Lights All Night Long Page 3

  “This is our room,” she said, presenting a carpeted kingdom into which Ilya could easily have tucked his entire apartment. “The door is always open.”

  “Well, not literally,” Papa Cam said, “but you can always knock.”

  Ilya stared. He couldn’t help it. The TV at the foot of their bed was as big as a door and as thin as a dinner plate. There was a sleek bureau with a dozen drawers, and on top was a silver tray bearing bottles of perfume and shimmery boxes. Through another door he glimpsed a bathroom with marble counters and two sinks in case Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ever wanted to wash their faces in concert. He tried to lock on to just one detail that he could give to his mother, something that she might use like currency with the other mothers in the kommunalkas, something about which she might say, “This is what it’s really like there,” but no one in the kommunalkas would talk to his mother now, with Vladimir in prison, and besides there wasn’t any detail that wouldn’t sting.

  When they’d gone back downstairs, Papa Cam said, “I’m going to call Terry and see if we can’t figure out this whole language situation. Maybe there’s someone in Leffie who speaks Russian.”

  “Doubtful,” Sadie said. She had a series of plastic containers open on the counter. She dabbed a finger into a beige puree, tasted it, and wrinkled her nose. “Is this old?” she said.

  Mama Jamie ignored her and went on telling Ilya about the house. She pointed here and there. Bathroom, she said. Towels. Trash. Chores. Yard. Phone. Garage. Her lips did wild exaggerations of each word, and twice beads of spit flew off her tongue, propelled by the force of her enunciations.

  “We have a pool,” she said, “and if you don’t know how to swim, Papa Cam can teach you. He taught all the girls. He had Molly doing freestyle—”

  “I’m sure he knows how to swim,” Sadie said.

  Ilya knew little more than how to keep his head above water—summers in Berlozhniki were short, and between the mine and the refinery, the river wasn’t so clean—but his throat caved in at the thought of Sadie in a bathing suit. A bikini. Topless, even, with sunglasses and a stomach piercing and a sweating Coke can in hand. It was a ridiculous fantasy, he knew, ripped in part from some advertisement he’d internalized, and it came barbed with the memory of nights, lying in bed, listening to Vladimir talk about girls. He couldn’t think of any fantasy of his that hadn’t been Vladimir’s first.

  “Terry’s looking into it,” Papa Cam said, coming back in from the deck. “He was stumped. He said Ilya’s the best student in the whole town there, like some sort of language savant, at least according to his teacher there. He’s going to get in touch with her.”

  Maria Mikhailovna. Ilya could see her pushing her glasses up her nose, nodding to the beat of his conjugations. He could see the tiny red notations she made in the margins of his homework, and the way she gripped her pen with one too many fingers. What would she say if she saw him now, after all her work, after all she’d risked, pretending not to understand a word of English?

  Mama Jamie’s smile was failing her. Worry puckered her mouth. He knew that this was the moment to speak up, to blurt out something in English, to say he’d been exhausted, scared. Any excuse would do, but he couldn’t shake the idea that uttering a word in English would be letting go of something.

  “Ilya, can you understand us?” Mama Jamie said. “Can you—”

  “I’m out of here,” Sadie said. She grabbed a backpack from a closet off the kitchen, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam pulled their eyes off Ilya and looked at her.

  “Where are you going?” Papa Cam said.

  “Kayla’s,” she said. “The summer reading report’s due Tuesday.”

  “And you’ve had how long to work on it—all summer?” Mama Jamie said. “It’s Ilya’s first night. We’re going to eat soon.”

  There was a long silence that Ilya recognized. Even the little girls stared at Sadie with big eyes, and Ilya could see that she was like Vladimir had been. She was the one they worried about.

  Sadie zipped up her backpack, which was encrusted with the same silver spray paint as her sneakers. As she pulled it onto her shoulders, her hair got trapped under the straps. She gathered it at the nape of her neck and freed it, and her eyes met his. She had not been particularly nice to him, but still he had the distinct impression that she’d saved him somehow, that she’d interrupted Mama Jamie on purpose and bought him a little more time.

  “Home by ten,” Papa Cam said.

