“Give him a few rubles, Masha,” a babushka shrink-wrapped in a kerchief whispered to her friend. “Pity the poor soul.”
“You’re a hero,” an elderly man in tortoise-rimmed glasses observed. “Better to lose your legs than your honor.”
For the length of the train ride, Kirill didn’t speak. He neither solicited nor acknowledged the alms that just kept falling from the wallets and purses of morning commuters. He put one fist in front of the other, his peaked cap tilting, his limp stumps dragging behind him, not a caricature, not a freak show, but a brave man crawling across a battlefield that raged in his head. I nearly opened my own wallet.
He made two hundred and forty rubles in the two minutes to Ploshchad Vosstaniya. I couldn’t believe how many coins and crumpled bills lay in the basket. It was more than my father made in three hours.
“You don’t want them to think you’re making money,” he whispered as he pocketed the change. At Ploshchad Vosstaniya, we moved to the next car.
We rode the one and two lines until early afternoon. Twelve hundred rubles by ten o’clock. Twenty-three hundred by noon. Who knew my fellow citizens possessed such patriotic generosity? For lunch we surfaced at Baltiyskaya and bought shawarma and kvass from an elderly street vendor with dyed purple hair. I watched short skirts pass through the long afternoon light. “My assistant here is stricken with an incurable case of virginity,” Kirill called to a really cute young woman whose dark brown bangs awninged the open pages of Harry Potter. “Will you take pity on him?”
I wanted to punch Kirill right then. I’d read the Harry Potter book three times through and it was a secret I’d carry to my grave. I might’ve told her. She’d already taken her book and walked away.
“Forty-one new stations are scheduled to be built in the next ten years,” Kirill announced between dainty bites of charred lamb. I wished I’d chased after the brown-haired girl, but then I’d be the Stalkerish Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Presently, I was just the Virgin Who Hangs Out With a Legless Guy. Some dignities are earned only by comparison.
“Forty-one new stations, you know what that means?” Kirill asked.
“That only three will be built.”
“It means more people will ride the metro every day. More people means more money.”
“You make too much already. Beggars shouldn’t make more than the people they beg from.”
“We work harder, I assure you.” Kirill smiled at a flock of schoolchildren flying to catch the crosswalk light. You’d think a man without legs would be a tragic sort. But Kirill seemed to live as if always staring into a field of sunflowers. “I’m saving for a dacha. Wheelchair accessible. I’ll be able to wash dishes in the sink.”
It was hard to take him seriously. Only crooks, oligarchs, and politicians — often the same person — could afford dachas. Men who could walk, who had never gone to Chechnya, whose sons would never go to Chechnya. And here was Kirill, thinking he could be one of them. Whatever parts he’d lost, he still had two billiard balls in his corner pocket.
“What a racket,” I said.
“It’s an art.”
“Taking people’s money?”
He squinted at me. “No one’s giving me anything. I’m a businessman.”
“What’re you selling?”
“All these people who opened their purses on the metro, when they see a legless vet, they feel ashamed and maybe a little pity. But when they see me crawling across the metro car, they see someone defiant, silent, not begging for anything, and they feel pride. They’re paying me for the privilege of feeling proud when they should feel disgraced.”
When I returned home that night, my father was sprawled on the divan in his underpants. He ate tinned fish from the can and let the cat clean the oil from his fingers between bites.
“Come here,” he commanded, and examined my pupils by television light. The cat wrapped its tail around my father’s forearm and purred lovingly. A devil in fur, that cat.
“Tell me what you learned today,” my father asked.
“The Chernyshevskaya escalator is a hundred and thirty-seven meters long.”
“Anything else?”
“I learned Kirill makes more money than you.”
“And how much of that money did he let you keep?”
“None,” I admitted. “But he bought me a shawarma.”
“Then we both make more money than you.” Satisfied with my silence, he turned back to the TV. All the parts, including that of the voluptuous femme fatale, were dubbed in the gruff monotone of a lobotomized Vladivostokian chain smoker. A strong-jawed actor survived a bomb blast by climbing into a refrigerator. I hoped refrigeration technology had reached Chechnya.
“Kresty’s going to become a hotel,” I said.
“Again? When?”
“The newspaper said as soon as a new prison’s built outside the city.”
“They were saying that even before I was arrested. Wish it had been a hotel. It wasn’t.”
I turned, but couldn’t escape him — around fifty portraits of my father hung in thin black frames from the living room walls. One for every year of his life, from the age of five to sixty-nine, except his prison years. His mother had taken him to the photographer once a year, a precaution in case the police arrested her and sent him to a state orphanage. His father had been an enemy of the people, so she had to think about things like that. He’d still dress in his best suit and go to a photographer’s studio on his birthday and come home with a new portrait to hang on the wall. Bit mad, really. Even if somewhere in the world there was a girl who wanted to come home with me, I couldn’t bring her here.
I crossed the living room and stared at my father’s portrait from 1983. Like all of them, it looked like a blown-up passport photo. That was the year I was born. He looked rather grim.
“You know, I never wanted a wife or child,” my father offered. “I was fifty years old, I thought I’d won. Then I met your mother. Then she got pregnant. Couldn’t very well leave her then, could I?”
“Some crimes are best left unsolved, Papa.”
“Nonsense. If you don’t know where you began you won’t know where you’ll finish. Everyone needs an origin story.”
I closed my eyes and did my best to humor him. “Then please, enlighten me.”
“You, my dear boy, began with a broken condom.”
Patricide really should be decriminalized. I turned toward the hall when I noticed a new portrait hanging above the tea-stained armchair. “When was your birthday?” I asked.
“Few weeks back,” he said. “Don’t give me that look. These photos, they’re all for you.”
“You realize how insane you sound, right? You’ve got more than fifty photos of yourself on the wall. Not photos of me or Mom, just of you. It’s like you saw a photo spread of Kim Jong-il’s living room and really liked his style.”
He scratched the bridge between the cat’s ears. We’d had this conversation about a billion times.
“There are no photos of my father. There used to be, but my mother had to destroy them. She would show me the photos when I was a little kid, but now they’re gone, and I can’t remember his face. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know where I began, Seryozha.” He looked up from the cat, to the portraits, and then to me. “They are for you. So you will know. So you won’t forget who I was.”
BEFORE the cancer took her, my mother worked the cash register at a produkti that from its depleted inventory looked more like a shelving emporium than a market. Fifteen minutes after she left the house, my father began his day. He had a mobile phone the size of a boot and he took calls like a man in the trenches, receiving and providing orders in clipped jargon. He wore rubber gloves and a surgical mask when he bagged white powder on the kitchen table. For the longest time, I thought he was a doctor.