The oilmen have arrived from Beijing for a ceremonial signing over of drilling rights. “It’s a holiday for them,” their translator told me, last night, at the Grozny Eternity Hotel, which is both the only five-star hotel and the only hotel in the republic. I nodded solemnly; he needn’t explain. I came of age in the reign of Brezhnev, when young men would enter civil service academies hardy and robust, only to leave two years later anemic and stooped, cured forever of the inclination to be civil or of service to anyone. Still, Beijing must be grim if they’re vacationing in Chechnya.
“We’ll reach Grozny in ten minutes,” I announce to them in English. The translator sits in the passenger seat. He’s a stalk-thin man with a head of hair so black and lustrous it looks sculpted from shoe polish. I feel a shared camaraderie with translators – as I do with deputies and underlings of all stripes – and as he speaks in slow, measured Mandarin, I hear the resigned and familiar tone of a man who knows he is more intelligent than his superiors.
The road winds over what was once a roof. A verdigris-encrusted arm rises from the debris, its forefinger raised skyward. The Lenin statue had stood in the square outside this school, arm upthrust, rallying the schoolchildren to glorious revolution, but now, buried to his chin like a cowboy sentenced to death beneath the desert sun, Vladimir Ilyich waves only for help. We drive onward, passing brass bandoliers and olive flak jackets, red bandannas and golden epaulettes, the whole palette of Russian invasion painted across a thunderstorm of wreckage. Upon seeing the 02 Interior Ministry plate dangling below the Mercedes’s hood, the spies, soldiers, policemen, and armed thugs wave us through without hesitation. The streets become more navigable. Cement trucks can’t make it from the cement works to the holes in the ground without being hijacked by one or another shade of our Technicolor occupation and sold to Russian construction companies north of the border, so road crews salvage office doors from collapsed administration buildings and lay them across the craters. Affixed to the doors are the names and titles of those who once worked behind them. Mansur Khalidov: Head of Oncology; City Hospital Number Six. Yakha Sagaipova: Assistant Director of Production; Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry. Perhaps my name is written over a gash in some shabby side street, supporting the weight of a stranger who glances at the placard reading Ruslan Dokurov: Deputy Director; Grozny Museum of Regional Art and wonders if such a person is still alive.
“A large mass grave was recently discovered outside of Grozny, no?” the translator asks.
“Yes, an exciting discovery. It will be a major tourist attraction for archaeology enthusiasts.”
The translator frowns. “Isn’t it a crime scene?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s millions of years old.”
“But weren’t the bodies found shot execution-style?” he insists.
I shrug him off. Who am I to answer for the barbarities of prehistoric man?
The translator nods to a small mountain range of rubble bulldozed just over the city limits. “What’s that?”
“Suburbs,” I say.
We pass backhoes, dump trucks, and jackhammers through the metallic dissonance of reconstruction – a welcome song after months of screaming shells. The cranes are the tallest man-made structures I have ever seen in person. We drive to the central square, once the hub of municipal government, now a brown field debossed with earthmover tracks. Nadya once lived just down the road. The oilmen climb out and frown at each other, then at the translator, and then finally at me.
Turning to the northeast, I point at a strip of blue sky wedged between two fat cumuli. “That was Hotel Kavkaz. ABBA stayed two nights. I carried their guitars when I worked there one summer. Next to that, picture an apartment block. Before ’91, only party members lived there; and after ’91, only criminals. No one moved in or out.”
None of the oilmen smiles. The translator leans to me and whispers, “You are aware, of course, that these three gentlemen are esteemed members of the Communist Party of China.”
“It’s OK. I’m a limo driver.”
The translator stares blankly.
“Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber?”
Nothing.
“Jim Carrey. A brilliant actor who embodies the senselessness of our era,” I explain.
The interpreter doesn’t bother translating. I continue to draw a map of the square by narration, but the oilmen can’t see what I see. They witness only a barren expanse demolished by bomb and bulldozer.
“Come, comrades, use your imagination,” I urge, but they return to the Mercedes, and I am talking solely to the translator, and then he returns to the Mercedes, and I am talking solely to myself.
Three months ago, the interior minister told me his idea. The proposition was ludicrous, but I listened with the blank-faced complacency I had perfected throughout my twenty-three years as a public servant.
“The United Nations has named Grozny the most devastated city on earth,” the minister explained between bites of moist trout.
I wasn’t sure of the proper response, so offered my lukewarm congratulations.
