The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (24 page)

In the flash there’s no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.

T
HAT
night Kolya returned to his flat above the space museum that had been shuttered since his father had passed the previous year. His porridge was still on the table from the morning. He
set it in the sink and reached his hand out to press his fingertips against the faint square of less faded wallpaper where his mother’s postcard had hung.

To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that’s what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him.

He turned on the VCR.
Deceit Web
played. Galina hopped on her motorcycle, paved a narrow corridor of speed down a wide avenue, dodged kiosks and
pirozhki
stands, the bike steered by her flared hips. Her hazy whisper sounded like Galina’s, but it conveyed no sentiment that could ever come from her natural heart. On the bookshelf lay the Polaroid of his family in leopard-print swimsuits, and on top of it the mixtape his brother and Galina had made for him. It struck him that this mixtape, whatever it contained, was the only question he had to which he could ever hope to receive an answer. Everything else was an afterlife he shared with the child whose first birthday he’d celebrated with an upside-down matchstick wedged into a biscuit.

He tucked the mixtape in his shirt pocket, along with the Polaroid, and stayed awake in the blue television glow until the army recruitment office opened the next morning.

T
HERE
was no funeral, no body found to wash and consecrate. Vera still went to church. She didn’t believe in God because there was no evidence that God existed, and now there was no evidence that Lydia had either. Vera stood at the front of the church before an icon of the Virgin and child. The great golden god was helpless in his mother’s arms. Though she held him across her chest, she looked outward rather than at her son.

On her way home, Vera passed a young woman holding a clipboard. She’d seen the woman before, milling about on street corners to ambush innocent pedestrians with solicitations for signatures. The young woman was still naive enough to believe in whatever big ideas she had on that clipboard.

“Would you sign this?” the young woman asked, thrusting the clipboard into Vera’s hands. “We’re petitioning the mayor to turn White Forest into a nature preserve.”

Vera couldn’t believe it. “You’re not from around here, are you? Have you ever been into the forest?”

The woman blushed.

“The trees are made of metal. The leaves are plastic. It was installed forty years ago to make people forget that we’re living where humans don’t belong.”

The young woman was unperturbed. “Whatever its origin, a rich and vibrant ecosystem has emerged. Feral dogs and cats, yes, but also arctic rabbits, foxes, and even wolves. This biodiversity, unlikely as it may be, deserves state protection.”

“Protection,” Vera slowly repeated, recalling Kolya at her kitchen table, a fat slice of cake on a saucer, explaining why his boss didn’t fear the police. The clipboard clattered on the sidewalk. The strip of concrete, scabbed in gray frost, stretched to the intersection where it linked with another sidewalk, which in turn intersected with another and another, circumscribing the limits of her life. How often had she walked down them silently? How often had she censored her thoughts, her judgments, her beliefs, her desires, consigning them to some region of her soul where they couldn’t betray her?

“Protection,” she mumbled, low enough that the young woman leaned forward to hear her. She had received honors from the Young Pioneers, Komsomol, the ironworkers’ trade union, had been anointed the future of socialism by
Pravda
, and only now, at this late date, had she discovered a denunciation that had been building in her for all her sixty-three years. She would denounce Kolya, Yelena, Yelena’s son, the gangsters and bandits that governed the city no less brutally than had the prison guards. The commissar, whose hand she’d shaken and whose congratulations she’d accepted days after he sentenced her mother. Her primary teacher, so afraid of Vera she’d never marked a single quiz less than one hundred percent correct, even when the girl left half the questions blank. Her husband, who had claimed cunnilingus was antirevolutionary and had lived so distantly from her that he’d closed the door to the bathroom as he had a heart attack inside. No one was innocent, no one was unconnected, no one was not complicit. The strongest, most damning adjectives she’d reserve for her own silences, if she could only now raise her voice. But it never went
louder than a whisper. She didn’t know where to begin. “Protection,” she said over and over as the girl bent over to pick up her clipboard.

Vera’s reaction didn’t surprise the young woman, who had recently watched her own grandmother descend into dementia. The young woman’s grandmother had cursed the clouds, the factories, the loved ones whose faces she no longer recognized. And here, this babushka cursed a nature preserve. One must have patience and compassion for the elderly, the young woman thought, as she took hold of Vera’s hand and shushed soothingly. They are from a different time. “Just breathe. Everything’s okay, grandmother. Everything is fine.”

Vera clutched the smooth hands that had appeared in hers. She’d have fallen without the young woman’s shoulder for support. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized she would never be a grandmother.

A
WEEK
later, a knock at the door. Vera approached. In the peephole Kolya was a beaky gargoyle. She held her chin in her hands.

“I know you’re there,” he said. “I can see your shadow at the glass.”

