The Tsar of Love and Techno

  She told him of her husband, who had died, a heart attack, ten years earlier, just after he’d finished brushing his teeth. He had had broad cheeks and a nose that had healed crookedly after a beekeeper’s escaped colony chased him, face-first, into a concrete wall. He’d thought they were demons. It was the only time in his life he would see a winged insect fly through Kirovsk. She admitted she had wanted to join Lydia in America, but that Gilbert objected. She admitted writing misleading letters to her daughter in an effort to lure her home. The unfairness of growing old, watching her body lose shape like a snowman in the sun, without relatives to blame, or to provide support, or to bear grievance—it just wasn’t right. Now and then, when she thought of her own mother, she felt herself at the edge of a darker injustice, but this she did not confide in Kolya.

  “I’ve heard stories of you as a child,” he said one afternoon.

  “Everyone has stories from childhood,” she said. “You tell me a dozen a day.” The first heavy snow had come late that year, and across the field ice encased the corroded branches of White Forest. Kolya sat at the kitchen table and tapped his cigarette into a plastic ashtray.

  “None of mine made the front page of Pravda.”

  “I don’t want to discuss it,” she said. Kolya went to the living room and flipped the channels of the Japanese television he’d brought over the previous week. Of late, he’d spent more and more time with Vera, refilling the kettle far into the evening and coming for dinner on his days off. The few friendships he had all revolved around alcohol, flatulence, and the gleeful inflicting of violence, so in that sense Vera wasn’t a friend. She was too warm and caring for him to think of her as a maternal figure. She was simply Vera, a vague but benevolent presence whose approval and affection he wanted to receive as much as she wanted to bestow it.

  Vera stood at the stove, frying chicken in a pan still greasy from the morning’s eggs, when the mail arrived. A maze of black cancellation marks caged the price of international postage. The envelope edges were worn, but the seal was unbroken. A dozen years earlier, a letter from America would have never reached her without having been read and noted by invisible men in distant offices.

  “What is it?” Kolya asked, sensing her disquiet. The letter, sent by land, bore no markings of urgency, but it lay on the coffee table like the gravitational center around which the rest of the room slowly spun. The whole universe of Vera’s fear, heartache, and regret was thin enough to fold inside that envelope. With the blunt side of her house key, she opened it and held the letter close to her face. The piano tuner in Glendale had divorced Lydia for a woman in Minsk and Lydia’s petition for conditional residence had been denied. She would be back within the month.

  Before slipping into bed that night, Vera pulled a shoebox from beneath her bed. It held the money Kolya left her each week, the newspaper clippings praising her denunciation, both letters her daughter had sent from America and the ones her mother had sent from her cell. She flipped through the brittle newsprint because even in their celebration of her betrayal, they were a reminder that she had been young and beloved, that she had not spent her entire life old, alone, and ignored. Five decades had whittled her remorse to pieces of manageable neglect—she had been a child, had been manipulated, innocent in any eyes but her own—and as she flipped through the clippings, she couldn’t shake off the disappointment for how ordinary the rest of her life had turned out. She had peaked before her eighth birthday.

  The shoebox lay open on the floor beside her as she repeated her mother’s prayers. She no longer prayed for life-changing miracles (wealth, forgiveness, new knees), and instead pinned her hopes on day-size miracles (an unbroken sleep, a bakery sale, a rash of adolescent acne blooming on Yelena’s cheeks). When she finished, she ran her finger across the broken seal of her daughter’s new letter and placed it in the shoebox along with the others. Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

  LYDIA arrived after five days of travel, flights from Los Angeles to New York to London to Petersburg to Novosibirsk, then north by rail, barge, and bus to Kirovsk. She returned with the same suitcase and pleather handbag she’d left with. She had lost two sweaters, a framed photograph of her parents, all faith in online relationships, regular contact with her friends, and replaced that sum with a thorough knowledge of drive-through menus, a few luggage tags, and a bit of a drinking problem. Her mother met her at the station, a little shorter and wider than Lydia remembered. Snow fell on them.

  Vera hugged Lydia in the blue kiosk light of a vendor selling Sylvester Stallone VHS tapes, Ukrainian cigarettes, Gosloto tickets. A lighter tied by string to the kiosk crossbar swung in the breeze. Even through the padded overcoat, she felt the narrowness of her daughter’s figure.

  “You’re crushing me,” Lydia groaned.

  “I know.”

  The city slid across the soot-mottled bus window. Say what you will about Southern California, but the place had color. Cacti of army-grade green alongside irrigated lawns. The incandescent signage of bodegas and check-cash swindlers. From the air above LAX, bungalow blocks formed interlocking periodic tables of pastels. In New York, she’d said good-bye to green. In London, red. By the time she’d reached Kirovsk, the palette had been scraped of all but the grays and yellows that painted the clouds, streets, snow, and even the vitamin-deficient pallor peeking from her mother’s coat collar.

