The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (23 page)

“Where are my clothes?”

“In your suitcase, I imagine,” Vera said.

“No, the ones I left.”

Vera had been worried both for this conversation and for the possibility that they would never have to have it. The open closet held nothing but bent wire hangers. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”

Lydia retrieved the elm tree sweatshirt and skinny jeans from the floor and put them back on with a despondency she knew would wound her mother more than anything she said. She had worn these clothes for five days and some seventeen thousand kilometers, she could wear them a little longer.

“Brush your hair,” Vera said. “We’re having company after dinner.”

K
OLYA
knocked on the front door four times, the first two of which sounded timid and hollow, the kind of knock to announce a bellboy rather than a rising gangster, and so he battered the door twice more for good measure. In his other hand
he held a bright bouquet of artificial roses tightly wrapped in green tinfoil.

After introductions, Kolya presented Lydia with the plastic flowers. He recognized her as one of the six or seven girls who had had an unhealthy fixation on Galina in school. Galina had never really liked them, and the idea of sleeping with one from their ranks felt like the kind of potent but ultimately meaningless act of self-assertion that appealed to him. She wore a sweatshirt, blue jeans, and no makeup. She didn’t even realize this was a date.

“What are these?” she asked, as if she’d never before seen a rose.

“They are made of plastic,” Kolya said proudly. “Much safer than real roses. And they will never die.”

Still, Vera put them in a vase with water and set it on the living room coffee table. She told them to sit where they wanted, then made sure Kolya sat next to Lydia. She had high hopes for the night. Sure, Kolya was involved with some unsavory business, but it showed ambition, didn’t it? Besides, Lydia would only benefit from spending time with a young man who was fond of Vera.

“How do you like being back in Kirovsk?” Kolya asked after they toasted to their health.

“It’s exactly as I imagined it would be,” Lydia said. She looked to Vera. “You wrote in one of your letters that they were distributing compensation money.”

Vera nodded. The mail worked one way, at least. She tried to remember what she had written. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been an outright lie, but rather a statement made from the
distant borderlands of truth. She had seen some sort of televised documentary program on reparations. Maybe it was about the Great Patriotic War. Maybe Germany was paying Belgium, rather than Russia paying its citizens. Who could even remember now. She shrugged. “From Moscow to Kirovsk is thousands of kilometers,” Vera said. “Every kilometer along the way someone puts their hand into the pot so by the time it gets here: nothing left.”

Kolya padded his tender neck with a napkin. It looked like he’d shaven with a guillotine. “Speaking of letters, your mother has not received many from you. I told her overseas mail is often lost.”

“Yes, I wrote every two weeks.”

“I never doubted that,” Vera said. Let the two believe they had fooled her. Meanwhile she’d fool them into falling in love.

But as the evening progressed, Lydia grew intoxicated. She had two shots for every one of Kolya’s, and grew angry when Vera tried to take the bottle from her.

When Kolya was leaving, Lydia stumbled to the door to kiss him good-bye. She spilled her drink on him as she leaned forward. Kolya placed his hands on her shoulders and firmly pushed her away. One look at his face was enough for Vera to know he’d never be her son-in-law, they would never be a family together, and she ached.

Later, Vera woke to splashing water. In the bathroom, she found her daughter on her knees before the toilet, holding her hair in a loose fist behind her head.

“You stupid child,” Vera said, dropping to a knee beside her.

Lydia’s head bobbed over the toilet seat.

“You stupid child. What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia mumbled, letting the fistful of hair go slack. Vera had an urge to shout, but she laid her daughter on the floor and made a pillow from the bath towel. A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera—Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter—but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia’s mother.

D
ECEMBER
approached, and the days shrank. Each Wednesday, hungover or not, Lydia left the house with her mother when the men arrived. Kolya nodded curtly. This peasant of a man must’ve been too intimidated by her worldliness to speak to her. And those ridiculous plastic flowers—he’d probably never smelled a real one in his life, whereas she’d once lived in a city where roses were so plentiful a stadium was named after them.