She pressed against the peeling paint, willing herself to slide through the wood atom by atom and dissolve.

“I’ve reenlisted in the army,” he said. “As a contract soldier. I’ll be back in Chechnya. You don’t need to worry about seeing me again.”

The mail slot lifted, then fell shut as a manila envelope
dropped to the floor. Vera’s insides tightened. She knew what the envelope contained. It had to be true. It had happened before. A final letter from Lydia, her last words transcribed by Kolya under frozen branches. She swelled with a cardiac rush of hope so entire she could’ve forgiven Kolya, right then, for murdering her daughter, if he had delivered a last message for her to save inside the shoebox, beside the final letter from her mother, a last message in which Lydia said the one lie Vera would’ve sold her soul to make true: that she had died knowing she was loved. Vera fumbled with the envelope. It was far too large, too thick, too heavy for a letter. Inside were ten stacks of banded thousand-ruble bills: compensation money.

Vera opened the door, ready to fling the bills at Kolya because this time her silence would not be bought. But he had already receded halfway down the block. She gripped the envelope tighter, afraid she might drop it. The winter still had months of life left. The gas bill was due. The cupboard was nearly empty. It was late in the day, late in the century. Too late to become someone else.

In her bedroom she pulled the shoebox from beneath the bed. The manila envelope wouldn’t fit inside, not with the other envelopes. She withdrew the various letters and newspaper clippings, laid them on the bed, and began stacking the banded bills in the shoebox. When she finished, she knelt beside the bed and prayed for her daughter, for her mother, and finally, for herself.

ST. PETERSBURG
, 2001

“
I
s there more, Sergei Vladimirovich?” my father demanded the day I received my conscription notice. His stomach filled half the doorway. In the slip of paper pinched between mustard-rimmed nails, he held a half-gram of heroin. My shoulder blades
snap-snap-snapped
spirals of peeling paint as I slouched down the wall to the bedroom floor and gazed up with the all-iris innocence of a cartoon kitten.

“Is there more?”

The phantoms of two hundred thousand cigarettes and a street
pirozhki
haunted his breath.

“Is there more?”

He steadied his wheezy frame against the doorway. He was already an old fart when I was a little boy. Now he qualified as antique. I still hadn’t answered his question.

Strength regained, my father lumbered into my bedroom and pulled the drawers from the dresser, plunged shoulder-deep into the hamper, scattered CDs, crunched videocassette cases underfoot, left the mattress listing drunkenly against the wall, the sheets dangling from the bedposts, employing all his
considerable bulk to rip and toss, throw and stomp, until it became clear that whatever he searched for was more elusive than the half-gram stashed in receipt paper at his feet. Once everything shelved, hung, or standing was strewn across the floor, he slumped into the rocking chair and finished the final drag of the cigarette I’d left smoldering in the ashtray.

“Is there more?” he asked.

The year before he went to prison, when I was eight years old, he’d taught me to keep silent in an interrogation. He planted one of my mother’s earrings in my coat pocket, kept me home from school, and grilled me in the kitchen with the windows closed, the oven on, the lamps unshaded. Cold cottony clouds ruffled the skies, but in that kitchen I sweltered like flesh skewered on a grease-brown rotisserie. In the end I would’ve confessed to killing Kirov. I opened my mouth, ready to admit anything and everything, but before I muttered a single syllable I felt the wrath of God in my father’s backhand.

“Is there more?” His voice surrendered to my silence. He knew I’d never confess. He knew he’d taught me well.

“More of what?” I finally said, when his repeated question had softened to whispers.

My father just looked at me as if I’d invited in the national billiards team to practice break shots on his nuts. “You talk? A rat as well as an addict. More of this.” He unfolded the paper. A winter wonderland lay in its creases.

“It’s just sugar. For tea.”

“Sugar, right. And do you put it in your tea with a hypodermic needle?”

When you can no longer deny logic, begin denying everything else.

“Do you have the virus?” he asked. His anger had burned away. Only the sad residue of paternal concern remained.

“Of course not.” I’d only shared needles with my three closest friends.

My father stood and trundled to the door. “Seryozha,” he said, without turning back, “until the army takes you, you will spend your days working.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll shoot you.”

“That would violate your parole.”

“I’ll claim self-defense. ‘May it please the court, I was only trying to
save
my son from the lunatic drug addict who’s moved into his room and begun wearing his clothes.’ No judge in heaven, hell, or the national judiciary would convict me.”

Next morning’s light was unwelcome proof that the world hadn’t ended overnight. I followed my father to the top floor of the apartment block. A dark gash leaked hall light into the metal door of the last flat on the left.

