“Because there’s something wrong with them?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Sergei cautioned. “I’d just say that those who enjoy his acting are unfamiliar with human nature.”
Wasn’t this what every parent hopes for? To equip your child with the confidence and support to seize opportunity, to succeed where you failed? His boy, an entrepreneur. He felt a strange surge of patriotism, a gratitude for the vision of his leaders. Here in the New Russia, you weren’t bound by the past. The grandson of an enemy of the people, the son of a convict, his boy, a successful businessman.
Sergei explained that even though he had Mrs. McGlinchy’s bank numbers, he wouldn’t touch a penny. Of course he wouldn’t. Vladimir’s boy was honest and sensitive to the feelings of others, his primary school teachers had always said so. Instead, Sergei would sign her up for a few dozen credit cards, link them to phony PayPal accounts, and transfer thousands of dollars into his personal account at Sberbank.
“Even if she’s got bad credit, we should still get three or four thousand dollars. And it’s not like we’re taking anything from Mrs. McGlinchy personally. Just the credit card companies.”
A beautiful word, we. To be taken into the intimacy of a personal pronoun. Go forth, my child, but take me with you.
“I don’t even think what I’m doing is illegal. MMM and those other pyramid schemes? They didn’t go to jail. The bankers in the West who cratered the world economy? They didn’t go to jail. It’s just the free market at work.”
“Only terrorists go to jail for what they say on the telephone,” Vladimir said. Water this seed of ambition with much love and encouragement. “Don’t apologize for your success. The layperson cannot possibly understand the complexities of high finance.”
“I’m trying to do good.”
“My Seryozha, my little oligarch. You’re doing so well.”
Sergei limped toward the WC, enough cheer to his gait that he nearly walked right.
Vladimir moved to Sergei’s seat. The computer stared him down. No more than a television lashed to a typewriter by wiggly telephone cords, as far as he was concerned. He tried the headset. Nothing.
A halved egg of plastic sat on a square of blue foam. The receiver? He put it to his ear. “Are you there, Gogol? I’m searching for someone.”
The monitor didn’t blink. “Hello? Gogol?”
The waitress tapped his shoulder. A long grin was pressed between her wide lips. Her eyelashes were thicker than a fountain pen’s line. “It’s a mouse. You don’t speak into it.”
He assessed the plastic egg thing. “I know mice,” he said. “This is not one.”
“It’s only called a mouse,” she explained. “Set it on the mousepad and move it around.”
A little white arrow drifted across the blue bird sky.
“Do you see this?” he declared, dashing his palm against the table. “The machine has surrendered without a fight. It may have beaten Kasparov but it knows better than to test me.”
The waitress laughed, her thin fingers just touching his shoulder, and ah, what a day this was. She opened Internet Explorer before returning to the register. “It’s Google, not Gogol. You type what you’re searching for and hit enter.”
He studied the keyboard. No sense to its arrangement. Not even the alphabet would submit to alphabetical order. Everyone had to be an individualist, everyone thinking they’re precious little snowflakes when really they’re just boring drops of water.
Best to start simple, let this Google warm its engine.
is the earth flat, he typed.
Images of globes, biographies of Columbus, circumferences and curvatures crowded across the monitor with dizzying suddenness. Vladimir had expected Google to come back with a simple da or nyet, but this, this was something else.
He typed japan: chopsticks, Tokyo high-rises, Wikipedia articles, travel guides, mushroom clouds.
He typed knee and a thousand different knees popped up along with exhaustive accountings of its every bone, muscle, and tendon, diagnoses and treatments for every injury from arthritis to gunshot wounds.
How was a universe of information compressed into this little metal box? He couldn’t fit a whole chicken into his toaster oven and this thing fit the entire world. It felt tinged with sacrilege, even for an atheist. No one should know this much. It must be illegal. He glanced behind, certain that dark-suited security forces would storm the room, confiscate the computer, lead him away in handcuffs. Nothing but jittery teenagers blasting each other in blood-splattered squares of light.
