The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (6 page)

where?

in the work i have censored. in the background. behind stalin and lenin. behind their heads where their eyes can’t find him.

W
HEN
the guards come, I stand quietly and without protest. They return my shoelaces and share a cigarette while I lace my shoes.

“Can I sew my shirt buttons back on?” I ask.

“A comedian,” one of the guards comments. “He’s the leopard guy?”

A second guard says yes.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask.

“The NKVD agent, of course,” the first guard answers. “Your Polish teacher.”

“They liquidated all the leopards at the zoo,” the second guard says. “To send a message.”

“A shame what we do to animals,” the first guard replies.

I am on my knees. I cannot stand. They will have to carry me from here. I hear something from the wall. The seminarian is a madman, why else risk tapping to me with two guards in the cell? First the faint rap of knuckles on the wall, then a pounded fist, then stomped feet. It gives me the strength to stand. The guards take me from the room, but it only grows louder, and
they pretend to ignore it, but the floor and walls and ceiling are shuddering, every bar and bone in the prison resounds with the code I first sent him, the code Vaska and I would tap to each other before climbing into bed and going to sleep.

They lead me into the darkness where I take my first breath of cold air. I remember Vaska racing toward the leopard cage. I chased after him, but he was always faster than me. Even now, I don’t know what that leopard was beyond an indefinable, nameless mystery.

They will put me in a car, take me to the edge of a pit not unlike those into which the disgraced dancer and Vaska fell, and with a bullet through my brain stem, I will also fall. Consider the disgraced dancer. Consider those who informed on her, those who relayed the information, those who approved the action, those who knocked on her door in the middle of the night, those who arrested her, those who photographed her, those who took her fingerprints, those who pulled out her shoelaces, those who interrogated her, those who beat her, those who engineered her confession, those who tried, judged, and condemned her, those who led her to the car, to the basement, to the pit, those who dug her grave, put a bullet in her head, buried her. And the countless others, like me, who destroyed her birth certificate and diploma, the newspaper clippings and photographs, the school and internal passport and ration voucher records, the near-endless documentation that proves she had lived. It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual—if that is what memory is now called—to preserve her.

And if that is true, perhaps someday, far from now, Vaska will be discovered. Perhaps the seminarian in the other cell is the error that preserves us both.

“A small favor,” I say. “Please. Give me the mercy of a single question.”

The guard sighs. “Yes?”

“The man in the cell next to mine, what was his name?”

“What man?” the guard asks, confused.

“The man in the cell next to mine. The seminarian.”

He pats my shoulder with what feels like genuine pity. “There was no cell next to yours.”

“Yes, there was. There was a man in it. I heard him. Please, just tell me his name.”

The guard shakes his head. “There’s only one solitary cell on the cellar floor and only you in it.”

The car idles at the end of the walkway. The door opens and the guard pushes me in. We drive. Ahead, a light glows through the shadows. For a moment, it’s the train approaching. I turn in my seat, hoping to glimpse something I have created before the end. The light expands as we near, as if we are entering. It rises in the windshield, disappears over the roof, fades behind us. It isn’t the approaching train, but a streetlamp. The rest of the road is dark.

KIROVSK
, 1937–2013

B
est to begin with the grandmothers. Galina’s was the labor camp luminary, while ours were the audience. Ours had been bakers, typists, nurses, and laborers before the secret police knocked on their doors in the middle of the night. It must be an error, they thought, a bureaucratic oversight. How could Soviet jurisprudence remain infallible if it failed to recognize innocence? Some held on to the misbelief as they stood pressed against one another in train cars heading east across the Siberian steppe, the names of previous prisoners haunting the carriage walls in smudged chalk. Some still held on to it as they were shoved aboard barges and steamed north on the Yenisei. But when they disembarked onto the glassy tundra, their illusion burned away in the glare of the endless summer sun. In distant cities, they were expurgated from their own histories. In photographs, they donned India ink masks. We never knew them, but we are the proof they existed. A hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, they built our home.

There we go, talking about ourselves again. Let’s start with Galina’s grandmother, the prima ballerina of the Kirov for five
seasons before her arrest for involvement in a Polish saboteur ring. She was a long, lean splinter of beauty embedded in the gray drab of any crowded city street. Though she crossed the same rails and rivers as our grandmothers, she wasn’t destined for the mines. The labor camp director was a ballet connoisseur as well as a beady-eyed sociopath. He’d seen Galina’s grandmother perform
Raymonda
in Leningrad two years earlier and had been among the first in the theater to stand in ovation. When he spied her name on the manifest, he smiled—a rare occurrence in his line of work. He clinked shot glasses with his deputy and toasted, “To the might of Soviet art, so great it reaches the Arctic.”

