“Forty-one new stations, you know what that means?” Kirill asked.
“That only three will be built.”
“It means more people will ride the metro every day. More people means more money.”
“You make too much already. Beggars shouldn’t make more than the people they beg from.”
“We work harder, I assure you.” Kirill smiled at a flock of schoolchildren flying to catch the crosswalk light. You’d think a man without legs would be a tragic sort. But Kirill seemed to live as if always staring into a field of sunflowers. “I’m saving for a dacha. Wheelchair accessible. I’ll be able to wash dishes in the sink.”
It was hard to take him seriously. Only crooks, oligarchs, and politicians—often the same person—could afford dachas. Men who could walk, who had never gone to Chechnya, whose sons would never go to Chechnya. And here was Kirill, thinking he could be one of them. Whatever parts he’d lost, he still had two billiard balls in his corner pocket.
“What a racket,” I said.
“It’s an art.”
“Taking people’s money?”
He squinted at me. “No one’s giving me anything. I’m a businessman.”
“What’re you selling?”
“All these people who opened their purses on the metro, when they see a legless vet, they feel ashamed and maybe a little pity. But when they see me crawling across the metro car, they see someone defiant, silent, not begging for anything, and they feel pride. They’re paying me for the privilege of feeling proud when they should feel disgraced.”
When I returned home that night, my father was sprawled on the divan in his underpants. He ate tinned fish from the can and let the cat clean the oil from his fingers between bites.
“Come here,” he commanded, and examined my pupils by television light. The cat wrapped its tail around my father’s forearm and purred lovingly. A devil in fur, that cat.
“Tell me what you learned today,” my father asked.
“The Chernyshevskaya escalator is a hundred and thirty-seven meters long.”
“Anything else?”
“I learned Kirill makes more money than you.”
“And how much of that money did he let you keep?”
“None,” I admitted. “But he bought me a shawarma.”
“Then we both make more money than you.” Satisfied with my silence, he turned back to the TV. All the parts, including that of the voluptuous femme fatale, were dubbed in the gruff monotone of a lobotomized Vladivostokian chain smoker. A strong-jawed actor survived a bomb blast by climbing into a refrigerator. I hoped refrigeration technology had reached Chechnya.
“Kresty’s going to become a hotel,” I said.
“Again? When?”
“The newspaper said as soon as a new prison’s built outside the city.”
“They were saying that even before I was arrested. Wish it had been a hotel. It wasn’t.”
I turned, but couldn’t escape him—around fifty portraits of my father hung in thin black frames from the living room walls. One for every year of his life, from the age of five to sixty-nine, except his prison years. His mother had taken him to the photographer once a year, a precaution in case the police arrested her and sent him to a state orphanage. His father had been an enemy of the people, so she had to think about things like that. He’d still dress in his best suit and go to a photographer’s studio on his birthday and come home with a new portrait to hang on the wall. Bit mad, really. Even if somewhere in the world there was a girl who wanted to come home with me, I couldn’t bring her here.
I crossed the living room and stared at my father’s portrait from 1983. Like all of them, it looked like a blown-up passport photo. That was the year I was born. He looked rather grim.
“You know, I never wanted a wife or child,” my father offered. “I was fifty years old, I thought I’d won. Then I met your mother. Then she got pregnant. Couldn’t very well leave her then, could I?”
“Some crimes are best left unsolved, Papa.”
“Nonsense. If you don’t know where you began you won’t know where you’ll finish. Everyone needs an origin story.”
I closed my eyes and did my best to humor him. “Then please, enlighten me.”
“You, my dear boy, began with a broken condom.”
Patricide really should be decriminalized. I turned toward the hall when I noticed a new portrait hanging above the tea-stained armchair. “When was your birthday?” I asked.
“Few weeks back,” he said. “Don’t give me that look. These photos, they’re all for you.”
“You realize how insane you sound, right? You’ve got more than fifty photos of yourself on the wall. Not photos of me or Mom, just of you. It’s like you saw a photo spread of Kim Jong-il’s living room and really liked his style.”
He scratched the bridge between the cat’s ears. We’d had this conversation about a billion times.
“There are no photos of my father. There used to be, but my mother had to destroy them. She would show me the photos when I was a little kid, but now they’re gone, and I can’t remember his face. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know where I began, Seryozha.” He looked up from the cat, to the portraits, and then to me. “They are for you. So you will know. So you won’t forget who I was.”
BEFORE the cancer took her, my mother worked the cash register at a produkti that from its depleted inventory looked more like a shelving emporium than a market. Fifteen minutes after she left the house, my father began his day. He had a mobile phone the size of a boot and he took calls like a man in the trenches, receiving and providing orders in clipped jargon. He wore rubber gloves and a surgical mask when he bagged white powder on the kitchen table. For the longest time, I thought he was a doctor.
“This is very bad for you,” he told me, when he let me watch him work after school. He used my mother’s measuring spoons to divide the powder into folded paper pouches. “You must never eat it.”
“What are you making?”
“A living,” he replied.
