The Tsar of Love and Techno

  “You know it’s been hard recently,” Vera began. She steepled her fingers to catch and shelter some vestige of fleeing dignity. “If prices keep going up at this rate they’ll look like postal codes soon. What once bought bread for a month, now buys half a loaf. My pension stays the same and even that they don’t bother paying half the time.”

  “The economic shock treatment has hurt the weakest members of society,” Yelena pointed out. “Not just you. Also the enfeebled and alcoholic.”

  The shadow of her collected Gorky was dust-etched into the empty bookshelf. The leather-bound set had gone for less than the kettle. “Please, Yelena. Can your son help me?”

  “Pavel?” She only had one son. “I wouldn’t want to bother him with something like this. You know how busy he gets.”

  They both knew that in the end she would help Vera. In the end, they always helped each other. Yelena relented. “I’m going to Pavel’s for dinner this Sunday. If the subject comes up, I’ll ask if he has work.”

  “Thank you.” Vera said it as nicely as she could, but the cold condensed her gratitude into a curse. After Yelena left, she washed up. She’d been born in this house sixty-three years earlier and intended to die here: It was one of her few life goals that she still had time to achieve. There was coherence in exiting by the same door through which you entered, bookending with order this senselessly churning existence.

  In bed, she prayed for that mercy. One night as a girl, huddled in that same bed with her parents for warmth, she’d seen them bow their heads and speak a formal language whose wide vowels yawned with wanting. They had thought she was asleep. A half-century had passed—and with it the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism, the infallible tenets of communism that had undergirded her faith—and now she found herself the citizen of a nation politically enfeebled and spiritually desolated enough to permit prayer to an authority more omnipotent than its government. But how do you trade your gods so late in life? Six decades of Soviet-speak had left her vocabulary crowded with slogans. She had little practice articulating the complexities of individual desire.

  Now Vera closed her eyes and imagined the sound of wolves carrying her to sleep. Before there had been a gulag, a mine, a city, there had been wolves. An early scientific expedition had reported multiple encounters with a roving pack that had never before encountered prey as portly and pusillanimous as academics. Ten of the thirty-two geologists who had discovered the first nickel vein had been killed by wolves in 1928. In the late 1930s, when engineers had hastily assembled a gulag around the nickel mine, the Red Army had hunted the wolves nearly to extinction. It became well established in university biology departments that wolves were the capitalist imperialists of the animal kingdom, and so the army went to great lengths to be rid of them. But the wolves had returned during the Great Patriotic War, when all Red Army units had been sent southwest to face encroaching panzer divisions. Wages had been paid in hunks of bread measured to the grain and gram. Vera had watched her parents and neighbors scavenge to survive. After the war, people had resumed killing wolves and Kirovsk had returned to silence.

  Now, curled beneath heavy blankets, Vera remembered when the howling of wolves had signaled a coming hunger.

  THE year of the German invasion had been the high point of Vera’s life. That year she was extolled in schools, newspapers, and radio broadcasts from Minsk to Vladivostok. In the official version, Vera had witnessed her mother break into the commissariat canteen, pledge loyalty to Trotsky, and abscond with a hundred kilos of flour and a dozen live chickens stuffed in a sack. Pravda praised Vera for immediately reporting her mother’s treason to a commissar. “My mother is an enemy of the state and an enemy of the people,” she said, to which the commissar replied, “Though the state and the people are one and the same, you are the hero of both.”

  In reality, the hoard was no more than a pouch of powdered eggs, a palmful of flour, and a cube of butter. The collaboration was not with the fascist enemy, but with Vera herself, who had dwindled to a bony thing made of stool legs and billiard cues. Despite swearing secrecy, Vera had boasted to Yelena about the small pie her mother had baked for Vera’s birthday. There had been no sugar in it, but nothing in her young life had ever tasted sweeter. Yelena had whispered it to another girl and soon the story had swept through the class, then the school, then the city, a rumor that grew more virulent with each host it infected. Kirovsk had only one mailbox for postal mail, but several hundred mailboxes for denunciations. To send a letter, you’d have to walk to the central post office and wait in line for the better part of a morning; to send a denunciation, you wouldn’t need to leave your factory, school, or apartment block.

