A black pistol lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and rubbed my thumb across its dark luster. Heavier than they look in movies. Holding that gun made me feel taller up top and longer down below. Somewhere in Chechnya was an eighteen-year-old Muslim holding a pistol for the first time and feeling this same surge of power?
“Put it down.”
Kirill wheeled through the doorway, my father behind him.
“You know what Chekhov had to say about loaded guns,” I said. Kirill didn’t smile. Probably hadn’t passed the UGE either. I rubbed my prints from the metal—another childhood lesson from my father—and set it on the table.
“Now you’re employed,” my father said. He was radiant.
“By whom?”
“By Kirill Andreyevich.”
“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected.
“Yes, you’ll be working for the junior sergeant.”
The future looked darker than a mortician’s closet. “You must be joking,” I said. My father never joked.
“Tomorrow morning you’ll begin,” my father said, quite pleased with himself. “It’s the early rising rooster who sticks it to the fattest hen.”
His smirk left little question as to which bird I was.
“And Seryozha,” my father said. “Remember, I’m not afraid of breaking my parole.”
DEFERMENTS went to university students, fathers, and prisoners, only the last of which me and my friends had any hope of becoming in the near future. Prison would be our trade school, the only one to admit us, the only one to provide the skill set that would expand our futures. We should’ve gone into a PTU after our ninth year, but our class boasted a bumper crop of underperforming students, making the one dumpy neighborhood vocational school harder to crack than Cambridge. No matter; if your business is crime, there’s no better business school than prison.
During our final spring of our last year as high schoolers, when we were well on our way to becoming the people we’d be for the rest of our lives, we skipped class to drink Baltika 7s and whistle at women in the Tauride Gardens. Black eyes of frozen muck peered through the snow. A pair of ten-thousand-year-old hermits played bullet chess at an icy table. We stood in a small shivering huddle.
“My grandpa fought his way all the way from Stalingrad to Hitler’s bunker and you know what they did to him when he got back? Popped his patriotic ass in a gulag,” Valeriy declared. He picked white grains from his scalp. Lint or dandruff, couldn’t tell. “I’m ashamed to be related to such a sucker.”
“Two hundred got beat to death last year before even making it to Chechnya. And if they’re reporting two hundred, the real figure’s got to be as long as an international phone number. Dedovshchina, no joke.”
“Two years with nothing but your canteen to fuck, that’s no joke.”
“That’s why I’m saying jail time’s soft time.”
“Where’s Tony with those beers?” Our names—Aleksandr Kharlmov, Valeriy Lebedev, Ivan Vladim, and Sergei Markin—fit who we were, not who we wanted to be, so we’d rechristened ourselves: Tony Montana, Joe Pesci, Don Corleone, and Tupac. Our spirit animals were all of the genus American Kingpin Tragically Slain in His Prime. Our parents learned English from the Beatles, but we learned from Biggie.
Different afternoon, different park, same conversation.
“The trick’s to jail just till the insurgency’s over.”
“And how you gonna do that?”
“Easy,” I boasted. Never forget the first three letters of confidence. “You forecast how long the war will last, how long you’ll need to jail, then find a felony that fits the sentence.”
Crime and Punishment. We knew nothing of history—decent odds that three of the four of us couldn’t tell you what year Jesus was born—but we staked our futures by predicting it. We took bets: The war would finish in a year, two, five. Browsing old newspapers and Yandexing court reports, we found sentences to fit each prediction. A year for assaulting an ethnic minority. Two to five for armed robbery. Three to seven for narcotics smuggling.
We wanted to become gangsters, but who could we look up to? Where were our heroes? Our fathers drove gypsy cabs, washed dishes, and pumped gas, their blood so timid a guillotine couldn’t make them bleed. They longed for the old days, not because their lives had been better, but because there had been an equality of misery back then. We were their sons and we wanted more.
