A few ruble coins glinted on the floor before the ticket counter. Were they just coins, or part of an art installation? The modernists ruined reality for laypeople.
I approached the counter. The temperature was set to meat locker. A couple tourists consulted a cinder-block-size Lonely Planet. Banter’s the doorway into a stranger’s good graces and I entered guns blazing. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let your hair down!”
“Excuse me?” the ticket cashier asked.
“I need to ask a bit of a favor,” I said, slouching into the counter. “Not long ago there was an exhibit here on a Chechen painter. I’d like the phone number of the exhibit curator. She lives in Grozny.”
“Fuck off.”
“Thank you, but no, just her number would be fine.”
Had I lived a life well watered with affection, I might not have withered under his arid stare. Before I could mount a fuller defense, I met the grim glare of an Orc in a security guard’s suit. Our atoms must’ve been polarized like repulsing magnets, because for every step he took toward me, I involuntarily took one toward the door. As much high culture as a prison weight room, that museum.
The door swung closed behind me. The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it’s earned. I told that to Yakov. He was perched on a yellow Citroën. He hopped down, scampered to me, and rubbed his pebbly nose on my shoes. Life’s little pleasures are the consolation of the paupered. But Yakov’s nose on my shoe, his hot purr up my pant leg, well, you take your triumphs where you can.
I should’ve gone to class, but I hadn’t gone once this term and didn’t want to confuse the professor by showing up. If I’d devoted as much brainpower to finishing school as I had to staying in school, I’d probably have a Nobel by now. I’d become one of those prisoners you read about who’s lived locked up so long that he tries to break in once he’s been let out. Who in their sane mind would ever want to leave?
Yakov followed me across the street and through eight blocks of midday monotony.
A vacant-eyed man studied a tram schedule under Plexiglas, but it was clear that no map could show him where he was headed.
Elderly women who hadn’t smiled since Gorbachev was general secretary queued outside the post office. They wore overcoats in midsummer, distrustful of every source of authority, even the calendar.
Up ahead, a supermodel as lean and pointy as a stiletto stared right at me. She was probably part of a stylish Ocean’s 11–like con. She’d size me up and see I was perfect for the role of the dumpy clown whom the whole crew rallies around when George Clooney gets distracted by his charity work. We’d rob a Dubai emirate blind. I’d give my cut to starving orphans because I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the thrill. She’d leave George Clooney and we’d live forever in the desolate beauty of a Malaysian beach. Drinking mai tais for breakfast would never get old. Roll credits.
“Your zipper’s down,” she said as she passed me.
Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.
Back home, I disinterred the painting from its bubble wrap for the first time since returning from Moscow. The canvas itself was hardly larger than a sheet of notepaper. This is where Kolya died. I’d known that, obviously, for several weeks, but seeing it there I flinched. I set the canvas on the shelf between the two pickle jars holding my parents’ ashes. Rather ghoulish, but family reunions usually are. I was twenty-eight years old, too old to be an orphan, but too young to be the sole survivor of the Kalugin tribe. Good God, I was probably expected to carry on the family name. Never has so much been asked by so many of someone who has so little.
Behind my mother’s jar hung the Black Sea postcard. For years I’ve been telling her I’d scatter her ashes there.
The whole scene freaked me out and I called Galina.
“Yes?” she said.
“It’s Alexei.”
“Who?”
“Alexei Kalugin. Kolya’s brother.”
“Who gave you this number?”
“You did.”
A crestfallen sigh. “I really am my own worst enemy. What do you want?”
Everything, now, without working, waiting, or doing. “Just to talk, I guess,” I said. “I’m looking at the Zakharov. I’ve propped it up next to the jars holding my parents’ ashes.”
“You should get in touch with my husband. Ex-husband, now. He’s always looking to add another psychopath to his staff.”
“The divorce went through?”
“It did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s only a legal formality. In our hearts, we’ve been living in different time zones for years. I’m moving back to Kirovsk.”
“In your heart?”
