The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
“It’s been the most brutal morning, Alexei,” she said. People who have it easy are always telling you how hard it is.
“You’ve been following the earthquake in Indonesia?” I asked.
“What? No, a trollop from the Royal Shakespeare Company landed the Russian seductress-spy role in the new Bond film. Probably shagged Leo the Lion to get the part.”
“I’m sure you’d have gotten it if anyone in Hollywood had seen Deceit Web,” I offered encouragingly. Her gaze dive-bombed to the floor. Some people you just can’t cheer up.
“I know I should count my blessings, but that’s what accountants are for.”
“Must be weird being you.”
“It’s a strange thing, Alexei. When we were teenagers, I’d never even imagined living in a penthouse with a chauffeur and a chef and a butler. But now that I have it, it’s nothing. Am I awful for saying that?”
“Just a little.”
“Life’s a little awful, I’m afraid. Pitiful creatures spinning on a senseless rock around a dying sun in a cold and uncaring cosmos and they still won’t give me the Bond movie. Fighting over matches while the world burns, no?”
“Sure,” I said. But I was trying to decide if it was rude to take a fifth konfeti when she still hadn’t taken one. Nope, definitely not.
“So how’ve you been? You’re not still in university, are you?”
“I am,” I beamed. Through sheer grit and tireless effort, I’d managed to stretch a five-year philology degree into its tenth annum. It was a loaves-and-fishes variety of miracle. The universe may be cold, dark, and indifferent, but in university you get to take club drugs all night and sleep all day. “I’m working on my thesis paper. On Odessa Tales. I have my title, ‘Babel’s Babbles,’ but that’s about it.”
“Any good?”
“I haven’t read it,” I said. “I don’t want the text to influence my interpretation.”
A sixth confection dissolved into a starchy paste that sopped the saliva from my tongue. We were quiet for a little while.
“You heard about Lydia?” I finally asked.
All the blush in a beauty box wouldn’t’ve brightened Galina’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said. Her eyes fixed on a safe, vacant patch of wall over my left shoulder. “Alina told me about her and her mother, and of course your brother. Then Olga told me. Then Lara. Then Darya. Then Zlata. And Tamara must’ve told me a dozen times”—the six-member gaggle that feasted on crumbs fallen from the table of Galina’s celebrity; Lydia had been their seventh member—“I don’t even know how they get my number. I change it every few months, mainly to avoid them, and they still somehow find it. The Americans should hire them to track down Al Qaeda. Ten minutes on the phone with Tamara is enough to make anyone disavow their most sacred beliefs”—she lit an incense stick that smelled of lavender fields doused in sunshine— “but anyway, Lydia. Let’s be honest, never the sharpest bayonet in the battalion, was she? I’m not saying she should’ve known better than to confide in them. But, come on. You could confide a secret to a megaphone and it would stay quieter. I’ve tried to make a film of her murder, but it’s easier coaxing a mouse down a cat’s throat than a decent script into production.”
“It’s a tragedy,” I said. “For Lydia, for Vera, for Kolya, for—”
“You don’t need to tell me. It’s a national embarrassment, really, our film industry. If there is an afterlife, then the circle of hell just below the Satan-Judas-Brutus gang bang is reserved for development executives, I mean—”
“Why am I here?” I shrank a little in the crosshairs of her narrowed eyes. She wasn’t used to being interrupted.
“A good question, Little Radish, taking us to the heart of the matter—though why those with the most free time are the stingiest with it, I’ll never know.” She scooted her chair toward my side of the table. She even made scooting sound sexy. I was pretty sure she wanted me to become her paramour. I’m flattered, I’d tell her, but I can’t do that to my brother, Kolya, even if he’s dead. She’d dissolve into inconsolable weeping, saying if she couldn’t have me she had no reason to go on. Buck up, I’d tell her. I’d kiss her right on the lips—with tongue—and she’d swoon, obviously. Then I’d walk out the door without looking back.