In the summer, he’d send me on daytime deliveries. Nothing major, just a few envelopes to university students and prostitutes, infractions so slight they’re illegal only by technicality. Before I left, he gave me a series of directions.
“You need to count the money before you give them the product.”
“You need never look a policeman in the eye.”
“You need to obey all laws but the one you’re breaking.”
“You need not stop to speak with anyone.”
“You need to pretend you’re a man and then you will become one.”
I bought metro tokens rather than hopping the turnstile, and I waited for every crosswalk signal. I was shorter than the peepholes and had to knock forever before anyone opened up. The prostitutes sometimes invited me in for tea and an Alenka chocolate bar. A few years after, I began to feel like Tsar Dipshit II when I realized I’d entered the flats of some of the most beautiful, least virtuous women in Petersburg and been only tempted by sweets. Now I just feel sad for whatever happened in those rooms that they needed drugs to endure.
Heroin on the kitchen table and snow on the windowsill; the tattoo of a lone wolf running up his forearm; the surgical mask halving his face; gloved hands performing a delicate operation: That had been my father. He was a capitalist, a man built for the New Russia, someone I thought I would forever look up to.
My mother knew, of course, but pretended otherwise. It came to an end when she discovered that I was my father’s errand boy.
“Where were you?” she asked when I strolled through the front door one August afternoon, fingers still sticky with ice cream melt. She’d come home from work early.
“Delivering a living,” I said proudly. She slapped me with her right hand and embraced me with her left.
“Criminals, everywhere,” she said. “On the TV. In the street. In the Kremlin. Now in my home. I won’t live with two of them.”
She called
the police. That afternoon my father was arrested outside our apartment block.
NOW that I was wheeling Kirill around, I had to avoid my friends. I didn’t return their phone calls and kept away from the parks, school yards, and apartment block basements we’d pass out in. Our paths only intersected once, in late June, on the Gostiny Dvor metro platform, as Kirill rambled on and on and on and on and on about the history of rail ties. Valeriy’s zombie eyes latched onto mine. He was scratching his crotch. The head lice must’ve migrated to his southern tropics.
“Tupac, where you been at?” he asked. Behind him Ivan stood in baggy jeans and a T-shirt XXXL enough for a family of four.
I nodded to Kirill. “Just working.”
Valeriy smirked. “New friend?”
“My dad’s making me.” I tried to speak soft enough that Kirill wouldn’t hear.
“You get word about Tony? Knocked off a computer store last week,” Ivan said. “He left his internal passport right on the counter and still couldn’t get himself arrested. Had to walk to the police station and insist that he was a criminal. Embarrassing, really.”
“He’s in Kresty?” I asked.
Valeriy nodded. “Till the trial at least. It’s not bad, by the sound of it. No water shortages. Free electricity. Bet he’s making all kinds of connects. We’ll join him this weekend.”
“On what charge?”
“We’re gonna steal a police car,” Ivan said, grabbing his jeans as they slunk toward his knees. Kirill pretended he wasn’t listening by looking away. “You want in?”
“I promised my dad I’d help him move some furniture this weekend,” I said. “But I’ll see you there.”
“You promise?” Ivan asked.
“Yeah, no doubt.”
“It’s your neck,” Valeriy said, before walking off. “In prison, your head might stay attached to it.”
Kirill didn’t speak until Ivan and Valeriy had disappeared into the white-tiled pedestrian tunnel toward the Nevsky Prospekt station. A gypsy vendor passed by with a tray of single items usually only sold in packs: disposable razors, condoms, Twix bars.
“Will you go through with it?” Kirill asked. There was no disdain in his voice, nothing even approaching disapproval.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“In my time, mental illness deferments were the most popular way to dodge conscription, besides university. You’d bribe a psychiatrist into saying you were certifiably cuckoo. The problem was that so many of the new rich received mental illness deferments, none were left for the actually mentally ill. My unit had two schizophrenics, a handful of manic depressives, and a guy who received regular visitations from angels. The insanity of war, eh?”
“How much did the deferments go for?”
“More than you can afford,” he said. The breeze of an approaching train whipped through my hair, but Kirill’s, slick with vegetable shortening, remained unmoved.
THE weeks passed. I hadn’t touched heroin since the night my father found what remained of the five-hundred-ruble check. I kept waiting for withdrawal to kick in—they can’t send me to Chechnya if I’m bouncing around a padded room—but I guess you don’t get withdrawal after using it four times in five months. Can’t even get addicted to drugs properly. Each morning I woke at four thirty and helped Kirill dress. We breakfasted on Java Gold cigarettes and worked the train cars until noon. One day we bought lunch from an elderly Georgian whose osteoporosis lived in him like a black hole slowly sucking his whole body stomach-ward. Kirill was going on about the metro system again.
“It’s the thirteenth busiest in the world,” he said between small bites of sausage. It was a holy day, the Feast of Peter and Paul, and humidity leached from the city’s pores. “Yet Petersburg is only the world’s forty-fifth biggest city. What does this tell you?”
“That we’re too poor to afford cars?”
“Idiot. It tells you we have a metro to be proud of. New York, London, you think their metros have crystal chandeliers and marble floors and bronze statues?”
