The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (25 page)

“How the hell do you normally get dressed?” I asked.

He sat at the end of his bed with a ten-thousand-watt smile. He was actually
enjoying
this! Happiness is zero sum, and the lower my stock in it fell, the higher his rose. Any moment it’d burst right through the ceiling.

“I can do it myself,” he said. His smile revealed teeth the color of cooking oil. “It just takes longer.”

“We’ve got all day.”

“You’re mouthy,” he said, “for a virgin.”

Devil! Who’d told him? And more importantly, had he told anyone else? I’d never live it down. Maybe I could sell
my kidneys for the identity of a reindeer herder on the Yamal Peninsula? A place that means “End of the World” in the local tongue just might be far enough. In my mind, I’d already built an igloo and married a muskox when Kirill cut in.

“Look at you, I’ve eaten borscht with less color than your cheeks.” He closed his eyes with the serenity of a man whose desires are modest enough to be met. “I remember when I popped my cork for the first time. It was my thirteenth birthday.”

At eighteen I wasn’t just a virgin. I was an elderly virgin.

“My father took me to his favorite prostitute to celebrate my becoming a man,” Kirill went on. “He stood just beside the bed while I went at it. Not close enough to make it weird, mind you. He just wanted to make sure I did my part. I finished about five seconds after I began and he burst into applause. Never made the old man prouder.

“But you.” His eyes zeroed on mine. “You think you’re too much of a man to pull trousers on an amputee and you haven’t even popped your cork. Shameful.”

I hoisted his trousers up his knobby hips. Hemmed mid-thigh, they looked more like volleyball shorts. He pointed to a roll of duct tape encircled by gummy rings on the floor. “You need to tape the stumps.”

“Hell no.”

“You need to learn how,” he stressed.

“You’re missing your legs, not your hands. Tape them yourself.”

“Virgin,” he commanded.

After I ran a few rings of tape around the stumps, Kirill greased his hair with vegetable shortening, combing it through
a dozen times before satisfied with the part. “They can scoop this crap into a jar with a French label and charge ten times the price,” he explained. “But they can’t fool me.”

The last touch was a squirt of embalming fluid–scented cologne. I heaved Kirill into his wheelchair and pushed him into the hall.

“I’ll go down myself,” he said when we reached the stairs. With a sheet of cardboard beneath him and his gloved hands clasped to the rail, he tobogganed down the steps. Seven flights of stairs, not a problem, and yet his trousers had been a peak only I could carry him over. Cheeky little shit.

“Wait,” he said. The apartment buildings’s front door clunked closed behind us. A medieval siege engine couldn’t break down that thing. “I want to catch my breath.”

“You’re in a wheelchair. Breathing is about all you can do.”

He shook his head, lit a cigarette, and spoke as if I were the unreasonable one. “In such a rush, this one, to do anything but lose his virginity.”

Following his lead, I lit up too. The White Nights always dead-ended into Gray Mornings. The clouds just dozed in the sky without a care in the world. Lazy bastards. Across the Neva, the odd smokestack stood taller than any imperial obelisk. If eras are remembered by their greatest monuments, ours will be remembered by billboards advertising Beeline mobile phone plans. Across the street, a pack of feral dogs chased a homeless man through a vacant lot. Our school textbooks said as many as a thousand serfs died building Petersburg. Our teacher put the number closer to a hundred thousand. But he’d say anything to sleep with you. The lead dog lunged for the vagrant’s ass, and
as he stumbled a bison of a Rottweiler charged into his back. Three brutal steps later, he toppled over. I’m not sure the city would be worth even him.

“I thought you wanted to get going.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Kirill replied, holding up his cigarette. “It’s important we take time to savor it.”

The white onion domes of Smolny Convent disappeared behind us as I pushed Kirill along Shpalernaya Street. We took a left at Prospekt Chernyshevskogo. A casino’s colors glowed like lollipops held to lamplight. Sushi restaurants and Irish pubs everywhere. Tinted town car windows the same obsidian black as their drivers’ sunglasses. Fires twitched through the grates of rusted ash cans. Weird how fires shiver as if they’re the ones cold. We waited for a break in traffic.