On the day Vera came upon her daughter at the forest edge, Lydia had been thinking of Gilbert’s piano-tuning kit. The brown leather case contained a gooseneck tuning hammer, nickel lever heads, and rubber mutes. Tuning forks that gave warm, round rings when she flicked them. A manual that Gilbert had ceased referring to years earlier, filled with terms like
equal temperament
,
fundamental frequency
, and
coincident harmonics
. When she first arrived at LAX, she wasn’t sure if she should kiss her fiancé or shake his hand. His flesh was the color and texture of an overcooked potato, and he wore Hawaiian shirts to counter the otherwise overpowering blandness that emanated
from him. When she joined him on calls to factory-size suburban houses, she read through the manual. She couldn’t find the technical terms in her Russian-English pocket dictionary, and Gilbert had done his best to explain them in simple language. He would have made a better elementary school teacher than a husband. A friend of Gilbert’s found Lydia a job as a minimum-wage caregiver at the Glendale Sunrise Rest Home. She couldn’t understand why so many of its residents viewed nursing homes as elderly storage where sons and daughters imprison parents to recompense unresolved childhood traumas. Compared to elder care in Russia, it was a beacon of warmth and compassion. When she saw her first wheelchair ramp in LAX, she had mistaken it for some kind of weird public sculpture. When she learned what a wheelchair ramp was, when she learned that they were mandated by law, she felt a pure rush of patriotism for a country she’d only been living in for a few hours. Of the century’s magnificent and terrible inventions, what was more humane, more elegant, more generous than the wheelchair ramp? The happiest day of her life was many decades away, she believed: when she was an elderly widow wheeled up the wheelchair ramp of Glendale Sunrise and into their care. She was only twenty years old and she knew where she wanted to die. One Friday afternoon, Gilbert emerged from a rare autumn rain shower, set his tuning kit on the floor, and told her he had met a Belarusian woman online.

Lydia continued trudging along the edge of the rusted forest. Wolves—or was it the wind?—howled deep among the steel branches. But she’d stopped caring a long while ago. A figure appeared ahead, stenciled against the dim sun. Her mother.

“December is cold,” Vera said. Her daughter’s presence leeched her powers of observation, and she couldn’t sustain a conversation with Lydia that extended beyond statements of obvious fact.

Lydia gave an unexpected smile. “You’ve grown wise in your old age.”

“I’m growing senile.”

“At the nursing home I worked exclusively with the bewildered and mentally deranged.”

“How far along am I?”

“We both crossed that border a ways back.”

“Will you take care of me when I’m old?” she asked Lydia, more seriously than she’d intended.

“Mama, you are old.”

Vera glanced down the field to the small squares of lamplight encased behind the triple-paned glass of her kitchen window. “We can go back soon.”

“You do know what they’re doing in there, don’t you?”

Vera looked away. A ballpoint pen was clipped to a folded sheet of paper in her pocket. She had been writing a letter to Lydia as if she still lived in America. In it she had described Kolya, how handsome and polite he was, how he and Lydia would make the most gorgeous couple, the most beautiful grandchildren. How everything in her life was on its way to being made right, and how, at the age of sixty-three, she had never felt more blessed.

“We have food on the table and money in the jar. Isn’t that enough? Why does it matter where it comes from? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not doing anything at all.”

“You’re from another world, Mama. Criminals are packaging drugs on our kitchen table and you act like this is something to be proud of.”

“Be quiet,” Vera commanded. She wouldn’t be lectured on self-respect by a mail-order bride. “You must be quiet.”

Vera turned toward the house. Lydia fell in line behind her and they hiked the half kilometer in silence. At home, the men packed bundled vials into a duffel bag. Vera looked away.

“We’re on our way out,” Kolya announced. He didn’t look at Lydia. He no longer stayed after work. The kitchen table had only two chairs.

The men left. Lydia unfurled her long legs on the divan, kept drinking, then left too. What accounted for her daughter’s unhappiness? Lydia had grown up in the party, had spent her childhood in the placid years of Brezhnev, her adolescence in Gorbachev’s glow. She’d never known hunger. It had been the best upbringing Vera could provide. In a kinder world, her best would’ve been enough.

Lydia returned a few hours later, so drunk she couldn’t fit the key in the keyhole. She had gone to a party thrown by one of her childhood friends. The girls, now women, with girls of their own, had gossiped about Galina and the oligarch until Lydia had let slip that Galina’s ex-boyfriend worked at her house. A hush had fallen over the five women. They had cajoled, promised not to tell a soul. They’d never been so interested, so concerned for Vera’s well-being. But by then, Lydia had been too drunk to care. She’d described Kolya, his associates, the drugs, her mother’s complicity. Her friends had given hushed assurances of confidentiality that hadn’t fooled anyone.
They’d spent their lives narrating Galina’s story and this tragic coda to the plot line of her first love was the best news they’d heard in ages.

Vera found her at the door, trying to unlock the mail slot with the house key. She mumbled about peasants, drug criminals, and piano tuners. “Be quiet. You can’t say these things,” Vera warned, but Lydia wasn’t listening.

T
HE
men didn’t show up the next week. Vera waited an hour before going to see Yelena. At two in the afternoon, the sun had already set.

