Then he’s gone. Galina remains at the Zakharov. Even now as I’m losing it, I’m proud my painting can elicit such sustained attention.
She nods to the stick-figure silhouettes of my wife and child, smiling as she dabs the corners of her eyes. “You wouldn’t understand, but someone I once loved died in this field.”
She pats my shoulder and walks to the door.
Then she’s gone and I’m left alone with the assistant whose saccharine perfume smells of vaporized cherubs. I close my eyes and try to imagine the darkness extending into permanent night, to imagine our lives as dreams we tumble through, but I can’t imagine, because even at night I know morning will come, and even with my eyes clamped I know I will open them. What will Nadya see when she opens hers? Who will she see when she sees me?
“And you’ll have to give us a curatorial description,” the assistant says. “Something we can mount on a placard.”
She passes me the notepad and I stand before my painting for a long while before I begin. Notice how the shadows in the meadow mirror the clouds in the sky, I write. Or the way the leaves of the apricot tree blow in the same direction as the grass on the far side of the meadow. For such a master, no verisimilitude is excluded. Notice the wall of white stones cutting an angle across the composition. It both gives depth and offsets the horizon line. On the left side of the canvas, running up the hill, you will see channels of turned soil. One could assume they are freshly dug graves, or recently buried land mines, but look closer and see they are the furrows of a newly planted herb garden. The first shoots of rosemary already peek out. In this painting, Zakharov portrays all the peace and tranquility of a spring day. The sun shines comfortably and hours remain before nightfall. Toward the crest of the hill, nearing the horizon, you may notice what look to be the ascending figures of a woman and a boy. Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist. They are no more than his shadows. They are not there.
A Prisoner of the Caucasus
CHECHEN HIGHLANDS, 2000
They crest the ridge with a thump and roll onto a green terrace as the Shishiga engine gasps twice and dies. Danilo, a contract soldier, body built like a flour sack and brain wired like a bargain firecracker, curses the Shishiga, then Jesus’s mother, and doubles down on both by shooting three at the engine block and three at the clouds. Their bad luck began years before they broke down in rebel-controlled territory, but no luck is so bad that Danilo can’t make it worse: Flames flutter through the hood’s bullet holes. Still, part of Kolya is relieved to climb down from the truck and that part is his stomach. The closest paved road lies fifty kilometers behind them, and the boulder-strewn path they’ve summited has more dips and swells than a tempest. Three thousand meters above ocean level and Kolya’s doubled over with seasickness.
“You are a disgrace to your people!” Danilo shouts as he upends his canteen on the smoking engine block. “Engines like this, engines made of tin cans and sheep shit, are the reason Putin drives a Kraut car.” He ticks off Teutonic inhumanities inflicted on western civilization: Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Claudia Schiffer. “A country whose main export is bad ideas and they still manage to build better engines than us.”
Folded at the waist in mid–dry heave, Kolya watches the scene upside-down through his spread legs. It’s the only way to look at the world that makes much sense to him these days. Danilo, son of a mechanic, has a history of abusive relationships with most of the unit’s vehicles, so Kolya isn’t surprised when he begins sweet-talking the shot-up engine. With no small effort, Kolya rights himself and looks around. A green staircase of terraces ascends the ridge. Far below, a ragged trail of white rocks tapers into a backwash of muddied branches. They’re in fuck-knows-where Chechnya, on an operation that might be the stupidest Kolya has ever encountered in a career that’s been a highlight reel of futility. Behind one of these jade lumps is a block-headed colonel in need of body bags. Not in itself an unreasonable request. But Kolya knows the colonel wants to build a banya and in terms of insulation, nothing invented by God, man, or Germany can contain steam better than the heavy black plastic of a Federal Army body bag.
Kolya returns to the truck. Danilo moves back behind the wheel. He coaxes the ignition, pumps the gas. The starter motor gags. Danilo gives Kolya a slow shake of his head. “It won’t start.”
“Because you shot it,” Kolya says.
“Your point?”
“No point,” Kolya sighs. Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points. It’s as comforting as believing in Ded Moroz, but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence. “No point at all.”
