The Tsar of Love and Techno

  “Let’s take a break,” I said when we reached Ploshchad Lenina.

  “It’s only eleven.”

  “I want some air.”

  Kirill sighed, but agreed. On the escalator he counted the morning’s earnings, pleased with the sum. “You need to keep your money in your front pocket,” he said. “Thieves will be too wary of your stumps to go anywhere near them.”

  “You keep saying ‘you,’ ” I whispered. It was a quiet realization.

  “I’m talking to you. How else should I address you?”

  “You keep giving me instructions. Like you’re training me. ‘You need to do this, you need to do that to be a good beggar.’ ”

  “I’m speaking in generalizations,” he began, but I’d already stopped listening. The whole summer long I hadn’t realized it. I wasn’t Kirill’s assistant. I was his apprentice.

  I can’t remember the faces of bystanders, what was shouted by whom when I let the collapsed wheelchair crash down the escalator, what Kirill said, or if he said anything at all. I remember grabbing Kirill’s pressed blue collar and pushing him against the slow slide of the escalator wall. If he wanted, he could’ve stopped me. Those arms of his walked three kilometers of train cars every day and still had enough oomph left to lift weights by night. But he didn’t resist, didn’t fight, surrendered before I threw that first punch, and when I had him by the neck, when his hat toppled and the escalator wall unmade his impeccable part, I swear a grin crossed his lips, and beneath his knotted brows his face held no fear. He had bet with his dead-eyed doubt that I was too craven to commit even this act of cowardice. I punched him once to prove that I could, and then kept punching him because I was too afraid to stop. My knuckles were four burst berries by the time I grabbed his greased hair and slammed his face into the escalator step. Finally, Kirill went limp. I reached into his front pocket, palmed the bills and loose change, and sprinted up the remaining steps. From a half block away, I saw the escalator deposit Kirill at street level. He lay lifelessly while the ascending steps snapped against his stumps. Hurried commuters stepped over him.

  The realization of what I’d done cannonballed into my guts. I killed a man. And not just any man, but a crippled war hero. I’d never go to Chechnya because I’d spend the rest of my life locked up. I was on my knees, dry-heaving, when I heard his shouts.

  He was still sloped across the escalator exit. His nose pointed the wrong way around, his face throbbed with blood, he spread his arms, he closed his fists. “I am alive!” he screamed. “I am alive! I will not die!”

  I fled to a shooting gallery in an outer suburb where I rented a needle for two rubles a blast. Even in a narcotic slumber, I couldn’t escape Kirill’s proclamation of immortality.

  KRESTY Prison was originally the imperial wine warehouse and stored enough booze to keep the royal family and their courtiers pickled through the long winters. After the emancipation of the serfs, when the state assumed from landlords the responsibility of locking up the newly freed, Kresty became a jail. For a century, according to my Russian civ teacher, it was the largest in Europe. After the Revolution, it’s where NKVD men beat confessions from communists and traitors. After the Collapse, it’s where drug offenders awaited trial. It was only designed to hold around a thousand inmates, but when my father went through the Komsomola Street gate, its population was ten times that.

  I visited him just once, bribing a guard with a few hundred rubles I had lifted from my mom. Later, when I recounted the story to my friends, I made it sound like the prison scene in Goodfellas, my father the capo of the entire place, no worry greater than the tomato sauce recipe. But the only garlic wafting down those halls came on the guard’s breath. I followed that guard’s clicking footsteps down a long corridor into the cell blocks. Men with twigs for arms and caverns for eyes leaned against the bars. The cell my father shared with nineteen others had originally been designed for solitary confinement. It had rained earlier that morning.

  The air around my father tasted of sweat, ammonia, and chlorine. He looked like a man born on a planet without vegetables or direct sunlight. “You got a smoke?” he asked me. I was nine years old.

