“So it seems. I can’t even tell what’s being advertised. Steely resolve?”
“You can’t go out for an ice cream without passing two dozen posters of Putin.” He said it like he’d really kept count. “Even a Magnate Gold sours under a dictator’s glassy gaze. Ridiculous, really. Imagine going to Baghdad and finding George Bush’s weaselly mug on every street corner?”
The guy next to Putin was Ryan Gosling from a parallel universe where instead of becoming a famous actor, he smoked too much weed, ate potato chips for breakfast, and was dressed by his grandmother. “Who’s he?”
“I take it you’re not a journalist?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he actually wanted to know. A question mark can turn any innocent sentence into an accusation.
“I’m a university student, technically.”
“That’s President Kadyrov. Very popular. He received a hundred and two percent of the vote last election.”
“I’ve never been good at math.”
“You might have a future as an election overseer.” We swerved out of the broad headlights of an oncoming truck. “You haven’t seen his Instagram?”
“That’s where I recognize him from! He’s the one with all the photos posing with tiger cubs and ducklings and kittens!”
His brows bunched over dirty-copper irises. Never seen such a grim response to baby animals. Maybe petting a duckling’s the final taboo down here.
“You’re not from around here either, are you?” I asked.
A tractor towing bushels of green-sheathed corn cobs trundled along the shoulder.
“Yes and no.” His volume knob in his throat had dialed down to movie-theater whisper. “I was born just outside of Grozny. But in 1994, just a kid, I was sent to Holland as a refugee. A lot of tea glasses had to be sweetened to make it happen. My parents could only afford to send one of us and I was the youngest. Lived there a long while, and even now I speak Dutch much better than Chechen.”
“So are you staying in London after you graduate or going back to Holland?”
A low wind peeled a gauze strip from the underbelly of a cloud.
“Of course I’m moving back here.”
Fifteen minutes later, he nodded to an empty field. Shards of concrete grew where grass should’ve been. “I lived there,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said.
Another few minutes passed, and he said, “All I’m trying to say is don’t trust someone who posts photos of himself playing with puppies and kittens online. Chances are, they’re sociopaths. You know who loved little animals?”
“You want me to name names?”
“Adolf bloody Hitler,” he snapped. “He was even a vegetarian. And look at the mess he made.”
White-orange flapped atop a flare stack.
A blackbird cursored across the blue screen of sky.
I made a note to more carefully curate my Facebook profile pics.
GROZNY was the cleanest city I’d ever seen. Its walls weren’t old enough to have seen a hoodlum’s paint can. The mortar between bricks was still white. The streets must’ve been swept hourly. Sapling-shaded promenades unfurled down wide boulevards. A Japanese sushi bar called Mafia advertised a bizniz lunch of pho, Thai green curry, and a fortune cookie. In 1995 when Kolya was deployed for the first time, then in 2000 when he returned as a contract soldier, I’d read every newspaper and magazine feature on the war I could find. The Grozny in those photos was a 1944 Dresden look-alike. The Grozny in the windshield was Dubai. In the city center five glass skyscrapers huddled together.
“I didn’t think it would look, well, so city-like,” I said.
“What did you expect?” Akim asked. Before I could answer, he nodded to a squat gray building of vaguely defined bureaucratic provenance. “First floor’s the art museum,” he said.
On the ride in, I’d told Akim about my brother and the painting, altering the details just slightly (in my version, Kolya was a human rights worker). Risky move, maybe, but I hadn’t thought any of this through and he seemed about as trustworthy a character as I could hope to find. He’d just nodded with the glazed-over indifference of someone subjected to detailed narration of another person’s dream. I guess our lives are all dreams—as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. He said he’d help, until four o’clock at least.
We parked and entered the museum. It was clogged with paintings and empty of patrons. The docent’s face bathed in the glow of her blocky Nokia cell phone. Her narrow brown eyes met ours when we walked in. I remembered those long winter afternoons at the ticket counter of the Kirovsk Cosmonautics Museum when the sudden appearance of a museum visitor was cause for celebration and alarm.
