Lights All Night Long Read online

  Two kilometers from town was a crescent-shaped complex of six huge kommunalkas, which had been built for the coal miners and their families. When the mine collapsed, the families stayed, without their miners. This was before perestroika, when living in a place was the closest you could come to owning it, and Ilya’s family had lived there for half a century without ever believing it their own.

  On the west side, the kommunalkas overlooked the remains of the mine, and, on the east, the remains of the camp, where the cells and the guard towers crumbled slowly, where crosses had been staked in the ground. In winter, snow fell, and people measured its depth by how much of the cross it swallowed. If it only reached the footrest, the winter would be mild. If it reached the higher crossbeam, the winter would be long. To the north, across the river, the refinery jutted into the sky, smoke heaving from its towers. Ilya’s mother worked in the cafeteria at the refinery, and she moaned sometimes about the poison it was spewing and the cancers that were sure to result, but Ilya was mesmerized by it. Electricity in the kommunalkas could not be counted on, but the refinery’s lights shone all night long. Like a city, like places Ilya had seen on TV. Moscow or Times Square or a space station. A patch of some other world stitched into Berlozhniki’s horizon by mistake.

  Ilya’s family lived in Building 2, which was considered the best by practical people because it was closest to the road into town and the worst by spiritual people because in the ’70s two brothers had jumped off the roof. Their apartment was one of a dozen on the eighth floor. All the floors were identical except for the color of paint used in the long, low hallways, so they came to be known by colors instead of numbers. Ilya’s floor was zhelty, a bright yellow that had dirtied over time to mustard. At the head of each hallway was a shared kitchen—though most of the residents had acquired tiny electric stoves—and at the end of each hallway was a shared bathroom. Before he died, Ilya’s father would wake in the middle of the night and trudge down the hall just to take a shit in peace. Vladimir had reported this fact to Ilya. All Ilya remembered of his father was a pair of dark, expressive eyebrows, and the thrill he’d get when his father flipped him over and pretended that a piece of candy had fallen out of his hair.

  Their apartment was tiny: a bedroom that Ilya’s mother and grandmother shared, and a living room where Vladimir and Ilya slept head-to-toe on a pull-out couch. The walls were crisscrossed with water pipes and studded with radiators. Above the couch hung a painting of a mother and child mushroom hunting that had been prized for its innocuousness long enough to become loved for its familiarity. There were striped curtains and a plaid tablecloth and mismatched floral cushions on each of the kitchen chairs. The woodstove was used for storage, and the red corner was papered with worker propaganda. When the shift occurred, Babushka had tacked a laminated icon right on top of Gorbachev’s portrait. She’d only used one pin, so it could be quickly removed if things shifted again, but it had been there for Ilya’s whole life: Jesus on the cross, the plastic clouded with grease, Gorbachev’s birthmark half visible over the thorny crown.

  Ilya was the younger son, without much to distinguish him from his brother but a chipped front tooth and a lopsided sag to his shoulders. The tooth was a mystery, but the shoulder sagged because his collarbone had broken during birth and never healed properly. He had been born in ’93, when Yeltsin was impeached, and tanks were shelling the White House. His mother said that the doctor had been listening to Echo of Moscow, to Rutskoy as he pleaded with the air force to bomb the Kremlin, and that in the excitement of it all he’d gripped Ilya’s shoulders a bit too hard with the forceps. She said that she could still hear the snap. “Like a nut cracking,” she’d say, with the same wince every time, because Ilya’s pain was intertwined with her own. But the kids in the kommunalkas had a different story: “Your mama’s a bone breaker. Tight enough to crush a man,” they whispered, until the day Vladimir overheard and threatened to crack each of their collarbones one by one.

  When Ilya was little, he was happy to be like Vladimir. Happy to have the same buzz cut, to wear Vladimir’s old snowsuits, which were too small in the waist and too long in the leg. Happy to time Vladimir skating up and down the Pechora on a knockoff Timex and to diligently log Vladimir’s times in a notebook, though they never really improved. When he was little, Ilya treated school like Vladimir treated school: as time spent dreaming up things to do when not in school. He learned to read from Vladimir’s comic books and hockey magazines, his chin hooked over Vladimir’s shoulder. Ilya was an observer and a mimic, Vladimir a natural performer who never seemed to mind the force of Ilya’s attention, though he did, from time to time, take advantage of it. Afternoons, when they were walking home from school, he’d ask Ilya to steal Fantas from the Minutka, and Ilya would stuff them under his sweater without a second thought. Once, ancient Anatoly, who worked the register, caught him and made him spend the day unloading beer crates as punishment. Ilya stole two beers to make up for the lost Fantas, and Vladimir accepted these as though they were his due.

