Lights All Night Long Page 4

  Snow was falling that afternoon, and his footprints were already soft at the edges as he followed them back across the courtyard to Building 2 and climbed to his floor. Babushka had recently struck up a friendship with Timofey Denisovich from down the hall, and they were playing prostoy durak at the table. Timofey was even more ancient than Babushka and had the sort of unkempt nostril hair that felt like an act of aggression. He and Babushka did not talk much, although sometimes Ilya would come home to find them humming songs from the Revolution or swapping sovok jokes.

  “What’s the latest requirement for joining the Politburo?” Timofey would say.

  “Tell me,” Babushka would say.

  “You have to be able to walk six steps without a cane.”

  “No, two. Two steps is enough.” Babushka would laugh, tears trickling from the corners of her eyes the way they did when she was happiest.

  That afternoon they were quiet, though. There was just the click of cards against the table, and the hiss of air through Timofey’s nose when Babushka laid down a strong suit.

  “Where is Vladimir?” Ilya said.

  Babushka looked at him with a smile left over from a card she’d played. “God knows,” she said as though God really did. “Are you hungry?”

  Ilya shook his head.

  “I am,” Timofey said.

  “He is the one who needs to eat, not you. What are you doing all day? Not studying. We know that,” she said, but she stood anyway, and got Timofey a plate and one for Ilya too.

  And so Ilya spent the afternoon at home, as he always did, picking at a beef blini and paging through his Handbook of Commonly Used American Idioms. On the cover was an American flag, a baseball, and a hamburger. Idioms were messy, logic-less things, but each page of the book had been divided into two columns—on the left were the idioms, on the right their definitions—and usually Ilya loved this imposed order, the promise that if he learned a column a week he would know them all in a hundred and sixty-two weeks. He would know them all by the time he was Vladimir’s age.

  “Above all,” he murmured.

  “Ace in the hole,” he said, but that day he couldn’t quite make the words mean anything.

  Vladimir was probably with Aksinya, cupping her new potatoes. Or he could be skating, but the ice wasn’t thick yet, and Ilya looked and could see the shine of Vladimir’s skates in the bin under the couch. Maybe he was clinging to the back of the #33 bus with Sergey, though Ilya didn’t know if they even rode out to the refinery anymore. And then, as though Ilya had conjured him, Vladimir burst through the door. His boots were untied, the laces wet and whipping at his ankles, and there were two girls following close behind him.

  “We saw Fyodor Fetisov!” he said. “We were up on the bridge and all of a sudden all these black cars roll out—one after the other—and then this SUV that is—” Vladimir kissed his fingers the way Italians did on TV when they saw a beautiful woman. “He was going like one fifty. He almost hit us.” Vladimir grabbed the blini off of Ilya’s plate and took it down in two bites, as though his brush with death had left him famished. Then he said, in a softer voice, “I touched his car. Just reached out and touched it.”

  Ilya could see it: his brother’s fingers touching that perfect paint job, the car shocking him with the import of the man inside.

  “Bozhe moy,” Babushka said. “Why do you do things like that? You’re going to get yourself arrested.” She collapsed the fan of cards in her hand into a neat stack and said, “Who are you?” to the girls.

  One of them was almost too beautiful to look at, with long, dark hair like the Nenets and blue eyes that were all Russian. “Aksinya,” she said, and then, to Vladimir, “I don’t know why you wanted to touch his car. He’s terrible. That’s what my sister says.”

  “It’s no business of ours,” Babushka said.

  “I’m Lana,” the other girl said. She was blond, softer, with a gap between her teeth that suggested a gentle stupidity.

  “Lana Vishnyeva. I know your father,” Babushka said, and Lana nodded.

  Ilya asked if they’d seen the oligarch’s face, and Vladimir shook his head. He said that the windows were as black as oil. “I saw Maria Mikhailovna’s husband through the windshield though,” Vladimir said. “He was driving.”

  “Why’s Fetisov here? He hasn’t been here since—” Ilya paused. As far as he could remember, Fyodor Fetisov had never been to Berlozhniki.

