Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Vasili Vasilyevich was at the sink in the bathroom at the end of the hall, his face covered in shaving cream. The razor shook in his hand. “Takes me two hours to shave now,” he said.

“Oh,” Ilya said, because Vasili was a talker and Ilya did not want to encourage him. Ilya’s eyes were gritty, and he could still taste the Tower’s chemical haze in the back of his throat. He needed to talk to Maria Mikhailovna, but he needed a shower first. He’d spent the walk back to the kommunalkas imagining all of the terrible things Maria Mikhailovna would say to him. He’d blown his chance at America, but she might want to keep him out of university altogether. She might kick him out of School #17. Or maybe, he thought, his mind clenched around the hope, maybe, maybe Vladimir would somehow fix the situation, persuade Maria Mikhailovna to let him take a makeup test or go the next year.

“If you’re going to shit, give me some warning,” Vasili said. “I may be old, but I can still smell.” When Ilya didn’t laugh, he said, “You’re a bit sour, aren’t you?”

“No,” Ilya said, sourly.

Ilya peed, and Vasili listened and then lamented his own flow, which was, he said, more like a leaky faucet. Ilya brushed his teeth, and Vasili asked him if it hurt to hold such a terrible expression for so long.

“Does it hurt your tongue to talk so much?” Ilya said.

He looked at Vasili in the mirror, straight into his dull blue eyes. Normally he wouldn’t have had the nerve to make eye contact, let alone to insult the man, but he felt a new sort of recklessness that came, he guessed, from not having much of a future. Vasili paused, the razor trembling by his wattle. Ilya expected him to be stung, but he said, “Molodoy chelovyek,” which meant “little man,” and his voice was warm, familial even, as though Ilya were a grandson whose attitude was a source of gentle amusement. “Whatever it is that has you so upset, it will pass. Trust me. I’m ancient. I’ve lost two women that I love, and each time I thought I wouldn’t survive, and yet here I am, shaving my beard because my third wife doesn’t like stubble scratching her pussy.”

Ilya blushed and mumbled something about a stomachache, and after his shower, he walked to Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment so slowly that his toes tingled and went leaden in his boots. He pressed the buzzer. No response. He pressed it again. No response, and he was about to press it a third time when the custodian—old now and stooped, but the same one who used to kick them off the elevator all those years ago—told him to fuck off. Halfway across the square Ilya looked back. He had the sense that the custodian might be following him, might want to keep scolding him just for the sheer pleasure of it. The old man was watching him from the lobby, with an expression of grim determination. Seven floors above him, Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment was dark, but way up at the top of the building, the penthouse was ablaze. Ilya could see a figure inside, silhouetted against the glass. It was Fyodor Fetisov, he guessed, and for a moment it seemed as though Fetisov were watching him, but then he stepped away from the glass, and Ilya told himself that he couldn’t be seen anyway. He was invisible in the darkness of the square, just another patch of shadow on the snow.

Ilya trudged on to the school, not really expecting to find Maria Mikhailovna there. It was a Saturday, after all. But he could see the light on in her classroom from a block away. She was at her desk, as always, with a stack of graded papers on her right and a stack of ungraded papers on her left.

He stood outside the window for a long moment. He wanted her to sense him and look up, but she did not. When he knocked on the glass, her head snapped toward him. She had to walk halfway across the classroom before she recognized him, and then she nodded, and he walked around the school and met her at the front doors.

She did not say her usual “Hello! How was your weekend?” to which he was expected to respond in English and at length, even though his weekends were always the same, blocks of studying punctuated by Babushka reminding him to eat. Instead she led him down the hallway, past the dark rooms, in silence. Once they were in her classroom, she locked the door.

“I thought you were hurt. Or worse,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “What happened?”

The answer was simple: he had wanted Vladimir back. He’d thought that he could choose Vladimir, but now he saw that he’d built that choice on a false premise, because Vladimir being gone had nothing to do with him, and nothing he did could change the fact of it. This idea was like a little spur of bone lodged in Ilya’s chest, something he had to breathe around.