  When Vladimir and his best friend, Sergey, clung to the back of the #33 bus, the one that took the neftyaniki out to the refinery, Ilya clung to the back too. They would jump off just before the gates in snow that came up to Ilya’s knees. Everything—the snow, their skin—was blue-tinged by the refinery’s light. Vladimir and Sergey dragged sticks along the chainlink fence, which seemed so high that it even segmented the sky, and when they were far enough from the road, they took turns flicking matches through the fence and watching them burn little holes in the snow. They circled the refinery slowly, like sharks might, looking for a break in the fence, and inevitably Vladimir and Sergey began trading stories of Fyodor Fetisov, the oligarch who owned it all.

  “Once,” Vladimir said, “he took a bath in beluga.”

  “With two prostitutes,” Sergey said.

  “That each cost two million rubles a night,” Ilya added, because this detail had stuck with him. Two million rubles was more than a thousand Fantas. Two million rubles could probably buy the Minutka and everything inside it.

  “That’s right,” Vladimir said. “And they had on thongs made of gold.”

  “And diamonds for nipples,” Sergey said. They all went silent for a moment at the power of this image. “He can do whatever the fuck he wants with them. Anything,” Sergey said, with a cruelness that sometimes surfaced in Sergey and that made Ilya wish it were just Vladimir and him leaning against the fence.

  “Where does he live? On the square?” Ilya said.

  Vladimir and Sergey looked at each other and laughed.

  “He doesn’t live here,” Vladimir said. “He’s probably been here once, to cut the ribbon.”

  “No one lives here,” Sergey said.

  “Not even the prostitutes?” Ilya asked.

  “Ilyusha,” Vladimir laughed, “I like the way you think.”

  * * *

  —

  When it was too cold to be outside, Ilya and Vladimir watched movies. Vladimir was obsessed with American movies, and Ilya liked them because Vladimir did. The pure action movies were Vladimir’s favorites—anything with Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Willis, anything with roundhouse kicks and explosions and sparse dialogue—but he would settle for badly dubbed dramas or sitcoms with too-loud laugh tracks or whatever Kirill the cranky Chechen was hawking at the Internet Kebab. The movies were all a decade old. The tapes were all bootleg.

  In The Bodyguard, the dubbing turned to Chinese five minutes in, and a wave of static washed across Whitney Houston’s face. In Die Hard, the Russian had been added without removing the English, so every line Bruce Willis said was a tangle of the two. One VHS was unlabeled, and Vladimir had bought it hoping that it was porn, but it was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, the title of which they never learned because the tape began at some point a third of the way in and ended right before the climax. Vladimir kept the VHSs stacked, according to genre, next to t
he TV, and when the VCR jammed, which it did with regularity, Ilya would hold the player’s mouth open, and Vladimir would use Babushka’s tweezers to unsnag the tape with a patience and attention that were rare in him.

  He and Ilya spent whole winters sitting cross-legged on the carpet. They watched blood fly and cars wreck and buildings crumble. They knew the dubbed Russian by heart. When the power went out, and the VCR whirred to a stop, they recited the dialogue. Kickboxer was their favorite. Vladimir could enact the final fight scene perfectly.

  “Like he trained for the Bolshoi,” their mother would say.

  “Oh, the Bolshoi,” Vladimir would say with a swoon because their mother had a crush on Alexander Bogatyrev.

  “I just mean,” she’d say, “that if you can memorize this, you can memorize other things. Useful things. What’s eight times six?”

  And Vladimir would groan and say, “Mama, you’re ruining it.”

  One afternoon, when Ilya was seven and snow was falling lazily outside and they were watching the unlabeled VHS for the millionth time, Ilya found himself mesmerized by Jean-Claude’s lips, by the fact that he was speaking a totally different language. Halfway through the movie, the fighting lulled and there was a love scene. Vladimir had roamed out to the balcony to take a piss. On-screen, Jean-Claude’s character was in bed with a blond woman. They were both so tan that Ilya thought they were a different race. The woman’s hair was in a lascivious halo around her face. The sheets vined up her body, covering strategic areas, though Vladimir was convinced that for a half second half of her nipple showed. She was asking Jean-Claude if he’d ever give up and settle down.

