Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“My brother read a story about us a while back,” he says. “Two assholes in Chechnya. They get captured and tossed in a pit.”

“There are literates among the Kolya clan?”

“Shocking, I know.”

“How did that story end?”

In Kolya’s recollection, one of the men escapes and the other stays behind. But that isn’t the kind of story he wants to tell tonight. “They got some sex surrogates.”

Danilo laughs. “My kind of fiction.”

“I think Tolstoy wrote it.”

“He did, Pushkin did, Lermontov did, all those old bastards wrote about two assholes in a pit in Chechnya.”

“How do you know?”

“We read them in school,” Danilo answers. “My last year, in fact. When I started going back to school to ask out my wife. She wasn’t my wife then, but I knew she would be.”

“Tell me something new about her. What’s her favorite book?”

“No,” Danilo says softly. “Tonight, she’s mine.”

SUMMER clots the air to a moist spoonable heat. In Kirovsk, summers were twenty-four hours of sweater-weather light, and Kolya has grown fond of Chechen Julys with the languid green color scale, the birds without Russian names, the humidity heavy enough to drown you if you breathe too deep. He spends hours planting seeds and tending to the little green stems that spurt from the soil. He has no idea what any of them are. Growing up, food came in cans delivered to the Arctic by transport truck and ice-breaking barge. He still can’t say what goes into a loaf of bread. He rakes the dirt, amazed by its looseness, its warmth. The one time he buried a body back home, he had to empty a clip into the frozen ground to break it up enough to begin digging. When the head of the blue-handled trowel comes loose, he flings it toward the trees. From then on he does all garden work with his hands and at the end of the day they are so dark with dirt he no longer recognizes them as his.

Summer is fighting season and rebels arrive every few weeks to resupply from the munitions stockpile Vova left in the rebuilt toolshed. When he spots the rebels in the distance the old man hurries Kolya and Danilo toward the pit, his stout little legs miraculously cured of whatever affliction makes necessary his cane. He smears mud on their faces, ruffles their hair, and sends them down the yellow rope with instructions to hold their hands behind their backs and moan from time to time.

“Why?” Kolya calls up.

“Russians,” the old man laments, as if their ethnicity is the most pitiable aspect of their current state. He’s peering over the lip of the pit, his face an inky sun-silhouetted pool. “If they think I’m beating you, they won’t feel they have to.”

Two rebels look into the pit an hour later. Garbed in bandannas and fat-framed sunglasses, they look more like members of a late-Beatles cover band than of a jihadi insurgency. Kolya and Danilo moan and writhe on cue and they nod with satisfaction.

The following morning the old man orders Kolya into the dacha to clean up. Refuse from the rebels’ visit — tea-stained mugs, bread crust, dried rice kernels, bandannas streaked with gun lubricant, fuses of homemade Khattabka hand grenades — are strewn in a manner suggesting that the old man doesn’t rank highly within the insurgency. A multitude of overlapping woven rugs cover the walls and floor, so many that Kolya at first can’t tell where the floor ends and the walls begin. Some of the patterned arabesques resemble sabers, others the daydreams of a meticulously warped mind, but all display a painstaking artistry as antiquated as the rugs themselves. Kolya fingers the rug at his feet, unable to remember the last time he touched something so fine.

Bookcases line the living room’s far wall. The cracked-leather spines look bound in the same century the rugs were woven. “Any of these good?” Kolya asks.

“They belong to the previous tenant,” the old man says. A heavy sadness is anchored to the word previous . With a sigh the man hoists himself from the divan and pulls a brown tome from the bottom shelf. Its pages are rimmed with gold, like those of a holy book.

The old man splays the book on his lap and points to a photograph of an oil painting stretching across two glossy pages. It’s a landscape you wouldn’t look at twice from a car window, the type of monumentally dull painting that adds to Kolya’s general suspicion that artists are always trying to pull one over on him. “Recognize it?” the old man asks.

It does look familiar. A moment and the sense of familiarity upgrades to recognition. The field cresting two thirds up the canvas, the well, the toolshed, the white stone wall Danilo is now repairing. It’s the very landscape that stretches outside. “Where’s our pit?”

“Right there,” the old man says, tapping the painted well with pleasure. “See how there is no pail or winch? The well had probably already run dry and was already converted for prisoners when this was painted.” He huffs on his spectacles and cleans them with a pinch of his white tunic. Without his glasses, his face looks made of loose skin that had once, maybe, belonged to a larger man. When’s the last time Kolya has seen an old man? Average male life expectancy in Kirovsk hovers somewhere in the high forties and while elderly men aren’t mythical creatures, they aren’t quite of this realm.

“So our fieldwork is to make the land look like it did back when this was painted?”

The old man nods with apparent admiration. “You are not one hundred percent idiot,” he says. Kolya takes it as an expression of great respect. “The property looked peaceful, didn’t it, before all of this awful business? We’ll make it look like this again. This is the blueprint.”

In the painting, the garden extends halfway up the left side of the hill that is now mined and punctured with a blast crater. The garden Kolya has planted and cultivated stops far short. “The garden, we won’t get it the rest of the way up the hill, will we?”

“No, not with the mines there.” The old man falls silent and dips an almond into an ashtray of honey.

“Who lived here before you?” Kolya ventures.

“My daughter and grandson.”

“I’m sorry,” Kolya says after a long, uncomfortable moment staring into the ashtray of honey to avoid the old man’s eyes. It hits him that this is the first time he’s ever said those two words in relation to a killing. And he had nothing to do with this one.

A WEEK later Kolya is tending the garden when the asthmatic heave of the Shishiga announces Vova’s return. The suspension sags beneath the mass of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, RPG rounds, an armory so large half the roof has been cut away to accommodate it all. Steam shoots through the bullet-holed hood as the truck summits a knobby incline to reach the dacha.

“Well?” Danilo asks.

With procedural solemnity befitting a papal pronouncement, Vova unfolds a note, sits a pair of reading glasses on his steeply sloped nose, takes a deep breath, clears his throat, takes another deep breath, and reads. “ ‘Dear Nikolai Kalugin and Danilo Beloglazov. I hate you. May the devil take you both. Respectfully yours, Captain Feofan Domashev.’ ”

Danilo grunts but nothing follows. Vova folds the letter, then his reading glasses, and returns both to his shirt pocket.

“The colonel’s banya was built three weeks late because of your little excursion,” Vova explains. “The colonel gave the captain a barrel of shit, which the captain’s now pouring on your heads. Chain of command, I’m afraid.”

“What about my wife?” Danilo asks. “Can she come up with the ransom?”

“Danilo. Man, I’m the bearer of bad news,” Vova says with a grin. Never has bad news been more happily borne. “I had to remind her who you were.”