The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (8 page)

The cellos trilled. Galina stood en pointe, her waist ringed in a white tutu. She lifted her left leg and traced a parabola in the air with her slipper. Her foot landed just as the violins came in, and oh, how we wished our grandmothers had been alive to witness it. For the two and a half minutes she danced, all the
city was silent. Seventeen hundred kilometers from the auditorium and we’d never felt closer to our friend. The attendees from Moscow, Petersburg, and Volgograd only saw the woman flapping her arms onstage, but we saw her in her first ballet auditions when the instructor had given a spirit-sapping sigh. We saw her jaw slacken when we told her stories about her grandmother. We saw her fly through the air when she tripped on her shoelace in third-year arithmetic. But we couldn’t blame any shoelace for the fall Galina took in the final fifteen seconds of her routine. It could only be attributed to a series of formidable
grand jetés
, the polished stage floor, excessive ambition, and insufficient talent. She leapt from the ball of her right foot but landed on the side of her left. The microphones didn’t pick up the fracturing of her medial malleolus above the orchestral din. We only heard the host’s exclamation, a short scream from Galina as she slammed to the floor, and the stubborn melody of a viola player who continued playing to the end of the page, long after his colleagues fell silent. When Galina pushed herself upright, her face was red. Her tutu spread around her on the stage, filling every centimeter of spotlight, and she looked at the camera with a beseeching whimper of defeat so familiar, so intimate we could feel it in our own throats.

Galina received medical treatment while the other contestants demonstrated their talent through song, acrobatics, and party tricks. We slouched, too bereft to do Galina the honor of ridiculing her rivals. She was pushed onstage in a wheelchair for the crowning ceremony, her ankle packed in ice. We couldn’t not watch her not win. We’d come too far. The night had given us something to talk about for years. Already we’d
begun criticizing her poor preparation, her arrogance, her hubris for not consulting us when we could’ve warned her that she was destined to fail. The host received an envelope from the judging panel and opened it onstage. He frowned. It wasn’t one of his suspenseful pauses; he was reading and rereading the name in genuine disbelief. Though we would later learn that the oligarch had been one of the chief financiers of the contest, and that the winner’s name had been written on the stationery and sealed in the envelope three days before the pageant began, it wouldn’t dilute the memory of the joy that rushed through us when the host smirked at the camera and said, “It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Miss Siberia tiara goes to none other than Galina Ivanova.” We clapped and we shrieked. We stomped on the floorboards and danced in the halls. We’d known she could do it. We’d never had a moment of doubt. Photoflashes sparkled back from Galina’s wet eyes. She couldn’t climb to the podium so stagehands lifted her and the host set a golden tiara on her head. Within a month the gold leaf would chip to reveal alloyed nickel underneath.

F
AME
followed. Galina received roles in film and television shows, and for a number of years we only saw her on cinema screens and in grainy tabloid papers. Kolya returned from Chechnya to a city where he was only employable as a hoodlum, and soon we forgot there had been a time in Galina’s life when she wasn’t the oligarch’s woman. She lived in Petersburg and Moscow in the penthouses of Voronov’s luxury hotels. Even
in their most scintillating speculations, the newspapers were always respectful of the oligarch. A generation or two ago, men like him would have sent troublesome writers to Siberian labor camps. Now, they simply had troublesome writers shot.

We had little time for celebration. Our fathers died of lung disease and our brothers and husbands replaced them. They returned from the mines glinting as our fathers had, but quiet, joyless, hollowed by existential worry. They’d only begun working when they began losing their jobs. The benefits the combine had once provided its employees had gone the way of the sickle and hammer. No more sanatoriums or hospital beds. The rubles received for combine shares had long been spent and we no longer had legal claim to the mines our grandparents had died excavating. And it stung, this hard slap of realization, when we understood that our mothers had been right: Teenagers yearn for freedom; adults yearn for security. Our country had been powerful. The world had feared us. A paternal state had provided. Now what did we have? Epidemics and addictions. As teenagers we had seen ourselves pitted against the strength of the state, but it was this very strength that had propped us here at the top of the earth.

