Summer is fighting season and rebels arrive every few weeks to resupply from the munitions stockpile Vova left in the rebuilt toolshed. When he spots the rebels in the distance the old man hurries Kolya and Danilo toward the pit, his stout little legs miraculously cured of whatever affliction makes necessary his cane. He smears mud on their faces, ruffles their hair, and sends them down the yellow rope with instructions to hold their hands behind their backs and moan from time to time.
“Why?” Kolya calls up.
“Russians,” the old man laments, as if their ethnicity is the most pitiable aspect of their current state. He’s peering over the lip of the pit, his face an inky sun-silhouetted pool. “If they think I’m beating you, they won’t feel they have to.”
Two rebels look into the pit an hour later. Garbed in bandannas and fat-framed sunglasses, they look more like members of a late-Beatles cover band than of a jihadi insurgency. Kolya and Danilo moan and writhe on cue and they nod with satisfaction.
The following morning the old man orders Kolya into the dacha to clean up. Refuse from the rebels’ visit—tea-stained mugs, bread crust, dried rice kernels, bandannas streaked with gun lubricant, fuses of homemade Khattabka hand grenades—are strewn in a manner suggesting that the old man doesn’t rank highly within the insurgency. A multitude of overlapping woven rugs cover the walls and floor, so many that Kolya at first can’t tell where the floor ends and the walls begin. Some of the patterned arabesques resemble sabers, others the daydreams of a meticulously warped mind, but all display a painstaking artistry as antiquated as the rugs themselves. Kolya fingers the rug at his feet, unable to remember the last time he touched something so fine.
Bookcases line the living room’s far wall. The cracked-leather spines look bound in the same century the rugs were woven. “Any of these good?” Kolya asks.
“They belong to the previous tenant,” the old man says. A heavy sadness is anchored to the word previous. With a sigh the man hoists himself from the divan and pulls a brown tome from the bottom shelf. Its pages are rimmed with gold, like those of a holy book.
The old man splays the book on his lap and points to a photograph of an oil painting stretching across two glossy pages. It’s a landscape you wouldn’t look at twice from a car window, the type of monumentally dull painting that adds to Kolya’s general suspicion that artists are always trying to pull one over on him. “Recognize it?” the old man asks.
It does look familiar. A moment and the sense of familiarity upgrades to recognition. The field cresting two thirds up the canvas, the well, the toolshed, the white stone wall Danilo is now repairing. It’s the very landscape that stretches outside. “Where’s our pit?”
“Right there,” the old man says, tapping the painted well with pleasure. “See how there is no pail or winch? The well had probably already run dry and was already converted for prisoners when this was painted.” He huffs on his spectacles and cleans them with a pinch of his white tunic. Without his glasses, his face looks made of loose skin that had once, maybe, belonged to a larger man. When’s the last time Kolya has seen an old man? Average male life expectancy in Kirovsk hovers somewhere in the high forties and while elderly men aren’t mythical creatures, they aren’t quite of this realm.
“So our fieldwork is to make the land look like it did back when this was painted?”
The old man nods with apparent admiration. “You are not one hundred percent idiot,” he says. Kolya takes it as an expression of great respect. “The property looked peaceful, didn’t it, before all of this awful business? We’ll make it look like this again. This is the blueprint.”
In the painting, the garden extends halfway up the left side of the hill that is now mined and punctured with a blast crater. The garden Kolya has planted and cultivated stops far short. “The garden, we won’t get it the rest of the way up the hill, will we?”
“No, not with the mines there.” The old man falls silent and dips an almond into an ashtray of honey.
“Who lived here before you?” Kolya ventures.
“My daughter and grandson.”
“I’m sorry,” Kolya says after a long, uncomfortable moment staring into the ashtray of honey to avoid the old man’s eyes. It hits him that this is the first time he’s ever said those two words in relation to a killing. And he had nothing to do with this one.
A WEEK later Kolya is tending the garden when the asthmatic heave of the Shishiga announces Vova’s return. The suspension sags beneath the mass of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, RPG rounds, an armory so large half the roof has been cut away to accommodate it all. Steam shoots through the bullet-holed hood as the truck summits a knobby incline to reach the dacha.
