Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In Berlozhniki that last winter, birch trees slashed the horizon. Wind coaxed the snow into twisters, and Babushka murmured about snow children and snyeg demons and what it meant when the sun didn’t appear for seven days straight. Babushka seemed to be the only person who had not forgotten about Yulia Podtochina. Some nights, she claimed to feel Yulia’s spirit slipping under the door and whispering in her ear. Some days she said that Yulia left her handprints on the mirror in the bathroom.

In theory, Ilya had everything to be happy about. He’d be in America in less than a year. He’d taken practice boards with Maria Mikhailovna and scored close to perfect. The actual boards were only a month away, and that should have been all he thought about, but he kept picturing Vladimir on that bench with Sergey. The two of them leaning toward each other. Vladimir holding the lighter and Sergey the cigarette. The gesture old and practiced, like they were bratya, like they were actual brothers, and Ilya was nothing to them at all. And he kept seeing Vladimir running in Dmitri’s headlights. What if he’d slipped? he thought, over and over, panic bubbling in his gut until he’d replayed the night to its end: Dmitri turning into the kommunalkas, his headlights shining on nothing but the snow falling as endlessly and innocently as ever.

One day he came home from school to find Babushka crying on the couch. Timofey was sitting next to her, looking small and a little lost. He patted her knee and murmured, “Tchoo, tchoo,” which was exactly what Babushka used to whisper to Ilya and Vladimir when they skinned their knees or needed garlic in their ears to get rid of an ache.

“What is it?” Ilya said, though he knew: Vladimir was hurt. He’d broken something, had wound up in the clinic or prison or dead.

“We were robbed,” Babushka said.

The apartment looked as it always looked: clean but cluttered. His mother and Babushka were neat, but they could not bear to throw things away, and so every surface—the counters, the kitchen table, the top of the TV—had the feeling of space about to be engulfed. Ilya looked at the door. The lock was cheap—it would pop out with one knock from a hammer. But it was in place.

“What did they take?”

“The samovar, your mother’s spoon, her rings, your grandfather’s medals, the vouchers—” She stopped, and Ilya thought a new wave of tears might come, but she swallowed and was quiet.

Timofey patted her knee. “They left the TV, though,” he said, “and the stove and the space heater. The important things.”

“Those are not the important things,” Babushka said. “They were probably too lazy to carry the TV down the stairs.”

“It’s true,” Timofey said. “Even thugs are lazy nowadays.”

The medals were his grandfather’s—“For Distinguished Labor” and “Veteran of Labor”—and Babushka had kept them in a tiny felt satchel inside a box of Q-tips in the drawer by her bed. His mother’s silver spoon—with the unknown initials carved in the handle—lived in a dusty depression above the kitchen cabinets along with the vouchers that they’d been given during perestroika without ever being told how to exchange them. The samovar was nestled in the depths under his mother and Babushka’s bed, hidden from the world by a warren of shoeboxes full of pictures and newspaper clippings and socks that needed mending and summer clothes that they never ever wore. Everything that had been stolen had been precious and nearly impossible to find.

Ilya dragged his crate out from under the couch. His clothes were all still there. His textbooks and exam prep books, his skates, and the decade-old New York City travel guide that he’d found at the bookshop and bought himself for his birthday were too, but his tape player was gone, and the Delta headphones, and all of the Michael & Stephanie tapes.

“Did they take anything of yours?” Babushka said.

Behind her legs, he could see Vladimir’s crate. It had been completely emptied.

“No,” he said, because she looked so forlorn. “Everything’s still here.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “They probably wouldn’t know what to do with a book if it hit them in the nose.”

Ilya stood. His chest was tight. It must have taken Vladimir a half hour to catalogue exactly what they had that was worth taking, and to gather it all, and at the thought Ilya could feel blood pumping in his hands, as though they were growing rapidly, and he wanted desperately to use them on something, to punch the wall or splinter the door, the way men did in movies. “I’ll go ask if anyone saw anything,” he said.

“No,” Babushka said, with enough force that Ilya understood that she suspected Vladimir too. “We don’t want the police mixed up in this. It’s not worth it. You hear? Ilya?”

Ilya nodded.

“Will you put on the kettle?” Babushka said.

Ilya filled the kettle from the pitcher on the counter and lit the stove. He watched the flame, and after a minute he could feel his hands relaxing, shrinking back to normal.

On the couch, Timofey said, “At least they didn’t take the kettle.”

“Pravda,” Babushka said. “We have the kettle.”

Weeks passed. On New Year’s, Medvedev gave his speech, with the Kremlin ablaze behind him. Babushka kept saying that at least they still had their TV, that at least they got to watch the speech.