And yet there was joy. We had children. They came into the world screaming, pale, and slick with placenta. They came coughing and sputtering and we received them into our arms and taught them to laugh. We applauded first birthdays and first steps. Our children forever changed our relationships with our mothers. Pity replaced the mild contempt with which we had previously regarded them, and we loved them as we never
had before, as we could only love ourselves, because despite our best intentions we had become them.

When Galina’s first film came to the cinema, we went with our children and their grandmothers. Galina seemed even more incredible when stretched two stories tall. She played a heroine trapped in a web of mystery and intrigue. She was held hostage by the CIA and escaped. She used her mental and physical agility to her advantage. She acted with cool cunning and even in moments of great danger she summoned withering one-liners. Critics lambasted
Deceit Web
as implausible, but we didn’t care. Our former classmate, our best friend, starred in a feature film, and here we were, watching it.

W
E DIDN
’
T
hear from Galina for several years. After she gave birth to a girl, she faded from public scrutiny, replaced by newer Miss Siberia winners, younger starlets. Her films went from theaters to television, then vanished from the airwaves altogether. We stopped talking about her. We had our own lives to worry about.

The layoffs began shortly after the first war in Chechnya ended. Automated machines mined nickel with greater efficiency than our husbands. Pensions vanished in the fluctuations of foreign stock exchanges. Even those who kept their jobs struggled. With the collapsing ruble, the payments of wages and pensions delayed for months, no one could afford the imported products that replaced familiar Soviet brands. We considered moving to a milder climate but couldn’t manage
relocation costs. Besides, our children were the fourth generation to call the Arctic home. This meant something even if we didn’t know quite what.

Amid the misfortunes of the late 1990s, one in particular stands out. It is the story of Lydia, who had been one of us until she moved to Los Angeles to marry the piano tuner she had met online. The marriage ended—we had all called it—and Lydia returned to Kirovsk and moved in with her mother, Vera Andreyevna. Surely you remember Vera, who as a child denounced her own mother to the NKVD? She was well provided for during the Soviet years, but her fortunes fell with the red flag. By the time Lydia returned, Vera had become involved with the same drug dealers that had given Kolya work after the war. Lydia was shocked and horrified to discover that her childhood home had become a criminal haven. It was only natural that she vent her anger and disappointment to us, her closest friends. She swore us to secrecy, but how could she expect us to keep gossip like that to ourselves? Within a week, word reached the city crime boss, who passed down the sentence of execution. But guilt, like nickel, is a finite resource divided and parsed in so many ways, with Kolya and the hoodlums who pulled the trigger taking the largest share, then the crime boss who passed down the verdict taking the second largest share, then Vera who went into business with these gangsters, then the police chief who conspired with these gangsters, then Lydia herself who should have never trusted us with such good gossip. We are somewhere far down the list, accepting only a fragment of guilt, and that fragment itself is divided by six,
so no single one of us will ever feel personally responsible for spreading the rumors that led to the murder of Lydia, who had once made us seven.

W
HEN
the KGB man won the presidency in 2000, we celebrated.

Our children were assigned new history textbooks in school and we helped them with their homework. They read about Peter the Great, whose magnificent city on the Neva cost the lives of a hundred thousand serfs, and yet the whole world agrees that St. Petersburg is among humanity’s marvels. They read about the tsars, the reach of imperial power, the discontent of workers, and the October Revolution. They read about Stalin and we read along with them, surprised that the new textbook offered a more generous perspective of him than our own did. According to the text, Stalin was an
effective manager who acted entirely rationally
and
the most successful Soviet leader ever
. Arctic labor camps were
a vital part of his drive to make the country great
. We reconsidered our grandmothers. Perhaps theirs was a necessary suffering, an evil justified by a greater good. They had sacrificed themselves for us, after all. When our children read aloud that
the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century
we nodded and told them, “This is the truth.”

