“So listen,” she said, sliding her hand across the table until the space between her fingers and mine was as thin as a butterfly wing. “I went to Chechnya a few years back. With Oleg. He had some business there, drilling oil and his assistant. The tart. While he was out doing that, I visited a few army hospitals and bases. I thought starring in a Great Patriotic War biopic was enough, but no, my publicist insisted that I had to actually talk to the poor devils. A pair of jackboots away from being a wunderbar stormtrooper himself, my publicist. Anyway, I asked an army official about your brother.”
“I’ve asked after Kolya with every army official in every army office with a listed address and phone number. No one knows anything.”
“You’re just the sweetest, aren’t you?” Her eyes iced over. “When you’re an important person, you can ask a question and even an army bureaucrat will answer.”
She reached across the table and sealed my fingers within the warm envelope of her hand. Her pulse clicked against my wrist like a telegraph message her heart had sent me to decode. My nerve endings gasped.
“I was told that he was taken prisoner and died on that field”—she nodded to the wall where a frame of golden dollops and curlicues wrapped around a simple painting of a pasture—“The field is something of a local landmark because it was the subject of this painting by some nineteenth-century artist. Rather dreary place if this is its most majestic vista. But it used to hang in a museum, so it must be important. I bought it.”
I left a trail of footprints in the plush white carpet as I approached the painting. It wasn’t much to look at, which is about all you can do with a painting. An empty pasture cresting into a hill. A small house. An herb garden. A waist-high wall of white stone meandering at a diagonal. But in a patch of plugged-in canvas the size of a halved playing card, two slender shadows ran up the hill. One was a head and a half taller than the other. A slender bar of green grass separated their dark hands, and I couldn’t tell if they were reaching for each other or letting go.
“Kolya died here? On this hill?” I asked.
“That’s what the army adjutant said.”
I turned back to the painting, to the two stick figures running up the hill, limbs unfurled. “Who are they?”
“I’m really not sure. I should’ve asked the prior owner when he called last year, asking for it back for a retrospective on Zakharov. Up in your stretch of the forest, actually. The Teplov Gallery, in Petersburg? I told them precisely where they could stick their request, and it wasn’t in their mailbox, mind you. The nerve. Sell you a painting one day, then ask you to donate it back the next. No more than vipers in ascots, these academics.”
A placard hung to the side of the painting. The final lines read Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist. They are no more than his shadows. They are not there.
My palms had dampened when I returned to the table. “You remember the mixtape we made for Kolya, before he went to Chechnya the first time?” I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but I’ve often thought about that tape.
She gave the widest smile. It was the first genuine sentiment she’d expressed that morning. “Devil, I’d forgotten. Then again, I try to forget about everything from Kirovsk. I was a mess back then, wasn’t I?”
She wanted me to say no, so I said, “Yes.”
“Let’s hope there’re no extant copies. If that made it online, I’m not sure I’d ever live it down. Probably as damaging as a sex tape, that.”
Nothing demystifies the glamour of celebrity like hearing one talk. I plopped an eighth confection onto my saucer. “He told me that he’d put off listening to the mixtape as long as possible. That he’d wait until he really needed it, like the last sip of water in his canteen. Do you think he ever heard it before, you know?”
I wanted her to say yes, so she said, “No.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Confections nine and ten landed on the saucer in tiny detonations of powdered sugar. I swear I just didn’t want them to go to waste.
“Oh, one other thing,” she said, crossing the living room to an antique desk constructed of a jillion drawers too small to hold anything larger than paper clips and stamps. She returned with a folded Polaroid I’d given to Kolya before he left for his first tour. I couldn’t risk unfolding it in front of her. “The army adjutant in Grozny gave me that.”
“Why’d you wait so long to tell me all this?”
She gazed at her dim reflection in the teacup, and then quickly broke it with the turn of the spoon. “I didn’t invite you here to talk about your brother. You see…my husband is divorcing me. Some people think I’ve been a bit too frank in my public comments on the state of modern Russia in recent interviews. You begin criticizing the casting choice of a certain director, and you end up comparing Putin, unfavorably, to Lord Voldemort. Who knows how these things happen?”
“What’s this have to do with me?”
“The painting, you idiot. The Zakharov. Oleg’s hired suit-jacketed leeches for lawyers. They’d claim my toes if they weren’t attached to my feet.”
I still didn’t understand.
She stared dismally. “I’m giving you the painting. Better you have it than the lawyers.”
Then I understood.
I wrapped the painting in enough bubble wrap to mummify a mastiff. She followed me into the hall. I’d sweep her off her feet and we’d waltz out the door. Never mind the daughter sleeping in the other room. The tabloids would call me heartless, but I won’t raise another man’s child as my own. We’d buy a mansion on the Riviera, and I’d learn how to do all the things the nouveau riche do, like buy cuff links and belittle the work ethic of the poor. I’d leave her heartbroken in Marseilles. She’d never recover. The tabloids would call me a cad, but I wouldn’t play by society’s rules. Everything in my life would be different. I just had to kiss her.
I shook her hand.
“It’s been good to see you, Alexei,” she said as she closed the door, and I knew she meant it. She’s not a very good actor.
2
A parachute of yellow smoke, tethered by thick billows to the smokestacks, hangs permanently over Kirovsk. The twelve smokestacks, the tallest edifices for five hundred kilometers, are known locally as the Twelve Apostles. They encircle Lake Mercury, a man-made lake of industrial runoff whose silvered waters are so veined with exotic chemicals they lap against the gravel-pocked banks year-round, unfrozen even in February. Behind the brainy folds of smoke, the moon is a dim ghost. Kirovsk is in annual competition with Linfen, China, to hold the title of the world’s most polluted city. When the nickel burns, it produces sulfuric soot so dense it stains the ground, accumulating in such concentrations that snowdrifts are mineable. And surrounding Kirovsk is White Forest. Constructed at the behest of the party boss’s wife to counter Kirovsk’s reputation as a frozen cesspool, the forest looks very fine in photographs circulated among engineering departments in Moscow and Leningrad to deceive their most promising students into taking jobs with the nickel combine. In person, however, you realize this is an unusual forest. The trees keep their leaves through winter. They neither grow nor die. No animals hibernate in their trunks. In a triumph over reality, the city commissioned an entire forest of fake trees. Over time the wind has stripped much of the plastic foliage from the steel limbs, and now White Forest is a field of rusted antennas, harboring the city’s de facto garbage dump beneath its naked branches. It is in White Forest, where Lydia’s story ends, that mine begins.