In bed I run my fingers through what remains of her hair, press my fingertips to her cheeks, slowly scrolling, as if I am the blinded of us, 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 rolls away.
Lying here in bed, you nearly forget the falling rockets, the collapsing museum, the air of the clean sky impossibly distant, the cinder blocks shifting like ice cubes in a glass. The Zakharov was in your hands when you found her, her face halved by burns, her teeth chattering. You nearly forget how you lifted her cheek to cool it with your breath, how her broken eyes searched for you as you held her.
You nearly forget the many times you have warned her of monsters as though they are a people apart: lurking beyond her doorway, ready to prey on the blind and vulnerable. As she turns from you, tucking the sheets beneath her hip, you nearly forget to ask yourself, “What monster have I become today?”
IN the morning I return to my flat and find the canvases on the floor where I left them. Daylight grants the scorch and char an odd beauty, as if the fires hadn’t destroyed the artworks, but revised them into expressions of a brutal present. I pick up the nearest canvas, 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 canvas commissioned 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 hung a work of modern art. After pulling the furniture into the kitchen, I hang the remaining canvases throughout the living room, finally coming to the restored Zakharov, which I consider taking back to the closet, shelving in the darkness where it will exist for me alone, but my curatorial instincts win out, and I hang the Zakharov on the wall where it is meant to be. The street children long ago stole the last of my door signs. I scrawl one more 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 they, like the Sunzha trout, are too hungry to pass up a baited hook. A small hand reaches around the corner, and I 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.
He stops squirming, perhaps out of shock, and I close his hand around the hundred-ruble note. His fingernails look rusted on. His shirt is no thicker than stitched-together soot.
“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 weeks, I bring all my tours through the museum. A delegation from the Red Cross. More Chinese oilmen. A heavyweight boxing champ. A British journalist. This is what remains, the charred 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. No longer am I deputy. As of today, I am director of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art.
THE newly installed phone 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 right to Rosneft for a few dozen Russian fighter jets.”
I nod. It explains why China hadn’t sent their most shrewd or 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’ll have one more tour, then it’s safe to say you’ll need to find new employment. Oleg Voronov. From Rosneft.”
It took 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 and print journalists, people of no power or importance. I’m not qualified to give a tour to a man of his stature. Why does he even want a tour?”
“My question precisely! 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.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, do show him our famed Chechen hospitality. Be sure to offer him a glass of unboiled tap water. Let’s give the thirteenth richest man in Russia an intestinal parasite!”
“Don’t worry, sir. I’m a limo driver.”
“I’ll land on my feet, Ruslan. Don’t lose too much sleep over my future. Perhaps I’ll visit America. I’d like to see Muskegon while I’m still young and healthy enough to really experience it.”
THREE weeks pass and here he is, Oleg Voronov sitting in the backseat of the Mercedes with his wife, the actress Galina Ivanova. Up front is his assistant, a bleached-blond parcel of productivity who takes notes even when no one is speaking. But try as I might, I’m unable to properly hate Voronov. So far he’s been untalkative, inattentive, and uncurious; in short, a perfect tourist. Galina, on the other hand, has read Khassan Geshilov’s The Origins of Chechen Civilization and recites historical trivia unfamiliar to me. The office doors of dead administrators clatter beneath us and she asks thoughtful questions, treating me not as a servant, or even a tour guide, but as a scholar. I casually mention the land mines, the street children, the rape and torture and indiscriminate suffering, but 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.
The tour concludes at my flat. I’m hesitant to allow a man of his stature into the small world of my museum, but his wife insists. As we ascend the stairwell, Voronov checks his watch, a cheap plastic piece of crap, and in that moment I know I will not hate him as he deserves to be hated.
“This is what remains of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art,” I say as I open the door. Voronov and his assistant circle the room. I glance to the kitchen sink, but a glass of unboiled tap water is a fate I wouldn’t wish upon even a Russian oligarch.
Voronov and Galina pass the burned-out frames to the pasture painting. “Is this the one?” he asks her. She nods.
“A Zakharov, no?” he asks, fingering his lapel as he turns to me. “There was an exhibit of his at the Tretyakov, if memory serves.”
Only now do I see clearly the animals I have invited into my home. “The fires destroyed most of the original collection when the museum was bombed. We sent what was saved to the Tretyakov.”
“But not this?”
“Not this.”
“Rather reckless, don’t you think, to leave such a treasure on an apartment wall guarded only by street urchins?”