The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (28 page)

On her second day of sight, he gave her a paint sampler. It contained eighteen hundred named colors. Coral Fuchsia. Cream of Amethyst. Golden Evening. Siberian Russet. She read and reread until she could identify by name every shade in an ice cream freezer, in Journalists’ Park, in the morning sky. As poets went, Aleksandr Pushkin had nothing on the paint sampler copywriter.

They married eight months after she left the hospital. As a
teenager, she’d imagined love to be a flare sparkling upward, unzipping the night sky. What she had with Ruslan gave off a warmth nearer to friendship than romance. That was fine with her. Better the dim heat of a hand in yours than all the fire in the sky. He massaged vaseline into her scars and she sat through endless American slapstick comedies. They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.

She gave birth to a daughter, Makka, at Hospital Number Six in Volchansk. A green-eyed girl, daughter of the head of surgery, mascot of the maternity ward, demanded a souvenir from her with the stubbornness of a bridge troll. Ruslan gave her one of the tourist brochures he still carried in his coat pocket.

The end of Ruslan’s career as a tour guide was the beginning of his career as a ministerial figure. The oligarch who had bought the Zakharov had taken a shine to Ruslan and had him installed as a temporary deputy minister. His predecessor had moved to a place in America called Muskegon and, to Nadya’s knowledge, still lived in the basement of his son’s pharmacy. As a deputy minister, Ruslan’s daily responsibilities largely consisted of accepting bribes. His subordinates nicknamed him The Natural. Someone always had to be paid off and the world seemed to think it was Ruslan’s turn. Nadya wasn’t one to argue.

To prove he understood that private enrichment was the first commandment of public service, Ruslan’s first official act was to de-mine the highlands of his ancestral village, beginning with Zakharov’s field. Nadya had never been there herself, had only seen it in the painting. She’d heard stories that Ruslan’s
former father-in-law, a pumpkin of a man with links to the insurgency, had used the property as a rebel safe house. Some said he’d even kept Russian soldiers prisoner there. Ruslan told her that the property had fallen into disrepair long ago and that they shouldn’t be surprised if it was all ruins now.

It was to Nadya’s surprise, then, that when they returned for the first time after the mine removal Ruslan pulled her to him. She felt his weight drape over her shoulder. The meadow was mottled Cézanne green. At a dozen meters before her, the land melted in spring light. It would be another year before she could see all the way to the crest of the hill.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s all there,” he said in a voice touched with wonder. Nadya knew the sensation, the eeriness of discovering a corresponding point between past and present, of realizing that not all memory is mirage.

She tried to coax him forward, but he leaned deeper into her arms.

“The shed and stone wall are rebuilt. Behind them the herb garden is replanted.” He built the image for her in short, declarative sentences, a habit he’d never fully surrender, even after sight was fully restored to her right eye. “It’s all here.”

“What wrong, then?” she asked.

“Where to begin?”

“What’s right, then?” she asked.

“That’s a trick question.”

She stroked the back of his neck, felt the downy hairs lift onto her finger pads. A gray bird in the sky twisted its shadow
on the ground. The sunshine glowed off her cheeks. They rarely kissed in daylight.

In the afternoon, they went to the meadow with a shovel. Ruslan insisted he walk a dozen paces ahead, just in case. The minesweeping team had cleared twenty-three mines from the hill. The repacked hollows were no wider than manhole lids. Sunken among them were two explosion craters, one at the end of the herb garden, the other farther up the hill.

“I don’t know which is theirs,” he said. “I didn’t think there would be two.” He frowned and his hands shook slightly. He looked awed and frightened by what he didn’t know, how the scope of what he didn’t know widened by the day.

He climbed into each hole, sifted through the dirt for remains. He reached over the lip of the crater, deposited what he’d found on the grass, then went back under like a kid diving for coins. Patches of pink silk. A marbled brown button. The melted treads of a sandal. A shattered cassette tape. She fit the fractured plastic face to read its half-erased message:
F r   ol a In Case     gency!!! Vol. 1.

