Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWELVE

Maria Mikhailovna’s building was on the square, one of the new ones that had gone up along with the refinery, when it seemed as though Berlozhniki’s time had finally come. It was tall and slim in defiance of the squat practicality of the kommunalkas, and it was the only building in Berlozhniki with an elevator. When Vladimir and Ilya were young, before Ilya knew a word of English, they would lurk outside the building. If the custodian left the service door propped open after his afternoon smoke, they’d sneak in and ride the elevator. What a thrill it was, to press a button and see it light up, to hear a whoosh and feel the ground move under your feet. Usually they’d have five minutes, maybe ten, before the custodian kicked them out, calling them little thugs or golovorezy, which did not have the sting he intended because Vladimir and all of his friends wanted, badly, to be gangsters.

One afternoon, when the custodian seemed to have disappeared altogether, they snuck in and pressed a button with PH on it. The elevator climbed and climbed and then it dinged and the doors parted to reveal another door made of thick, brushed metal.

“Where’s the hall?” Ilya had asked.

“It’s the penthouse. Some badass has the whole floor,” Vladimir said. He reached out and touched the door. “Bet you anything it’s bulletproof.”

The elevator hesitated there, shaking slightly, and then it dinged and the doors slid shut, and it descended again. In awe over the revelation that one individual might own an entire floor, they didn’t immediately realize that the L button was glowing and that the elevator was not descending of its own accord. It had been summoned. The floors whizzed by, and this was usually Ilya’s favorite part of the ride, when it seemed like the elevator could not possibly stop in time, and a delicious terror would fly up his spine. But the terror was not delicious this time. Vladimir began madly pressing buttons, trying to pick a floor that they hadn’t already passed, but the elevator was quicker than him. Then it slowed, its cables smooth and silent, and stopped. The L above the door lit up. The elevator dinged once more, this beautiful impassive note, and the doors opened.

Ilya saw the man’s shoes first—slick and pointy and dark green, like they had been made with the skin of some fantastic jungle snake. On each there was a thin metal buckle shaped like a bone. He was in a suit, an anomaly in Berlozhniki, and an overcoat. Ilya did not see his face—there wasn’t time, because as the man stepped into the elevator, Ilya darted past him and ran for the door. Vladimir was behind him for a second, but the man must have caught him, because by the time Ilya yanked open the service door, he was alone.

“Vlad!” Ilya yelled, just as Vladimir staggered out of the elevator.

Ilya heard the man say “Scum,” softly, and then the doors slid shut.

Under Vladimir’s eye, blood pearled from a long cut, and as they pushed through the door and out into the snow, the blood began to roll down his cheek in fat droplets.

“He hit you?” Ilya said.

Vladimir winced and wiped at his cheek with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “He had this fucking ring on. With this fat diamond.”

Ilya had never seen Vladimir hurt before, not really, and his anger was sharp and sudden, a pain in his belly as though the man had cut him there. “Let’s get him back,” Ilya said. “Put shit in the elevator, or—”

“Nah,” Vladimir said, “let’s go.”

Once they’d rounded the corner and the building was out of sight, Vladimir squatted down so that his eyes were level with Ilya’s. He turned and showed Ilya his cheek. Up close the cut was messy, the flesh snagged, the skin around it fattening. “Clean me up,” Vladimir said. “I don’t want Babushka freaking out.”

So Ilya melted snow in his palm, wet the cuff of his sweatshirt, and dabbed the blood away as gently as he could.

“You know what?” Ilya said.

Vladimir shook his head.

“He’s probably still in the elevator. You pressed every fucking button.”

“It’ll take him an hour to get to the top,” Vladimir said, smiling. Somehow he’d decided that the man lived in the penthouse.

That had been a decade ago, but as Ilya pressed the button to call the elevator, he had the strange sense that the man would still be in it, the panel ablaze, every button lit, as though he’d been trapped there in life just as he had been in Ilya’s memory. The PH button was still there, and Ilya was tempted, but he pushed the 7 for Maria Mikhailovna’s floor. The button lit up, the elevator whirred and lifted, and Ilya felt a bit of that old thrill, or he remembered it, which was not so different.

