“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 had demolished the museum and with my staff I’d saved what I could from the ensuing fires. Soon after, I was ordered to surrender them to the Russians. When I saw that I’d been listed as co-curator of an exhibit of the rescued Chechen paintings at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, I closed my lids and wondered what had happened to all the things my eyes have loved.
The minister tilted the plate over the rubbish bin and the ribs slid from the spine of the skeleton fish. “Nothing suggests stability and peace like a thriving tourism sector,” the minister said. “I think you’d be the perfect candidate to head the project.”
“With respect, sir,” I said. “I did my dissertation on 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 show that Chechnya is much more than a recovering war zone, that we possess a rich cultural history 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.”
“Then 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 it often is, entirely without my consent.
Office space was a valuable commodity given how few buildings were still standing, 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 at the office. I taped the sign to the front door, but 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 vodka bottle the minister had sent over in celebration until I passed out in tears on the floor. So ended my first day as Tourist 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 tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. From them I learned to be lavishly adjectival, to treat prospective tourists as semiliterate gluttons, and 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 wrote unexpected encounters with natural wildlife! The city bazaar hummed with the sales of looted industrial equipment, humanitarian aid rations, and munitions suited for every occasion: unparalleled shopping opportunities at the Grozny bazaar! Even before I reached the first checkpoint, I had scribbled first-rate security! The copy wrote itself; the real challenge was finding images that substantiated it. After all, the siege had remapped 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 the present city would send a cannonball through my verbiage-fortified illusion of a romantic paradise for heterosexual couples. But I couldn’t find suitable photographs of prewar Grozny within the destroyed archives. In the end, I forwent photographs altogether and instead used January, April, and August of the 1984 Grozny Museum of Regional Art calendar for visuals. In the three nineteenth-century landscapes, swallows frolic over ripening grapevines and a shepherd minds his flock beneath a sunset; they portray a land untouched by war or communism and beside them my descriptions of a picturesque Chechnya do not seem entirely inappropriate.
I RETURN home after depositing the troika of Chinese oilmen at the Interior Ministry. The street children vanish from the staircase landing as I approach, but leave behind the instruments of their survivaclass="underline" 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 as she takes measured steps to the Primus stove. She doesn’t need her white cane to reach the counter. I scan the room for impediments but everything is in order. Nothing on the floorboards but the paths of kopek coins I’d glued down so her bare feet could find their way to the bathroom, the kitchen, the front door 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 in the Stalinist era. I sift through a few while she puts the kettle on. Nadya has circled a single face in each. The same face, or rather, same person is painted into the background of each photograph, from his 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 so I can’t see the left side 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. The Zakharov room, the museum’s largest gallery, had been her favorite too. The first time I ever saw her was in that room, in 1987, her first day working as the museum’s newly hired 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 tourists. I know. I’m in the industry.”
“You don’t need to take care of me. I keep telling you,” she says with a firm but appreciative squeeze of my fingers. “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.”