Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TEN

Ilya woke the morning after the windstorm with the last bits of a dream melting in his mind the way sugar melts on your tongue. Had all of it—Maria Mikhailovna’s visit, the exchange program, America—been a dream? The heat was back on. All of the candles had burned down to nubs overnight. Frozen wax puddled on the countertops and windowsills. Babushka was chipping away at it with a spoon and collecting the shavings in a pot. Ilya watched her for a moment, then he sat up.

“Is it true?” he said.

Babushka nodded. She put the pot on the stove, walked over to the couch, and sat on its edge. “When I woke up this morning, for the first time in my life, I was thankful that your grandfather is with God instead of with me. Do you know why?”

Ilya shook his head. She leaned over him, the way she used to when he and Vladimir were little and still got good night kisses. She was beautiful as grandmothers go. Her spine was straight, her eyes clear and blue. She did not have any of the terrible and obvious signs of age—the knobs and growths, the shaking—but still it scared him to really examine her. Her veins were too apparent. Loose skin fringed her jaw like melting wax and every once in a while her voice slowed as she spoke, as though her brain were limping toward the end of the sentence.

“Why?” he said.

“Because he wouldn’t have let you go. America. Not in a million years. You suffer for a country, and either you find a way to love it or you go crazy. He found a way to love it. Even here.” Ilya’s grandfather had been in the camp for seven years. The day after he’d gotten out, he’d taken the son he’d never met fishing. The day after that he’d gone to party headquarters and begged for his membership to be reinstated. “But it’s different now,” she said. “It’s allowed.”

“Yes, it’s allowed,” Ilya said, gently. In theory he understood her awe, but it still seemed misplaced. The miracle wasn’t that someone was allowed to go to America, but that he had been chosen. “I dreamt of flying there,” he said, because a piece of the dream had come back to him. He’d been up in a plane, and the stewardesses’ faces all came straight out of Michael & Stephanie. They were a rainbow of races, but somehow identical, just like Stephanie’s friends, and they had taken turns offering him sodas and blankets and bonbons with the simple diction of the Level I tapes.

“Listen,” she said, “you’re smart—I know that, that you’re smart and that you work hard—but you’re lucky too. There aren’t places for everyone in this world.”

He knew what she meant, knew that she was thinking of Vladimir, who had left before Maria Mikhailovna, while the windstorm was still raging outside. Ilya winced at the thought. Worry seeped into his brain, and then annoyance, at the way his happiness always had to be alloyed by Vladimir.

He was still dressed in a half-dozen layers from the night before, and all of a sudden he felt clammy, suffocated. His tongue thick and furred in his mouth. He needed to wash his face and piss before Marina Kabayeva began her endless ablutions in the bathroom. He needed to get to school, to see Maria Mikhailovna and have the reality of it all confirmed, but he could see that Babushka hadn’t gotten across whatever point she’d intended, or that, if she had, it hadn’t had the desired impact.

“Babulya,” he said, “what if I could go to university there? Get a job there. Bring you all over.”

“Sure, with your grandfather haunting me the whole way.” The pot of wax began to make wet, popping sounds on the stove.

“Go on,” Babushka said. “You can’t start being late now.”

Ilya washed, dressed, and was out the door faster than he’d ever been before. The stairwell seemed strangely silent without the wind. The air was thin and too easy to move through. Outside, the storm had raked the snow, made hard ridges like ribs on its surface. On the road that ringed the kommunalkas, an old fir tree had split in two. It had been there for all of Ilya’s life, and now its insides were exposed, a yellow so bright in all that white that it was unseemly, as though someone had dragged a highlighter across a blank page. The storm had rearranged the playground at the primary school. Snow splashed up the slide. The seesaw had been ripped off its mooring and flung into the parking lot and the swings were so twisted and tangled that they dangled out of reach.

Ilya took it all in with a new, distant sense of wonder. This world wouldn’t be his for long, he thought, and another piece of his dream came to him: the plane had landed, and it was only when the stewardesses paraded down the aisle and up the gangway that Ilya had noticed that he was the only passenger. In the dream, this seemed natural to him, a source of pride even, like he was Fyodor Fetisov and the plane was his own private jet. He didn’t have any bags, and he walked past row after row of empty seats toward the cockpit, which was empty too. The cockpit door was open, and Ilya could see panels of buttons and screens and the windshield, which was lit up by the shine of the American sun. For a second he’d basked in its glow, but then he’d heard a voice calling him from back down the aisle. And in one of those rare moments when your dream self listens to your rational self, he’d ignored the voice. It was speaking Russian, and he’d told himself he didn’t understand it. He’d studied the glint of sunlight against glass and walked off the plane.