  “Some new pipeline project,” Vladimir said.

  “Because the billions he has aren’t enough,” Babushka said, her tone sharp, and then it softened, and she said, “Are you hungry, girls?”

  Once Vladimir had asked her if she ever got tired of asking people if they were hungry, of feeding them. “There’s nothing that makes me happier in the world than being able to feed a child,” she’d said in that tone that old people used when they talked about the Great War, and Vladimir had rolled his eyes.

  “I’m starving,” Lana said, without any shame.

  Aksinya nodded, and Babushka brought out more plates. Ilya cleared his books, and the prostoy durak game was put on hold. They crowded around the table, and the apartment got that feeling that it could sometimes have, like it was holding something golden and sweet, like it was filled to the brim with honey.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  From down in the basement, Ilya could hear the Masons eating dinner. The clink of dishes. Chairs scraping, water running, the occasional shriek of Marilee or Molly. He had yawned enough times during Mama Jamie’s tour of the basement—the “rec room,” she called it—that she had relented and allowed him to skip dinner and whatever other orientation activities she had planned.

  The basement had a set of glass doors that framed a dark patch of earth under the deck where a few bikes were slumped in a pile. A ping-pong table stretched across half the room. The net had given up in the middle, the paddles peeled at the edges, and Ilya was comforted by these tiny signs of neglect. Over the bed, there was an enormous poster of a beach with footprints near the surf. The sky had been enhanced till it looked radioactive. The water was the color of Freon. It had something to do with Jesus, but Ilya wasn’t sure what exactly. He had his own bathroom. “Feel free to flush the t.p.,” Mama Jamie had said, and she’d ripped a few squares off the roll and flushed them herself to prove the power of American plumbing. Then she’d opened a shallow cabinet over the sink to reveal a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, each in its own bright packaging. Ilya wished that he didn’t need them—if he had left under different circumstances, his mom would have packed them—but he did.

  In a little nook by the glass doors was a desk with a computer. The monitor was off, the screen the gray of a dead tooth, but still Ilya’s stomach lifted and flipped when he saw it. He wanted news of Vladimir. He wanted, so badly, just to see Vladimir’s face. As soon as Mama Jamie had retreated up the basement stairs, he pressed the button on the hard drive. For a long second there was nothing, and he thought it must be broken, aged out by the sleeker model in the den, but then the computer exhaled softly. Something inside began to spin. A weak green light flicked on, and the screen came to life. The background loaded: Papa Cam, Mama Jamie, and the girls on a beach. They were all in turquoise shirts and white shorts. Sadie’s hair was a darker blond—her natural color, Ilya guessed—and now that he could stare at her unabashedly, he saw that there was something strange about one of her eyes. One pupil was slightly jagged, as though it had suffered a tiny explosion. Then the applications popped up. One covered Sadie’s face, and Ilya pulled the mouse over to the internet browser and clicked.

  First he checked his email, hoping for some sort of good news, but of course there was nothing but spam—ads for penis enlargements and hot American pussy and cheap flights to Lake Baikal. He couldn’t log in to VKontakte without converting the keyboard to Cyrillic, and so he spent half an hour Googling keyboard conversion
s, and another half hour in the bowels of the computer settings, until, finally, the Roman letters on the keyboard called up his old, familiar alphabet. Then he logged in, typed Vladimir’s name in the search box, and waited for his profile to load.

  He’d last checked Vladimir’s profile the day before Maria Mikhailovna drove him to the airport, and there were dozens of new posts since then:

  Rot in Hell.

  Even GOD won’t forgive you.

  I hope you get raped up the ass every day for the rest of your miserable life. That will = what you deserve.

  Ilya forced himself to read each one, to wait until the sting had faded, and then to read it again. He moved slowly, deliberately, sounding out each word in the same way he did with his lists of English vocabulary. Pyotr Vladimirov, who lived two floors below them, had written Genesis 3 without any additional explanation, and Pasha Tretiak, who had skated with Vladimir the one year he’d been on the School #17 team, had written I always knew you were a sick fuck.

