The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (9 page)

G
ALINA
asked if Kolya really had been killed in action. The petty bureaucrat scanned the rest of the file.

“Technically, no. He was likely killed in captivity. But dead all the same.” The bureaucrat delivered the news in the same tone he used to greet an orderly good day. “We haven’t recovered a body, but in hostage situations like this, when one soldier makes it out, the other one, well, he often doesn’t. Danilo said he died on the mined meadow itself.”

“I want to see where he died,” Galina said.

The petty bureaucrat explained, at considerable length, his uneasiness in declining the request of an oligarch’s wife, and the star of
Deceit Web
, no less, but that the mountainous region was still an active war zone, even if given the euphemism of
zone of counterterrorism operations
.

“What about the painting you mentioned? The one that shows the place where Kolya died?” Galina asked later that afternoon. “I want to see that.”

Three days later, Galina met the former deputy director of the Museum of Regional Art. The museum had been destroyed several years earlier, and the deputy director had begun a second career as a tour guide.

W
E’VE
been told that Galina was never the same after returning from Chechnya. She ate little. She turned morose. Even when she took her daughter for afternoon walks in the park, she returned to the penthouse pallid and weary. Whatever she’d seen in Chechnya had changed her—and we don’t really know what she saw, our story is rumor and hearsay, which when applied to a figure like Galina quickly becomes myth.

In short, she was stupid enough to become a dissenter. Had she educated herself on the situation in Chechnya, she would have seen that the president was correct in his approach, as he is in all things. Don’t valorize her: She only wanted to create enough distance to enjoy the luxuries of the ruling class without feeling morally complicit in its actions. They were only whispers, of course. Galina wasn’t a protester. Yet anyone who has
gone to see one of Galina’s films knows that a single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.

No one paid heed to her off-color comments at dinner parties and art gallery openings. But when we heard Galina as a phone-in guest on a radio show we knew from her breathless first words that she hadn’t thought through her entire course of action. What could have prompted her? How could she be so ungrateful to the government that had given her so much? She had no right! She had everything! Later we learned that the radio station was the subsidiary of a media holding company, which in turn was the subsidiary of a conglomerate whose primary shareholder was none other than the now thirteenth richest man in Russia, our dear oligarch. Had she known it when she mocked the prime minister’s love of sport by calling him a
bare-chested barbarian
? It is unlikely. After all, as the newly minted thirteenth richest man in Russia, the oligarch was a primary shareholder in just about everything. For a man like the oligarch whose fortune and freedom relied on good relations with the Kremlin, political marriages would always trump romantic ones.

In the ensuing weeks, her films disappeared from DVD kiosks and she was quietly but officially stripped of her Miss Siberia title. She wasn’t airbrushed from photographs, as her grandmother had been; instead, she was Photoshopped from Miss Siberia publicity materials. We didn’t blame the oligarch. The Khodorkovsky affair was still front-page news. Galina lost the Petersburg and Moscow condos, the chauffeured black sedans, the pearls and furs. Everything for which she did not possess a title, deed, or receipt was taken away. The oligarch,
who didn’t think much of children, particularly his own, granted Galina one surprising concession, giving her their daughter to raise in Kirovsk.

N
OW
we see Galina all the time. Not on billboards of cinema screens, but in the market, walking down the street, waiting at the bus stop. Her face is the same size as ours. Still prettier, we’ll grant her that, but we’ve long outgrown such jealousies. In general, we’re happy. The rising price of oil and natural gas has stabilized the ruble. The mining combine profits grow in correlation to the Chinese economy. Ninety-five percent of the world’s catalytic converters are made with Kirovsk palladium and our town prospers beneath denser layers of pollution thanks to the efforts of American and European environmentalists hell-bent on keeping their skies clean. From time to time we hear stories not unlike those of Galina and her grandmother; people who speak too loudly tend to find themselves charged with corruption and sentenced to Siberian prisons. Their lives are small sacrifices.