“What’s wrong?” This voice was real and came from close enough to startle. It was Lana. She was in a miniskirt and heels. The girls all wore things like this despite the weather, as though their vanity were insulation enough, but Lana was visibly cold. Goosebumps brailled her thighs, and her cheeks were grayish-blue.

“Nothing. Actually I’m good,” Ilya said. He wanted to tell her the news about America, but Maria Mikhailovna had asked them all to wait until after he’d taken the boards and the exchange was officially announced at the Winter Festival in March.

“Good for you,” she said, her eyebrows pulling together like he’d said something unseemly. “Did Vlad walk you?”

He shook his head. There was a clump of what looked like eyelashes stuck to one of her cheeks. This was mysterious and slightly repulsive, one of those things about girls that Ilya filed in his mind for later exploration. She dug in her purse for a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“So he’s not in there?” She arched her neck in the direction of School #17. The wind had blown snow against the building, covering the front steps and the first-floor windows entirely. Ilya could already feel what the light would be like inside, the bottled-up, pinkish cast it took on when the snow was this high. It was late—three minutes until the first bell—and the stragglers were picking their way through narrow paths dug out of the snowbanks.

Ilya shook his head again.

“What about Sergey?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Ilya said. “Are you going?”

“I doubt it,” Lana said. She ran a finger over her lips, as though she were thinking of kissing him or remembering kissing someone else.

“How do you say ‘I love you’ in English?” she said.

Ilya blushed. He wondered if somehow America had already seeped into his appearance and altered his aspect, whether it had made him noticeable to girls, lovable even.

“I love you,” he said, in English.

“I love you,” she said, sounding out the phrase with such unabashed awkwardness that he knew it was not meant for him. “Is that right?”

He nodded. “I’m gonna be late,” he said, just as Sergey loped up.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Sergey said.

Sergey was squat and meaty, his face perpetually sullen until something made him laugh and his cheeks dipped into folds like a puppy’s. Ilya used to be comfortable with him, but they’d lost that ease recently. Or maybe it wasn’t recent. Maybe it had been months since Ilya had seen Sergey laugh.

“Sure,” Lana said, and then, to Ilya, “You better get in there.” She took another drag of her cigarette, dropped it into the snow, and wobbled off with Sergey, her heels sliding and clacking on the icy sidewalk.

In preparation for the boards, Maria Mikhailovna began tutoring Ilya after school and during lunch. She had the same lunch every day—a row of sprats in a tin—and afterward her lips were shiny with oil and her breath smelled like Ilya imagined the ocean might. Everything she said came with this tiny puff of salt. Ilya was trying to master the defective verbs, the ones that did not have a past tense, and he found himself conjugating all the time: as he walked through the halls at School #17, as he brushed his teeth in the communal bathroom. I can. I could. I must. I should. He’d spit toothpaste into the sink and in the hallway someone would yell for him to hurry up, and he’d realize that his gums were bloody from brushing so long.

Vladimir had not been home since the night Maria Mikhailovna announced the exchange. Ilya was rarely home himself. Between school and tutoring, it was dark when he arrived at school and dark when he came home, and it was easy not to think of Vladimir as gone. His absence wasn’t anything so dramatic. Plus, Ilya saw him around: sitting on a bench at the old bus stop with Aksinya straddling him, her butt pushing at the seams of her jeans; in the passenger seat of a car, sputtering off the square; smoking outside Dolls. Ilya didn’t hesitate in these moments. He’d raise a hand, yell Vladimir’s name, and Vladimir would wave back, would yell from the window of a car, “I’ll swing by tomorrow,” only he never did, and as weeks passed this tiny distance between them grew. Ilya would never have imagined it possible, but there it was, and the next time he saw Vladimir through the glass at the Minutka, he did hesitate, and instead of stopping, he walked a little faster until he’d rounded the corner toward home.

That winter, School #17 went electric with talk of a new drug. Rumors hummed in the halls. Krokodil the kids called it, and the cooler of them said it in English: crocodile. They said the high was like an endless orgasm, like all of your best dreams rolled into one. They said it was like living in your memories, like being back in the womb. They said you could die from one hit. That it turned your skin to scales. Some said a soldier, fresh off a stint in Chechnya, had brought the recipe to town. Some said Aksinya’s sister’s pimp had showed her how to cook it and that it was all the rage in Moscow. Others said that Sasha Blazhenov had invented it with nothing but the shit his mother kept under the kitchen sink.

