The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.
Anthony Marra is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won an array of prizes including the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Barnes and Noble Fiction Discover Award, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle and the Athens Prize for Literature, and appeared on more than twenty Books of the Year lists. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, Marra lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Stanford University. The Tsar of Love and Techno is his second book. Visit http://anthonymarra.net/.
I AM AN artist first, a censor second.
I had to remind myself of this two years ago, when I trudged to the third-floor flat of a communal apartment block, where my widowed sister-in-law and her four-year-old son lived. She answered the door with a thin frown of surprise. She wasn’t expecting me. We had never met.
“My name is Roman Osipovich Markin,” I said. “The brother of your husband.”
She nodded and ran her hand along the worn pleat of a gray skirt as she stood aside to allow me in. If the mention of Vaska startled her, she hid it well. She wore a blond blouse with auburn buttons. The comb lines grooving her damp dark hair looked drawn on by charcoal pencil.
A boy was slumped into the divan’s mid-cushion sag. My nephew, I supposed. For his sake, I hoped he took after his mother.
“I don’t know what my brother has told you,” I began, “but I work in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. Are you familiar with the job?”
“No,” the boy said. The poor child had inherited his father’s forehead. His future lay under a hat.
To his mother: “Your husband really didn’t talk about me?”
“He did mention a brother who was something of the village idiot in Pavlovsk,” she said, a bit more cheer to her tone. “He didn’t mention you were balding.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.
“Perhaps you could get to the purpose of your visit?”
“Every day I see photographs of traitors, wreckers, saboteurs, counterrevolutionaries, enemies of the people. Over the last ten years, only so many per day. Over the last few months, the usual numbers have grown. I used to receive a slim file each month. Now I receive one every morning. Soon it will be a box. Then boxes.”
“Surely you haven’t come only to describe the state of your office?”
“I am here to do my brother a final service,” I said.
“And that is?” she asked.
My vertebrae cinched together. My hands felt much too large for my pockets. It’s a terrible thing, really, when said aloud. “To ensure that his misfortune doesn’t become a family trait.”
She gathered every photograph she had of Vaska, as I asked. Nine in total. A marriage portrait. A day in the country. One taken the day they moved to the city, their first act as Leningraders. One of Vaska as a boy. She sat down on the divan and showed each to her boy for a final time before bringing them to the bedroom.
She arrayed them on the desk. Her bedroom was mainly bare floor. The bed still wide enough for three, the blanket neatly pulled over a flabby mass of pillows. She must have only shared it with her son now.
I slid a one-ruble coin across the desk, hammer-and-sickle side up.
“What am I to do with this?”
I nodded at the photos. “You know what to do.”
She shook her head, and with a sweep of her forearm that sent a small galaxy of dust motes into orbit, she winged the coin to the floor.
Could she have still loved my brother? Hard to believe. He’d been proven guilty of religious radicalism by an impartial and just tribunal. He’d received the only sentence suitable for a madman who poisoned others with the delusion that heaven awaits us. Paradise is possible only here on earth, possible only if we engineer it. One shouldn’t envy this woman’s blind devotion to a man who has proven himself unworthy of love. One mustn’t.
She pressed her palms over the photographs, threw her elbows out to shield the images with her broad back, an instinct that suggested a starving creature protecting her last morsels, and this may be true: The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.
“Leave,” she said, a ragged edge to her voice. She stared at the back of her hands. “Leave us be.”
I could have turned, walked out of the room, closed the door on the whole affair. I’d done more than was required already. But something kept my heels pinned to the floorboards. Even though the concept of family was slipping into history as swiftly as the horse and carriage, I didn’t have a wife or child of my own, and I wanted someone who shared my blood to live to see that paradise we’ve given ourselves to achieve. I wanted that little fellow out there on the divan to grow up, to become an active builder of communism, to look back on his life when he is a fat and happy old man, to know that the faultless society surrounding him justifies his father’s death, and then, to be grateful for the lesson taught by the uncle he briefly met on a cold winter morning a lifetime ago.
It’s silly. I know.
I grabbed her wrist and pinched the coin between her fingers.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I told her. “I’m here to make sure you don’t get hurt. Your husband was an enemy of the people. What do you think will happen if NKVD men search the flat and find all these photographs? Must I go into greater detail?”
Whatever naked sentiment splayed itself across the table recoiled within her. She kept hold of the coin when I let go. That coin could have bought a meat pie, a sketch pad, a confectionary, a bar of soap; pressed into someone else’s palm it could have become the bright spot in a dull day, but coins cannot choose their fate.
“Why can’t you do it? You’re the artist. This is your job.”
I checked my watch. “I don’t begin work for another hour.”
When I heard the slow scratch of the coin on photo paper, I turned away. In the living room, the boy sat quietly peering at the thin lines etched upon his palms.