Look across the street. That’s Galina’s girl on the jungle gym, playing with our girls, laughing and shouting down the slide. A beautiful girl, we won’t deny it. Usually Galina sits on this bench with us while we reminisce and vent our frustrations and share our joys. Mainly, we talk about our children. How they infuriate us; how they make us ache; how our fear of failing them startles us from our sleep. No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are
proud, we are so proud of them. We’ve given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what keeps them alive. In a few years, they will be married and having children of their own. We wonder what stories our grandchildren will tell of us and if their stories will sound at all like ours.

GROZNY
, 2003

T
he oilmen have arrived from Beijing for a ceremonial signing over of drilling rights. “It’s a holiday for them,” their translator told me, last night, at the Grozny Eternity Hotel, which is both the only five-star hotel and the only hotel in the republic. I nodded solemnly; he needn’t explain. I came of age in the reign of Brezhnev, when young men would enter civil service academies hardy and robust, only to leave two years later anemic and stooped, cured forever of the inclination to be civil or of service to anyone. Still, Beijing must be grim if they’re vacationing in Chechnya.

“We’ll reach Grozny in ten minutes,” I announce to them in English. The translator sits in the passenger seat. He’s a stalk-thin man with a head of hair so black and lustrous it looks sculpted from shoe polish. I feel a shared camaraderie with translators—as I do with deputies and underlings of all stripes—and as he speaks in slow, measured Mandarin, I hear the resigned and familiar tone of a man who knows he is more intelligent than his superiors.

The road winds over what was once a roof. A verdigris-encrusted
arm rises from the debris, its forefinger raised skyward. The Lenin statue once stood in the square outside this school, arm raised, rallying the schoolchildren to glorious revolution, but now, buried to his chin like a cowboy sentenced to death beneath the desert sun, Vladimir Ilich waves only for help. We drive onward, passing brass bandoliers and olive flak jackets, red bandannas and golden epaulettes, the whole palette of Russian invasion painted across a thunderstorm of wreckage. Upon seeing the zero-two Interior Ministry plate dangling below the Mercedes’s hood, the spies, soldiers, policemen, and armed thugs wave us through without hesitation. The streets become more navigable. Cement trucks can’t make it from the cement works to the holes in the ground without being hijacked by one or another shade of our technicolor occupation and sold to Russian construction companies north of the border, so road crews salvage office doors from collapsed administration buildings and lay them across the craters. Attached to the doors are the names and titles of those who had once worked behind them.
Mansur Khalidov: Head of Oncology; City Hospital Number Six. Yakha Sagaipova: Assistant Director of Production; Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry.
Perhaps my name is written over a crater on some shabby side street, supporting the weight of a stranger who glances at the placard
Ruslan Dokurov: Deputy Director; Grozny Museum of Regional Art
and wonders if such a person is still alive.

“A large mass grave was recently discovered outside of Grozny, no?” the translator asks.

“Yes, an exciting discovery. It will be a major tourist attraction for archaeology enthusiasts.”

The translator frowns. “Isn’t it a crime scene?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s millions of years old.”

“But weren’t the bodies found shot execution-style?” he insists.

I shrug him off. Who am I to answer for the barbarities of prehistoric man?

The translator nods to a small mountain range of rubble bulldozed just over the city limits. “What’s that?”

“Suburbs,” I say.

We pass backhoes, dump trucks, and jackhammers through the metallic dissonance of reconstruction that comes as a welcome song after months of screaming shells. The cranes are the tallest man-made structures I have ever seen in person. I drive to the central square, once the hub of municipal government, now a brown field debossed with earthmover tracks. Nadya once lived just down the road. The oilmen climb out and frown at each other, then at the translator, and then finally at me.

Turning to the northeast, I point at a strip of blue sky wedged between two fat cumuli. “That was Hotel Kavkaz. ABBA stayed two nights. I carried their guitars when I worked there one summer. Next to that, picture an apartment block. Before ninety-one only party members lived there and after ninety-one only criminals. No one moved in or out.”

None of the oilmen smile. The translator leans to me and whispers, “You are aware, of course, that these three gentlemen are esteemed members of the Communist Party of China.”

“It’s okay, I’m a limo driver.”

The translator stares blankly.

“Lloyd from
Dumb and Dumber
?”

Nothing.

“Jim Carrey. A brilliant actor who embodies the senselessness of our era,” I explain.