“Yes?” Her voice rose a half octave toward suspicion. She couldn’t’ve been older than eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was covered in an electric-pink headscarf that obeyed the letter of the law while exorcizing its spirit.
“I have something to return,” I began and pulled the canvas from the duffel bag. She inhaled sharply. She looked from me to the canvas and then back as if we were two mismatched puzzle pieces she couldn’t fit together.
“You’ve seen this before?” I asked.
Her Nokia buzzed on the table in a universe far from us. She nodded.
I pointed to the dacha in the painting. “Do you know where this plot of land is?”
“The man this belongs to, he lives there now.”
While she showed Akim the route on a Yandex map, I circled the museum. The earliest date I found etched into the display placard thingies was 2003. Most were portraits of the family Kadyrov. In several, the president cuddled calico kittens.
THE Lada’s rear tires ejected dusty rooster tails, but the car wouldn’t budge. I checked my phone. Zero bars. Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God. The roads had broken, disintegrated, and washed away the farther from Grozny we’d come. Here, somewhere in the southern mountains, what we referred to as “road” was in fact “impending landslide.” The wide green bowl of valley stretched down the ridge. Akim floored the accelerator. The motor vhroooooomed but gravity pulled harder than the engine pushed.
“I think this is it,” Akim said. A clear sheen of perspiration mustached his upper lip. He still hadn’t loosened his thickly striped ash and navy necktie.
“I can’t believe we made it this far.” And I couldn’t. Given the state of the car I was surprised it didn’t explode into a Michael Bay finale every time Akim punched the accelerator.
“This”—he glanced to the line of white rocks weaving up the ridge—“whatever this is, isn’t on the map. But I reckon we’re only four or five kilometers away. You start walking now, you’ll probably get there in a few hours.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And thank you for taking me around, particularly when you’re just getting home.”
“It’s nothing. It’s been nice, actually. No one’s met me at that airport before.”
“It’s not nothing. I’m sure you’re busy and have family to see and everything.”
He looked away from me. His voice was flat and inflectionless. “That field we passed where I said I’d grown up? That’s the last place I saw any of them.”
He slid his Ray-Bans up the cliff of his nose. I should’ve asked for his phone number or email, or even just his last name to look him up on Facebook or VK. I should’ve told him that my family was gone too. But I was afraid. Even though Kolya had been killed, he wasn’t a victim, and neither was I, not really. There was a pause, five seconds when I felt him looking at me as Kolya had in those rare moments when we’d worn through our deceptions. I could’ve described the loneliness of living far from home, among people you don’t know. I could’ve shown him the jars containing my parents’ ashes and he would’ve understood me entirely. Maybe we would’ve become lifelong friends. Maybe he was the person I came to Chechnya to meet. I won’t know. I just thanked him again, stepped out of the car, and watched him n
avigate the long, broken road in reverse.
10
In his first tour, from ’95 to ’97, Kolya was stationed in a remote outpost near the Chechen-Dagestani border where even in peacetime telephone lines and mail routes didn’t exist. For the duration of his tour, not a single letter Galina or I wrote reached him. The world he’d left in Kirovsk froze over in his mind. In the absence of news, he imagined our lives, invented daily dramas, small triumphs, conferring on us a peace that didn’t exist for him. He couldn’t have known about the Miss Siberia Beauty Pageant or Oleg Voronov. He couldn’t have known that she made the difficult but prudent decision to end her pregnancy.
In the sigh between battle and resupply, between hitting the ground and falling asleep, he imagined Galina making a crib from an empty dresser drawer. He imagined the bizarre foods pregnancy would give her the taste for. He built and populated an alternate universe that was part memory and part the projected future that day by day he came closer to joining. The child in Kolya’s imagined realm was a boy, born on September 3, 1995, seven months to the day after Galina announced she was two months pregnant, weighing a robust three and one quarter kilograms, and named Arkady. He announced it to his platoon, and even though they knew better, they congratulated him with handshakes and backslaps. A year later, he celebrated his son’s first birthday by wedging an upside-down matchstick into a stale biscuit.