It was uncanny how much he resembled his father. A nose he hadn’t yet grown into; a messy thatch of black hair, each follicle aimed in a different direction; lips pursed as small as a button. I would have been eight when Vaska was his age. Summer days we roamed the forests and fields, and at night we tapped coded messages to each other through the wall between our rooms; we each had our own. I made him sit for me in every shade and season of light so that I could sketch his likeness, could preserve his expression in charcoal on the page. If not for Vaska, I would have never become an artist. His face was my apprenticeship.
“Do you speak?” I asked.
He nodded.
“With understatement, I see. Tell me your name.”
“Vladimir.”
I clasped his shoulder and he flinched, surprised by the sudden gesture of affection. He shared his first name with Lenin—an auspicious sign.
“I want to see if you can do something for me,” I asked. “Are you willing to try?”
He nodded.
“Stare straight at me,” I instructed, then I flashed my fingers by his ear. “How many am I holding up?”
He held up four fingers.
“Very good. You’ve got keen eyes. Someday you might be a sharpshooter or a watchman. I’m going to tell you the story of the tsar and the painting. Have you heard it?”
The coin scratching in the bedroom might have been wind rustling leaves; we might have been far from there, near a dacha, in a field, the sun burning just over our heads.
“No, I didn’t think you would have,” I said. “It begins with a young man who overthrows an evil tsar. The young man becomes the new tsar. He promises his subjects that their troubles will disappear if they obey him. ‘What will this new kingdom look like?’ his subjects ask. The tsar considers it and then commissions his court painters to paint a picture of what the new kingdom will look like.
“First the painting is only a few paces wide, then a few dozen paces, then hundreds of paces. Soon the painting is miles and miles wide. Now, this is a big painting, no? Raw materials are essential to its success. The flax that would have clothed the tsar’s subjects is requisitioned for the canvas. The wood that would have built houses is requisitioned for the frame.
“When the subjects are cold, the tsar tells them to look at the painting and see the beautiful coats and furs they will soon wear. When they sleep outside, he tells them to look at the painting and see the beautiful homes they will soon live in.
“The subjects obey the tsar. They know that if they turn their eyes from the painting and see what is around them, if they see the world as it is, the tsar will make them disappear in a big poof of smoke. Soon, all his subjects are frozen in place, unable to move, just like their reflections in the painting.”
The boy stared with a bored frown. He must have been accustomed to excellent storytelling. Literature for children receives less attention from the censors than literature for adults, so naturally our best writers flock to the genre.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” I asked.
He put up three.
I slid my hand farther into his periphery. “How many now?”
He put up one.
“And now?”
He began turning his head, but I snapped. “Eyes ahead. Just like people in a painting can’t turn their heads to see who’s behind them, neither can you.”
“I can’t see how many fingers,” he said. “Your hand is too far back.”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s where your father is. He’s there, painted in the background, back behind your head, where you can’t see. He’s there, but you can never turn to look.”
The coin scratching had silenced some time ago. When I looked up, the boy’s mother was standing in the bedroom doorway. I followed her in. The photographs were lined neatly on the desk. In each one, a single face had been so violently scratched out that the desk’s wood grain was visible through the hole. My eyes ached to see it. I closed them.
“Get photographs of your son every year,” I advised. “If you’re arrested, he’ll be placed in a state orphanage who knows where. With a recent photograph, you’ll have a better chance of finding him.”
I was already at the door when she grabbed my wrist and turned me around.
“You’re not finished,” she said. “You owe my husband more.”
“This is the best I can do.”
Her hand was on my neck. The boy just sat there, across the room, watching with dark, dumb eyes. What did he see when he saw me? You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s. His mother’s chest indented on my forearm.
“You’re in the party,” she insisted. “Do something. Move us somewhere.”
“I correct images. That’s it.”
“Then what more can we do? Tell me. When they go into an orphanage you never find them.”
Her eyes were webbed with pink and her hands cupped my cheeks, her middle fingers tucked under my earlobes. There was something foreign in the hard, dense heat of her breath on my face. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had breathed on me, nor the last time I had felt needed.
“You prove your loyalty,” I said quietly. “That can work. In my own experience it has worked.”
She looked to the boy, then took my hand. She led me past him, toward the bedroom, toward the bed still wide enough for two. All I wanted was to get out, to be rid of these people. Even so it was a relief to see that she would take her dead husband’s brother to the bedroom, a relief to know that the boy might live to become that fat and happy old man because his mother understood, as his father never had, that it is not God or gravity but grace of the state that holds us upon the earth.
I shook my hand from her grip. She turned, uncertain. I leaned toward her, so the boy wouldn’t overhear.
“You prove loyalty through betrayal.” The words traveled no farther than the length of a little finger, from my lips to her ear. “You inform on someone close to you. This is what I know works.”
Two years have passed since that morning. A month ago the department requisitioned my small office. A mean sense of humor, if little else, has filled the vacancy between my superior’s ears: He has assigned me to continue our necessary work underground. Several hundred feet underground.
I bid the sky farewell and climb down. Amid dim electric bulbs, I imagine myself contracting within shadow, becoming Caravaggian. No matter how early I arrive, the workmen are already here: laying rail track, reinforcing tunnel cement, never raising their wary eyes to mine. I enter a sawdust swarm and on the other side emerge at the door of what will be the stationmaster’s office.