  “Nine,” Mama Jamie said.

  “Later,” Sadie said to no one in particular.

  * * *

  —

  As Mama Jamie slipped a casserole into the oven, Papa Cam led Ilya out onto the deck to see the backyard. A grill was tucked into one corner. Mow lines checked the grass, which was encircled by a low brick wall.

  “It’s to keep out alligators,” Papa Cam said, pointing at the wall. “Vicious, but they can’t even climb a foot.”

  The pool was square and still, the water taking on a dark shine, like oil, in the dusk. Papa Cam seemed to have taken the idea of immersion less literally than Mama Jamie, or maybe he was more comfortable with silence. He leaned against the deck rail and let Ilya look for himself. Eventually he said, “It took us two years to get the pool built. For a while there I thought it just wasn’t in God’s plan.”

  Part of Ilya wanted to express his awe, but what he wanted to say more—the thing burning his tongue like acid—was that if God did exist then he was a motherfucker if the Masons’ pool was part of his plan, was even a blip on his radar.

  Ilya thought of his mother and Babushka, wondered what they were doing at that moment. He did not even know what time it was at home, whether they were sitting on the wooden bench in the hall of the police station, waiting for someone to talk to them, or whether his mom was halfway through her night shift, eating the boiled eggs on rye that Babushka packed her every evening. He couldn’t imagine where Vladimir was. The only prisons he’d seen were on TV—American prisons—and he knew that wherever they were holding Vladimir would be worse. But then, suddenly, he could picture Vladimir: his back against a rough concrete wall, the kind that crumbled slightly under your fingertips. His lips were moving like he was praying, but of course he wasn’t. He was reciting the lines from Kickboxer, the movie unspooling behind his eyelids, his fists clenching with the muscle memory of the fight scenes.

  Behind him, Papa Cam flipped a light switch on the wall of the house, and the pool jumped into being. Turquoise and glowing, with a rim of blue tiles and a lone leaf resting on the bottom.

  “There,” Papa Cam said. His voice was exalted, and Ilya thought he might vomit.

  For almost a year, since the night Maria Mikhailovna had knocked on their door, he had thought about America constantly. On some level he had imagined the wide, smooth streets, the car-size refrigerators, the tank-size cars, the carpets that went all the way from one wall to another. He had even anticipated the faith with which the Masons clicked their seat belts; the way Papa Cam had paid for the airport parking with a lazy swipe of his credit card; the fact that, in the one grocery store they’d driven past, there had been no lines. But he hadn’t ever thought of this: in America, they light their pools. This was the detail for his mother. He imagined telling her. He could almost hear her silence, the quick suck of air through her teeth.

  “Sometimes,” Papa Cam said, “the girls like to swim at night.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time Ilya turned eleven, he’d skipped a level at School #17, and there was constant talk of his promise. “He’s sharp,” one teacher said. “A prodigy,” said another. They said that he might get a scholarship to Syktyvkar State or even to the Language Institute in Moscow. Convinced by his teachers of Ilya’s aptitude, his mother and grandmother started to hope. For a little more money, for a table that didn’t wobble, for a bigger apartment, for a car, but most of all their
hope conjured his future: a degree and a good job in Moscow or St. Petersburg, neither of which they’d ever seen. They treated Ilya as tenderly as the brass samovar that came out from under the bed, from under its layers of felt, only for polishing. His grandmother mixed extra sour cream into his shchi. She scooped it onto his pelmeni.

  “More smetana, Ilyusha?” she’d say. He’d watch the cream quiver on the end of her spoon and knew she’d give him all they had.

  Vladimir noticed this favoritism—it was impossible not to. He teased Ilya about it. “Your big brain is oozing out of your ears,” he’d say, or, “Study, smart-ass, study!” But sometimes when Ilya pulled out his pencil case and his textbooks, Vladimir would go quiet. He’d shut off the TV and slink down to the stairwell where boys bounced tennis balls off the walls and smoked cigarettes.