With Ruslan’s trousers rolled to his knees, his hands and feet tanned with dirt, Nadya could so easily imagine him as the kind of boy whose mother was forever following with a broom. With nothing else to inter, he divided the artifacts into two piles and set one at the bottom of each crater. For the rest of the afternoon and into evening, he shoveled burgundy dirt into each. He had no bodies to bury, only holes to fill.

Over the following years, they spent spring and summer weekends at the dacha, the rest of the time in Grozny. With
funds diverted from a dozen more-needed infrastructure projects, the Museum of Regional Art was rebuilt. Nadya returned as head of conservation. She completed her dissertation on the censor, Roman Markin, and created a website to catalog his falsified images.

One summer day a visitor arrived at the dacha. Young man. Shorn hair and jeans baggy enough to clothe six legs. Ruslan and Makka had been playing on the hill. Nadya watched the stranger approach with a map stretched between his hands. The map didn’t bend in the breeze. It was wrapped in a gold-leafed frame.

She tied her headscarf and waited for Ruslan before approaching.

“You look lost,” Ruslan said.

The young man glanced to the lush green steps ridging the far slope. The grasses of the empty pasture swayed with the light touch of wind on their tips. “It’s a peaceful place,” the young man said, now holding the framed map away from them. “Can you tell me if anyone died by a land mine here?”

Ruslan stepped to the young man and grabbed him by the back of the neck. The suddenness stunned Nadya.

“Time to explain yourself,” he said.

The young man lifted the map upright and only when its contours matched those of the hill did they recognize what it was.

In the living room, the young man explained himself over tea. He had been told his brother had died on the hill depicted in the painting and wanted to see the place for himself. When
Ruslan asked how he’d come across the painting, he shook his head and smiled, as if to say life is well suited for nearly everything but explanation. “Have you ever seen
Deceit Web
?” he asked.

Ruslan ran his fingers over the gilded frame, inhaled the musty coarseness of the canvas. Nadya observed him. Two manneristic figures, painted in black, ran toward the crest of the hill. Ruslan held his fingertips over them, as if testing them for warmth.

Nadya stayed inside with Makka while the two men climbed the hill.

“I was told two Russian soldiers were kept here during the war,” Ruslan said. “They rebuilt the place. Did a decent job, actually.” He broke off a sprig of mint leaf and passed it. The young man slid the leaf between his lips and tongued it across the roof of his mouth. They climbed to the two grave markers. “I found two mine craters when I returned here. One might be your brother’s.”

The young man dropped to one knee and unzipped his duffel bag. Nestled among underwear and balled socks lay three pickle jars, two filled with ashes, the third empty. He scooped a palmful of dirt into the empty one. “When we were kids, we’d pretend that the world was ending and he’d climb into a rocket ship and blast off into space.”

Ruslan squinted into the liquid shimmer of sunlight at the horizon. There was an explosion. His world had ended. He was still here.

“I guess I’ll go now,” the young man said.

Ruslan wasn’t finished. “Without the Zakharov.”

“Excuse me?”

“The painting. It stays.”

“But it’s mine.”

“This is where it belongs.”

The young man’s soft face hardened like a dollop of melted wax. “I’m going to leave now.”

Ruslan stepped near enough to smell the mint leaf wilting on the young man’s tongue. “As I see it, you have two options. You can sell it to me and I’ll give you a ride to the airport. Or I’ll take it from you and you can find your own way. You’re a long way from home in a land you don’t understand. Choose wisely.”

“Memory is the only true real estate,” the young man said. “Nabokov wrote that.”

“Good for him. What will it be?”

The young man studied the painting for another moment. “I’m sure I can get a poster of it,” he said. They looked back at the hill before returning inside. There wasn’t a shadow on it.

With three pickle jars and ten thousand U.S. dollars in his suitcase, the young man flew to a resort town on the Black Sea. For three days he ambled along the beaches, his feet sinking in brown sand, his pale cheeks baked to a permanent blush. That beach was nearer to the sun than any strip of land he’d ever known. On his fourth day, he shouldered his duffel bag and walked to the sand. He held a worn postcard and followed the shore until he stood on the spot the card depicted. No one would force him to sell the postcard. The heavily oiled, lightly
clad swimmers might have wondered why the skinny young man in a leopard-print Speedo had gone into the water with three pickle jars. More likely, they didn’t notice him at all.

