Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

The road doglegged, as if the paver billed by the meter and was deeply in debt. Our fellow drivers took the lane markers as well-intended but misguided suggestions they freely ignored. I don’t know how we managed to a) stay alive, and b) make such good time, given we were mainly headed into oncoming traffic.

An owlish man walked along the roadside with closed eyes and leathery beak aimed sunward. His jagged grin was a pink miniature of the half-eaten watermelon slice in his hand. Speed-chilled air flooded through the cracked window, wonderful on my face.

We passed a massive billboard with a stern and puffy-chested Vladimir Putin standing beside a younger guy with a cropped beard. The two stood in a misty mantle of white, blue, and red patriotism.

“Didn’t think I’d see him down here,” I said, pointing to Putin.

“To the victor go the advertisements.”

“So it seems. I can’t even tell what’s being advertised. Steely resolve?”

“You can’t go out for an ice cream without passing two dozen posters of Putin.” He said it like he’d really kept count. “Even a Magnate Gold sours under a dictator’s glassy gaze. Ridiculous, really. Imagine going to Baghdad and finding George Bush’s weaselly mug on every street corner?”

The guy next to Putin was Ryan Gosling from a parallel universe where instead of becoming a famous actor, he smoked too much weed, ate potato chips for breakfast, and was dressed by his grandmother. “Who’s he?”

“I take it you’re not a journalist?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he actually wanted to know. A question mark can turn any innocent sentence into an accusation.

“I’m a university student, technically.”

“That’s President Kadyrov. Very popular. He received a hundred and two percent of the vote last election.”

“I’ve never been good at math.”

“You might have a future as an election overseer.” We swerved out of the broad headlights of an oncoming truck. “You haven’t seen his Instagram?”

“That’s where I recognize him from! He’s the one with all the photos posing with tiger cubs and ducklings and kittens!”

His brows bunched over dirty-copper irises. Never seen such a grim response to baby animals. Maybe petting a duckling’s the final taboo down here.

“You’re not from around here either, are you?” I asked.

A tractor towing bushels of green-sheathed corn cobs trundled along the shoulder.

“Yes and no.” His volume knob in his throat had dialed down to movie-theater whisper. “I was born just outside of Grozny. But in 1994, just a kid, I was sent to Holland as a refugee. A lot of tea glasses had to be sweetened to make it happen. My parents could only afford to send one of us and I was the youngest. Lived there a long while, and even now I speak Dutch much better than Chechen.”

“So are you staying in London after you graduate or going back to Holland?”

A low wind peeled a gauze strip from the underbelly of a cloud.

“Of course I’m moving back here.”

Fifteen minutes later, he nodded to an empty field. Shards of concrete grew where grass should’ve been. “I lived there,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said.

Another few minutes passed, and he said, “All I’m trying to say is don’t trust someone who posts photos of himself playing with puppies and kittens online. Chances are, they’re sociopaths. You know who loved little animals?”

“You want me to name names?”

“Adolf bloody Hitler,” he snapped. “He was even a vegetarian. And look at the mess he made.”

White-orange flapped atop a flare stack.

A blackbird cursored across the blue screen of sky.

I made a note to more carefully curate my Facebook profile pics.

GROZNY was the cleanest city I’d ever seen. Its walls weren’t old enough to have seen a hoodlum’s paint can. The mortar between bricks was still white. The streets must’ve been swept hourly. Sapling-shaded promenades unfurled down wide boulevards. A Japanese sushi bar called Mafia advertised a bizniz lunch of pho, Thai green curry, and a fortune cookie. In 1995 when Kolya was deployed for the first time, then in 2000 when he returned as a contract soldier, I’d read every newspaper and magazine feature on the war I could find. The Grozny in those photos was a 1944 Dresden look-alike. The Grozny in the windshield was Dubai. In the city center five glass skyscrapers huddled together.

“I didn’t think it would look, well, so city-like,” I said.

“What did you expect?” Akim asked. Before I could answer, he nodded to a squat gray building of vaguely defined bureaucratic provenance. “First floor’s the art museum,” he said.

On the ride in, I’d told Akim about my brother and the painting, altering the details just slightly (in my version, Kolya was a human rights worker). Risky move, maybe, but I hadn’t thought any of this through and he seemed about as trustworthy a character as I could hope to find. He’d just nodded with the glazed-over indifference of someone subjected to detailed narration of another person’s dream. I guess our lives are all dreams — as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. He said he’d help, until four o’clock at least.

We parked and entered the museum. It was clogged with paintings and empty of patrons. The docent’s face bathed in the glow of her blocky Nokia cell phone. Her narrow brown eyes met ours when we walked in. I remembered those long winter afternoons at the ticket counter of the Kirovsk Cosmonautics Museum when the sudden appearance of a museum visitor was cause for celebration and alarm.

“Yes?” Her voice rose a half octave toward suspicion. She couldn’t’ve been older than eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was covered in an electric-pink headscarf that obeyed the letter of the law while exorcizing its spirit.

“I have something to return,” I began and pulled the canvas from the duffel bag. She inhaled sharply. She looked from me to the canvas and then back as if we were two mismatched puzzle pieces she couldn’t fit together.

“You’ve seen this before?” I asked.

Her Nokia buzzed on the table in a universe far from us. She nodded.

I pointed to the dacha in the painting. “Do you know where this plot of land is?”

“The man this belongs to, he lives there now.”

While she showed Akim the route on a Yandex map, I circled the museum. The earliest date I found etched into the display placard thingies was 2003. Most were portraits of the family Kadyrov. In several, the president cuddled calico kittens.

THE Lada’s rear tires ejected dusty rooster tails, but the car wouldn’t budge. I checked my phone. Zero bars. Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God. The roads had broken, disintegrated, and washed away the farther from Grozny we’d come. Here, somewhere in the southern mountains, what we referred to as “road” was in fact “impending landslide.” The wide green bowl of valley stretched down the ridge. Akim floored the accelerator. The motor vhroooooomed but gravity pulled harder than the engine pushed.

“I think this is it,” Akim said. A clear sheen of perspiration mustached his upper lip. He still hadn’t loosened his thickly striped ash and navy necktie.

“I can’t believe we made it this far.” And I couldn’t. Given the state of the car I was surprised it didn’t explode into a Michael Bay finale every time Akim punched the accelerator.

“This”—he glanced to the line of white rocks weaving up the ridge—“whatever this is, isn’t on the map. But I reckon we’re only four or five kilometers away. You start walking now, you’ll probably get there in a few hours.”