Conscription season began in spring. The steady sluice of burgs had dissolved down the Neva. A bask of geriatric crocodiles sunbathed at the beachfront wall of Peter and Paul Fortress. Daytime drunks extended their working hours. The arctic winter unraveled into pastel peach, lavender, plum. We received postcards from the military commissariat the same day and carried them with us to the park. Mine was the first correspondence I’d received since the letters my father had sent from prison.
I compared my red-bannered postcard with my friends’. They were identical but for our names. By law, the commissariat could send us to a military base for testing the day after graduation, but for whatever reason, they’d given us until August. If we all died in Chechnya, would our families receive form postcards, identical but for our names, or would the army honor our sacrifice with a form letter?
“I’ll knock off an electronics store,” Aleksandr announced, killing his cigarette in five colossal puffs. He had the lungs of a blue whale. “Three years, that should cover it.”
“Too long, Tony,” Ivan said. “Any day now Putin’s going to tear off his shirt, jump on a brown bear, ride that bitch bareback to Grozny, and finish those beards by himself. Six months tops. I’ll mug a tourist.”
“Four years,” Valeriy said, still picking the rice-white flakes that had turned out to be lice. “I’m going to steal a police car.”
We exploded into laughter.
“Laugh it up,” Valeriy said, “but you know no policeman’s going to worry himself about a robbed electronics store or tourist. Shit, robbing tourists is their job. Take a policeman’s ride, though. Four years, easy.”
They turned to me. “I haven’t decided how many years,” I said, a beat too slowly. “But don’t worry. I’m in. I’m all in.”
We pounded fists, then swaggered toward Ploshchad Lenina to pick up a thousand-ruble check, so named because the heroin comes folded in receipt paper. Oily rainbows arced the swollen sparkle of the Neva. Tourists clambered from pontoons, all oohs and aahs, jumping for their cameras as though the imperial mansions lining the banks were a flock of rare birds. I didn’t see the rush. Those pink powder puffs weren’t flying anywhere. We turned onto Arsenalnaya, then onto Komsomola. In the distance, brick-walled, spired, and domed, a tourist would be forgiven for mistaking Kresty Prison for a palace. In history class, we learned about the red herrings caught, descaled, and fried up in the 1937 show trials. In literature class, we read an Akhmatova poem about the prison. Her son was detained for seventeen months. With hundreds of other women she waited outside those great brick walls for news of the accusation, verdict, sentence. “Can you describe this?” a woman with blue lips whispered. And Akhmatova answered, “Yes, I can.”
Now, outside the brick walls, their granddaughters waited, a few lost in oversized overcoats, the wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters of pretrial prisoners. We catcalled. We hooted. We asked if they wanted to party. Had they stood there seventy years earlier, their sorrows would’ve been worth a great poet’s words. But who reads poetry anymore?
“I’m not scared,” I stated, and Valeriy, Ivan, and Aleksandr all agreed they too were unafraid. I didn’t know if we meant Kresty or Chechnya. Up ahead a Lenin statue toupeed in pigeon shit silently perorated to masses. I gathered the sweat-softened bills from my friends and climbed to the third-floor flat of a crumbling communal housing complex to pick up the thousand-ruble check.
THE job was like nothing found in the classifieds of regional papers and blog forums, where postings sought multilingual men with business degrees an
d attractive single women to work as dancers in European strip clubs. No glamour, no glitz, no status to propel me past the face control at Jakata or Decadence nightclubs, whose bouncers are harder to bribe than Peter at the Pearly Gates. That first day I dragged my ass out of bed at four in the morning to help Kirill dress. His shirt, trousers, and bedsheets were cut from the same square of bureaucratically blue canvas.
“How the hell do you normally get dressed?” I asked.
He sat at the end of his bed with a ten-thousand-watt smile. He was actually enjoying this! Happiness is zero sum, and the lower my stock in it fell, the higher his rose. Any moment it’d burst right through the ceiling.
“I can do it myself,” he said. His smile revealed teeth the color of cooking oil. “It just takes longer.”
“We’ve got all day.”
“You’re mouthy,” he said, “for a virgin.”