Maxim, my assistant, has beaten me here. The worktable is already prepared with nozzles, cylinders of pressurized air, paint, sealed directives, and stacked files of uncorrected photographs.
Our Younger Stalins cabinet stands in the corner. It holds photographs of our vozhd taken ten to twenty years ago. When possible, we substitute a Younger Stalin for current ones. It’s essential we convey to the people the youthful vigor of their elder statesman. The longer we do it, the further back in time we must go to find new material. Readers of certain periodicals may worry that he is growing younger with each passing year; by his seventieth birthday he will be a slender-faced adolescent.
“You’re late, Comrade,” Maxim says, speaking of slender-faced adolescents. The day we met, when the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation first assigned him as my assistant, was the last day he saluted me. He sends letters praising the party leadership with the hope that the police will intercept, read, and record his expressions of loyalty. He makes no secret of wanting my post.
“I’m old, Comrade,” I say.
Maxim, the little brute, nods in agreement.
By lunch we have corrected by airbrush three faces from a 1930 Foreign Trade Committee portrait that has been retouched so many times it’s more painting than photograph. Or I should say, I have; Maxim contributes only cigarette smoke and a sour smirk. While concentrating on the face beneath my airbrush, I glance up to find Maxim concentrating on mine. The little brute couldn’t erase pencil lead.
We lunch alone. Maxim stays in the mercury-vapor brightness of the office, while I wander through the tunnels. I have walked for hours through these tunnels and have found no end to them. Someday trains will carry the grateful citizens of a socialist paradise through this netherworld. All the work we have done here in their name will then be justified.
In the afternoon, we turn to an Isaak Brodsky canvas depicting Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station in the city then known as Petrograd.
“Do you notice the perspective, Maxim?” I ask. “Do you see how the vanishing lines all center upon Comrade Lenin’s open mouth, to give the sense that the entire scene is delivered through his speech? The technique goes back to the Renaissance masters. Think of Leonardo’s Last Supper.”
It’s so rare to find good work.
Maxim frowns and gestures to Enemy Trotsky, lurking beside Lenin, whom we must erase, because he was never there.
“Come on,” he says, disdainful, as always, of formalism. “It will take long enough to correct the painting without the entire history of Western Art. Painting should’ve stopped with Leonardo anyway. End on a high note.”
Pity. I fear I’m among the last of the Leningrad correction artists who attended the Imperial Academy of Arts before the Revolution. The new breed, philistines like Maxim, have grown up in schools where children finger-paint watery ash over the faces of political enemies. They learn to censor before they learn to write. They were never taught to create what they now destroy, and have no appreciation of what, precisely, they sacrifice.
Last July I had the opportunity to correct one of my own paintings, a scene of the October Revolution oiled a decade ago, in 1927. Amid an ardent proletariat uprising, I had mistakenly included the figures of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who couldn’t have been there, not after having been proven perfidious in a recent public trial. I replaced our villains with our hero; Stalin was there, is there, is everywhere. In addition, I noticed other errors—slight skews in perspective, a poorly rendered poplar, a flat and sterile night sky—which, unasked, I took upon myself to correct. I spent two weeks on what should have taken an afternoon. One is so rarely given second chances.
Maxim places a new photograph on the desk.
In it a ballerina floats above the Mariinsky stage. Her left arm ascends into the brilliant wedge of an unseen spotlight. A corona of feathers laurels her black hair. The thick fingers of a silhouetted man corset her waist. He lifts her, throws her, carries or receives her. Photographed from backstage, the first five rows of spectators are visible.
“Who is this?”
Maxim shrugs. The woman is no one. That we have been given her photograph is proof enough that she no longer dances.
But in this photograph, she still has a tutu, tights, a full house, roses in water and champagne on ice in her dressing room. Still has a career. A home. A diploma. A birth certificate.
I know I should be priming the airbrush, bringing it to her pancaked cheek, but she looks so much like my brother’s wife—ridiculous, I know—and to deface her seems a cruelty inflicted on her, on this piece of paper, on the ink in the airbrush, on any hand that will ever hold it, on any eye that will ever see it.
Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, I swear. I wait for the sensation to subside. Maxim must have noticed my expression and he asks if I am unwell.
“Dizzy,” I tell him. “Light-headed.”
“You should eat your lunch, rather than wandering through the tunnels,” he says, and suggests we save the dancer for the next day.
By the time I climb the wooden steps to street level, the sunset is a coppery coin on the horizon. It is late October and the winter closes in. Soon night will wrap around the earth and all Leningrad will become a tunnel I walk through.
Pastel palaces line the Neva, designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli or his later imitators; I have forgotten which are authentic and which are counterfeit. Rastrelli died here in 1771, and one can see the later additions of expanded drives, garages, antennas, barred windows, iron doors. Do these architectural changes undermine Rastrelli’s original vision, or would he, as a fellow court artisan, understand that like one’s politics, morality, and convictions, one’s art is subordinate to the mandates of power?