Ilya learned of krokodil slowly. There was no moment when he didn’t know and then did. For some kids, the Vladimirs and Sergeys and Aksinyas of the world, life developed quickly. A Polaroid shaken. A world clarified. But without Vladimir, knowledge of the nonacademic sort came gradually to Ilya, if at all. He had to rely on overhearing and observing—conversations snipped by the open and shut of the girls’ bathroom; the grunts and nods and gestures of boys. When girls said it, their lips looped around the word. Krok-o-dil. Each syllable marked off like the tock-tick-tock of a clock. A word made for hand clapping, for dancing, for music with a beat. From boys, it came out as something sly, a long glint of a word like a knife glimpsed in a waistband.

The worst kids disappeared from school first, like they’d run through a sieve meant to separate them from what was worth keeping, and the teachers seemed more relieved than concerned. Ilya told himself it had nothing to do with him. Less than a year from now, he’d be in America. He’d pictured himself in that big-bellied plane so many times that thinking of it felt like remembering. He’d sit by a window, and as Berlozhniki grew smaller, he’d grow larger. He’d fill out his skin. Start to exist.

With Maria Mikhailovna, he practiced his idioms. Go for broke. Good riddance. Grasping at straws. He practiced ordering at an imaginary McDonald’s. Over and over he said the word “extra-large.”

“In America, you order an extra-large even if you’re not hungry,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “It’s a custom.”

“Hello, sir,” she said. “What may I prepare for you to eat today?”

“I’ll have an extra-large hamburger with an extra-large french fry, please,” Ilya said. “And please an extra-large Coca-Cola.” But that other word—krokodil—snuck in, hijacking his mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He wanted, desperately, not to know or care. It was clearly the sort of thing one was better off not knowing about, but he knew that the kids disappearing were like Vladimir. If they had heard of krokodil, Vladimir had tried it. If they had tried it, Vladimir was hooked.

Aksinya and Lana were rarely at school, and then never. Aksinya left a coat of hers hanging on a hook in Maria Mikhailovna’s classroom, and every day during tutoring, Ilya stared at it. He didn’t know whether he wanted her to claim it or not. It was the same green as the larch trees, with a hood trimmed in fake fur and grime on the cuffs. It smelled of ancient cigarettes and mildew. He’d seen her in it dozens of times. He’d watched Vladimir unzip it. He’d watched her smoke in it, with the hood up and the fur edging her forehead like bangs. It was the only coat he’d ever seen her in, and they were deep in winter now—a bad winter; the snow had completely covered the crosses that ringed the camp—and Ilya couldn’t think what she was doing without it.

Once, Maria Mikhailovna caught him staring at it.

“I think it’s Aksinya’s,” she said. “She must have gotten a new one.”

Ilya nodded. Maybe she had. Maybe the same man who pimped her sister kept her and Lana now too. He might buy them new coats and perfume and high heels—all the things girls wanted but didn’t need. Those were the things Stephanie bought, in The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie, when Michael took her to the shopping mall. But Aksinya was tougher than Stephanie, tougher than her sister. She wore a T-shirt with a pig roasting on a spit, and the pig had CAPATLISM carved across its belly. Spelled like that. Spelled wrong, but Ilya hadn’t told her, nor had he thought it stupid. Plus, Aksinya loved Vladimir at least enough not to fuck other guys.

“Do you know where she is?” Maria Mikhailovna said.

Ilya shook his head. He could feel his eyes starting to burn, though he wasn’t sure why. He thought of Babushka and the way she apologized for crying sometimes, saying that it wasn’t her fault, that her eyes were just old.

“She’ll be back,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “She’s too smart to give up for good.”

Vladimir wasn’t dumb, Ilya thought, but that hadn’t stopped him from giving up on school. Or maybe that was the definition of being dumb.

“Ilya?”

She waited until Ilya looked at her to go on. “Why don’t you come to dinner at my house? Saturday night? My husband would love to meet you. And we can celebrate.”

“But I haven’t passed the boards yet.”

“I know,” she said, “but this winter we need an excuse to celebrate, right? And you will pass them.”

“OK,” Ilya said.

