Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“Stay for a cup of tea,” Vera suggested. He looked as surprised to receive the invitation as she felt offering it. Associating with characters of ill repute, at her age! But there was a forlornness about the young man she recognized, a heavy-lidded exhaustion to his expression mirrored in her own.

“I should go.” He stood, stretched his limber arms.

“Stay. Have some tea. I have cake.”

The man glanced to the front door as if hoping a momentary variance in air pressure might suck him out into the night, then sat down. He’d never know why this woman with eyes too wide for her head and pens sticking from her pockets had shown him insistent, if self-serving, kindness that cool autumn evening. And Vera would never know that eleven hours earlier, the man had watched Deceit Web for the one hundred and fifty-eighth time. He’d long ago memorized the dialogue and camera cuts, could replicate the film beat by beat in his mind, was less an audience than a second screen for the film to keep on playing after the final credits rolled. He missed his brother more than he’d ever thought he could miss someone he hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids with. He’d bribed a university official, secured his brother a seat at Saint Petersburg State University, saved him from mandatory military service and the unrest in Chechnya. But as he’d waded through snow soup that morning, he had considered his brother, parents, ex-fiancée. Each had taken different exits from his life for which he couldn’t reasonably be blamed. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he was the architect of a city made entirely of off-ramps, all leading away from him.

Vera climbed the stool her father had climbed, and had then stepped from, some thirty-seven years earlier, with a noose around his neck. She rooted through the cupboard, a largely symbolic performance since the cake sat in plain view on the otherwise empty shelf, but she wanted the man to think her pantry was so prosperous a cake could get lost in it. The cake was a thin pedestal on which a monument of pink-striped chocolate frosting towered.

She cut two slices with a spoon. He accepted the pink parade warily.

“Good, isn’t it? Would you like some more?” She still took orders from the sweet tooth — an actual tooth, she imagined, her right canine, the only one of her thirty-two natural teeth without a cavity — she’d developed even before she was upgraded to a commissar’s rations.

He thanked her as she plopped another massive wedge on his plate. She wanted to ask his name. To have a man for tea and cake without knowing his name was indecorous. Then again, so was renting her house to drug dealers, but she had long ago learned to ignore her largest moral failures by attending to the smallest social proprieties.

“Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“Pets?”

“A brother.”

“What’s his story?”

“His story, well, it’s all beginnings,” the man said, glancing down. “Still finding his way. Do you have pets?”

“I have a daughter. She lives in America. Married to a man named Gilbert. He is Glendale, California’s preeminent pi-an —” and here, after the second syllable, the word would normally veer away from reality, but talking to a petty criminal, she felt liberated from the need to lie “—piano tuner.”

The man whistled enviously — and the envy of others was the closest she came to feeling proud of Lydia. When asked about her daughter, Vera added rooms to Gilbert’s modest condo, added zeros to his salary. She recounted her daughter’s life in America just as she wrote of her own in the carefully constructed letters she mailed each month at the city post office — with aggrandized half-truths, little lies that had grown beyond her control. But she didn’t fear the judgment of this man sitting before her, licking pink frosting from the back of his spoon.

“She was a mail-order bride,” Vera said.

“In a catalog?”

“A catalog. Several websites. She had to pose for pictures in a bikini. A shameful thing.”

“Does she eat cheeseburgers and watch basketball?”

“I don’t know,” Vera admitted. Lonely American men reading Lydia’s marriage website profile had had greater access to her daughter’s inner life. “She’s not particularly forthcoming with me. She’s sent six letters in the last year. Mainly to tell me about the weather. Do you know how many types of clouds there are in Glendale? Three. She’s described them all.”

“America’s far away and the only mailman I’ve ever known would need a map to find his own feet. Many letters must get lost along the way.”

“I’ve told myself that.”

“Tell me about this husband. What sort of man is he?”

Vera shook her head. “What sort of man finds his wife in an Internet catalog and still calls himself a man?”

“A trailblazer. In a few years, we’ll all be embarrassing ourselves on the Internet.”

“You must be around her age. Did you know her?”

“In passing,” the man admitted. “I dated one of her friends. Galina Ivanova.”

Vera had, like everyone, watched Galina’s ascent into stardom. She might’ve been the only soul in Kirovsk to pity Galina’s good fortune. “And do you have a wife?”

“Only a brother.”

When the man left the house that evening, he lit a cigarette. He’d wanted one for hours. A few days earlier he’d beaten the gold teeth from an unlucky but persistent gambler who possessed no other form of payment, yet he found himself too sheepish to ask Vera for an ashtray. Snowdrifts darkened in the shadows. The end of his cigarette was the closest thing to a working streetlamp for eight blocks. Behind Vera’s house, White Forest loomed. A decade had passed since he’d last walked through it. He’d been a child then, but when he’d shielded his brother’s eyes from the execution they had stumbled upon, he’d felt like a father for the first but not the final time in his brief life. His name was Kolya and not long ago he’d returned from Chechnya. In less than a year, he would be back there, where he would spend his final moments planting dill seeds on a mined hill.

EACH week Kolya slunk into Vera’s house as wordless and grim-faced as his associates. But when she returned eight hours later, she found her new kettle humming with steam, two teacups on the kitchen table, Kolya singing quietly to himself as he cut thick cake slices at the counter. He told her about his brother, the games they had played, rooftop leaps into snowdrifts, the outer-space museum their father had run, which Vera admitted she’d visited several times over the years. He described the heroin trade like a market analyst, cloaking the brutal business in the hazy virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. The cultivation of poppy fields in Afghanistan, the refinement into opium and overland transport through Tajikistan, the whole greased chute of corruption on which heroin simply slid northward, from Kandahar to the Arctic. The Ecuadorian birds Yelena’s son collected in his private aviary. The money paid for police protection. When Vera asked, cautiously, why such a big-brained and convivial young person had gotten into this business, he smiled, and said he could ask the same of her. Regardless of what penthouse politicians might say, there was nothing reckless in his logic: Schools had only taught him how to cheat; the military had trained him in ballistics, subordination, and intimidation; he had returned to a mining town where the jobs had become automated and the narcotics business was the only prosperous industry that would benefit from his skill set. For someone in his boots, the drug trade was the only path for economic advancement. She asked if there was a woman in his life since Galina, and he said no, not to speak of, then looked away.