“I’m making macaroni and cheese,” Maria Mikhailovna said when she opened the door. “And french fries and apple pie. To celebrate. I had to use syr though, and the Americans use American cheese, so it won’t be quite authentic.”

“American cheese,” a voice said behind her. “That’s got to be an oxymoron.”

Maria Mikhailovna smiled and stepped aside to reveal a small, fair man—barely bigger than she was—with glasses identical to hers. Her husband was a policeman, Ilya knew, but he didn’t look the part. From the way Vladimir talked about policemen, Ilya had assumed that they were universally terrible, that they lived to spoil fun and besmirch human rights, infractions that Vladimir gave equal weight, but Maria Mikhailovna’s husband had this lively expression, his cheeks high and bright, like they were readying themselves for a laugh.

“Dmitri Ivanovich,” he said, and he held a hand out, and Ilya shook it.

“The cynic,” Maria Mikhailovna said. She had a glass of wine in her hand, and there was a shine to her voice that it didn’t have in the classroom. Ilya wondered if it was because he wasn’t used to hearing her speak Russian or if she was truly that excited to have him here.

“I know you two would rather be speaking English, but mine’s no good,” Dmitri said.

“No,” Maria Mikhailovna said, “it’s worse than no good. It’s hopeless. He only knows the words he shouldn’t, Ilya. I’ve tried to teach him, but he has such trouble paying attention.”

“It’s true,” Dmitri said. “When I was young, English was just a liability.”

Maria Mikhailovna ushered Ilya inside. Her apartment was not much larger than Ilya’s, but it was much nicer, and only she and Dmitri lived there. In the living room, there was an enormous single-pane window with a view down Ulitsa Lenina so clear that it was as though the glass did not exist. Windows in the kommunalkas were often papered over in the winter, rags stuffed in the gaps in the sill, and still the cold seeped in, but Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment was warm. There was the whoosh of central air, like they were inside a living, breathing lung, and the light had this rich, amber glow that came, Ilya realized, from lampshades.

Dmitri was putting a CD into a stereo flanked on all sides by bookcases. The CD clicked and the sound of some stringed instrument floated into the air, and the notes were so clear and singular and free of static that they made Ilya feel as though he were hearing music for the first time. Their tree was already up for New Year’s, the branches drooping with tiny glass snow maidens and wooden stars, and its lights were doubled in the window.

Ilya imagined Vladimir taking all this in—the tray of radishes and bread and butter, the tiny bowl of caviar, the pretty light, and the kvass that Maria Mikhailovna was handing him now, in a glass that looked like it was made of crystal. Vladimir would mock it all, no doubt. He’d want something stronger to drink; he’d ask if they had any rap or punk or club music.

“It’s so hard for me to believe that you two haven’t met,” Maria Mikhailovna said. She took her husband’s hand, and Ilya could see that for a moment she wanted to take his hand too. Her generosity had been a part of his life for so long that he hardly thought about it, and it occurred to him now that perhaps he gave her something too. She and her husband looked small under these high ceilings, and he wondered if they had wanted children of their own, whether that was something they’d had to give up on.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Ilya Alexandrovich,” Dmitri said. “You’ve made Maria very proud.”

“I hope I do as well as she expects,” Ilya said.

“You’ll do wonderfully,” she said. “I have a surprise tonight—besides the macaroni and cheese—I’ve gotten the surname of the host family.” She waited a second, her eyes bright. “The Ma-sons.”

“Ma-sons,” Ilya said.

“It’s spelled like ‘ma’ and ‘sons’ put together.”

“What are their given names?”

“Cam and Jamie. Only I can’t figure out who’s the man and who’s the woman.” Maria Mikhailovna giggled.

“Come-on jam-eee,” Dmitri said. “There are no patronymics?”

“No, sweetheart,” she said. “That would certainly make it easier, wouldn’t it?”

“Jamie has to be the man,” Ilya said. “A diminutive for James. Like James Bond. King James.”

“Maybe, but ‘Cam’? It’s manly for a woman, no?” Maria Mikhailovna said. “And they have three children.”