  By the time the tale had reached the town commissar, it seemed perfectly plausible for a starving woman to carry off a hundred kilos of flour and a dozen live chickens that never existed, all while reciting Trotsky speeches verbatim. The commissar, of course, knew such a story was sheer lunacy, but he’d ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.

  “You really believe I used a hundred kilos of flour for a single pie?” Vera’s mother asked in her defense at the trial.

  “Profligacy,” the commissar replied, “is characteristic of the fascist.” Five years later, when the commissar was stripped of his rank and sentenced to the mines, he learned for himself that a malnourished body is incapable of carrying a hundred kilograms of anything, including the nourishment it needs. A certain amount of flour had in fact gone missing from the gulag reserves over the course of several months; had Vera investigated the town archives during glasnost, she would have learned that it had all gone to the commissar’s wife. The archives give no evidence of chickens, alive or dead, in Kirovsk in the summer of 1941.

  Vera’s mother sent letters from her cell that eventually became a history classroom where the curiosity and childish wonder of several generations of Kirovsk schoolchildren would asphyxiate in the leaden air. The letters, which went by way of the commissar’s office, took more than a week to cross the three hundred meters to Vera’s home. Each was folded into a triangle and let in the cold air as it fell through the mail slot. A censor’s marker striped her mother’s crimped handwriting. Piecing together meaning from the few uncensored words became an exacting lesson in how little she knew her mother.

  On October 21, 1941, soldiers young enough to still check their cheeks each morning for pimples marched her mother into the wilderness, where she received her sentence from the barrel of a gun.

  Vera’s father, a prison guard demoted to custodian after his wife’s arrest, led Vera into what would become White Forest. He wasn’t a cruel or vindictive man—he would later be eulogized by former inmates as a prison guard whose kindnesses had saved dozens of lives—but he felt he had the responsibility as a father and bereaved widower to show Vera the repercussions of her careless words. They wandered for two hours without speaking. He’d nearly given up, nearly turned for home, when his hands dropped to his sides. There she was, his wife, his dear. Cigarette ends lay among snowy paw prints. Wolves had already found the body. Vera hid before the scene in a bony crouch as her father buried the remains. When he finished, he collected the cigarette ends. Those ends would haunt him more forcefully than the bits of viscera he had gathered from as far as fifty meters from the execution site and buried in an unmarked grave. He would never smoke again.

  The mail slot clattered a week later and Vera found a letter. For a brief, spectacular moment, she was able to believe that her mother was still in jail, that the sentence hadn’t been carried out yet, that the corpse ringed by paw prints belonged to someone else’s mother. The letter was dated ten days prior. In it, her mother wrote: I have been given—years without—to correspondence˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗the last˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗receive˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗. Ten years˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗and when˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗you will—old, a woman˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗children a
nd˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗˗.

  Various journalists approached Vera over the years and she parroted lines about duty, sacrifice, and patriotism. She accepted honors from the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol, the electricians’ and ironworkers’ trade union, despising all, refusing none. “The world will give you pig shit,” her mother had once told her. “The secret to a happy life is learning to accept it as pork sausage.” On account of her heroism in defense of the people, Vera was upgraded to a commissar’s rations and her father was reinstated to his former position. She didn’t have to worry about hunger for many years.

  YELENA’S son found work for Vera. Once a week Pavel’s men arrived with two duffel bags and Vera left for the day. That was it, just leave for the day and don’t ask questions. She’d expected jewel-festooned thugs, but Pavel’s wiry underlings looked like boys adrift in the seas of their fathers’ rumpled shirts. Between them they had a combined spoken vocabulary of perhaps two dozen non-scatological words. Vera used the time for errands: the town pharmacy for arthritis medicine, the post office to send letters to her daughter in America, the Leninsky Prospekt kiosk for chocolate bars so aerated they could be used as packing material. As winter neared, she felt herself drawn across the meadow stretching from her house to White Forest.