A wave tumbled him into a dusky green tunnel. Ropes of seawater uncoiled down his neck. The next wave broke gently over his torso. He backstroked with one arm. The other clasped the three jars to his chest. Silver schools darted at his side. There he was. He could barely believe it. When he’d swum far past the breakwater, so far he had the whole sea, from here to the horizon, all to himself, he unscrewed the jars and let them sink into the dark blue.

He bought his father a smartphone for his birthday.

“I already have a telephone,” his father said. “It’s connected by cords to the wall so it can’t be lost or stolen. You tell me whose phone is smarter.”

“I got it for the camera. Look,” Sergei said. He pressed the power button and the phone chirped to life. “There’s two camera lenses. One pointing out, one back at you.”

“We live in troubling times.”

“It’s for selfies. So…”

His father scowled. “Don’t be vulgar.”

Sergei crossed the room to the wall of his father’s portraits. Whenever he wanted to discuss a difficult subject, he addressed it to one of the more sympathetic photographs of his father. “Bit optimistic, leaving all this extra space, no?” he asked,
nodding to the bare wall that stretched beyond the last framed photograph.

“It’s your inheritance. When you become a father, you can put photos of yourself on the wall and your son will think you’re a deluded narcissist.”

“Let’s hope you live a long time yet,” Sergei said. He coughed into his fist. “A couple years ago, I found the website of an art historian in Grozny. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on your uncle. The censor.”

His father said nothing.

“She’s putting on some sort of museum exhibition on him next month, here in Petersburg.”

“Last I checked, digging up graves and horsing around with the skeletons is still against the law,” his father said.

“I’m not sure old photographs on a wall are the same thing.”

“Just because something’s not illegal doesn’t make it right.”

“Says the man with old photographs on his walls.”

His father responded by making a farting sound with his lips. Sergei flopped into the tea-stained armchair. He knew, of course, that his father had typed the name
roman osipovich markin
into the search engine, had left it there for Sergei to find. Neither of them could risk the vulnerability of a direct request; instead each had become sensitized to the intimations of the other. Sergei would make a suggestion and his father would refuse. The more adamant his father’s resistance, the closer Sergei felt to the raw nerve anchored so deeply in his father it may have been his soul.

“Go with me, Papa.”

“Never.”

A thick paste of July humidity plugged the spaces between Nevsky Prospekt traffic on the evening the temporary exhibition opened. Vladimir’s watch read half past seven. The sun, bright in the sky, warm on his face, said early afternoon. Too early, too late—Vladimir couldn’t tell anymore.

“Let’s go in,” Sergei said. They’d been circling the block for an hour. “It’s nearly over.”

At the corner, a spindly ice-cream vendor knelt and stuck his head in the freezer.

“You think a freezer does the job as well as an oven?” Vladimir asked.

“I think he’s just trying to stay cool.”

Vladimir scanned the street for another potential instrument of self-harm. It shouldn’t have been so hard. The most inconceivable deaths fell within the municipal borders of any major metropolis. Standing on a street corner in Petersburg should place one in mortal jeopardy.

Let me die before I pass the ice cream stand.

He passed the ice cream stand.

Let me die before I reach the blind man selling sunglasses
.

He passed the sunglass stand.

Just ahead the gallery loomed. The polished door handle glinted. If he passed right now—a heart attack, a bolt of lightning—he would, in his last moment, consider himself spared from whatever awaited him inside.

Let me die before I open it
.

He opened it.

A few attendees meandered through the exhibit. Vladimir would remember none of them. He would remember opening the door for his son, stepping into the cool gallery air, looking up to see the mug shot of his uncle, blown up two meters tall, staring directly at him.
Roman Markin: 1902–1937
.

“Are you okay?” his son asked.

He hadn’t realized he was leaning on Sergei. “I’m sorry. Your leg.”

“My leg’s fine. What’s wrong?”

“Nineteen thirty-seven. That’s when, that’s when I told my teacher that my uncle was a spy.”