The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
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.
WE 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.
WHEN 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 o
GALINA 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.
WE’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.
NOW 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.
The Grozny Tourist Bureau
GROZNY, 2003
The 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
“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.