  “Yebat ’ne,” a husky voice said.

  The Russian was ridiculous and the dubbing was off, so it took a second for Jean-Claude’s lips to part in a silent “Fuck no.” No sound came out, but Ilya could see the sounds he was making: the flash of his teeth against his lower lip with the “Fff,” the slight grimace of the “ck,” the pursed lips of that final “o,” and Ilya found himself stringing the sounds together until he could hear Jean-Claude’s voice clearly, as though he had whispered right into Ilya’s ear.

  “Fuck no,” Ilya said softly.

  It was English. He had said two words in English. Not only that: he knew what they meant. He looked to see if anyone had heard him, sure that the thrill he felt, a thrill like he’d cracked a code, was illicit. His mother was sleeping off her night shift, and Babushka was working the coat check at the Museum of Mining, and Vladimir had finished pissing and was doubled over the balcony railing spitting on the sidewalk.

  The woman in bed was sitting up now, with the sheets clutched to her chest. Jean-Claude leaned over her.

  “Yebat ’ne,” the husky voice said again.

  “Fuck no,” Ilya said, his lips moving at just the moment Jean-Claude’s did, and again that thrill twirled up his spine.

  “What did you say?” Vladimir stood in the doorway, his cheeks pink from being outside and upside down. He was ten then, with this haze of hair on his upper lip that Ilya wanted badly for himself.

  Ilya said it in Russian.

  “No,” Vladimir said. “You said it in English. Say it again.”

  “Fuck no,” Ilya murmured.

  Jean-Claude and the woman were kissing now, but in a minute the Chinese mob would kick down the door and shoot the bed with such vigor that feathers filled the air.

  “You learned that? From watching their lips?”

  Ilya nodded.

  Vladimir clapped his hands. “Come here,” he said. He went back onto the balcony, and Ilya followed him.

  The balcony was the size of a shower stall and webbed with so many strands of laundry line that you had to crouch to get to the railing. When they did, Vladimir propped Ilya on the rail. The courtyard was a muddy expanse, scabbed with spring snow. One man trudged across it, coming from the bus stop with a bagged beer. Behind him, the refinery was the whole horizon, bright and pulsing.

  “Yell it,” Vladimir said. He had his arms around Ilya’s waist. The metal rail was so cold that it felt as though it were burning Ilya’s ass right through his pants.

  “Go on,” Vladimir said. “Yell it.”

  Ilya was quiet, and then Vladimir said the woman’s line in Russian, “‘Are you gonna give up?’”

  “Fuck no,” Ilya said, and his voice wasn’t big enough to carry. The man with the beer kept trudging.

  “Fuck no!” Vladimir yelled, and Ilya could hear the thickness of English on Vladimir’s tongue, could hear how his own had been clear in comparison.

  Ilya opened his mouth and this time he yelled it. The insides of his cheeks tightened in a rush of cold, and the man with the bottle looked up. If he could understand them, he didn’t show it. Vladimir pointed at him just as he dropped his beer in a patch of slush and disappeared around the corner of their building.

  “See,” Vladimir said, “you already know more than that old fucker.” He lifted Ilya down. “Jean-Claude wasn’t born American.”

  “He wasn’t?” Ilya said. He’d thought Jean-Claude the epitome of all things American.

  “He was French. Or Dutch or something. But he’s American now. He moved there. And you know who he brought with him?”

  Ilya shook his head.

  “His brother. They live in a mansion right on fucking Hollywood Boulevard.” They ducked under a line of Ilya’s underwear, which had been Vladimir’s before him and had turned the color of concrete. Vladimir nudged Ilya toward the TV. “Go see what they say next,” he said.