“Ilya, what happened?” She reached a hand out and touched his brow bone where Vladimir had hit him. Her eyes were huge. She thought something truly terrible had prevented him from taking the boards. Vladimir had said that he would try to fix the situation, but Vladimir’s plan was half-assed in the way of all Vladimir’s plans: Ilya had no idea if he had seen Maria Mikhailovna, no idea what he might have told her, or how to corroborate it, and so he just told her the truth.

“I was with Vladimir,” he said. “At a party at the Tower.”

“The Tower.” She paused, her brain taking a moment to process the unlikely combination of Ilya and the Tower. “Was he in trouble? Did he need help?” Ilya hesitated, and she said, “He forced you, didn’t he? To miss the test. Is that it? He wanted to sabotage you?”

Ilya was about to shake his head, and then he thought better of it. What in the world did Vladimir have to lose? “Yes,” he said, his voice small.

He looked at the empty hook on the wall where Aksinya’s coat had hung. He looked at the “Look Where English Can Take You!” posters that marched across the wall. Big Ben. The Statue of Liberty. The Sydney Opera House. The Wild West. He looked out the window to the hall, which was tiled in a yellow that was the color of butter, of winter sun.

She looked to the hall too, and then she spoke in a rush: “Listen,” she said, “I took them for you. I couldn’t not. Not after all the work you’ve done—all the work I’ve done.” She let out this strange little snort. “I sharpened five pencils. I even set the timer for myself. For each section. I didn’t give myself an extra second. I just did the best I could. And you know the thing that made me the saddest?”

Ilya was stunned. She would be fired. Arrested. She was insane, taking a risk like that. Of course she was insane, he thought. How else did someone from Moscow wind up teaching in Berlozhniki? He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even shake his head. And then, as if she knew he was thinking she was crazy, her eyes went glassy.

“What made me so sad—so angry—was the fact that you would have done better. You would have done perfectly.”

And then America burst into his brain like something held too long underwater, and with it the same huge hope. Her hope. His hope. His hands began to sweat. He could feel his heart beating in his palms, his pulse like something trying to escape him. It was absurd to be given such a chance twice; it was a sign of a universe completely lacking in logic. He felt sick, betrayed almost, like when he’d first learned that languages have as many exceptions as they do rules. He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

Maria Mikhailovna pulled her chin back into her neck. Her look was still incredulous, but it was no longer sympathetic. “Did you want me to let you fail? You want to spend your life drinking at the Tower? Puking in the snow? You know there are other kids who are smart. They might not be as smart as you, but they’re smart enough to be grateful.”

Ilya thought of Grigori Alexandrov with the doughy crescent of flesh that hung over the waistband of his jeans. He had been taken under the wing of the math teacher, but he was proficient at English too. He worked hard. Sometimes, walking home from school after a long session with Maria Mikhailovna, Ilya would sense Grigori walking behind him. He wouldn’t turn around, though, nor would Grigori say hello.

“It’s not that,” Ilya said. “It just doesn’t feel fair. It’s never felt fair.”

“Fair.”

“That I get to go.”

“It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s unfair. It’s terrible. But you don’t help anyone by spitting in the face—” She took a breath, tried to calm herself down. “Do you know that your brother came to me?”

A tiny bubble of something—hope or trepidation—shot up Ilya’s spine. Vladimir had kept a promise. He’d come to see Maria Mikhailovna, and he’d made her take the test. He’d made all of this happen.

“After I came to your house and told you about the exchange, he came to me, and he begged me to let him go. To America. He said that he would change, that he would turn it all around. He wanted to be the one. He said that you would succeed no matter what, that you’d get to go to university for sure, but that this would be the closest he’d ever come to an opportunity like this.” She took a breath, then looked at Ilya as though aiming at him through a sight. “I had to tell him that he wasn’t close at all.”