Galina and I had repeatedly submitted written requests to the conscription center, but a clerk with no more empathy than the aluminum stool he roosted on filed our requests in the trash. No one knew when, or even if, Kolya would return, and so no one met him at the dock when he did, finally, come home.
The slushy river port was shadowless beneath a noon sun. Passengers heavy of heart, head, and suitcase disembarked, Kolya among them. He scanned the crowd for a familiar face and at last he found one: Galina’s, high in the air, on a billboard advertising Deceit Web. What was she doing up there? There must be another Galina who looked just like his Galina but couldn’t be his Galina because his Galina was at home with their son. His mind had so firmly wrapped around this one single idea of what awaited him that no space remained for what was actually there. He shouldered his duffel bag and kept his eyes fixed on the mud-spattered pavement, refusing to acknowledge the face he’d waited two years to see again.
But Galina was everywhere. On billboards, bus stops, and tabloid covers, advertising everything from facial cream to mineral water. The face he had searched for in Caucasian cloud formations was pixilated across kiosks. The lips that had only made sense when pressed against his own now pouted at the entire city. The nightmare of finding a missing face everywhere is no less horrifying than the nightmare of finding it nowhere, and Kolya trudged through a hometown no less surreal or foreign than the Chechen hamlet he had left.
Most cinemas had gone bankrupt, yet the ticket line for Deceit Web wrapped around the block. He stopped to ask a man in a pair of slacks creased every way but the right way the name of the starring actress. The man gave a perplexed frown, and then said, “Galina Ivanova, of course.”
“Do you know if she’s seeing anyone?”
“Oleg Voronov. They’re engaged.”
Kolya nodded as if it were only natural to return home after two years to find his fiancée engaged not only to another man, but to the fourteenth richest man in Russia, the boss of Kirovsk, a man who could have any woman in the world, and so of course took the only one Kolya loved. He wanted to melt into the puddle of gray water that was slowly seeping into his boots.
“Does she have a child?” he asked quietly, but by now he knew the answer.
The man shook his head, less at the question than at the idea that anyone alive was still ignorant of the intimate details of Galina’s private life. He pulled an oil-stained bandanna from his back pocket and gave a foghorn blow of his nose. “Not yet, though what a baby those two will make. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of our Galina. Everyone knows her.”
When he arrived at the museum, I wanted to shout, leap, proclaim, but with one look at Kolya’s expression I knew we wouldn’t celebrate. He was a shaving of the person he’d been. I’d always been afraid of him—of his strength, of his disapproval—but seeing his stooped, slender figure in a doorway that had suddenly grown much wider, I realized I’d never before felt afraid of hurting him. At the kitchen table he interrogated me about Galina and I tried to deliver the news as gently as I could, but you can’t really shatter someone’s life gently.
“It wasn’t intentional,” I said. Weak consolation. “She tried to write you. We all did. Dad practically bankrupted himself buying postage, just hoping one letter would reach you. We didn’t even know if you were alive, Kolya.”
He played with a pale little coat button that might’ve been all that fastened him to the world.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked. It was all I could do to nod to the bookshelf, where a second pickle jar had sat for more than six months.
The next day Kolya visited Pavel Petrukhin, who was to the city drug trade what Oleg Voronov was to its nickel economy. The army had well prepared Kolya for a career as a professional mercenary, and Pavel eagerly hired him. I only learned about it later, when Kolya informed me that I’d be going to university in Petersburg when I graduated from high school. A bribe to a university admissions official meant I was accepted before I even applied. By the time I’d heard about Lydia, Kolya had already disappeared back into Chechnya, this time as a contract soldier. I’d been in Petersburg for less than a year then. He didn’t even call to say good-bye.