A poster exclaims, WOMEN, DO NOT BE FOOLS, PARTAKE IN SPORT! Another displays a blindfolded man walking off a cliff: ILLITERATES ARE BLIND MEN WHO BELIEVE THEY SEE!
My spectacles fog as I enter my flat. I search for the vestige of furnace heat. A Polish émigré invented the radiator on this very street some eighty years ago; I’m still waiting for one. When I was promoted five years ago, a team of underlings, enough to field a soccer squad, swept through my flat and confiscated every image bearing my face. A precaution, they had explained.
My walls are empty but for a hanging portrait of our vozhd, Stalin. The portrait has been vignetted so Stalin’s face seems to float freely in downy light, like a saint or savior in an old icon. If heaven can only exist on earth, then God can only be a human.
I flip it over. On the back, I have painted one of Henri Rousseau’s jungle cats, a spotted golden glimmer peering through verdant leaves. A sense of belonging seeps from me in a sigh. Now I am at home.
In my generation the position of correction artist is a consolation prize for failed painters. I attended the Imperial Academy of Arts for a year, where I made small still lifes of fruit bowls and flower vases, each miniature as realistic as a photograph, before moving on to portraiture, my calling, the most perfect art. The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose, and mouth that compose a sitter’s face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.
“We have art in order not to die of the truth,” wrote Nietzsche in a quote I kept pinned to my workbench. Even as a student I knew we die of art as easily as of any instrument of coercion. Of course a handful of true visionaries treated Nietzsche’s words as edict rather than irony, but now they are dead or jailed, and their works are even less likely than mine to grace the walls of the Hermitage. After the Revolution, churches were looted, relics destroyed, priceless works sold abroad for industrial machinery; I joined in, unwillingly at first, destroying icons while I dreamed of creating portraits, even then both a maker and eraser of human faces.
Soon I was approached by the security organs and given a position. Those who can’t succeed, teach. Those who can’t teach, censor the successes of others. Still I could have turned out worse; I’m told the German chancellor is also a failed artist.
Most censoring, of course, is done by publishers. A little cropping, editing, adjusting of margins can rule out many undesirable elements. This has obvious limitations. Stalin’s pitted cheeks, for instance. To fix them you’d have to crop his entire head, a crime for which your own head would soon follow. For such sensitive work, I am brought in. During one bleak four-month stretch, I did nothing but airbrush his cheeks.
During my early days in the department, I wasn’t entrusted with such delicate assignments. For my first year, I combed the shelves of libraries with the most recently expanded edition of Summary List of Books Excluded from Libraries and the Book Trade Network, searching for images of newly disgraced officials. This should be a librarian’s job, of course, but you can’t trust people who read that much.
I found offending images in books, old newspapers, pamphlets, in paintings or as loose photographs, sitting in portrait or standing in crowds. Most could be ripped out, but some censored images needed to remain as a cautionary tale. For these, obliteration by India ink was the answer. A gentle tip of the jar, a few squeezes of the eyedropper, and the disgraced face drowned beneath a glinting black pool.
Only once did I witness the true power of my work. In the reading room of the Leningrad State University library, which I often visited to pore over folios of pre-Revolutionary prints, I saw a young man in a pea jacket search a volume of bound magazines. He flipped halfway through the August 1926 issue to a group portrait of military cadets. The cadets stood in three stern rows, ninety-three faces in total, sixty-two of which I had, one by one, over two years, obliterated.
I still don’t know which among the sixty-two he had been searching for, or if his was among those thirty-one still unblackened faces. His shoulders slumped forward. His hand gripped the table for support. Something broke behind his wide brown eyes. A gasp escaped his lips before he choked the cry with his fist.
With a few ink droplets I had inflicted upon his soul a violence beyond anything my most loving portraits could have ever achieved. For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer.
“No more idleness,” Maxim says. “Today we correct the dancer.”
“You are too eager, Maxim. Personal ambition doesn’t sit well on a socialist’s shoulders.”
He grunts. He may be science’s fullest proof that man is descended from monkey.
A few days have passed since we received the photograph of the disgraced dancer. I’ve hoped she’d be overlooked in the influx of other offending images. The anteroom is a shoulder-high maze of boxes growing taller by the day. Best not follow this to its natural conclusion.
Maxim readies the photograph on the table. My brother’s wife isn’t a ballerina. This isn’t her. This is no one I owe anything to. She is an enemy, a nonperson, she isn’t even there. I’ve airbrushed out Trotsky so many times that I know him by every mood and gesture, know him with the familiarity of a family member and have never felt regret, yet at the thought of erasing this single stranger something in me collapses over a hollow sphere of sadness.
Collect yourself, man.
“May I borrow your lighter?” Maxim asks, holding up a cigarette. I pass it to him and he lights his cigarette without taking his eyes from me.