  Sheaves of plastic foliage drooped from metal branches, giving the impression that, despite the chill, she stood at the threshold of a melting realm. She followed the tree line for a kilometer. When her knees ached, she spread a shawl on the ground and sat to draft a letter to Lydia. She spoke the sentences aloud to see in her frozen breath their dissipating shapes. If each was perfect she could live in her daughter’s imagination more prosperously than she ever could in the new Russia. There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion. To that end, she invented stories, built town rumors into fortresses of truth. She wrote that her pension increased each month to keep pace with the hyperinflation, leaving enough in her budget to afford a Korean television. She wrote of compensation, reparations to the victims of state-sponsored terror, that she would finally be compensated for the loss she had, however inadvertently, inflicted upon herself. Justice would prevail in the fertile fantasyland of her Americanized daughter’s mind. Daylight had flattened into burgundies across the horizon.

  White flour packed the nicks and divots of the kitchen table where the envelope of money lay waiting for Vera when she returned. Pavel’s men must be bakers, making good use of her spacious kitchen. A few days later she found powdered infant formula and quinine beneath the sink. Yes, she had an idea of what went on in her absence, but better to not think about those things. One evening she returned to find a man still sitting at the table.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, rankled by having to apologize for entering her own home unannounced. “Am I early?”

  “No, I’ll be going,” the man replied. A boy, really, though these days anyone who hadn’t lived through Stalin was a child to her. Early twenties, the same age as her daughter, the thin gray work shirt and unevenly barbered hair of someone recently released from a grim state institution. The musk of extinguished cigarettes percolated in the heavy air. He sat in a weary slump.

  “Stay for a cup of tea,” Vera suggested. He looked as surprised to receive the invitation as she felt offering it. Associating with characters of ill repute, at her age! But there was a forlornness about the young man she recognized, a heavy-lidded exhaustion to his expression mirrored in her own.

  “I should go.” He stood, stretched his limber arms.

  “Stay. Have some tea. I have cake.”

  The man glanced to the front door as if hoping a momentary variance in air pressure might suck him out into the night, then sat down. He’d never know why this woman with eyes too wide for her head and pens sticking from her pockets had shown him insistent, if self-serving, kindness that cool autumn evening. And Vera would never know that eleven hours earlier, the man had watched Deceit Web for the one hundred and fifty-eighth time. He’d long ago memorized the dialogue and camera cuts, could replicate the film beat by beat in his mind, was less an audience than a second screen for the film to keep on playing after the final credits rolled. He missed his brother more than he’d ever thought he could miss someone he hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids with. He’d bribed a university official, secured his brother a seat at Saint Petersburg State University, saved him from mandatory military service and the unrest in Chechnya. But as he’d waded through snow soup that morning, he had considered his brother, parents, ex-fiancée. Each had taken different exits from his life for which he couldn’t reasonably be blamed. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he was the architect of a city made entirely of off-ramps, all leading away from him.

  Vera climbed the stool her father had climbed, and had then stepped from, some thirty-seven years earlier, with a noose around his neck. She rooted through the cupboard, a largely symbolic performance since the cake sat in plain view on the otherwise empty shelf, but she wanted the man to think her pantry was so prosperous a cake could get lost in it. The cake was a thin pedestal on which a monument of pink-striped chocolate frosting towered.

  She cut two slices with a spoon. He accepted the pink parade warily.

  “Good, isn’t it? Would you like some more?” She still took orders from the sweet tooth—an actual tooth, she imagined, her right canine, the only one of her thirty-two natural teeth without a cavity—she’d developed even before she was upgraded to a commissar’s rations.

  He thanked her as she plopped another massive wedge on his plate. She wanted to ask his name. To have a man for tea and cake without knowing his name was indecorous. Then again, so was renting her house to drug dealers, but she had long ago learned to ignore her largest moral failures by attending to the smallest social proprieties.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “No.”

  “Pets?”

  “A brother.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “His story, well, it’s all beginnings,” the man said, glancing down. “Still finding his way. Do you have pets?”