If this machine knew everything, would it know his father?
vasily osipovich markin. He didn’t hit the enter key, not yet, because he’d never written his father’s name before, never seen it written. The cursor blinked impatiently. What good could come from this? You had to keep your eyes forward. Don’t turn your head. Don’t mind what lies in the periphery. Behind you is only ruin.
He deleted vasily osipovich markin and typed roman osipovich markin.
He wanted to hit enter but he was already standing, out of the chair, backing away. He was…devil, was he crying?
You’ve ripened into a pungent piece of cheese, Vladimir.
Yes, fine, okay. Just get me out of here.
“What’s wrong?” the waitress asked, when he reached the door.
“I have a lump in my throat,” he admitted.
“Oh my god,” she said. She was young enough to be his daughter-in-law but she looked at him like his mother. “Is it malignant?”
“Tell Sergei I’m not feeling well. Tell him I’ve gone home.”
When Sergei emerged from the bathroom, his father had already left. He sat down at his computer. The cursor blipped behind roman osipovich markin in the search bar. His father’s uncle. Curious, Sergei hit return.
Nadya
On a July morning in 2004, a surgeon in Moscow unwound the bandages from Nadya’s head.
“Everything will be blurry,” the doctor said. Nadya opened her right eyelid and three years of darkness peeled away.
The surgeon’s office was a 1970s Gerhard Richter, a quarter turn of the focus away from clarity. When she extended her arms, she couldn’t count the fingers on her hands but she could see they were there. Ruslan was too. Her fingers slipped into his.
Three nurses ran into the surgeon’s office when they heard Ruslan shout. They stood at the door, hesitant, because the cries of the ill, the suffering, the dying, and the bereaved had become well known to the three nurses. They had heard every iteration of pain. They were less familiar with the howling awe of rejoicing.
On her second day of sight, he gave her a paint sampler. It contained eighteen hundred named colors. Coral Fuchsia. Cream of Amethyst. Golden Evening. Siberian Russet. She read and reread until she could identify by name every shade in an ice cream freezer, in Journalists’ Park, in the morning sky. As poets went, Aleksandr Pushkin had nothing on the paint sampler copywriter.
They married eight months after she left the hospital. As a teenager, she’d imagined love to be a flare sparkling upward, unzipping the night sky. What she had with Ruslan gave off a warmth nearer to friendship than romance. That was fine with her. Better the dim heat of a hand in yours than all the fire in the sky. He massaged vaseline into her scars and she sat through endless American slapstick comedies. They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.
She gave birth to a daughter, Makka, at Hospital Number Six in Volchansk. A green-eyed girl, daughter of the head of surgery, mascot of the maternity ward, demanded a souvenir from her with the stubbornness of a bridge troll. Ruslan gave her one of the tourist brochures he still carried in his coat pocket.
The end of Ruslan’s career as a tour guide was the beginning of his career as a ministerial figure. The oligarch who had bought the Zakharov had taken a shine to Ruslan and had him installed as a temporary deputy minister. His predecessor had moved to a place in America called Muskegon an
d, to Nadya’s knowledge, still lived in the basement of his son’s pharmacy. As a deputy minister, Ruslan’s daily responsibilities largely consisted of accepting bribes. His subordinates nicknamed him The Natural. Someone always had to be paid off and the world seemed to think it was Ruslan’s turn. Nadya wasn’t one to argue.
To prove he understood that private enrichment was the first commandment of public service, Ruslan’s first official act was to de-mine the highlands of his ancestral village, beginning with Zakharov’s field. Nadya had never been there herself, had only seen it in the painting. She’d heard stories that Ruslan’s former father-in-law, a pumpkin of a man with links to the insurgency, had used the property as a rebel safe house. Some said he’d even kept Russian soldiers prisoner there. Ruslan told her that the property had fallen into disrepair long ago and that they shouldn’t be surprised if it was all ruins now.
