Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

She told him of her husband, who had died, a heart attack, ten years earlier, just after he’d finished brushing his teeth. He had had broad cheeks and a nose that had healed crookedly after a beekeeper’s escaped colony chased him, face-first, into a concrete wall. He’d thought they were demons. It was the only time in his life he would see a winged insect fly through Kirovsk. She admitted she had wanted to join Lydia in America, but that Gilbert objected. She admitted writing misleading letters to her daughter in an effort to lure her home. The unfairness of growing old, watching her body lose shape like a snowman in the sun, without relatives to blame, or to provide support, or to bear grievance — it just wasn’t right. Now and then, when she thought of her own mother, she felt herself at the edge of a darker injustice, but this she did not confide in Kolya.

“I’ve heard stories of you as a child,” he said one afternoon.

“Everyone has stories from childhood,” she said. “You tell me a dozen a day.” The first heavy snow had come late that year, and across the field ice encased the corroded branches of White Forest. Kolya sat at the kitchen table and tapped his cigarette into a plastic ashtray.

“None of mine made the front page of Pravda .”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” she said. Kolya went to the living room and flipped the channels of the Japanese television he’d brought over the previous week. Of late, he’d spent more and more time with Vera, refilling the kettle far into the evening and coming for dinner on his days off. The few friendships he had all revolved around alcohol, flatulence, and the gleeful inflicting of violence, so in that sense Vera wasn’t a friend. She was too warm and caring for him to think of her as a maternal figure. She was simply Vera, a vague but benevolent presence whose approval and affection he wanted to receive as much as she wanted to bestow it.

Vera stood at the stove, frying chicken in a pan still greasy from the morning’s eggs, when the mail arrived. A maze of black cancellation marks caged the price of international postage. The envelope edges were worn, but the seal was unbroken. A dozen years earlier, a letter from America would have never reached her without having been read and noted by invisible men in distant offices.

“What is it?” Kolya asked, sensing her disquiet. The letter, sent by land, bore no markings of urgency, but it lay on the coffee table like the gravitational center around which the rest of the room slowly spun. The whole universe of Vera’s fear, heartache, and regret was thin enough to fold inside that envelope. With the blunt side of her house key, she opened it and held the letter close to her face. The piano tuner in Glendale had divorced Lydia for a woman in Minsk and Lydia’s petition for conditional residence had been denied. She would be back within the month.

Before slipping into bed that night, Vera pulled a shoebox from beneath her bed. It held the money Kolya left her each week, the newspaper clippings praising her denunciation, both letters her daughter had sent from America and the ones her mother had sent from her cell. She flipped through the brittle newsprint because even in their celebration of her betrayal, they were a reminder that she had been young and beloved, that she had not spent her entire life old, alone, and ignored. Five decades had whittled her remorse to pieces of manageable neglect — she had been a child, had been manipulated, innocent in any eyes but her own — and as she flipped through the clippings, she couldn’t shake off the disappointment for how ordinary the rest of her life had turned out. She had peaked before her eighth birthday.

The shoebox lay open on the floor beside her as she repeated her mother’s prayers. She no longer prayed for life-changing miracles (wealth, forgiveness, new knees), and instead pinned her hopes on day-size miracles (an unbroken sleep, a bakery sale, a rash of adolescent acne blooming on Yelena’s cheeks). When she finished, she ran her finger across the broken seal of her daughter’s new letter and placed it in the shoebox along with the others. Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

LYDIA arrived after five days of travel, flights from Los Angeles to New York to London to Petersburg to Novosibirsk, then north by rail, barge, and bus to Kirovsk. She returned with the same suitcase and pleather handbag she’d left with. She had lost two sweaters, a framed photograph of her parents, all faith in online relationships, regular contact with her friends, and replaced that sum with a thorough knowledge of drive-through menus, a few luggage tags, and a bit of a drinking problem. Her mother met her at the station, a little shorter and wider than Lydia remembered. Snow fell on them.

Vera hugged Lydia in the blue kiosk light of a vendor selling Sylvester Stallone VHS tapes, Ukrainian cigarettes, Gosloto tickets. A lighter tied by string to the kiosk crossbar swung in the breeze. Even through the padded overcoat, she felt the narrowness of her daughter’s figure.

“You’re crushing me,” Lydia groaned.

“I know.”

The city slid across the soot-mottled bus window. Say what you will about Southern California, but the place had color. Cacti of army-grade green alongside irrigated lawns. The incandescent signage of bodegas and check-cash swindlers. From the air above LAX, bungalow blocks formed interlocking periodic tables of pastels. In New York, she’d said good-bye to green. In London, red. By the time she’d reached Kirovsk, the palette had been scraped of all but the grays and yellows that painted the clouds, streets, snow, and even the vitamin-deficient pallor peeking from her mother’s coat collar.

Lydia undressed in her bedroom. A knit hat, outlet-mall scarf, and wool mittens. A winter coat with a detachable hood clinging from half of its buttons. A bright pink sweatshirt with the flared image of a screen-printed elm. Her underwear, to Vera’s mind, was far too narrow in back and far too translucent in front. Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn’t look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera’s emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia’s poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.

“Where are my clothes?”

“In your suitcase, I imagine,” Vera said.

“No, the ones I left.”

Vera had been worried both for this conversation and for the possibility that they would never have to have it. The open closet held nothing but bent wire hangers. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”

Lydia retrieved the elm tree sweatshirt and skinny jeans from the floor and put them back on with a despondency she knew would wound her mother more than anything she said. She had worn these clothes for five days and some seventeen thousand kilometers, she could wear them a little longer.

“Brush your hair,” Vera said. “We’re having company after dinner.”

KOLYA knocked on the front door four times, the first two of which sounded timid and hollow, the kind of knock to announce a bellboy rather than a rising gangster, and so he battered the door twice more for good measure. In his other hand he held a bright bouquet of artificial roses tightly wrapped in green tinfoil.