When he’s exhausted all other memories, he thinks of home. The lake of industrial runoff ringed by gravel where one summer he had sunbathed with his mother and younger brother, pretending they were on a Black Sea vacation. The nickel furnaces blurting endless exclamation marks of smoke. The pollution so dense nickel is extractable from snowdrifts. The raw-fish pinks and reds of dusk, where clouds of sulfur and palladium clot the sky. Here starlight domes the open pit. Kolya was eighteen when he saw stars for the first time. It had been his first night in Chechnya.
He still has the mixtape his brother gave him before his first tour. For Kolya. In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1. Searching for a cassette player down here is as pointless as hoping for an electrical outlet on the moon, but he keeps the gift close, wondering what his brother has spooled on its gears. It’s the only question he has that he might someday answer, his reminder to live long enough to hit play.
One morning the leathery hands appear at the pit lip, this time holding a yellow rope knotted with handholds. In training, Kolya climbed a rope twice its length in thirty seconds. It takes him two minutes to summit this one. The two brown hands that mean to Kolya both captivity and nourishment are attached to a squat elderly man with a ferocious mustache. In one hand he holds a black Makarov, the handgun favored by Kolya’s own superiors. In the other he holds two sets of leg cuffs.
“A gift from one of your generals,” the old man says, eyeing the gun proudly. He tosses the leg cuffs between them. Kolya closes his eyes and focuses on the sun’s saturating warmth. The bottom of the pit receives only a half hour of direct sunlight a day and Kolya feels he has emerged from a long Arctic winter and stepped directly into June’s bright beam.
The old man leads them past a white stone house, past a collapsed toolshed, to a sloping field. Without boots, the field is their best avenue for escape. “Land mines,” the old man says, snuffing Kolya’s dim hope. A blast hole is sunken halfway up the hill. “You’re welcome to try.”
He takes them to a bed of weeds a little way off where two shovels angle from the ground. “Begin,” he commands.
This is it, Kolya thinks. We’re digging our graves. Should they run? Should they try to overpower the old man? They could hit him in the face with the shovel before he could shoot them both. He tries to catch Danilo’s eye, but Danilo harbors no great zeal for staying alive, and come to think of it, neither does Kolya. The leg cuffs make it difficult to get much leverage on the shovel, but he manages to get three decent scoops before the old man stops him.
“Russian,” the old man mutters as if the language, culture, and people are a curse word. He takes the shovel from Kolya, kicks it into the ground, and goes to one knee to yank weeds from the loosened soil. He extracts the green clumps and then sifts through the dirt for their white veiny roots. When finished, he pulls a few seeds from his tunic and scatters them in the hole. Realizing that only seeds will be buried here, Kolya sighs, loud enough for the old man to glance up and smile.
That night, Kolya gets hard for the first time in weeks. “Did your wife send you any photos of her yet?” Kolya asks Danilo, pointing to his crotch with both index fingers. Some mornings Kolya sizes Danilo’s wife’s nipples to the coins in his pocket, and then slips the one- or two-ruble coin between his lips, closing his eyes and tonguing the coin vertical against his front teeth while he jerks off, hearing Danilo’s wife moan, telling him to lick faster, suck harder, and he always complies, because this is the closest he will ever come to the woman he loves, and the sharp brass sweating from the coin is a taste to remind him of who he is, to remind him that he is loved, a taste to savor and preserve by forgoing food and water for the rest of the day. Kolya has never seen Danilo’s wife, but Danilo claims she’s pretty enough to do porn, which as far as Kolya knows is the highest compliment you could pay someone from Irkutsk.
“Nope, but I still got that picture of your mom in the leopard-print bikini,” Danilo says.