“Right,” Ilya’s mother said, “what luck,” and she disappeared into the bedroom, and then Babushka fell asleep, and Ilya muted the TV and listened to the sound of fireworks cracking in the sky.

Ilya didn’t see Vladimir in town anymore, and sometimes he wondered if he’d left Berlozhniki entirely. He imagined Vladimir and Sergey clinging to the back of one of the semis that braved the roads all winter. Sergey claimed that his older brother had done that once, though his brother had been in Berlozhniki for as long as Ilya could remember, working at an auto shop, father to three kids who’d all inherited his and Sergey’s skin, which was as patchy as a rotten potato.

The more Ilya thought about Vladimir, about the stolen tapes, about the fact that he had mustered the energy to rob them but had not bothered to try to see Ilya in almost three months, the larger his hurt grew, and over time he found that he could cook it into hatred. He should have hated Vladimir, of course, but it was hard to hate someone whom you never saw, so instead he hated his mother. He hated the way her eyes turned down at the corners. The noisy way she ate. The fatness of her ass. The skinniness of her legs. She couldn’t say his name without it sounding like a plea. He hated her blind hope and stupid trust. There were other mothers, he knew, who helped their children with schoolwork, who did not stink of yeast and sleep all day. Grigori Alexandrov’s mother had written out a five-year study schedule as soon as his talent in math had become apparent; Ilya’s mother did not even know the date of the boards, though that did not stop her from applying pressure that Ilya didn’t need. And there was the way she had picked him as the smart one and defined Vladimir by default: the idiot, the failure, trouble through and through. In more rational moments, he remembered the folder of math homework, the term card filled with 1s, the fact that Vladimir had said he would try and had not. He remembered that Vladimir had left of his own accord, but what sort of mother let her son leave? Why had she not gone to find him? And would she have if Ilya and his promise had never existed? At the hot center of his anger was a fact that he tried his best to ignore: Vladimir had not been home since the night Maria Mikhailovna had told them about the exchange. Vladimir had not wanted to be left, and when Ilya thought of that night, he hoped that he had looked his brother in the eyes, that he had at least considered not abandoning him, but of course that wasn’t the case. He’d said, “Yes,” more loudly and clearly than he’d said those first words of English nearly a decade before.

When his mother was at work, Ilya sassed Babushka instead. Babushka who, it seemed, could never keep her fingers still, could never just do nothing. Babushka who saw portent in everything, who, one day, when she was making gogol-mogol, cracked open an egg and saw that it was yolkless.

“It could be good,” she said. “Or it could be very bad.”

“So it could be anything,” Ilya said, without looking up from his book. He was reviewing advanced algebra because a quadratic equation had been the only thing to trip him up on his last practice test.

“No yolk.” Babushka thrust the bowl under his nose, and he looked down at the egg white. It was perfectly clear except for a few milky particles. “Maybe he’ll come home.”

“I doubt it,” Ilya said. His voice came out sour, exactly as he’d wanted it to.

“You don’t miss your brother?” she said, and when Ilya shrugged, she said, “Maybe you’re missing your yolk.”

That winter, his mind was like a fire heap, doused and fumy with gasoline. He lived for any insult, any slight or spark. He slammed his book shut so that the table wobbled and his chair wobbled and the egg white wobbled in its bowl. His coat and scarf and hat were bundled on the couch, still thawing from his walk home from school, and he grabbed them, shoved his feet into his boots and stomped out of the apartment. Halfway down the endless stairs, he paused. He had nowhere to go. Five flights above him, three below. It was freezing. Here, and everywhere else in Berlozhniki. He’d forgotten his mittens, and his fingers were already tingling, halfway to numb. His breath stung with the cold. He’d have to be gone for an hour at least. If he went home any sooner, Babushka’s smugness would be unbearable. He’d skip dinner. He’d stay silent for the rest of the night. Maybe he’d stay silent through the winter, through the summer, until he said good-bye and left for America.

He was on the korichnevy floor, the brown floor, the worst floor, and it smelled of onions and cat piss. Every time Ilya climbed past this floor, babies were wailing and women were yelling and men were slamming doors—it had the general feel of humanity at war—but the long hallway was silent now. Across from Ilya, a door opened. A dumpy woman emerged from the bathroom in a robe with damp spots in terrible places.

“What are you lurking around for? Thought you’d sneak a peek?” She said it like she wouldn’t mind if he had snuck a peek, and he was terrified that she might whip open her robe and make him look at her.

“I wasn’t,” he said. According to Vladimir, middle-aged women—especially ugly ones—could be aggressive. “But you could do worse,” Vladimir had told him once, “if you’re in need of an education.”

“Which floor is… ” He stalled.

She rolled her eyes, and her mouth stiffened with impatience. “All your life you’ve been living here and you don’t know the floors. I thought you were the big brain.”