“No, you dimwit. In an airplane.”
“Why?”
“What else can I do?” A slow sigh of resignation leaked from her. “Let’s be honest, I haven’t been seriously considered for a part in years, and now that I’ve fallen from political favor, I’d be lucky if Deceit Web is still bootlegged. Besides, it’ll be nice for Natasya to grow up outside Moscow. Kirovsk isn’t that bad, is it?”
It’s a poisoned post-apocalyptic hellscape. “It’s a wonderful place to raise a family.”
“You mean it?”
“I don’t lie to anyone”—present company excluded—“You can stay in the museum, if you need to. No one’s lived there since Kolya left.”
She snorted so loud I worried she’d choked. “You are a dear, but no, thank you. Oleg’s lawyers still haven’t seized my dignity. Though no doubt it’s next on their agenda.”
“I went to the Teplov Gallery,” I said, tacking into unclear waters. “I tried to get the number of the people in Grozny you bought the painting from.”
“What ever for?”
“I was thinking I’d talk to them. About the place where Kolya died.”
“A picture’s worth what, a thousand words? More than that, if you’re to judge by the reams of shoddy copy on Lindsay Lohan’s crotch shot. Besides, I gave you the painting so that you could see where he, well, you know.”
“I know, it’s just that…” The sledgehammer of epiphany swung cranium-ward. “It’s just that I was thinking I’d go there.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
Far, far too late.
“I was thinking I’d go there,” I went on, “to the hill where Kolya died. It’s the last place he was. “I’ll go there. I’ll actually do it. I’ll stand where he last stood and see what he last saw.”
“What ever for?” she asked again.
I looked to the two pickle jars. I’d never received Kolya’s remains. I told her I wanted to go there, to the plot of land where he died, and fill a pickle jar with the dirt.
“Well, maybe you should,” she said.
“Really?” I couldn’t recall the last time I’d actually acted on my daydreams.
“What do you want?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I’m serious, Alexei. The life expectancy of a man from Kirovsk is, what, forty or fifty years? You’ve burned through half of that already. What do you want from the rest?”
“I want to be quotable.”
“What?”
My blush was hot enough to soften the receiver. “I’m studying philology and I don’t even like reading. At least not books. I mean, why read a book when you can sum up the point in a pithy little line? I like sayings, fortune cookies, single-serving packets of wisdom. But you have to be famous or climb Mount Everest or something for people to take you seriously as an aphorist.”
“You want to be a professional aphorist?”
“Well, yes.”
“Jesus, Alexei. You were always a sweet kid, but you’re not a kid. Go to Chechnya. Go somewhere. Do something.”
Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.
6
Kolya’s story collided into Galina’s the day he wandered into the school gymnasium/boiler room for an orienta
tion led by the principal, a fleshy man with a neck like a sea lion’s. Pig-iron pipes mazed over mattresses, creating an avant-garde gymnastics course of perpendicular bars and unbalanced beams. No one from the men’s or women’s gymnastics team had ever made it to the Olympics, not for lack of talent, but because they performed like freewheeling jazz soloists in a sport judged by classicists. The principal punctuated his speech with dull jabs of his forefinger. If occupations were assigned by disposition, he’d be the supreme leader of a volcanic island republic devoid of natural resources. On stiff benches that had once populated the gulag canteen, the assembled fourteen-year-olds slouched forward or back, aged by boredom until they resembled, in posture at least, their grandparents who’d once bruised their backsides on those same seats.
When he finished, the principal goose-stepped from the room to a fanfare playing only in his head. Upperclassmen gymnasts had already begun somersaulting on the hot water pipes. The several dozen first-years had begun to stretch and mill about, but Kolya stayed seated. He didn’t often feel nervous or bashful, but he was new to this school. He’d been booted from the last one and he knew nobody in this class. The seconds ticked by and Kolya knew he had to do something tough or clever, something that would secure his social standing, because every school must have its outcasts and weirdos, and I know from personal experience that there is no escape from that untouchable caste but suicide or matriculation. Kolya sifted through his frozen insides for a loose leak of the courage and charisma that flowed so freely in my presence. Time was running out. Already his classmates had clumped into bantering clusters soon sealed from outsiders with inside jokes. But right there, several benches away, a lanky, densely lashed girl also sat alone.
