She gave birth to a daughter, Makka, at Hospital Number Six in Volchansk. A green-eyed girl, daughter of the head of surgery, mascot of the maternity ward, demanded a souvenir from her with the stubbornness of a bridge troll. Ruslan gave her one of the tourist brochures he still carried in his coat pocket.
The end of Ruslan’s career as a tour guide was the beginning of his career as a ministerial figure. The oligarch who had bought the Zakharov had taken a shine to Ruslan and had him installed as a temporary deputy minister. His predecessor had moved to a place in America called Muskegon and, to Nadya’s knowledge, still lived in the basement of his son’s pharmacy. As a deputy minister, Ruslan’s daily responsibilities largely consisted of accepting bribes. His subordinates nicknamed him The Natural. Someone always had to be paid off and the world seemed to think it was Ruslan’s turn. Nadya wasn’t one to argue.
To prove he understood that private enrichment was the first commandment of public service, Ruslan’s first official act was to de-mine the highlands of his ancestral village, beginning with Zakharov’s field. Nadya had never been there herself, had only seen it in the painting. She’d heard stories that Ruslan’s former father-in-law, a pumpkin of a man with links to the insurgency, had used the property as a rebel safe house. Some said he’d even kept Russian soldiers prisoner there. Ruslan told her that the property had fallen into disrepair long ago and that they shouldn’t be surprised if it was all ruins now.
It was to Nadya’s surprise, then, that when they returned for the first time after the mine removal Ruslan pulled her to him. She felt his weight drape over her shoulder. The meadow was mottled Cézanne green. At a dozen meters before her, the land melted in spring light. It would be another year before she could see all the way to the crest of the hill.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“It’s all there,” he said in a voice touched with wonder. Nadya knew the sensation, the eeriness of discovering a corresponding point between past and present, of realizing that not all memory is mirage.
She tried to coax him forward, but he leaned deeper into her arms.
“The shed and stone wall are rebuilt. Behind them the herb garden is replanted.” He built the image for her in short, declarative sentences, a habit he’d never fully surrender, even after sight was fully restored to her right eye. “It’s all here.”
“What wrong, then?” she asked.
“Where to begin?”
“What’s right, then?” she asked.
“That’s a trick question.”
She stroked the back of his neck, felt the downy hairs lift onto her finger pads. A gray bird in the sky twisted its shadow on the ground. The sunshine glowed off her cheeks. They rarely kissed in daylight.
In the afternoon, they went to the meadow with a shovel. Ruslan insisted he walk a dozen paces ahead, just in case. The minesweeping team had cleared twenty-three mines from the hill. The repacked hollows were no wider than manhole lids. Sunken among them were two explosion craters, one at the end of the herb garden, the other farther up the hill.
“I don’t know which is theirs,” he said. “I didn’t think there would be two.” He frowned and his hands shook slightly. He looked awed and frightened by what he didn’t know, how the scope of what he didn’t know widened by the day.
He climbed into each hole, sifted through the dirt for remains. He reached over the lip of the crater, deposited what he’d found on the grass, then went back under like a kid diving for coins. Patches of pink silk. A marbled brown button. The melted treads of a sandal. A shattered cassette tape. She fit the fractured plastic face to read its half-erased message: F r ol a In Case gency!!! Vol. 1.
With Ruslan’s trousers rolled to his knees, his hands and feet tanned with dirt, Nadya could so easily imagine him as the kind of boy whose mother was forever following with a broom. With nothing else to inter, he divided the artifacts into two piles and set one at the bottom of each crater. For the rest of the afternoon and into evening, he shoveled burgundy dirt into each. He had no bodies to bury, only holes to fill.
Over the following years, they spent spring and summer weekends at the dacha, the rest of the time in Grozny. With funds diverted from a dozen more-needed infrastructure projects, the Museum of Regional Art was rebuilt. Nadya returned as head of conservation. She completed her dissertation on the censor, Roman Markin, and created a website to catalog his falsified images.
One summer day a visitor arrived at the dacha. Young man. Shorn hair and jeans baggy enough to clothe six legs. Ruslan and Makka had been playing on the hill. Nadya watched the stranger approach with a map stretched between his hands. The map didn’t bend in the breeze. It was wrapped in a gold-leafed frame.
She tied her headscarf and waited for Ruslan before approaching.
“You look lost,” Ruslan said.
The young man glanced to the lush green steps ridging the far slope. The grasses of the empty pasture swayed with the light touch of wind on their tips. “It’s a peaceful place,” the young man said, now holding the framed map away from them. “Can you tell me if anyone died by a land mine here?”
Ruslan stepped to the young man and grabbed him by the back of the neck. The suddenness stunned Nadya.
“Time to explain yourself,” he said.
The young man lifted the map upright and only when its contours matched those of the hill did they recognize what it was.
In the living room, the young man explained himself over tea. He had been told his brother had died on the hill depicted in the painting and wanted to see the place for himself. When Ruslan asked how he’d come across the painting, he shook his head and smiled, as if to say life is well suited for nearly everything but explanation. “Have you ever seen Deceit Web?” he asked.
Ruslan ran his fingers over the gilded frame, inhaled the musty coarseness of the canvas. Nadya observed him. Two manneristic figures, painted in black, ran toward the crest of the hill. Ruslan held his fingertips over them, as if testing them for warmth.
Nadya stayed inside with Makka while the two men climbed the hill.
“I was told two Russian soldiers were kept here during the war,” Ruslan said. “They rebuilt the place. Did a decent job, actually.” He broke off a sprig of mint leaf and passed it. The young man slid the leaf between his lips and tongued it across the roof of his mouth. They climbed to the two grave markers. “I found two mine craters when I returned here. One might be your brother’s.”
The young man dropped to one knee and unzipped his duffel bag. Nestled among underwear and balled socks lay three pickle jars, two filled with ashes, the third empty. He scooped a palmful of dirt into the empty one. “When we were kids, we’d pretend that the world was ending and he’d climb into a rocket ship and blast off into space.”
Ruslan squinted into the liquid shimmer of sunlight at the horizon. There was an explosion. His world had ended. He was still here.
“I guess I’ll go now,” the young man said.
Ruslan wasn’t finished. “Without the Zakharov.”
“Excuse me?”
“The painting. It stays.”
“But it’s mine.”
“This is where it belongs.”
The young man’s soft face hardened like a dollop of melted wax. “I’m going to leave now.”
Ruslan stepped near enough to smell the mint leaf wilting on the young man’s tongue. “As I see it, you have two options. You can sell it to me and I’ll give you a ride to the airport. Or I’ll take it from you and you can find your own way. You’re a long way from home in a land you don’t understand. Choose wisely.”
“Memory is the only true real estate,” the young man said. “Nabokov wrote that.”