Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Raz, dva, tri,” the gym teacher, Ekaterina Borisovna, counted.

It was the end of class, and Ilya was the last in the row, stretching, reaching his fingertips toward his toes, toward the floorboards, which had been scrubbed with lye so often that the smell of them made Ilya nauseous.

“Lana Vishnyeva was killed,” a girl said loudly, as though she needed everyone to hear it.

Her friend nodded. “I know,” she said.

Ilya stood up, and his vision went black and then cleared.

“What?” he said.

The girls turned, their hands still dangling at their toes, their rumps high in the air. Their ponytails dusted the floor. He had never spoken to either of them before.

“They found her yesterday,” one girl said. “But she’d been dead three weeks at least.”

Ekaterina Borisovna pointed a finger at Ilya and then at the ground, and Ilya bent back into the stretch. He could feel Lana kissing him. Their teeth hitting, her tongue darting into his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You were fine.”

“She was killed?” he said, thinking of her overdosing, of how thin she’d been.

“Her throat was cut,” the girl’s friend said.

“And stand,” Ekaterina Borisovna said.

They all stood and crossed their right arms over their torsos and began to count. They had been doing the same series of stretches for ten years.

“So not exactly like the other two. But she had the slashes on her cheeks. And apparently the knife was the same.”

“They were stabbed thirteen times,” her friend offered.

“No,” she said. “Twelve.”

Ilya skipped math for the first time in his life and went to the Internet Kebab to read the article in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. It was short and formal. This time there was no picture. The girls were right: Lana’s throat had been cut, and she had been dead for three weeks before her body was found by a group of kids playing in the grove of trees behind the kommunalkas, only two kilometers from Berlozhniki proper. A two-minute walk from Ilya’s apartment. One minute in the summer. When Ilya was little, kids had used those trees as hiding spots in tag, crouching among the trunks until they were flushed out.

Most of the article was devoted to a self-satisfied explanation of how the police had calculated Lana’s date of death. Snow, the article explained, could serve as a chronological record in the same way that sediment layers did, and Lana’s body had been preserved under a layer of ice that rested beneath a half meter of snow. The ice was formed during a deep thaw and flash freeze that had occurred four weeks before. Her family had not reported her missing.

“She was living with a friend,” her mother was quoted as saying, “because we had argued about her lifestyle.”

It was impossible to read the tone in this—whether it was said with regret or reproach. The article said that Lana did not appear to have been robbed and that the motive may have been sexual. It closed with a list of what she had been wearing when she was killed—jeans, a parka, and a pink T-shirt—and a plea for any information that might aid the police in their investigation. Ilya read this last line over again, sure that he’d misread or imagined. She’d been wearing a pink shirt that night in the Tower. Four weeks and a day earlier. He remembered the pink of it with the pink of her hair; he remembered wanting to ask her if she liked to do that, to match her clothes with her hair, but he’d been too afraid.

He looked up the weather in Berlozhniki from the past month, which was a flat line punctuated by one deep dip, like a heart giving one last twitch. The thaw had been the night after the boards, the night after Ilya had kissed Lana. He tried to think when he had last seen her at the Tower, whether she’d left the mess hall with all of them or whether she’d stayed and kept dancing, but all he could remember was that she’d been gone when he woke up.

Ilya walked home so fast that his lungs were burning when he got to the grove. It was just a thin cluster of birch trees that had grown around some long-departed spring and that, for some unknown reason, the loggers had spared. The police had marked off the entire area. The slim gray trunks were banded together with police tape like a bouquet. The police were not there, though, and Ilya could not tell the exact spot where Lana had been found, whether she’d been leaning against a tree or lying in the snow between them. There were crisp packets and plastic bags and cigarette butts everywhere. All the usual garbage. High up in the branches of one tree, a bra dangled. It had been there for years, fading from red to pink, and a tiny icicle had managed to find purchase on one of its straps.