  He was released four years later. My mother had died just before his first parole hearing and state orphanages were more overcrowded than Kresty. But the parole judge was disconcertingly law-abiding and humane, perhaps the only judge in the entire Justice Ministry whose heart hadn’t been surgically removed and replaced with a charcoal briquette. He let my father off, having served only a third of his sentence. After his release he went civilian. Working as a gypsy cab driver, he stopped for every yellow light. I’d like to believe he began living honestly for my sake, but it was for his own. He feared Kresty more than the disappointments of a lawful life.

  A few months after his release, I got my ass beat by a couple older kids. I came home with black eyes and a gashed-up forehead. My father looked me over.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked.

  “It was—” I began, but his hand shot out before I could finish, and he stabbed his finger into the cut on my forehead.

  “My son, a snitch?” he asked.

  I began to scream, but he clamped his palm over my mouth and watched me with these hollowed, betrayed eyes.

  “All these photos of myself on the walls, you think I’m some sort of narcissist, I know,” he said. I’d fallen back against the kitchen table. The cut on my temple wasn’t deep, but my skull felt impaled on his pressing finger.

  “I can’t remember my father’s face because my uncle made my mother scratch it from every photo with a coin.”

  I thrashed my legs. I slapped my hands across the tabletop for a knife to slice him, a fork to skewer him. My lips squashed in his grip. His finger hadn’t left the open cut.

  “A few years later, I asked my mother what had happened to my father, and she said that man who had come to our flat, who had told me this lovely fairy tale about a tsar and his court painters, that man, my uncle, had been involved. Maybe he informed on my father, she didn’t know, but she knew he wouldn’t have come to our flat to warn us if he hadn’t been guilty of something. The next day in school I went to my teacher and made up a story that my uncle was a subversive, that I had seen him conducting business with foreigners. I wanted revenge. Somebody had to pay. I didn’t know the man I snitched on. I’d only met him for a few minutes one early morning.”

  His face was broken with tenderness.

  “You can hate me, so long as you don’t become me. Do you understand?”

  I could barely breathe.

  “I’m trying to teach you to be a better man.”

  He let me go. He wiped the blood from my face with his shirtsleeves. He didn’t wipe his cheeks. He opened the window, picked three icicles, and broke them with the back of a butcher’s knife. He slid them into a plastic shopping bag and pressed it to my face. I shook as he washed the dirt from my bruises. “Be brave,” he demanded, holding my mangled face in his palms. He gave me a tall glass of vodka before going back in with the washcloth. “A man who walks with fear only crawls. He deserves all the suffering of the world.”

  “I won’t deserve it,” I promised. Even though my face was pasted in mucus and tears, my father beamed at me with pride.

  I LOST two nights, my virginity, and all of Kirill’s money. In my head an industrious blacksmith pounded away. In my stomach hurricanes brewed. Somewhere a diva belted. Couldn’t tell her vibrato from the hum in my veins. In the corner a shadeless lamp was connected to an outlet in the next building over by an extension cord laundry-lined across the alley. From nowhere came a man with crutches. He feet were the size and shade of black bread loaves. No human shoes would ever fit them. He pulled a bag of white powder from his pocket, scattered it on a cooking sheet, and mixed in a different white powder with a razor. In the corner a boy drew ferocious breasts on the wall. The man asked him for a marker and started drawing on my arms. He kept telling me the Latin names for veins and arteries, u
nreal the study he’d put into the science of self-destruction. The next morning I woke next to a woman with spiderwebs of gray hair. She had deeply burrowed brown eyes that barely reflected light. “First morning you’re a man,” she said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Three hundred rubles,” she said. Then I understood. “You want a toothbrush?” she asked. I told her I didn’t need one, and she said, “But you do, young man. You need to keep those teeth clean. With a healthy set of teeth there’s no telling what you’ll make of yourself.” I bought the toothbrush and shot up again, piercing the little red boat someone had drawn on a blue tributary of vein. I couldn’t make sense of my fingers. What lunatic god would trust me with so many of them? White paint chips shook from the ceiling. I waited for it all to collapse. How many years would I get for nearly killing Kirill, and would they be any worse than serving in Chechnya?

  When I returned home, I expected police cars, but nothing waited for me but the same rusted bike frames locked to a lamppost and stripped of their hardware. The same dust lay on the same stairs and I climbed to the top floor. Not to apologize, I just didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t see my father.