“Once I got shot while I was jerking off and you know what I did?”
“Depends where you got shot.”
Danilo gives him a don’t-doubt-me glare. “I manned up and I finished, Kolya. It was easy with that photo of your mom in the leopard-print bikini.”
Kolya elbows him in the kidney.
“Don’t worry,” Danilo says. “I folded it so you and your little bro were out of view. And I didn’t get a drop of blood on it.”
“It’s not blood I’m worried about.”
“Point is, I finished my mission. Unlike this goddamn engine.” Danilo slams his fist into the steering column and Kolya waits it out before suggesting they reevaluate their options. They climb out from the truck and unfold their map on the ground. Kolya had made it by taping sheets of notepaper over command’s computer monitor, tracing pictures of antique maps of Chechnya, and then pasting the sheets together in what he hoped was the right order.
“Which way’s north?” Danilo asks.
Kolya pulls out a compass that points north no matter which direction he holds it. “Which way do you want it to be?”
“We should check the map,” Danilo surmises.
They check the map. Having forgotten to include a legend within the map itself, they examine the map, squint at the horizon, quarter-turn the map, frown at the horizon, and repeat a half-dozen more times without discovering any of the map on the land or any of the land on the map.
“We can’t find north on the map and we can’t find north where we are. We are more than fucked,” Kolya says.
“The map’s fucked. We’re fine.” Danilo scans the ridge. “That fat old bastard’s got to be here somewhere. It’s supposed to be a day’s drive, right? We’ve been driving, what, five hours? That’s a day, right?”
Kolya’s from the wrong side of the Arctic Circle, from Kirovsk, where a winter day is a fifteen-minute glow on the horizon. “Sure,” he says.
It’s clear they’ll have to set out on foot. They have a radio, but it hasn’t worked in several years and they carry it as a good luck charm more than anything; even in that capacity, it isn’t working. They pack up as many of the body bags as they’re able, to prove they aren’t deserters in case a patrol picks them up. With two body-bag-stuffed parachute duffels, and whatever provisions and extra ammo they can pocket, they set off.
They only make it fifty meters when Danilo drops his parachute bag. “Hold up,” he says and jogs back to the Shishiga to empty the rest of his clip into the engine block. The eight staccato blasts multiply off the valley walls in a brief but thunderous applause for Danilo’s coup de grâce. When Danilo returns, he looks much more chipper.
“Was that necessary?” Kolya asks. He should be irate with Danilo for wasting the ammo, but more seriously, for announcing themselves to any rebel in a ten-kilometer radius. It’s April 2000 and the army has sealed the bulk of the Chechen insurgents within the topographical confines of the southern mountains, an area into which generals issue demands with the ineffectual bluster of zookeepers shouting into a cage. But Kolya can’t summon the appropriate anger. Whatever life-preserving instincts evolution endowed him with have been war-blunted to an amused disregard for all mortality, pa
rticularly his own.
“Don’t you worry yourself,” Danilo says. “We know two things about our revered colonel. First, that he loves his banyas. Second, that he’s a cur-hearted coward less likely to see action than my left hand. If he’s around here, then here is as safe as my grandmother’s lap.”
Kolya wouldn’t put much trust in anyone involved with raising Danilo. But he shoulders his parachute duffel and his Kalashnikov and follows Danilo into the valley.
THEY spend the night zipped inside the body bags. In the morning Kolya drinks from a stream that runs clearer than any faucet he’s ever known. Upon closer inspection, it’s not a stream but an ancient irrigation canal that continues to water the terraces a century after the soil was last tilled. They decide to march downhill and Kolya points the busted compass toward the valley to officially make it the right direction. Trees prosper on the valley floor and dwindle to waist-high grasses as they climb another ridge. Vertical seams of white stone split the green slopes at haphazard intervals. The soreness in Kolya’s heels is less a physical pain than a physical fact he’s as familiar with as the color of his eyes.
