Lights All Night Long Read online

  Ilya sighed and clicked Aksinya’s tag in the picture. The photo was hers. It was the only one that she’d tagged from that night at the Tower, but now, as her profile loaded, he saw that it wasn’t the only one that she’d posted. There were a dozen of the same shot, more or less, and Ilya clicked through them. In the first, Sergey’s finger was on the lens, obscuring Vladimir entirely, but Aksinya looked gaunt and gorgeous, which must have been why she’d posted it. In the second shot, Lana’s eyes were closed and so was Vladimir’s mouth. The third photo was the one they’d all been tagged in, and then, as Ilya clicked to the next and the next, Vladimir’s mouth opened wider. The pictures blurred until they were like a movie—the girls dipping inward to kiss Ilya and Vladimir’s cheeks, their arms extending to flick Sergey off. Vladimir’s lips split. His tongue hit his teeth. Ilya could hear him again, just as clearly as he had at the Masons’ church. “You have competition, Ilyusha,” and as Vladimir said it, his eyes shifted bit by bit by bit until, in the last photo, they were looking to the far left.

  Ilya zoomed in on the photo until each of their faces was as big as his palm. He scrolled left, past Vladimir, past himself, past Lana. There were people dancing all around her. The background was a tangle of appendages whose owners were hard to identify, but on the edge of the frame there was someone in the foreground. Someone walking past them, close enough for his shoulder to brush Lana’s. That was who Vladimir was looking at. The person was cut in half. One shoulder, one leg, the shadowy suggestion of hair under a baseball cap. Ilya zoomed in as far as the computer would allow. The pixels fattened and blurred like cells in a petri dish, and then they clarified, cell by cell, until the face resolved into one that Ilya recognized. It was Gabe Thompson, the only American in Berlozhniki. His baseball cap had an orange bear on it, and the hat struck a chord in Ilya’s brain, made his ribs clench his heart like a fist squeezing tight.

  He clicked on Lana’s name under the photo, and her profile pictures loaded just as they had the night before. There, just before the photo from the Tower, was the series of Lana lying on a bed in the black bikini, which seemed, on closer inspection, to be a bra. Her hair was wild, her makeup in half-moons under her eyes. She was on her stomach, her breasts squished together so that a seam of cleavage halved the photo. The sight of all that skin tripped some sexual circuit and heat rushed Ilya’s crotch and then he thought, she’s dead, and just as quickly the feeling was gone, replaced by nausea as if he’d drunk sour milk. She was wearing a baseball hat too. It was askew, the brim tilting toward one cheek. The logo was only half visible, but still Ilya could see that it was an orange bear, its fangs bared.

  * * *

  —

  Since the midnineties Berlozhniki had played host to a trickle of tourists, groups of Swedes or Brits decked out in snowsuits so new and stiff that they barely allowed for movement. They’d check in to the Hotel Berlozhniki, which was really more of a hostel, eat at the pizza place on the square, and visit the Museum of Mining, where Babushka would give them a chit for their coats. They’d tour the museum’s three rooms, have a coffee in its café, reclaim their coats, and go gawk at the field of crosses that marked the camp’s dead. After thirty-six hours, two days at most, they’d leave, feeling sober and superior, but Gabe Thompson had been in Berlozhniki for close to two years.

  He’d arrived alone, with money, and without, it seemed, any plans to leave, and at first the town had welcomed him. The Cold War was over, after all, and families had him over for supper. This young, blond American in a parka and a too-big suit. The mayor’s wife baked him her famous kulich. He got a monthly discount at the Hotel Berlozhniki, and the pizza place gave him a free pie, took a picture of him eating it, and made a poster of it that said, AUTHENTIC! AMERICA! PIZZA! The businesses on the square spruced themselves up—Anatoly at the Minutka was even spotted mopping—in the hope that Gabe might be the vanguard of a new wave of tourism that would drown Berlozhniki in rubles.