  Ilya started secondary school, and his new English teacher, Maria Mikhailovna, was a tiny woman with enormous glasses and a prodigious amount of hair that she wore in a thick, schoolgirl braid. Her husband was a policeman, so everyone regarded her with a bit of suspicion, but she herself was soft-spoken and sometimes seemed surprised to find herself at the front of the room and the center of attention. After Ilya’s first week in her class, she asked him to stay behind and said, quietly, “You have a gift.”

  Ilya’s eyes fell like sinkers. He was used to hearing things like this by now, but still he never knew what to say in return. “Take the compliment like a boss,” Vladimir always told him. “Just say, ‘No shit.’” But, as always, Vladimir’s advice was only applicable if you had Vladimir’s balls, and Ilya did not.

  “Thank you,” Ilya managed.

  Maria Mikhailovna handed him a piece of paper. “Ask your mother to get what she can, and if it’s any trouble, tell me.”

  He nodded. There was a Russian-English dictionary on the list, a book of idioms, a tape player, a set of tapes, and corresponding workbooks. He estimated the costs on his walk home, and the total was close to a week’s groceries, but his mother smiled when he showed it to her. She handed Vladimir a stack of rubles and told him to take Ilya to the bookstore on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, which was the more expensive of Berlozhniki’s two bookstores.

  When they walked in the door, a tiny bell shook above them, and the shopkeeper looked at them and said, “Money on the counter.” The shopkeeper was a sour sort, with permanently pursed lips, and Ilya could feel Vladimir bristling next to him, could feel how badly Vladimir wanted to slam the door, head across the square, and spend the money on a dozen VHSs at the Internet Kebab, but instead he cleared his throat and showed the man Maria Mikhailovna’s list. When the total was more than their mother had given them, the shopkeeper allowed a smile.

  “If I cancel the tapes you’ll have enough,” the man said.

  “We’re not canceling the tapes,” Vladimir said.

  “It’s OK,” Ilya said. “Maria Mikhailovna—”

  “We’re getting the tapes.” Vladimir reached into the waistband of his jeans and plucked out a bill that was rolled thin as a straw. He handed it to the shopkeeper. “You do the math,” he said.

  “Of course I’ll do the math,” the shopkeeper said, and, once he had, he said, “It’ll be two weeks at least.”

  Vladimir nodded, and Ilya followed him out the door. When it had closed behind them, Vladimir said, “Did you see his mouth? He looks like he’s been sucking cock nonstop for a decade.”

  Ilya laughed, but Vladimir was not joking. His eyes had gone narrow and sharp. “You’re not going to get anywhere, ever, if you let people like that push you around.” He was walking fast toward home, his steps making a staccato rhythm of his words. “That guy wants the whole world to fail. You. Me. Himself even. Just so he can say he saw it coming.”

  “OK,” Ilya said.

  “Not OK,” Vladimir said, ahead of him.

  “Where did you get the money?” Ilya asked. He knew for a fact that Vladimir had spent his name-day money within an hour of receiving it, but Vladimir didn’t answer.

  Two weeks later, when they returned to the shop, the shopkeeper hefted a box out of the storeroom and slid it onto the counter. Ilya could see that everything was there. The tapes in a cellophane stack. The books pristine, their pages so bright and white that Ilya could feel the way they would cut his fingers.

  “Thank you,” Ilya said, but Vladimir, who lost his homework on a weekly basis, unearthed Maria Mikhailovna’s list from his pocket.

  “I’ll check it,” he said, and he began to match the books’ titles to the ones on the list. Ilya knew that Vladimir meant to make a point, but his reading was a work in progress, his English abysmal, and it took him a long time to sound out each title. His lips moved, slow and labored, as though he were giving birth to each word. The shopkeeper pulled a toothpick from his pocket and began to flip it, end over end, between his teeth. He was watching Vladimir too.

  “I have to piss,” Ilya said, because he could feel the shopkeeper practicing insults with each flip of the toothpick.

  “Hold it,” Vladimir said. He moved his finger down the list and began sounding out and searching for the last title. Finally, he was done. He handed Ilya the tapes and stacked the books in his arms, and as Ilya followed him out the door the shopkeeper said, “Idiot.”