There was another war in Chechnya—or perhaps it was the resumption of a singular war waged for centuries, we’ll leave that to the judgment of the textbook historians—and Galina’s story took a turn, though we only heard of it later,
after she had become one of us again. When the counterinsurgency forces replaced major combat operations, and the republic showed its first signs of revitalization, Galina accompanied the oligarch on a business trip to Grozny. Voronov had built his fortune in mineral mining, but he was merely the fourteenth richest man in Russia, and eager to expand into oil. The Chechen fields, untapped during the decade-long unrest, provided an ideal starting point. While Voronov met with various ministries, Galina sought news of Kolya. He had reenlisted as a contract soldier after the horrible business with Lydia. Years had passed since she had last seen him. By the time he completed his two-year military service, impenetrable layers of publicists, managers, and agents shielded her from men like him. She wondered if he had tried to contact her, if her silences had pushed him down the path that ended in Lydia’s murder.

For the wife of an oligarch, military officials were all too happy to hand over medical and service records, because at the heart of the military’s famously incompetent bureaucracy lives an efficient adjutant class reserved for oligarchs, politicians, and crooks too wealthy and powerful to know by name even one soldier fighting their wars. Within an afternoon, a petty bureaucrat and
Deceit Web
fan had given Galina Kolya’s file, which identified him in descending taxonomy that began with brigade and ended with blood type.

“The good news is that his company is stationed five kilometers from here,” the petty bureaucrat said. “The bad news is that Kolya has been declared killed in action.”

Galina nodded solemnly.

“Don’t look so glum!” the petty bureaucrat said. “We declare perfectly healthy soldiers KIA all the time. You don’t have to pay a dead man a living wage, after all. KIA is more a clerical than existential state. In fact, we had a patient from Kolya’s platoon who was declared KIA along with him.”

The patient’s name was Danilo. He had been discovered some months earlier in the mountains near Benoi, the petty bureaucrat went on to say after further study of the file folder. He had been missing for months and would have been court-martialed as a deserter had he not already been declared dead. By the time he arrived at the hospital, his wounded foot had grown gangrenous, and it had to be amputated, a specialty of the resident surgery team. Danilo had lost much of what little mind he had, but from what the military police had gathered he had been held by insurgents at the bottom of a well.

The petty bureaucrat produced a photograph from a file. The photograph had been folded and unfolded so many times that its image looked superimposed on graph paper. He handed it to Galina and she saw a woman in a leopard-print bikini standing between two boys in leopard-print bikini bottoms. In the background yellow smoke drifted from the Twelve Apostles. The photograph had been taken several years before Galina had met Kolya. She recognized him as the taller of the two boys.

“The episode has an added peculiarity, one which an artist such as yourself might find intriguing,” the petty bureaucrat continued, blithe to the grief building on Galina’s face. “The alpine meadow where the two soldiers were held captive is well known, locally at least, because it was the subject of a landscape painting that once hung in the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.”

Galina still hadn’t looked up from the photograph. She still looked at Kolya as if back through time, which of course is the only way to look at a photograph, and we’ve done so with photographs of our teenage boyfriends killed in Chechnya or at home, by land mines or gunshots, by drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning, by mining accidents or maniacal drivers, by tuberculosis or HIV. Galina must have felt the sorrow we are familiar with, a sorrow so commonly experienced it has become a touchstone for our generation, the sorrow that begins the moment you learn your teenage boyfriend died violently, prematurely, senselessly. Their deaths have aged us, as if their unlived years have been added to our lived years and we bear the disappointments of both the lives we have and haven’t lived, so that even when we are alone, brushing our teeth in our quiet bathrooms, lying awake in our empty beds, even when our little ones are tucked in, when our friends are brushing their teeth in their quiet bathrooms, lying awake in their empty beds, even when the door is shut and no one can see or hear us, we are not alone, we still think in the plural voice.