Yulia Podtochina’s and Olga Nadiova’s deaths had been met with shock, but Lana’s was met with resignation. Look at where we live, people said, gesturing, vaguely, toward the camp and its crosses. Should we expect anything different? And yet defensive preparations were made. Lana was blond like Yulia and Olga, and so women started darkening their hair. Dye rimmed the sinks in the bathrooms and the communal kitchen, and the women—who went everywhere in pairs now—took on the look of actresses poorly cast as sisters.

When the police tape was taken down, the grove became a shrine. People left teddy bears and plastic bouquets and laminated postcards of Jesus and Axl Rose, who had been Lana’s idol. Ilya hadn’t known this. He hadn’t really known her at all, he reminded himself, and when he thought of her death, it was with wonder rather than grief. Someone he had touched had died. Someone he had kissed. Someone young. He had the feeling too that her death was a portent of worse things to come—whether for him specifically or Berlozhniki in general, he couldn’t say—and he found himself desperate to get to America, to leave before whatever happened next.

He drew a grid on an enormous sheet of newsprint, numbered the days until he left, and crossed off each one with a red X. One hundred and fifty-two. One hundred and fifty-one. If Babushka and his mother resented his eagerness, they didn’t show it. Babushka bought him supplies: a new sweatshirt and jeans, a watch that was also a calculator, a pair of Adidas knockoffs with four stripes instead of three, a St. Nicholas medal to wear when he flew, and a St. Sergius medal for after he landed. She washed the clothes and folded them, and Ilya stacked them carefully in the crate under the couch, and tried not to think of Vladimir and all of his tapes in that pink bag in the Tower.

At the Internet Kebab, Kirill took his passport photo. Babushka had given Ilya a fresh haircut, and he wore the shirt with the collar reserved for the Winter Festival and the official announcement of the exchange. He looked good, he thought, but Kirill was not impressed.

“Stop smiling,” he said.

Ilya thinned his lips and tilted his chin up like Vladimir did for photos.

“Now you look like a mole,” Kirill said. “Just relax.” Ilya tried to, but Kirill put the camera down and came over and unbuttoned the top two buttons of Ilya’s shirt. “Better,” he said. “Way better.”

He took three photos and the flash made Ilya jump each time. They printed instantly, and Kirill murmured over them approvingly. “I should charge for styling,” he said.

“I look like a thug,” Ilya said.

“Exactly,” Kirill said. “You can thank me when you don’t get jumped as soon as you get to America. It’s the fucking wild west there.”

“I’m going to Leffie, Louisiana,” he said. “It’s in the south.” The name of the town had been the latest tidbit from Maria Mikhailovna. She had stopped tutoring him, but sometimes after class she’d ask him to stay a moment. She’d told him that the Masons’ children were girls—three girls. One day she’d handed him a plastic envelope with his plane tickets inside, and, thinking of Vladimir and the way he’d robbed the apartment, Ilya had asked her to hold on to them for him. “Of course. Of course,” she’d said, embarrassed, as though it were insensitive of her not to have anticipated the request.

“When do you go?” Kirill said.

“One hundred and fourteen days,” Ilya said.

Kirill laughed. “We’ll miss you too, you fucker,” he said. “You want to see some young-but-not-too-young pussy? On the house.” He spread a hand and gestured grandly toward the computer monitors.

“Save it for Vladimir,” Ilya said. “Next time he comes in.”

“That thug,” Kirill said, with affection. “Nothing’s on the house for him.”

Ilya hadn’t expected there to be many people at the Winter Festival—not after Yulia and Olga and Lana—but the square was packed, and there was a feverishness to the crowd, as though they were all taking a risk being out, and they were determined to make it worthwhile. Women walked in tight groups, their hair—light or dark—hidden under fur caps, their eyes skidding toward the edges of the crowd, the shadows, the places that might hide a killer. They laughed too loudly, sipping at the kvass that vendors sold with pirozhki and shashlik. A few fights had broken out, and the police, who were normally patient enough to let things peter out as long as no weapons appeared, had carted the men off immediately.