  If Gabe seemed at all odd—and he did talk, occasionally, about angels and a golden book buried on a mountaintop—it was attributed to the language barrier. Besides, everyone said, all Americans are eccentric because look what they’d impeached their president over: some funny business with a cigar. Then, one day, Gabe picked a bench on the square, unzipped a duffel bag filled with pamphlets, and began to preach about Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni and a dream mine. Ah ha, people said. Finally they understood. Gabe had been sent to Russia to proselytize. With great disappointment they began to ignore him, to give his bench a wide berth or else to take his pamphlets and use them to kindle their stoves. Anatoly let the Minutka return to its usual filthy state and joked to anyone who would listen about how only in America would people waste time mining dreams.

  A year passed, Gabe converted no one, and everyone assumed that he would go back to the bosom of whatever church had sent him, but he stayed. He ran out of pamphlets, and still he stayed. Kids approached his bench on dares and asked him questions about saints in stumbling English, then giggled while he answered. From time to time he brought a bagged Baltika to the bench, and the babushka who cleaned his room at the Hotel Berlozhniki revealed that he had several each evening as well. The women of Berlozhniki found this development especially dispiriting. Their lives were filled with men who lined up at the kiosk for a beer before work, and now it seemed that this problem was not particular to Russia, that all across the whole, wide, enormous world, men were worthless. Some days Gabe didn’t make it out of his hotel. Some days he sat on his bench, drunk, letting snowflakes melt on his cheeks. Sometimes he fell asleep there, and the police would leave him for a little while—everyone agreed that some gentle punishment was necessary—but they would always drag him back to his room before frostbite set in. And then there were the days when he seemed resolved to make a fresh start. His suit was clean and pressed. His face was puffy, but his eyes were clear and hard.

  “I need to talk to you about God,” he’d say, and people would shake their heads at him, they would cross the square, and his voice would rise, and he’d yell, “Give me a minute! It’s not too late to be saved!”

  Ilya was fascinated by Gabe, the only native English speaker for hundreds of miles, but he’d avoided him just as everyone else had. Though once, when Gabe was sitting on his bench asleep, Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had seen a dog trot over to him, lift its leg, and piss on Gabe’s shins. They’d stared, transfixed. They were only a few meters away, close enough that Ilya could see an angry red divot in Gabe’s cheek, as though some insect had crawled out of or burrowed into his skin. They were close enough to shoo the dog, Ilya was thinking, just as Gabe’s eyes opened. For a second he looked at Ilya calmly, and then he sensed the dog or felt its piss, and he began to yell. The boys scrambled away—the snow tripping Ilya, Vladimir grabbing his arm—and ran for the Minutka. Once they were safely inside, roaming the aisles under Anatoly’s glare, Vladimir and Sergey started to laugh. They were screamed at, scolded, and cuffed with regularity. Disapproval was like a drug to them, but Ilya was terrified. He’d been able to understand what Gabe was yelling.

  “Come on, Ilyusha,” Vladimir had said. “He’s just drunk.”

  Vladimir picked up an Alyonka bar and began to examine it as though he might purchase it. At the register, Anatoly’s eyes narrowed. This was a cue to Sergey and Ilya to pocket something while Anatoly’s attention was focused on Vladimir. Sergey slipped some caramels into his coat with his usual finesse, but Ilya did not. Vladimir put the Alyonka bar down. “What’s wrong, Ilya?” he said.

  “Are you afraid he’s going to come piss on you? A revenge piss!” Sergey said.

  “He said he’d kill us,” Ilya said.

  This had sent Vladimir and Sergey into another round of hysterics, and Ilya had forced himself to laugh with them until he realized that Anatoly was no longer watching them. He was looking out the window, the safety of his merchandise forgotten, and Ilya followed his eyes to t
he sidewalk where Gabe Thompson was standing, staring at them.

  “Stop it,” Ilya hissed, and Vladimir and Sergey quieted.

  “Just our luck,” Anatoly murmured. “The only American we get is insane.”

  Gabe didn’t move. His stare pinned Ilya in place, gave Ilya the sense that his own stillness was ensuring Gabe’s, that if he flinched, Gabe would spring into violent motion. So Ilya resisted the urge to hide behind the enormous case of birch juice to his left. He forced himself to look at Gabe’s eyes, which were puffy and bloodshot and horrible, and then Anatoly picked up the shovel he kept by the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Shit,” Vladimir whispered.