Ilya had tried over and over to imagine what his host family might be like. Sometimes he pictured Michael and Stephanie waiting for him in the airport. Stephanie would be holding a picnic basket, her breasts as pointy as ever in her sweater, and she’d suggest that they go to the beach for the day, and Michael in his glasses would agree. Sometimes it’d be Jean-Claude and his girlfriend from the unlabeled VHS, their lives happily domestic now that Jean-Claude had defeated the mob boss. He’d never imagined kids, though, and he didn’t know whether the idea thrilled him or terrified him.

“What are the children’s names?” Ilya said.

“They didn’t say.”

“Probably equally ugly,” Dmitri said. “Are you hoping for girls? Full immersion, right?”

Ilya’s cheeks prickled at the thought of living in a house with an American girl and all the intimacy that entailed: eating off the same plates, showering in the same shower.

“Dmitri,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “He’s not there to meet girls.”

“Of course he is,” Dmitri said.

In the kitchen, a buzzer sounded, and Maria Mikhailovna leapt up and ran for the stove.

Dmitri leaned toward Ilya and put a hand on his thigh, and his posture reminded Ilya of pictures he’d seen of politicians in the thick of deals. “I bought us frozen pelmeni,” he said, “just in case the macaroni doesn’t work out.”

Ilya laughed. “Whatever it is will be better than what my mother makes. She cooks everything ’til it’s carcinogenic.”

“That sounds like my mother, which is probably why she has cancer. That or the cigarettes,” Dmitri said. His expression was the same: still that jolly, cherubic look that made Ilya feel in turns relaxed and like he was somehow a source of amusement. “You know I’m from here too,” he said, “not like Maria, not a cultured city kid.”

“You were born here?”

“Born and bred.” He hummed a few notes of “My Berlozhniki” with false bravado, but Ilya could tell that his voice was good.

“I still had to leave people behind though. That’s a fact of life now. Simple. Some people are dead weight.” He made a “plop” with his lips, like a rock dropped in a pond. “I went to School #17. It was a better school back then, only there were no teachers as beautiful as my Masha.”

“Stop it, Dmitri!” Maria Mikhailovna yelled from the kitchen.

With a start, Ilya realized that Dmitri was the reason Maria Mikhailovna’s voice was different. They were in love, these two. Truly in love, and maybe that was why the air and the light felt like they did. Ilya finished his kvass, and Dmitri filled his glass with beer. It was bubbly and tart on his tongue, and his chair was incredibly soft. It seemed to have molded around his buttocks and spine, like it was meant for him. He imagined getting under the covers at home that night and having Vladimir smell the alcohol on his breath the way he’d smelled it on Vladimir dozens of times, and a sort of sprightly pride came over him. He had not felt so good since the day Maria Mikhailovna had told him about the exchange. In this chair, he could forget that Vladimir had not been home for more than a month. He could forget krokodil and the way his mother and Babushka looked at the door like dogs sometimes, hoping for a knock, for Vladimir to come home spun or sober or however. He felt like he was in a different world already, like the happiness he felt here was a preview of America. For dinner he had two helpings of macaroni and cheese, and enough beer that he lost his shyness and began to talk without thinking first.

“How did you meet?” he asked them, and maybe it was the drink, but he thought he could actually see the love seep into their faces the way morning light seeps over the horizon.

“Skating,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

“How Russian,” Ilya said.

Dmitri cackled.

“At the Winter Festival,” Dmitri said, “if you can believe that. She is lovely, beautiful, brilliant, of course, but she is not so good on skates. In fact, her skating is a disruption of the peace.”

“Luckily Dmitri was there, in uniform. And for the safety of others he removed me from the rink.”

“So the Winter Festival is your anniversary,” Ilya said. The Winter Festival was three and a half months away. That was when Maria Mikhailovna planned to announce the exchange as long as Ilya passed the boards.

They nodded. “It’s been too many years to celebrate,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

“Isn’t that when you’re supposed to celebrate?” Ilya could feel himself glowing. It was silly, he knew, but he felt the same sense of accomplishment talking with these two, in this apartment, in this light, that he felt when he perfectly translated a dictation or when he understood a whole conversation between Michael and Stephanie without having to pause and rewind.

“Exactly,” Dmitri said. “And, between us, she says this—‘No, no, I don’t want to celebrate, no presents, no flowers’—but I’ll be sleeping at the station for a week if I don’t plan something.”

