We pass backhoes, dump trucks, and jackhammers through the metallic dissonance of reconstruction that comes as a welcome song after months of screaming shells. The cranes are the tallest man-made structures I have ever seen in person. I drive to the central square, once the hub of municipal government, now a brown field debossed with earthmover tracks. Nadya once lived just down the road. The oilmen climb out and frown at each other, then at the translator, and then finally at me.
Turning to the northeast, I point at a strip of blue sky wedged between two fat cumuli. “That was Hotel Kavkaz. ABBA stayed two nights. I carried their guitars when I worked there one summer. Next to that, picture an apartment block. Before ninety-one only party members lived there and after ninety-one only criminals. No one moved in or out.”
None of the oilmen smile. The translator leans to me and whispers, “You are aware, of course, that these three gentlemen are esteemed members of the Communist Party of China.”
“It’s okay, I’m a limo driver.”
The translator stares blankly.
“Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber?”
Nothing.
“Jim Carrey. A brilliant actor who embodies the senselessness of our era,” I explain.
The interpreter doesn’t bother translating. I continue to draw a map of the square by narration, but the oilmen can’t see what I see. They see only an empty square demolished by bomb and bulldozer.
“Come, comrades, use your imagination,” I urge, but they return to the Mercedes, and I am talking only to the translator, and then he returns to the Mercedes, and I am talking only to myself.
THREE months earlier, the Interior minister told me his idea. The proposition was ludicrous but I listened with the blank-faced complacency I had perfected throughout my twenty-three years as a public servant.
“The United Nations has named Grozny the most devastated city on earth,” the minister explained between bites of moist trout.
I wasn’t sure of the proper response, so I gave him my lukewarm congratulations.
“Yes, well, always nice to receive recognition, I suppose. But as you might imagine, we have an image problem.”
He loomed over his desk in a high-backed executive chair, while across from him I listened from an odd, leggy stool designed to make its occupant struggle to stay upright before the minister. The minister’s path had first crossed mine fifteen years earlier, when he had sought my advice regarding a recently painted portrait of him and his sons, and I had sought his regarding a dacha near my home village. He’d had two sons then. The first emigrated before the most recent war to attend an American pharmacology school, now worked at a very important drugstore in Muskegon, Michigan. I don’t know what happened to the second, but the lack of ministerial boasting serves as a death knell. The portrait, which still hung on the far wall, depicted the minister and his sons in tall leather boots, baggy trousers, long woolen chokhas, and sheepskin papakhas heroically bestriding the carcass of a slain brown bear that bore a striking resemblance to Yeltsin.
“Foreign investment,” the minister continued. “Most others don’t agree with me, but I believe we need to attract capital unconnected to the Kremlin if we’re to achieve a degree of economic autonomy, and holding the record for the world’s largest ruin isn’t helping. Rosneft wants to sink its fangs into our oil reserves, but the Chinese will cut a better deal. Have you heard of Oleg Voronov? He’s on the Rosneft board, the fourteenth richest man in Russia, and one of the hawks who pushed for the 1994 invasion. The acquisition of Chechen oil is among his top priorities.”
The minister set down his silverware and began sorting through the little trout bones on his plate, reconstructing the skeleton of the fish he had consumed. “If we’re to entice foreign investment, we need to rebrand Chechnya as the Dubai of the Caucasus. That’s where you come in. You’re what, the director of the Museum of Regional Art?”
“Deputy director, sir.”
“That’s right, deputy director. You did fine work sending those paintings to Moscow. A real PR coup. Even British newspapers wrote about the Tretyakov exhibit.”
With a small nod, I accepted the compliment for what was the lowest point of my rut-ridden career. In 1999, Russian rockets had demolished the museum and with my staff I’d saved what I could from the ensuing fires. Soon after, I was ordered to surrender them to the Russians. When I saw that I’d been listed as co-curator of an exhibit of the rescued Chechen paintings at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, I closed my lids and wondered what had happened to all the things my eyes have loved.
The minister tilted the plate over the rubbish bin and the ribs slid from the spine of the skeleton fish. “Nothing suggests stability and peace like a thriving tourism sector,” the minister said. “I think you’d be the perfect candidate to head the project.”