  Kirill’s door was unlocked. He sat in the wheelchair, an ice pack pressed to his cheek, the pistol on the table beside him. His face made his stumps look like the least of his mutilations. He didn’t grab for the phone or call for help. Just reached for the gun and set it between his duct-taped thighs.

  He looked at me with the expression I reserved for people like him.

  “You need to go downstairs,” he calmly said.

  “Am I going to jail? Have you told the police?”

  He was offended by the questions and answered simply, “I was a junior sergeant.”

  His chin dipped in and out of a shadow. His remaining teeth were spare pins in the bowling lane of his mouth. He wasn’t at all afraid of me. I hated him for it.

  “Go downstairs, Seryozha. You aren’t going to prison.”

  But I stepped forward. Raised my hands. One step became a second and a third. One click released the safety, a second cocked the hammer. He held the gun between his stumps. My knee was two meters from the barrel when he realized what I was asking. He nodded with a slow ache of understanding and it was all I could do not to weep with relief. I began to thank him but the gunshot swallowed my gratitude. The floor fell from under me. The bullet passed through my knee. I don’t know how long I lay there before I crawled to him, and he lifted me into his arms, and whispered, “You are alive. You are alive. You are alive.”

  A Temporary Exhibition

  ST. PETERSBURG, 2011–2013

  Vladimir

  “Hello, is this Mrs. Jonanne McGlinchy of 1898 Calvert Road, Ohio? Yes, and your birthday is October 12, 1942? My name is John Smith from IRS. Yes, madam. To my displeasure, your taxes will to be audited unless you provide certain informations. First, you must tell to me your Social Security and bank account numbers. Also, your mother’s maiden name. To verify your identity, yes. At IRS, we take the identity theft most seriously.”

  Look at him go! An incredible thing, really. To sit in the gloom of the Chernyshevskaya Cybercafé and watch his boy work. Some kind of prodigy, Vladimir’s boy. In the case of nature versus nurture, Vladimir threw his support behind the plaintiff. The stuff of eugenicists’ dreams runs through Sergei’s veins.

  Don’t get cocky, Vladimir. Fatherhood points aren’t doled for time served. Should look up at the library the fathers of other wunderkinds: Mozart, Pushkin, et cetera. They too absent in children’s formative years? Father’s absence forces child to grow up sooner, accelerating child’s emotional, creative, artistic maturity?

  “Ha! Very witty,” Sergei continued, two chairs down, broadcasting broken English into a wiry headset, the café bustle tuned out. “I assure you, KGB and IRS do not have exchange program.”

  Too much life in his voice to pull off convincing bureaucratese. Too much love in his labor. Only trust a government worker whose personality is as thin and stamped upon as a time card. But who’s Vladimir to question the maestro?

  “Take your time, Mrs. McGlinchy,” Sergei said. “Pocketbooks can be most difficult to find.”

  Vladimir had missed graduation ceremonies and chess tournaments on account of incarceration. He had never seen his son perform for him. Had this beaming pride been building in him all along, concentrating in his system like a magnificent mercury poisoning?

  Mustn’t let Sergei forget these last few years when he’s fabulously wealthy. Mustn’t let him forget that first day home from the hospital. White plaster and bandages had braced Sergei’s leg. Poor kid had looked at the knee-high bathtub lip as if it were Everest. “I don’t want to take a shower. I’m not dirty,” he had said.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Vladimir had said, but it wasn’t okay. Not at all. He’d never given his son a bath before. Where to begin? Take off Sergei’s socks? His shirt? Run the water first? Does he get in with Sergei? Does he look away?

  “I don’t want to. I’m not dirty.”

  One whiff would wake a coma patient.

  Vladimir had swaddled the bandaged leg in plastic bags and rubber bands. Set a stool in the tub. Changed into his bathing suit. He had lifted his son into the tub and set him on the stool. Spat out the rusty aftertaste of shower hose water. Too hot. Lathered up his son’s hair and shoulders. Too cold. The armpit, the hip bone, the belly button. Strange parts he’d last seen unclothed when his son was still too young to spell his own name. This grown man still fit in his father’s arms. Just right.