That was why Vladimir had not come home, Ilya realized. That was why he lived in that terrible room, and Ilya didn’t know if he felt more guilt or anger at the knowledge.

“Did Vladimir come to see you today?” Ilya asked, his voice so tired and sure of the answer that it didn’t come out sounding like a question.

“Today?” she said. “No. Why would he?”

“No reason,” Ilya said.

“He doesn’t know, does he? Ilya? No one can know.”

“He won’t tell anyone,” Ilya said. He thought of Vladimir begging Maria Mikhailovna to come to America. He had never heard Vladimir beg for anything, and he wanted to know what his voice had sounded like, and if it had happened here, where Ilya was standing, and whether Vladimir had been serious enough about the plea to stay sober. He didn’t need to know what Vladimir had done when Maria Mikhailovna had told him that he wasn’t close at all—he could already imagine that.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t,” she said, and then she sat heavily in her chair. The school was completely quiet, so quiet that the air felt like it was made of cotton. Maria Mikhailovna blinked and rubbed at the spot on her nose where her glasses dug into her flesh. Then she pushed a stapled packet across the desk. “I made a copy. Just in case. So you know the questions, and what you answered.”

The board results came with unusual speed. A week of snow, a week of no Vladimir, a week of memorizing the test that Maria Mikhailovna had taken, and then she presented Ilya with a gray envelope from the Ministry of Education in Leshukonskoye.

“I thought you might want to open it at home, with your family,” she said, with this lightness to her voice that made it seem far away.This was how she spoke to him now. “I have a copy as well.”

And though Ilya had always thought he’d open the letter at this desk where she’d tutored him, the desk with the tiny moon and stars etched in the upper right corner and the slight list that meant a pencil always rolled off the left side, he walked home with it, intending to do what she’d said and open it at home with his mother and Babushka. But when he got to the kommunalka, there was a cluster of boys—younger than him—smoking in the stairwell, and he didn’t want to murmur “Izvinite” and listen to them go quiet as he edged by them. Instead, he kept on walking toward the Pechora.

There was a slick path cut by cross-country skiers that followed the river for twenty kilometers and then circled back, across taiga to the south side of town. To his left, the Pechora was frozen solid, a blank strip of snow flanked by birches. Ilya slid along the path for a kilometer or so until he was sweating inside his coat and he’d found a spot that seemed both beautiful and desolate enough for such an occasion. He sat on the frozen ridges of the path and opened the envelope.

Maria Mikhailovna had scored in the ninety-second percentile. As he knew from the copy she’d given him, she’d done perfectly on the multiple choice. She’d lost all of her points on the written section. He’d read her essays and dictations and knew just the things that had tripped her up: the plural possessives and habitual aspect. Ilya’s personal information was clustered at the top of the page. His name, his birthdate, his school and address and identification number. That was it. Most of the page was empty. There was no “Congratulations!”, no personal note at all, and this reassured him. No one was looking too deeply into this test. The State had more important matters to attend to.

He walked home as the light was faltering. The boys were gone. When he showed his mother and Babushka the results, they both started to cry and then to laugh.

“I thought you were better at the written than the multiple choice,” his mother said, and then she said, “Listen to me, looking a gift horse in the mouth.” She kissed Ilya. “You’re my brilliant boy,” she said.

“Your papulya would be thrilled,” Babushka said. “He’d be yelling in the halls.”

“He’d be drinking,” Ilya’s mother said, but without the usual scorn, and she pulled down a bottle of vodka and insisted that they all—even Babushka, who only drank on religious occasions—have shots.

Then they borrowed the neighbor’s Lada and drove it to the place on the square that served pizza on red and white checked tablecloths and catered to the refinery apparatchik and the rare tourist. The one with the faded photo of Gabe Thompson eating pizza in the window. His mother ordered mushroom pizza for all of them, and Ilya did not even try to protest. He had never seen her so happy. Even when she called Vladimir’s cell—a cell that he hadn’t answered in weeks, that Ilya was sure he’d traded for drugs—the smile stayed on her face.