“Yes, well, always nice to receive recognition, I suppose. But as you might imagine, we have an image problem.”
He loomed over his desk in a high-backed executive chair, while across from him I listened from an odd, leggy stool designed to make its occupant struggle to stay upright. The minister’s path had first crossed mine fifteen years earlier, when he had sought my advice regarding a recently painted portrait of him and his sons, and I had sought his regarding a dacha near my home village. He had two sons then. The first emigrated before the most recent war to attend an American pharmacology school and now works at a very important drugstore in Muskegon, Michigan. I don’t know what happened to the second, but the lack of ministerial boasting serves as a death knell. The portrait, which still hung on the far wall, depicted the three of them in tall leather boots, baggy trousers, long woolen chokhas, and sheepskin papakhas, heroically bestriding the carcass of a slain brown bear that bore a striking resemblance to Yeltsin.
“Foreign investment,” the minister continued. “Most others don’t agree with me, but I believe we need to attract capital unconnected to the Kremlin if we’re to achieve a degree of economic autonomy, and holding the record for the world’s largest ruin isn’t helping. Rosneft wants to sink its fangs into our oil reserves, but the Chinese will cut a better deal. Have you heard of Oleg Voronov? He’s on the Rosneft board, the fourteenth richest man in Russia, and one of the hawks who pushed for the 1994 invasion. The acquisition of Chechen oil is among his top priorities.”
The minister set down his silverware and began sorting through the little bones on his plate, reconstructing the skeleton of the fish he had consumed. “If we’re to entice foreign investment, we need to rebrand Chechnya as the Dubai of the Caucasus. That’s where you come in. You’re what – the director of the Museum of Regional Art?”
“Deputy director, sir.”
“That’s right, deputy director. You did fine work sending those paintings to Moscow. A real PR coup. Even British newspapers wrote about the Tretyakov exhibit.”
With a small nod, I accepted the compliment for what was the lowest point of my rut-ridden career. In 1999, Russian rockets demolished the museum, and with my staff I saved what I could from the ensuing fires. Soon after, I was ordered to surrender the salvaged works to the Russians. When I saw that I’d been listed as co-curator of an exhibit of Chechen paintings at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, I closed my lids and wondered what had happened to all the things my eyes had loved.
The minister tilted the plate over the rubbish bin, and the ribs slid from the spine of the fish. “Nothing suggests stability and peace like a thriving tourism sector,” he said. “I think you’d be the perfect candidate to head the project.”
“With respect, sir,” I said. “The subject of my dissertation was nineteenth-century pastoral landscapes. I’m a scholar. This is all a bit beyond me.”
“I’ll be honest, Ruslan, for this position we need someone with three qualifications. First, he must speak English. Second, he must know enough about the culture and history of the region to convey that Chechnya is much more than a recovering war zone, that we possess a rich heritage unsullied by violence. Third, and most important, he must be that rare government man without links to human rights abuses on either side of the conflict. Do you meet these qualifications?”
“I do, sir,” I said. “But still, I’m entirely unqualified to lead a tourism initiative.”
The minister frowned. He scanned the desk for a napkin before reaching over to wipe his oily fingers on my necktie. “According to your dossier, you’ve worked in hotels.”
“When I was sixteen. I was a bellhop.”
“Well,” the minister beamed, “then you clearly have experience in the hospitality industry.”
“In the suitcase-carrying industry.”
“So you accept?”
I said nothing, and as is often the case with men who possess more power than wisdom, he took my silence for affirmation. “Congratulations, Ruslan. You’re head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau.” And so my future was decided – as has become custom – entirely without my consent.
Given how few buildings were still standing, office space was a valuable commodity, so I worked from my flat. I spent the first morning writing Tourist Bureau on a piece of cardboard. My penmanship had been honed by years of attempting to appear productive, and I taped the sign to the front door. Within five minutes, it had disappeared. I made a new sign, then another, but the street children who lived on the landing kept stealing them. After the fifth sign, I went to the kitchen and drank the bottle of vodka the minister had sent over in celebration and passed out in tears on the floor. So ended my first day as bureau chief.