  And because Ilya wanted that thrill again, and because Vladimir had told him to, he did. He spent the afternoon a meter from the screen, his fingers kneading the nub of Babushka’s carpet. Behind him, Vladimir practiced choke holds on pillows, while Ilya listened to the Russian and moved his lips like the Americans. The little, sharp words were the easiest to mimic: the “nos” and “thanks” and “fucks.” But as weeks and months passed, he learned to pause the videos, to play them in slow motion and tease out the vowels and cobble together longer words. Syllable by syllable he watched the way American tongues hit American teeth. There was a lot he didn’t understand, but that seemed inconsequential next to the miracle of what he did.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sun was still high as Papa Cam pulled onto a smaller street and sped up a rise into a cul-de-sac where a lone house bit a chunk out of the sky. It was as graceless as a kommunalka. Over one of its shoulders, Ilya could make out the refinery, so small that its lights had merged into one light. Its smoke melted into the clouds. The Masons’ lawn was cut military short, but the lots on either side were full-grown with sawgrass.

  “It was supposed to be a neighborhood, then the market crashed,” Papa Cam said. He slung Ilya’s duffel over his shoulder with a grunt and made his way up a brick walk to the door.

  “We have it all to ourselves,” Molly said in a rote, uninflected way, as though that were the party line.

  Inside, everything—the walls, the furniture, the pillows, the countertops—was the color of tea made for a child, with lots of milk. The ceilings went up and up and up, and there seemed a determination not to divide space into rooms. The kitchen bled into the dining room, which bled into the den and the foyer, where the stairs curled into an open-air hallway. Mama Jamie gave Ilya a tour, using game-show host gestures, and the house did seem like something on TV. It was all polish; it lacked dimension, lacked the smells and sounds and smudges that were life in the kommunalkas. Ilya’s duffel, in all of its dirtiness, suddenly seemed like the only real thing, and he wanted to grab it from the chair where Papa Cam had left it and run. He would head toward the refinery and figure things out from there, he thought, just as Mama Jamie reached out and took his arm. Ilya flinched, and there was this flash of fear in her eyes, as though he’d been the one to touch her. She looked at him and he looked at her, and his heart was beating so h
ard that he was sure that she could see it shaking his body. Then she smiled. And he was wondering how many times she would do that—let her goodwill trump her instincts—when footsteps sounded in the hallway and a girl appeared at the top of the stairs. The third daughter. The first daughter, he thought, because she was the eldest. She was his age. Maybe a year younger. Her hair was dyed a shade close to white, which was more unsettling than attractive, but still there was something beautiful about her. Like the girls in Berlozhniki, she was all long, pale lengths: her shins, her wrists, her neck, which she was stretching now, with an arm crooked over her head and an elbow pointing to the ceiling. Her voice was long and pale too.

  “Took you a while,” she said, and it did not in any way mean that she cared. She let her arm drop and rolled her head gently and her eyes closed with the motion. She was wearing an enormous black T-shirt with cut-off jean shorts, and as she walked down the stairs toward him, the T-shirt consumed all of her shorts except the little white threads that hung down her thighs like icicles. Her sneakers were high-tops, spray-painted silver so that even the laces were crusty with paint.

  “Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “this is Sadie.”

  Sadie looked at him for a long moment. “Welcome to Leffie,” she said. “Home of the largest boudin ball ever cooked.” She smiled. A darting, furtive expression. Ilya tried to think what “boudin” meant and could not.

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” Papa Cam said.

  “True,” Sadie said. “There’s the corn festival.”

  “Ilya doesn’t speak quite as much English as we were thinking,” Mama Jamie said, “but he’s going to learn fast. Immersion, right?”

  “He doesn’t speak any,” Marilee said.

  Sadie rolled her eyes—whether at Marilee or her mom or his lack of English, Ilya wasn’t sure—and walked past them all into the kitchen. She opened the fridge door and disappeared behind it. Ilya thought that they would all migrate to the kitchen, that naturally they would follow her, but Mama Jamie just called, “Don’t spoil your supper,” and led Ilya upstairs, where the girls’ bedrooms marched down the hall, one after another. Marilee and Molly opened their doors to reveal studies of pink and green—plaid, polka dots, stripes, flowers. There was not an inch that had been left unmolested. But when Ilya looked through the cracked doorway into Sadie’s bedroom, it was spartan: a white quilt on a slim bed; a single pillow over which a slight, black cross hung; a wooden desk with a chair lumped in clothes. It looked temporarily inhabited, like there might be a suitcase somewhere out of sight. He wanted to linger, to open the door just a little wider, but Mama Jamie had moved on.