He primes the airbrush and I load a gray-scale paint canister. Beneath brief exclamations of smoke he observes as I airbrush the stage over the disgraced dancer’s legs, the faces of the audience over the dancer’s slender torso. She falls, I have decided, into her partner’s hands. She looks away from the audience, to the camera positioned at the back of the stage, through the open aperture, to me, her final audience, as I erase her eyes.
It takes such artistry, such visual perception to disappear a figure into the backdrop. With a magnifying glass and a thin paintbrush, I expunge her waist from the furrows that widen between her partner’s spread fingers. I airbrush her arms until all that remains is her left hand, stenciled in spotlight, like a windblown glove dancing with a lonesome man, and I leave it there while I finish.
There are moments of intense creative pleasure: The dancer’s right leg obscures the face of an adolescent in the front row, and in its place I paint a postage-stamp portrait of my brother, Vaska, when he was that age. Over the last two years I have inserted him into hundreds of photographs and paintings. Young Vaskas. Old Vaskas. Vaskas in crowds listening to Lenin. Vaskas laboring in fields and factories. He hangs on the walls of courthouses, ministries, schools, prisons, even the NKVD headquarters, where if you look closely you will see Vaska glaring at Yevgeny Tuchkov, the man who made him disappear.
Do I worry I’ll be caught? Please. My superiors are too focused on who I take out to notice who I put in.
The dancer’s left hand still dangles in the air. My decision isn’t decided so much as felt. I set down the airbrush as one might set down a fork when nauseous. I will leave the disgraced dancer’s hand where it is, where it should be, right there, a single hand waving for help, waving good-bye, applauding no one, a single hand that may have once held my neck while a voice in my ear asked for help.
I slip the corrected photograph into a stack of a half-dozen others. Maxim flips through them as I clean the airbrush with an oil cloth. He grunts. Has he noticed?
“Is everything all right, Comrade?” I ask, unable to steady the shake in my voice.
He smiles warmly. Tusks of smoke slide from his nostrils.
“I was only admiring your work,” he says. “It’s so easy to overlook the beauty of what we do, isn’t it?”
We spend the afternoon working through the most recent box. When Maxim plods to the anteroom, I slip the photograph of the dancer from the stack. It’s irrational, a madman’s instinct, but what if her hovering hand is noticed? Will I be punished for my carelessness?
Maxim returns to the office before I can correct or return it to the stack, and I hide it in my lap. “Are you well, Comrade?” he asks. “You look feverish.”
I blot my forehead with my shirtsleeve. “Too much time underground, perhaps.”
Maxim nods and suggests we end early today. I nod, gratefully. Not knowing what else to do, I fold the photograph into my overcoat pocket. I am a dozen paces into the tunnel when he calls. “Comrade, I think you have forgotten something.”
The fever Maxim suspected suddenly feels real. There is no excuse for taking a photograph from the premises. The suspicion cast makes it a capital offense. I hold the doorframe.
“Yes, Comrade?” I manage.
Maxim eyes me. He knows. He knows.
“You’re growing forgetful, Comrade,” he says, and holds up my silver cigarette lighter.
As children in the years leading up to the Revolution, my brother and I played monarchists and revolutionaries, switching sides a half-dozen times before dinner. At night we rapped against the wall separating our bedrooms in the prisoner’s code invented by the Decembrists. The code arranged the alphabet into a graph of five rows and six columns. The tap for each letter corresponded to its row and column number. We wrote with sound on a wall that divided us no more than a letter divides sender from recipient.
By the time we were old enough to mistake ourselves for men, I’d already turned toward Bolshevism. Vaska found comfort in the Orthodox Church. We idolized the dead martyrs of our respective causes. One evening my comrades beat Vaska with such ferocity he nearly became one. His left eye had swollen shut and his nose bent at an awful angle when he entered my grandmother’s kitchen. I grabbed his hands. Only his knuckles were unbruised.
“You must run away when they come after you,” I told him.
“No, I must stay,” he said, glaring at me.
“Then at least put up a fight. This is shameful.”
He leaned forward, offering his busted face as evidence, and said, “Do you think this shames me?”
It was the last time we spoke. For many years after that, I believed that I knew so little of his life I would never betray him.
In August 1931, agents of the OGPU told me that Vasily Markin would be arrested within a fortnight on charges of religious radicalism. They told me my brother had married, that his wife was pregnant. They gave me his address. It was a test. It must have been. So much was lost in communications between raions that had I warned Vaska, had he fled Leningrad, he might still be alive. Had I done that, had the agents raided his apartment in the early hours and found him missing, they would have come for me instead—I believe this, I must, because if I begin to wonder, if I begin to think maybe they tipped me off as a professional courtesy, so that I could warn Vaska, if I begin to think … all roads in that direction lead to darkness.
That October, after the arrest, trial, and execution, the agents returned with a brown envelope. “Have a seat, Citizen,” the senior among them said, and gestured to my divan, where I’d just been eating dessert. I followed his extended hand, suddenly a guest in my own home.