Beyond the next ridge an emerald field gradually unrolls, dead-ending into trees. With binos, Danilo scans the straightedge of woodland cutting across the meadow. They go quickly and somewhat ridiculously, bent at the waist in a crouched shuffle as if the open field has been rolled into a tight tunnel. Discrete packets of panic burst in Kolya each time the wind shifts the grass, or the shadow of a bird cuts over the ground. He focuses on his breathing to delay an oncoming anxiety attack. Over the past year he’s developed a deep mistrust of open spaces and now can’t cross anything wider than a doorframe without wondering if he’s walking into a sniper’s scope.
When they reach the tree line, Danilo snaps up his arm with tight-lipped alarm.
Kolya freezes.
Danilo farts.
“Devil,” Kolya mutters, cuffing Danilo on the shoulder. “You’ll give me a heart attack before the rebels ever get me.”
“Oh no,” Danilo says. His face, often formed of diagonals—slanted eyebrows, sneered lips, sloped cheeks that together resemble a crudely drawn demon—completely wilts.
“Fuck off,” Kolya says.
“It won’t be a heart attack.” Danilo nods into the forest, where Kolya catches sight of a dozen rebels gathered around the remains of a campfire. They hold their rifles in their right hands, bowls of kasha in their left, apparently alerted by Danilo’s flatulence. Twelve barrels stare up at Kolya, and the fear that had loosened its grip in his chest since he crossed the field now crushes his heart with both hands.
They drop their parachute bags and raise their arms as they are relieved of their weapons, ammo, and boots. The man patting Kolya down misses the cassette tape buttoned into his shirt pocket. The rebels sport full beards, slender waists, and mud-spattered plastic and leather sandals. One wears a green headband squirming with Arabic script. The one patting Kolya’s calves for concealed sidearms has the straightest, whitest teeth he’s ever seen. The scrawny kid with almond eyes doesn’t have the beard of an insurgent yet, but Kolya knows that’s what he is, deep down, just as he’d feared himself capable of murder long before he ever picked up a gun.
“Kontraktniki,” the rebels whisper. From their tattoos and black sleeveless shirts, Danilo and Kolya are obviously mercenaries rather than conscripts. The rebels deal with captured conscripts—all poorly trained and terrified teenagers—more leniently than contract soldiers, who collectively conduct themselves like Russian Rambos with less discriminate aim.
A tall, silent man in a Tesco T-shirt kicks Kolya’s legs from under him and binds his wrists from behind with wire. He lies on the ground beside Danilo. Behind them, younger insurgents sift through their belongings. The tall one doesn’t leave their sides. We’ll die today, Kolya realizes, but rather than horror or surprise, the realization hits him like the first breath after a long, dark dive under water.
The tall man spreads open two body bags in front of Kolya and Danilo. “Get in,” he orders.
Danilo begins to protest, but a swift rifle butt to his temple interrupts the plea. Kolya watches two younger rebels fold Danilo into the black plastic body bag like a poorly tailored suit into a garment bag. The second bag lies open on the ground, and with a sigh, he climbs in legs first and is zipped up.
They lie there for an indeterminate interval while the rebels talk in Chechen. The body bag traps all of Kolya’s heat. The whole goddamn thing smells like the inside of his boot. There’s a two-centimeter gap in the zipper and he puts his mouth to it as if to a nipple and sucks. He keeps waiting for the sifting of dirt, the ring of spade on rock, and when several strong hands lift the corners of the body bag, his throat clenches and he thinks: this is it, this is it, this is it. But rather than falling, he is raised. Rather than dirt, he feels the ribbed plastic of a truck bed slide under him.
The ignition thrums to life. German make, no doubt. The truck jolts forward.