It was to Nadya’s surprise, then, that when they returned for the first time after the mine removal Ruslan pulled her to him. She felt his weight drape over her shoulder. The meadow was mottled Cézanne green. At a dozen meters before her, the land melted in spring light. It would be another year before she could see all the way to the crest of the hill.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“It’s all there,” he said in a voice touched with wonder. Nadya knew the sensation, the eeriness of discovering a corresponding point between past and present, of realizing that not all memory is mirage.
She tried to coax him forward, but he leaned deeper into her arms.
“The shed and stone wall are rebuilt. Behind them the herb garden is replanted.” He built the image for her in short, declarative sentences, a habit he’d never fully surrender, even after sight was fully restored to her right eye. “It’s all here.”
“What wrong, then?” she asked.
“Where to begin?”
“What’s right, then?” she asked.
“That’s a trick question.”
She stroked the back of his neck, felt the downy hairs lift onto her finger pads. A gray bird in the sky twisted its shadow on the ground. The sunshine glowed off her cheeks. They rarely kissed in daylight.
In the afternoon, they went to the meadow with a shovel. Ruslan insisted he walk a dozen paces ahead, just in case. The minesweeping team had cleared twenty-three mines from the hill. The repacked hollows were no wider than manhole lids. Sunken among them were two explosion craters, one at the end of the herb garden, the other farther up the hill.
“I don’t know which is theirs,” he said. “I didn’t think there would be two.” He frowned and his hands shook slightly. He looked awed and frightened by what he didn’t know, how the scope of what he didn’t know widened by the day.
He climbed into each hole, sifted through the dirt for remains. He reached over the lip of the crater, deposited what he’d found on the grass, then went back under like a kid diving for coins. Patches of pink silk. A marbled brown button. The melted treads of a sandal. A shattered cassette tape. She fit the fractured plastic face to read its half-erased message: F r ol a In Case gency!!! Vol. 1.
With Ruslan’s trousers rolled to his knees, his hands and feet tanned with dirt, Nadya could so easily imagine him as the kind of boy whose mother was forever following with a broom. With nothing else to inter, he divided the artifacts into two piles and set one at the bottom of each crater. For the rest of the afternoon and into evening, he shoveled burgundy dirt into each. He had no bodies to bury, only holes to fill.
Over the following years, they spent spring and summer weekends at the dacha, the rest of the time in Grozny. With funds diverted from a dozen more-needed infrastructure projects, the Museum of Regional Art was rebuilt. Nadya returned as head of conservation. She completed her dissertation on the censor, Roman Markin, and created a website to catalog his falsified images.
One summer day a visitor arrived at the dacha. Young man. Shorn hair and jeans baggy enough to clothe six legs. Ruslan and Makka had been playing on the hill. Nadya watched the stranger approach with a map stretched between his hands. The map didn’t bend in the breeze. It was wrapped in a gold-leafed frame.
She tied her headscarf and waited for Ruslan before approaching.
“You look lost,” Ruslan said.
The young man glanced to the lush green steps ridging the far slope. The grasses of the empty pasture swayed with the light touch of wind on their tips. “It’s a peaceful place,” the young man said, now holding the framed map away from them. “Can you tell me if anyone died by a land mine here?”
Ruslan stepped to the young man and grabbed him by the back of the neck. The suddenness stunned Nadya.
“Time to explain yourself,” he said.
The young man lifted the map upright and only when its contours matched those of the hill did they recognize what it was.
In the living room, the young man explained himself over tea. He had been told his brother had died on the hill depicted in the painting and wanted to see the place for himself. When Ruslan asked how he’d come across the painting, he shook his head and smiled, as if to say life is well suited for nearly everything but explanation. “Have you ever seen Deceit Web?” he asked.
Ruslan ran his fingers over the gilded frame, inhaled the musty coarseness of the canvas. Nadya observed him. Two manneristic figures, painted in black, ran toward the crest of the hill. Ruslan held his fingertips over them, as if testing them for warmth.