“With respect, sir,” I said. “I did my dissertation on nineteenth-century pastoral landscapes. I’m a scholar. This is all a bit beyond me.”
“I’ll be honest, Ruslan, for this position we need someone with three qualifications. First, he must speak English. Second, he must know enough about the culture and history of the region to show that Chechnya is much more than a recovering war zone, that we possess a rich cultural history unsullied by violence. Third, and most important, he must be that rare government man without links to human rights abuses on either side of the conflict. Do you meet these qualifications?”
“I do, sir,” I said. “But still, I’m entirely unqualified to lead a tourism initiative.”
The minister frowned. He scanned the desk for a napkin before reaching over to wipe his oily fingers on my necktie. “According to your dossier, you’ve worked in hotels.”
“When I was sixteen, I was a bellhop.”
“Well,” the minister beamed. “Then you clearly have experience in the hospitality industry.”
“In the suitcase-carrying industry.”
“Then you accept?”
I said nothing, and as is often the case with men who possess more power than wisdom, he took my silence for affirmation. “Congratulations, Ruslan. You’re head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau.” And so my future was decided, as it often is, entirely without my consent.
Office space was a valuable commodity given how few buildings were still standing, so I worked from my flat. I spent the first morning writing Tourist Bureau on a piece of cardboard. My penmanship had been honed by years of attempting to appear productive at the office. I taped the sign to the front door, but within five minutes it had disappeared. I made a new sign, then another, but the street children who lived on the landing kept stealing them. After the fifth sign, I went to the kitchen and drank the vodka bottle the minister had sent over in celebration until I passed out in tears on the floor. So ended my first day as Tourist Bureau chief.
Over the following weeks, I designed a brochure. The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. From them I learned to be lavishly adjectival, to treat prospective tourists as semiliterate gluttons, and to impute reports of kidnapping, slavery, and terrorism to the slander of foreign provocateurs. Thrilled by my discoveries, I tucked a notebook into my shirt pocket and raced into the street. Upon seeing the empty space where an apartment block once stood, I wrote wide and unobstructed skies! I watched jubilantly as a pack of feral dogs chased a man, and wrote unexpected encounters with natural wildlife! The city bazaar hummed with the sales of looted industrial equipment, humanitarian aid rations, and munitions suited for every occasion: unparalleled shopping opportunities at the Grozny bazaar! Even before I reached the first checkpoint, I had scribbled first-rate security! The copy wrote itself; the real challenge was finding images that substantiated it. After all, the siege had remapped the city. Debris rerouted roads through abandoned warehouses—once I found a traffic jam on a factory floor—and what was not rerouted was razed. A photograph of the pres
ent city would send a cannonball through my verbiage-fortified illusion of a romantic paradise for heterosexual couples. But I couldn’t find suitable photographs of prewar Grozny within the destroyed archives. In the end, I forwent photographs altogether and instead used January, April, and August of the 1984 Grozny Museum of Regional Art calendar for visuals. In the three nineteenth-century landscapes, swallows frolic over ripening grapevines and a shepherd minds his flock beneath a sunset; they portray a land untouched by war or communism and beside them my descriptions of a picturesque Chechnya do not seem entirely inappropriate.
I RETURN home after depositing the troika of Chinese oilmen at the Interior Ministry. The street children vanish from the staircase landing as I approach, but leave behind the instruments of their survival: a metal skewer to roast pigeons, a chisel to chip cement from the loose bricks they sell to construction crews for a ruble each.
I knock on the door of the flat adjacent to mine and announce my name. Nadya appears in a headscarf and sunglasses. Turning her unscarred side toward me, she invites me in. “How was the maiden voyage?”
“An excellent success,” I say. “They dozed off before we reached the worst of the wreckage.”