During her first year in the camp, Galina’s grandmother was received as a guest rather than an inmate. Her private room was austere but clean, a single bed, a bureau for her wardrobe, a wood-burning stove. Several times a week, the camp director invited her to his office for tea. Across a desk cluttered with registers, quotas, circulars, and directives, they would discuss the Vaganova method, the proper femur length for a prima ballerina, whether Tchaikovsky really had been so afraid his head would fall off while conducting that he had held it in place with his left hand. Galina called the camp director “a loyal citizen of the People’s Republic of Bullshit” for his insistence that
Swan Lake
contained Marius Petipa’s most sophisticated
pas de deux
. No one but the camp director’s six-year-old nephew spoke to him so bluntly, but he didn’t cut her rations or put nine grams of lead through her head. He offered more tea and suggested they might reach a consensus the following week, to which she declared, “Consensus is the goal of the feeble-minded.”
We can’t help loving her just a little. Neither could the camp director.

The following year, he asked Galina’s grandmother to create, train, and lead a small ballet troupe for his personal pleasure and for camp morale. The ensemble rehearsed for three months before making its debut. Some of its members had taken ballet classes as children and the rest were versed in peasant dances. After several long afternoons, the camp director and Galina’s grandmother decided on an abridged treatment of
Swan Lake
. The ensemble rehearsed turns with questionably cosmopolitan French names until blisters pocketed their feet. Muscle memory was reeducated as Galina’s grandmother browbeat elegance into these enemies of the people. It became increasingly unclear whether she was captive, captor, or both. After pulled muscles tightened and swollen toes deflated, after the curtain was drawn and a camp searchlight lit the far end of the canteen, it was evident to all that the stage was set for something extraordinary.

Our grandmothers sat on canteen benches in the audience, and the production was, as you can imagine, a fiasco. The nearest orchestra was eighteen hundred kilometers away, so the score played through the rusted horn of a gramophone previously used to store onions. The choreography required dozens of dancers; the ensemble had ten, and four of them wore charcoal-drawn mustaches to play Siegfried, Von Rothbart, and various footmen, tutors, and court gentlemen. The lake itself was rather thin on waterfowl; later some would joke that NKVD huntsmen had arrived first. There were slips and missteps, the music speeding past dancers left flailing in its wake.
But then Galina’s grandmother, alone onstage, slid into a pool of light. Her hair washed and laureled in feathers, her shoulders polar-summer pale, her feet laced in real silk slippers. In the crowd, our grandmothers went silent. Some were transported back to the concert halls, anniversaries, and champagne flutes of their former lives. Some used the reprieve to nap. But most, we suspect, were astounded. After working fourteen-hour shifts in the mines, inhaling so much nickel they sneezed silver glitter, none could have expected a private performance from the prima ballerina of the Kirov.

Despite the many mishaps, the camp director was thrilled. For the next eight years, he sponsored ballets on the summer and winter solstices; but he hadn’t risen through the ranks by giving anything away for free. For a man determined to wring maximum productivity from his prisoners before they died, the ballet proved an effective coercion. Seats—and with them upgraded rations—were reserved for those who exceeded their ever-increasing quotas. Galina’s grandmother helped shave years off the lifespan of her audience.

It all ended in the ninth year. Galina’s grandmother had less than three months until her release date and the camp director had fallen in love. Can someone like him actually love another human being? We’re pained to admit that yes, he might delude himself into believing so. We have some experience with this kind of man, not bureaucratic mass murderers, of course, but with alcoholic boyfriends, violent husbands, strangers harboring the misconception that their unwanted advances are compliments. Galina’s grandmother was the only woman for thousands of kilometers who wasn’t one hundred
percent repulsed at the sight of the camp director. Perhaps he mistook her lack of utter contempt for infatuation? Whatever his reasons, he summoned her to his office eighty-five days before her release date. The office door closed behind her and what happened next we only know from rumors spread by the guards. There was a declaration of love followed by a moment that still astonishes, these many decades later, when Galina’s grandmother refused the camp director. At this point in the story, our dried-up admiration for her floods back, and we feel a little bad about accusing her of collaboration. But the camp director was unaccustomed to rejection. The guards overheard a muffled struggle, a scream, the tearing of cloth. As the rest of the camp slept, the camp director became Galina’s grandfather.

Or maybe they had been sleeping together the whole time. Who are we to say?

Years passed. Stalin’s death and denunciation led to the decommissioning of the prison. Camp administrators transferred from the Interior Ministry to the Ferrous Metallurgy Ministry without even changing offices. The same people pulled nickel from the ground. Our grandmothers married miners, smelter techs, even former prison guards. They stayed for profit and practicality: The Arctic nickel mines paid among the highest wages in the country, and its former prisoners had difficulty obtaining residency permits to go back home. Galina’s grandmother was among them. She raised her daughter and taught schoolchildren the tenets of communism. The camp director was demoted and replaced with a party boss. On her deathbed in May 1968, she clutched the arm of the attendant nurse and
whispered, “I see, I see, I see.” She passed before she could tell the nurse precisely what she saw.

But hers is the story of our grandmothers. Galina’s story is ours.