  Lydia undressed in her bedroom. A knit hat, outlet-mall scarf, and wool mittens. A winter coat with a detachable hood clinging from half of its buttons. A bright pink sweatshirt with the flared image of a screen-printed elm. Her underwear, to Vera’s mind, was far too narrow in back and far too translucent in front. Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn’t look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera’s emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia’s poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “In your suitcase, I imagine,” Vera said.

  “No, the ones I left.”

  Vera had been worried both for this conversation and for the possibility that they would never have to have it. The open closet held nothing but bent wire hangers. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”

  Lydia retrieved the elm tree sweatshirt and skinny jeans from the floor and put them back on with a despondency she knew would wound her mother more than anything she said. She had worn these clothes for five days and some seventeen thousand kilometers, she could wear them a little longer.

  “Brush your hair,” Vera said. “We’re having company after dinner.”

  KOLYA knocked on the front door four times, the first two of which sounded timid and hollow, the kind of knock to announce a bellboy rather than a rising gangster, and so he battered the door twice more for good measure. In his other hand he held a bright bouquet of artificial roses tightly wrapped in green tinfoil.

  After introductions, Kolya presented Lydia with the plastic flowers. He recognized her as one of the six or seven girls who had had an unhealthy fixation on Galina in school. Galina had never really liked them, and the idea of sleeping with one from their ranks felt like the kind of potent but ultimately meaningless act of self-assertion that appealed to him. She wore a sweatshirt, blue jeans, and no makeup. She didn’t even realize this was a date.

  “What are these?” she asked, as if she’d never before seen a rose.

  “They are made of plastic,” Kolya said proudly. “Much safer than real roses. And they will never die.”
>
  Still, Vera put them in a vase with water and set it on the living room coffee table. She told them to sit where they wanted, then made sure Kolya sat next to Lydia. She had high hopes for the night. Sure, Kolya was involved with some unsavory business, but it showed ambition, didn’t it? Besides, Lydia would only benefit from spending time with a young man who was fond of Vera.

  “How do you like being back in Kirovsk?” Kolya asked after they toasted to their health.

  “It’s exactly as I imagined it would be,” Lydia said. She looked to Vera. “You wrote in one of your letters that they were distributing compensation money.”

  Vera nodded. The mail worked one way, at least. She tried to remember what she had written. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been an outright lie, but rather a statement made from the distant borderlands of truth. She had seen some sort of televised documentary program on reparations. Maybe it was about the Great Patriotic War. Maybe Germany was paying Belgium, rather than Russia paying its citizens. Who could even remember now. She shrugged. “From Moscow to Kirovsk is thousands of kilometers,” Vera said. “Every kilometer along the way someone puts their hand into the pot so by the time it gets here: nothing left.”

  Kolya padded his tender neck with a napkin. It looked like he’d shaven with a guillotine. “Speaking of letters, your mother has not received many from you. I told her overseas mail is often lost.”

  “Yes, I wrote every two weeks.”

  “I never doubted that,” Vera said. Let the two believe they had fooled her. Meanwhile she’d fool them into falling in love.

  But as the evening progressed, Lydia grew intoxicated. She had two shots for every one of Kolya’s, and grew angry when Vera tried to take the bottle from her.

  When Kolya was leaving, Lydia stumbled to the door to kiss him good-bye. She spilled her drink on him as she leaned forward. Kolya placed his hands on her shoulders and firmly pushed her away. One look at his face was enough for Vera to know he’d never be her son-in-law, they would never be a family together, and she ached.

  Later, Vera woke to splashing water. In the bathroom, she found her daughter on her knees before the toilet, holding her hair in a loose fist behind her head.

  “You stupid child,” Vera said, dropping to a knee beside her.

  Lydia’s head bobbed over the toilet seat.

  “You stupid child. What have you done?”

  “I don’t know,” Lydia mumbled, letting the fistful of hair go slack. Vera had an urge to shout, but she laid her daughter on the floor and made a pillow from the bath towel. A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera—Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter—but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia’s mother.

  DECEMBER approached, and the days shrank. Each Wednesday, hungover or not, Lydia left the house with her mother when the men arrived. Kolya nodded curtly. This peasant of a man must’ve been too intimidated by her worldliness to speak to her. And those ridiculous plastic flowers—he’d probably never smelled a real one in his life, whereas she’d once lived in a city where roses were so plentiful a stadium was named after them.

