“It’s not for you. It’s for movies, for videocassettes,” I say, a beat too quickly. Slapstick and romantic comedies have become 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. She was with me when rockets turned three floors of art into an inferno she barely escaped. The third-degree burns hardened to a crevassed canvas of scar tissue wrapped over the left side of her skull. She might feel with her fingers what had been her face, but she can’t see it, and in that sense her blindness is a gift the fire gave as it took everything else. Her left eye isn’t there. She could point it at the noon sun and it would remain midnight in that bare socket. But her right side was partly spared. There the scar tissue opens onto valleys of smooth skin. In the heat her right eyelids fused together, sealing her eye from the worst of the flames. In it she can at times sense the flicker of light, the faintest movements. There is the possibility, an ophthalmologist told her, that sight could be restored to her right eye. But any optical surgeon clever enough to perform such a delicate operation was clever enough to have fled Grozny long ago. Nadya hasn’t any appointments, but she’ll try to meet with a half-dozen eye surgeons in Petersburg next week. If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.
“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 hardened residue of the morning’s kasha onto a slice of round bread. The granules wedge into my molar divots, rough and folically acidic, 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 my hands are 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 exhibition. Not one was painted after 1879, and yet they look like the surreal visions of a psychedelic-addled mind. Most are burned through, some no more than mounted ash, more reminiscent of Alberto Burri’s slash-and-burn Tachisme than the Imperial Academy’s classicism. In others the heat-melted oils have turned photo-realistic portraits into dissolved dreamscapes.
My closet holds one last canvas, the Zakharov I rescued. I set it on the coffee table and examine the brushwork by the light of an unshaded lamp. The seamless gradation of color, the nearly invisible brushstrokes; classic Zakharov. Not even the three years I spent writing my dissertation on Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets could diminish my fascination with his work. Born in 1816, during the Caucasian War that Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin would later memorialize in their “Prisoner of the Caucasus” story cycle, he was a war orphan before his fourth birthday. Yet his brilliance so exceeded his circumstances that he went on to attend the Imperial Academy of Arts 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. Here is 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. For more than fifty years the party boss occupied the bottom left corner of the painting like a mislaid statue of Socialist Realism. Soviet dogma had already pervaded the whole of the present, and here was a reminder that the past was no less revisable, no less susceptible to alteration than an unfinished canvas. 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. She was well trained, intuitive, a natural restoration artist, and over the course of several weeks, she expunged the party boss from the painting. 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, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, and 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 away from the pasture. Illiterate villagers who knew nothing of art proudly claimed this strip of soil worthy of Zakharov’s paintbrush. 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 pasture. In secondary school, my class took a trip to the Grozny Museum of Regional Art and I finally saw the canvas that existed more vibrantly in village lore that it ever could on a museum wall.
More than anything, it was that painting that led me to study art at university. 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 village 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 on Zakharov’s pasture amid the frenzied privatization of the post-Soviet, prewar years. When the first war began, I stayed in Grozny and did my best to protect the museum from the alternating advances of foreign soldiers and local insurgents. My wife and son lived in the dacha, far from the war.
In my tourist bureau research, I’ve learned that the first and second Chechen wars have made the republic among the most densely mined regions in human history. The United Nations estimates five hundred thousand mines were planted, roughly one for every two Chechen. I didn’t know that number when I visited the dacha during the first war, taking what provisions I could cull 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 them never to venture into the pasture. Until May 1996, they heeded my warnings. I don’t know how it happened, why they walked into the pasture, if they were pursued, if they fled masked men, if the mined field was a sanctuary compared with the depredations of their pursuers, if they were afraid, if they called for help, if they called for me. Those questions have been unanswerable from the moment they swung open the back door, descended the stairs, and ran across that fallow garden. I’d like to believe it was a day so beautiful they couldn’t be kept from the crest of the hill, the open sky, that radiance. I’d like to believe that my wife suggested a picnic on the hill. I’d like to believe that the moment before their last moment was one of whimsy, charm, 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, right to the end — I must remind myself 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.