S
HE
was born in 1976. The obstetrician didn’t care for children, and so when he didn’t frown at the sight of her, all took it as a prognosis of future beauty. As Galina grew, we all acknowledged the prescience of the doctor’s early appraisal. Galina was more her grandmother than either of her parents.

She was born to a miner and a seamstress for a local textile factory, and yes, our mothers did approve of them in the early years of the girl’s childhood. They managed to remain unremarkable in all the proper ways. They worked long days, adhering to the second principal of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism:
conscientious labor for the good of society—he who does not work, neither shall he eat
. At home they spoke loudly enough for our mothers to hear through the wall that they harbored no perverse secrets. But strangely, they didn’t allow Galina to play with us as children. They declined invitations to birthday celebrations, left early from International Day of Solidarity of Youth festivities. It raised our mothers’ suspicion. “They are haughty at best, subversive at worst,” our mothers whispered as they scooped jam into their tea. This was the late seventies, early eighties, and though the purges had receded into memory, glasnost was still years away. Our city was small and whispers easily became verdict. Who has forgotten the story of Vera Andreyevna, who unintentionally denounced
her own mother, and was heralded in newspapers from Minsk to Vladivostok? Galina’s mother might have suffered a similar fate, had not the lung cancer taken her first.

We didn’t understand why Galina had been kept from us until our third year of primary school. We left for lunch after reciting our multiplication tables—no difficult task, for we excelled at memorization and recitation. Galina tripped over a loose shoelace and lurched, her books sailing through the air as she tumbled under them. We’d never seen a shoelace cause such a commotion before.

“Not quite living up to your grandmother’s reputation,” our teacher said. We laughed with the spite of those without legacies to honor.

“What do you mean?” Galina asked. She didn’t know. We couldn’t believe it. We gushed, speaking over one another, telling her about the ballet ensemble, the evil camp director, the remarkable fate of Galina’s grandmother. She shook her head with confusion, incredulity, and, eventually, pride.

At home that evening, she demanded ballet lessons.

“Ballet?” her father asked, his voice a sore-throated rasp of nickel dust. He would die at the age of fifty-two, exceeding the life expectancy of a miner by three years. “You’ll join Young Pioneers this year. You’ll be busy with learning leadership and team-building skills.”

But Galina was adamant. “I want to dance ballet like my grandmother.”

Her father sighed and ran his hands through the scalding beam emitted from a reflector space heater. Over the years he had questioned why he and his wife had concealed the family
celebrity, but the answer was simple: They were faithful communists, children of the labor camp, with a daughter who looked like her grandmother. Galina’s father knew her best hope for prosperity would come from dulling all that made her exceptional until the plural voice accepted her as one of its own. No doubt he had heard Lenin’s famous reaction to Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23:
It is wonderful, ethereal music. But I am unable to listen to it. It moves me to stroke the heads of my fellow beings for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living in. It is necessary to smash those heads, smash them without mercy
.

But ever since his wife had passed, he had grown indulgent and rather fatalistic. “Of course, Galya,” he said. The next day she told us all about it.

Gorbachev came to power the year Galina began ballet training, and brought with him glasnost, perestroika, and
demokratizatsiya
. Our mothers whispered a little louder, and, as we passed from early to late adolescence, we found our voices. We started softly and we were wise to be wary; the city party boss was every bit as cruel as the camp director had been, and like new pop songs, political reforms reached us long after they were first broadcast in Moscow. In the winter, when the sun disappeared beneath the three-month night, we gathered in parks and deserted lots, under the rusted metal limbs of White Forest, warmed ourselves in deserted apartment blocks and cafeterias where we passed around tattered samizdat pages of Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, danced to the Queen LPs someone’s second cousin’s violin instructor brought back from Europe, and wore black-market Levi’s that always looked better
than they actually fit. We traded old
ryobra
—rib records, bone music, skeleton songs—banned fifties and sixties rock and roll inscribed by phonograph onto exposed X-rays that could be played on gramophones at hushed volumes. Radiographs of broken ribs, dislocated shoulders, malignant tumors, compacted vertebrae had been cut into vague circles, the music etched into the X-ray surface, the center hole punctured with a cigarette ember, and it was glorious to know that these images of human pain could hide in their grooves a sound as pure and joyful as Brian Wilson’s voice. Our parents called the music capitalist pollution, as if the cancerous masses on the X-rays had been caused by a song recorded on the other side of the world, rather than by the pollution that flowed from the smokestacks just outside our windows, free for us all.

In the summertime, the devastation of the earth permeated the clouds. Yellow fog enshrouded the city like a varnish aged upon the air. Sulfur dioxide rose from the Twelve Apostles, the dozen nickel smelters ringing a lake of industrial waste. Rain burned our skin. The pollution congealed into a dense ceiling blocking the starlight. The moon belonged to the past our grandmothers spoke of. We made the most of our summers: days without school, nights without darkness. First dates, first kisses. We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for
Surfin’ Safari
, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.