Just as the pizzas arrived, there was a knock at the window behind them, and they turned to see Maria Mikhailovna and Dmitri standing at the glass. She smiled and lifted a hand. Ilya stared, wanting so badly to thank her and to apologize. Then his mother was tugging at his sleeve.

“Get them to join us, Ilya,” she said. “Go, go! Our treat!”

By the time he was out the door, they were past the restaurant, giving Gabe Thompson and his bench a wide berth.

“Maria Mikhailovna!” he called. “Will you join us? Please?” He said it like he was saying sorry. He imagined that he was saying sorry, and she must have heard that in his voice, because her face took on this soft look that was the look his mother got when she thought of Vladimir, like all she wanted to do was forgive him.

“We’d love to,” she said. “Another time—Dmitri’s been working so hard with these cases. He needs rest.”

She meant Yulia and Olga. The police had not made progress on either case, and Ilya could see the wear of them on Dmitri’s face. There were rings that fully circled his eyes, like another set of glasses, and his skin was sagging in a way Ilya did not remember.

“Of course. Another time,” Ilya said. He and his mother and Babushka had never been to the pizza place before, but it seemed suddenly possible that they might go there again, that after America, eating out on the square might become a regular thing.

“Congratulations are in order,” Dmitri said, and there was this tiny snag to his voice as he said, “Congratulations,” and Ilya wondered whether Maria Mikhailovna had told him about the boards.

“Spasibo,” Ilya said, and then Dmitri ducked into the restaurant and beckoned to a waiter.

When he came back out, he kissed Maria Mikhailovna on the top of her head. “I ordered the ladies a bottle of wine. Surely they’ve earned it,” and again Ilya wondered if Dmitri meant something else by what he was saying, but Maria Mikhailovna smiled at him and said, “They have.”

Behind them, Gabe Thompson coughed—a terrible sound—and when they turned to look at him, he said, “Fuck off.”

Maria Mikhailovna looked at Dmitri, and Ilya did too, expecting the same anger he’d seen in him the night he’d chased Vladimir in the car, but Dmitri just said, “I’m off duty tonight, myshka,” in this tired voice. And then to Ilya, “Even the Americans have their problems. Remember that,” and he led Maria Mikhailovna away.

His mother and Babushka were thrilled with the wine, and with each glass his mother alternated between saying that she’d never, ever imagined this and that she’d known all along that Ilya would succeed—from the moment she’d first held him, his head huge, his eyes alert to the whole world—that through hard work he would create great opportunity. Babushka was adamant that Jesus was involved, and she swore over and over that Jesus would be thanked like he had never been thanked before.

Ilya winced when the waitress brought the bill. Just the pizza cost what his mother made in a week, and she’d gotten them all hot chocolate too. His mother saw his face and said, “Don’t worry, golubchik, there will be only three mouths to feed soon.”

Two, Ilya thought, and normally his mother and Babushka would have thought the same thing, all of them acknowledging Vladimir in a beat of silence, but they were too happy or too drunk to think of Vladimir that night.

“Unless Timofey Denisovich moves in,” his mother said.

“Please,” Babushka said, blushing. “That old fart.”

“More like old flirt,” his mother said.

By the time they left it was close to eleven, and the borrowed Lada wouldn’t start. It was sixteen below freezing, and the battery had gotten too cold. Ilya’s mother tried, and then Babushka tried, though she hadn’t driven in a decade. Their neighbor kept hot water bottles in the glovebox for just this situation, and they brought them into the restaurant and begged the waiter to fill them, and then they wrapped them around the battery the way Babushka wrapped them around her knees at night. When the water cooled, they filled them again. Once, twice, and the waiter began to charge for the hot water. On the third try, the ignition sparked, and his mother ground the gas pedal to the floor, and the car groaned to life. His mother and Babushka cheered and the sound of them filled the square, which was empty and bright. Even Gabe Thompson had found somewhere warmer to be.