“Well?” Danilo asks.
With procedural solemnity befitting a papal pronouncement, Vova unfolds a note, sits a pair of reading glasses on his steeply sloped nose, takes a deep breath, clears his throat, takes another deep breath, and reads. “ ‘Dear Nikolai Kalugin and Danilo Beloglazov. I hate you. May the devil take you both. Respectfully yours, Captain Feofan Domashev.’ ”
Danilo grunts but nothing follows. Vova folds the letter, then his reading glasses, and returns both to his shirt pocket.
“The colonel’s banya was built three weeks late because of your little excursion,” Vova explains. “The colonel gave the captain a barrel of shit, which the captain’s now pouring on your heads. Chain of command, I’m afraid.”
“What about my wife?” Danilo asks. “Can she come up with the ransom?”
“Danilo. Man, I’m the bearer of bad news,” Vova says with a grin. Never has bad news been more happily borne. “I had to remind her who you were.”
“She’s forgetful,” Danilo snaps.
“Brother, she doesn’t know you.”
Danilo leaps forward and Kolya instinctively holds him back with one arm, like a parent to a child in a car stopping short. “Vova,” Kolya says. “I know you’ve got grudges to settle with Danilo, but this isn’t the time or place. What did his wife really say?”
“Believe whatever you want. I called her and she thought I was playing a prank. It took her a few minutes to remember some creep named Danilo Beloglazov who kept asking her out her last year of school.”
“She’s ly—” Danilo’s voice breaks. “She’s lying.”
“She said she’s been married to an electrician for five years. They have a four-year-old son.”
Danilo holds his cheeks in his large hands. His red eyes radiate substratum pain, an ache so deep and unyielding that Kolya witnesses it as a geologic event. And Kolya, he’s reeling. In a unit stocked with more liars, crooks, and bullshitters than the Duma, no one had once doubted the existence of Danilo’s wife. A half-dozen soldiers have survived the war thanks to their imaginary marriages to her. The hope she’s given the unit is real and unequivocal and in that sense she’s an act of generosity that Kolya had assumed extinct in Chechnya. Kolya recalls the painting the old man showed him and he’s a little disgusted that some nineteenth-century syphilitic so unambitious he merely reproduces reality should be venerated while at the bottom of that meticulously painted well lives a half-literate, borderline lunatic maker of miracles. Meanwhile, the miracle maker is shaking like an anesthetized thing slowly coming to life.
“Take us back with you,” Danilo pleads in a voice whittled to a whimper. Kolya wants to reach out and take his friend in his arms and sway side to side as he did when his younger brother woke from nightmares of dark, endless forests. He hadn’t known Danilo was still capable of shock, of disappointment, and he envies and pities him for it. The old man emerges from the dacha with a blue cellophane cookie bag bulging with money. “Please. Right now,” Danilo says. “Put one between his eyes and we’ll just go.”
“I can’t do that,” Vova says. “These are our business partners.”
“They’re our enemies.”
“They’re our counter party. But I do have some good news. You two have officially been declared dead.”
> “How is that good news?” Kolya asks.
“Before you were listed as deserters.”
Kolya leads Vova a few meters from tear-streaked Danilo. “Don’t tell the unit about Danilo’s wife,” Kolya says and holds Vova’s gaze until he’s sure the weak-chinned Omskman will obey.
“Okay. And I’m sorry,” Vova says, frowning from Danilo to Kolya, unsure where to direct his condolences. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Kolya and Danilo, widowers for all of three minutes, bow their heads and stare at the dirt.
REBELS arrive later that afternoon to pick up the new stock of munitions. Their voices, coming from the dacha long into the night, are still audible when Danilo announces his intent to escape. “I got to get back. My wife needs me,” he says.
A half-moon sits low in the star-buttoned sky. An ache relays down Kolya’s vertebrae as he sits up, from his neck to the base of his spine. “We need to prepare. Need a map, provisions. More than anything we need boots,” Kolya points out.
Danilo gives Kolya a deadened stare. “I’m leaving tonight.” Without further explanation, he begins filling his body bag with handfuls of dirt. When Danilo has filled it with a narrow body of soil, he stands and assesses his work. “Good enough. You should do the same, Kolya. They’ll think we’re just sleeping in tomorrow.”