Ice sculptures were scattered around the square, glowing under the lights strung up from the larches. A stage stretched from Gabe Thompson’s bench all the way to the Minutka. It was laced in bunting that must have been silver a decade earlier, but had faded to the color of slush. The stage was empty. Later, Ilya would stand up there as Fyodor Fetisov announced the exchange. Later still, girls from Ilya’s school would dance the chechotka and the Komis would spin in circles, their elbows and feet flying, and inevitably some drunkard in the crowd would get too excited doing a barynya and fall off the stage. For now, though, classical music blasted from speakers as Ilya, his mother, Babushka, and Timofey let the crowd press them from one sculpture to the next.

The theme of that year’s festival was “Wind & Fire,” and it was announced on banners that dangled from every lamppost in Berlozhniki, but most of the sculptors seemed to have ignored it or interpreted it liberally. There was a life-size ice replica of a Toyota Land Cruiser, with one door propped open and the steering wheel wrapped in leather and a real gearshift ripped from some less fortunate car. The line to get your picture taken in the driver’s seat wound past the stage and all the way to the Internet Kebab. There was an enormous television set with antennae so thin they seemed as if they might crack at any moment. A blue light glowed and flickered inside it. There were the traditional statues too—Leda and her swan and Pushkin and Yuri Gagarin standing in front of a mini Monument to the Conquerors of Space. Timofey stared at each sculpture as though he were at the Hermitage examining masterpieces. He liked the sculptures that had taken physical risks—the spider web with its thin filaments, the top-heavy St. Basil’s, Baryshnikov perched on his big toe.

In the center of the square, the most coveted spot, Gazneft had sponsored an enormous replica of the refinery. It was shot through with multicolored lights that flashed and pulsed, and it was encircled by a red velvet rope. It was entirely unnecessary—the refinery itself was visible from the square, as were the gray columns of its smoke, which had not been replicated—but Fyodor Fetisov did not normally attend the Winter Festival.

“Don’t tell Fetisov, but they forgot the cafeteria,” his mother said.

“It’s a gift to him, from him,” Timofey said, fingering the velvet rope. “Heaven forbid we touch it.”

“Don’t talk that way,” Babushka said. “It’s an honor Ilya will meet him.” Babushka hated Fetisov more than any of them, but not as much as she feared any disrespect of authority.

“I’m just shaking his hand,” Ilya said. Maria Mikhailovna had told him that it would be entirely transactional: Fyodor Fetisov would detail plans to expand the refinery, he would announce the exchange, the handshake would occur, and that was it.

They wandered over to the amateurs’ section, to a Snow Queen whose ice nipples jutted through her fur coat like a force of nature. Her face had been so crudely hacked that it looked manly, and at some point her chin had melted and refrozen into a Lenin goatee.

“What are you grinning at?” Timofey said.

“The cross-dressing Snow Queen,” Ilya said, and Timofey laughed.

“Ridiculous,” Babushka said. She looked at the little card that listed the sculptor. “And it’s Mikhail Kolchin. He just gets worse and worse every year. Remember the bear?”

Ilya’s mother started to laugh. “It was the skinniest bear ever. It looked like a weasel.”

“A demented weasel.”

The next lot seemed to be empty. His mother and Babushka strolled past it, but Ilya stubbed his toe on a ridge of ice. He bent and dusted snow off the ridge with the sleeve of his jacket. The ice was curved into a long, low hump, and Ilya swiped more snow off until he’d uncovered the whole thing. A crocodile. It was poorly done. It looked more like the pedestal for a statue than the statue itself, but the primitive shape was there: the tapered snout, the bulbous eyes and bulging body, the long, ridged tail. Half of the creature had been gouged with crude scales before the sculptor had lost interest.

Ilya stared at it, remembering how Vladimir had said, “We don’t really call it krokodil. We don’t really call it anything.” Still, it seemed to Ilya like more than a coincidence. It seemed like a sign. A declaration. The crowd was still by the Land Cruiser and the refinery. Babushka and his mother had joined a line of women to get their pictures taken with a bust of Vladimir Mashkov. They yelled Ilya’s name and waved at him, and he waved back before leaning over and brushing the snow off the card by the crocodile’s snout. It was blank.