The seconds unspool and in the dank darkness Kolya finds himself wondering what Danilo’s wife is doing at that moment. Where she is, what she’s wearing, what thoughts are dreaming their way through her mind. Only four men in the unit are married and their wives have become communal. In small Siberian towns, those four wives will never know that in Chechnya they’re polygamous, that soldiers they’ll never meet yearn for and wish after them. Some compose long love letters, never sent. Others rewrite their wills to bequeath their modest possessions—a hunting knife, an ammo belt—to women known only in their imaginations. Danilo’s wife had grown up in Irkutsk as the granddaughter of a barber rumored to have once trimmed Stalin’s mustache. As a child she’d wanted to play the violin, but the violin teacher had taken one look at her cigar-stub fingers and told her to take up the trombone instead, even though she was a girl. That trombone might’ve saved her life when grain shortages hit the city: Party bigwigs wanted a healthy horn section on call for fanfares in case someone from Moscow visited, so she received upgraded ration coupons while the violin teacher went hungry. She has wet-grass green eyes and a Prometheus disco light set. All throughout childhood her father told her that only a mousetrap offers free cheese, but she’d already left home and couldn’t repeat the proverb back to him when he decided to invest his life’s savings in a bank account that promised a five-hundred-percent annual return. She can still perform patriotic fanfares when required, but prefers big-band jazz, and when she plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” her single trombone sounds like a twelve-piece band. From the raw materials of Danilo’s stories, Kolya has built himself a life with her. Believing in the unconditional love of a woman he’s never seen, never met, is the closest he’s ever felt to God’s grace.
He rolls over and speaks through the two-centimeter gap. “You there?”
Danilo rolls over too. They’re lying side by side, bagged bodies nearly touching, passing a single breath back and forth through the small slit in their zippers. The truck lurches beneath them.
“I guess I am,” Danilo answers. They both know better than to speculate on what’s to come.
“Hum that song about the marching saints for me,” Kolya whispers. But whatever Danilo hums is lost in the wind-whipped velocity of the accelerating truck.
They don’t speak again, but the muggy lightless coffin becomes less oppressive to Kolya when he thinks of Danilo suffering too. Minutes and hours lose their edges inside the body bag, and Kolya has no idea how much time has passed when the truck stops. With a heave, Kolya is carried thirty paces. “One, two, three,” a voice counts in Chechen, and then Kolya is weightless, aloft, and falling. Two seconds later the impact knocks the breath from his lungs and his left shoulder from its socket. His breath finds its way back a few moments before his shoulder. He lies there in the body bag, paralyzed with pain, waiting for the first clump of dirt to scatter over him. A descending scream and a hard thump announces Danilo’s arrival. Kolya goes to work on the zipper with his teeth and
eventually pulls it far enough to fit his head through.
“Where are we?” Danilo asks. They’re in a pit, what might have once been a wide well. The stone walls rise six or seven meters to a tight circle of sky. It’s wide for a well, but not wide for a prison, two and a half meters across, he guesses. He squirms out of the body bag and unzips Danilo’s. Sitting back to back, they untie each other’s wrists.
THE weeks shrink from seven days to five, counted first on Kolya’s left hand, then his right, then Danilo’s left hand, then his right. Each morning a pair of sun-browned hands appears at the lip of the pit to lower jugs of water that become latrines by noon. Disks of bread fall from the sky and plop into the dirt with disorienting irregularity. At two weeks, Kolya and Danilo are nearly as bearded as the rebels who tossed them in here. At three weeks, a matchbook-size soap bar drops. It’s from a Saudi hotel. Kolya dips it in a water jug but can’t summon a single bubble from the stupid thing. Danilo grabs it from him. Peeling off his shirt, Danilo shows Kolya the bullet hole in his left shoulder where he’d been shot mid-jerk. It’s hardened to a pink coin of scar tissue. Danilo has six others scattered over his torso and legs and surrounding each are homemade tattoos of irises, lids, and lashes. When Danilo bends to try the bone-dry bar on his feet, his back stares up at Kolya.
On cold nights Kolya climbs into his body bag and zips it to his chin. Although the two body bags are demonstrably identical, Kolya has grown attached to his. He’s tried to personalize it, to tear through the sealed seams, to write his name in mud on the canvas carry handles, all token efforts to inflict enough change on his one possession to convince himself that he’s actually alive, that this isn’t some metaphysical holding pen, because a few days in the bottom of a pit with Danilo has taught him all he needs to know about eternity. Sometimes Kolya thinks of his captain, Feofan, a man who always wears his uniform, even to sleep. Behind his back the soldiers would joke that he’d collapse on the ground like loose straw without his fatigues to give him shape. The body bag has begun to feel to Kolya what the uniform must feel to Feofan.