  Gabe took a step toward Anatoly. Anatoly gripped the handle of the shovel and raised it off the ground—a half meter, maybe less. Ilya would have hit Gabe with it. He knew that with certainty, but maybe Anatoly had been born brave, or maybe because he’d outlived Stalin and Beria and communism and had little left to fear, he did not hit Gabe. Instead, he turned and rammed the shovel into the centimeter of snow that had fallen that afternoon. Metal screeched against concrete. It was not enough snow to shovel, but still Anatoly flung the dusting of it into the street, and Gabe turned and walked back across the square.

  It had been terrifying—surely Ilya hadn’t imagined that—but could Gabe have killed Lana and the other girls? Ilya wasn’t sure. Gabe was fervent, which was a close cousin to crazy. He was a drunk, probably an addict, possibly, as Anatoly had said, insane. Yet he was in a picture with Lana on the night she’d died. And Lana had posted a sultry picture of herself in Gabe’s hat like it was something to be proud of, like she wanted it to be recognized. At the thought, anger gathered, burning behind his eyes, and then another idea struck him: Berlozhniki was not the sort of place one chose to go; it was the sort of place you were sent. It had been part of the gulag. Prisoners had dug the mine. They had laid the train tracks and built the station and poured the roads that radiated from it. Everyone in Berlozhniki had assumed that Gabe had been sent there by his church on a conversion mission—but what if Gabe had not been sent to do anything, what if he’d been sent because of something he’d already done?

  Ilya opened a browser window and typed Gabe’s name into the search engine. He’d never heard the name Gabe before, and so he’d assumed that it was rare, but as the results loaded, he could see that it was not rare enough. There were hundreds of hits. There was an NFL player with the name, a reality TV star, a professor at a school in Ohio. A Gabe Thompson was in the Guinness Book of World Records for toenail length. Another had been in the Summer Olympics that year. Ilya clicked on the image results. He scrolled through page after page. None of the faces were familiar. None of them were him.

  Babushka had saved Gabe’s pamphlets. She was a hoarder by nature and too devout to throw out any image of Jesus, even if it was the paraphernalia of a ridiculous offshoot of Christianity. Instead, she’d cut out the sherbet-colored pictures—all of those angels and archangels—and pasted them to the windowpanes in her bedroom. In the summer, when the sun lit them from behind, they looked like stained glass, which had been her hope. CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS was stamped in tiny letters in the corner of each picture, and Ilya remembered sounding out those words and puzzling over the meaning of “Latter-day,” before deciding that it must be a fancy way of saying “tomorrow.” Now he added the church’s name to Gabe’s in his search. Again there were lots of hits. Congregations of clean-cut boys in suits and ties. Ilya scanned the pictures until his eyes blurred, but again none of them were him.

  Ilya cleared the search window. In its empty box, the cursor blinked in synchrony, it seemed, with his heart. He typed Gabe’s name again, and this time he added the word “murder.” There were fewer hits this time: a dozen sullen-cheeked men in orange jumpsuits, and Ilya thought of Vladimir. But Vladimir wouldn’t be in orange; in Russia, prisoners wore black.

  Upstairs there were footsteps, and Ilya looked at the clock on the computer, thinking that it might be Sadie, that it was the middle of the night and that she was about to sneak out again, as she had the night before. But it was much later—five a.m.—and the sky was lightening. In a few hours, it’d be his first day of school in America. He took one last look at the computer screen, at the violence in each set of eyes, and then he emailed Aksinya.

  Did she sleep with Gabe Thompson? he wrote, and then, with a throb of love for Aksinya because she had been Vladimir’s or because she was beautiful but still wouldn’t ever get to leave, he wrote, Please stay away from him. He clicked send and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For a while that last winter, Vladimir did try. He came home for meals. He seemed generally sober. Some afternoons, he and Aksinya and Lana would lie on the carpet like three sardines in a tin, watching movies, while Ilya did homework at the kitchen table. Ilya even saw him at school—granted, he and Aksinya were disappearing into the custodial closet, but still, he was in the building. There had been no more questions from teachers about Vladimir’s health, no more folders from Nikolay Grigorievich, and Ilya took all of this as a good sign.