“So listen,” she said, sliding her hand across the table until the space between her fingers and mine was as thin as a butterfly wing. “I went to Chechnya a few years back. With Oleg. He had some business there, drilling oil and his assistant. The tart. While he was out doing that, I visited a few army hospitals and bases. I thought starring in a Great Patriotic War biopic was enough, but no, my publicist insisted that I had to actually talk to the poor devils. A pair of jackboots away from being a wunderbar stormtrooper himself, my publicist. Anyway, I asked an army official about your brother.”
“I’ve asked after Kolya with every army official in every army office with a listed address and phone number. No one knows anything.”
“You’re just the sweetest, aren’t you?” Her eyes iced over. “When you’re an important person, you can ask a question and even an army bureaucrat will answer.”
She reached across the table and sealed my fingers within the warm envelope of her hand. Her pulse clicked against my wrist like a telegraph message her heart had sent me to decode. My nerve endings gasped.
“I was told that he was taken prisoner and died on that field”—she nodded to the wall where a frame of golden dollops and curlicues wrapped around a simple painting of a pasture—“The field is something of a local landmark because it was the subject of this painting by some nineteenth-century artist. Rather dreary place if this is its most majestic vista. But it used to hang in a museum, so it must be important. I bought it.”
I left a trail of footprints in the plush white carpet as I approached the painting. It wasn’t much to look at, which is about all you can do with a painting. An empty pasture cresting into a hill. A small house. An herb garden. A waist-high wall of white stone meandering at a diagonal. But in a patch of plugged-in canvas the size of a halved playing card, two slender shadows ran up the hill. One was a head and a half taller than the other. A slender bar of green grass separated their dark hands, and I couldn’t tell if they were reaching for each other or letting go.
“Kolya died here? On this hill?” I asked.
“That’s what the army adjutant said.”
I turned back to the painting, to the two stick figures running up the hill, limbs unfurled. “Who are they?”
“I’m really not sure. I should’ve asked the prior owner when he called last year, asking for it back for a retrospective on Zakharov. Up in your stretch of the forest, actually. The Teplov Gallery, in Petersburg? I told them precisely where they could stick their request, and it wasn’t in their mailbox, mind you. The nerve. Sell you a painting one day, then ask you to donate it back the next. No more than vipers in ascots, these academics.”
A placard hung to the side of the painting. The final lines read Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist. They are no more than his shadows. They are not there.
My palms had dampened when I returned to the table. “You remember the mixtape we made for Kolya, before he went to Chechnya the first time?” I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but I’ve often thought about that tape.
She gave the widest smile. It was the first genuine sentiment she’d expressed that morning. “Devil, I’d forgotten. Then again, I try to forget about everything from Kirovsk. I was a mess back then, wasn’t I?”
She wanted me to say no, so I said, “Yes.”
“Let’s hope there’re no extant copies. If that made it online, I’m not sure I’d ever live it down. Probably as damaging as a sex tape, that.”
Nothing demystifies the glamour of celebrity like hearing one talk. I plopped an eighth confection onto my saucer. “He told me that he’d put off listening to the mixtape as long as possible. That he’d wait until he really needed it, like the last
I wanted her to say yes, so she said, “No.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Confections nine and ten landed on the saucer in tiny detonations of powdered sugar. I swear I just didn’t want them to go to waste.
“Oh, one other thing,” she said, crossing the living room to an antique desk constructed of a jillion drawers too small to hold anything larger than paper clips and stamps. She returned with a folded Polaroid I’d given to Kolya before he left for his first tour. I couldn’t risk unfolding it in front of her. “The army adjutant in Grozny gave me that.”
“Why’d you wait so long to tell me all this?”
She gazed at her dim reflection in the teacup, and then quickly broke it with the turn of the spoon. “I didn’t invite you here to talk about your brother. You see…my husband is divorcing me. Some people think I’ve been a bit too frank in my public comments on the state of modern Russia in recent interviews. You begin criticizing the casting choice of a certain director, and you end up comparing Putin, unfavorably, to Lord Voldemort. Who knows how these things happen?”