  One person had posted a picture of Vladimir superimposed over a picture of the devil—horns, tail, and all. Another had posted a picture of Olga Nadiova, the second girl killed, and written, Why?

  Russians murdering Russians—this is capitalism, one man had written, and a political debate had unspooled in a dozen more posts.

  You are why the death penalty exists.

  If only Stalin were alive to deal with you.

  They were the same things that people had spat at him and his mother and Babushka in the bathroom line; the same things that people had spray-painted on their apartment door.

  “Why are you torturing yourself?” Kirill had asked him once, when he was paying for yet another session at the Internet Kebab. “Move on, bratishka. He confessed.”

  Vladimir had confessed to all three murders. That was true. But Ilya reminded himself, just as he had reminded Kirill, that Berlozhniki was a gulag town, a place born of forced and false confessions.

  He typed Lana’s name into the search box. Her wall was filled with new posts too. Sympathy posts. There were images of bouquets, of Jesus crying, of hearts broken, bleeding, weeping. There were notes too—I miss you. I love you. You’re somewhere better now. All of it was the virtual equivalent of the flowers and cards and stuffed animals that had been left in the grove where she’d been killed, but Ilya was looking for something different. Some shift in tone, some strange specificity. That was the shape that clues took. He scrolled down and read for a half hour, until he reached posts that he knew by heart. There was nothing strange; in fact it was all so clichéd that it felt anonymous, even the posts from the people who’d known Lana best. You were too good for this world, her mother had written. We’ll never forget you. But it felt to Ilya that they already had.

  Ilya clicked on the photos tab and scrolled through Lana’s pictures. He started at the beginning, when she’d first created her account. In the first photo she was twelve or thirteen, in a teal sweatshirt with Madonna on it. Her hair was curled, glitter nestled in the creases of her eyelids, and her face was rounder than Ilya remembered. There were pictures of her sipping from a carton of milk in the school cafeteria, sticking out a tongue to catch a snowflake, onstage in a leotard at the House of Culture. Halfway through the pictures, the pink streak in her hair made its debut. Her makeup got heavier, her shirts lower cut. A cigarette appeared between her fingers and stayed, even as the background changed. There was Lana smoking in a dim apartment with green walls. Lana smoking in a swing on the primary school playground. Lana smoking in a nest of bedding wearing a black bikini and a too-big baseball cap. Then came the picture from the Tower, which was not a tower at all, but the old gulag barracks, where kids went to do nothing good. There they all were: Lana, Aksinya, Vladimir, and Ilya made almost life-size by the Masons’ enormous monitor. Ilya and Vladimir were in the middle, and Aksinya and Lana flanked them. Aksinya was kissing Vladimir’s cheek, and Lana was kissing Ilya’s cheek. Lana’s fist was thrust out, flicking off the camera. Somehow the other photos had a doomed quality to them that reminded Ilya of the faded portraits of miners at the museum on the square, but this one was the worst to look at because Lana seemed so alive. Simply, defiantly alive, like she might tip forward, tumble out of the monitor, and start to dance. Like she had no idea what was coming.

  Ilya hunched closer to the screen. The flash had been kind to Vladimir. It had erased the shadows under his eyes, the sore on his lip, the blackheads that speckled his nose. There were the thin, bright slips of his eyes. His mouth was open—what had he been saying?—and there were his teeth, the front two crossing at the bottom the way Babushka crossed her ankles when she sat. It was not the face of a murderer. A punk, sure. An idiot. An addict. But not a murderer.

  Ilya opened a new email and typed Vladimir’s address.

  I know you didn’t do it, he wrote.

  Each blink of the cursor was a tiny jab of expectation. That’s it? it seemed to say. That’s all? Ilya clicked send. He’d sent Vladimir this same message dozens of times now. He knew it was a lost cause, a kopek in a well—Vladimir would probably never be allowed to check email again—but what else could he do?

