The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
“Why are you swimming here?” I asked one of the women. She stood beside a rusted sign that warned off swimmers. She was no taller than me—which is not to say I was short, just short for a biped. Her hazel eyes held my fuzzy reflection. Her generation had journeyed through hell so we could grow up in purgatory.
She glanced to the rusted sign. It depicted a grapefruit-headed man made of forty-five-degree angles falling into the open jaws of a shark. Perhaps before she was arrested and condemned to Kirovsk, she had grown up by a lake where her father had taught her to float by keeping his hand beneath her arched spine so she knew she wouldn’t sink, that he would be there, until one day she lay on the calm surface, her back parabolic, her arms crucified on the water, her brown hair sieving algae, and she flitted her father a look and he raised his hands as if her glance was a loaded gun, and for a second she floundered, terrified she would sink to the lake bottom without him to hold her, but she stilled her arms, gulped the air, she was doing it, all by herself, she was floating. Perhaps she wanted to tell me that if she had outlived Stalin, the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Empire, a little dirty water wouldn’t kill her. Instead, she glared at the sign. “I’ve fried scarier fish with just a sliver of butter.”
She joined the other grandmothers. Clad in nothing but discolored undergarments, they hobbled to the gravel bank. All around, smoke blabbered endlessly from the smelter stacks. A woman with a noose of scar tissue carried her wooden cane right into the water. The others followed, and all together, they waded in. After a half-century drought, they remember how to swim.
A husband and wife backstroked across the lake, water glistening toward shoulders, legs splashing in unison. A rope, lashed around their waists, tied them together, in case one began to sink.
A one-legged man paddled with slow thrusts of his arms. Both real and phantom legs were weightless in the water below.
A man with a mustache as wide as his waistline, whom all the world had nicknamed Walrus, took his first tentative strokes, marveling at the cool rush against his skin, the freedom of movement, and began weeping right there in the water for the countless times he had given up hope, the countless times he had prayed for death in the mines, in the prison camp, and now, now gratitude cracked him open, and he thanked God for ignoring his prayers, for letting him live long enough to learn to swim.
And in the middle of the lake the woman I’d spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.
AUGUST grew warmer. Centrally planned weather patterns were in open revolt. To everyone’s surprise, the bathing babushkas didn’t turn lime color, or grow third ears; if anything, the chemical mélange restored to them a long-ago dissipated vitality. Soon grandparents in their sixties joined the geriatric swimmers, followed by people in their fifties, then forties, and so on until the youngest children of the youngest families dipped their baby-prawn toes into the water. No one believed the state-sponsored propaganda: The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism predicts the inevitable contours of history, the individual is significant only in his submission to the collective, the chemicals in the water cause cancer. Our revolution was a Sunday swim.
My mother, as I’ve said, wanted no more from life than an afternoon at the Black Sea. That August, my father came home with leopard-print bikinis.
“What’re we supposed to do with these?” Kolya asked, eyeing the two-piece.
“It’s a swimsuit. I’ll give you one guess.”
“It’s a bikini.”
My father grabbed the top piece from Kolya’s hands and tossed it in the trash. “Now it’s a Speedo.”
This summer Lake Mercury, the next the Black Sea, my father promised. But contrary to his plans, by the next summer the pain in my mother’s chest would have already taken her to the doctor, then the hospital, then the crematorium, and finally the living room bookshelf, where her ashes still rest, and will likely spend eternity, in a pickle jar between a can of spare buttons and two phone books, despite my father’s promises to someday scatter them in waters off Sochi.
But before all that, we went as a family to Lake Mercury, my mother in her leopard-print bikini, my brother and I in our leopard-print bikini bottoms, and we splashed in the lake, the water a mouthful of dirty change, my open eyes burning as I watched the flailing limbs of the decapitated swimmers, and at the end of the day, when everyone was sun drunk, or punch drunk, or just drunk, that hour in summer when falling inhibition and rising permissibility intersect, my father chased my mother across the gravel bank. With leaping strides he lunged for her in her leopard-print bikini, claiming he was a leopardopterist, that he would pin and mount her, and my brother and I chased them, two cubs protecting our leopardess. We bared our teeth and snarled, we clawed and growled, we were wild, we didn’t care, and all the while my father chased and my mother fled, her laughter held by the stadium of smoke rising from the Twelve Apostles, never had I seen her so happy, never so loved, so wanted, never had I seen her as a sexual being, as desired quarry, as anything but a taciturn and dissatisfied figure at the kitchen sink who occasionally walloped me over the head with a soup ladle; and even though my father had no appreciation for metaphor, or feline biology, or the sunbathers he hurdled over, even though he was my father and she my mother and we were all a few steps from the precipice, I look back at that moment, that afternoon, with flooded longing, and think: We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste.