Nadya stayed inside with Makka while the two men climbed the hill.
“I was told two Russian soldiers were kept here during the war,” Ruslan said. “They rebuilt the place. Did a decent job, actually.” He broke off a sprig of mint leaf and passed it. The young man slid the leaf between his lips and tongued it across the roof of his mouth. They climbed to the two grave markers. “I found two mine craters when I returned here. One might be your brother’s.”
The young man dropped to one knee and unzipped his duffel bag. Nestled among underwear and balled socks lay three pickle jars, two filled with ashes, the third empty. He scooped a palmful of dirt into the empty one. “When we were kids, we’d pretend that the world was ending and he’d climb into a rocket ship and blast off into space.”
Ruslan squinted into the liquid shimmer of sunlight at the horizon. There was an explosion. His world had ended. He was still here.
“I guess I’ll go now,” the young man said.
Ruslan wasn’t finished. “Without the Zakharov.”
“Excuse me?”
“The painting. It stays.”
“But it’s mine.”
“This is where it belongs.”
The young man’s soft face hardened like a dollop of melted wax. “I’m going to leave now.”
Ruslan stepped near enough to smell the mint leaf wilting on the young man’s tongue. “As I see it, you have two options. You can sell it to me and I’ll give you a ride to the airport. Or I’ll take it from you and you can find your own way. You’re a long way from home in a land you don’t understand. Choose wisely.”
“Memory is the only true real estate,” the young man said. “Nabokov wrote that.”
“Good for him. What will it be?”
The young man studied the painting for another moment. “I’m sure I can get a poster of it,” he said. They looked back at the hill before returning inside. There wasn’t a shadow on it.
With three pickle jars and ten thousand U.S. dollars in his suitcase, the young man flew to a resort town on the Black Sea. For three days he ambled along the beaches, his feet sinking in brown sand, his pale cheeks baked to a permanent blush. That beach was nearer to the sun than any strip of land he’d ever known. On his fourth day, he shouldered his duffel bag and walked to the sand. He held a worn postcard and followed the shore until he stood on the spot the card depicted. No one would force him to sell the postcard. The heavily oiled, lightly clad swimmers might have wondered why the skinny young man in a leopard-print Speedo had gone into the water with three pi
ckle jars. More likely, they didn’t notice him at all.
A wave tumbled him into a dusky green tunnel. Ropes of seawater uncoiled down his neck. The next wave broke gently over his torso. He backstroked with one arm. The other clasped the three jars to his chest. Silver schools darted at his side. There he was. He could barely believe it. When he’d swum far past the breakwater, so far he had the whole sea, from here to the horizon, all to himself, he unscrewed the jars and let them sink into the dark blue.
Sergei
He bought his father a smartphone for his birthday.
“I already have a telephone,” his father said. “It’s connected by cords to the wall so it can’t be lost or stolen. You tell me whose phone is smarter.”
“I got it for the camera. Look,” Sergei said. He pressed the power button and the phone chirped to life. “There’s two camera lenses. One pointing out, one back at you.”
“We live in troubling times.”
“It’s for selfies. So…”
His father scowled. “Don’t be vulgar.”
Sergei crossed the room to the wall of his father’s portraits. Whenever he wanted to discuss a difficult subject, he addressed it to one of the more sympathetic photographs of his father. “Bit optimistic, leaving all this extra space, no?” he asked, nodding to the bare wall that stretched beyond the last framed photograph.
“It’s your inheritance. When you become a father, you can put photos of yourself on the wall and your son will think you’re a deluded narcissist.”
“Let’s hope you live a long time yet,” Sergei said. He coughed into his fist. “A couple years ago, I found the website of an art historian in Grozny. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on your uncle. The censor.”
His father said nothing.
“She’s putting on some sort of museum exhibition on him next month, here in Petersburg.”
“Last I checked, digging up graves and horsing around with the skeletons is still against the law,” his father said.