Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

After introductions, Kolya presented Lydia with the plastic flowers. He recognized her as one of the six or seven girls who had had an unhealthy fixation on Galina in school. Galina had never really liked them, and the idea of sleeping with one from their ranks felt like the kind of potent but ultimately meaningless act of self-assertion that appealed to him. She wore a sweatshirt, blue jeans, and no makeup. She didn’t even realize this was a date.

“What are these?” she asked, as if she’d never before seen a rose.

“They are made of plastic,” Kolya said proudly. “Much safer than real roses. And they will never die.”

Still, Vera put them in a vase with water and set it on the living room coffee table. She told them to sit where they wanted, then made sure Kolya sat next to Lydia. She had high hopes for the night. Sure, Kolya was involved with some unsavory business, but it showed ambition, didn’t it? Besides, Lydia would only benefit from spending time with a young man who was fond of Vera.

“How do you like being back in Kirovsk?” Kolya asked after they toasted to their health.

“It’s exactly as I imagined it would be,” Lydia said. She looked to Vera. “You wrote in one of your letters that they were distributing compensation money.”

Vera nodded. The mail worked one way, at least. She tried to remember what she had written. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been an outright lie, but rather a statement made from the distant borderlands of truth. She had seen some sort of televised documentary program on reparations. Maybe it was about the Great Patriotic War. Maybe Germany was paying Belgium, rather than Russia paying its citizens. Who could even remember now. She shrugged. “From Moscow to Kirovsk is thousands of kilometers,” Vera said. “Every kilometer along the way someone puts their hand into the pot so by the time it gets here: nothing left.”

Kolya padded his tender neck with a napkin. It looked like he’d shaven with a guillotine. “Speaking of letters, your mother has not received many from you. I told her overseas mail is often lost.”

“Yes, I wrote every two weeks.”

“I never doubted that,” Vera said. Let the two believe they had fooled her. Meanwhile she’d fool them into falling in love.

But as the evening progressed, Lydia grew intoxicated. She had two shots for every one of Kolya’s, and grew angry when Vera tried to take the bottle from her.

When Kolya was leaving, Lydia stumbled to the door to kiss him good-bye. She spilled her drink on him as she leaned forward. Kolya placed his hands on her shoulders and firmly pushed her away. One look at his face was enough for Vera to know he’d never be her son-in-law, they would never be a family together, and she ached.

Later, Vera woke to splashing water. In the bathroom, she found her daughter on her knees before the toilet, holding her hair in a loose fist behind her head.

“You stupid child,” Vera said, dropping to a knee beside her.

Lydia’s head bobbed over the toilet seat.

“You stupid child. What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia mumbled, letting the fistful of hair go slack. Vera had an urge to shout, but she laid her daughter on the floor and made a pillow from the bath towel. A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera — Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter — but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia’s mother.

DECEMBER approached, and the days shrank. Each Wednesday, hungover or not, Lydia left the house with her mother when the men arrived. Kolya nodded curtly. This peasant of a man must’ve been too intimidated by her worldliness to speak to her. And those ridiculous plastic flowers — he’d probably never smelled a real one in his life, whereas she’d once lived in a city where roses were so plentiful a stadium was named after them.

On the day Vera came upon her daughter at the forest edge, Lydia had been thinking of Gilbert’s piano-tuning kit. The brown leather case contained a gooseneck tuning hammer, nickel lever heads, and rubber mutes. Tuning forks that gave warm, round rings when she flicked them. A manual that Gilbert had ceased referring to years earlier, filled with terms like equal temperament, fundamental frequency , and coincident harmonics . When she first arrived at LAX, she wasn’t sure if she should kiss her fiancé or shake his hand. His flesh was the color and texture of an overcooked potato, and he wore Hawaiian shirts to counter the otherwise overpowering blandness that emanated from him. When she joined him on calls to factory-size suburban houses, she read through the manual. She couldn’t find the technical terms in her Russian-English pocket dictionary, and Gilbert had done his best to explain them in simple language. He would have made a better elementary school teacher than a husband. A friend of Gilbert’s found Lydia a job as a minimum-wage caregiver at the Glendale Sunrise Rest Home. She couldn’t understand why so many of its residents viewed nursing homes as elderly storage where sons and daughters imprison parents to recompense unresolved childhood traumas. Compared to elder care in Russia, it was a beacon of warmth and compassion. When she saw her first wheelchair ramp in LAX, she had mistaken it for some kind of weird public sculpture. When she learned what a wheelchair ramp was, when she learned that they were mandated by law, she felt a pure rush of patriotism for a country she’d only been living in for a few hours. Of the century’s magnificent and terrible inventions, what was more humane, more elegant, more generous than the wheelchair ramp? The happiest day of her life was many decades away, she believed: when she was an elderly widow wheeled up the wheelchair ramp of Glendale Sunrise and into their care. She was only twenty years old and she knew where she wanted to die. One Friday afternoon, Gilbert emerged from a rare autumn rain shower, set his tuning kit on the floor, and told her he had met a Belarusian woman online.

Lydia continued trudging along the edge of the rusted forest. Wolves — or was it the wind? — howled deep among the steel branches. But she’d stopped caring a long while ago. A figure appeared ahead, stenciled against the dim sun. Her mother.

“December is cold,” Vera said. Her daughter’s presence leeched her powers of observation, and she couldn’t sustain a conversation with Lydia that extended beyond statements of obvious fact.

Lydia gave an unexpected smile. “You’ve grown wise in your old age.”

“I’m growing senile.”

“At the nursing home I worked exclusively with the bewildered and mentally deranged.”

“How far along am I?”

“We both crossed that border a ways back.”

“Will you take care of me when I’m old?” she asked Lydia, more seriously than she’d intended.

“Mama, you are old.”

Vera glanced down the field to the small squares of lamplight encased behind the triple-paned glass of her kitchen window. “We can go back soon.”

“You do know what they’re doing in there, don’t you?”

Vera looked away. A ballpoint pen was clipped to a folded sheet of paper in her pocket. She had been writing a letter to Lydia as if she still lived in America. In it she had described Kolya, how handsome and polite he was, how he and Lydia would make the most gorgeous couple, the most beautiful grandchildren. How everything in her life was on its way to being made right, and how, at the age of sixty-three, she had never felt more blessed.

“We have food on the table and money in the jar. Isn’t that enough? Why does it matter where it comes from? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not doing anything at all.”