Devil! Who’d told him? And more importantly, had he told anyone else? I’d never live it down. Maybe I could sell my kidneys for the identity of a reindeer herder on the Yamal Peninsula? A place that means “End of the World” in the local tongue just might be far enough. In my mind, I’d already built an igloo and married a muskox when Kirill cut in.
“Look at you, I’ve eaten borscht with less color than your cheeks.” He closed his eyes with the serenity of a man whose desires are modest enough to be met. “I remember when I popped my cork for the first time. It was my thirteenth birthday.”
At eighteen I wasn’t just a virgin. I was an elderly virgin.
“My father took me to his favorite prostitute to celebrate my becoming a man,” Kirill went on. “He stood just beside the bed while I went at it. Not close enough to make it weird, mind you. He just wanted to make sure I did my part. I finished about five seconds after I began and he burst into applause. Never made the old man prouder.
“But you.” His eyes zeroed on mine. “You think you’re too much of a man to pull trousers on an amputee and you haven’t even popped your cork. Shameful.”
I hoisted his trousers up his knobby hips. Hemmed mid-thigh, they looked more like volleyball shorts. He pointed to a roll of duct tape encircled by gummy rings on the floor. “You need to tape the stumps.”
“Hell no.”
“You need to learn how,” he stressed.
“You’re missing your legs, not your hands. Tape them yourself.”
“Virgin,” he commanded.
After I ran a few rings of tape around the stumps, Kirill greased his hair with vegetable shortening, combing it through a dozen times before satisfied with the part. “They can scoop this crap into a jar with a French label and charge ten times the price,” he explained. “But they can’t fool me.”
The last touch was a squirt of embalming fluid–scented cologne. I heaved Kirill into his wheelchair and pushed him into the hall.
“I’ll go down myself,” he said when we reached the stairs. With a sheet of cardboard beneath him and his gloved hands clasped to the rail, he tobogganed down the steps. Seven flights of stairs, not a problem, and yet his trousers had been a peak only I could carry him over. Cheeky little shit.
“Wait,” he said. The apartment buildings’s front door clunked closed behind us. A medieval siege engine couldn’t break down that thing. “I want to catch my breath.”
“You’re in a wheelchair. Breathing is about all you can do.”
He shook his head, lit a cigarette, and spoke as if I were the unreasonable one. “In such a rush, this one, to do anything but lose his virginity.”
Following his lead, I lit up too. The White Nights always dead-ended into Gray Mornings. The clouds just dozed in the sky without a care in the world. Lazy bastards. Across the Neva, the odd smokestack stood taller than any imperial obelisk. If eras are remembered by their greatest monuments, ours will be remembered by billboards advertising Beeline mobile phone plans. Across the street, a pack of feral dogs chased a homeless man through a vacant lot. Our school textbooks said as many as a thousand serfs died building Petersburg. Our teacher put the number closer to a hundred thousand. But he’d say anything to sleep with you. The lead dog lunged for the vagrant’s ass, and as he stumbled a bison of a Rottweiler charged into his back. Three brutal steps later, he toppled over. I’m not sure the city would be worth even him.
“I thought you wanted to get going.”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Kirill replied, holding up his cigarette. “It’s important we take time to savor it.”
The white onion domes of Smolny Convent disappeared behind us as I pushed Kirill along Shpalernaya Street. We took a left at Prospekt Chernyshevskogo. A casino’s colors glowed like lollipops held to lamplight. Sushi restaurants and Irish pubs everywhere. Tinted town car windows the same obsidian black as their drivers’ sunglasses. Fires twitched through the grates of rusted ash cans. Weird how fires shiver as if they’re the ones cold. We waited for a break in traffic.
“You need to carry me over the gate,” Kirill said when we reached the entrance of the Chernyshevskaya metro station. I plunked two tokens in the turnstile and hoisted him by the armpits. Heavy, for half a man.
Newspaper vendors flashed headlines as I broke down the wheelchair. Sochi Mega Resort to Open Next Year. Sydney Prepares for Summer Olympics. Kresty Prison to Be Turned into Hotel-Entertainment Complex.