  “Are you okay?” Vladimir had asked.

  Sergei had replied in a garbled sob, the compact heat of his breath like a hand dryer on Vladimir’s skin. If you could trade, but you couldn’t. If there was a way to make it okay, but there wasn’t. If you can, but you can’t. Why are children doomed to remain beautiful to their parents, even when they become so ugly to themselves?

  “It’s not fair,” his son had said.

  “It isn’t,” Vladimir had agreed.

  He had gone on soaping Sergei’s fingers and underarms. Who can you be but the chest your child shouts into. The shoulder he balances on. The hands washing him clean. The shower drizzled steamy gray stripes. A towel lolled on the closed bathroom door. There was so much Vladimir wanted to make right.

  Six months later, he had signed Sergei up for language classes taught by an Australian man with English teeth. Al Pacino quotes and Tupac lyrics qualified as rudimentary English and Sergei placed out of the intro course. Within two years, he spoke well enough to take Business English I and II, which used Donald Trump’s autobiography for a textbook. In such richly manured soil, a seed hardly needs sunlight to grow.

  “Very good, Mrs. McGlinchy. Last four digits are two nine two one? I will correct the error into the system and we will avert the audit. Indeed, I am originally coming from Russia. Now a resident of Florida. Drinking the orange juice and sitting on the beach most often.”

  The world’s greatest bullshit harvester ties himself to the crop’s most insatiable market with no more than a phone line. If this is capitalism, no small wonder communism failed.

  Sergei wished Mrs. McGlinchy a fine day and rang off. “Well, what did you think?”

  What did Vladimir think? His son was slaying giants, that’s what he thought. “I don’t know what you said, but you said it wonderfully.”

  Sergei gave a bashful smile.

  Vladimir wanted to pull his boy into his arms and say, Do you see? I told you you’d have a happy life. Now do you see?

  Instead, he asked, “Why do these foolish Americans believe you?”

  “When I first started, they didn’t,” Sergei admitted. “I was calling numbers at random from online telephone directories, saying to them, ‘Hello, you have won the sweepstakes, please give me your bank account number.’ ”

  “And no one believed you?”

  Sergei shook his head. “Took a long time to understand the American mind-se
t. The fear of their cruel and capricious government weighs heavily on their psyches. They’re more inclined to believe they’ll lose what they have than receive what they want.

  “Better to be the tax man than the sweepstakes, I decided,” Sergei went on. “But it wasn’t good enough. Too many skeptics, still. Then I remembered something you told me.”

  Vladimir leaned in.

  “About the list that you and your mother were on. Because your dad was an enemy of the people. I figured that somewhere online, there must be a list of Americans who will believe anything, no matter how implausible or insulting to their intelligence.”

  “Is there such a list?”

  Sergei spun white froth in his glass. “Tom Hanks’s Facebook fan page.”

  Vladimir had no idea what his son was talking about.

  “You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook. And Forrest Gump, you must have seen Forrest Gump.”

  “It is a nature film?”

  “No, no. Classic cinema. About how every achievement in American society over the last fifty years was really just the dumb luck of a mentally challenged man.”

  “This was a Soviet propaganda film?”

  “No, it’s a big Hollywood movie. They play it for children in history class there.” Sergei took a final sudsy sip of his Baltika 7. “So I cross-reference the names and birthdays pulled from Tom Hanks’s Facebook fans with WhitePages. Why, you might ask, would they put their birthday right there on the Internet when it’s one of the three pieces of information necessary to steal their identity? So that strangers will wish them a happy birthday! It’s incredible, I know. When I called up Mrs. McGlinchy, I had her name, address, and birthday, told her I was from the IRS, and asked that she provide the necessary information to prove her identity. The trick is to make the American feel he must convince you of his identity, rather than the other way around. Tom Hanks’s fans are maybe ten times more likely to fall for this than the average American.”