Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“Is there more?”

The phantoms of two hundred thousand cigarettes and a street pirozhki haunted his breath.

“Is there more?”

He steadied his wheezy frame against the doorway. He was already an old fart when I was a little boy. Now he qualified as antique. I still hadn’t answered his question.

Strength regained, my father lumbered into my bedroom and pulled the drawers from the dresser, plunged shoulder-deep into the hamper, scattered CDs, crunched videocassette cases underfoot, left the mattress listing drunkenly against the wall, the sheets dangling from the bedposts, employing all his considerable bulk to rip and toss, throw and stomp, until it became clear that whatever he searched for was more elusive than the half-gram stashed in receipt paper at his feet. Once everything shelved, hung, or standing was strewn across the floor, he slumped into the rocking chair and finished the final drag of the cigarette I’d left smoldering in the ashtray.

“Is there more?” he asked.

The year before he went to prison, when I was eight years old, he’d taught me to keep silent in an interrogation. He planted one of my mother’s earrings in my coat pocket, kept me home from school, and grilled me in the kitchen with the windows closed, the oven on, the lamps unshaded. Cold cottony clouds ruffled the skies, but in that kitchen I sweltered like flesh skewered on a grease-brown rotisserie. In the end I would’ve confessed to killing Kirov. I opened my mouth, ready to admit anything and everything, but before I muttered a single syllable I felt the wrath of God in my father’s backhand.

“Is there more?” His voice surrendered to my silence. He knew I’d never confess. He knew he’d taught me well.

“More of what?” I finally said, when his repeated question had softened to whispers.

My father just looked at me as if I’d invited in the national billiards team to practice break shots on his nuts. “You talk? A rat as well as an addict. More of this.” He unfolded the paper. A winter wonderland lay in its creases.

“It’s just sugar. For tea.”

“Sugar, right. And do you put it in your tea with a hypodermic needle?”

When you can no longer deny logic, begin denying everything else.

“Do you have the virus?” he asked. His anger had burned away. Only the sad residue of paternal concern remained.

“Of course not.” I’d only shared needles with my three closest friends.

My father stood and trundled to the door. “Seryozha,” he said, without turning back, “until the army takes you, you will spend your days working.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll shoot you.”

“That would violate your parole.”

“I’ll claim self-defense. ‘May it please the court, I was only trying to save my son from the lunatic drug addict who’s moved into his room and begun wearing his clothes.’ No judge in heaven, hell, or the national judiciary would convict me.”

Next morning’s light was unwelcome proof that the world hadn’t ended overnight. I followed my father to the top floor of the apartment block. A dark gash leaked hall light into the metal door of the last flat on the left.

“Do you see this?” he asked, pointing to the door with a fully cocked frown of indignation. What my father lacked in education, he made up for in opinions. I silently prepared to hibernate through the long winter of his lecture. “They make new doors from recycled fish tins and burglars need only a can opener to break in. Bullshit for brains, these—”

The tin door swung open, thank the merciful heavens. On the other side sat the legless man. Late twenties, clean-shaven, hair the greased silver of a ball bearing, smelling of cheap Ukrainian tobacco and burnt vegetable shortening. He sat in a wheelchair. Two strips of pig leather and canvas sagged between rubber wheels — probably the most advanced mode of transport owned by anyone in the building.

“This is my son, Sergey Vladimirovich, but you may call him ‘asshole,’ ” my father announced, then gestured at the legless man. “And this is Kirill Andreyevich.”

“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected. Only his unimpressed gaze met my outstretched hand.

I poked around the flat while my father spoke with Kirill in the kitchen. I expected chaos, disarray, but only chair and table legs touched the living room floor. A dish rack sat beside the bathtub. A bit of that morning’s oats ringed the drain. Large glass water jars stood along the bathroom baseboard with red rust clouding their bottom centimeter. Did Kirill know something we didn’t? My throat was dry and my mouth tasted like a compost bin, but it’s never a good idea to drink from jars found in a stranger’s bathroom.

Party-approved volumes lined the bookshelves: Red Army field manuals, censored editions of nineteenth-century novels, flinty odes to heavy industries — the sort of kitsch sold to Western tourists outside the Winter Palace or down the Embankment. I picked up a copy of How the Steel Was Tempered. Had I been born a few decades earlier, I’d have been assigned a novel like this in my final year of school, and I’d have known exactly what the book was about without reading it, and I’d have aced whatever literature exam they gave before the UGEs. But I was born in 1983, assigned The Master and Margarita— a long canal to nowhere, that, no wonder Stalin was a Bulgakov fan — and scored a two on the exam. No university wanted me. The army did.

A black pistol lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and rubbed my thumb across its dark luster. Heavier than they look in movies. Holding that gun made me feel taller up top and longer down below. Somewhere in Chechnya was an eighteen-year-old Muslim holding a pistol for the first time and feeling this same surge of power?

“Put it down.”

Kirill wheeled through the doorway, my father behind him.

“You know what Chekhov had to say about loaded guns,” I said. Kirill didn’t smile. Probably hadn’t passed the UGE either. I rubbed my prints from the metal — another childhood lesson from my father — and set it on the table.

“Now you’re employed,” my father said. He was radiant.

“By whom?”

“By Kirill Andreyevich.”

“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected.

“Yes, you’ll be working for the junior sergeant.”

The future looked darker than a mortician’s closet. “You must be joking,” I said. My father never joked.

“Tomorrow morning you’ll begin,” my father said, quite pleased with himself. “It’s the early rising rooster who sticks it to the fattest hen.”

His smirk left little question as to which bird I was.

“And Seryozha,” my father said. “Remember, I’m not afraid of breaking my parole.”

DEFERMENTS went to university students, fathers, and prisoners, only the last of which me and my friends had any hope of becoming in the near future. Prison would be our trade school, the only one to admit us, the only one to provide the skill set that would expand our futures. We should’ve gone into a PTU after our ninth year, but our class boasted a bumper crop of underperforming students, making the one dumpy neighborhood vocational school harder to crack than Cambridge. No matter; if your business is crime, there’s no better business school than prison.

During our final spring of our last year as high schoolers, when we were well on our way to becoming the people we’d be for the rest of our lives, we skipped class to drink Baltika 7s and whistle at women in the Tauride Gardens. Black eyes of frozen muck peered through the snow. A pair of ten-thousand-year-old hermits played bullet chess at an icy table. We stood in a small shivering huddle.