Over the following weeks, I designed a brochure. The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. From them I learned to be lavishly adjectival, to treat prospective visitors as semiliterate gluttons, to impute reports of kidnapping, slavery, and terrorism to the slander of foreign provocateurs. Thrilled by my discoveries, I tucked a notebook into my shirt pocket and raced into the street. Upon seeing the empty space where an apartment block once stood, I wrote, Wide and unobstructed skies! I watched jubilantly as a pack of feral dogs chased a man, and noted, Unexpected encounters with wildlife! The city bazaar hummed with the sales of looted industrial equipment, humanitarian aid rations, and munitions suited for every occasion: Unparalleled shopping opportunities! Even before reaching the first checkpoint, I’d scribbled, First-rate security! The copy was easy; the real challenge was in finding images to substantiate it. After all, the siege had transfigured the city. Debris rerouted roads through abandoned warehouses-once I found a traffic jam on a factory floor – and what was not rerouted was razed. A photograph of my present surroundings would send a cannonball through my verbiage-fortified illusion of a romantic paradise for heterosexual couples, and I couldn’t find suitable alternatives of prewar Grozny within the destroyed archives. In the end, I forwent photographs altogether and instead used the visuals from January, April, and August of the 1984 Grozny Museum of Regional Art calendar. In the three nineteenth-century landscapes, swallows frolic over ripening grapevines, and a shepherd minds his flock backlit by a sunset; they portray a land untouched by war or communism, and beside them my descriptions of a picturesque Chechnya do not seem entirely dishonest.
I return home after depositing the troika of Chinese oilmen at the Interior Ministry. As I approach the staircase landing, the street children vanish, leaving behind the instruments of their survival: a metal skewer to roast pigeons, a chisel to chip cement from the loose bricks they sell to construction crews for a ruble each.
I knock on the door of the flat adjacent to mine and announce my name. Nadya appears in a headscarf and sunglasses. Turning her unscarred side toward me, she invites me in. “How was the maiden voyage?”
“An excellent success,” I say. “They dozed off before we reached the worst of the wreckage.”
Nadya smiles and takes measured steps to the Primus stove. She doesn’t need her white cane to reach the counter. I scan the room for impediments, yet everything is in order. Nothing on the floorboards but the kopek coins I’d glued down in paths to the bathroom, the kitchen, the front door so her bare feet could find their way in her early months of blindness. At the end of one of these paths is a desk neatly stacked with black-and-white photographs, once the subject of her dissertation on altered images from the Stalinist era. I sift through a few while she puts the kettle on. Nadya has circled a single face in each – the same person painted into the background of every photo, aging from childhood to his elderly years, the signature of the anonymous censor.
The kettle whistles in the kitchen. We sip tea from mismatched mugs that lift rings of dust from the tabletop. She sits to hide the left half of her face.
“The tourist brochures will be ready next week,” I say. “I’ll have to send one along to our Beijing comrades, if the paintings come out clearly. I’m skeptical of Ossetian printers.”
“You used three from the Zakharov room?”
“Yes, three Zakharovs.”
Her shadow nods on the wall. That gallery, the museum’s largest, had been her favorite, too. The first time I ever saw her was there, in 1987, on her first day as the museum’s restoration artist.
“You’ll have to save me one,” she says. “For when I can see it.”
Her last sentence hangs in the air for a long moment before I respond. “I have an envelope with five thousand rubles. For your trip. I’ll leave it on your nightstand.”
“Ruslan, please.”
“St Petersburg is a city engineered to steal money from visitors. I know. I’m in the industry.”
“You don’t need to take care of me,” she says with a firm but appreciative squeeze of my fingers. “I keep telling you – I’ve been saving my disability allowance. I have enough for the bus ticket, and I’m staying with the cousin of a university classmate.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for movies, for videocassettes,” I say, a beat too quickly. Slapstick and romantic comedies have been my favorite genres in recent years. “Find some that are foreign.”
She’s looking straight at me, or at my voice, momentarily forgetting the thing her face has become. We were together when rockets turned three floors of our city’s preeminent works of art into an inferno she barely escaped. The third-degree burns hardened into a chapped canvas of scar tissue wrapping the left side of her skull. That eye is gone, yet the other was partly spared. In the heat her right lids fused together, sealing her eye from the worst of the flames, and at times it can sense the flicker of light, the faintest movements. There is the possibility, an ophthalmologist has told her, that sight could be restored. However, any optical surgeon clever enough to perform such a delicate operation was also clever enough to have fled Grozny long ago. Nadya hasn’t any appointments, but if she can find a surgeon in Petersburg next week, and if she can come up with the money for the procedure, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.
“If it happens, the surgery, if it’s successful,” I say, “you don’t need to leave.”
“What I need is sleep.”