Kolya looks to the pyramid in his lap. His dick feels like the densest of all his calcium-starved bones. It’s been so long since he’s seen a woman that any would do. Danilo passes Kolya the wrinkled photograph, still folded so Kolya and his younger brother are out of view. Kolya shakes his head. If someone had told him he’d one day be living in a pit and jerking off to a photograph of his mother, well, he’d probably have tried harder in school. In fact, he’d rethink just about all the choices he’d made if only to ensure access to a clean bed and some decent pornography.
“No shame to it,” Danilo says, seeing Kolya’s hesitation. “The ancient Greeks were always trying to fuck their own mothers. And those sickos invented civilization.”
For a moment Kolya feels so far gone he could do it. But he’s two hundred clicks from anywhere he’d call civilization and the moment passes. He folds the photograph and slips it into his pocket. “Tell me a story about your wife instead,” he says.
“I’m not telling you about my wife while you get off. We’ve got to have some kind of boundaries.”
“No, tell me something nice. Tell me again about when you met her.”
Danilo sighs and tells the story Kolya’s heard so many times it’s become a song he knows by heart. Danilo had already dropped out of his final year of school when he met the young woman who would one day become his wife. She was with one group of friends, he with another, and their quick glances were invitations to an event both were too nervous to attend. After she left, Danilo learned that she’d moved to Irkutsk from some corner of Siberia even colder and more remote. He started going back to school just to talk to her. He kept asking her out and she kept saying, “Another time,” and he kept going to school to keep asking her. Danilo had wanted a date and ended up with a high school diploma. She said, “Yes,” just before the graduation ceremony. Kolya is there beneath the auditorium’s shadow-faded heights. Kolya follows her onstage. The audience applauds. He smiles, bows, and falls into a dreamless sleep.
AS THE weeks pass, Kolya and Danilo wire-walk the line between captives and guests. The leg cuffs they donned the first time out of the pit are still fastened, though looser given the weight they’ve lost, and brittle enough to break with a good hammer strike. But the old man has granted them greater freedom. In the mornings they work the garden, weeding, planting, fertilizing, according to the old man’s instruction. They sow the herb garden that extends to the base of the mined hill. The single crater, halfway up the hill, sucks into it lingering fantasies of flight. Sometimes Kolya seats his hand in an unearthed clump of soil and watches earthworms and roller-upper bugs, an unnameable underworld of blind little bastards that rise through the dirt to promenade on his open palm, and he’s drawn back to that time in his life when he still had the chance to become someone else and is momentarily freed from who he is. At midday the old man brings him a bucket of water and greasy flatbread. Sometimes they talk for a few minutes, finding common ground in the institutional incompetence of both their respective armies.
In the afternoons, he and Danilo rebuild the collapsed shed or the white stone fence. The evenings are theirs. Escape is a vague, undefinable goodness, and they discuss it abstractly, as they would God. Sure, they could easily handle the old man, but then what? Then they’re just two bootless idiots lost in the mountains. At least with the old man alive, they’re prisoners of war. Danilo finds a length of fishing line among the debris of the shed and fastens it to the end of the yellow rope. When the old man pulls up the rope each evening, the fishing line dangles into the pit like a rip cord they’d only use in a genuine emergency.
One day while harvesting kalina berries for the old man’s sore throat, they spot a Shishiga trundling through the forest toward the dacha. As it approaches, they make out the bullet holes in the hood where Danilo had shot it. They sprint for it, as much as one can sprint in leg cuffs. When the old man emerges from the dacha with his hands raised not in surrender but in greeting, Kolya’s ballooning hope ruptures. When a soldier jumps from the truck and clasps the old man
in friendship, it deflates entirely.
“Vova?” Danilo calls when they’re close enough to recognize the soldier. The soldier takes two steps forward, cocks his head, and frowns. Behind him the old man fiddles with his prayer beads, unconcerned.
“It’s me. Danilo.”
Vova is the type of Omskman remembered for his weak chin and little else. He’d started as a conscript, leaping to contract soldier only six months earlier, which made him the runt of the unit and the target of Danilo’s bullying. Vova smiles. “That’s you under all that beard, Danilo?”