The officers sat on either side of me, making the divan feel like the backseat of a Black Crow police van, and the senior agent opened the envelope and slid a photograph across the heat-ringed coffee table. If I gasped, it was from shock, from terror, from some dark thing rending inside me that might have been the birth pangs of remorse. I had corrected some thousand photographs in that year alone, but not one had I recognized, not one had I been part of.
The portrait the agent held out had been taken in 1906, on a Wednesday. My father, a haberdasher, had closed the shop that morning. He was well regarded, at least in haberdashery circles, having built his reputation on a pearl netting kokoshnik that had made a minor countess the talk of the Winter Palace ballroom. My mother did the bookkeeping, the restocking, the hiring of seamstresses—nearly everything, she felt, but placing the hat on the buyer’s head. She had grown up on potatoes and made sure her children grew up on meat.
We dressed in our finest clothes that Wednesday in 1906 and took the train from Pavlovsk to Petersburg to the photographer’s studio. It had been our mother’s idea, as most good ideas were. A portrait, by camera rather than paintbrush, would convey in a single image the forward-looking optimism she had spent her life enacting. Peacock plumage roosted on my mother’s head. In the photograph, it is dishwater gray. I stand in front of her with a faint smile. Not even the noose of my necktie strangled the excitement of having my picture taken. And beside me, wearing a matching necktie, a matching smile, his cowlick roughly brushed, his broad face whittling to a slender nose, my brother stood stiffly, gazing through the lens, through time, to meet my eyes as I sat framed between the agents who had executed him.
After leaving the photographer’s studio, my parents had taken us to the Petersburg Zoological Gardens. It had been a terrible decade for the zoo—the grounds had been largely abandoned and many of the cages were empty—but I was a child, and didn’t understand what the empty cages meant. What still lived in that zoo was a revelation. I had never before spied an animal larger than a milk cow, more ferocious than a hungry dog. Who could have imagined a beast as strange and melancholy as a giraffe? But of every animal we saw that afternoon, I remember none more clearly than the leopard. Loose-limbed and lanky. Nostrils spouting narrow triangles of steam. Claws clicking coded messages across the concrete floor. Eyes all pupil. Each step unfurling through the spine. An inconceivable creature at which Vaska and I first marveled, then threw bread crumbs.
“You recognize this, I’m sure,” the senior agent said, nodding to Vaska in the portrait. “I trust you know who to correct.”
By this point I had moved from India ink to airbrushing. It was no longer enough to obliterate a traitor’s face; the inky mask acknowledged that a traitor could exist, an assertion that quickly becomes a traitorous act in itself. History is the error we are forever correcting.
The senior agent guided me to my workbench.
“Is it necessary to do this now?” I asked.
“The work of building socialism never ceases. It doesn’t take leisure hours.” He frowned at my dessert on the table. “It doesn’t eat sugar plums.”
I flattened the photograph, loaded the paint into the airbrush like a bullet into a pistol. With the patience of an Ottoman miniaturist, I corrected my brother. I began with his black leather shoes, slowly dissolving them into the floor they stood upon. Then his stockings and breeches. Our father stood behind him, and with slow, even strokes, I airbrushed an approximation of our father’s trousers over my brother, so it seemed I was not erasing Vaska but folding him in our father’s clothes, where he would stay safe and warm, his skin pressed to our father’s. I remembered drawing him when we were children, paying him in sweets to sit for me when he was angry, tearful, exhausted, contrite, merciful, joyous. I had never felt closer to him than when I had felt some essence of his soul pressing its way through the pencil to the page.
When my brother’s face disappeared into my father’s dress shirt, I looked to the boy standing beside him, and wondered what judgments he cast as he stared through the lens and into the future where he met the gaze of the man he had become, and I knew then, beyond doubt, that I had sealed myself to the state, that my faith had become unshakable, my loyalty unimpeachable, because if this was wrong, if we did this in vain, all the water in the Baltic wouldn’t be enough to cleanse us.
I passed the corrected photograph to the senior agent when I finished. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me the entire time.
“You know what they’re saying about you?” the agent asked, holding the photo to the light.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“That it takes less talent to dredge a face from oblivion than to cast it back. In that sense, you are a genius of a certain kind.”
Three weeks have passed since I corrected the dancer. Several times I have tried to correct her hand, to slip the image back into its file, but Maxim’s watchful eyes never leave me, I cannot retrieve the airbrush from our office, and what’s more, the file has already been returned to NKVD headquarters.
There has been no mention of the missing photograph, and given the deluge of erroneous images, it has likely been overlooked and forgotten. But something is happening. People keep their eyes fixed roadward, afraid to speak or glance about. One evening at a restaurant, I pulled out my notebook to sketch an elderly man hunched over his soup bowl. Within two minutes everyone sitting at the poor man’s table had quietly left. Twice this week I’ve woken to raids on the floor below me; the NKVD works at night, as is typically the case with murderers. The stacked boxes of erroneous images grow ever taller, threatening to topple and crush us as we work. I ask Maxim what he has heard.
“There is talk that the security organs have uncovered a Polish diversionist-espionage network.”