“The Chernyshevskaya metro escalator is one hundred and thirty-seven meters long. Do you know what that makes it?” Kirill asked.
“Enough of a ruler to measure my member of the party,” I said.
“We’ll have to take your word on that, virgin,” he replied. “A hundred and thirty-seven meters makes this very escalator the longest escalator in the world. A world record, right here in our own neighborhood, and ninety-nine out of a hundred people who ride these stairs don’t even know it.”
“Why’d they build the tunnels so deep?”
“So they could be used as shelters if the Americans nuked us. You’re too young to remember, but when I was coming up in the eighties we were still afraid Americans would drop a nuclear warhead on us.”
“Do people hit by nuclear warheads ever lose just their legs?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He frowned at his stumps. “I’ve never been hit by one.”
The marbled metro platform was chessboard checkered. Kirill strapped on his leather gloves, planted his palms on the marble, and swung his body between his arms. For Kirill, the world was made of parallel bars. I pushed the empty wheelchair behind him.
“How do I look?” he asked. Dressed in full military uniform, from his peaked cap to his hemmed trousers, he looked too solemn for me to take seriously.
“Short,” I said.
A tube of muggy air as long and swift as the train it preceded gushed into the station. Kirill gave instructions. The act was nothing new. You couldn’t go more than three metro stops without seeing a crippled vet from the war in Chechnya. They sang folk songs, sat on wooden pallets, recited Pushkin, pretzeled lifeless limbs, held cardboard signs advertising their suffering. Others just got drunk and murmured stories so depraved they could never be true.
The train exhaled a congested breath of passengers. Kirill knuckle-walked through the shuffling legs and I followed behind with his wheelchair. Young men offered their seats to women and the elderly with a decorum you’d rarely find above ground. Doors closed, wheels hummed on rails, and Kirill began. He didn’t sing the national anthem, didn’t produce a tray of ten-ruble trinkets from his wheelchair satchel or a horror story from his past. He simply crawled through the parting crowd on clenched fists, head raised, eyes meeting every glance. I just pushed the wheelchair behind him and watched the rubles tumble into the wicker basket.
“Give him a few rubles, Masha,” a babushka shrink-wrapped in a kerchief whispered to her friend. “Pity the poor soul.”
“You’re a hero,” an elderly man in tortoise-rimmed glasses observed. “Better to lose your legs than your honor.”
&n
bsp; For the length of the train ride, Kirill didn’t speak. He neither solicited nor acknowledged the alms that just kept falling from the wallets and purses of morning commuters. He put one fist in front of the other, his peaked cap tilting, his limp stumps dragging behind him, not a caricature, not a freak show, but a brave man crawling across a battlefield that raged in his head. I nearly opened my own wallet.
He made two hundred and forty rubles in the two minutes to Ploshchad Vosstaniya. I couldn’t believe how many coins and crumpled bills lay in the basket. It was more than my father made in three hours.
“You don’t want them to think you’re making money,” he whispered as he pocketed the change. At Ploshchad Vosstaniya, we moved to the next car.
We rode the one and two lines until early afternoon. Twelve hundred rubles by ten o’clock. Twenty-three hundred by noon. Who knew my fellow citizens possessed such patriotic generosity? For lunch we surfaced at Baltiyskaya and bought shawarma and kvass from an elderly street vendor with dyed purple hair. I watched short skirts pass through the long afternoon light. “My assistant here is stricken with an incurable case of virginity,” Kirill called to a really cute young woman whose dark brown bangs awninged the open pages of Harry Potter. “Will you take pity on him?”
I wanted to punch Kirill right then. I’d read the Harry Potter book three times through and it was a secret I’d carry to my grave. I might’ve told her. She’d already taken her book and walked away.
“Forty-one new stations are scheduled to be built in the next ten years,” Kirill announced between dainty bites of charred lamb. I wished I’d chased after the brown-haired girl, but then I’d be the Stalkerish Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Presently, I was just the Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Some dignities are earned only by comparison.