Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

A few months after his release, I got my ass beat by a couple older kids. I came home with black eyes and a gashed-up forehead. My father looked me over.

“Who did this to you?” he asked.

“It was—” I began, but his hand shot out before I could finish, and he stabbed his finger into the cut on my forehead.

“My son, a snitch?” he asked.

I began to scream, but he clamped his palm over my mouth and watched me with these hollowed, betrayed eyes.

“All these photos of myself on the walls, you think I’m some sort of narcissist, I know,” he said. I’d fallen back against the kitchen table. The cut on my temple wasn’t deep, but my skull felt impaled on his pressing finger.

“I can’t remember my father’s face because my uncle made my mother scratch it from every photo with a coin.”

I thrashed my legs. I slapped my hands across the tabletop for a knife to slice him, a fork to skewer him. My lips squashed in his grip. His finger hadn’t left the open cut.

“A few years later, I asked my mother what had happened to my father, and she said that man who had come to our flat, who had told me this lovely fairy tale about a tsar and his court painters, that man, my uncle, had been involved. Maybe he informed on my father, she didn’t know, but she knew he wouldn’t have come to our flat to warn us if he hadn’t been guilty of something. The next day in school I went to my teacher and made up a story that my uncle was a subversive, that I had seen him conducting business with foreigners. I wanted revenge. Somebody had to pay. I didn’t know the man I snitched on. I’d only met him for a few minutes one early morning.”

His face was broken with tenderness.

“You can hate me, so long as you don’t become me. Do you understand?”

I could barely breathe.

“I’m trying to teach you to be a better man.”

He let me go. He wiped the blood from my face with his shirtsleeves. He didn’t wipe his cheeks. He opened the window, picked three icicles, and broke them with the back of a butcher’s knife. He slid them into a plastic shopping bag and pressed it to my face. I shook as he washed the dirt from my bruises. “Be brave,” he demanded, holding my mangled face in his palms. He gave me a tall glass of vodka before going back in with the washcloth. “A man who walks with fear only crawls. He deserves all the suffering of the world.”

“I won’t deserve it,” I promised. Even though my face was pasted in mucus and tears, my father beamed at me with pride.

I LOST two nights, my virginity, and all of Kirill’s money. In my head an industrious blacksmith pounded away. In my stomach hurricanes brewed. Somewhere a diva belted. Couldn’t tell her vibrato from the hum in my veins. In the corner a shadeless lamp was connected to an outlet in the next building over by an extension cord laundry-lined across the alley. From nowhere came a man with crutches. He feet were the size and shade of black bread loaves. No human shoes would ever fit them. He pulled a bag of white powder from his pocket, scattered it on a cooking sheet, and mixed in a different white powder with a razor. In the corner a boy drew ferocious breasts on the wall. The man asked him for a marker and started drawing on my arms. He kept telling me the Latin names for veins and arteries, unreal the study he’d put into the science of self-destruction. The next morning I woke next to a woman with spiderwebs of gray hair. She had deeply burrowed brown eyes that barely reflected light. “First morning you’re a man,” she said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Three hundred rubles,” she said. Then I understood. “You want a toothbrush?” she asked. I told her I didn’t need one, and she said, “But you do, young man. You need to keep those teeth clean. With a healthy set of teeth there’s no telling what you’ll make of yourself.” I bought the toothbrush and shot up again, piercing the little red boat someone had drawn on a blue tributary of vein. I couldn’t make sense of my fingers. What lunatic god would trust me with so many of them? White paint chips shook from the ceiling. I waited for it all to collapse. How many years would I get for nearly killing Kirill, and would they be any worse than serving in Chechnya?

When I returned home, I expected police cars, but nothing waited for me but the same rusted bike frames locked to a lamppost and stripped of their hardware. The same dust lay on the same stairs and I climbed to the top floor. Not to apologize, I just didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t see my father.

Kirill’s door was unlocked. He sat in the wheelchair, an ice pack pressed to his cheek, the pistol on the table beside him. His face made his stumps look like the least of his mutilations. He didn’t grab for the phone or call for help. Just reached for the gun and set it between his duct-taped thighs.

He looked at me with the expression I reserved for people like him.

“You need to go downstairs,” he calmly said.

“Am I going to jail? Have you told the police?”

He was offended by the questions and answered simply, “I was a junior sergeant.”

His chin dipped in and out of a shadow. His remaining teeth were spare pins in the bowling lane of his mouth. He wasn’t at all afraid of me. I hated him for it.

“Go downstairs, Seryozha. You aren’t going to prison.”

But I stepped forward. Raised my hands. One step became a second and a third. One click released the safety, a second cocked the hammer. He held the gun between his stumps. My knee was two meters from the barrel when he realized what I was asking. He nodded with a slow ache of understanding and it was all I could do not to weep with relief. I began to thank him but the gunshot swallowed my gratitude. The floor fell from under me. The bullet passed through my knee. I don’t know how long I lay there before I crawled to him, and he lifted me into his arms, and whispered, “You are alive. You are alive. You are alive.”

ST. PETERSBURG, 2011–2013

Vladimir

“Hello, is this Mrs. Jonanne McGlinchy of 1898 Calvert Road, Ohio? Yes, and your birthday is October 12, 1942? My name is John Smith from IRS. Yes, madam. To my displeasure, your taxes will to be audited unless you provide certain informations. First, you must tell to me your Social Security and bank account numbers. Also, your mother’s maiden name. To verify your identity, yes. At IRS, we take the identity theft most seriously.”

Look at him go! An incredible thing, really. To sit in the gloom of the Chernyshevskaya Cybercafé and watch his boy work. Some kind of prodigy, Vladimir’s boy. In the case of nature versus nurture, Vladimir threw his support behind the plaintiff. The stuff of eugenicists’ dreams runs through Sergei’s veins.

Don’t get cocky, Vladimir. Fatherhood points aren’t doled for time served. Should look up at the library the fathers of other wunderkinds: Mozart, Pushkin, et cetera. They too absent in children’s formative years? Father’s absence forces child to grow up sooner, accelerating child’s emotional, creative, artistic maturity?

“Ha! Very witty,” Sergei continued, two chairs down, broadcasting broken English into a wiry headset, the café bustle tuned out. “I assure you, KGB and IRS do not have exchange program.”

Too much life in his voice to pull off convincing bureaucratese. Too much love in his labor. Only trust a government worker whose personality is as thin and stamped upon as a time card. But who’s Vladimir to question the maestro?

“Take your time, Mrs. McGlinchy,” Sergei said. “Pocketbooks can be most difficult to find.”

Vladimir had missed graduation ceremonies and chess tournaments on account of incarceration. He had never seen his son perform for him. Had this beaming pride been building in him all along, concentrating in his system like a magnificent mercury poisoning?