  “I have a daughter. She lives in America. Married to a man named Gilbert. He is Glendale, California’s preeminent pi-an—” and here, after the second syllable, the word would normally veer away from reality, but talking to a petty criminal, she felt liberated from the need to lie “—piano tuner.”

  The man whistled enviously—and the envy of others was the closest she came to feeling proud of Lydia. When asked about her daughter, Vera added rooms to Gilbert’s modest condo, added zeros to his salary. She recounted her daughter’s life in America just as she wrote of her own in the carefully constructed letters she mailed each month at the city post office—with aggrandized half-truths, little lies that had grown beyond her control. But she didn’t fear the judgment of this man sitting before her, licking pink frosting from the back of his spoon.

  “She was a mail-order bride,” Vera said.

  “In a catalog?”

  “A catalog. Several websites. She had to pose for pictures in a bikini. A shameful thing.”

  “Does she eat cheeseburgers and watch basketball?”

  “I don’t know,” Vera admitted. Lonely American men reading Lydia’s marriage website profile had had greater access to her daughter’s inner life. “She’s not particularly forthcoming with me. She’s sent six letters in the last year. Mainly to tell me about the weather. Do you know how many types of clouds there are in Glendale? Three. She’s described them all.”

  “America’s far away and the only mailman I’ve ever known would need a map to find his own feet. Many letters must get lost along the way.”

  “I’ve told myself that.”

  “Tell me about this husband. What sort of man is he?”

  Vera shook her head. “What sort of man finds his wife in an Internet catalog and still calls himself a man?”

  “A trailblazer. In a few years, we’ll all be embarrassing ourselves on th
e Internet.”

  “You must be around her age. Did you know her?”

  “In passing,” the man admitted. “I dated one of her friends. Galina Ivanova.”

  Vera had, like everyone, watched Galina’s ascent into stardom. She might’ve been the only soul in Kirovsk to pity Galina’s good fortune. “And do you have a wife?”

  “Only a brother.”

  When the man left the house that evening, he lit a cigarette. He’d wanted one for hours. A few days earlier he’d beaten the gold teeth from an unlucky but persistent gambler who possessed no other form of payment, yet he found himself too sheepish to ask Vera for an ashtray. Snowdrifts darkened in the shadows. The end of his cigarette was the closest thing to a working streetlamp for eight blocks. Behind Vera’s house, White Forest loomed. A decade had passed since he’d last walked through it. He’d been a child then, but when he’d shielded his brother’s eyes from the execution they had stumbled upon, he’d felt like a father for the first but not the final time in his brief life. His name was Kolya and not long ago he’d returned from Chechnya. In less than a year, he would be back there, where he would spend his final moments planting dill seeds on a mined hill.

  EACH week Kolya slunk into Vera’s house as wordless and grim-faced as his associates. But when she returned eight hours later, she found her new kettle humming with steam, two teacups on the kitchen table, Kolya singing quietly to himself as he cut thick cake slices at the counter. He told her about his brother, the games they had played, rooftop leaps into snowdrifts, the outer-space museum their father had run, which Vera admitted she’d visited several times over the years. He described the heroin trade like a market analyst, cloaking the brutal business in the hazy virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. The cultivation of poppy fields in Afghanistan, the refinement into opium and overland transport through Tajikistan, the whole greased chute of corruption on which heroin simply slid northward, from Kandahar to the Arctic. The Ecuadorian birds Yelena’s son collected in his private aviary. The money paid for police protection. When Vera asked, cautiously, why such a big-brained and convivial young person had gotten into this business, he smiled, and said he could ask the same of her. Regardless of what penthouse politicians might say, there was nothing reckless in his logic: Schools had only taught him how to cheat; the military had trained him in ballistics, subordination, and intimidation; he had returned to a mining town where the jobs had become automated and the narcotics business was the only prosperous industry that would benefit from his skill set. For someone in his boots, the drug trade was the only path for economic advancement. She asked if there was a woman in his life since Galina, and he said no, not to speak of, then looked away.