Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“It’s your inheritance. When you become a father, you can put photos of yourself on the wall and your son will think you’re a deluded narcissist.”

“Let’s hope you live a long time yet,” Sergei said. He coughed into his fist. “A couple years ago, I found the website of an art historian in Grozny. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on your uncle. The censor.”

His father said nothing.

“She’s putting on some sort of museum exhibition on him next month, here in Petersburg.”

“Last I checked, digging up graves and horsing around with the skeletons is still against the law,” his father said.

“I’m not sure old photographs on a wall are the same thing.”

“Just because something’s not illegal doesn’t make it right.”

“Says the man with old photographs on his walls.”

His father responded by making a farting sound with his lips. Sergei flopped into the tea-stained armchair. He knew, of course, that his father had typed the name roman osipovich markin into the search engine, had left it there for Sergei to find. Neither of them could risk the vulnerability of a direct request; instead each had become sensitized to the intimations of the other. Sergei would make a suggestion and his father would refuse. The more adamant his father’s resistance, the closer Sergei felt to the raw nerve anchored so deeply in his father it may have been his soul.

“Go with me, Papa.”

“Never.”

Vladimir

A thick paste of July humidity plugged the spaces between Nevsky Prospekt traffic on the evening the temporary exhibition opened. Vladimir’s watch read half past seven. The sun, bright in the sky, warm on his face, said early afternoon. Too early, too late — Vladimir couldn’t tell anymore.

“Let’s go in,” Sergei said. They’d been circling the block for an hour. “It’s nearly over.”

At the corner, a spindly ice-cream vendor knelt and stuck his head in the freezer.

“You think a freezer does the job as well as an oven?” Vladimir asked.

“I think he’s just trying to stay cool.”

Vladimir scanned the street for another potential instrument of self-harm. It shouldn’t have been so hard. The most inconceivable deaths fell within the municipal borders of any major metropolis. Standing on a street corner in Petersburg should place one in mortal jeopardy.

Let me die before I pass the ice cream stand.

He passed the ice cream stand.

Let me die before I reach the blind man selling sunglasses .

He passed the sunglass stand.

Just ahead the gallery loomed. The polished door handle glinted. If he passed right now — a heart attack, a bolt of lightning — he would, in his last moment, consider himself spared from whatever awaited him inside.

Let me die before I open it .

He opened it.

A few attendees meandered through the exhibit. Vladimir would remember none of them. He would remember opening the door for his son, stepping into the cool gallery air, looking up to see the mug shot of his uncle, blown up two meters tall, staring directly at him. Roman Markin: 1902–1937 .

“Are you okay?” his son asked.

He hadn’t realized he was leaning on Sergei. “I’m sorry. Your leg.”

“My leg’s fine. What’s wrong?”

“Nineteen thirty-seven. That’s when, that’s when I told my teacher that my uncle was a spy.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I thought maybe he’d go to jail for a few weeks, until he was found innocent. How could he be shot for something he didn’t do?”

“It was the middle of the purges. He was just unlucky, that’s all. You were just a boy, Papa.”

A woman wearing a long skirt and too much makeup approached. Raised relief scar tissue was mapped over her left cheek.

“I was just a snitch,” Vladimir said, and turned back to the mug shot. “A snitch.”

The name tag on the woman’s blouse read Nadya Dokurova, Exhibition Curator .

“Thank you for coming,” the curator said.

Uncle , he thought.

“We appreciate your interest,” she said.

Uncle , he thought.

“The museum is closing now,” she said.

Uncle , he thought.

“Is he okay?”

I don’t want to die.

“Sir?”

Not yet.

“Do you need a doctor, Papa?”

Not yet, son .

Sergei wrapped his arm around Vladimir’s waist to steady him. “I’ve got you,” he said. Vladimir let Sergei lead him to a wooden chair beside a tray of untouched cheese cut into damp cubes. The woman fanned his face with an exhibition catalog.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Sergei gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Ask her what you need to,” he said. “You need to.”

What has happened to my asshole boy? Who is this wise man he has become?

“This censor, this Roman Markin—” Vladimir nodded to the enlarged mug shot taken in Kresty the night the censor was arrested “—tell me about him. Please.”

The curator peered at her watch and pursed her lips to a pale, uncertain point, but it was clear from the stack of unread catalogs, the untouched cubes of damp cheese, that attendance for the exhibition opening had been lackluster. Here, perhaps, were interested visitors.

“He was arguably the USSR’s most talented and productive censor,” she said. “His technical mastery was unrivaled. If he’d put his efforts into painting, rather than censoring, this wouldn’t be the first exhibit of his work.”

“Why was he arrested?” Vladimir asked.

The woman steepled her index fingers. “It’s unclear. In nineteen thirty-seven he was convicted on trumped-up charges that he’d been involved with a dancer in connection with a supposed Polish spy ring. A scripted confession appears in the court records, but witnesses to the trial have said that he refused to testify or confess.”

“But why? Who informed on him?”

She shrugged. “He worked for the state in nineteen thirty-seven. There’s no why about it. Work in a barbershop long enough and someday you’ll be the one getting your hair cut.”

He could have turned toward the door now. Sergei would have understood. Their silhouettes lay across the empty museum floor. The curator glanced at her watch, down to him, hesitated, then asked, “Feel like taking a tour?”

She took them along one side of the gallery, explaining the security apparatus’s awe for the power of images, the history of alteration and censorship, the India-ink masks, the early application and refinement of that postmodern tool of photographic manipulation: the airbrush. He leaned on Sergei. They passed a wall of men and women with inked-out faces.

In a side gallery, a painting of Rousseau’s jungle cat hung in a glass stand. He circled it: Stalin on one side, the leopard on the other. Beside it hung a nineteenth-century pastoral flushed with soft greens and yellows.

The curator was speaking and Sergei was nodding, but Vladimir didn’t hear them. A jungle cat parted wide fronds. Leaves as wide as dinner plates flopped overhead. A red sun shimmered.

“This is where it all began for me,” the curator said as she led them back to the main gallery. “This is the image the prosecution used in Markin’s trial. But it also contains one of Markin’s mysteries. Take a look. See if you notice anything odd.”

In the first photograph a hand floated over a stage. The original, unaltered image hung beside it, printed from a stray negative strip that had outlived the Soviet Union in a mislabeled file cabinet. Vladimir studied the dancer: dark locks flecked with spotlight; gray irises beneath the double arch of thin eyebrows; a laurel of dark feathers; ears rather average.