  On the day Vera came upon her daughter at the forest edge, Lydia had been thinking of Gilbert’s piano-tuning kit. The brown leather case contained a gooseneck tuning hammer, nickel lever heads, and rubber mutes. Tuning forks that gave warm, round rings when she flicked them. A manual that Gilbert had ceased referring to years earlier, filled with terms like equal temperament, fundamental frequency, and coincident harmonics. When she first arrived at LAX, she wasn’t sure if she should kiss her fiancé or shake his hand. His flesh was the color and texture of an overcooked potato, and he wore Hawaiian shirts to counter the otherwise overpowering blandness that emanated from him. When she joined him on calls to factory-size suburban houses, she read through the manual. She couldn’t find the technical terms in her Russian-English pocket dictionary, and Gilbert had done his best to explain them in simple language. He would have made a better elementary school teacher than a husband. A friend of Gilbert’s found Lydia a job as a minimum-wage caregiver at the Glendale Sunrise Rest Home. She couldn’t understand why so many of its residents viewed nursing homes as elderly storage where sons and daughters imprison parents to recompense unresolved childhood traumas. Compared to elder care in Russia, it was a beacon of warmth and compassion. When she saw her first wheelchair ramp in LAX, she had mistaken it for some kind of weird public sculpture. When she learned what a wheelchair ramp was, when she learned that they were mandated by law, she felt a pure rush of patriotism for a country she’d only been living in for a few hours. Of the century’s magnificent and terrible inventions, what was more humane, more elegant, more generous than the wheelchair ramp? The happiest day of her life was many decades away, she believed: when she was an elderly widow wheeled up the wheelchair ramp of Glendale Sunrise and into their care. She was only twenty years old and she knew where she wanted to die. One Friday afternoon, Gilbert emerged from a rare autumn rain shower, set his tuning kit on the floor, and told her he had met a Belarusian woman online.

  Lydia continued trudging along the edge of the rusted forest. Wolves—or was it the wind?—howled deep among the steel branches. But she’d stopped caring a long while ago. A figure appeared ahead, stenciled against the dim sun. Her mother.

  “December is cold,” Vera said. Her daughter’s presence leeched her powers of observation, and she couldn’t sustain a conversation with Lydia that extended beyond statements of obvious fact.

  Lydia gave an unexpected smile. “You’ve grown wise in your old age.”

  “I’m growing senile.”

  “At the nursing home I worked exclusively with the bewildered and mentally deranged.”

  “How far along am I?”

  “We both crossed that border a ways back.”

  “Will you take care of me when I’m old?” she asked Lydia, more seriously than she’d intended.

  “Mama, you are old.”

  Vera glanced down the field to the small squares of lamplight encased behind the triple-paned glass of her kitchen window. “We can go back soon.”

  “You do know what they’re doing in there, don’t you?”

  Vera looked away. A ballpoint pen was clipped to a folded sheet of paper in her pocket. She had been writing a letter to Lydia as if she still lived in America. In it she had described Kolya, how handsome and polite he was, how he and Lydia would make the most gorgeous couple, the most beautiful grandchildren. How everything in her life was on its way to being made right, and how, at the age of sixty-three, she had never felt more blessed.

  “We have food on the table and money in the jar. Isn’t that enough? Why does it matter where it comes from? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not doing anything at all.”

  “You’re from another world, Mama. Criminals are packaging drugs on our kitchen table and you act like this is something to be proud of.”

  “Be quiet,” Vera commanded. She wouldn’t be lectured on self-respect by a mail-order bride. “You must be quiet.”

  Vera turned toward the house. Lydia fell in line behind her and they hiked the half kilometer in silence. At home, the men packed bundled vials into a duffel bag. Vera looked away.

  “We’re on our way out,” Kolya announced. He didn’t look at Lydia. He no longer stayed after work. The kitchen table had only two chairs.

  The men left. Lydia unfurled her long legs on the divan, kept drinking, then left too. What accounted for her daughter’s unhappiness? Lydia had grown up in the party, had spent her childhood in the placid years of Brezhnev, her adolescence in Gorbachev’s glow. She’d never known hunger. It had been the best upbringing Vera could provide. In a kinder world, her best would’ve been enough.

  Lydia returned a few hours later, so drunk she couldn’t fit the key in the keyhole. She had gone to a party thrown by one of her childhood friends. The girls
, now women, with girls of their own, had gossiped about Galina and the oligarch until Lydia had let slip that Galina’s ex-boyfriend worked at her house. A hush had fallen over the five women. They had cajoled, promised not to tell a soul. They’d never been so interested, so concerned for Vera’s well-being. But by then, Lydia had been too drunk to care. She’d described Kolya, his associates, the drugs, her mother’s complicity. Her friends had given hushed assurances of confidentiality that hadn’t fooled anyone. They’d spent their lives narrating Galina’s story and this tragic coda to the plot line of her first love was the best news they’d heard in ages.

  Vera found her at the door, trying to unlock the mail slot with the house key. She mumbled about peasants, drug criminals, and piano tuners. “Be quiet. You can’t say these things,” Vera warned, but Lydia wasn’t listening.

  THE men didn’t show up the next week. Vera waited an hour before going to see Yelena. At two in the afternoon, the sun had already set.