Nadya smiles as she takes measured steps to the Primus stove. She doesn’t need her white cane to reach the counter. I scan the room for impediments but everything is in order. Nothing on the floorboards but the paths of kopek coins I’d glued down so her bare feet could find their way to the bathroom, the kitchen, the front door in her early months of blindness. At the end of one of these paths is a desk neatly stacked with black-and-white photographs, once the subject of her dissertation on altered images in the Stalinist era. I sift through a few while she puts the kettle on. Nadya has circled a single face in each. The same face, or rather, same person is painted into the background of each photograph, from his childhood to his elderly years, the signature of the anonymous censor.
The kettle whistles in the kitchen. We sip tea from mismatched mugs that lift rings of dust from the tabletop. She sits so I can’t see the left side of her face.
“The tourist brochures will be ready next week,” I say. “I’ll have to send one along to our Beijing comrades, if the paintings come out clearly. I’m skeptical of Ossetian printers.”
“You used three from the Zakharov room?”
“Yes, three Zakharovs.”
Her shadow nods on the wall. The Zakharov room, the museum’s largest gallery, had been her favorite too. The first time I ever saw her was in that room, in 1987, her first day working as the museum’s newly hired restoration artist.
“You’ll have to save me one,” she says. “For when I can see it.”
Her last sentence hangs in the air for a long moment before I respond. “I have an envelope with five thousand rubles. For your trip. I’ll leave it on your nightstand.”
“Ruslan, please.”
“St. Petersburg is a city engineered to steal money from tourists. I know. I’m in the industry.”
“You don’t need to take care of me. I keep telling you,” she says with a firm but appreciative squeeze of my fingers. “I’ve been saving my disability allowance. I have enough for the bus ticket and I’m staying with the cousin of a university classmate.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for movies, for videocassettes,” I say, a beat too quickly. Slapstick and romantic comedies have become my favorite genres in recent years. “Find some that are foreign.”
She’s looking straight at me, or at my voice, momentarily forgetting the thing her face has become. She was with me when rockets turned three floors of art into an inferno she barely escaped. The third-degree burns hardened to a crevassed canvas of scar tissue wrapped over the left side of her skull. She might feel with her fingers what had been her face, but she can’t see it, and in that sense her blindness is a gift the fire gave as it took everything else. Her left eye isn’t there. She could point it at the noon sun and it would remain midnight in that bare socket. But her right side was partly spared. There the scar tissue opens onto valleys of smooth skin. In the heat her right eyelids fused together, sealing her eye from the worst of the flames. In it she can at times sense the flicker of light, the faintest movements. There is the possibility, an ophthalmologist told her, that sight could be restored to her right eye. But any optical surgeon clever enough to perform such a delicate operation was clever enough to have fled Grozny long ago. Nadya hasn’t any appointments, but she’ll try to meet with a half-dozen eye surgeons in Petersburg next week. If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.
“If it happens, the surgery, if it’s successful,” I say. “You don’t need to leave.”
“What I need is sleep.”
When I return to my flat, I scoop the hardened residue of the morning’s kasha onto a slice of round bread. The granules wedge into my molar divots, rough and folically acidic, suggesting the kind of rich, fibrous nutrients that uncoil one’s intestines into a vertical chute. I rinse my hands in the sink and let the water run even after my hands are clean. Indoor plumbing was restored six months ago. Above the doorway hangs a bumper sticker of a fish with WWJCD? inscribed across its body, sent by an American church along with a crate of bibles in response to our plea for life-saving aid.
I take a dozen scorched canvases from the closet and lay them on the floor in two rows of six. They were too damaged for the Tretyakov exhibition. Not one was painted after 1879, and yet they look like the surreal visions of a psychedelic-addled mind. Most are burned through, some no more than mounted ash, more reminiscent of Alberto Burri’s slash-and-burn Tachisme than the Imperial Academy’s classicism. In others the heat-melted oils have turned photo-realistic portraits into dissolved dreamscapes.
