Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

The following year, he asked Galina’s grandmother to create, train, and lead a small ballet troupe for his personal pleasure and for camp morale. The ensemble rehearsed for three months before making its debut. Some of its members had taken ballet classes as children and the rest were versed in peasant dances. After several long afternoons, the camp director and Galina’s grandmother decided on an abridged treatment of Swan Lake . The ensemble rehearsed turns with questionably cosmopolitan French names until blisters pocketed their feet. Muscle memory was reeducated as Galina’s grandmother browbeat elegance into these enemies of the people. It became increasingly unclear whether she was captive, captor, or both. After pulled muscles tightened and swollen toes deflated, after the curtain was drawn and a camp searchlight lit the far end of the canteen, it was evident to all that the stage was set for something extraordinary.

Our grandmothers sat on canteen benches in the audience, and the production was, as you can imagine, a fiasco. The nearest orchestra was eighteen hundred kilometers away, so the score played through the rusted horn of a gramophone previously used to store onions. The choreography required dozens of dancers; the ensemble had ten, and four of them wore charcoal-drawn mustaches to play Siegfried, Von Rothbart, and various footmen, tutors, and court gentlemen. The lake itself was rather thin on waterfowl; later some would joke that NKVD huntsmen had arrived first. There were slips and missteps, the music speeding past dancers left flailing in its wake. But then Galina’s grandmother, alone onstage, slid into a pool of light. Her hair washed and laureled in feathers, her shoulders polar-summer pale, her feet laced in real silk slippers. In the crowd, our grandmothers went silent. Some were transported back to the concert halls, anniversaries, and champagne flutes of their former lives. Some used the reprieve to nap. But most, we suspect, were astounded. After working fourteen-hour shifts in the mines, inhaling so much nickel they sneezed silver glitter, none could have expected a private performance from the prima ballerina of the Kirov.

Despite the many mishaps, the camp director was thrilled. For the next eight years, he sponsored ballets on the summer and winter solstices; but he hadn’t risen through the ranks by giving anything away for free. For a man determined to wring maximum productivity from his prisoners before they died, the ballet proved an effective coercion. Seats — and with them upgraded rations — were reserved for those who exceeded their ever-increasing quotas. Galina’s grandmother helped shave years off the lifespan of her audience.

It all ended in the ninth year. Galina’s grandmother had less than three months until her release date and the camp director had fallen in love. Can someone like him actually love another human being? We’re pained to admit that yes, he might delude himself into believing so. We have some experience with this kind of man, not bureaucratic mass murderers, of course, but with alcoholic boyfriends, violent husbands, strangers harboring the misconception that their unwanted advances are compliments. Galina’s grandmother was the only woman for thousands of kilometers who wasn’t one hundred percent repulsed at the sight of the camp director. Perhaps he mistook her lack of utter contempt for infatuation? Whatever his reasons, he summoned her to his office eighty-five days before her release date. The office door closed behind her and what happened next we only know from rumors spread by the guards. There was a declaration of love followed by a moment that still astonishes, these many decades later, when Galina’s grandmother refused the camp director. At this point in the story, our dried-up admiration for her floods back, and we feel a little bad about accusing her of collaboration. But the camp director was unaccustomed to rejection. The guards overheard a muffled struggle, a scream, the tearing of cloth. As the rest of the camp slept, the camp director became Galina’s grandfather.

Or maybe they had been sleeping together the whole time. Who are we to say?

Years passed. Stalin’s death and denunciation led to the decommissioning of the prison. Camp administrators transferred from the Interior Ministry to the Ferrous Metallurgy Ministry without even changing offices. The same people pulled nickel from the ground. Our grandmothers married miners, smelter techs, even former prison guards. They stayed for profit and practicality: The Arctic nickel mines paid among the highest wages in the country, and its former prisoners had difficulty obtaining residency permits to go back home. Galina’s grandmother was among them. She raised her daughter and taught schoolchildren the tenets of communism. The camp director was demoted and replaced with a party boss. On her deathbed in May 1968, she clutched the arm of the attendant nurse and whispered, “I see, I see, I see.” She passed before she could tell the nurse precisely what she saw.

But hers is the story of our grandmothers. Galina’s story is ours.

SHE was born in 1976. The obstetrician didn’t care for children, and so when he didn’t frown at the sight of her, all took it as a prognosis of future beauty. As Galina grew, we all acknowledged the prescience of the doctor’s early appraisal. Galina was more her grandmother than either of her parents.

She was born to a miner and a seamstress for a local textile factory, and yes, our mothers did approve of them in the early years of the girl’s childhood. They managed to remain unremarkable in all the proper ways. They worked long days, adhering to the second principal of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism: conscientious labor for the good of society — he who does not work, neither shall he eat . At home they spoke loudly enough for our mothers to hear through the wall that they harbored no perverse secrets. But strangely, they didn’t allow Galina to play with us as children. They declined invitations to birthday celebrations, left early from International Day of Solidarity of Youth festivities. It raised our mothers’ suspicion. “They are haughty at best, subversive at worst,” our mothers whispered as they scooped jam into their tea. This was the late seventies, early eighties, and though the purges had receded into memory, glasnost was still years away. Our city was small and whispers easily became verdict. Who has forgotten the story of Vera Andreyevna, who unintentionally denounced her own mother, and was heralded in newspapers from Minsk to Vladivostok? Galina’s mother might have suffered a similar fate, had not the lung cancer taken her first.

We didn’t understand why Galina had been kept from us until our third year of primary school. We left for lunch after reciting our multiplication tables — no difficult task, for we excelled at memorization and recitation. Galina tripped over a loose shoelace and lurched, her books sailing through the air as she tumbled under them. We’d never seen a shoelace cause such a commotion before.

“Not quite living up to your grandmother’s reputation,” our teacher said. We laughed with the spite of those without legacies to honor.

“What do you mean?” Galina asked. She didn’t know. We couldn’t believe it. We gushed, speaking over one another, telling her about the ballet ensemble, the evil camp director, the remarkable fate of Galina’s grandmother. She shook her head with confusion, incredulity, and, eventually, pride.

At home that evening, she demanded ballet lessons.

“Ballet?” her father asked, his voice a sore-throated rasp of nickel dust. He would die at the age of fifty-two, exceeding the life expectancy of a miner by three years. “You’ll join Young Pioneers this year. You’ll be busy with learning leadership and team-building skills.”