FOR the two weeks Nadya is in Petersburg, my evenings stagnate. Russian dignitaries, potential investors, state-approved journalists, and the omnipresent oilmen fill my mornings and afternoons, but when I return to my flat I’m reminded I am, at the end of the day, alone. Twice I go to Nadya’s flat to clean her bedroom closet, the back corners of shelves, behind the toilet, the little places that even in her fastidiousness she’d miss. I’m uncomfortable with the neediness that underlies my decision to insert myself into her life under the pretext of concern. I am concerned, of course. Some nights I wake from nightmares that she has tripped over a chair, a shoe, a broomstick I could have moved. But in rare moments—like now, as I scour the mildew from her bathroom tiles—clarity surfaces through the murky soup of daily life, and I know I have purposefully made myself into a crutch she cannot risk discarding. What I don’t know is whether I’ve done so out of love or loneliness, or if in this upside-down world where roofs lie on streets, intentions have lost their moral weight altogether.
One Wednesday, feeling unusually alert given the hour, I contemplate Zakharov’s pasture. It’s the least ruined of the canvases, stained with ash and soot, but still the damage is minor. Most severe is the burn hole at the center of the canvas, upon the hill, and even though the hole was burned into the canvas during the museum fires, I see it as the crater left by the land-mine blast, the hole through which everything disappeared. A few years ago, Nadya could’ve restored it in days.
An idea. I let myself back into Nadya’s flat to retrieve her restoration kit. It’s at her desk, amid the black-and-white photographs censored by the propaganda officer who had painted the Grozny party boss into the foreground of the Zakharov. Nadya became fascinated with the propaganda officer after she had expunged the party boss from the painting, particularly when she discovered that he had inserted a portrait of the same person into hundreds of the censored images, from boyhood to elderly years. If you lined up all the photographs, you might see this stranger’s entire life unfold before you in the background. I pause on one, identified as Leningrad 1937 in pencil on the back. Here he’s just a boy, chubby face and gray eyes below the accent mark of a cowlick, hardly noticeable in the crowd. I feel him staring up at me with an intensity approaching sentience, and for a moment I can’t move: His gaze has pierced and pinned me to a present space we share. How did he die? The question has looped through me on a ticker tape these past five years, but I have never before asked it about a boy who was not my son.
Back home I set the contents beside the Zakharov canvas. Plastic bottles of emulsion cleaner, neutralizer, gloss varnish, conditioner, and varnish remover. A tin of putty. Eight meters of canvas lining. A depleted packet of cotton-tipped swabs. A dozen disposable chloroprene gloves. I’d taken a yearlong course in conservation at university, but my real education came from Nadya, when, in the months after my family died, I neglected my duties as deputy director and spent most afternoons in her office, watching her work.
Every evening for the next week I snap on the chloroprene gloves and wash away the surface dirt with cotton balls dampened in neutralizer. The emulsion cleaner smells of fermented watermelon, and I apply it with the swabs, running small circles until the cotton tips gray and the unadulterated color of Zakharov’s palette is revealed. Using the repair putty as sealant, I patch the burn hole with a square of fresh canvas. Then, for the real challenge, I paint.
The patched hole is the size of a halved playing card in the center-right of the painting, near the cresting hill. The grass, turned emerald by sunlight, must be flawless, the gradation beyond reproach, and I spend several hours testing different blends of oils before coloring the canvas patch with delicate brushstrokes. As I work, I realize that even in his rendering of a distant field of grass, Zakharov is beyond imitation. I lean back, search the painting for two familiar figures, as I have for years, but this time is different. Nadya would never forgive me had she been here and been able to see me paint, upon the patched hole on the hillside, a woman and a boy.
With quick, strong lines, I draw them as silhouettes. The boy’s arms are raised, his body elongated as he makes for the crest, his hands thrown open. The woman, a step behind, follows him up the hill. Their backs are to me. The sun rakes the grass and ripe apricots bend the branches. No one chases them. They run from nothing.