A half hour later, Fetisov arrived in a cavalcade of sirens, and the loudspeakers announced that the speeches and performances would soon commence. Ilya’s mother ushered Babushka and Timofey to a bench by the stage, and Ilya waited in a sort of holding pen between the portable toilets and an ice cream cart. A ten-year-old girl in an orange tutu and too much makeup waited next to him. She was dancing the solo from The Firebird for Fetisov, she told him, with no small amount of pride. Every few minutes she twirled spontaneously, kicked one leg into the air, and wiggled her toes up by her ears.

The mayor took the stage as the anthem was played. He announced Fyodor Fetisov, and a half-dozen enormous bodyguards surrounded the stage. Two more flanked the man himself, so Ilya could only see a sliver of him. He was shorter than Ilya had expected, but with a meaty neck that was incredibly tan, as though he’d been somewhere tropical just hours before. He was known for his terseness—brevity, was how people put it when they were being diplomatic or were afraid of being overheard—and he dispensed with thank-yous altogether and in a quiet monotone announced that the refinery would soon be expanded to accommodate supply from a new pipeline.

There were cheers from the crowd, and one boo that required the attention of one of the bodyguards.

“And I’m pleased,” he said, sounding far from pleased, “to announce that this marks the inaugural year of an exchange between Gazneft and EnerCo. This year’s Gazneft Academian is Ilya Alexandrovich Morozov.”

The crowd cheered again—with less enthusiasm than they had for the refinery expansion, but still it was paralyzing. What if someone knew that he hadn’t taken the boards? What if Maria Mikhailovna decided that this was the moment for a crisis of conscience? Why did he even need to go up there at all? His name had been announced. That was enough, wasn’t it? But Fetisov extended an arm into the empty space to his right, and the ballerina nudged Ilya’s elbow, and Ilya managed somehow to climb a small set of stairs and cross the stage. Fyodor Fetisov gripped his hand. A camera clicked wildly, the flash spasming. And as Fetisov dropped his hand, Ilya felt the sharp edge of something against his palm. A thick, gold ring, studded with an enormous diamond. Ilya looked at Fetisov’s shoes. They were pointy, slick, expensive.

“Congratulations,” Fyodor Fetisov said.

Ilya nodded. Fetisov’s lips thinned. Ilya was supposed to thank him, but he couldn’t muster it. He was back in the elevator, all the buttons glowing. He was running for the service door, and Vladimir was staggering out of the elevator, his face bloodied, and Ilya wondered if Vladimir was in the crowd somewhere, if he could see Fetisov and had recognized him also.

In the end, Fetisov left the stage before Ilya. He trooped off with his bodyguards, and the mayor ushered Ilya back to the holding pen and said, “You’re Berlozhniki’s best and brightest?” as the ballerina tiptoed out to the first tiny, teasing notes of The Firebird.

It was close to midnight when they walked home, but dancers were still twirling on the stage, their skirts a red blur. The road out to the kommunalkas was filled with people too belligerent to let cars pass, so the cars joined in the procession, horns honking, the windows rolled down, the music from their radios mixing with the music from the square.

Ilya was the first up the eight flights, and so he saw Vladimir first. He was sitting with his spine curled against the door and his head on his knees.

“Vlad,” Ilya said, and he could hear it echo down the stairs behind him, could hear his mother reframe Vladimir’s name as a question. Vladimir didn’t move. There were fast steps on the stairs behind Ilya. Then Babushka said, “What is it?” and Ilya’s mother was pushing past him, saying Vladimir’s name again and again, and still Vladimir didn’t move until she was kneeling in front of him, lifting his head up in her hands.

“You locked me out,” he said. Then he retched, and nothing came out but a bit of frothy spit. He tried to stand and couldn’t, and even in the dimness of the hallway Ilya could see that something was wrong with one of his legs and that he was covered in blood.

“Oh God,” Timofey said from behind Ilya.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Ilya said. He could hardly breathe, and the words rose up his throat like stones.

“No,” his mother said.

“He’s sick, Mamulya,” Ilya said, his voice sounding high and afraid, though he had meant to be firm.

“They’ll arrest him,” she said.

