Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“It wasn’t what you think.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. The wall of air broke over us. “I’m only telling you this since you’ll be going south into the Zone. It wasn’t a land mine. It wasn’t even in Chechnya. I was shit-drunk one night a few years back and passed out on a tram track right here in Peter.”

That evening a threadbare military uniform lay on the living room coffee table. It was the blue-gray of rain clouds. I unfolded the trousers, held them to my waist. The legs reached past my ankles and flapped at the floor.

“Your grandfather was a tall man,” my father said from the doorway. Hell-cat watched from between his legs. “A pair with hemmed legs, you’ll look so grown up.”

Hearing him say it killed me.

“I don’t want to go,” I told the cat. The little sadist tilted its head, then snapped its tail and strode from the room.

My father hooked my chin with his finger and raised my face to his. “If we had a choice, none of us would ever put on trousers.” His half-smoked cigarette made my eyes all watery. He dropped the stub in a teacup and thumbed the tears from my cheeks.

“Oh, Seryozha, sometimes I wish you could see what I see when I see you.” His face was a big bright sun. I had to look away. I tried to find a neutral space to rest my gaze, but his framed portraits filled the walls. I couldn’t escape him. He was everywhere, watching over me.

“What do you see?” My voice cracked for the first time in two years. I’d have traded the rest of my life for a Cloak of Invisibility. I’d apparate to Chechnya, Kresty, anywhere beyond sight of my father’s eyes.

“I see a clever young man, too clever for his own good maybe. I see someone kind and sweet-hearted in a world that encourages and rewards neither. I see a son who is unlike me in every way I’ve hoped he would be unlike me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’ll have a happy life. You’ll see.”

I wished then, more than I’d ever wished before, that I trusted my father.

“Look at you,” he said, and leaned in to plant a kiss on my forehead. “My Seryozha. My holy little fool. You’ve spent these last few years working so hard to become an asshole. Despite your best efforts, you’re becoming a man instead. And I know you want to become so great an asshole that centuries from now people will speak of wiping their Sergeis. But you’re not an asshole. You’re my son. So when you want to disgrace yourself, remember, little one, that you are all of your father’s pride.”

THE next morning, both head and heavens had clouded over. I ignored Kirill’s history lessons as I pushed him to Chernyshevskaya. In four days, I was to report for duty.

For hours, I barely talked. Kirill fist-marched across train cars and I pushed the wheelchair behind him. Rubles dropped into the wicker basket, and he collected them at every stop.

“Let’s take a break,” I said when we reached Ploshchad Lenina.

“It’s only eleven.”

“I want some air.”

Kirill sighed, but agreed. On the escalator he counted the morning’s earnings, pleased with the sum. “You need to keep your money in your front pocket,” he said. “Thieves will be too wary of your stumps to go anywhere near them.”

“You keep saying ‘you,’ ” I whispered. It was a quiet realization.

“I’m talking to you. How else should I address you?”

“You keep giving me instructions. Like you’re training me. ‘You need to do this, you need to do that to be a good beggar.’ ”

“I’m speaking in generalizations,” he began, but I’d already stopped listening. The whole summer long I hadn’t realized it. I wasn’t Kirill’s assistant. I was his apprentice.

I can’t remember the faces of bystanders, what was shouted by whom when I let the collapsed wheelchair crash down the escalator, what Kirill said, or if he said anything at all. I remember grabbing Kirill’s pressed blue collar and pushing him against the slow slide of the escalator wall. If he wanted, he could’ve stopped me. Those arms of his walked three kilometers of train cars every day and still had enough oomph left to lift weights by night. But he didn’t resist, didn’t fight, surrendered before I threw that first punch, and when I had him by the neck, when his hat toppled and the escalator wall unmade his impeccable part, I swear a grin crossed his lips, and beneath his knotted brows his face held no fear. He had bet with his dead-eyed doubt that I was too craven to commit even this act of cowardice. I punched him once to prove that I could, and then kept punching him because I was too afraid to stop. My knuckles were four burst berries by the time I grabbed his greased hair and slammed his face into the escalator step. Finally, Kirill went limp. I reached into his front pocket, palmed the bills and loose change, and sprinted up the remaining steps. From a half block away, I saw the escalator deposit Kirill at street level. He lay lifelessly while the ascending steps snapped against his stumps. Hurried commuters stepped over him.

The realization of what I’d done cannonballed into my guts. I killed a man . And not just any man, but a crippled war hero. I’d never go to Chechnya because I’d spend the rest of my life locked up. I was on my knees, dry-heaving, when I heard his shouts.

He was still sloped across the escalator exit. His nose pointed the wrong way around, his face throbbed with blood, he spread his arms, he closed his fists. “I am alive!” he screamed. “I am alive! I will not die!”

I fled to a shooting gallery in an outer suburb where I rented a needle for two rubles a blast. Even in a narcotic slumber, I couldn’t escape Kirill’s proclamation of immortality.

KRESTY Prison was originally the imperial wine warehouse and stored enough booze to keep the royal family and their courtiers pickled through the long winters. After the emancipation of the serfs, when the state assumed from landlords the responsibility of locking up the newly freed, Kresty became a jail. For a century, according to my Russian civ teacher, it was the largest in Europe. After the Revolution, it’s where NKVD men beat confessions from communists and traitors. After the Collapse, it’s where drug offenders awaited trial. It was only designed to hold around a thousand inmates, but when my father went through the Komsomola Street gate, its population was ten times that.

I visited him just once, bribing a guard with a few hundred rubles I had lifted from my mom. Later, when I recounted the story to my friends, I made it sound like the prison scene in Goodfellas , my father the capo of the entire place, no worry greater than the tomato sauce recipe. But the only garlic wafting down those halls came on the guard’s breath. I followed that guard’s clicking footsteps down a long corridor into the cell blocks. Men with twigs for arms and caverns for eyes leaned against the bars. The cell my father shared with nineteen others had originally been designed for solitary confinement. It had rained earlier that morning.

The air around my father tasted of sweat, ammonia, and chlorine. He looked like a man born on a planet without vegetables or direct sunlight. “You got a smoke?” he asked me. I was nine years old.

He was released four years later. My mother had died just before his first parole hearing and state orphanages were more overcrowded than Kresty. But the parole judge was disconcertingly law-abiding and humane, perhaps the only judge in the entire Justice Ministry whose heart hadn’t been surgically removed and replaced with a charcoal briquette. He let my father off, having served only a third of his sentence. After his release he went civilian. Working as a gypsy cab driver, he stopped for every yellow light. I’d like to believe he began living honestly for my sake, but it was for his own. He feared Kresty more than the disappointments of a lawful life.