“You need to carry me over the gate,” Kirill said when we reached the entrance of the Chernyshevskaya metro station. I plunked two tokens in the turnstile and hoisted him by the armpits. Heavy, for half a man.

Newspaper vendors flashed headlines as I broke down the wheelchair.
Sochi Mega Resort to Open Next Year. Sydney Prepares for Summer Olympics. Kresty Prison to Be Turned into Hotel-Entertainment Complex.

“The Chernyshevskaya metro escalator is one hundred and thirty-seven meters long. Do you know what that makes it?” Kirill asked.

“Enough of a ruler to measure my member of the party,” I said.

“We’ll have to take your word on that, virgin,” he replied.
“A hundred and thirty-seven meters makes this very escalator the longest escalator in the world. A world record, right here in our own neighborhood, and ninety-nine out of a hundred people who ride these stairs don’t even know it.”

“Why’d they build the tunnels so deep?”

“So they could be used as shelters if the Americans nuked us. You’re too young to remember, but when I was coming up in the eighties we were still afraid Americans would drop a nuclear warhead on us.”

“Do people hit by nuclear warheads ever lose just their legs?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He frowned at his stumps. “I’ve never been hit by one.”

The marbled metro platform was chessboard checkered. Kirill strapped on his leather gloves, planted his palms on the marble, and swung his body between his arms. For Kirill, the world was made of parallel bars. I pushed the empty wheelchair behind him.

“How do I look?” he asked. Dressed in full military uniform, from his peaked cap to his hemmed trousers, he looked too solemn for me to take seriously.

“Short,” I said.

A tube of muggy air as long and swift as the train it preceded gushed into the station. Kirill gave instructions. The act was nothing new. You couldn’t go more than three metro stops without seeing a crippled vet from the war in Chechnya. They sang folk songs, sat on wooden pallets, recited Pushkin, pretzeled lifeless limbs, held cardboard signs advertising their
suffering. Others just got drunk and murmured stories so depraved they could never be true.

The train exhaled a congested breath of passengers. Kirill knuckle-walked through the shuffling legs and I followed behind with his wheelchair. Young men offered their seats to women and the elderly with a decorum you’d rarely find above ground. Doors closed, wheels hummed on rails, and Kirill began. He didn’t sing the national anthem, didn’t produce a tray of ten-ruble trinkets from his wheelchair satchel or a horror story from his past. He simply crawled through the parting crowd on clenched fists, head raised, eyes meeting every glance. I just pushed the wheelchair behind him and watched the rubles tumble into the wicker basket.

“Give him a few rubles, Masha,” a babushka shrink-wrapped in a kerchief whispered to her friend. “Pity the poor soul.”

“You’re a hero,” an elderly man in tortoise-rimmed glasses observed. “Better to lose your legs than your honor.”

For the length of the train ride, Kirill didn’t speak. He neither solicited nor acknowledged the alms that just kept falling from the wallets and purses of morning commuters. He put one fist in front of the other, his peaked cap tilting, his limp stumps dragging behind him, not a caricature, not a freak show, but a brave man crawling across a battlefield that raged in his head. I nearly opened my own wallet.

He made two hundred and forty rubles in the two minutes to Ploshchad Vosstaniya. I couldn’t believe how many coins and crumpled bills lay in the basket. It was more than my father made in three hours.

“You don’t want them to think you’re making money,” he whispered as he pocketed the change. At Ploshchad Vosstaniya, we moved to the next car.

We rode the one and two lines until early afternoon. Twelve hundred rubles by ten o’clock. Twenty-three hundred by noon. Who knew my fellow citizens possessed such patriotic generosity? For lunch we surfaced at Baltiyskaya and bought shawarma and kvass from an elderly street vendor with dyed purple hair. I watched short skirts pass through the long afternoon light. “My assistant here is stricken with an incurable case of virginity,” Kirill called to a really cute young woman whose dark brown bangs awninged the open pages of
Harry Potter.
“Will you take pity on him?”

I wanted to punch Kirill right then. I’d read the Harry Potter book three times through and it was a secret I’d carry to my grave. I might’ve told her. She’d already taken her book and walked away.

“Forty-one new stations are scheduled to be built in the next ten years,” Kirill announced between dainty bites of charred lamb. I wished I’d chased after the brown-haired girl, but then I’d be the Stalkerish Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Presently, I was just the Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Some dignities are earned only by comparison.