Kolya is zipped in to his waist. He presses his head back against the white stone wall, draws meaningless shapes in the dirt floor. This well, this pit has become for him a burrow. He considers the endpoints of escape—reenlistment, death, home—and the happiest outcome he can envision is this, right here, recaptured and resentenced to work a peaceful plot of land. It’s as much as he can hope for right now. He’s lived longer than he ever expected, longer than he has any right to live, and he’s tired. His twenty-third birthday is still three weeks away.
“You’ll have to take this mission solo,” Kolya says. Danilo studies Kolya for a long moment, then pulls the photo of Kolya’s bikini-clad mother from his pocket and offers it. Kolya unfolds the two wrinkled wings where he and his brother stood, shirtless and swimsuited, arms locked around their mother’s pale, fleshy waist. He can’t remember who had taken the photo, or when, or where, or why. He can barely recall that little family, that three-citizen-republic bordered by the Polaroid frame. If he were to unbutton his pants right now, he wouldn’t feel the faintest twitch of shame.
“Don’t give that picture too much of a workout,” Danilo says. He pulls the fishing line rip cord with a dramatic flourish and the knotted yellow rope flops over the edge of the pit. Kolya folds the photo into a tight pellet and tosses it to Danilo when he reaches the top. “Send that to my brother. Tell him you’re the asshole who escaped.”
He keeps the mixtape, For Kolya, In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1, buttoned in his breast pocket. There’s still time, he tells himself, to hear what it has to say.
DANILO catches the folded photo, gives Kolya a half-cocked salute, and wades into the India-ink night with his shirt wrapped around his leg cuffs to muffle the clatter. His escape routes are limited. He could try the hill, and whatever lies beyond its crest, but it’s mined. He could try the stone path the rebels drove up on, but that would be the first place they’d search for him. The woods, he decides, are his best bet. He’s nearly reached them when something slashes from the ground into his right foot. Pain pulsates from the ball of his foot, up his leg, through his chest, exiting through his throat in an involuntary gasp. It must be a land mine, he thinks as he buckles into the grass. But there is no explosion, no flame, just silent agony enveloping his foot. He bites down on his wrist to steady his breathing and examines his foot. Blood spits from the wound and drips down a deeply lodged trowel blade. He takes the blade in both hands. With a terrific wrench, he withdraws the blade and the void fills with an agony so searing that white light flashes on the backs of his closed eyelids. Before his adrenaline expires, he crawls to the tree line.
Under a screen of floppy green leaves, Danilo collapses. His foot has been replaced with some awful instrument whose only purpose is to hurt. A breath rises from the cellar at the center of his chest and leaves his lips in a shrill, unfamiliar cry. He lifts his hands to the trees in surrender. “I give up,” he announces, no longer caring if the rebels hear him, no longer caring about anything. When did he begin telling people that his secondary school crush was his wife? There must have been a moment of deliberate deception, but his mind has been so jumbled for so long he can’t discern now. He can see his wedding so clearly. He wore a thirty-thousand-ruble suit. She couldn’t stop kissing him. They honeymooned in Moscow, posing for photographs in front of the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s and GUM. His father emerged from wherever he had disappeared to ten years earlier and shook Danilo’s hand saying, “I was wrong about you.”
The night is a sweat-slick fever dream. His wife stands at the well-scrubbed sink, wearing the paisley apron he bought her one spring day four and a half months after New Year’s and four and a half months before her birthday, the day of the year when she was farthest from presents, and thus, the day Danilo most wanted to give her one. She’s wearing the paisley apron that had made her flush with happiness when she unwrapped it from pink tissue paper, not that the paisley apron was itself responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks, no apron wrapped in pink tissue paper has ever brought anything but disappointment to the recipient, rather Danilo was responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks because he had counted the days from New Year’s and then counted the days to her birthday, and calculated the day in her annual orbit at which she was farthest from presents, and surprised her with a paisley apron that on New Year’s or her birthday would have disappointed her, but on that particular day, in that particular pink tissue paper, made her feel unbelievably loved. She’s wearing the paisley apron and she’s standing at the well-scrubbed sink and her back is to him so he cannot see her face. She’s standing at the sink in an apron and carving dark bruises from a potato with a paring knife. She carves away the dark bruises until so little potato remains it could fit in a teaspoon. “Even these rotten ones have a little good in them,” she says and tosses the nub into the boiling pot, standing at the well-scrubbed sink, her back to him so he cannot see her face, wearing the paisley apron all the while.
