Summer is fighting season and rebels arrive every few weeks to resupply from the munitions stockpile Vova left in the rebuilt toolshed. When he spots the rebels in the distance the old man hurries Kolya and Danilo toward the pit, his stout little legs miraculously cured of whatever affliction makes necessary his cane. He smears mud on their faces, ruffles their hair, and sends them down the yellow rope with instructions to hold their hands behind their backs and moan from time to time.
“Why?” Kolya calls up.
“Russians,” the old man laments, as if their ethnicity is the most pitiable aspect of their current state. He’s peering over the lip of the pit, his face an inky sun-silhouetted pool. “If they think I’m beating you, they won’t feel they have to.”
Two rebels look into the pit an hour later. Garbed in bandannas and fat-framed sunglasses, they look more like members of a late-Beatles cover band than of a jihadi insurgency. Kolya and Danilo moan and writhe on cue and they nod with satisfaction.
The following morning the old man orders Kolya into the dacha to clean up. Refuse from the rebels’ visit — tea-stained mugs, bread crust, dried rice kernels, bandannas streaked with gun lubricant, fuses of homemade Khattabka hand grenades — are strewn in a manner suggesting that the old man doesn’t rank highly within the insurgency. A multitude of overlapping woven rugs cover the walls and floor, so many that Kolya at first can’t tell where the floor ends and the walls begin. Some of the patterned arabesques resemble sabers, others the daydreams of a meticulously warped mind, but all display a painstaking artistry as antiquated as the rugs themselves. Kolya fingers the rug at his feet, unable to remember the last time he touched something so fine.
Bookcases line the living room’s far wall. The cracked-leather spines look bound in the same century the rugs were woven. “Any of these good?” Kolya asks.
“They belong to the previous tenant,” the old man says. A heavy sadness is anchored to the word previous. With a sigh the man hoists himself from the divan and pulls a brown tome from the bottom shelf. Its pages are rimmed with gold, like those of a holy book.
The old man splays the book on his lap and points to a photograph of an oil painting stretching across two glossy pages. It’s a landscape you wouldn’t look at twice from a car window, the type of monumentally dull painting that adds to Kolya’s general suspicion that artists are always trying to pull one over on him. “Recognize it?” the old man asks.
It does look familiar. A moment and the sense of familiarity upgrades to recognition. The field cresting two thirds up the canvas, the well, the toolshed, the white stone wall Danilo is now repairing. It’s the very landscape that stretches outside. “Where’s our pit?”
“Right there,” the old man says, tapping the painted well with pleasure. “See how there is no pail or winch? The well had probably already run dry and was already converted for prisoners when this was painted.” He huffs on his spectacles and cleans them with a pinch of his white tunic. Without his glasses, his face looks made of loose skin that had once, maybe, belonged to a larger man. When’s the last time Kolya has seen an old man? Average male life expectancy in Kirovsk hovers somewhere in the high forties and while elderly men aren’t mythical creatures, they aren’t quite of this realm.
“So our fieldwork is to make the land look like it did back when this was painted?”
The old man nods with apparent admiration. “You are not one hundred percent idiot,” he says. Kolya takes it as an expression of great respect. “The property looked peaceful, didn’t it, before all of this awful business? We’ll make it look like this again. This is the blueprint.”
In the painting, the garden extends halfway up the left side of the hill that is now mined and punctured with a blast crater. The garden Kolya has planted and cultivated stops far short. “The garden, we won’t get it the rest of the way up the hill, will we?”
“No, not with the mines there.” The old man falls silent and dips an almond into an ashtray of honey.
“Who lived here before you?” Kolya ventures.
“My daughter and grandson.”
“I’m sorry,” Kolya says after a long, uncomfortable moment staring into the ashtray of honey to avoid the old man’s eyes. It hits him that this is the first time he’s ever said those two words in relation to a killing. And he had nothing to do with this one.
A WEEK later Kolya is tending the garden when the asthmatic heave of the Shishiga announces Vova’s return. The suspension sags beneath the mass of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, RPG rounds, an armory so large half the roof has been cut away to accommodate it all. Steam shoots through the bullet-holed hood as the truck summits a knobby incline to reach the dacha.
“Well?” Danilo asks.
With procedural solemnity befitting a papal pronouncement, Vova unfolds a note, sits a pair of reading glasses on his steeply sloped nose, takes a deep breath, clears his throat, takes another deep breath, and reads. “ ‘Dear Nikolai Kalugin and Danilo Beloglazov. I hate you. May the devil take you both. Respectfully yours, Captain Feofan Domashev.’ ”
Danilo grunts but nothing follows. Vova folds the letter, then his reading glasses, and returns both to his shirt pocket.
“The colonel’s banya was built three weeks late because of your little excursion,” Vova explains. “The colonel gave the captain a barrel of shit, which the captain’s now pouring on your heads. Chain of command, I’m afraid.”
“What about my wife?” Danilo asks. “Can she come up with the ransom?”
“Danilo. Man, I’m the bearer of bad news,” Vova says with a grin. Never has bad news been more happily borne. “I had to remind her who you were.”
“She’s forgetful,” Danilo snaps.
“Brother, she doesn’t know you.”
Danilo leaps forward and Kolya instinctively holds him back with one arm, like a parent to a child in a car stopping short. “Vova,” Kolya says. “I know you’ve got grudges to settle with Danilo, but this isn’t the time or place. What did his wife really say?”
“Believe whatever you want. I called her and she thought I was playing a prank. It took her a few minutes to remember some creep named Danilo Beloglazov who kept asking her out her last year of school.”
“She’s ly—” Danilo’s voice breaks. “She’s lying.”
“She said she’s been married to an electrician for five years. They have a four-year-old son.”
Danilo holds his cheeks in his large hands. His red eyes radiate substratum pain, an ache so deep and unyielding that Kolya witnesses it as a geologic event. And Kolya, he’s reeling. In a unit stocked with more liars, crooks, and bullshitters than the Duma, no one had once doubted the existence of Danilo’s wife. A half-dozen soldiers have survived the war thanks to their imaginary marriages to her. The hope she’s given the unit is real and unequivocal and in that sense she’s an act of generosity that Kolya had assumed extinct in Chechnya. Kolya recalls the painting the old man showed him and he’s a little disgusted that some nineteenth-century syphilitic so unambitious he merely reproduces reality should be venerated while at the bottom of that meticulously painted well lives a half-literate, borderline lunatic maker of miracles. Meanwhile, the miracle maker is shaking like an anesthetized thing slowly coming to life.
“Take us back with you,” Danilo pleads in a voice whittled to a whimper. Kolya wants to reach out and take his friend in his arms and sway side to side as he did when his younger brother woke from nightmares of dark, endless forests. He hadn’t known Danilo was still capable of shock, of disappointment, and he envies and pities him for it. The old man emerges from the dacha with a blue cellophane cookie bag bulging with money. “Please. Right now,” Danilo says. “Put one between his eyes and we’ll just go.”