The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  If a great teacher can be found at any school, what can’t often be found is an opportunity for students of various backgrounds, social class, outlook, to blend. This is part of what makes 826 Valencia such a special organization, one to be revered and supported. Among its many incredible programs is Best American Nonrequired Reading, where students can work together, read together, debate, and discuss, and they are from different environments and neighborhoods and schools—public and private, religious and secular. The esteemed and brilliant 2016 editorial board at BANR are a truly diverse group of people whose commonality was reading carefully, with empathy and humility. I only wish I could have attended their meetings every week, but since I do not live in San Francisco, I made a single guest appearance. We worked long distance. I suggested some things, but most of their selections they discovered as a group, by reading broadly. When I was at their meeting, it was clear to me, and to the group, that part of our objective was to encompass some of the critical themes and events of the past year, aside from the more general project of choosing excellent and hopefully timeless texts.

  The unit of the year suggests the arc of its news cycle, and behind that cycle, the real fluctuations, the rhythms and ruptures, of historical time. But inside of a year, there is also the dynamic potential for poetic transcendence, where a person is only a reader, a mind, and can go wherever a writer takes them: out of their own era, their own limits, into something remarkable.

  RACHEL KUSHNER

  ANTHONY MARRA

  The Grozny Tourist Bureau

  FROM Zoetrope

  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. 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 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’ve ever seen in person. We reach 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 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 translator 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 observe 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 impassive complacency I’d 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’d sought my advice regarding a recently painted portrait of him and his sons, and I’d 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 must 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-ri
chest 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’d 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 cocurator 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 his plate over the rubbish bin, and the ribs of the fish slid from the spine. “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 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 discerning 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 have sent 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. The three nineteenth-century landscapes—in which swallows frolicked over ripening grapevines, and a shepherd minded his flock backlit by a sunset—portrayed a land untouched by war or Communism, and beside them my descriptions of a picturesque Chechnya did 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—the floorboards clear but for 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 during her early months of blindness. At the end of one such path 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 initial 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 the 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 afterward. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.