  Vladimir did not react. He did not stiffen. He did not get the furious flush that usually preceded a tantrum of some kind. It didn’t seem as though Vladimir had heard the man, and so Ilya pretended he hadn’t either. They brought the books home. And because of the books they had a meatless dinner for the tenth night in a row, and Vladimir said nothing about that or about the shopkeeper. But a few days later, Ilya walked by the shop alone and found the glass storefront splintered. The glass had held, but cracks radiated out from a crystalline patch in the center of the window. Ilya looked down, wondering what Vladimir had thrown, but the sidewalk was clean. Inside, the shop was dark and empty. Ilya put a finger to the point of impact and pushed, just gently, and it seemed to him as though the window bowed inward—a millimeter, no more, but enough to make him whip his hand back. His fingertip came away coated in tiny shards, one of which brought out a bead of blood. Ilya sucked it, and then he looked up. The shopkeeper was behind the counter. He had come out from the storeroom and was watching Ilya through the cracks in the glass, and Ilya shoved his hand in his pocket and hurried away.

  * * *

  —

  The set of tapes was called Learn English: The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie, and Maria Mikhailovna assigned him an hour of listening comprehension each night on top of his regular workload. Michael and Stephanie were an American couple. They went to the grocery store, to the beach, to the movies and the mall. All the while they’d talk in slow, happy, somewhat stoned voices, and Ilya would listen. Sometimes they’d ask him questions:

  “What did you have for lunch today?” Stephanie would ask.

  “Bread and cheese,” Ilya would say.

  “What is the weather like today?” Michael would ask.

  “It snows,” Ilya would say.

  There were line drawings of Michael and Stephanie in the corresponding workbooks. Stephanie was decent looking, with pointy breasts that made twin tents in her sweaters. Vladimir claimed that she was good fodder for masturbation, and that Michael, who was gangly and wore glasses, was not satisfying her adequately. Her breasts excited Ilya, as did the pinch of her waist, but it was her eyes that he loved. They were big and liquid and sad, despite all the American fun she had.

  In Maria Mikhailovna’s program, Ilya’s world narrowed. He was only ever at school or at the kitchen table with his workbooks spread before him. His ears were always bracketed by a pair of foam Delta headphones that had come with the tape player. But somehow the world felt expansive. He’d close his eyes and listen through the static until Michael’s and Stephanie’s voices grew clear and large, and it was as though he’d opened a tiny, secret door o
nto an incredible vista. It was as though he were moving through the door, shutting it carefully behind him and breathing this new, perfect sort of air. Before long, he didn’t even need to be listening to the tapes to be transported. Michael and Stephanie spoke to him constantly. Every time he looked at his watch, they told him the time in English. Every time he climbed the flights up to his apartment, they counted the steps in English.

  “Uzhin gotov, Ilyusha,” Babushka would say, and Ilya would hear Stephanie say, “Ilyusha, dinner is ready.”

  “What are we eating tonight?” Ilya would say, in English, and Babushka would look at him with the jolt of an old fear in her eyes. Then her face would soften, and she would say, “Even you can’t make English sound pretty.”

  * * *

  —

  While Ilya studied, Vladimir gained his own sort of knowledge. He stole a carton filled with crisps from a truck broken down on the high road and sold them outside the school for ten rubles less than what crisps went for at the Minutka. He skated down the Pechora, smoked pot under the bridge, and broke his arm skating home. He watched porn over the stuttering connection at the Internet Kebab. He was held back a year in school and in his new grade, he got a girlfriend, Aksinya, who let him feel her breasts. He told Ilya that they were as small and hard as new potatoes. Aksinya gave Vladimir a hand job. Then a blow job. Each night, in bed, Vladimir reported all of these developments to Ilya with gusto, with hand motions, and for a while Ilya thought that he could do these things too, that he was making a choice to study instead. But one afternoon, when he was eleven, he went to find Vladimir in the stairwell of Building 4, where he and Sergey liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and smoke cigarettes. Vladimir wasn’t there. No one was. There weren’t any balls or cigarette butts on the ground. The graffiti had been painted over, the floor had been swept, and Ilya got the same feeling looking at that clean concrete that he got when the swallows departed on cue each August, when the gray sky was full one moment and empty the next.