She wrapped her arms around Vladimir and pulled him up, and Babushka opened the door behind them. Vladimir closed his eyes. His skin looked like marble. Ilya could hear the sound of Babushka turning on the stove in the apartment, and all he could think was that she was cooking blini for Vladimir the way she had cooked it for them when they were little and something had happened to make them sad. His mother dragged Vladimir inside, into the light, and the blood, which had looked like shadow in the darkness of the hall, turned bright red.

“Get more hot water,” Babushka said to Timofey. Timofey nodded, but Babushka had to say, “Now,” before Timofey ran for the kitchen.

“Shut the door, Ilya,” his mother said. “I need you to hold his head up and talk to him. Try to get him awake.”

Ilya sat and pulled Vladimir’s head into his lap. Vladimir’s skin felt like marble too, and somehow this was a comfort to Ilya because the cold was a familiar threat. He’s just cold, he thought. He just stayed out too long in the cold. He rubbed at Vladimir’s cheeks. He said his name over and over, as his mother pulled off Vladimir’s jacket. At the stove, Babushka had both teakettles whistling. She poured them into the enormous roast pan that was reserved for the New Year’s feast and filled them again from the jug of water on the counter. Ilya’s mother unbuttoned Vladimir’s shirt. He was even thinner than he’d been in the Tower, with deep shadows between his ribs. There were scabs at the crook of his arm, marching along the veins all the way to his hands, and their mother must have noticed them, but she just said, “Thank God,” when she saw his chest, the skin intact, the heart fluttering under it.

“Ilya,” she said, “wake him up. And if he vomits again, turn his head. Make sure he doesn’t choke on it.”

Ilya pinched Vladimir’s cheeks and red bloomed on his skin, then faded in an instant. “Wake up!” he yelled. “Wake up, wake up!” He slapped Vladimir, felt his own cheeks burn in apology, but Vladimir’s head just lolled to the side, and his lips parted and let out a gasp of bitter breath.

Timofey was back with two kettles of steaming water, and Babushka pointed to the roast pan and said, “More,” and he poured the water into the pan and ran for more.

Their mother had Vladimir’s shoes off. His socks were filthy, crusted brown with blood. His mother rolled them off, and Ilya could see that the pockets of skin between his toes were oozing. When his mother pulled at Vladimir’s jeans, Vladimir’s eyes flashed open, and for a second, Ilya thought, He’s OK. He’s awake, and he’s OK. But then Vladimir screamed, his body jackknifing, his head smashing into Ilya’s chin. He twisted onto his side and vomited again, and again nothing came out.

Ilya’s mother let out a sound that was something like a sob, though she wasn’t crying. She put her hands on her knees and bowed her head, and he thought that she might give in and call for an ambulance, but after a moment she lifted her head and said, “I need scissors,” and Babushka brought them from her sewing kit.

“OK,” his mother said. “Vova, can you hear me? I’ll be gentle, but we have to get your pants off. We have to get you clean. OK?”

The pain had woken Vladimir, and his eyes were narrowed on a spot on the carpet just past his nose. His face was slick with sweat, and Ilya could see that he did not have it in him to respond, let alone fight her. She began to cut, very slowly, very gently, along the seam of his pants. On one leg, the fabric fell away, but on the other, it stuck to the skin and so she cut even more slowly, millimeter by millimeter. Timofey brought water again, and now the roast pan was full and steaming, and his mother had cut Vladimir’s pants all the way up through the waistband.

“Ilya,” she said, “you need to really hold him now.”

Ilya put his arms around Vladimir’s head, so that his fingers laced under his chin, and Babushka pushed a spoon between his teeth.

“This will hurt, Vova, but I’ll be quick,” their mother said. She had never talked to Vladimir so softly before, had not used his nickname since they were children. Always she said “Vla-di-mir,” the syllables a scale of disappointment.

The spoon clattered in Vladimir’s teeth, and Ilya couldn’t tell if he was nodding or shaking. He groped for Ilya’s hand and found it, and Ilya thought of war movies, of all those glorious deaths in the Great War, when it had seemed so clear who the enemy was and who the hero. Vladimir yanked at his hand, feebly, and spit the spoon out of his mouth. He wanted to say something—and this was like the movies too, Ilya thought, his heart racing. Vladimir had some last words, some assertion of love or apology, something for them.

