The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  “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, along with 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 than 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 contents of 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 a
nd 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, regrettably. “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, certainly 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 were concluded, as if there were 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 mount 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. Yet my curatorial instincts win out, and I place 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 month, 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 rights 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.