“Do you see this?” he asked, pointing to the door with a fully cocked frown of indignation. What my father lacked in education, he made up for in opinions. I silently prepared to hibernate through the long winter of his lecture. “They make new doors from recycled fish tins and burglars need only a can opener to break in. Bullshit for brains, these—”

The tin door swung open, thank the merciful heavens. On the other side sat the legless man. Late twenties, clean-shaven,
hair the greased silver of a ball bearing, smelling of cheap Ukrainian tobacco and burnt vegetable shortening. He sat in a wheelchair. Two strips of pig leather and canvas sagged between rubber wheels—probably the most advanced mode of transport owned by anyone in the building.

“This is my son, Sergey Vladimirovich, but you may call him ‘asshole,’ ” my father announced, then gestured at the legless man. “And this is Kirill Andreyevich.”

“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected. Only his unimpressed gaze met my outstretched hand.

I poked around the flat while my father spoke with Kirill in the kitchen. I expected chaos, disarray, but only chair and table legs touched the living room floor. A dish rack sat beside the bathtub. A bit of that morning’s oats ringed the drain. Large glass water jars stood along the bathroom baseboard with red rust clouding their bottom centimeter. Did Kirill know something we didn’t? My throat was dry and my mouth tasted like a compost bin, but it’s never a good idea to drink from jars found in a stranger’s bathroom.

Party-approved volumes lined the bookshelves: Red Army field manuals, censored editions of nineteenth-century novels, flinty odes to heavy industries—the sort of kitsch sold to Western tourists outside the Winter Palace or down the Embankment. I picked up a copy of
How the Steel Was Tempered.
Had I been born a few decades earlier, I’d have been assigned a novel like this in my final year of school, and I’d have known exactly what the book was about without reading it, and I’d have aced whatever literature exam they gave before the UGEs. But I was born in 1983, assigned
The Master and Margarita—
a
long canal to nowhere, that, no wonder Stalin was a Bulgakov fan—and scored a two on the exam. No university wanted me. The army did.

A black pistol lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and rubbed my thumb across its dark luster. Heavier than they look in movies. Holding that gun made me feel taller up top and longer down below. Somewhere in Chechnya was an eighteen-year-old Muslim holding a pistol for the first time and feeling this same surge of power?

“Put it down.”

Kirill wheeled through the doorway, my father behind him.

“You know what Chekhov had to say about loaded guns,” I said. Kirill didn’t smile. Probably hadn’t passed the UGE either. I rubbed my prints from the metal—another childhood lesson from my father—and set it on the table.

“Now you’re employed,” my father said. He was radiant.

“By whom?”

“By Kirill Andreyevich.”

“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected.

“Yes, you’ll be working for the junior sergeant.”

The future looked darker than a mortician’s closet. “You must be joking,” I said. My father never joked.

“Tomorrow morning you’ll begin,” my father said, quite pleased with himself. “It’s the early rising rooster who sticks it to the fattest hen.”

His smirk left little question as to which bird I was.

“And Seryozha,” my father said. “Remember, I’m not afraid of breaking my parole.”

D
EFERMENTS
went to university students, fathers, and prisoners, only the last of which me and my friends had any hope of becoming in the near future. Prison would be our trade school, the only one to admit us, the only one to provide the skill set that would expand our futures. We should’ve gone into a PTU after our ninth year, but our class boasted a bumper crop of underperforming students, making the one dumpy neighborhood vocational school harder to crack than Cambridge. No matter; if your business is crime, there’s no better business school than prison.

During our final spring of our last year as high schoolers, when we were well on our way to becoming the people we’d be for the rest of our lives, we skipped class to drink Baltika 7s and whistle at women in the Tauride Gardens. Black eyes of frozen muck peered through the snow. A pair of ten-thousand-year-old hermits played bullet chess at an icy table. We stood in a small shivering huddle.

“My grandpa fought his way all the way from Stalingrad to Hitler’s bunker and you know what they did to him when he got back? Popped his patriotic ass in a gulag,” Valeriy declared. He picked white grains from his scalp. Lint or dandruff, couldn’t tell. “I’m ashamed to be related to such a sucker.”

“Two hundred got beat to death last year before even making it to Chechnya. And if they’re reporting two hundred, the real figure’s got to be as long as an international phone number.
Dedovshchina
, no joke.”

“Two years with nothing but your canteen to fuck,
that’s
no joke.”

“That’s why I’m saying jail time’s soft time.”

“Where’s Tony with those beers?” Our names—Aleksandr Kharlmov, Valeriy Lebedev, Ivan Vladim, and Sergei Markin—fit who we were, not who we wanted to be, so we’d rechristened ourselves: Tony Montana, Joe Pesci, Don Corleone, and Tupac. Our spirit animals were all of the genus American Kingpin Tragically Slain in His Prime. Our parents learned English from the Beatles, but we learned from Biggie.