“Forty-one new stations, you know what that means?” Kirill asked.

“That only three will be built.”

“It means more people will ride the metro every day. More people means more money.”

“You make too much already. Beggars shouldn’t make more than the people they beg from.”

“We work harder, I assure you.” Kirill smiled at a flock of schoolchildren flying to catch the crosswalk light. You’d think a man without legs would be a tragic sort. But Kirill seemed to live as if always staring into a field of sunflowers. “I’m saving for a dacha. Wheelchair accessible. I’ll be able to wash dishes in the sink.”

It was hard to take him seriously. Only crooks, oligarchs, and politicians—often the same person—could afford dachas. Men who could walk, who had never gone to Chechnya, whose sons would never go to Chechnya. And here was Kirill, thinking he could be one of them. Whatever parts he’d lost, he still had two billiard balls in his corner pocket.

“What a racket,” I said.

“It’s an art.”

“Taking people’s money?”

He squinted at me. “No one’s giving me anything. I’m a businessman.”

“What’re you selling?”

“All these people who opened their purses on the metro, when they see a legless vet, they feel ashamed and maybe a little pity. But when they see me crawling across the metro car, they see someone defiant, silent, not
begging
for anything, and they feel pride. They’re paying me for the privilege of feeling proud when they should feel disgraced.”

When I returned home that night, my father was sprawled on the divan in his underpants. He ate tinned fish from the
can and let the cat clean the oil from his fingers between bites.

“Come here,” he commanded, and examined my pupils by television light. The cat wrapped its tail around my father’s forearm and purred lovingly. A devil in fur, that cat.

“Tell me what you learned today,” my father asked.

“The Chernyshevskaya escalator is a hundred and thirty-seven meters long.”

“Anything else?”

“I learned Kirill makes more money than you.”

“And how much of that money did he let you keep?”

“None,” I admitted. “But he bought me a shawarma.”

“Then we both make more money than you.” Satisfied with my silence, he turned back to the TV. All the parts, including that of the voluptuous femme fatale, were dubbed in the gruff monotone of a lobotomized Vladivostokian chain smoker. A strong-jawed actor survived a bomb blast by climbing into a refrigerator. I hoped refrigeration technology had reached Chechnya.

“Kresty’s going to become a hotel,” I said.

“Again? When?”

“The newspaper said as soon as a new prison’s built outside the city.”

“They were saying that even before I was arrested. Wish it had been a hotel. It wasn’t.”

I turned, but couldn’t escape him—around fifty portraits of my father hung in thin black frames from the living room walls. One for every year of his life, from the age of five to
sixty-nine, except his prison years. His mother had taken him to the photographer once a year, a precaution in case the police arrested her and sent him to a state orphanage. His father had been an enemy of the people, so she had to think about things like that. He’d still dress in his best suit and go to a photographer’s studio on his birthday and come home with a new portrait to hang on the wall. Bit mad, really. Even if somewhere in the world there was a girl who wanted to come home with me, I couldn’t bring her here.

I crossed the living room and stared at my father’s portrait from 1983. Like all of them, it looked like a blown-up passport photo. That was the year I was born. He looked rather grim.

“You know, I never wanted a wife or child,” my father offered. “I was fifty years old, I thought I’d won. Then I met your mother. Then she got pregnant. Couldn’t very well leave her then, could I?”

“Some crimes are best left unsolved, Papa.”

“Nonsense. If you don’t know where you began you won’t know where you’ll finish. Everyone needs an origin story.”

I closed my eyes and did my best to humor him. “Then please, enlighten me.”

“You, my dear boy, began with a broken condom.”

Patricide really should be decriminalized. I turned toward the hall when I noticed a new portrait hanging above the tea-stained armchair. “When was your birthday?” I asked.

“Few weeks back,” he said. “Don’t give me that look. These photos, they’re all for you.”

“You realize how insane you sound, right? You’ve got more
than fifty photos of yourself on the wall. Not photos of me or Mom, just of you. It’s like you saw a photo spread of Kim Jong-il’s living room and really liked his style.”

He scratched the bridge between the cat’s ears. We’d had this conversation about a billion times.