Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“Good news,” she says and feels across the floor for her suitcase. She hands me two VHS tapes. “These are the two you wanted, right?”

I examine the two VHS cases. Soviet comedies, sadly.

“Yes, these are precisely the ones I wanted.”

“I was afraid the street vendor had swindled me.”

“What did the eye surgeons say, Nadya?”

The pause was long enough to peel a plum.

She delivers the news with a downcast frown. “Reconstructive surgery is possible.”

I force as much gusto into my congratulations as I can muster, slapping my palm on the table while my spine wilts. What will I be if Nadya no longer needs me, what if she moves to Sweden and assembles bookcases in a living room I will never see? This is good news, though, of course it is, but Nadya’s face is joyless. “What’s wrong? Is there a long wait for the operation?”

“There won’t be one.”

“What? Why not?”

“Too expensive.” She’s still facing the empty chair across the table, thinking that I’m still sitting there. “It’s one hundred and fifteen thousand.”

One hundred and fifteen thousand rubles. A huge, but not impossible, sum. Years to save for, but within the realm of possibility, like a vacation to Belarus. I’m already scheming ways to defraud the Interior Ministry when she says, “Dollars.”

My heart spirals and crash-lands somewhere deep in my gut. At thirty-three rubles to a dollar, the number is insurmountable. Nadya reaches for her purse and pulls out an envelope.

“What I owe you for the trip. Help me count it out,” she says. For a moment her instinct to trust anyone, even me, is infuriating. Isn’t suspicion the natural condition of the blind? Haven’t I warned her, told her to be careful, that she can’t rely on anyone? But by some perversion she’s become more trusting, more willing to believe that people aren’t by nature hucksters and scoundrels, which is why, I suppose, my VHS collection is rounded out with Gentlemen of Fortune .

“It’s nothing,” I say.

“I’m paying you back.”

“If you want to be a martyr go join them in the woods.”

“Help me count it out,” she insists, her voice stern, cool, serious. “I still have money left from the disability fund. I’m not a charity.”

Of course there’s no disability fund. Of course the government isn’t sending her a monthly payment or subsidizing the flat adjacent to mine. The cash sealed in the Interior Ministry envelopes I bring over on the first of the month comes from me, as does her monthly rent.

“I’m waiting,” she says. We both know this is a farce. But I sit beside her. I play my part in the lie that preserves the illusion that our friendship, our romance, whatever this is, is based on affection rather than need. I count out the bills that I will return to her in an Interior Ministry envelope on the first of the month, and when I finish we shake hands as if our business is concluded and there is nothing left that we owe each other, no debt unpaid, no obligation unfulfilled.

In bed I run my fingers through what remains of her hair, press my fingertips to her cheeks, slowly scrolling, as if I am the blinded of us, to decipher the dense Braille scrawled across her face. I slide my hand down her torso, over the bulge of her left breast, the hook of her hip bone, to thighs so smooth and unmarked they’re hers only in darkness. She rolls away.

Lying here in bed, you nearly forget the falling rockets, the collapsing museum, the air of the clean sky impossibly distant, the cinder blocks shifting like ice cubes in a glass. The Zakharov was in your hands when you found her, her face halved by burns, her teeth chattering. You nearly forget how you lifted her cheek to cool it with your breath, how her broken eyes searched for you as you held her.

You nearly forget the many times you have warned her of monsters as though they are a people apart: lurking beyond her doorway, ready to prey on the blind and vulnerable. As she turns from you, tucking the sheets beneath her hip, you nearly forget to ask yourself, “What monster have I become today?”

IN the morning I return to my flat and find the canvases on the floor where I left them. Daylight grants the scorch and char an odd beauty, as if the fires hadn’t destroyed the artworks, but revised them into expressions of a brutal present. I pick up the nearest canvas, a family portrait commissioned by a nobleman as a wedding present for his second son. The top third of the canvas has been incinerated, taking with it the heads of the nobleman, his wife, the first son, and the newly betrothed, but their bodies remain, dressed in soot-stained breeches and petticoats, and by their feet sits a dachshund so fat its little legs barely touch the ground, the only figure — in a canvas commissioned to convey the family’s immortal honor — to survive intact.

I hang the canvas on the wall from a bent nail and step back, marveling that here, for the first time in my career, I’ve hung a work of modern art. After pulling the furniture into the kitchen, I hang the remaining canvases throughout the living room, finally coming to the restored Zakharov, which I consider taking back to the closet, shelving in the darkness where it will exist for me alone, but my curatorial instincts win out, and I hang the Zakharov on the wall where it is meant to be. The street children long ago stole the last of my door signs. I scrawl one more on a cardboard shingle and nail it to the door: Grozny Museum of Regional Art .

Now for guards. I toss a crumpled hundred-ruble note down the stairs, thinking that they, like the Sunzha trout, are too hungry to pass up a baited hook. A small hand reaches around the corner, and I grab it, yanking on the slender arm to reel in the rest of the child. He squirms wildly, biting at my wrists, until I shake him into submission and offer him a job in museum security.

He stops squirming, perhaps out of shock, and I close his hand around the hundred-ruble note. His fingernails look rusted on. His shirt is no thicker than stitched-together soot.

“Bandits are stealing the signs from my door,” I tell him. “I’ll pay you and your friends three hundred rubles a week to keep watch.”

Over the following weeks, I bring all my tours through the museum. A delegation from the Red Cross. More Chinese oilmen. A heavyweight boxing champ. A British journalist. This is what remains , the charred canvases cry. You cannot burn ash! You cannot raze rubble! As the only museum employee besides the street children, I give myself a long overdue promotion. No longer am I deputy. As of today, I am director of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.

THE newly installed phone rings one morning and the gloomy Interior minister greets me. “We’re properly fucked.”

“Nice to hear from you, sir,” I reply. I’m still in my sleeping clothes and even for a phone conversation I feel unsuitably dressed.

“The Chinese are out. They traded their drilling right to Rosneft for a few dozen Russian fighter jets.”

I nod. It explains why China hadn’t sent their most shrewd or sober representatives. “So this means Rosneft will drill?”

“Yes, and it gets even worse,” he heaves. “I may well be demoted to deputy minister.”

“I was a deputy for many years. It’s not as bad as you think.”

“When the world takes a dump, it lands on a deputy’s forehead.”

I couldn’t deny that. “What does this mean for the Tourist Bureau?”

“You’ll have one more tour, then it’s safe to say you’ll need to find new employment. Oleg Voronov. From Rosneft.”

It took a beat for the name to register. “The fourteenth richest man in Russia?”

“Thirteenth now.”

“With respect, sir, I give tours to human rights activists and print journalists, people of no power or importance. I’m not qualified to give a tour to a man of his stature. Why does he even want a tour?”