless of what penthouse politicians might say, there was nothing reckless in his logic: Schools had only taught him how to cheat; the military had trained him in ballistics, subordination, and intimidation; he had returned to a mining town where the jobs
had become automated and the narcotics business was the only prosperous industry that would benefit from his skill set. For someone in his boots, the drug trade was the only path for economic advancement. She asked if there was a woman in his life since Galina, and he said no, not to speak of, then looked away.

She told him of her husband, who had died, a heart attack, ten years earlier, just after he’d finished brushing his teeth. He had had broad cheeks and a nose that had healed crookedly after a beekeeper’s escaped colony chased him, face-first, into a concrete wall. He’d thought they were demons. It was the only time in his life he would see a winged insect fly through Kirovsk. She admitted she had wanted to join Lydia in America, but that Gilbert objected. She admitted writing misleading letters to her daughter in an effort to lure her home. The unfairness of growing old, watching her body lose shape like a snowman in the sun, without relatives to blame, or to provide support, or to bear grievance—it just wasn’t right. Now and then, when she thought of her own mother, she felt herself at the edge of a darker injustice, but this she did not confide in Kolya.

“I’ve heard stories of you as a child,” he said one afternoon.

“Everyone has stories from childhood,” she said. “You tell me a dozen a day.” The first heavy snow had come late that year, and across the field ice encased the corroded branches of White Forest. Kolya sat at the kitchen table and tapped his cigarette into a plastic ashtray.

“None of mine made the front page of
Pravda
.”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” she said. Kolya went to the living room and flipped the channels of the Japanese television
he’d brought over the previous week. Of late, he’d spent more and more time with Vera, refilling the kettle far into the evening and coming for dinner on his days off. The few friendships he had all revolved around alcohol, flatulence, and the gleeful inflicting of violence, so in that sense Vera wasn’t a friend. She was too warm and caring for him to think of her as a maternal figure. She was simply Vera, a vague but benevolent presence whose approval and affection he wanted to receive as much as she wanted to bestow it.

Vera stood at the stove, frying chicken in a pan still greasy from the morning’s eggs, when the mail arrived. A maze of black cancellation marks caged the price of international postage. The envelope edges were worn, but the seal was unbroken. A dozen years earlier, a letter from America would have never reached her without having been read and noted by invisible men in distant offices.

“What is it?” Kolya asked, sensing her disquiet. The letter, sent by land, bore no markings of urgency, but it lay on the coffee table like the gravitational center around which the rest of the room slowly spun. The whole universe of Vera’s fear, heartache, and regret was thin enough to fold inside that envelope. With the blunt side of her house key, she opened it and held the letter close to her face. The piano tuner in Glendale had divorced Lydia for a woman in Minsk and Lydia’s petition for conditional residence had been denied. She would be back within the month.

Before slipping into bed that night, Vera pulled a shoebox from beneath her bed. It held the money Kolya left her each week, the newspaper clippings praising her denunciation, both
letters her daughter had sent from America and the ones her mother had sent from her cell. She flipped through the brittle newsprint because even in their celebration of her betrayal, they were a reminder that she had been young and beloved, that she had not spent her entire life old, alone, and ignored. Five decades had whittled her remorse to pieces of manageable neglect—she had been a child, had been manipulated, innocent in any eyes but her own—and as she flipped through the clippings, she couldn’t shake off the disappointment for how ordinary the rest of her life had turned out. She had peaked before her eighth birthday.

The shoebox lay open on the floor beside her as she repeated her mother’s prayers. She no longer prayed for life-changing miracles (wealth, forgiveness, new knees), and instead pinned her hopes on day-size miracles (an unbroken sleep, a bakery sale, a rash of adolescent acne blooming on Yelena’s cheeks). When she finished, she ran her finger across the broken seal of her daughter’s new letter and placed it in the shoebox along with the others. Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

L
YDIA
arrived after five days of travel, flights from Los Angeles to New York to London to Petersburg to Novosibirsk, then north by rail, barge, and bus to Kirovsk. She returned with the same suitcase and pleather handbag she’d left with. She had lost two sweaters, a framed photograph of her parents, all faith
in online relationships, regular contact with her friends, and replaced that sum with a thorough knowledge of drive-through menus, a few luggage tags, and a bit of a drinking problem. Her mother met her at the station, a little shorter and wider than Lydia remembered. Snow fell on them.

Vera hugged Lydia in the blue kiosk light of a vendor selling Sylvester Stallone VHS tapes, Ukrainian cigarettes, Gosloto tickets. A lighter tied by string to the kiosk crossbar swung in the breeze. Even through the padded overcoat, she felt the narrowness of her daughter’s figure.

“You’re crushing me,” Lydia groaned.

“I know.”

The city slid across the soot-mottled bus window. Say what you will about Southern California, but the place had color. Cacti of army-grade green alongside irrigated lawns. The incandescent signage of bodegas and check-cash swindlers. From the air above LAX, bungalow blocks formed interlocking periodic tables of pastels. In New York, she’d said good-bye to green. In London, red. By the time she’d reached Kirovsk, the palette had been scraped of all but the grays and yellows that painted the clouds, streets, snow, and even the vitamin-deficient pallor peeking from her mother’s coat collar.

Lydia undressed in her bedroom. A knit hat, outlet-mall scarf, and wool mittens. A winter coat with a detachable hood clinging from half of its buttons. A bright pink sweatshirt with the flared image of a screen-printed elm. Her underwear, to Vera’s mind, was far too narrow in back and far too translucent in front. Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn’t look
at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera’s emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than
wonder
to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia’s poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.