When I return to my flat, I scoop the concrete residue of the morning’s kasha onto a slice of round bread. The granules wedge into my molar divots, rough and bitter, suggesting the kind of rich, fibrous nutrients that uncoil one’s intestines into a vertical chute. I rinse my hands in the sink and let the water run even after they’re clean. Indoor plumbing was restored six months ago. Above the doorway hangs a bumper sticker of a fish with WWJCD? inscribed across its body, sent by an American church along with a crate of bibles in response to our plea for life-saving aid.
I take a dozen scorched canvases from the closet and lay them on the floor in two rows of six. They were too damaged for the Tretyakov exhibit. Not one was painted after 1879, and yet they look like the surreal visions of a psychedelic-addled mind. Most are charred through, some simply mounted ash, more reminiscent of Alberto Burri’s slash-and-burn Tachisme than the Imperial Academy of Arts’s classicism. In others the heat-melted oils have turned photo-realistic portraits into dissolved dreamscapes.
My closet holds one last canvas. I set it on the coffee table to examine by the light of an unshaded lamp. The seamless gradation of color, the nearly invisible brushstrokes – not even the three years I spent writing my dissertation on Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets could diminish my fascination with his work. Born in 1816, on the eve of the Caucasian War that Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin would later memorialize in their story cycle, he was an orphan before his fourth birthday. Yet his brilliance so exceeded his circumstances that he went on to attend the Imperial Academy in St Petersburg, and despite exclusion from scholarship, employment, and patronage due to his ethnicity, he eventually became a court painter and a member of the Academy. He was a Chechen who learned to succeed by the rules of his conquerors, a man not unlike the interior minister, to be admired and pitied.
A meadow, an apricot tree, a stone wall in a diagonal meander through the grasses, the pasture cresting into a hill, a boarded well, a house. In 1937, the censor who would become the subject of Nadya’s dissertation painted the figure of the Grozny party boss beside the dacha, like a mislaid statue of Socialist realism. Soviet dogma pervaded the whole of the present, and here was a reminder that the past was no less revisable.
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet satellite states began breaking away, when the politicians and security apparatus had more pressing concerns than nineteenth-century landscapes, I asked Nadya to restore the Zakharov, and over the course of several weeks, she did. We didn’t take to the streets; we didn’t overthrow governments or oust leaders; our insurrection was ten centimeters of canvas.
It’s among the least ambitious of all Zakharov’s work. Here is an artist who painted the portraits of Tsar Nicholas I, General Alexei Yermolov, and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, and the famed depiction of Imam Shamil’s surrender, and this, in my hands, portrays all the drama its title suggests: Empty Pasture in Afternoon.
I grew up in the southern highlands, just a few kilometers from the pasture. Though the land was technically part of a state farm, nothing was ever planted, and flocks were banned from grazing because no one liked the idea of sheep relieving themselves on Zakharov’s soil. During secondary school, on a class trip to the Grozny Museum of Regional Art, I finally beheld the canvas that existed with greater vibrancy in village lore that it ever could on a gallery wall.
More than anything, it was that painting that led me to study art at university, and there I met and married Liana. We lived with my parents in cramped quarters well into our twenties, and found the privacy to speak openly only in deserted public areas: on the roof of the village schoolhouse, in the waiting room of the shuttered clinic, in Zakharov’s pasture. After I received my doctorate and a position at the museum, we relocated to a Grozny flat, where we learned to talk in bed.
The USSR fell. We had a son. With the assistance of the interior minister, I purchased the dacha in Zakharov’s pasture amid the frenzied privatization of the post-Soviet, prewar years. When the First War began, I stayed in Grozny to protect the museum from the alternating advances of foreign soldiers and local insurgents. My wife and son fled to the dacha, far from the conflict.
In my research for the tourist bureau, I’ve learned that the First and Second Chechen Wars have rendered the republic among the most densely mined regions in human history. The United Nations estimates that five hundred thousand were planted, roughly one for every two citizens. I was unaware of this statistic when I visited the dacha during the First War, taking what provisions I could from the ruined capital, a few treats for which I paid dearly – tea leaves for my wife, sheets of fresh drawing paper for my son – but I knew enough to warn my family never to venture into the pasture. Initially, they heeded my words.