“Pocket,” he said, his voice sounding full of sand. “Coat pocket.”

“Mama?” Ilya said.

His mother closed her eyes and nodded, and it was from her expression—that calm defeat—that Ilya knew what was in the pocket.

There was a vial and a syringe. The syringe was visibly dirty, the needle crusted with something yellow. The vial had a pathetic amount in it. Less than a teaspoon. Less than a lick, already mixed, with gray sediment at the bottom.

“Do I have to cook it?” Ilya said, thinking of the process he’d witnessed at the Tower, knowing that he couldn’t replicate it, that he hadn’t been watching it with the right sort of desire.

Vladimir shook his head. Ilya wiped down the syringe and sucked the liquid into it. He pressed the plunger down to get the air out because Vladimir had told him a story about a man, three floors down, who had filled his insulin syringe with air and pushed it into his veins in ’98, when the currency crashed.

“Mama,” Ilya said again.

She took the syringe from him, held it out, and started to cry. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t know how to find a vein.”

Vladimir’s eyes were clearer, now that the syringe was in sight, as though he could already feel the drug working. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a vein.”

So she stuck the needle into the bare skin of his thigh, in a spot that looked vaguely blue, and Vladimir leaned back onto Ilya’s lap and opened his mouth, and Ilya put the spoon back between his teeth though his jaw was too slack to hold it. Once she’d pushed the plunger down, his mother handed the syringe to Babushka, and Babushka opened the door to the balcony, disappeared into a gust of cold air, and came back without it.

“The water’s getting cold,” Babushka said.

His mother nodded and gripped the edges of his pants where they were stuck to his skin.

“Ready?” she said.

Ilya nodded and gripped Vladimir’s hand, and Vladimir’s mind was far away, gripping whatever memory it had found, and when their mother ripped the fabric away and bits of his flesh came too, he did not yell or move.

The leg was ruinous. The skin, where it remained, was the color of onions cooked in grease, and below the knee there was a crater where his shin should have been, and in the muck of flesh and blood and pus, there was the clean white flash of bone.

Ilya would remember the horror from this night. In America, he would dream of it, but he would remember this too: how his mother and Babushka had moved in concert, each seeming to find strength right when the other had lost it.

It was his mother who had ripped the fabric off, who threw up at the sight of Vladimir’s leg, but then looked again anyway. It was Babushka who spread a towel under Vladimir and bathed him with the water from the roast pan, which had been their tub when they were babies. Her hand plunged into the water over and over, as endlessly patient as an oil pump dipping into the earth.

“He’ll have to go to the hospital,” she said, when he was clean.

“I know,” his mother said.

Timofey sat at their table with his head in his hands. “It’s gangrene,” he said softly, then, “How the hell did he get gangrene?”

His mother brought her makeup kit from the bedroom and began to dab makeup over the puncture marks on Vladimir’s arms, between his toes, everywhere except the bone-deep sore on his leg. Her fingers shook as she put it on. The makeup was the wrong color—too orange for Vladimir’s skin—and the scabs made his skin look like rocky soil. It was ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop herself and neither Ilya nor Babushka tried to stop her. She was writing her hope out on his skin. Hiding the drugs so that he wouldn’t get arrested, blacklisted, or sent to a narc clinic, which was worse than prison. They dressed Vladimir in a sweater of Timofey’s and a pair of Ilya’s sweats—a respectable outfit for Vladimir—and still the nurse at the hospital took one look at his face and said, “Any idea what he’s on?”

They were all silent.

“We’ll need to know to treat him,” she said, sounding infinitely patient in the way of the disinterested. She had tiny gold crosses in her ears, and she tucked her hair behind them.

Ilya looked to his mother for permission, and she shrugged.

“Krokodil,” Ilya said, and then, “I think that’s what they call it.”

The nurse looked up at them then. Her face was full of pity. “How long has he been using?” she said, though for a second it seemed that what she wanted to say was that she was sorry.