  Ilya pushed the chair back from the desk. Out the glass doors, through the gaps in the deck supports, he could sense more than see the pool’s glow, as though there were a crack in the earth issuing cool light. He closed his eyes. The Masons’ dinner noises had faded into the murmur of the TV. It was still early, but his body felt thick with tiredness. It was the time difference and the exhaustion of hearing nothing but English. It was looking at his brother’s face.

  Upstairs, the phone rang once, twice. Probably Terry, the American exchange coordinator, Ilya thought, telling the Masons to get him on the first plane out of Baton Rouge. Fine. He would go home. He imagined his mother, three days from now, turning at the sound of the apartment door. She’d have that look of fear that had become the new set of her face, and then the look would loosen into disappointment at the waste of him, home again. She would not have the energy even to yell, and at the thought of that, his eyes filled and he pressed the heels of his palms into them to keep from crying.

  For as long as he could remember, he had been meant to leave Berlozhniki. He had wanted to leave. Now he wanted that old desire. He wanted to be that old self, the Ilya who would be upstairs with the Masons right now, sitting on the couch, speaking textbook English. He was the good kid, the perfect student, the big brain. How had this happened? he wondered, and of course the answer was right in front of him, in a thousand pixels: Vladimir. If it weren’t for Vladimir, he could take all of this—America—as his due, but instead here he was, alone in a dark room, and he couldn’t even feel properly sorry for himself because of course Vladimir was alone too, and somewhere way worse than this.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, a wooden creak. Ilya wiped at his cheeks and stood. It would be Papa Cam, his face a study in apologetic firmness. “Ilya, I’m sorry,” he’d say, “but you’re going to have to go home.” But the footsteps grew fainter rather than closer. They were outside, Ilya realized, and then there was Papa Cam in silhouette, gripping a long net. He paced the length of the pool, fishing for that one leaf.

  Ilya pulled the shredded plastic wrap off his duffel and unpacked. All of his clothes fit in the dresser’s top drawer. His tape player and Michael & Stephanie tapes were still in the pink plastic bag, buried beneath Vladimir’s sweatshirt. He’d found the bag the week before he left. It had been the only thing in Vladimir’s room at the Tower, its presence a mystery, a minor miracle. As Ilya pulled out the sweatshirt, it released a vinegary tang. He recognized the smell—Vladimir on his worst days, Vladimir sleeping it off—just as it dissipated, anesthetized by whatever industrial-strength cleaning agent Mama Jamie used to make the basement smell like a very clean toilet. All of the tapes were there. He had listened to them so many times that the cardboard covers had gone white and furry at the edg
es. The titles had worn off the spines. He stacked them in a neat row on top of the dresser along with the tape player and his book of idioms. In the bathroom, he scrubbed his face and underarms, pulled on his sweatpants, washed his underwear and undershirt in the sink and hung them over the shower rod to dry.

  He wanted to listen to Michael and Stephanie as he always had at home, to let their soft, insistent repetitions fade into white noise, and so he plucked a tape from the top of the stack and climbed into bed. The sheets were perfectly smooth. Up the hill the pool lights went out, and the basement walls went black. In the dark the bugs sounded more aggressive, like they were planning an invasion. Babushka said that before the refinery, in the summer, the bugs in Berlozhniki were the loudest in Russia, and, by implication, the whole world. She said this like it was a point of pride, like the bugs could stand in for a town orchestra or opera, but after the refinery was built they went quiet.

  Ilya slipped the Delta headphones over his ears and pressed play. He could feel his eyes closing in anticipation of their voices—it was the only moment of pure pleasure he’d had that day—but their voices did not come. He pressed the button again. Still nothing. He flipped the player over and popped open the battery compartment. It was empty. All four 286s stolen by some thug in Leshukonskoye who’d spent all his earnings on beer and couldn’t afford batteries for his TV remote. So instead of Michael and Stephanie, Ilya rapped the words to “Dark City” softly, hoping that might soothe him. It was one of Kolyan’s hits, an ode to gangster life that Vladimir had sung so often that sometimes it became the soundtrack to Ilya’s dreams.