Ilya backed away from her and ran down the stairs.

“Seems like your brain’s shrinking!” she yelled after him.

He tucked his hands up inside his jacket sleeves and walked fast to the Internet Kebab on the square, where Vladimir had shown him his first porno over a stuttering, stalling connection. All those pauses, the endless buffering had been both painful and delicious.

“It’s tantric porn,” Vladimir had said. “A Berlozhniki special.”

Ilya gave Kirill, the horny Chechen who ran the place, thirty kopeks. He wanted to see if he could find out a little more about his host family, or the town at least, which Maria Mikhailovna had told him was in the south, in the state of Louisiana. First he had to wait for the homepage—the Vecherniye Berlozhniki—to load, and as it did, he felt Kirill hovering behind him.

By the time a third of the page had loaded, Ilya recognized the picture on the screen. It was Olga Nadiova. Everyone in Berlozhniki knew her. When she was little, she’d been an ice-skating phenomenon. She’d gone to an athletics compound in Sochi at seven. She’d been an Olympic hopeful. For years her likeness had been carved in ice at the Winter Festival. She was put on a pedestal right next to Father Frost and Yeltsin. She’d been headed for the Goodwill Games, but then at twelve, in the second spin of a triple jump, she’d sliced through her Achilles tendon with the toe pick of her other skate, and that was it. She moved back to Berlozhniki. She taught skating at the rink, started drinking, and gave impassioned, nonsensical speeches at the House of Culture, and now here she was on the screen, a child again, in full skating regalia. The headline said she was dead. She’d been murdered two nights earlier. Stabbed, just as Yulia Podtochina had been.

“Fuck me,” Kirill said, and Ilya knew it wasn’t out of sympathy. Olga Nadiova had split her salary between booze and the Kebab. Ilya had seen her here, plenty of times, watching videos of her best performances.

Panic set in after Olga’s murder, and it became hard to separate facts from rumors, to untangle the truth from the articles that ran in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki—which, after all, was edited by the mayor’s brother. The Vecherniye didn’t bring up any connection between Olga’s and Yulia’s deaths. Instead, it printed picture after picture of Olga in her red and yellow spangles, ice spraying off her skates. Olga midair, midaxel. The Pride of Berlozhniki, they called her, and they dredged up details of her skating career, her eleven medals in the Russian Youth Olympiads, her tragic injury. The articles always closed with a brief line about how her body had been found: “at 4 a.m. by a vagrant next to one of the trash bins behind the bazaar,” and there was an accusation implicit in this description that wasn’t lost on anyone. The trash bins. The vagrant. What had she been doing behind the bazaar at four a.m.? Nothing good.

Olga’s parents lived in the kommunalkas, across the courtyard from Ilya’s flat, and everyone brought candles and visited them, everyone listened to them insist that Olga had not done drugs—she had been a drinker, yes, of course, but never drugs—just as everyone had listened to them brag when Olga left Berlozhniki for the athletics compound in 1987. Olga’s parents said that she had been stabbed, just like Yulia. They had seen her body in the morgue and said that each cheek had been slashed, just like Yulia’s. They said that Olga had managed to call her mother while she was dying, but that her mother had been asleep and hadn’t answered. The message was nothing but static broken by two thumps. They said that she had been about to turn her life around.

Late at night, people gathered in the kitchens, poured shots of vodka, and talked about the details. Some said that Yulia and Olga had the same number of stab wounds. Some said that the killer had taken each of their ring fingers. Some said that both had been raped and others said that neither had been. There was talk of a serial killer, and a few even speculated about his identity: Anton Solomin, who’d been caught masturbating outside the school a decade earlier; Maxim Grinkov, who never made eye contact; Roman Rochev, who had come back from Chechnya with this shattered look in his eye, who could no longer even manage to lift a hand and say, “Privyet.”

Police cars appeared, sharking around the kommunalkas and the square. They trolled up and down the refinery road, where Yulia’s body had been found. Occasionally, walking home from school, Ilya saw Dmitri in his patrol car, his eyes scanning the horizon like he might happen upon a murder-in-progress, and if Dmitri saw Ilya, he would lift a hand and smile so heartily that it was easy to forget the few minutes Ilya had spent in his car.

The Minutka stocked pepper spray and knives and bullets and padlocks. Those who could afford to had iron bars installed over their wooden doors. Women walked everywhere in pairs. And of course some said that Olga and Yulia were to blame. That they had not been smart, that they had not been sensible. As though of course men with knives were lurking at the fringes of life, waiting for any woman foolish enough to step out of bounds. Even the grown-ups knew, now, of the new drug. It’s called krokodil, they said, because it makes you vicious, makes you violent. Krokodil, because it turns your skin to scales.