Maria Mikhailovna smiled, and a small silence settled over the table. It was comfortable, calm, the sort of silence that could never exist in his apartment. He thought of Babushka’s endless murmurings, his mother’s rants, the neighbors’ fights, which were audible enough to follow like soap operas. He had no memories of his mother and father together, but he could feel in his marrow that they had not been like this, and for a long second he let himself imagine that he was the Malikovs’ son. It made him feel guilty, of course, to imagine that, and he wondered—not for the first time—if everyone was as traitorous in their daydreams, if Babushka wished she’d married Timofey when they were young enough to have a different son, one who survived. Maybe his mother longed for children who were nothing like him or Vladimir, maybe she longed to leave them all behind and go to America herself. But he could tell that these two, at least, did not regret each other.

Later, when Maria Mikhailovna was in the kitchen cutting the apple pie, Ilya asked Dmitri if he was a detective.

“Yes.” Dmitri laughed. “But it’s not so glamorous as you make it sound. Mostly I patrol for the refinery.”

That explained the apartment. That explained why Maria Mikhailovna was the one teacher at School #17 who did not have a second job at a kiosk or café. Fyodor Fetisov probably paid Dmitri more than his salary from the police force.

“Did you hear of the woman on Ulitsa Gornyakov?” Ilya knew that Dmitri had heard of Yulia, and what he meant was, do you know anything?

Dmitri nodded. “It’s sad, no? She was poteryana.” Lost, he’d said, and Ilya didn’t know whether he meant that she’d been lost when she died or in general.

“My babushka’s scared,” Ilya lied, “because my mother works the same job.”

“She doesn’t need to be scared,” he said. “Your mother should take the bus to be safe. And stay away from the Tower. The woman was not so innocent.”

“Did she die at the Tower?”

Dmitri looked at him, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how when you roll over a log there are worms and zhuki and slugs all grubbing around in the muck?” Ilya nodded. “The Tower is like that, only there are getting to be too many bugs. They’re not staying under the log.”

Maria Mikhailovna set the plates of pie on the table. “They need jobs,” she said.

“Of course they do,” Dmitri said. “Welcome to the new Russia.” He sounded proud, because he had done just fine in the new Russia, but there was this tightness in his face that spread the way a crack spreads across ice. Maria Mikhailovna saw it too. She put a hand on his arm. Still he went on, “It’s not even their fault. They have nothing, and they have nothing to hope for. At least before, we had a big idea, with big flaws, sure, but now what have they got? Is it any wonder they’re killing themselves?”

Yulia Podtochina had not killed herself, but Ilya knew there was no point in saying so. Dmitri was grandstanding the way Vladimir sometimes did, connecting dots until he could condemn the whole world and make himself feel like he was somehow outside it. Only Vladimir was outside it, and Dmitri was profiting from it.

“That’s why we teach them,” Maria Mikhailovna said. Her voice was soft but firm. She had understood that for Ilya the conversation was more than ideological.

“Teach them to leave?” Dmitri said, lifting a hand toward Ilya. There was a bubble of spit on his lip that he didn’t seem to notice. He was drunk, Ilya thought, or getting there.

“They leave and then maybe they come back.”

Dmitri laughed. “Sure,” he said.

“OK,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “Pie.”

“Pie. Yes. Sorry, pie and coffee too.” Dmitri smiled at his wife and then at Ilya. “And no more politics.”

“Yulia Podtochina was pretty,” Ilya said. He knew he should drop the subject, but he wanted to say the pretty without the enough, and he had the feeling that Dmitri had slandered her somehow.

“To pretty women,” Dmitri said.

He raised his wineglass and drank the dregs, and they all ate their pie, which was studded with raisins and not as good as Babushka’s apple dumplings. Ilya reminded himself to tell Babushka this. “Shush,” Babushka would say, “who’s competing,” but she would be flattered.

They ate in front of the enormous window, and from the seventh floor, the snow was beautiful as it fell. They were too high to see the slush, the streaks of oil, the yellow spots where dogs and drunks had pissed.

Dmitri offered to drive Ilya home, and Ilya demurred, but Dmitri insisted. He wanted to do a patrol of the refinery road anyway, and the kommunalkas were on the way. It was late enough and cold enough that Ilya said yes. In the elevator, Ilya looked at Dmitri’s boots. They were shiny, without any trace of snow or salt. They seemed to be brand-new, and Ilya wondered if he and Maria Mikhailovna had lived here a decade ago and whether it could have been Dmitri who had kicked Vladimir and him out of the elevator.