A single gunshot launches him from dreams of his wife and into stark morning light. His pulse leaps with jungle-cat acceleration. He’s just behind the tree line, where he passed out in the night. When he figures out that the gunfire isn’t directed toward him, he examines his foot. The wound has clotted into a black slit from toes to arch. Another spurt of gunfire. He drags himself until he can see a half-dozen rebels standing at the bottom of the mined hill. The spindly one angles his Kalashnikov skyward and fires another shot. Beside him, the old man smooths his rebellious mustache with one hand and holds a large, unwieldy book in the other. Marooned alone in the middle of the hill, thirty meters up, Kolya kneels.
For a moment, Danilo assumes the rebels are firing at Kolya, but the gunman has his rifle pointed at the morning sun and shoots to encourage Kolya, rather than kill him. On his knees, Kolya claws at the ground. He seems to take direction from the old man, who uses the fat art book as a map. They’re making him dig for mines, Danilo realizes. But no, that’s not it either, because Kolya pulls a handful of something from his pocket—dill seeds?—sprinkles them over the holes he’s dug, and begins repacking the dirt.
A cement-thick heaviness hardens in Danilo’s stomach as he realizes that Kolya is being made to extend the herb garden up the mined hill. As punishment for Danilo’s escape? He doesn’t want to know. He bandages his foot with folded green leaves. During the next spray of gunfire, he slams the trowel head into his leg cuffs. The rusted metal chain snaps on his third try. He spreads his legs for the first time in months and a wonderful relief seeps along his tendons. The undergrowth cushions his wounded foot and he hobbles away as fast as the pain allows. The scent of butter-fried potatoes hangs sweetly in the
air. His wife is setting the table for lunch. An explosion echoes from the mined hill and enters the forest, but it’s nothing, only a plate falling from the table. Little pieces of flowery porcelain lie everywhere. His wife tucks in her apron and drops to one knee. With open arms she gathers them all.
INTERMISSION
The Tsar of Love and Techno
ST. PETERSBURG, 2010; KIROVSK, 1990S
1
Galina called to say she had bought me a first-class ticket to Moscow, and then she said that my brother was dead. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d never even received first-class mail since the postal service introduced it six years ago, let alone a first-class train compartment. As for Kolya, well, he’d been dead for years.
She lived in a top-floor penthouse with a chest-tightening view, lined with thick white carpets that may have been polar bear pelts. Wealth announces itself with what’s easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises. Jasmine and plum perfumed the air. A crooning tenor went into histrionics on the Bose. Dozy bronze Buddhas meditated on the bookshelf. I was wondering if artsy-fartsy types in Tibet fetishize crucifixes when Galina returned, her loosely tied kimono yawning at the chest and knees.
“My. God. Who is your hairstylist?” she asked.
In truth, I’ve never had a haircut that’s fit my head. One-Eyed Onegin used to give my head the once-over with the clippers, but depth perception isn’t his strong suit. Plus I’m pretty sure he uses them to shave his pubes.
“I don’t really have one.”
“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Very avant-garde.”
If a stopped clock is right twice a day, a bad haircut is right twice a decade.
It had been longer than that since I’d last seen Galina, since my brother left for his first tour and she became a celebrity and they never saw each other again. It’s easy to forget what someone really looks like when you see them everywhere. On billboards her face is airbrushed as smooth and shiny as an inner organ, and she has a bust-waist-hips ratio that is found in nature only inside the mind of a Dr. Frankenstein with Adobe Photoshop training. But the Galina standing there in a slab of noon light, made up and manicured, in a fancy kimono that ten million silkworms gave their lives for, looked more person-like than the Galina of the billboard, tabloid, or screen.