“What’s this have to do with me?”
“The painting, you idiot. The Zakharov. Oleg’s hired suit-jacketed leeches for lawyers. They’d claim my toes if they weren’t attached to my feet.”
I still didn’t understand.
She stared dismally. “I’m giving you the painting. Better you have it than the lawyers.”
Then I understood.
I wrapped the painting in enough bubble wrap to mummify a mastiff. She followed me into the hall. I’d sweep her off her feet and we’d waltz out the door. Never mind the daughter sleeping in the other room. The tabloids would call me heartless, but I won’t raise another man’s child as my own. We’d buy a mansion on the Riviera, and I’d learn how to do all the things the nouveau riche do, like buy cuff links and belittle the work ethic of the poor. I’d leave her heartbroken in Marseilles. She’d never recover. The tabloids would call me a cad, but I wouldn’t play by society’s rules. Everything in my life would be different. I just had to kiss her.
I shook her hand.
“It’s been good to see you, Alexei,” she said as she closed the door, and I knew she meant it. She’s not a very good actor.
2
A parachute of yellow smoke, tethered by thick billows to the smokestacks, hangs permanently over Kirovsk. The twelve smokestacks, the tallest edifices for five hundred kilometers, are known locally as the Twelve Apostles. They encircle Lake Mercury, a man-made lake of industrial runoff whose silvered waters are so veined with exotic chemicals they lap against the gravel-pocked banks year-round, unfrozen even in February. Behind the brainy folds of smoke, the moon is a dim ghost. Kirovsk is in annual competition with Linfen, China, to hold the title of the world’s most polluted city. When the nickel burns, it produces sulfuric soot so dense it stains the ground, accumulating in such concentrations that snowdrifts are mineable. And surrounding Kirovsk is White Forest. Constructed at the behest of the party boss’s wife to counter Kirovsk’s reputation as a frozen cesspool, the forest looks very fine in photographs circulated among engineering departments in Moscow and Leningrad to deceive their most promising students into taking jobs with the nickel combine. In person, however, you realize this is an unusual forest. The trees keep their leaves through winter. They neither grow nor die. No animals hibernate in their trunks. In a triumph over reality, the city commissioned an entire forest of fake trees. Over time the wind has stripped much of the plastic foliage from the steel limbs, and now White Forest is a field of rusted antennas, harboring the city’s de facto garbage dump beneath its naked branches. It is in White Forest, where Lydia’s story ends, that mine begins.
I must have been ten, Kolya thirteen, on the afternoon we watched two men kill a third. But I’ll come back to that. We woke in the room we shared to the dueling cries of my father and the teakettle. Kolya climbed from bed. His hair was a typographical error someone had scribbled out. He hit me, as he did most mornings, to toughen me for my own good, but it’s difficult to muster much brotherly gratitude while getting slapped. We skated across the floorboards and into the kitchen in our woolen socks.
My father had begun lending sweaters to Kolya. As Kolya grew, the neck and shoulders of the sweaters slowly stretched, giving my father the appearance of a man incrementally disappearing when he wore them once again. But that morning, my father looked years younger, taller, larger. His eyes were bloodshot rivets of inspiration. He paced before the charred stove top.
“This is it, boys!” he exclaimed. “The exhibition that will send the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics to the dustbin of museum history.”
My father was an outer-space freak in a city roofed by pollution so dense he’d have to drive a hundred kilometers to see starlight. A few years earlier, in what was a moment of either personal courage or mental collapse, he had quit his comfortable position as a furnace technician to pursue his dream of opening a cosmonautics museum. His passion was rivaled only by his ineptitude, and he presided over the Kirovsk Museum of Inner and Outer Space as its founder, director, docent, archivist, press secretary, ticket inspector, and janitor. Quartered in an abandoned warehouse adjoined to one of the city smelting complexes, the museum was not only the kingdom of my father’s unfulfilled ambition, but my playground, my classroom, and, in the lofted flat above it, my home.
