Then, later, her bedroom. Old rugs hung from the walls for insulation. The floor was twice carpeted, once with rugs, and again with their scattered clothes. Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can’t trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We’re not gaseous no matter how we wish to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.
They rarely used prophylactics. Galina was two months pregnant when a white postcard striped with a red, declarative diagonal arrived for Kolya. As far as I know, it was the first piece of mail he’d ever received. It ordered him to report to the Department of Conscripts and New Recruits for his physical within three days.
What followed in the days leading to his deployment: carousels of conversation that never stopped moving forward and never arrived anywhere; professions of fidelity; self-pity shaping to every vessel it filled; the kind of reassurances that promise everything and therefore mean nothing. One afternoon, Kolya proposed to Galina in the vegetable aisle of the produkti. He dropped to one knee, pulled a rubber band from his pocket, and wrapped it around her ring finger. She said yes, not because it was something she wanted, but because he was on his knees, begging her.
A half an hour at the civil registration office was all that was necessary; in those days, marriage and divorce didn’t take much time or effort. But they postponed it until no time remained. He spent the Saturday morning before his deployment at her flat. The bedsheets nested at their feet. They projected hypotheticals that hardened to reality in Kolya’s mind over the coming months: a shared family, a shared future.
“It will only be two years and I’ll be back,” Kolya said, staring up at the paint-fissured ceiling. “Two years is nothing. And if you have twins, that’s an automatic deferment.”
“You say that like a grandfather would say it.”
“What do you mean?” He rolled over and pulled the sheet over their heads so they lay in semi-darkness with the freckles on their noses nearly touching. If they could just stay like this, sealed from the world beneath a pink cotton bedsheet. If they could just hit pause and cocoon themselves in this moment. They passed back and forth a single breath that grew heavier with each exhalation.
“I mean if we were sixty or seventy years old, two years would be nothing. You’re eighteen. Two years is forever. If we get married, have the child, get divorced as soon as it’s born, you might get a deferment.”
“You might have twins. Then we wouldn’t have to get divorced at all.”
“Either way, there’d be a child.”
“What are you trying to say?”
She sighed. “You hear what I’m saying, even if you’re not listening.”
“It’s just two circles around the sun, then I’ll be back,” he said, a shaky sweetness to his voice. “The little guy will be a year and a half old by then. We’ll find a flat of our own. You and me and the little one. I’ll get a job at the smelter and you could give ballet lessons.”
She wove her fingers through his. There was such tenderness, such mercy to her lie, that Kolya took it as truth. “Of course. We will,” she said.
At the time, I was still making mixtapes. My favorite cassettes were the Assofoto MK-60s because they came in bitching grapefruit pinks and sherbet oranges; plus you’d feel like James Bond because they were so poorly made they’d disintegrate after one listen. Free advice: When purchasing a tape deck or preamp, you want a fake, so don’t forget to bring a knife with you. You need to pop off the back and scrape the black paint and stenciled Cyrillic from the superconductors. If you see Asian-looking letters beneath, you’re golden. Japanese is best, but Korean, even Chinese, will do. If there’s no foreign lettering, then it really is genuine Russian-make, and it’s more likely to roast your loved ones in an electrical fire than to play Cybertron’s Clear all the way through.
But my prized possession was a Maxell XLII-S 90-minute cassette, still swathed in golden shrink-wrap. It took me forever to save enough pocket change to afford it — at least five weeks — and I held it like Michelangelo would a hunk of Carrara. For the longest time, I didn’t use it, didn’t even open it for fear of squandering the potential coiled within that plastic case.
I showed up at Galina’s one afternoon. Her father answered the door, his fingers tinny with model battleship paint. Galina emerged from her room a moment later in an oversized sweater and staticky hair, still so unbelievably unaware of the celebrity she’d become. “I want to make a tape for Kolya to take with him. I need your help,” I said, and showed her my Maxell. We got to work.
I gave him the mixtape the morning of his departure. We stood across the street from the military commissariat. He and Galina had said their good-byes the night before. He held the mixtape in both hands and read the label. For Kolya, In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1. A teary glaucoma kept clouding my eyes.
“I don’t have a tape player,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he repeated.
“Come home.” I barely got it out.
He pulled me to him. I knotted my fingers at the base of his spine and squeezed him hard enough to imprint a bruised blueprint of his bones on my flesh.
“The world is ending,” he said.
“Don’t die,” I said.
“The imperialist warheads will land soon.”
“You will have the last word.”
“Your name will be that word.” He tapped the mixtape case on my forehead. “And when my time comes, when I’m way out there in space, I’ll be listening.”
9
I arrived. The Grozny terminal was gray-gloss new. The airport gift shop sold knives. Women who’d left their hair bare in flight donned silky, candy-bright headscarves. The baggage claim was a closet passengers entered one by one. Judging from the well-armed luggage attendant at the door, I wasn’t at all convinced they’d reemerge. It was about ten million degrees outside and my underwear had bunched into a sweat-swamped thong. Directly across the asphalt, the midday sun poured across the golden cupolas of a mosque.
The road stretching along the airport was empty. The men lugging suitcases all wore tasseled skullcaps and slack, pajama-y things. Any one of them could’ve starred as the villain in a grainy hostage video. Maybe the souvenir knives in the airport gift shop were meant for arriving tourists. I fidgeted until a slender, clean-shaven man about my age pushed through the exit doors. His long limbs piped through the sleeves of a tight, 1960s mod-style suit either teetering at the cutting edge of fashion or plunged somewhere far over the cliff. As a general rule, people in suits are more likely to take advantage of you than people in pajamas, but Chechnya requires you to reevaluate deeply held assumptions.