NADYA has returned and the white tea has cooled in our cups and still she hasn’t mentioned the Petersburg eye surgeons.
“Good news,” she says and feels across the floor for her suitcase. She hands me two VHS tapes. “These are the two you wanted, right?”
I examine the two VHS cases. Soviet comedies, sadly.
“Yes, these are precisely the ones I wanted.”
“I was afraid the street vendor had swindled me.”
“What did the eye surgeons say, Nadya?”
The pause was long enough to peel a plum.
She delivers the news with a downcast frown. “Reconstructive surgery is possible.”
I force as much gusto into my congratulations as I can muster, slapping my palm on the table while my spine wilts. What will I be if Nadya no longer needs me, what if she moves to Sweden and assembles bookcases in a living room I will never see? This is good news, though, of course it is, but Nadya’s face is joyless. “What’s wrong? Is there a long wait for the operation?”
“There won’t be one.”
“What? Why not?”
“Too expensive.” She’s still facing the empty chair across the table, thinking that I’m still sitting there. “It’s one hundred and fifteen thousand.”
One hundred and fifteen thousand rubles. A huge, but not impossible, sum. Years to save for, but within the realm of possibility, like a vacation to Belarus. I’m already scheming ways to defraud the Interior Ministry when she says, “Dollars.”
My heart spirals and crash-lands somewhere deep in my gut. At thirty-three rubles to a dollar, the number is insurmountable. Nadya reaches for her purse and pulls out an envelope.
“What I owe you for the trip. Help me count it out,” she says. For a moment her instinct to trust anyone, even me, is infuriating. Isn’t suspicion the natural condition of the blind? Haven’t I warned her, told her to be careful, that she can’t rely on anyone? But by some perversion she’s become more trusting, more willing to believe that people aren’t by nature hucksters and scoundrels, which is why, I suppose, my VHS collection is rounded out with Gentlemen of Fortune.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“I’m paying you back.”
“If you want to be a martyr go join them in the woods.”
“Help me count it out,” she insists, her voice stern, cool, serious. “I still have money left from the disability fund. I’m not a charity.”
Of course there’s no disability fund. Of course the government isn’t sending her a monthly payment or subsidizing the flat adjacent to mine. The cash sealed in the Interior Ministry envelopes I bring over on the first of the month comes from me, as does her monthly rent.
“I’m waiting,” she says. We both know this is a farce. But I sit beside her. I play my part in the lie that preserves the illusion that our friendship, our romance, whatever this is, is based on affection rather than need. I count out the bills that I will return to her in an Interior Ministry envelope on the first of the month, and when I finish we shake hands as if our business is concluded and there is nothing left that we owe each other, no debt unpaid, no obligation unfulfilled.
In bed I run my fingers through what remains of her hair, press my fingertips to her cheeks, slowly scrolling, as if I am the blinded of us, to decipher the dense Braille scrawled across her face. I slide my hand down her torso, over the bulge of her left breast, the hook of her hip bone, to thighs so smooth and unmarked they’re hers only in darkness. She rolls away.
Lying here in bed, you nearly forget the falling rockets, the collapsing museum, the air of the clean sky impossibly distant, the cinder blocks shifting like ice cubes in a
glass. The Zakharov was in your hands when you found her, her face halved by burns, her teeth chattering. You nearly forget how you lifted her cheek to cool it with your breath, how her broken eyes searched for you as you held her.
You nearly forget the many times you have warned her of monsters as though they are a people apart: lurking beyond her doorway, ready to prey on the blind and vulnerable. As she turns from you, tucking the sheets beneath her hip, you nearly forget to ask yourself, “What monster have I become today?”
