Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

i am here , the seminarian taps back.

Every inch of my body aches. My knuckles feel like my only unbroken bones. I bring them to the wall and tap, i have a confession to make.

i am listening , the seminarian replies.

For a moment I feel as if I’ve fallen into the dream, the dark tunnel wrapped around me, my brush raised to the wall. But the brush is only my curled finger, tapping coded messages on a cell wall meant for someone far away.

if you get out, you must pass it on to my brother’s son , I tap.

what is his name?

vladimir vasilyevich markin.

what is your confession? he asks.

his father’s face , I tap. you must tell him where he can see what his father looked like.

where?

in the work i have censored. in the background. behind stalin and lenin. behind their heads where their eyes can’t find him.

WHEN the guards come, I stand quietly and without protest. They return my shoelaces and share a cigarette while I lace my shoes.

“Can I sew my shirt buttons back on?” I ask.

“A comedian,” one of the guards comments. “He’s the leopard guy?”

A second guard says yes.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask.

“The NKVD agent, of course,” the first guard answers. “Your Polish teacher.”

“They liquidated all the leopards at the zoo,” the second guard says. “To send a message.”

“A shame what we do to animals,” the first guard replies.

I am on my knees. I cannot stand. They will have to carry me from here. I hear something from the wall. The seminarian is a madman, why else risk tapping to me with two guards in the cell? First the faint rap of knuckles on the wall, then a pounded fist, then stomped feet. It gives me the strength to stand. The guards take me from the room, but it only grows louder, and they pretend to ignore it, but the floor and walls and ceiling are shuddering, every bar and bone in the prison resounds with the code I first sent him, the code Vaska and I would tap to each other before climbing into bed and going to sleep.

They lead me into the darkness where I take my first breath of cold air. I remember Vaska racing toward the leopard cage. I chased after him, but he was always faster than me. Even now, I don’t know what that leopard was beyond an indefinable, nameless mystery.

They will put me in a car, take me to the edge of a pit not unlike those into which the disgraced dancer and Vaska fell, and with a bullet through my brain stem, I will also fall. Consider the disgraced dancer. Consider those who informed on her, those who relayed the information, those who approved the action, those who knocked on her door in the middle of the night, those who arrested her, those who photographed her, those who took her fingerprints, those who pulled out her shoelaces, those who interrogated her, those who beat her, those who engineered her confession, those who tried, judged, and condemned her, those who led her to the car, to the basement, to the pit, those who dug her grave, put a bullet in her head, buried her. And the countless others, like me, who destroyed her birth certificate and diploma, the newspaper clippings and photographs, the school and internal passport and ration voucher records, the near-endless documentation that proves she had lived. It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual — if that is what memory is now called — to preserve her.

And if that is true, perhaps someday, far from now, Vaska will be discovered. Perhaps the seminarian in the other cell is the error that preserves us both.

“A small favor,” I say. “Please. Give me the mercy of a single question.”

The guard sighs. “Yes?”

“The man in the cell next to mine, what was his name?”

“What man?” the guard asks, confused.

“The man in the cell next to mine. The seminarian.”

He pats my shoulder with what feels like genuine pity. “There was no cell next to yours.”

“Yes, there was. There was a man in it. I heard him. Please, just tell me his name.”

The guard shakes his head. “There’s only one solitary cell on the cellar floor and only you in it.”

The car idles at the end of the walkway. The door opens and the guard pushes me in. We drive. Ahead, a light glows through the shadows. For a moment, it’s the train approaching. I turn in my seat, hoping to glimpse something I have created before the end. The light expands as we near, as if we are entering. It rises in the windshield, disappears over the roof, fades behind us. It isn’t the approaching train, but a streetlamp. The rest of the road is dark.

KIROVSK, 1937–2013

Best to begin with the grandmothers. Galina’s was the labor camp luminary, while ours were the audience. Ours had been bakers, typists, nurses, and laborers before the secret police knocked on their doors in the middle of the night. It must be an error, they thought, a bureaucratic oversight. How could Soviet jurisprudence remain infallible if it failed to recognize innocence? Some held on to the misbelief as they stood pressed against one another in train cars heading east across the Siberian steppe, the names of previous prisoners haunting the carriage walls in smudged chalk. Some still held on to it as they were shoved aboard barges and steamed north on the Yenisei. But when they disembarked onto the glassy tundra, their illusion burned away in the glare of the endless summer sun. In distant cities, they were expurgated from their own histories. In photographs, they donned India ink masks. We never knew them, but we are the proof they existed. A hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, they built our home.

There we go, talking about ourselves again. Let’s start with Galina’s grandmother, the prima ballerina of the Kirov for five seasons before her arrest for involvement in a Polish saboteur ring. She was a long, lean splinter of beauty embedded in the gray drab of any crowded city street. Though she crossed the same rails and rivers as our grandmothers, she wasn’t destined for the mines. The labor camp director was a ballet connoisseur as well as a beady-eyed sociopath. He’d seen Galina’s grandmother perform Raymonda in Leningrad two years earlier and had been among the first in the theater to stand in ovation. When he spied her name on the manifest, he smiled — a rare occurrence in his line of work. He clinked shot glasses with his deputy and toasted, “To the might of Soviet art, so great it reaches the Arctic.”

During her first year in the camp, Galina’s grandmother was received as a guest rather than an inmate. Her private room was austere but clean, a single bed, a bureau for her wardrobe, a wood-burning stove. Several times a week, the camp director invited her to his office for tea. Across a desk cluttered with registers, quotas, circulars, and directives, they would discuss the Vaganova method, the proper femur length for a prima ballerina, whether Tchaikovsky really had been so afraid his head would fall off while conducting that he had held it in place with his left hand. Galina called the camp director “a loyal citizen of the People’s Republic of Bullshit” for his insistence that Swan Lake contained Marius Petipa’s most sophisticated pas de deux . No one but the camp director’s six-year-old nephew spoke to him so bluntly, but he didn’t cut her rations or put nine grams of lead through her head. He offered more tea and suggested they might reach a consensus the following week, to which she declared, “Consensus is the goal of the feeble-minded.” We can’t help loving her just a little. Neither could the camp director.