The Tsar of Love and Techno

by Anthony Marra

They will put me in a car, take me to the edge of a pit not unlike those into which the disgraced dancer and Vaska fell, and with a bullet through my brain stem, I will also fall. Consider the disgraced dancer. Consider those who informed on her, those who relayed the information, those who approved the action, those who knocked on her door in the middle of the night, those who arrested her, those who photographed her, those who took her fingerprints, those who pulled out her shoelaces, those who interrogated her, those who beat her, those who engineered her confession, those who tried, judged, and condemned her, those who led her to the car, to the basement, to the pit, those who dug her grave, put a bullet in her head, buried her. And the countless others, like me, who destroyed her birth certificate and diploma, the newspaper clippings and photographs, the school and internal passport and ration voucher records, the near-endless documentation that proves she had lived. It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual—if that is what memory is now called—to preserve her. And if that is true, perhaps someday, far from now, Vaska will be discovered. Perhaps the seminarian in the other cell is the error that preserves us both.