The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (26 page)

“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.”

B
EFORE
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.

N
OW
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.

T
HE
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. The 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.”

T
HE
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.

“Let’s take a break,” I said when we reached Ploshchad Lenina.

“It’s only eleven.”

“I want some air.”

Kirill sighed, but agreed. On the escalator he counted the morning’s earnings, pleased with the sum. “You need to keep your money in your front pocket,” he said. “Thieves will be too wary of your stumps to go anywhere near them.”

“You keep saying ‘you,’ ” I whispered. It was a quiet realization.

“I’m talking to you. How else should I address you?”

“You keep giving me instructions. Like you’re training me. ‘You need to do this, you need to do that to be a good beggar.’ ”

“I’m speaking in generalizations,” he began, but I’d already stopped listening. The whole summer long I hadn’t realized it. I wasn’t Kirill’s assistant. I was his apprentice.

I can’t remember the faces of bystanders, what was shouted by whom when I let the collapsed wheelchair crash down the escalator, what Kirill said, or if he said anything at all. I remember grabbing Kirill’s pressed blue collar and pushing him against the slow slide of the escalator wall. If he wanted, he could’ve stopped me. Those arms of his walked three kilometers of train cars every day and still had enough oomph left to lift weights by night. But he didn’t resist, didn’t fight, surrendered before I threw that first punch, and when I had him by the neck, when his hat toppled and the escalator wall unmade his impeccable part, I swear a grin crossed
his lips, and beneath his knotted brows his face held no fear. He had bet with his dead-eyed doubt that I was too craven to commit even this act of cowardice. I punched him once to prove that I could, and then kept punching him because I was too afraid to stop. My knuckles were four burst berries by the time I grabbed his greased hair and slammed his face into the escalator step. Finally, Kirill went limp. I reached into his front pocket, palmed the bills and loose change, and sprinted up the remaining steps. From a half block away, I saw the escalator deposit Kirill at street level. He lay lifelessly while the ascending steps snapped against his stumps. Hurried commuters stepped over him.