“Who lives in the penthouse?” Ilya asked.

“The penthouse?”

Ilya nodded.

“It’s been empty for a decade. Fetisov owns it. I go up a couple times a year to make sure the heat works and the pipes haven’t frozen. But he’s here occasionally with the new pipeline project.” Dmitri ran a hand lightly down the elevator panel. “Almost all of them are empty. They built them for the bigwigs, but then the bigwigs didn’t want to live here. They’d rather live anywhere else—fly in, fly out, not even spend the night if they can help it. So they’ve got no one who can afford the apartments, and they had to start cutting the prices. Ours is a perk of the job. But as you can see, the job never ends.”

“Of course,” Ilya said.

The elevator let them out in a garage. Somehow Ilya had not expected Dmitri to drive a patrol car, but there it was: the siren, the blue stripe, the MILITSIYA across the hood. There was not a flake of snow on it, the door was barely cold to the touch, and this was a marvel to Ilya.

“Maria is going to miss you, you know. She cares for you,” Dmitri said, as they pulled out of the garage. “She thinks of you like family, which means you’re family to me too.”

Ilya nodded. He knew that he should say something more—that he cared for Maria Mikhailovna too, or that he wouldn’t forget her—but he’d let the silence go too long.

“You want me to turn on the lights and sirens?”

“No,” Ilya said with a smile.

“I figured you were too old for that.”

On the corner of Ulitsa Tsentralnaya and Ulitsa Lenina, Dmitri hit the endless traffic light, the krasny beskonechnyy, which seemed to never be green, no matter what direction you were coming from. Dmitri groaned, and Ilya looked out the window and saw two figures sitting on a bench. Their shoulders were dusted in snow. They were looking down at their laps. Bare fingers flashing above their knees. They were gloveless, rolling cigarettes, and Ilya recognized the motion of Vladimir’s hands before he recognized his face. On his lap was the little pouch that their mother had given him eons ago to hold pencils and pens and erasers and that he had only ever used for tobacco. A lighter sparked in his hands, and in the glow, Ilya saw that it was Sergey sitting next to him. Vladimir lit his own cigarette, as straight and even as a factory-made. It bobbed between his lips as he said something to Sergey that Ilya couldn’t hear. The heat was blasting in the car and the windows were up, and Dmitri said, “You want to know a secret?”

Ilya nodded, his eyes on Vladimir.

“They programmed this light to be red for double the usual time. So people would run it and the traffic cops could pad their pockets, but of course here I am, waiting and waiting.” He went on complaining, saying that they had all spent lifetimes waiting at lights like this even though there weren’t any other cars in sight.

On the bench, Vladimir lit Sergey’s cigarette. Their hands cupped around the lighter. Their heads dipped toward each other. Their noses might have touched. There was ease there and symmetry. They stayed that way for only a moment, but it was a long moment for Ilya. He had always believed that some cord, some twine of genes and history and proximity, held him to his brother and held his brother to him, but he could feel the cord—or his belief in it—slacken as he watched them. He had the sense that he wasn’t looking out a window but at a screen, at a character whose fate he was invested in but powerless to change. And he had this feeling that he’d been getting more and more recently, that each time he saw Vladimir might be the last.

Sergey looked up at the car, smoke rolling up over his cheeks. He elbowed Vladimir. Vladimir stuffed the pouch in his pocket, and they both stood. Two shadow shapes cut out of the snow. Ilya thought they would walk away, but instead they headed toward the car, and Ilya could feel Dmitri stiffen beside him.

“Look at these two,” he murmured.

Vladimir and Sergey cut across the street a few meters in front of the car, moving slowly, like they thought that might make them look innocent. Dmitri’s headlights caught the stripes on the track pants that Vladimir wore day in and day out. Then the traffic light turned green. Sergey didn’t notice, but Vladimir stopped and looked toward the car. He can’t see me, Ilya thought, the headlights are too bright, but Vladimir squinted and stared.

Ilya saw him mouth, “Ilyusha?” and he hoped that Dmitri had not understood.