His gaze climbed her legs. When he reached her eyes, she’d already seen him.
“I’m Kolya,” he managed to say.
“Galina,” she replied. Her lips flattened and curved at the ends like something wet that hadn’t dried right. It was a smile. His chest unzipped from the inside.
SHE sat next to Kolya in the dimly lit history classroom. Built during Stalin’s purges, our school had originally been a prison, and the bars gridding the history classroom windows cast toothy shadows across the warped floorboards. Galina couldn’t sit still. An invisible flame burned beneath her desk chair, too weak to set the wood alight, but strong enough to singe her skin if she sat too long in the same position. She twirled her pencil between her fingers, but her hand-eye coordination was similar to her foot-eye, and it inevitably tumbled to the side of the desk she couldn’t reach. Kolya retrieved it.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“It’s nothing.”
A peculiar intimacy grew from the daily transaction of recovered pencils. It became a game. The pencil somersaulted from Galina’s slender fingers, while Kolya watched with a throb building at the base of his throat. The front of the room, where the teacher expatiated on the conquests of dead European empires, was as distant as the medieval battlefields themselves. He overlayed his fingerprints on hers, making himself the willing collaborator to any crime in which the pencil might be used. He held it by the point and she accepted it by the rounded rubber eraser, leaving its yellow length between her fingertips and his. As the pencil shortened with each sharpening, Kolya’s fingertips came closer to hers, until one splendid day they touched. On that day, Kolya asked Galina if she wanted to go for a walk.
November winds skewered loose newspaper to bent flagstaffs, imprinted grit on windshields, inscribed the corona of smelters whose furnaces were the sole reason for our life in the Arctic. Clad in heavy layers, Galina looked twice her true width. They sauntered to the center of the Twelve Apostles along the gravel road that lassoed the silvered lapping of Lake Mercury. The gravel had stiffened to a frigid corpse on which Kolya fixed his eyes to avoid the face of the young woman so near he felt her heat signature like a phantom of spring sun.
She told him how much she hated the ballet, how terrible a dancer she was, and Kolya took her mittened hand in his own. He placed his right hand on the small of her back, pressing through the layers until she fell toward him, into him. He made fingerholds of the valleys of her vertebrae.
“BUM BA-DA-DA DUM BUM, DUM DUM DUM,” he trumpeted. It took her a moment to find in his atonal exhilaration the melody from the first march of The Nutcracker Suite. By the time she did, she was already cantering, cratering the frost.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Dance was supposed to be choreographed, rehearsed, and sterilized until its most trivial imperfections had been obliterated along with any vestigial joy, and performed to silent, judgmental audiences. It wasn’t spontaneous. It was never fun. “This is a march,” she stammered. “You don’t waltz to a march.”
“I don’t even know what a waltz is,” Kolya breezed, breaking his a cappella rendition long enough to spin Galina in small circles, dipping her until her hair swished against the gravel. She wanted to weep but she laughed. She joined in when he reprised the march. This feeling of rightness, of belonging-to-ness, it wasn’t an idea or a word, but an absence of ideas and words, an airiness where blood and bone had been, right out to her weightless fingers, safely fastened within his in case she floated away.
The Twelve Apostles spouted golden pillars. Shadows widened beyond wedges of electric light.
Kolya entered the chorus with an orchestra of punch-drunk madmen living in him, belting the tune to the velvet yellow, to the misting lake, to the carcinogens no song could dislodge from his capillaries, and in this amphitheater of decimated industry, on this stage of ice and steel, he taught the granddaughter of a prima ballerina to dance.