“Of course they do.”
“They do not,” he insisted. “They have graffiti and crumbling walls and hoodlums who push decent commuters into oncoming trains. They do not have beauty. They do not have a Palace of the People.”
“That’s a TV show, right?” I said. Finally, a shared interest.
“I’m not talking about a TV show! I’m talking about the metro. The Palace of the People, that’s what Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev called it. A palace not for tsars or princes, but for you and me.”
“Off to your palace then, Comrade,” I suggested, and wheeled him to the Pushkinskaya station entrance.
“You shouldn’t work on April twentieth,” he said as I lifted him over the turnstile. “The skinhead gangs are always the worst on Hitler’s birthday.”
It was still summer. I didn’t see how his advice applied to me.
“What would you do if, you know,” I said, nodding to his stumps when we reached the platform.
“If I still had legs?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d start an autoerotic asphyxiation service,” he said without hesitation.
“What?”
“Autoerotic asphyxiation. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it?”
“Is that a new TV show?”
His jaw slackened with disbelief. “It’s a hobby. You should try it. It’s great fun.”
“What is it?”
“It’s when you tie a belt around your neck and get off.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said. “It sounds pretty awful, in fact.”
“A virgin and a puritan. You’ll grow up to be a nun!”
What he’d lost in limbs, he’d gained in lip. “So what’s the service?” I asked. “It sounds like a private affair.”
“There will always be a risk when you wrap a belt around your neck and bring yourself to the point of strangulation. It can be a life-changing or life-ending experience. Like skydiving. My service would provide the proverbial parachute. Say you wanted to autoerotically asphyxiate yourself. You’d call me up ahead of time. I’d already have the spare keys to your flat. If you didn’t call back in, say, one hour, I’d come over to check on you. By then you’d probably be dead. So I’d hitch up your trousers so your loved ones would have the comfort of thinking you’d died by ordinary suicide.”
“And if they didn’t die, you’d have the keys to their flat, so you could rob them blind.”
“There’s hope for you yet, molokosos.”
We waited at the platform edge and I don’t know why it came out then but it did. I asked Kirill why he never recounted how he had lost his legs, why he was silent and defiant when seeking charity.
He frowned, displeased that the conversation had taken a precipitous turn into seriousness. A train arriving on the opposite track nearly whooshed away his words. “You can live off others’ guilt,” he said. “But if you want a dacha, you must also make them proud.”
Air surged from the tunnel with the catcall of train breaks. “But how did you lose them?” Saying the question aloud, hearing the tremor of my voice, I recognized what I’d long suspected: I was a coward.
“It wasn’t what you think.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. The wall of air broke over us. “I’m only telling you this since you’ll be going south into the Zone. It wasn’t a land mine. It wasn’t even in Chechnya. I was shit-drunk one night a few years back and passed out on a tram track right here in Peter.”
That evening a threadbare military uniform lay on the living room coffee table. It was the blue-gray of rain clouds. I unfolded the trousers, held them to my waist. The legs reached past my ankles and flapped at the floor.
“Your grandfather was a tall man,” my father said from the doorway. Hell-cat watched from between his legs. “A pair with hemmed legs, you’ll look so grown up.”
Hearing him say it killed me.
“I don’t want to go,” I told the cat. T
he little sadist tilted its head, then snapped its tail and strode from the room.
My father hooked my chin with his finger and raised my face to his. “If we had a choice, none of us would ever put on trousers.” His half-smoked cigarette made my eyes all watery. He dropped the stub in a teacup and thumbed the tears from my cheeks.
“Oh, Seryozha, sometimes I wish you could see what I see when I see you.” His face was a big bright sun. I had to look away. I tried to find a neutral space to rest my gaze, but his framed portraits filled the walls. I couldn’t escape him. He was everywhere, watching over me.
“What do you see?” My voice cracked for the first time in two years. I’d have traded the rest of my life for a Cloak of Invisibility. I’d apparate to Chechnya, Kresty, anywhere beyond sight of my father’s eyes.
“I see a clever young man, too clever for his own good maybe. I see someone kind and sweet-hearted in a world that encourages and rewards neither. I see a son who is unlike me in every way I’ve hoped he would be unlike me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’ll have a happy life. You’ll see.”
I wished then, more than I’d ever wished before, that I trusted my father.
“Look at you,” he said, and leaned in to plant a kiss on my forehead. “My Seryozha. My holy little fool. You’ve spent these last few years working so hard to become an asshole. Despite your best efforts, you’re becoming a man instead. And I know you want to become so great an asshole that centuries from now people will speak of wiping their Sergeis. But you’re not an asshole. You’re my son. So when you want to disgrace yourself, remember, little one, that you are all of your father’s pride.”
THE next morning, both head and heavens had clouded over. I ignored Kirill’s history lessons as I pushed him to Chernyshevskaya. In four days, I was to report for duty.
For hours, I barely talked. Kirill fist-marched across train cars and I pushed the wheelchair behind him. Rubles dropped into the wicker basket, and he collected them at every stop.