My closet holds one last canvas, the Zakharov I rescued. I set it on the coffee table and examine the brushwork by the light of an unshaded lamp. The seamless gradation of color, the nearly invisible brushstrokes; classic Zakharov. Not even the three years I spent writing my dissertation on Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets could diminish my fascination with his work. Born in 1816, during the Caucasian War that Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin would later memorialize in their “Prisoner of the Caucasus” story cycle, he was a war orphan before his fourth birthday. Yet his brilliance so exceeded his circumstances that he went on to attend the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and despite exclusion from scholarship, employment, and patronage due to his ethnicity, he eventually became a court painter and a member of the Academy. Here is a Chechen who learned to succeed by the rules of his conquerors, a man not unlike the Interior minister, to be admired and pitied.
A meadow, an apricot tree, a stone wall in a diagonal meander through the grasses, the pasture cresting into a hill, a boarded well, a house. In 1937, the censor who would become the subject of Nadya’s dissertation painted the figure of the Grozny party boss beside the dacha. For more than fifty years the party boss occupied the bottom left corner of the painting like a mislaid statue of Socialist Realism. Soviet dogma had already pervaded the whole of the present, and here was a reminder that the past was no less revisable, no less susceptible to alteration than an unfinished canvas. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet satellite states began breaking away, when the politicians and security apparatus had more pressing concerns than nineteenth-century landscapes, I asked Nadya to restore the Zakharov. She was well trained, intuitive, a natural restoration artist, and over the course of several weeks, she expunged the party boss from the painting. We didn’t take to the streets; we didn’t overthrow governments or oust leaders; our insurrection was ten centimeters of canvas.
It’s among the least ambitious of all Zakharov’s work. Here is an artist who painted the portraits of Tsar Nicholas I, General Alexei Yermolov, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, and the famed depiction of Imam Shamil’s surrender, and this, in my hands, portrays all the drama
its title suggests: Empty Pasture in Afternoon.
I grew up in the southern highlands, just a few kilometers away from the pasture. Illiterate villagers who knew nothing of art proudly claimed this strip of soil worthy of Zakharov’s paintbrush. Though the land was technically part of a state farm, nothing was ever planted, and flocks were banned from grazing because no one liked the idea of sheep relieving themselves on Zakharov’s pasture. In secondary school, my class took a trip to the Grozny Museum of Regional Art and I finally saw the canvas that existed more vibrantly in village lore that it ever could on a museum wall.
More than anything, it was that painting that led me to study art at university. There I met and married Liana. We lived with my parents in cramped quarters well into our twenties, and found the privacy to speak openly only in deserted public areas: on the roof of the village schoolhouse, in the waiting room of the shuttered village clinic, in Zakharov’s pasture. After I received my doctorate and a position at the museum, we relocated to a Grozny flat, where we learned to talk in bed.
The USSR fell. We had a son. With the assistance of the Interior minister, I purchased the dacha on Zakharov’s pasture amid the frenzied privatization of the post-Soviet, prewar years. When the first war began, I stayed in Grozny and did my best to protect the museum from the alternating advances of foreign soldiers and local insurgents. My wife and son lived in the dacha, far from the war.
In my tourist bureau research, I’ve learned that the first and second Chechen wars have made the republic among the most densely mined regions in human history. The United Nations estimates five hundred thousand mines were planted, roughly one for every two Chechen. I didn’t know that number when I visited the dacha during the first war, taking what provisions I could cull from the ruined capital, a few treats for which I paid dearly, tea leaves for my wife, sheets of fresh drawing paper for my son. But I knew enough to warn them never to venture into the pasture. Until May 1996, they heeded my warnings. I don’t know how it happened, why they walked into the pasture, if they were pursued, if they fled masked men, if the mined field was a sanctuary compared with the depredations of their pursuers, if they were afraid, if they called for help, if they called for me. Those questions have been unanswerable from the moment they swung open the back door, descended the stairs, and ran across that fallow garden. I’d like to believe it was a day so beautiful they couldn’t be kept from the crest of the hill, the open sky, that radiance. I’d like to believe that my wife suggested a picnic on the hill. I’d like to believe that the moment before their last moment was one of whimsy, charm, anything to counter the more probable realities at the edge of my imagination. With terror or joy, with abasement or delight, they remained my wife and child, right to the end—I must remind myself because in the mystery that subsumes those final moments, they are strangers to me. I was in Grozny, at the museum, and never heard the explosion.