“I salute the vigilance of our state police,” I say. What a relief. I am not Polish. I have no relations or friends who are Polish.
“Saboteurs and kielbasa are Poland’s only exports,” he says, winking. “The NKVD will take care of the saboteurs, but you and me, we should take care of the kielbasa!”
“I have no desire for foreign sausages of any kind. If I ever hear another remark about Polish meat products I will report you.”
Maxim’s smile wilts and a surprised hurt sinks into his eyes.
We get to work. Over the past few weeks, Maxim has shown an interest in the mechanics of airbrushing, even asking me to explain linear perspective and my personal theories regarding the submersion of a subject into the background. To my pride and dismay, he’s gotten rather good. The light of socialism burns bright enough to illumine even his brutish soul.
From our office, we hear the tick-tock of pickaxes, the gears of immense machines grinding forward. The construction never ceases. Working in twelve-hour shifts, the crews excavate the bedrock, cart-haul the debris, raise tunnel walls, lay ties and rail beams. At this rate, the entire metro system will be built before our work is finished. When Maxim and I break at lunch, I wander through the unlit tunnels. Each day I tell myself to walk farther, but in the darkness, with no unit of measurement but footsteps, distance becomes an increasingly futile concept. I doubt I will see the end.
When I return, Maxim is beaming. “I finally have a rendezvous with a certain blue-eyed secretary from the New Metal Institute this evening,” he says. “I’ve been courting her for months.”
“We’ll be working late tonight,” I inform him.
“But you said I could leave early tonight.”
“New developments have arisen.”
“But …”
“The work of socialism doesn’t pause for secretaries of any eye color,” I say. Poor Maxim. His misery is among the few indulgences I allow myself.
At twenty-two hundred hours, I surface to a tar-black night. December has come. If I maintain my current work schedule, I won’t see the sun until April.
My cleaning woman has left my meal on the stove, but I take only a glass of plum brandy and retire to the living room. I set a record on the gramophone and collapse into the comforting depression between the second and third divan cushions. I retrieve the rolled photograph of the dancer from the hollowed coffee table leg. A spot-lit hand, and below, her partner dancing onstage alone. I remove my spectacles and set them on the side table. Like ice cubes melting in a glass, the furniture loses its edges, and I nestle into the cushions, and sip plum brandy as the notes creak through the gramophone, and I feel fine, feel freed from the heaviness of sight, and a waddling oboe enters, and I imagine the dancer onstage, the whole of her, and I extend my hand but cannot see to the end of my wrist, see only a floating blankness that could be hers as easily as mine.
In my dream, I wander through endless train tunnels with a paintbrush and a jar of India ink. It is dark and I find the tunnel wall by touch, dip the brush head into the ink, and raise it to the concrete.
Two years ago: After I left my brother’s wife and son, I went to work.
On my desk lay a pastoral by the nineteenth-century Chechen painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets, perhaps the dullest work in his catalogue raisonné. An empty pasture in late daylight rises to a crest at the canvas’s top third. A white stone wall cuts a quiet diagonal across the field. A dacha, a well, and an herb garden extending halfway up the pasture hill, foregrounded in shadow. There is no sign of life or movement, not even a lost goat.
I’d had the canvas for over a month and had put off my assigned task of inserting the Grozny party boss into the foreground. It says less about the state of my ego than it does about the state of contemporary art to admit I could improve upon any work of Socialist Realism. A nineteenth-century master, that’s something else entirely.
When I painted in the toy soldier-size party boss, I gave him Vaska’s face; or what Vaska might have looked like had he grown into a bloated party bigwig. The best my profession can do is convert from image to memory, from light to shadow, but the brushstrokes I erased were repainted in me, and I realized that before I was a correction artist, a propaganda official, a Soviet citizen, before I was even a man, I was an afterlife for the images I had destroyed.
That morning the last images of Vaska’s face had been scratched into nothingness with a one-ruble coin.
That afternoon I began painting him into everything.
At first I was sure I’d be caught. In public buildings, I’d passed corrected landscapes with the pulsing certainty that everyone recognized Vaska’s face pinpointed into the background. No one did. It was just like that silly fairy tale I told my brother’s son; he was safe, in the background, beyond sight of those who would hurt him. I went on inserting him into every image I could, at every age, even, or especially, Vaska as an old man. The ledger will never be righted, and Vaskas added to art will never make up for the Vaska subtracted from life, but the act of multiplying my brother, of seeing him again each day, seeing who he was and might have become, the idea that I may have finally become a portrait artist, makes the rest of the work bearable.
I was never original enough to have my work shown in a café. Now my miniature portraits of Vaska hang everywhere: I’m told one has even made it into Stalin’s living quarters.
I hung Zakharov’s canvas in my office for several days before taking it down and shipping it back to Grozny. I never learned what became of it.