“Good,” she said, “that’s settled,” and she scooted a piece of paper over the expanse of desk between them. English contractions were typed in neat rows:

“What’s the difference between a contraction and the possessive?” she said. He watched her lips move in the spastic way they did when she spoke English. Like the words were sharp and hard to maneuver. He thought of Lana’s lips. How they paled in the cold. He imagined them opening, singing, “Krok-o-dil.”

“A contraction,” Maria Mikhailovna said, “and the possessive.”

“A contraction is a combination of two words. And a possessive shows ownership.”

“How do you form one?” She leaned back, and her glasses caught the overhead light.

“With a hook.”

“A hook?” she said, smiling. She curled a finger, slashed the air with it.

“An apostrophe.”

“Good. Now use ‘there’s’ in a sentence.”

There’s a new drug, he thought. There’s nobody left.

“There’s America,” he said. He’d have his nose against the window. He’d see it for the first time at night. The lights would be bright enough to blanken his mind, and he’d feel nothing but right.

“Again.”

“There’s nothing in the cupboard.”

“Good,” she said, “but you don’t say the ‘p’ in cupboard. It’s quiet.”

Silent, not quiet, he thought, but he nodded and wrote “cupboard” in his notebook, the last in a list of words he’d practice that night. He’d say them over and over until his voice had smoothed out all the bumps, and sometimes as his mother wiped down the table, he’d hear her murmuring them too.

Later, when Maria Mikhailovna took one of her bathroom trips, Ilya yanked Aksinya’s coat from the wall and stuffed it into his backpack. The backpack bulged, and fur sprouted from the zipper, but Maria Mikhailovna didn’t seem to notice. When they’d finished for the day, she turned out the lights and locked the classroom. They walked through the school’s empty corridors, and their footsteps sounded out a slow beat. It was strange, he thought, that she was the one person in the world that he spent the most time with. This tiny woman with the plain face and the pretty smile. They pushed through the main doors and out into the cold. It was four-thirty and pitch black. Maria Mikhailovna’s glasses fogged, and she swiped at them with her mittens, smiling apologetically.

“So this weekend,” she said, “we’ll see you for supper.”

It was around this time—December of Ilya’s last winter in Berlozhniki—that a body was found in a snowbank on Ulitsa Gornyakov.

Seventy years earlier, prisoners had laid Ulitsa Gornyakov, pouring hot asphalt down the gentle slope from Berlozhniki, past the mines, to the camp. Over the years, through the Great War, through Brezhnev and glasnost, through seventy freezes, the asphalt had cracked and furled and canted until it jarred even the sturdiest of axles. Then the refinery was built, and the road was dug up. It was widened and smoothed so that two tankers could pass with a meter margin. Most of the roads in Berlozhniki disappeared under snow each winter, leaving the buildings lonely and illogical without their connections, but Gazneft cleared Ulitsa Gornyakov religiously, and the body was found by a plower named Mikhail Tukhachevsky early one morning.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky told the Vecherniye Berlozhniki that each type of snow feels different to the plow. There is snow that’s crusted with ice, which makes the plow buck then dip, buck then dip. Wet snow is heavy enough to drive the plow toward the shoulder, heavy enough to have your forearms aching at the end of a shift from holding the wheel straight. And then there is pillow snow, Tukhachevsky said. Light and dry, easy as breathing. It had been pillow snow that morning, and so Mikhail Tukhachevsky had noticed the instant the plow took on weight, dragged left, and went light again. He climbed down from the cab and circled back behind the truck. In the red of his taillights he saw a woman’s leg slanting up out of the snow. Straight up, he said, like a joke, except that she was barefoot, and so he’d known that she was dead. He dug for her face anyway, just to be sure.

Her name was Yulia Podtochina. If someone had not left the paper in the communal bathroom, Ilya would not have even read the article. If Yulia Podtochina had not worked at the refinery, he would not have taken much notice. There were a few deaths from exposure every year in Berlozhniki, drunks or junkies who got confused about where home was and wandered the wrong way. But Yulia worked at the cafeteria in the refinery: fitting the hot trays into their metal frames, wiping down tables, mixing the soda water and soda syrup in the machines, doling out pelmeni and cutlets to the neftyaniki. She had his mother’s exact job, except that she worked the opposite shift. She slept while his mother worked; she worked while his mother slept. She was like his mother’s shadow, in a way, and they were joined by that one moment each afternoon when their buses passed on Ulitsa Gornyakov, and each driver pressed the horn, and the two blasts were sharp and short in the cold.