“Make something of yourself,” he’d told me the last time I saw him, when he sent me off to Petersburg. My half-empty duffel bag slouched against my shin. Oily dock water sludged against the piers. The school year would start in ten days. I’d never been below the Arctic Circle. He put me in a loose headlock and kissed my right ear. “Make something of yourself,” he repeated.
11
My legs have become rubber. Bass drum pedals thud-a-thud my temples with every heartbeat. It’s like summiting Everest, but without sherpas to carry you. The ridge falls only to rise again, up and down, a bad joke Mother Nature insists on retelling over and over. The air’s cooled and dried out at this unholy height. The stony trail’s a split scar through the short grass. I’d forswear my immortal soul for a chairlift. But I persist. The rises shorten, the drops deepen, and soon I’m in a valley of green foothills and farmland. A few unsheared sheep laze in the grasses. I wave to them. They don’t wave back.
I use the Zakharov canvas as my map, holding it to the horizon to match the topographical contours. A few times I think I’m nearly there, but no, not quite. This is a titanic waste of time. I’ll get lost and rebel bandits will chop off my head and donate my vital organs to Saudi charities.
I should probably turn around.
I really should.
But there, up ahead. An apricot tree. A boarded well. A white stone fence. An herb garden. A home. I look back and forth between the real and painted landscapes. The two shouldn’t so perfectly correspond, not after two centuries, but they do.
On the hill an adult and child are shadowed within a dissolving orange sunset. Just like the apricot tree, the stone fence, and the herb garden, the two figures silhouetted on the hill match those of the painting.
I wave to them.
I wave again.
I wave a third time.
They wave back.
SIDE B
Wolf of White Forest
KIROVSK, 1999
No one could explain why the wolves returned in the early years of the newly formed Russian Federation. Biologists arrived with honorifics and plastic binders, departed with unpaid hotel bills and findings so disparate it was a wonder they could agree a wolf had four legs, two eyes, and one nose. Some blamed an irregular cycle of population growth and decline. Some blamed global warming and intense logging of woodlands to the distant southwest. Most blamed their mothers, for one thing or another. V
era had her own theory, but no one thought to ask her.
The wolves howled in White Forest just across the colorless meadow from Vera’s house. She stood at the stove boiling water in a saucepan dented sixteen years earlier, when she’d thrown it at a telephone that kept on ringing long after she’d hung up. The kettle had been a gift from her mother-in-law, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, and Vera had sold it with a set of dull knives and what remained of her daughter’s clothes. But the saucepan boiled water as well as the kettle, the knives weren’t sharp enough to slice a slab of cold butter, and her daughter’s clothes, well, Lydia had moved to the right side of the world and these were difficult times. She strained the Ivan-chai into teacups.
“I didn’t know you drank such a weak brew,” Yelena commented, in the living room, with a thin smile of insincerity stitched between her plump cheeks. Her eyebrows were plucked brown sickles. Every two months she flew business class to Moscow—always bringing a stack of airline napkins as “souvenirs” for Vera—to have her hair recolored, her skin reapplied, and the toxins leached from her body by a Tibetan healer. Not a very good Tibetan healer, Vera would think to herself. If he properly leached all the toxicity from Yelena, there would be no Yelena left.
“I prefer a subtle brew in the evenings,” Vera said. It was two in the afternoon. Any more subtle and they’d be drinking straight water. “Otherwise I’d be up all night.”
Yelena slinked her arms into her coat sleeves with a slight shiver, which she realized wasn’t even theatrical. But there was nowhere she’d rather be. How many times, as a young woman, had she come to Vera cold, hungry, impoverished? How many times had Vera subjected her to audiences no less humiliating than this? Grand Inquisitors had treated heretics with more clemency than Vera had treated her closest friend. So yes, Yelena had every right to enjoy this. She would’ve conjured more empathy for Vera’s present difficulties had they not been her own so often in the past.
The furnace glowered at Vera from her late husband’s favorite corner of the living room. Even broken it wasn’t quite as useless as he had been—if nothing else, she could hang wet stockings over it—but for two weeks now, it had produced no more than a stray cat’s body heat.