IN the morning I return to my flat and find the canvases on the floor where I left them. Daylight grants the scorch and char an odd beauty, as if the fires hadn’t destroyed the artworks, but revised them into expressions of a brutal present. I pick up the nearest canvas, a family portrait commissioned by a nobleman as a wedding present for his second son. The top third of the canvas has been incinerated, taking with it the heads of the nobleman, his wife, the first son, and the newly betrothed, but their bodies remain, dressed in soot-stained breeches and petticoats, and by their feet sits a dachshund so fat its little legs barely touch the ground, the only figure—in a canvas commissioned to convey the family’s immortal honor—to survive intact.
I hang the canvas on the wall from a bent nail and step back, marveling that here, for the first time in my career, I’ve hung a work of modern art. After pulling the furniture into the kitchen, I hang the remaining canvases throughout the living room, finally coming to the restored Zakharov, which I consider taking back to the closet, shelving in the darkness where it will exist for me alone, but my curatorial instincts win out, and I hang the Zakharov on the wall where it is meant to be. The street children long ago stole the last of my door signs. I scrawl one more on a cardboard shingle and nail it to the door: Grozny Museum of Regional Art.
Now for guards. I toss a crumpled hundred-ruble note down the stairs, thinking that they, like the Sunzha trout, are too hungry to pass up a baited hook. A small hand reaches around the corner, and I grab it, yanking on the slender arm to reel in the rest of the child. He squirms wildly, biting at my wrists, until I shake him into submission and offer him a job in museum security.
He stops squirming, perhaps out of shock, and I close his hand around the hundred-ruble note. His fingernails look rusted on. His shirt is no thicker than stitched-together soot.
“Bandits are stealing the signs from my door,” I tell him. “I’ll pay you and your friends three hundred rubles a week to keep watch.”
Over the following weeks, I bring all my tours through the museum. A delegation from the Red Cross. More Chinese oilmen. A heavyweight boxing champ. A British journalist. This is what remains, the charred canvases cry. You cannot burn ash! You cannot raze rubble! As the only museum employee besides the street children, I give myself a long overdue promotion. No longer am I deputy. As of today, I am director of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.
THE newly installed phone rings one morning and the gloomy Interior minister greets me. “We’re properly fucked.”
“Nice to hear from you, sir,” I reply. I’m still in my sleeping clothes and even for a phone conversation I feel unsuitably dressed.
“The Chinese are out. They traded their drilling right to Rosneft for a few dozen Russian fighter jets.”
I nod. It explains why China hadn’t sent their most shrewd or sober representatives. “So this means Rosneft will drill?”
“Yes, and it gets even worse,” he heaves. “I may well be demoted to deputy minister.”
“I was a deputy for many years. It’s not as bad as you think.”
“When the world takes a dump, it lands on a deputy’s forehead.”
I couldn’t deny that. “What does this mean for the Tourist Bureau?”
“You’ll have one more tour, then it’s safe to say you’ll need to find new employment. Oleg Voronov. From Rosneft.”
It took a beat for the name to register. “The fourteenth richest man in Russia?”
“Thirteenth now.”
“With respect, sir, I give tours to human rights activists and print journalists, people of no power or importance. I’m not qualified to give a tour to a man of his stature. Why does he even want a tour?”
“My question precisely! Apparently his wife, Galina Something-or-other-ova, the actress, has heard of this art museum you’ve cobbled together. What’ve you been up to?”
“It’s a long story, sir.”
“You know I hate stories.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, do show him our famed Chechen hospitality. Be sure to offer him a glass of unboiled tap water. Let’s give the thirteenth richest man in Russia an intestinal parasite!”
“Don’t worry, sir. I’m a limo driver.”
“I’ll land on my feet, Ruslan. Don’t lose too much sleep over my future. Perhaps I’ll visit America. I’d like to see Muskegon while I’m still young and healthy enough to really experience it.”