If you haven’t seen the museum, let’s say it’s one of the world’s most unique science museums and just leave it at that. If you have seen it, my apologies. You could say my father built a Potemkin space station, that he forged every exhibit, that he had an intensely one-sided rivalry with the Moscow Cosmonautics Museum. You could also say that compared with the greater inhumanities of our city, my father’s misdemeanors are so trivial they seem virtuous.
“What’s he on about?” Kolya asked my mother, the family bilingual who translated my father’s ravings. She stood at the sink. A postcard of the Black Sea had been pasted above the tap. As the discolored water softened her fingertips, she stared into the breakers unfurling over a sandy strip. Perhaps she strolled along the white-painted promenade, a slender leash wrapped around her wrist, a lady with a lapdog. Perhaps she imagined a summer romance, the thrill of unfamiliar hands, the unknown warmth of sunlight on her shoulders, the gasp of seawater on her toes. Sealed within the worn postcard edges was a sunlit world where my mother splintered into thousands of imagined selves, none of whom answered Kolya’s question.
“The End!” my father declared. He punctuated the declaration with a blow to the kitchen table that scattered the silverware.
“The end of what?”
“The end of everything. An exhibit on all ends, from the end of a day to the end of a life, a civilization, a planet, a universe. It will put the museum in the guidebooks.”
The museum had opened the previous year with my father christening the front door with a thrown bottle of saccharine Soviet champagne. It had hardened into a puddle of frozen glass that had resulted in the broken hip of our third visitor. My father dropped to one knee and clamped his hands on our shoulders. As we huddled together, linked through the chain of his grip, the current of his fervor sank into our muscles. “Go to the forest. See if you can find anything we might use.”
The floor of White Forest had filled with waste in the decades since its construction. Over the years Kolya and I had found a collection of refrigerator doors, a dozen leaky barrels of toxic waste, a file cabinet filled with classified documents, knives and bullet casings in police department evidence bags, a cat caged in a kennel, a drunk driver sobbing in the car he had somehow skewered to a steel tree limb, and an electric heater in perfect working order. Most of the displays in the Hall of Inexplicable Phenomena came from the debris.
The last house we passed before crossing a wide field to reach the forest edge belonged to Lydia’s family. She was the same age as Kolya, twelve or thirteen
“What are we looking for?” I asked. Except for a few hypodermics we poked each other with, we hadn’t found anything worth keeping. “This is stupid. Where are we even going?”
“We’ll know what we’re looking for when we find it,” Kolya answered loudly and slowly, as if I were both deaf and dim-witted. A note of vexation pulsed beneath the equanimity of his logic. I was afraid I’d disappointed him. You’re probably thinking that I’m a high-density, dehydrated slab of manliness, a testosterone prune, if you will, but as a boy I was a plum. My family nickname was Little Radish: Even as a taproot, I didn’t rise to the stature of greatness. I was terrified of nearly everything, from atomic war to other people’s belly buttons, Kolya’s displeasure most of all. When he was annoyed, he’d look just over my head when speaking to me. It made me feel shorter than I already was and embedded the conversation with an expectation I failed to meet unless I stood on stilts. We carried on. Ten minutes later, we heard voices.
“You’re not scared, are you?” The rasped question carried the ghosts of ten thousand cigarettes.
“Scared of sharks,” answered a second, younger voice. Through the gaps in the trees, we saw the two men standing a dozen meters ahead. We crouched to get a better view. The first man must have been in his early thirties, wearing the circular spectacles and pressed trousers of a gulag-bound academic. A deep cleft made his chin look like a small dog’s testicles. The other man wasn’t even a man, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in a tracksuit, his hair slicked into an aerodynamic wedge, his upper lip feathered with a mustache as useless as a brush missing half its bristles, his little teeth swallowed by gummy arches.