That same afternoon, my father borrowed a Polaroid camera and lined us up on the bank of Lake Mercury. I’d never seen a Polaroid before, never seen any camera more advanced than the Zenit E-series. In the sulfurous light, Kolya’s chest was as pale as amphibian spawn. We flanked our mother and waited with pinched smiles as my father framed the photograph. Goose bumps pinpricked my mother’s bare thighs; they had never before seen direct sunlight. We had ranged far above our natural latitudes.
The camera clicked and the moment disappeared in a flash. For years, I kept that photograph. I gave it to Kolya when he went to war.
It was that very day, surrounded by smokestacks, soon after my father caught my mother and pinned her elbows to the muddy ground and planted a sugary smooch on her lips, that she coughed blood. A galaxy of crimson phlegm unraveled to the gravel. She blushed and stammered, embarrassed to interrupt that moment of unlikely magic. For weeks we pretended it was nothing. My mother insisted it was a summer cold, and we believed her, or pretended to, because chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and thoracotomies were luxuries reserved for the politically connected, and we could afford no more for her than a bottle of bleach-flavored cough syrup. The days shortened as the months slipped away. By winter, when she had shrunk to two-thirds her normal size, the battering ram of reality breached my father’s fortress. The doctor confirmed what we already knew: “One in two people in Kirovsk will die of lung cancer.”
Until her final day, my mother insisted on doing the dishes. “Of course not. Don’t be absurd,” my father countered. But she demanded in a voice that fell through the air like a brittle thing we scrambled to catch. The hot water was inconsistent, the soap was chemical burns in bar form; few chores promised more misery than the dishes. Yet my mother, masochist or no, saw standing at the sink before the Black Sea postcard as the most tranquil moment of her day, and she wouldn’t let illness take that from her. To make things easier for her, my father, brother, and I shared a single plate, glass, fork, knife, and bowl. We ate in rotation, each of us alone at the kitchen table with a single place setting.
That winter, in the fifteen minutes of daylight, Kolya and I climbed to the roof of the warehouse and snow dived. Five-meter-tall snowdrifts filled the road outside the museum. From the roof of the warehouse, five stories up, they were the swells of a frozen sea. I’d never snow dived before. I was afraid I’d fall straight through the snow and splatter on the tarmac, only to have my blini-thin remains removed by spatula the following spring.
“Ivan broke bot
“Then why are we jumping into a road?” I asked. The snowbanks rose high enough to conceal aircraft.
“Have you ever seen a car parked in front of the museum?”
I hadn’t, but that didn’t make the idea any wiser.
“We’ll check if it makes you feel better.”
“It would—” I began, but before I could finish the sentence, Kolya’s hands planted into my lower back and launched me over the cinder-block lip, and I was flailing, falling, a dust mite pulled in earth’s terrible inhalation, the yellow-white dream tumbling around me, and I knew I would die, my heart de-valved, the air rushed up, it was glorious. A soft glove of snow caught me. Water would’ve hurt more. I opened my eyes and couldn’t see. The air had been everywhere. Now it was gone. I butterflied the snow. My arms, frantic. Through a jag of compacted powder, sunlight slanted in. I lunged for it.
I couldn’t see Kolya’s face clearly enough to make out his expression. In his erupting laughter, I heard his relief.
“Any cars?” he called down.
“See for yourself!”
He crouched and exploded, thrusting aloft, legs straight and arms wide, jackknifing at the waist and falling in a slow, deliberate backflip. I remember Kolya in the space capsule, breaking the heavy grip of gravity, soaring forever, and I remember him arcing, falling, returning in a spray of snow. He swam to the surface, red-faced and wheezy. We raced back to the roof.
Our little flat above the museum shared a ventilation system with the adjacent nickel smelter and everything, even canned trout, stank of sulfur. My father feared nothing on this earth more than a draft, but even he propped open the triple-paned kitchen window to blast in polar night. “To air out the room,” he repeated as justification, admonishment, threat. We lived in our greatcoats, scarves, and ushankas, while my mother lay immobilized beneath the weight of a dozen blankets. One day I entered the flat and found my father in bed with her. He held her upright and her head lolled on his shoulder as he rocked her back and forth in his arms. He patted her back, helping her burp, and watching it I remembered how playful they had been, how lustful, how unabashedly magnetized to each other’s bodies. Glacial winds tore through the room as he rested her against a pyramid of pillows. A centimeter of snow covered the kitchen floor. She drifted in and out of consciousness. One of the pillows slipped and fell across her face and she startled from her haze.
“There’s nothing there,” he said, trying to calm her.
“I know there’s nothing there,” she replied, as if this were the source of her distress rather than its assuagement. He went on whispering in her ear, too low for me to hear, and she was in such a state, who knows what she understood then, what any of us understood, one moment she was there with us, the next she was gone, entering without fanfare the flat, dark line we will all one day become part of, and my father didn’t notice, he went on whispering to her, pressing his lips to skin as if to summon the cancer, to draw it out like a venom, because if every one of two people is fated to die of lung cancer, he wanted it to be him.