THREE weeks pass and here he is, Oleg Voronov sitting in the backseat of the Mercedes with his wife, the actress Galina Ivanova. Up front is his assistant, a bleached-blond parcel of productivity who takes notes even when no one is speaking. But try as I might, I’m unable to properly hate Voronov. So far he’s been untalkative, inattentive, and uncurious; in short, a perfect tourist. Galina, on the other hand, has read Khassan Geshilov’s The Origins of Chechen Civilization and recites historical trivia unfamiliar to me. The office doors of dead administrators clatter beneath us and she asks thoughtful questions, treating me not as a servant, or even a tour guide, but as a scholar. I casually mention the land mines, the street children, the rape and torture and indiscriminate suffering, but Voronov and his wife shake their heads with sympathy. Nothing I say will turn them into the masks of evil I want them to be.
The tour concludes at my flat. I’m hesitant to allow a man of his stature into the small world of my museum, but his wife insists. As we ascend the stairwell, Voronov checks his watch, a cheap plastic piece of crap, and in that moment I know I will not hate him as he deserves to be hated.
“This is what remains of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art,” I say as I open the door. Voronov and his assistant circle the room. I glance to the kitchen sink, but a glass of unboiled tap water is a fate I wouldn’t wish upon even a Russian oligarch.
Voronov and Galina pass the burned-out frames to the pasture painting. “Is this the one?” he asks her. She nods.
“A Zakharov, no?” he asks, fingering his lapel as he turns to me. “There was an exhibit of his at the Tretyakov, if memory serves.”
Only now do I see clearly the animals I have invited into my home. “The fires destroyed most of the original collection when the museum was bombed. We sent what was saved to the Tretyakov.”
“But not this?”
“Not this.”
“Rather reckless, don’t you think, to leave such a treasure on an apartment wall guarded only by street urchins?”
“It’s a minor work.”
“Believe it or not, my wife has been looking for this painting. It has special meaning for her. I know, I know. I married a sentimentalist.”
“Could I offer you a glass of water?”
“You could offer me the painting.”
I force a laugh. He laughs too. We are laughing. Ha-ha! Ha-ha! It’s all a joke. “The painting is not for sale,” I say.
He stops laughing. “It is if I want to buy it.”
“This is a museum. You can’t have a painting just because you want it. The director of the Tretyakov wouldn’t sell you art from his walls just because you can afford it.”
“You are only a deputy director and this isn’t the Tretyakov.” There’s real pity in his voice as he surveys the ash flaking from the canvases, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, and yes, now, at last, I hate him.
“Come now, I have a penthouse gallery in Moscow. Temperature and moisture controlled. First-rate security. No one but Galina, and a few guests, and I will ever see it. You must realize I’m being
more than reasonable.” In a less than subtle threat he nods out the window to the street where his three armed Goliaths skulk beside their Land Rover. “What is the painting worth?”
“It’s worth,” I begin, but how can I finish? What price can I assign to the last Zakharov in Chechnya, to the last image of my home? One sum comes to mind, but it terrifies me. Wouldn’t that be the worst of all outcomes, to lose both the Zakharov and Nadya in the same transaction? “Just take it,” I say. “You took everything else. Take this too.”
Voronov bristles. “I’m not a thief. Tell me what it’s worth.”
My gaze floats and lands upon the bumper sticker of WWJCD? inscribed within the body of a fish. What would he do? Jim Carrey would be brave. In the end, no matter how hard, Jim Carrey does the right thing. I close my eyes. I don’t want to say it. “One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. U.S.”
“One-fifteen?”
I nod.
“That’s what, three-point-seven, three-point-eight million rubles? Let’s make it an even four,” Voronov says with a single fleshy clap. His wife still hasn’t looked away from the painting. He turns to his assistant who has followed him around the room, taking notes all the while. The assistant unyokes herself from a mammoth purse, pulls out eight stacks of banded five-thousand-ruble bills, and lays them on the floor. “Never trust banks,” Voronov says. “You can have that advice for free. It’s been a pleasure.” He slaps my back, tells the assistant to bring the canvas down with her, and heads for the door.