Different afternoon, different park, same conversation.

“The trick’s to jail just till the insurgency’s over.”

“And how you gonna do that?”

“Easy,” I boasted. Never forget the first three letters of
confidence
. “You forecast how long the war will last, how long you’ll need to jail, then find a felony that fits the sentence.”

Crime and Punishment. We knew nothing of history—decent odds that three of the four of us couldn’t tell you what year Jesus was born—but we staked our futures by predicting it. We took bets: The war would finish in a year, two, five. Browsing old newspapers and Yandexing court reports, we found sentences to fit each prediction. A year for assaulting an ethnic minority. Two to five for armed robbery. Three to seven for narcotics smuggling.

We wanted to become gangsters, but who could we look up to? Where were our heroes? Our fathers drove gypsy cabs, washed dishes, and pumped gas, their blood so timid a guillotine couldn’t make them bleed. They longed for the old days, not because their lives had been better, but because there had
been an equality of misery back then. We were their sons and we wanted more.

Conscription season began in spring. The steady sluice of burgs had dissolved down the Neva. A bask of geriatric crocodiles sunbathed at the beachfront wall of Peter and Paul Fortress. Daytime drunks extended their working hours. The arctic winter unraveled into pastel peach, lavender, plum. We received postcards from the military commissariat the same day and carried them with us to the park. Mine was the first correspondence I’d received since the letters my father had sent from prison.

I compared my red-bannered postcard with my friends’. They were identical but for our names. By law, the commissariat could send us to a military base for testing the day after graduation, but for whatever reason, they’d given us until August. If we all died in Chechnya, would our families receive form postcards, identical but for our names, or would the army honor our sacrifice with a form letter?

“I’ll knock off an electronics store,” Aleksandr announced, killing his cigarette in five colossal puffs. He had the lungs of a blue whale. “Three years, that should cover it.”

“Too long, Tony,” Ivan said. “Any day now Putin’s going to tear off his shirt, jump on a brown bear, ride that bitch bareback to Grozny, and finish those beards by himself. Six months tops. I’ll mug a tourist.”

“Four years,” Valeriy said, still picking the rice-white flakes that had turned out to be lice. “I’m going to steal a police car.”

We exploded into laughter.

“Laugh it up,” Valeriy said, “but you know no policeman’s
going to worry himself about a robbed electronics store or tourist. Shit, robbing tourists is
their
job. Take a policeman’s ride, though. Four years, easy.”

They turned to me. “I haven’t decided how many years,” I said, a beat too slowly. “But don’t worry. I’m in. I’m all in.”

We pounded fists, then swaggered toward Ploshchad Lenina to pick up a thousand-ruble check, so named because the heroin comes folded in receipt paper. Oily rainbows arced the swollen sparkle of the Neva. Tourists clambered from pontoons, all
oohs
and
aahs
, jumping for their cameras as though the imperial mansions lining the banks were a flock of rare birds. I didn’t see the rush. Those pink powder puffs weren’t flying anywhere. We turned onto Arsenalnaya, then onto Komsomola. In the distance, brick-walled, spired, and domed, a tourist would be forgiven for mistaking Kresty Prison for a palace. In history class, we learned about the red herrings caught, descaled, and fried up in the 1937 show trials. In literature class, we read an Akhmatova poem about the prison. Her son was detained for seventeen months. With hundreds of other women she waited outside those great brick walls for news of the accusation, verdict, sentence. “Can you describe this?” a woman with blue lips whispered. And Akhmatova answered, “Yes, I can.”

Now, outside the brick walls, their granddaughters waited, a few lost in oversized overcoats, the wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters of pretrial prisoners. We catcalled. We hooted. We asked if they wanted to party. Had they stood there seventy years earlier, their sorrows would’ve been worth a great poet’s words. But who reads poetry anymore?

“I’m not scared,” I stated, and Valeriy, Ivan, and Aleksandr
all agreed they too were unafraid. I didn’t know if we meant Kresty or Chechnya. Up ahead a Lenin statue toupeed in pigeon shit silently perorated to masses. I gathered the sweat-softened bills from my friends and climbed to the third-floor flat of a crumbling communal housing complex to pick up the thousand-ruble check.

T
HE
job was like nothing found in the classifieds of regional papers and blog forums, where postings sought multilingual men with business degrees and attractive single women to work as dancers in European strip clubs. No glamour, no glitz, no status to propel me past the face control at Jakata or Decadence nightclubs, whose bouncers are harder to bribe than Peter at the Pearly Gates. That first day I dragged my ass out of bed at four in the morning to help Kirill dress. His shirt, trousers, and bedsheets were cut from the same square of bureaucratically blue canvas.