The interpreter doesn’t bother translating. I continue to draw a map of the square by narration, but the oilmen can’t see what I see. They see only an empty square demolished by bomb and bulldozer.

“Come, comrades, use your imagination,” I urge, but they return to the Mercedes, and I am talking only to the translator, and then he returns to the Mercedes, and I am talking only to myself.

T
HREE
months earlier, the Interior minister told me his idea. The proposition was ludicrous but I listened with the blank-faced complacency I had perfected throughout my twenty-three years as a public servant.

“The United Nations has named Grozny the most devastated city on earth,” the minister explained between bites of moist trout.

I wasn’t sure of the proper response, so I gave him my lukewarm congratulations.

“Yes, well, always nice to receive recognition, I suppose. But as you might imagine, we have an image problem.”

He loomed over his desk in a high-backed executive chair, while across from him I listened from an odd, leggy stool designed to make its occupant struggle to stay upright before the minister. The minister’s path had first crossed mine fifteen years earlier, when he had sought my advice regarding a
recently painted portrait of him and his sons, and I had sought his regarding a dacha near my home village. He’d had two sons then. The first emigrated before the most recent war to attend an American pharmacology school, now worked at a very important drugstore in Muskegon, Michigan. I don’t know what happened to the second, but the lack of ministerial boasting serves as a death knell. The portrait, which still hung on the far wall, depicted the minister and his sons in tall leather boots, baggy trousers, long woolen
chokhas
, and sheepskin
papakhas
heroically bestriding the carcass of a slain brown bear that bore a striking resemblance to Yeltsin.

“Foreign investment,” the minister continued. “Most others don’t agree with me, but I believe we need to attract capital unconnected to the Kremlin if we’re to achieve a degree of economic autonomy, and holding the record for the world’s largest ruin isn’t helping. Rosneft wants to sink its fangs into our oil reserves, but the Chinese will cut a better deal. Have you heard of Oleg Voronov? He’s on the Rosneft board, the fourteenth richest man in Russia, and one of the hawks who pushed for the 1994 invasion. The acquisition of Chechen oil is among his top priorities.”

The minister set down his silverware and began sorting through the little trout bones on his plate, reconstructing the skeleton of the fish he had consumed. “If we’re to entice foreign investment, we need to rebrand Chechnya as the Dubai of the Caucasus. That’s where you come in. You’re what, the director of the Museum of Regional Art?”

“Deputy director, sir.”

“That’s right, deputy director. You did fine work sending
those paintings to Moscow. A real PR coup. Even British newspapers wrote about the Tretyakov exhibit.”

With a small nod, I accepted the compliment for what was the lowest point of my rut-ridden career. In 1999, Russian rockets had demolished the museum and with my staff I’d saved what I could from the ensuing fires. Soon after, I was ordered to surrender them to the Russians. When I saw that I’d been listed as co-curator of an exhibit of the rescued Chechen paintings at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, I closed my lids and wondered what had happened to all the things my eyes have loved.

The minister tilted the plate over the rubbish bin and the ribs slid from the spine of the skeleton fish. “Nothing suggests stability and peace like a thriving tourism sector,” the minister said. “I think you’d be the perfect candidate to head the project.”

“With respect, sir,” I said. “I did my dissertation on nineteenth-century pastoral landscapes. I’m a scholar. This is all a bit beyond me.”

“I’ll be honest, Ruslan, for this position we need someone with three qualifications. First, he must speak English. Second, he must know enough about the culture and history of the region to show that Chechnya is much more than a recovering war zone, that we possess a rich cultural history unsullied by violence. Third, and most important, he must be that rare government man without links to human rights abuses on either side of the conflict. Do you meet these qualifications?”

“I do, sir,” I said. “But still, I’m entirely unqualified to lead a tourism initiative.”

The minister frowned. He scanned the desk for a napkin
before reaching over to wipe his oily fingers on my necktie. “According to your dossier, you’ve worked in hotels.”

“When I was sixteen, I was a bellhop.”

“Well,” the minister beamed. “Then you clearly have experience in the hospitality industry.”

“In the suitcase-carrying industry.”