AROUND the same time, I fell into a different kind of love. It began when our father sent us to a warehouse across town to conduct a little business for him. Yes, it might have been crime but it certainly wasn’t organized. Besides, in Kirovsk the line between crime and business is as slender as an orphan’s forearm.
My chilled breath grew and vanished like a unicorn’s horn continually poached from my face.
We slogged through a twilight town banked with snow so high the first floors of buildings were their third stories. No street signs or addresses marked that side of the city—a ploy, Kolya claimed, to confuse invading Yankee armies—and we walked for what felt like hours before we heard the music: thunderous drums, shimmering melodies, a bass loud enough to put the beat back in a stopped heart. Around the corner, BMWs idled at the curb, languorous Nordic swans stretched their limber necks, lips tightened on fancy cigarettes, lizard-skin shoes, golden chains, men’s shirts stitched of siren light, yawning pupils, noses in their glory days between rhinoplasty and cocaine collapse, nymphs dressed in diamonds large enough to fund Third World civil wars, tasteful neon signage hummed over the entranceway: DANCE PARTY PLACE!
A line stretched halfway down the block, but Kolya wrapped his arm around my neck, and we jostled to the front. The bouncer had the flattened, scarred face of a well-loved anvil. He glared at our muddy shoes with little admiration. But Kolya could sweet-talk the deaf, and within moments the bouncer had ushered us inside. How to describe the paradise within? In a word, women. The dance floor awash in steel-tipped heels, leather boots gripping sweat-slick calves, skirts small enough to seal inside an envelope. Fake lashes, nails, and breasts that collectively enlarged reality to normalize their obscene dimensions. Coin-thick cosmetics. Flesh coruscating in strobe light with the depilated iridescence of deep-sea invertebrates. Our flat-faced Virgil led us through the swelling sea of bodies, but I wanted to drown, die, live forever, there is no difference, within the sequined sound.
In a shadow-dampened room behind the DJ booth, Kolya spoke with a ladder of a man whose vermillion suit jacket sat on his shoulders as if still on the hanger. His greased, blond, butter-cleaved hair stood at attention, and I could tell from the way he held his cigarette that he could commit murder on his way to dinner and still have enough appetite to order dessert.
He handed us a brown attaché
case and dismissed us with a quick flick of his cigarette. We duckling-waddled behind the bouncer as he left the room.
“Can you introduce me to a woman?” I asked him.
“Which one?”
Let’s be honest: It didn’t matter. The heat-seeking desire flowing from my heart via my south-lands was indiscriminate in its aim. A woman needed only acknowledge my existence to become the love of my life. I was twelve years old.
“Her.” I pointed vaguely to the crowd.
He buckled with laughter. He had to clasp my shoulder to keep himself from falling. I was no more than a serf allowed to glimpse the Winter Palace ballroom before being shoved into the open arms of the communal night. But beneath it all, the bouncer was a deep and empathetic soul. Before he escorted us to the exit by our elbows, he grabbed a black mixtape from the DJ booth and stuffed it in my sagging coat pocket.
The next morning I woke to the sharp scent of vinegar—my father had long been an amateur pickler—and wondered if the previous night had been a mirage baked in slumber. But there, right beside me, on the rickety nightstand, the mixtape soaked in a pool of honeyed daylight.
Kolya was still asleep. I dove beneath his bed and rooted through his library of sexual congress: peach-flesh magazines for every perversion, lusty paperbacks, bodies clothed only in unmarked VHS cases, stalagmites of used tissue, unsent love letters to Galina, and, floating on that sordid sea, a tiny one-shot-size vodka bottle filled with my mother’s ashes, which he’d stolen from the jar-urn right after the funeral to save some small part of her from the Black Sea. I unearthed and flung it all behind me until I found his cassette player.
For waking him at that unholy hour, he walloped me with his boot, the first in a migrating flock of projectiles aimed at me over the course of the next few minutes. I sat in bed, facing the wall with my blanket sprawled tent-like over me, locked in the stereophonic groove, oblivious to the storm breaking over my back.