The funeral was on a Tuesday. Afterward our neighbors and friends came over with plates, pans, and platters. My mother had feared being buried alive—a not altogether unreasonable phobia given our city history—and generally disliked graveyards, cellars, and basements, so after she was cremated in Kirovsk’s newly built crematorium, the pickle jar containing her ashes went on the bookshelf. Behind it we’d posted her Black Sea postcard. She’d bask in its view for the hereafter. An inebriate third cousin mistook a bowl of potpourri for potato chips and munched the lavender flakes until the bowl bottom held his fissured reflection. Laid-off smelting techs wandered over from a table crowded with open-faced salami sandwiches, fish, beet, and potato salads, to express condolences in careful voices made uncomfortable by my grief. A quick word of sympathy, an awkward pause, and they turned back to the food, having done their duty, perhaps remembering it as the only unfortunate moment of an otherwise wonderful party. Shaking their hands was like clutching squirming herrings, and while I’ve now forgotten much of that day, I’ll never forget their tendrily fingers, moistened with salami grease, as well lubricated as the machines they had manipulated.
The following morning my father stood before dirty dishes towered about the kitchen. The sink hadn’t held more than a single place setting since the day my mother reclaimed her after-dinner washing. Now dishes climbed over the lip, stretched along the countertop, rose in narrow stacks on the stove range, descended the staircase of open drawers to the kitchen floor where bowls, plates, and glasses filled the floor. A tumor of crockery had grown on our home. My father reached for a white ceramic serving dish and examined it curiously. Orange grease dripped down the side. He tried to wedge it under the faucet, but the sink was too full. He made a halfhearted swipe with a sponge and dropped his arm. He looked down at the sink. A short, powerful scream erupted from him. He was usually such a quiet man. I didn’t know he contained such volumes. Kolya rushed from the bedroom and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Our father turned. We stood there in our pajamas. He held up the dish. Oily amoebas dripped to the floor. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
Our little family might have ended right then as our helplessness, our collective failure, amplified within the uneven triangle we made. But Kolya took the dish from my father and opened the kitchen window. “To air out the room,” he said, and he calmly lobbed the dish out the window. My father turned to Kolya, as if to hit him, but when the dish shattered in the alley below, his entire face loosened. “You know, I think that belonged to Boris’s wife,” he mused. “Your mother always hated her.”
“This belongs to her too,” Kolya said, and flung a massive platter out the window.
“And this,” I chimed in, throwing a glass.
“What about this?” Kolya asked, tossing a soup pot before anyone could answer. A loaded glass pitcher burst with silverware shrapnel. My father lifted a dozen stacked dinner plates and calmly slid them out the windowsill. We pitched sugar jars and salt shakers and saucers and teacups and large plates and small plates and soup bowls and porridge bowls. We threw every dish brought by neighbors, friends, and mourners, and then we ransacked the cupboards, tossing frying pans and cutlery, bread boards and cooking trays. It was an exorcism. We stripped the kitchen of any dish, utensil, and mug until nothing survived that would ever need to be washed. It was the morning after my mother’s funeral and there we were, we couldn’t stop laughing. We went on until there was nothing left but one plate for each of us. When the last excess plate shattered in the alley below, my father finally closed the window.
5
For several weeks I left the painting suffocated in bubble wrap beneath my divan. Well, I say divan. Really, it’s a stingily cushioned hunk of aluminum built to last rather than to provide comfort, like something you’d find in a fallout shelter. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, I tell my friend Yakov. No other choice, really. Sometimes I find condom wrappers between the cushions. They’re all mine, definitely. The flat is owned by a widowed she-huckster who’d sell me into slavery in my sleep, if I slept. Her two grown sons live here too. They think they’re tough just because they’ve been to jail, joined a gang, survived stabbings. But I could teach them a thing or two. It takes less courage to criticize the decisions of others than to stand by your own, for instance. Good advice. Attila the Hun said it, and he ransacked half of Europe! But to some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses. They’ll quote me on that someday.
The two sons smoke as if desperate to commit suicide but only by emphysema. Their mother only lets them smoke in the bathroom, which they’ve filled with a black-and-white television, a broken boom box, a dozen ashtrays, and a sawed-in-half sofa. It looks like something between an outdated disco and the office of
One of the finest I came across in my wanderings was in a café three blocks from the Teplov Gallery, where Galina had said there’d been an exhibition on Zakharov a year or two back. Yakov walked with me part of the way. He’s an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I have human friends, obviously. But everything’s easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.
Yakov had gone to investigate a dumpster by the time I reached the Teplov Gallery. The door handle was a silver bracket. The marble foyer was poorly plagiarized from an imperial summer palace. None of the art would hang above eye level, but the ceiling rose to the lower stratosphere. Even the air tasted imported from a country ranked high on the quality-of-life index.
Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-size plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should’ve been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.