She had been murdered. Killed with violent intent, the paper said, though how someone could be killed without violent intent, Ilya wasn’t sure. There weren’t any more details about her death, but the little Ilya read about her was a relief to him because it quickly became clear that she was nothing like his mother. Yulia Podtochina was young. Only twenty-four. She’d grown up in Arkhangelsk and moved to Berlozhniki two years ago. She was married to a childhood sweetheart who still lived in Arkhangelsk, working the ice barges. The paper had not been able to reach her husband for comment, and according to a cousin of Yulia’s who lived in Berlozhniki, she and her husband hadn’t seen each other in over a year.

One Friday after work, Yulia was supposed to meet up with this cousin—they were going to get a drink at Dolls—but when she didn’t show, her cousin didn’t worry. Their plans had been loose, and Yulia had friends at work, friends from her building, friends everywhere, it seemed, and her cousin figured that she’d found a better party. That Friday, she hadn’t boarded the bus with her colleagues. She told them that she wanted to walk home, which was strange, but not unheard of. The cold had abated a bit that afternoon—the pillow snow wouldn’t begin until that night—and it was only five kilometers to the kommunalkas and three more to town. Yulia set out. The departing bus passed her just outside the refinery gates, and a few people on the arriving bus—Ilya’s mother’s bus—saw her halfway to town, by the Tower, a cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other, and that was it. No one worried about her. No one called the police. She was missing for only a day before Mikhail Tukhachevsky felt her weight on his plow.

The picture of her was from her wedding day. She was in a white minidress, tight as a tourniquet, and white platform heels. Her legs were scrunched together at the knees like she was freezing cold, and a man’s Adidas jacket was draped over her shoulders. Her hair was curled and piled on her head. A papier-mâché dove stuck out of it like a cocktail decoration. She had a shy sort of smile, but there was a gloss to her cheeks and eyes that suggested that she wasn’t all that shy. She was pretty. Pretty enough was the thought that popped into Ilya’s mind when he looked at her, though he felt guilty thinking it, because he wasn’t even sure what he meant by enough and because she was dead. No one was in custody for the crime, and the police were pursuing all leads. Any information about the crime was to be reported to the Berlozhniki police department.

“Why would she walk home dressed like that?” Babushka said, when Ilya showed her the article.

“She wasn’t wearing that when she walked home,” Ilya said. “That’s her wedding dress.”

“Her wedding dress?! Case closed! You walk around in a dress that short and bad things happen.”

“She didn’t walk around in that,” Ilya said. “She got married in it.”

“Even worse!” Babushka said.

He asked his mother if she’d seen Yulia from the bus that day, and his mother had shaken her head and said, “She was a nice girl. But too dreamy. She served the golubtsy once and it was so frozen on the inside that Igor Zubkov chipped a tooth. She was a kid, you know. Into things.”

Ilya didn’t say anything. Since Vladimir had left, there was a new wistfulness to the way his mother spoke about kids, like the things they got into were inevitable.

In the communal kitchen, over the steam and bubble of their soup pots, the babki said that it was strange that she hadn’t seen her husband in a year. They said it was strange that she’d been found so close to the Tower.

In the bathroom line, old men talked about how in winters like this one the spirits woke. They talked about the brothers who had jumped to their deaths off the top of Ilya’s building, about how many prisoners hadn’t been properly buried. They talked about how the snow had covered the crosses completely. They said the road was built on death and that ancient anger doesn’t die. A spirit had killed Yulia, they said. A guard or a prisoner, depending on who was talking and whether their ancestors had been guards or prisoners.

Ilya read everything about Yulia that he could find. A later article reported that she’d been stabbed, that her cheeks had been slashed. The Berlozhniki police finally managed to get in touch with her husband—he’d been out on an ice ship for months and knew nothing of her death. All he could offer was that Yulia was a partier and had gotten into some stuff that he didn’t approve of. After that, there were no leads and no new details released.

A week later a teenager was attacked by a bear outside of Syktyvkar, and there was an outbreak of listeria from some baloney sold at the Minutka, and the mayor began his reelection campaign. Posters of him were hung from all the light posts on the square, and he rode in circles around the kommunalkas, shouting into a loudspeaker about how Berlozhniki’s time had come, about how Berlozhniki’s youth needed to stay and procreate, and Yulia was pretty much forgotten.

“That girl?” someone might say. “The one who wasn’t from here? Who knows what trouble she got herself into.”