“What is this? You’re here to rescue us, right?” Danilo asks.
“No, not this time,” Vova says with so much pleasure he turns to the truck bed to conceal it. There he hoists a bucket of bullets. “We didn’t know what happened to you. Found the truck, but no Danilo or Kolya. Give me a hand with these, will you?”
Kolya and Danilo each carry two buckets of loose ammo to the shed they’ve rebuilt over the past several weeks. They’re Russian army bullets, manufactured in Russia, where they’ll one day return sealed first inside dead Russian soldiers, then inside black body bags.
After watching them hump rifles and red petrol jugs to the shed with a cheerful smirk, the old man gives Vova an envelope stuffed with green currency. Vova quickly counts the bills. “Anything you’d like me to pass on to Captain Feofan?”
Danilo stares, dumbfounded. “Tell him to get us the fuck out of here!” He pauses, for a moment unable to find the words to liberate them from the curlicue of logic that imprisons as totally as their ankle cuffs. “The captain can’t evacuate his bowels without first putting in paperwork to Moscow. You better contact my wife too.”
While Danilo writes his wife’s details on one of the mint U.S. bills, Vova asks the old man for a ransom price. The old man leans against his cane, stroking his mustache thoughtfully. He looks to Kolya. “This one is very good in the garden. He works with care and diligence. The garlic will be wonderful this year. A thousand U.S. for him. As for the imbecile,” he says, turning to Danilo, “you can have him for a barrel of cooking oil.”
Danilo raises his index finger in objection to the price disparity before thinking better of it. “Can you lend us the money, Vova? So we can buy ourselves now?”
The weak-chinned Omskman beams. Apparently he hasn’t forgotten the drunken night when Danilo made him wear a dead woman’s dress. “The slave trade is unlawful,” he says. “As your comrade, I cannot allow you to engage in it.”
“WE DIDN’T ask Vova if the colonel ever got his banya,” Kolya says that evening at the bottom of the well.
“I bet they sent two more idiots in a truck full of body bags the day we didn’t arrive. He’s probably steaming the fat from his ass right now.”
“Why did you sign the contract?” Kolya asks, a few minutes later. Danilo frowns at the question. With reason. You don’t ask questions about life before the war unless you already know the answer, and the answer better involve drunken antics and irresponsible sex.
“First time was to get out of jail,” Danilo answers plainly. “Ten years in prison or two down here. After those first two years, my wife and I married and moved into this tiny studio flat. I wanted to stay up late drinking and she wanted to get up early to practice trombone. You just can’t do both well in a studio flat. So I signed on a second time. I told her it was so we’d have enough to afford a place with two rooms, but really I just wanted some peace and quiet. Don’t know why I thought I’d find it in a war. Never the brightest pennant in the parade, as my dad liked to remind me.” Danilo closes his eyes and a quiet expression of yearning irons the wrinkles from his face. “I told myself so long as she insists on blowing her horn before noon, I’ll keep signing whatever these brass-button motherfuckers push in front of me. That’s just how love works.”
“You think?”
“I know it, man,” Danilo explains. “Some people need at least a thousand kilometers between them to stay happily married. But I don’t think I’m that husband anymore. Living in a pit changes the way you look at things, you know? I mean, to think that once my biggest grief was waking up to music.” Danilo doesn’t seem to realize he’s crying. “But everything’ll be all right if I can just get back. We can live in a broom closet and the entire Irkutsk Philharmonic can squeeze in to practice. But enough about that. Why’d you sign on?”
“It was this army man,” Kolya begins. “He told me about this guy he knew who stepped on a land mine. Both legs missing, but it’s okay, he likes sitting, he’s got a nice divan, he comes home. But right quick he learns no woman wants to get with a cripple. And that was the only thing he had any talent for. Tragedy.”