“Then you accept?”

I said nothing, and as is often the case with men who possess more power than wisdom, he took my silence for affirmation. “Congratulations, Ruslan. You’re head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau.” And so my future was decided, as it often is, entirely without my consent.

Office space was a valuable commodity given how few buildings were still standing, so I worked from my flat. I spent the first morning writing
Tourist Bureau
on a piece of cardboard. My penmanship had been honed by years of attempting to appear productive at the office. I taped the sign to the front door, but within five minutes it had disappeared. I made a new sign, then another, but the street children who lived on the landing kept stealing them. After the fifth sign, I went to the kitchen and drank the vodka bottle the minister had sent over in celebration until I passed out in tears on the floor. So ended my first day as Tourist Bureau chief.

Over the following weeks, I designed a brochure. The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. From them I learned to be lavishly adjectival, to treat prospective tourists as semiliterate gluttons, and to impute
reports of kidnapping, slavery, and terrorism to the slander of foreign provocateurs. Thrilled by my discoveries, I tucked a notebook into my shirt pocket and raced into the street. Upon seeing the empty space where an apartment block once stood, I wrote
wide and unobstructed skies!
I watched jubilantly as a pack of feral dogs chased a man, and wrote
unexpected encounters with natural wildlife!
The city bazaar hummed with the sales of looted industrial equipment, humanitarian aid rations, and munitions suited for every occasion:
unparalleled shopping opportunities at the Grozny bazaar!
Even before I reached the first checkpoint, I had scribbled
first-rate security!
The copy wrote itself; the real challenge was finding images that substantiated it. After all, the siege had remapped the city. Debris rerouted roads through abandoned warehouses—once I found a traffic jam on a factory floor—and what was not rerouted was razed. A photograph of the present city would send a cannonball through my verbiage-fortified illusion of a romantic paradise for heterosexual couples. But I couldn’t find suitable photographs of prewar Grozny within the destroyed archives. In the end, I forwent photographs altogether and instead used January, April, and August of the 1984 Grozny Museum of Regional Art calendar for visuals. In the three nineteenth-century landscapes, swallows frolic over ripening grapevines and a shepherd minds his flock beneath a sunset; they portray a land untouched by war or communism and beside them my descriptions of a picturesque Chechnya do not seem entirely inappropriate.

I
RETURN
home after depositing the troika of Chinese oilmen at the Interior Ministry. The street children vanish from the staircase landing as I approach, but leave behind the instruments of their survival: a metal skewer to roast pigeons, a chisel to chip cement from the loose bricks they sell to construction crews for a ruble each.

I knock on the door of the flat adjacent to mine and announce my name. Nadya appears in a headscarf and sunglasses. Turning her unscarred side toward me, she invites me in. “How was the maiden voyage?”

“An excellent success,” I say. “They dozed off before we reached the worst of the wreckage.”

Nadya smiles as she takes measured steps to the Primus stove. She doesn’t need her white cane to reach the counter. I scan the room for impediments but everything is in order. Nothing on the floorboards but the paths of kopek coins I’d glued down so her bare feet could find their way to the bathroom, the kitchen, the front door in her early months of blindness. At the end of one of these paths is a desk neatly stacked with black-and-white photographs, once the subject of her dissertation on altered images in the Stalinist era. I sift through a few while she puts the kettle on. Nadya has circled a single face in each. The same face, or rather, same person is painted into the background of each photograph, from his childhood to his elderly years, the signature of the anonymous censor.

The kettle whistles in the kitchen. We sip tea from mismatched mugs that lift rings of dust from the tabletop. She sits so I can’t see the left side of her face.

“The tourist brochures will be ready next week,” I say. “I’ll have to send one along to our Beijing comrades, if the paintings come out clearly. I’m skeptical of Ossetian printers.”

“You used three from the Zakharov room?”

“Yes, three Zakharovs.”

Her shadow nods on the wall. The Zakharov room, the museum’s largest gallery, had been her favorite too. The first time I ever saw her was in that room, in 1987, her first day working as the museum’s newly hired restoration artist.

“You’ll have to save me one,” she says. “For when I can see it.”