I don’t know how it happened, on that May day in 1996, if they were pursued by depraved men, if the perilous field were a relative sanctuary, if they were afraid, if they called for help, if they called for me. I’d like to believe that it was a day so beautiful they couldn’t resist the crest of the hill, the open sky, that radiance. I’d like to believe that my wife suggested a picnic, that their penultimate moment was one of whimsy, charm. I’d like to believe anything to counter the more probable realities at the edge of my imagination. With terror or joy, with abasement or delight, they remained my wife and child to the end – I must remind myself of this, because in the mystery that subsumes those final moments they are strangers to me. I was in Grozny, at the museum, and never heard the explosion.
For the two weeks Nadya is in Petersburg, my evenings stagnate. Russian dignitaries, potential investors, state-approved journalists, the omnipresent oilmen fill my mornings and afternoons, but when I return to my flat I’m reminded that 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 misses. I’m uncomfortable with the neediness that underlies my interventions in her life under the pretext of concern. I am concerned, of course. Some nights I wake from nightmares that she’s tripped over a chair, a shoe, a broomstick I could have moved. Yet in rare spells – like now, as I scour the mildew from her bathroom tiles – clarity surfaces through the murky soup of daily life, and I know that I’ve 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 night, feeling unusually alert given the hour, I contemplate Zakharov’s pasture. It’s the least ruined of the canvases, the principal damage – aside from the stains of ash and soot – being the burn hole at its center, upon the hill, which I see as the aftermath not of the museum fire but of the mine blast, the crater into which everything disappeared. A few years ago, Nadya could have restored it in days.
An idea. I let myself back into her flat to retrieve her restoration kit. It’s at the desk, amid the photographs. I pause on one in which the party boss is 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’m immobilized. How did he die? I’ve never before asked such a question about a child who was not my son.
Back home I set the kit beside the Zakharov. Plastic bottles of emulsion cleaner, neutralizer, gloss varnish, conditioner, 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 in tight circles until the tips gray and the unadulterated color of Zakharov’s palette is revealed. Employing the repair putty as sealant, I patch the burn hole with a square of fresh canvas. Then I paint.
The totality of my attention is focused on an area the size of a halved playing card. The grass, turned emerald by sunlight, must be flawless, and I spend several hours testing different blends of oils. As I apply them with delicate brushstrokes, I realize that even in his rendering of a distant field, Zakharov is beyond imitation, and that were Nadya here to witness my final infidelity, she would never forgive me.
With precise, strong lines, I draw them as silhouettes. The boy’s arms are raised, his body elongated as he makes for the crest, his head thrown back in rapture. The woman hurries a step behind, animated by his anticipation. 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, then hands me two VHS tapes. “These are the ones you wanted, right?”
I examine the cases. Soviet comedies, sadly. “Yes, these are exactly the ones.”
“I was afraid the street vendor had swindled me.”
“What did the doctors say, Nadya?”
The pause is long enough to peel a plum.
She delivers her reply with a downcast frown. “Reconstructive surgery is possible.”
I force as much gusto as I can muster into my congratulations, slapping a palm on the table while my spine wilts. What will I be if Nadya no longer needs me? This is truly good news, though, of course it is, but her 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 facing the empty chair across the table, thinking that I’m still sitting there. “One hundred and fifteen thousand.”
One hundred and fifteen thousand rubles. A huge yet 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 figure 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, cautioned that she can’t rely on anyone? But by some perversion she’s become more credulous, 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 providing her a stipend or subsidizing the flat adjacent to mine. The cash delivered in the Interior Ministry envelope on the first of the month comes from me, as does her 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 in affection rather than dependence. I count the bills that I will return to her, and we shake hands as if our business is concluded, as if there is nothing left that we owe one another.
In bed I run my fingers through what remains of her hair, press my fingertips to her cheeks, slowly scrolling 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 turns away.
Lying here, I nearly forget the falling rockets, the collapsing museum, the cinder blocks shifting like ice cubes in a glass, the air of a clean sky impossibly distant. The Zakharov was in my hands when I found her, her face halved, her teeth chattering. I nearly forget how I lifted her cheek to cool it with my breath, how her broken eyes searched for me as I held her. So many times I’ve warned her of monsters, ready to prey on the vulnerable, and as she turns, I nearly forget to ask myself, What monster have I become today?
In the morning I return to my flat and find the paintings on the floor where I left them. Daylight grants the scorch and char an odd beauty, as if the fires haven’t destroyed the works but revised them into expressions of a brutal present. I pick up the nearest one, 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 painting intended 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 displayed 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 returning to the closet, where it would exist in darkness for me alone, but my curatorial instincts win out, and I mount it beside the others, where it is meant to be. I scrawl one more sign 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 the young landing-dwellers, like the Sunzha trout, are too hungry to pass up a baited hook. A small hand reaches around the corner, and I spring out and 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.