  That winter, Ilya’s last in Berlozhniki, was one of the coldest in the books. Snow swallowed the crosses in the field by the Tower completely. It was rumored that the Pechora was frozen solid, surface to bed, with whole schools of salmon trapped in the ice. A Nenets man parked his sleigh outside the clinic, unharnessed his reindeer, and dragged it inside. It was alive, but one eyeball had frozen in its head. The doctor said there was a clink when he touched it with the scalpel.

  Sometime in the dregs of November, a month after the first freeze and a month still to go until the New Year’s festivities, a windstorm took down dozens of trees. Tatyana Andropova from Building 4 brought her dog out for a pee, and the dog was blown away like a tumbleweed. The doors to the stairwell were ripped off Ilya’s building, and all the radiators in the kommunalkas rattled, sighed, and went quiet. Babushka took the old Chukovsky books out of their storage spot in the woodstove, dusted off the baffles and firebricks, and sent Ilya and Vladimir down to buy satchels of wood from Daniil Chernyshev, who was crazy and kept birch logs stacked floor to ceiling along his walls in case of just such an occasion.

  The wind shrieked up the stairwell, the sort of wind that feels barbed, and there were enough people who were too frail or too afraid to leave their apartments that Ilya and Vladimir each made a couple hundred rubles shuttling between their floors with satchels of wood curled under each of their arms. The wind got stronger and stronger, louder and louder so that they had to yell to hear each other. Ilya’s arms ached from carrying wood, but there was a giddiness to it all too, to the easy money.

  “Motherfucker!” Vladimir said as they rounded the third-floor stairwell, headed down to Daniil’s again. The wind pulled tears up out of his eyes toward his temples. “This is amazing. Watch this,” he said. He stood at the top of the next flight, scooted his feet so that they were halfway over the edge of the stair, and leaned a couple of millimeters into the wind. It was strong enough to hold him. His jacket ballooned behind him. His jeans slicked to his legs. The wind rippled the skin of his cheeks like water. But then he got greedy—Vladimir had a tendency to get greedy—he stuck his chest out even farther, as though he were a figurehead moving over the waves. Ilya gripped the railing behind him.

  “Try it, Ilyusha,” Vladimir said, and at that moment the wind stopped and Vladimir fell. Down three stairs, then four, then five, all the way to the landing where he crumpled into a ball.

  Ilya ran to him, thinking of what he’d broken and whether they’d have to go to the clinic and whether it would be open and whether it had electricity, and then Vladimir sat up and began to laugh. Blood was trickling out of his nose.

  “You saw that, right?” he said. “The way the wind just stopped.”

  Ilya nodded. He wanted to say that if you leaned into the wi
nd forever then it was bound to stop, that it was nothing personal, but then the wind began to whistle through the rungs of the railing, and then it was fully wailing again, the noise inhuman but seeming to speak of human pains, and Ilya wondered if somehow it was personal. Vladimir wiped at his nose and blood smeared across his cheek.

  “Help me up,” he said, and Ilya could barely hear him over the wind.

  * * *

  —

  That night they pulled the table as close to the stove as they could. The backs of Ilya’s calves burned, but his legs felt frozen in the center, like meat that’s failed to thaw. The windows were blanketed against the cold, and, as the wind went on and on, as their kommunalka, squat as it was, began to sway, Ilya wanted to pull the blankets down so that he could see the storm and make sure that it hadn’t taken on some new and terrible form.

  The buses were not running to the refinery, and his mother had found a mostly empty bottle of peppermint schnapps, and she’d had a few shots and was ruddy with it, with all of them together at the table. As Babushka heated dinner, she prayed to St. Medard, who she said had once been shielded from a hurricane by a hovering eagle. He was a Catholic saint, but Babushka occasionally prayed to Catholic saints if there was one perfectly suited to the occasion.

  “Even a saint’s gonna get shat on, standing under a bird,” Vladimir said.

  “Hush,” their mother said, with the requisite sharpness, but her eyes had this bubbliness to them, like kvass poured into a glass, that they got only from Vladimir.

  After dinner Babushka dealt out seka, and Ilya divvied up a box of macaroni to use for bets. Babushka beat them all for the first five hands, but then Vladimir started to pay attention. He got three of a suit twice in a row, and soon he had to get a bowl to hold all of his macaroni. He was gloating, talking about becoming a card shark and joining the weekly game the dedki played in the kitchen.