“The man this belongs to, he lives there now.”
While she showed Akim the route on a Yandex map, I circled the museum. The earliest date I found etched into the display placard thingies was 2003. Most were portraits of the family Kadyrov. In several, the president cuddled calico kittens.
THE Lada’s rear tires ejected dusty rooster tails, but the car wouldn’t budge. I checked my phone. Zero bars. Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God. The roads had broken, disintegrated, and washed away the farther from Grozny we’d come. Here, somewhere in the southern mountains, what we referred to as “road” was in fact “impending landslide.” The wide green bowl of valley stretched down the ridge. Akim floored the accelerator. The motor vhroooooomed but gravity pulled harder than the engine pushed.
“I think this is it,” Akim said. A clear sheen of perspiration mustached his upper lip. He still hadn’t loosened his thickly striped ash and navy necktie.
“I can’t believe we made it this far.” And I couldn’t. Given the state of the car I was surprised it didn’t explode into a Michael Bay finale every time Akim punched the accelerator.
“This”—he glanced to the line of white rocks weaving up the ridge—“whatever this is, isn’t on the map. But I reckon we’re only four or five kilometers away. You start walking now, you’ll probably get there in a few hours.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And thank you for taking me around, particularly when you’re just getting home.”
“It’s nothing. It’s been nice, actually. No one’s met me at that airport before.”
“It’s not nothing. I’m sure you’re busy and have family to see and everything.”
He looked away from me. His voice was flat and inflectionless. “That field we passed where I said I’d grown up? That’s the last place I saw any of them.”
He slid his Ray-Bans up the cliff of his nose. I should’ve asked for his phone number or email, or even just his last name to look him up on Facebook or VK. I should’ve told him that my family was gone too. But I was afraid. Even though Kolya had been killed, he wasn’t a victim, and neither was I, not really. There was a pause, five seconds when I felt him looking at me as Kolya had in those rare moments when we’d worn through our deceptions. I could’ve described the loneliness of living far from home, among people you don’t know. I could’ve shown him the jars containing my parents’ ashes and he would’ve understood me entirely. Maybe we would’ve become lifelong friends. Maybe he was the person I came to Chechnya to meet. I won’t know. I just thanked him again, stepped out of the car, and watched him navigate the long, broken road in reverse.
10
In his first tour, from ’95 to ’97, Kolya was stationed in a remote outpost near the Chechen-Dagestani border where even in peacetime telephone lines and mail routes didn’t exist. For the duration of his tour, not a single letter Galina or I wrote reached him. The world he’d left in Kirovsk froze over in his mind. In the absence of news, he imagined our lives, invented daily dramas, small triumphs, conferring on us a peace that didn’t exist for him. He couldn’t have known about the Miss Siberia Beauty Pageant or Oleg Voronov. He couldn’t have known that she made the difficult but prudent decision to end her pregnancy.
In the sigh between battle and resupply, between hitting the ground and falling asleep, he imagined Galina making a crib from an empty dresser drawer. He imagined the bizarre foods pregnancy would give her the taste for. He built and populated an alternate universe that was part memory and part the projected future that day by day he came closer to joining. The child in Kolya’s imagined realm was a boy, born on September 3, 1995, seven months to the day after Galina announced she was two months pregnant, weighing a robust three and one quarter kilograms, and named Arkady. He announced it to his platoon, and even though they knew better, they congratulated him with handshakes and backslaps. A year later, he celebrated his son’s first birthday by wedging an upside-down matchstick into a stale biscuit.
Galina and I had repeatedly submitted written requests to the conscription center, but a clerk with no more empathy than the aluminum stool he roosted on filed our requests in the trash. No one knew when, or even if, Kolya would return, and so no one met him at the dock when he did, finally, come home.
The slushy river port was shadowless beneath a noon sun. Passengers heavy of heart, head, and suitcase disembarked, Kolya among them. He scanned the crowd for a familiar face and at last he found one: Galina’s, high in the air, on a billboard advertising Deceit Web. What was she doing up there? There must be another Galina who looked just like his Galina but couldn’t be his Galina because his Galina was at home with their son. His mind had so firmly wrapped around this one single idea of what awaited him that no space remained for what was actually there. He shouldered his duffel bag and kept his eyes fixed on the mud-spattered pavement, refusing to acknowledge the face he’d waited two years to see again.
But Galina was everywhere. On billboards, bus stops, and tabloid covers, advertising everything from facial cream to mineral water. The face he had searched for in Caucasian cloud formations was pixilated across kiosks. The lips that had only made sense when pressed against his own now pouted at the entire city. The nightmare of finding a missing face everywhere is no less horrifying than the nightmare of finding it nowhere, and Kolya trudged through a hometown no less surreal or foreign than the Chechen hamlet he had left.
Most cinemas had gone bankrupt, yet the ticket line for Deceit Web wrapped around the block. He stopped to ask a man in a pair of slacks creased every way but the right way the name of the starring actress. The man gave a perplexed frown, and then said, “Galina Ivanova, of course.”
“Do you know if she’s seeing anyone?”
“Oleg Voronov. They’re engaged.”
Kolya nodded as if it were only natural to return home after two years to find his fiancée engaged not only to another man, but to the fourteenth richest man in Russia, the boss of Kirovsk, a man who could have any woman in the world, and so of course took the only one Kolya loved. He wanted to melt into the puddle of gray water that was slowly seeping into his boots.
“Does she have a child?” he asked quietly, but by now he knew the answer.
The man shook his head, less at the question than at the idea that anyone alive was still ignorant of the intimate details of Galina’s private life. He pulled an oil-stained bandanna from his back pocket and gave a foghorn blow of his nose. “Not yet, though what a baby those two will make. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of our Galina. Everyone knows her.”
When he arrived at the museum, I wanted to shout, leap, proclaim, but with one look at Kolya’s expression I knew we wouldn’t celebrate. He was a shaving of the person he’d been. I’d always been afraid of him — of his strength, of his disapproval — but seeing his stooped, slender figure in a doorway that had suddenly grown much wider, I realized I’d never before felt afraid of hurting him. At the kitchen table he interrogated me about Galina and I tried to deliver the news as gently as I could, but you can’t really shatter someone’s life gently.
“It wasn’t intentional,” I said. Weak consolation. “She tried to write you. We all did. Dad practically bankrupted himself buying postage, just hoping one letter would reach you. We didn’t even know if you were alive, Kolya.”
He played with a pale little coat button that might’ve been all that fastened him to the world.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked. It was all I could do to nod to the bookshelf, where a second pickle jar had sat for more than six months.