“Good for him. What will it be?”
The young man studied the painting for another moment. “I’m sure I can get a poster of it,” he said. They looked back at the hill before returning inside. There wasn’t a shadow on it.
With three pickle jars and ten thousand U.S. dollars in his suitcase, the young man flew to a resort town on the Black Sea. For three days he ambled along the beaches, his feet sinking in brown sand, his pale cheeks baked to a permanent blush. That beach was nearer to the sun than any strip of land he’d ever known. On his fourth day, he shouldered his duffel bag and walked to the sand. He held a worn postcard and followed the shore until he stood on the spot the card depicted. No one would force him to sell the postcard. The heavily oiled, lightly clad swimmers might have wondered why the skinny young man in a leopard-print Speedo had gone into the water with three pickle jars. More likely, they didn’t notice him at all.
A wave tumbled him into a dusky green tunnel. Ropes of seawater uncoiled down his neck. The next wave broke gently over his torso. He backstroked with one arm. The other clasped the three jars to his chest. Silver schools darted at his side. There he was. He could barely believe it. When he’d swum far past the breakwater, so far he had the whole sea, from here to the horizon, all to himself, he unscrewed the jars and let them sink into the dark blue.
Sergei
He bought his father a smartphone for his birthday.
“I already have a telephone,” his father said. “It’s connected by cords to the wall so it can’t be lost or stolen. You tell me whose phone is smarter.”
“I got it for the camera. Look,” Sergei said. He pressed the power button and the phone chirped to life. “There’s two camera lenses. One pointing out, one back at you.”
“We live in troubling times.”
“It’s for selfies. So…”
His father scowled. “Don’t be vulgar.”
Sergei crossed the room to the wall of his father’s portraits. Whenever he wanted to discuss a difficult subject, he addressed it to one of the more sympathetic photographs of his father. “Bit optimistic, leaving all this extra space, no?” he asked, nodding to the bare wall that stretched beyond the last framed photograph.
“It’s your inheritance. When you become a father, you can put photos of yourself on the wall and your son will think you’re a deluded narcissist.”
“Let’s hope you live a long time yet,” Sergei said. He coughed into his fist. “A couple years ago, I found the website of an art historian in Grozny. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on your uncle. The censor.”
His father said nothing.
“She’s putting on some sort of museum exhibition on him next month, here in Petersburg.”
“Last I checked, digging up graves and horsing around with the skeletons is still against the law,” his father said.
“I’m not sure old photographs on a wall are the same thing.”
“Just because something’s not illegal doesn’t make it right.”
“Says the man with old photographs on his walls.”
His father responded by making a farting sound with his lips. Sergei flopped into the tea-stained armchair. He knew, of course, that his father had typed the name roman osipovich markin into the search engine, had left it there for Sergei to find. Neither of them could risk the vulnerability of a direct request; instead each had become sensitized to the intimations of the other. Sergei would make a suggestion and his father would refuse. The more adamant his father’s resistance, the closer Sergei felt to the raw nerve anchored so deeply in his father it may have been his soul.
“Go with me, Papa.”
“Never.”
Vladimir
A thick paste of July humidity plugged the spaces between Nevsky Prospekt traffic on the evening the temporary exhibition opened. Vladimir’s watch read half past seven. The sun, bright in the sky, warm on his face, said early afternoon. Too early, too late — Vladimir couldn’t tell anymore.
“Let’s go in,” Sergei said. They’d been circling the block for an hour. “It’s nearly over.”
At the corner, a spindly ice-cream vendor knelt and stuck his head in the freezer.
“You think a freezer does the job as well as an oven?” Vladimir asked.
“I think he’s just trying to stay cool.”
Vladimir scanned the street for another potential instrument of self-harm. It shouldn’t have been so hard. The most inconceivable deaths fell within the municipal borders of any major metropolis. Standing on a street corner in Petersburg should place one in mortal jeopardy.
Let me die before I pass the ice cream stand.
He passed the ice cream stand.
Let me die before I reach the blind man selling sunglasses.
He passed the sunglass stand.
Just ahead the gallery loomed. The polished door handle glinted. If he passed right now — a heart attack, a bolt of lightning — he would, in his last moment, consider himself spared from whatever awaited him inside.
Let me die before I open it.
He opened it.
A few attendees meandered through the exhibit. Vladimir would remember none of them. He would remember opening the door for his son, stepping into the cool gallery air, looking up to see the mug shot of his uncle, blown up two meters tall, staring directly at him. Roman Markin: 1902–1937.
“Are you okay?” his son asked.
He hadn’t realized he was leaning on Sergei. “I’m sorry. Your leg.”
“My leg’s fine. What’s wrong?”
“Nineteen thirty-seven. That’s when, that’s when I told my teacher that my uncle was a spy.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I thought maybe he’d go to jail for a few weeks, until he was found innocent. How could he be shot for something he didn’t do?”
“It was the middle of the purges. He was just unlucky, that’s all. You were just a boy, Papa.”
A woman wearing a long skirt and too much makeup approached. Raised relief scar tissue was mapped over her left cheek.
“I was just a snitch,” Vladimir said, and turned back to the mug shot. “A snitch.”
The name tag on the woman’s blouse read Nadya Dokurova, Exhibition Curator.
“Thank you for coming,” the curator said.
Uncle, he thought.
“We appreciate your interest,” she said.
Uncle, he thought.
“The museum is closing now,” she said.
Uncle, he thought.
“Is he okay?”
I don’t want to die.
“Sir?”
Not yet.
“Do you need a doctor, Papa?”
Not yet, son.
Sergei wrapped his arm around Vladimir’s waist to steady him. “I’ve got you,” he said. Vladimir let Sergei lead him to a wooden chair beside a tray of untouched cheese cut into damp cubes. The woman fanned his face with an exhibition catalog.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Sergei gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Ask her what you need to,” he said. “You need to.”
What has happened to my asshole boy? Who is this wise man he has become?
“This censor, this Roman Markin—” Vladimir nodded to the enlarged mug shot taken in Kresty the night the censor was arrested “—tell me about him. Please.”
The curator peered at her watch and pursed her lips to a pale, uncertain point, but it was clear from the stack of unread catalogs, the untouched cubes of damp cheese, that attendance for the exhibition opening had been lackluster. Here, perhaps, were interested visitors.