“Like the Greek kind. Speaking of which, you’ve been holding that photo of your mom real close. You sure you’re not part Greek?”
“No way,” Kolya says. He pulls the photo from his pocket and gives it back to Danilo. “But anyway, this army man tells me it’s okay. What the army takes away, the army gives back. They pay for the cripple to see a sex surrogate.”
“What’s a sex surrogate?”
“My question to him. He says it’s a doctor you fuck.”
“Like in a porn movie? Like, we need to take her temperature and your dick is the only thermometer?”
“No, like the kind of doctor that speaks Latin.”
A supernova of disbelief lights up Danilo’s eyes. “Wait, wait, wait. Doctor, doctor? Like he’s fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago?”
“Well, yeah. He’s fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago.”
“You believed him?”
“What can I say? I’m a romantic. Who wouldn’t want to believe that somewhere a cripple’s out fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago on the army’s ruble? Who wouldn’t want to believe that the world could be that just and right-sided? So here I am, getting fucked every which way but the way I signed on for.” Kolya isn’t sure if the conversation ever actually took place, or if the lunacy governing his present life is so omnipotent it’s changed his past. He lights one of the cigarettes Vova had given them. “You know what, I’m glad we got captured. I mean, we spend our days planting gardens.”
“You crazy? We’re slaves, Kolya.”
“Come on.”
“What word would you use? We wear chains. We do field labor. Doesn’t matter if we’re planting gardens, we’re living in a hole in the ground.”
True, but Kolya doesn’t care. The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn’t added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it’s peace of a kind he hadn’t imagined himself worthy of receiving. “We don’t have to shoot people here,” he says simply.
Danilo bats at the fishing line rip cord, then spits a sunflower seed husk at Kolya’s head. “Someone like you? You’re born a killer. The army doesn’t make you shoot people. They make you shoot the right people.”
Kolya tries to remember how many people he’s killed. A baker’s dozen maybe, but who knows? It’s a moral failure that keeps him awake even after he’s forgotten the faces comprising the lost figure. It began with Lydia, back home, but he tries not to think about that. What modest pay and war loot he has gathered, he’s sent home to bribe university officials on his younger brother’s behalf. Now his brother is just starting a philology degree. He won’t ever have to keep count.
“My brother read a story about us a while back,” he says. “Two assholes in Chechnya. They get captured and tossed in a pit.”
“There are literates among the Kolya clan?”
“Shocking, I know.”
“How did that story end?”
In Kolya’s recollection, one of the men escapes and the other stays behind. But that isn’t the kind of story he wants to tell tonight. “They got some sex surrogates.”
Danilo laughs. “My kind of fiction.”
“I think Tolstoy wrote it.”
r /> “He did, Pushkin did, Lermontov did, all those old bastards wrote about two assholes in a pit in Chechnya.”
“How do you know?”
“We read them in school,” Danilo answers. “My last year, in fact. When I started going back to school to ask out my wife. She wasn’t my wife then, but I knew she would be.”
“Tell me something new about her. What’s her favorite book?”
“No,” Danilo says softly. “Tonight, she’s mine.”
SUMMER clots the air to a moist spoonable heat. In Kirovsk, summers were twenty-four hours of sweater-weather light, and Kolya has grown fond of Chechen Julys with the languid green color scale, the birds without Russian names, the humidity heavy enough to drown you if you breathe too deep. He spends hours planting seeds and tending to the little green stems that spurt from the soil. He has no idea what any of them are. Growing up, food came in cans delivered to the Arctic by transport truck and ice-breaking barge. He still can’t say what goes into a loaf of bread. He rakes the dirt, amazed by its looseness, its warmth. The one time he buried a body back home, he had to empty a clip into the frozen ground to break it up enough to begin digging. When the head of the blue-handled trowel comes loose, he flings it toward the trees. From then on he does all garden work with his hands and at the end of the day they are so dark with dirt he no longer recognizes them as his.