While Danilo writes his wife’s details on one of the mint U.S. bills, Vova asks the old man for a ransom price. The old man leans against his cane, stroking his mustache thoughtfully. He looks to Kolya. “This one is very good in the garden. He works with care and diligence. The garlic will be wonderful this year. A thousand U.S. for him. As for the imbecile,” he says, turning to Danilo, “you can have him for a barrel of cooking oil.”
Danilo raises his index finger in objection to the price disparity before thinking better of it. “Can you lend us the money, Vova? So we can buy ourselves now?”
The weak-chinned Omskman beams. Apparently he hasn’t forgotten the drunken night when Danilo made him wear a dead woman’s dress. “The slave trade is unlawful,” he says. “As your comrade, I cannot allow you to engage in it.”
“WE DIDN’T ask Vova if the colonel ever got his banya,” Kolya says that evening at the bottom of the well.
“I bet they sent two more idiots in a truck full of body bags the day we didn’t arrive. He’s probably steaming the fat from his ass right now.”
“Why did you sign the contract?” Kolya asks, a few minutes later. Danilo frowns at the question. With reason. You don’t ask questions about life before the war unless you already know the answer, and the answer better involve drunken antics and irresponsible sex.
“First time was to get out of jail,” Danilo answers plainly. “Ten years in prison or two down here. After those first two years, my wife and I married and moved into this tiny studio flat. I wanted to stay up late drinking and she wanted to get up early to practice trombone. You just can’t do both well in a studio flat. So I signed on a second time. I told her it was so we’d have enough to afford a place with two rooms, but really I just wanted some peace and quiet. Don’t know why I thought I’d find it in a war. Never the brightest pennant in the parade, as my dad liked to remind me.” Danilo closes his eyes and a quiet expression of yearning irons the wrinkles from his face. “I told myself so long as she insists on blowing her horn before noon, I’ll keep signing whatever these brass-button motherfuckers push in front of me. That’s just how love works.”
“You think?”
“I know it, man,” Danilo explains. “Some people need at least a thousand kilometers between them to stay happily married. But I don’t think I’m that husband anymore. Living in a pit changes the way you look at things, you know? I mean, to think that once my biggest grief was waking up to music.” Danilo doesn’t seem to realize he’s crying. “But everything’ll be all right if I can just get back. We can live in a broom closet and the entire Irkutsk Philharmonic can squeeze in to practice. But enough about that. Why’d you sign on?”
“It was this army man,” Kolya begins. “He told me about this guy he knew who stepped on a land mine. Both legs missing, but it’s okay, he likes sitting, he’s got a nice divan, he comes home. But right quick he learns no woman wants to get with a cripple. And that was the only thing he had any talent for. Tragedy.”
“Like the Greek kind. Speaking of which, you’ve been holding that photo of your mom real close. You sure you’re not part Greek?”
“No way,” Kolya says. He pulls the photo from his pocket and gives it back to Danilo. “But anyway, this army man tells me it’s okay. What the army takes away, the army gives back. They pay for the cripple to see a sex surrogate.”
“What’s a sex surrogate?”
“My question to him. He says it’s a doctor you fuck.”
“Like in a porn movie? Like, we need to take her temperature and your dick is the only thermometer?”
“No, like the kind of doctor that speaks Latin.”
A supernova of disbelief lights up Danilo’s eyes. “Wait, wait, wait. Doctor, doctor? Like he’s fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago?”
“Well, yeah. He’s fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago.”
“You believed him?”
“What can I say? I’m a romantic. Who wouldn’t want to believe that somewhere a cripple’s out fucking a woman Doctor Zhivago on the army’s ruble? Who wouldn’t want to believe that the world could be that just and right-sided? So here I am, getting fucked every which way but the way I signed on for.” Kolya isn’t sure if the conversation ever actually took place, or if the lunacy governing his present life is so omnipotent it’s changed his past. He lights one of the cigarettes Vova had given them. “You know what, I’m glad we got captured. I mean, we spend our days planting gardens.”
“You crazy? We’re slaves, Kolya.”
“Come on.”
“What word would you use? We wear chains. We do field labor. Doesn’t matter if we’re planting gardens, we’re living in a hole in the ground.”
True, but Kolya doesn’t care. The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn’t added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it’s peace of a kind he hadn’t imagined himself worthy of receiving. “We don’t have to shoot people here,” he says simply.
Danilo bats at the fishing line rip cord, then spits a sunflower seed husk at Kolya’s head. “Someone like you? You’re born a killer. The army doesn’t make you shoot people. They make you shoot the right people.”
Kolya tries to remember how many people he’s killed. A baker’s dozen maybe, but who knows? It’s a moral failure that keeps him awake even after he’s forgotten the faces comprising the lost figure. It began with Lydia, back home, but he tries not to think about that. What modest pay and war loot he has gathered, he’s sent home to bribe university officials on his younger brother’s behalf. Now his brother is just starting a philology degree. He won’t ever have to keep count.
“My brother read a story about us a while back,” he says. “Two assholes in Chechnya. They get captured and tossed in a pit.”
“There are literates among the Kolya clan?”
“Shocking, I know.”
“How did that story end?”
In Kolya’s recollection, one of the men escapes and the other stays behind. But that isn’t the kind of story he wants to tell tonight. “They got some sex surrogates.”
Danilo laughs. “My kind of fiction.”
“I think Tolstoy wrote it.”
“He did, Pushkin did, Lermontov did, all those old bastards wrote about two assholes in a pit in Chechnya.”
“How do you know?”
“We read them in school,” Danilo answers. “My last year, in fact. When I started going back to school to ask out my wife. She wasn’t my wife then, but I knew she would be.”
“Tell me something new about her. What’s her favorite book?”
“No,” Danilo says softly. “Tonight, she’s mine.”
SUMMER clots the air to a moist spoonable heat. In Kirovsk, summers were twenty-four hours of sweater-weather light, and Kolya has grown fond of Chechen Julys with the languid green color scale, the birds without Russian names, the humidity heavy enough to drown you if you breathe too deep. He spends hours planting seeds and tending to the little green stems that spurt from the soil. He has no idea what any of them are. Growing up, food came in cans delivered to the Arctic by transport truck and ice-breaking barge. He still can’t say what goes into a loaf of bread. He rakes the dirt, amazed by its looseness, its warmth. The one time he buried a body back home, he had to empty a clip into the frozen ground to break it up enough to begin digging. When the head of the blue-handled trowel comes loose, he flings it toward the trees. From then on he does all garden work with his hands and at the end of the day they are so dark with dirt he no longer recognizes them as his.