His body quiets, perhaps out of shock, and I close his hand around the bill. His fingernails look rusted on. His shirt is no thicker than stitched dust.
“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 champion. A British journalist. This is what remains, the 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. Henceforth, I am director.
The newly installed telephone 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, grasping why Beijing didn’t sent its shrewdest or most 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 should find new employment. But first, you have one final tour. Oleg Voronov. From Rosneft.”
It takes 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, print journalists, state and corporate underlings – people of no power or importance. What does a man of his stature want with me?”
“My question precisely! Yet 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, but do show him our famed Chechen hospitality – perhaps with a glass of unboiled tap water. Let’s give the thirteenth richest man in Russia an intestinal parasite!”
“I understand, sir. I’m a limo driver.”
Three weeks pass and here he is, Oleg Voronov, in the backseat of the Mercedes, with his wife, the actress Galina Ivanova. Sitting up front is his assistant, a bleached-blonde parcel of productivity who takes notes even when no one is speaking. Still, try as I might, I’m unable to properly hate Voronov. So far he’s been nontalkative, inattentive, and uncurious – in short, a perfect tourist. Galina, on the other hand, has read Khassan Geshilov’s Origins of Chechen Civilization and recites historical trivia unfamiliar to me. As the office doors of dead administrators clatter beneath us, she asks thoughtful questions, treating me not as a servant, or even as a tour guide, but as a scholar. I casually mention the land mines, the street children, the rape and torture and indiscriminate suffering, and 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; and when the oligarch checks his watch, a cheap plastic piece of crap, I feel an affinity for a man who deserves its opposite.
The tour concludes at my flat. As I open the door, I say, “This is what remains of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.”
Voronov and Galina pass the burned-out frames to the pasture. “Is this the one?” he asks her. She nods.
“A Zakharov, no?” he inquires, fingering his lapel as he turns to me. “There was an exhibit of his at the Tretyakov, if memory serves.”
Only now do I recognize clearly the animals I have invited into my home. “When the museum was bombed, the fires destroyed most of the original collection. 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. She collects art from every region where I drill oil.”
“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!
“The painting is not for sale,” I say.
His mirth disappears. “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 the 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. “I have a penthouse gallery in Moscow. Temperature- and moisture-controlled. First-rate security. No one but Galina and I and a few guests will ever see it. You must realize that I’m being more than reasonable.” In a less-than-subtle threat, he nods out the window to the street below, 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: WWJCD? What would he do? Jim Carrey would be brave. No matter how difficult, Jim Carrey would do the right thing. I close my eyes. “One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. U.S.”
“One fifteen?”
I nod.
“That’s what – 3.7, 3.8 million rubles?” Voronov fixes me with a venomous stare, then turns to his wife, who still hasn’t glanced away from the painting. I look into it, too, to its retreating figures, wondering if we might be reunited soon.
A single, fleshy clap startles me like a gunshot, and I spin to find Voronov smiling once more. “Let’s make it an even four,” he says expansively.
The assistant unyokes herself from a mammoth purse and spills eight stacks of banded five-thousand-ruble bills onto 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, and heads for the door. Then he’s gone.
Galina remains at the Zakharov. Even as I’m losing it, I’m proud my painting can elicit such sustained attention. She dabs her eyes, touches my shoulder, and follows her husband out.
I’m left with the assistant, whose saccharine perfume reeks of vaporized cherubs. “And you’ll have to give us a curatorial description,” she says. “Something we can mount on a placard.” She passes me the notepad, and I stand before my painting for a long while before I begin.
Notice how the shadows in the meadow mirror the clouds in the sky, how the leaves of the apricot tree blow with the grass. No verisimilitude escapes such a master. The wall of white stones cuts an angle across the composition, both establishing depth and offsetting the horizon line. Channels of turned soil run along the left flank of the hill, as if freshly dug graves, or recently buried land mines, but closer inspection reveals the furrows of a newly planted herb garden. The first shoots of rosemary already peek out. Zakharov portrays all the peace and tranquility of a spring day. The sun shines comfortingly, and hours remain before nightfall. Toward the crest of the hill, nearing the horizon, you may notice what look to be the ascending figures of a woman and a boy. Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist, no more than his shadows. They are not there.
This is an edited version of a story taken from the collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth, £16.99)