“Is this fucker really going to test me?” Dmitri said. He dug his palm into the horn and blasted it. Sergey was past the car, but he stopped now too. Sergey, who was always ready for a fight, looked back at them, his face wild with anger. Then he raised a hand and lifted his middle finger and jabbed it in the air.

“Run!” Sergey yelled just as the car jolted forward.

The tires shimmied on the ice—Dmitri had pressed hard on the gas—and the tail twisted out so that the car was almost sideways in the street. Dmitri cursed. Vladimir and Sergey were moving now, running sloppily, but gaining distance nonetheless. They were half a block away. Sergey tripped once, caught himself on one hand, and was up again. And then Dmitri righted the car and gassed it, more gently this time, so that it glided smoothly over the snow, gaining on Sergey and Vladimir until the bumper was only a few meters from their feet. The bottoms of Vladimir’s shoes—ancient sneakers, with no treads—rose like shadows in the headlights. His boots were at home, by the door, under the picture of their father in the red plastic frame that Babushka liked to touch each time she left the apartment, but of course Vladimir wasn’t wearing them. Ilya shut his eyes. He was sure that Vladimir would fall, that he would hear the thump, thump of his body under the tires.

“Urody,” Dmitri said, which was the word for freaks, but also for babies born with something wrong, for black sheep, for imbeciles. Dmitri’s face was thrust forward over the steering wheel. His tongue moved over his lips. “Fucking urody.”

They were almost at the corner, the turnoff to the kommunalkas, and as Vladimir ran into the intersection, sinking ankle-deep into the crisscrossing mounds of snow left by the plows, Ilya managed to say, “Here. Right here. This is my turn.” As though Dmitri were just driving him home.

Dmitri glanced over at him, and then he twisted the wheel right, and the back tires shot out from under them again. Ilya could hear him breathing through his mouth, as though he too had been running. Then he started to laugh.

“Can you believe them?” he said. “They were too high to even think of running out of the road.”

The kommunalkas were ahead of them, a cluster of darkness blocking the refinery’s light.

“Like ants, right? Too stupid to break the line,” Dmitri said.

Ilya didn’t say anything. Dmitri could easily turn the car around—Vladimir was still only a minute away, probably standing in the middle of the street, rehearsing the story with Sergey between jagged breaths. And Dmitri had power over Ilya too, over his whole future, over America, and Ilya thought that if he could just hold himself incredibly still and silent, he could protect it all.

“Not a word of this to Masha,” Dmitri said. “You hear me?”

Ilya nodded.

“She’s a pacifist,” he said. “She’s meant for a better world. That’s why I love her.”

Ilya nodded again.

“Listen,” Dmitri said, as he pulled up to Ilya’s building. His hand was on Ilya’s thigh again. “Those two will be fine. Maybe even better for this. Maybe I scared them sober, right?”

Ilya could feel his leg shaking. He knew that Dmitri could feel it too. This wouldn’t be over, he wouldn’t be released, until he said something. So he smiled at Dmitri and managed to thank him for dinner and the ride home, and then he got out of the car and watched Dmitri drive over the bridge and down the road until his lights merged with the refinery’s.

That night Ilya waited for Vladimir for a long time, pacing the stretch of carpet between the TV and the couch. He knew that Dmitri was right, that Vladimir had been too high, too stupid to just run off the road, to run up into the square, into the trees where the car couldn’t follow him. And though he knew that that was beside the point, though he could hear the thump of Vladimir under the car so clearly that he had to remind himself that it hadn’t happened, he was angry too. Vladimir was always in these sorts of situations. Vladimir was always the one out until two a.m., the one sneaking out of school, sneaking in the back door of Dolls; the one never, ever doing what he was supposed to, and it was infuriating to always worry that his latest mistake might be the one that was too big, too deep and stupid for him to escape. Ilya burned the beer off pacing. Eventually he burned his anger off too, and there was just this acidic film of fear on his tongue, lining his stomach. He lay on the couch. He was tired. He felt young. He wanted to tell Vladimir that he’d been in the elevator, that he’d seen one of the apartments. He wanted to tell him that no one even lived in the penthouse. He waited and waited, but of course Vladimir didn’t come home.