Yelena opened the door with a nod. She’d been expecting Vera. The samovar was still warm in the kitchen.

Vera sat hunched at the edge of the leather sofa, which Yelena never failed to mention had been imported from Italy. She tapped her foot, folded and unfolded her hands. All her nervous energy drained to her extremities. A pack of Benson and Hedges lay open beside a silver ashtray.

“Sugar?” Yelena offered, sliding the teacup to Vera.

“They haven’t come today.”

Yelena stirred three scoops of sugar into both teas. She took her time. It was a strong brew. She had a child any mother would be proud of.

“It’s over,” she said.

“But why?” Vera asked.

“Your daughter. She talks.”

Without asking, Vera slid one of the scrawny cigarettes from the pack. Was this why the wolves had returned? For her
own daughter’s denunciation? For her? A ridiculous idea, she knew, but in a world so topsy-turvy, superstition was the only rational system of belief. She drew on the cigarette, her first in twenty-three years, and held the tickle in her throat.

“What will happen to me?” Prison, she imagined, was the best possible outcome. She expected something far worse. “Will I be arrested?”

You’re living in the wrong decade
, Yelena thought.
The police have nothing to do with it
. Yelena watched her old friend’s hands tremble ash to the carpet. No,
friend
wasn’t the right word. What bound them was more enduring than friendship. In school their teacher had applauded Vera for her courage, for her self-sacrifice in the name of the people; and even during the famine of 1947, when Yelena had shrunk to a malnourished sliver and buried her two brothers, Vera had always had enough to eat. And now Yelena wore shoes whose price, even on sale, exceeded Vera’s net worth. In the end the world is just and righteous. One is always compensated for what one has earned.

“What will happen to me?” Vera asked.

“You?” Yelena shook her head. “Nothing will happen to you.”

V
ERA
returned home to find the front door unlocked. An uncapped bottle stood beside the divan, three fingers from full. A trail of footprints began at the back door and ran in a perforated line across the snowy field to White Forest. Her knees ached as she followed the trail toward the trees. She didn’t stop
to count the sets of footprints. She recognized the smallest of them.

A crescent of moonlight dissolved in cloud wisps. Snow soaked her boot linings. Decades had passed since she’d last run, but she did, now, adding her footprints to those that entered the forest. In the darkness she lost the trail. She found blown-out tires, mulching waste paper, yellow plastic leaves everywhere, but no footprints. She spun around, sifted through refuse, searched for a sign, a voice, a clue, an answer, a reason. She’d never know that fifty-two minutes earlier and a hundred and sixteen meters away, her daughter had looked toward that same sky. Even through her terror and bewilderment, the trees of White Forest had reminded Lydia of the redwood forest Gilbert had taken her to a week after she’d arrived in America, when she still could speak no more than a dozen words of English, when she still couldn’t believe her luck.

Two men walk in front of her, two beside. She has no shoes on and her feet are wooden blocks fixed to her ankles. Raw copper wiring binds her wrists behind her back in rings of pain. She focuses on her wrists, on the copper infinity wound around them, her skin a frozen lake into which a skater carves figure eights. Beside her the man’s leather jacket squeaks. He pulls a small bottle of motor oil from his pocket, splashes a bit under his arm, and his jacket silences. Ahead, a hole. An oval missing from the ground. Every particle inside Lydia rises. She has something to say. She must articulate the monstrousness of that hole, the impossibility of her ever going in. If they could only feel what she feels, if she could just position the right
words in the right order, they would understand. A whimper is all she summons as she’s pushed to her knees. The moon is a distant and indifferent witness. Mute clouds collide. Kolya’s stricken face appears beside hers. He doesn’t want to do this. No one could ever want to do this. This is her life. This is what she has. There’s so much she has to fix. There’s so much she still has to do. She can’t die now, not when she has so little to lose. She tries to explain this but Kolya frowns at her as if she speaks a language he briefly studied but no longer remembers. She bargains. She’ll leave Kirovsk forever, she’ll quit drinking, she’ll go to university, she’ll get a job, she’ll have kids and they’ll have kids, she’ll live a long, happy, useful existence, she’ll turn her entire life around, she’s never felt more powerful, more capable, more aware of what her life might become if they will just give it back to her. Kolya reaches behind her and gently holds her hands. “Close your eyes now,” he says. “When you open them, you’ll be home.” He releases her hands but his voice still holds her. “I’m right here. You’re nearly there.” This is a good thing, she tells herself. This will change me. I’ll be a better person. I’ll be the person I want to be. Everything will be different. This is what I’ve been searching for.