A loud splintering wakens me. I reach for my spectacles, but they are not on the nightstand. There is no nightstand. I have fallen asleep on the divan. Before I can sit upright, hands seize my shoulders and throw me, face first, to the floor. A kneecap presses against my spine and I am a pinched, gasping flail. I am not trying to escape, I want to say, I am trying to breathe, but the kneecap presses harder, making a home between my vertebrae.
“My spectacles,” I mutter, as I am heaved to my feet.
The reply is the crunch of glass underfoot.
“I can’t see.” But if the man hears me, he doesn’t care.
“What is this?” another agent asks, holding a gray image to my face. The dancer, I realize. I must have fallen asleep with it in plain view on the coffee table. A moment later he thrusts in my hands the frame that displays the portrait of Stalin on one side, and Rousseau’s jungle cat on the other.
“There is more than one side,” the agent marvels.
“True,” the first agent says. “And like this picture, he will be pressed against the wall.”
In the hall a third agent pulls a hazy crimson band—what must be the official state security seal—across what must be my closed door. They lead me down the staircase and place me in the backseat of a waiting car. The interrogation rooms of the Shpalerka jail have been full for weeks. We can only be going to Kresty Prison.
For a half hour we drive aimlessly, passing through half the city to arrive at the redbrick prison, on the far side of the Neva within view of my flat. The agents lead me through several doorways and depart. Someone takes my fingers, presses them to a damp pad and then to a sheet of paper, tells me to play the piano. From there I am taken to another room and given a placard to hold. A flashbulb goes off, a camera shutter snaps closed.
“What am I charged with?” I repeatedly ask, but I receive no reply. They are low-level functionaries to whom I am nothing. The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer?
The man who searches me moves my limbs as if I am a collapsible bed. He checks between my toes, under my foreskin, inside my ears, beneath my eyelids. He searches my mouth for hollow teeth, pokes inside my nose with his pen, all with the gruff carelessness of the put-upon. He sighs and mutters, as if this charade pollutes his dignity alone.
When he finishes the search, I am allowed to dress. When I finish dressing, he unties my shoes and pulls out the laces, unbuckles my belt and rips it from the loops. “What are you doing?” I ask. In response he runs a blade down the front of my shirt. The buttons clink to the floor. He picks each up, then slices the waistband from my long underwear. “What is this?” I ask again, more urgently.
“Suicide is the enemy’s final act of sabotage,” the man says as he leaves. My shoes are falling from my feet, my trousers from my waist, and my shirt hangs open.
“How can anyone kill themselves with underwear?” I call after him, but the door has already closed.
One hand keeps my shirt closed, the other holds up my underwear and trousers. I take short, cautious steps into the gray murk and find the room empty but for two stools and a table. Was Vaska brought into a similar room in Kresty? An identical room? This room? It’s not right: There should be a half-dozen other prisoners in here, twice that if the rumors of Kresty’s overcrowding are even half true. I am no one special, no one at all.
Two sets of footsteps enter. Strong hands lift me by the armpits and guide me to a stool.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he blind? What’s wrong with you?” asks a voice from across the table.
Where to begin?
For nine hours, the interrogator asks me the same questions. When did you and the disgraced dancer initiate contact? What does the severed hand signify? What other Polish spies are you in contact with? We spin on a grotesque carousel—he makes the same accusations, I make the same denials—each of us mistaking our circling for progress.
“The dancer is a stranger to me,” I explain. “Her hand, it was just a mistake at the end of a long day. It was just a mistake and I brought the photograph home to hide my mistake.”
I’m exhausted and thirsty. The interrogator promises me a bed and water, a five-course meal, my freedom, all the world and a bottle of vodka if I will only confess the truth.
“But I have confessed the truth!”
The interrogator sighs, his disappointment palpable. In the silence I imagine him frowning at his paperwork, his frustration a blind mirror of mine. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” he says.
I ask for a pillow and blanket but the guard laughs and pulls me to my feet. If I try to sit, he kicks me. If I lean against the wall, he kicks me. “What time is it?” I ask. He kicks me. I had imagined steel laboratories, industries of pain, whirring instruments to uproot every nerve. Thirst, sleep exhaustion, a few kicks from a bored guard; it seems such an antiquated process. Effective nonetheless. My feet swell inside my laceless shoes. Nodding off, my grip loosens and my trousers and underwear fall to the floor. The guard, naturally, kicks me. It continues. Rounds of sleepless standing, punctuated by the guard’s heel, followed by interrogation. The Kresty interrogators have no evidence, and so they will beat me until I build a case against myself. But they don’t need evidence. They can invent whatever they want.
Three interrogation sessions pass and the interrogator begins to plead for my confession.
It is preposterous and strangely touching. The interrogator who until now has been a disembodied voice, an impossible question, becomes an afflicted soul. He needs my confession to confirm the infallibility of Soviet jurisprudence, to justify the descent from humanity we together share. I want to comfort him.
I’ve been awake for days, perhaps, when the minister enters. He relieves the current guard and waits until the door locks behind him before greeting me.
“My old friend,” he says, sadly. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
“What day is it?” I ask. My stubble is the only measure of passing time.
“Friday,” he says.