The Tsar of Love and Techno

by Anthony Marra

“Because you need a soul the devil wants before you can begin bargaining with him.”

glasnost

You see, Kolya was a hundred meters of arrogance pressed into a two-meter frame, the kind of young man who makes you feel inadequate for not impressing him. He was forever leaning, slanting, sidling, his existence italicized down to his crooked hat.

Galina must have felt the sorrow we are familiar with, a sorrow so commonly experienced it has become a touchstone for our generation, the sorrow that begins the moment you learn your teenage boyfriend died violently, prematurely, senselessly. Their deaths have aged us, as if their unlived years have been added to our lived years and we bear the disappointments of both the lives we have and haven’t lived, so that even when we are alone, brushing our teeth in our quiet bathrooms, lying awake in our empty beds, even when our little ones are tucked in, when our friends are brushing their teeth in their quiet bathrooms, lying awake in their empty beds, even when the door is shut and no one can see or hear us, we are not alone, we still think in the plural voice.

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We’ve given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what keeps them alive.

I feel a shared camaraderie with translators—as I do with deputies and underlings of all stripes—and as he speaks in slow, measured Mandarin, I hear the resigned and familiar tone of a man who knows he is more intelligent than his superiors.

Over the following weeks, I designed a brochure. The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.

If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.

I know I have purposefully made myself into a crutch she cannot risk discarding. What I don’t know is whether I’ve done so out of love or loneliness, or if in this upside-down world where roofs lie on streets, intentions have lost their moral weight altogether.

“No point,” Kolya sighs. Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points.

If a stopped clock is right twice a day, a bad haircut is right twice a decade.

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.

Her hazel eyes held my fuzzy reflection. Her generation had journeyed through hell so we could grow up in purgatory.

I have human friends, obviously. But everything’s easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.

Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

I could tell from the way he held his cigarette that he could commit murder on his way to dinner and still have enough appetite to order dessert.

“That’s President Kadyrov. Very popular. He received a hundred and two percent of the vote last election.” “I’ve never been good at math.” “You might have a future as an election overseer.”

There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.

What my father lacked in education, he made up for in opinions. I silently prepared to hibernate through the long winter of his lecture.

They longed for the old days, not because their lives had been better, but because there had been an equality of misery back then. We were their sons and we wanted more.

He sat at the end of his bed with a ten-thousand-watt smile. He was actually enjoying this! Happiness is zero sum, and the lower my stock in it fell, the higher his rose.

If eras are remembered by their greatest monuments, ours will be remembered by billboards advertising Beeline mobile phone plans.