Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ilya sat on the steps of the Berlozhniki police station, watching the square wake up. Kirill yanked up the metal grate to the Internet Kebab, grunting each time the grate snagged in its rusted tracks. Anatoly opened the Minutka, and a man selling pirozhki from a cart steered it through the slush, calling out the day’s choices: “Cabbage! Egg! Beef! Cabbage! Egg! Beef!” Every once in a while, he added “Jam!” to the list, but with less conviction, like it was his least favorite filling. At eight, a few secretaries in high-heeled boots picked their way from the bus stop to the station. They teetered up the stairs, toting purses and thermoses, and did not look at him.

“That’s it,” one said. “That was the whole date. And then he expected a fuck.” The others laughed, and the sound was suctioned off by the door shutting behind them. Eventually the policemen trickled in, but not Dmitri.

As the sun inched up to the tops of the birch trees, a babushka poked her head out the station door and said, “You should wait inside. You’ll freeze. Come, come.”

She held an arm out and bent it as though Ilya’s shoulders were already wrapped in it, but he shook his head. He wanted to talk to Dmitri alone, knew that Dmitri would be more apt to listen without an audience, and, besides, the idea of going into the station and announcing that he was Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov’s brother was too terrifying, too shaming, even though he knew that his mother came to the station every day to plead Vladimir’s innocence and that she did it without shame.

The babushka sensed his degradation and did not like it. Her arm dropped and her face tightened. “Wait on the bench then.” She pointed across the street to Gabe’s bench, which was flanked by overflowing trash cans. “You’re in the way.”

So Ilya waited on the bench, and after another hour the babushka came out with a bucket of salt and began to scatter it on the station steps. The policemen left for lunch at the Kebab or Tepek, and each time they came down the steps the babushka skittered away from them. One policeman coughed, then spat, and his spit landed on the babushka’s shoe, and she made no move to wipe it off until he was out of sight. Occasionally she looked up at Ilya and glared, as though his presence in her periphery were a burden even heavier than the bucket of salt.

It was well past noon, and still Dmitri had not arrived. Ilya began to wonder if Dmitri even came to the station at all. He patrolled the refinery, Ilya knew, and he knew that the refinery paid him on the side to keep the private road clear, to make sure that the miles and miles of fence were secure, that the pipeline was safely buried under its coat of snow. And Ilya was about to stand, to stretch his legs and begin to walk north past the Malikovs’ apartment and then out of town, toward the Tower and the refinery, when he saw Dmitri round the corner of Ulitsa Lenina. He was in his valenki and pogony like all the other policemen, and they made him look anonymous and sharp. Ilya stood, and forced himself to think of the night when he’d eaten at the Malikovs’, when Dmitri had said that Maria Mikhailovna loved him like family and that that meant that he, Dmitri, loved Ilya like family. He thought of this, and not of what had happened next—of Vladimir and Sergey running in his headlights—as he ran across the street.

“Dmitri Ivanovich,” he said, when he was near enough that no one but Dmitri would hear him.

Ilya was not expecting Dmitri to be happy to see him—there was a chance that someone might recognize Ilya, might know that he was Vladimir’s brother, and Dmitri could be tainted by association—but Dmitri smiled and made room for Ilya to walk beside him. “Berlozhniki’s pride!” he said. “How long have you got left here?”

Ilya’s chest cinched. “Berlozhniki’s Pride” was what the papers had called Olga Nadiova in her heyday, when she had braids and could do a perfect double axel with her eyes closed. “A few months,” he said.

“Good, good,” Dmitri said, and then he stopped walking, and Ilya stopped too. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about your brother. Sorry that I had to be involved at all. And I don’t believe what they’re saying—that he was evil—all this shit. He was on drugs, and the drugs made him crazy. In a way, prison might save him. But I’m sorry—I know it’s hard for you.”

This was kind. Kinder, at least, than what any other policeman would say to him. Kinder than the things that had been spat at him and his mother in the kommunalkas. The mean things always made his mind turn to metal, made his spine straighten, but at this kindness tears banked up behind his eyes, and before he could cry, he said, “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Dmitri Ivanovich. I was with Vladimir the night Lana died. I went to the Tower with him, and I was there, with him, the whole time.” This wasn’t exactly true, but he figured it was a lie worth telling. “He was with me and Aksinya. Aksinya Stepanova. We were together the whole time. She will tell you—”

“Your brother confessed, Ilya. He knew things he could only know if he’d done it. If he was guilty.”

“I know, but I was with him. It doesn’t make any sense. He loved Lana. And the other two—he didn’t even know them.”

“Love can be like that. It can have two sides.” Dmitri put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re smart, right? This is what Maria is always telling me. That you have a gift. And that it is a gift to teach you, to see how a mind is supposed to work. Sometimes I’m jealous when she talks like that. Me, I’m a dolt. My mind is all rusty gears. Nothing’s a gift.”

It was true that Maria Mikhailovna said this about Ilya. She’d been saying it for four years, and it had always embarrassed him, made him feel like a fraud or an alien. “Maybe I’m not as smart as she thinks I am.”

“There are different kinds of smart,” he said. “And I’m sure that Maria’s not wrong about you. But it is not smart, it is idiotism, to tell someone—even me—that you were at the Tower with a girl the night she was killed. Do you understand that? Do you know how quickly people could believe that it was you and your brother—or even the three of you? Aksinya too. That you all worked together?”

He was right. Ilya could see that, and he understood that he’d been naive to think himself above whatever trouble Vladimir had fallen into. A new sort of panic hit him with force. Not only had he been with Lana the night she’d died, he’d kissed her. He pictured himself holding her, leaving bits of skin and hair and who knew what other traces of himself.

“He’s your brother. You love him,” Dmitri said, and his voice was soft and level. “I know that, and I’m sorry, but there’s not an alibi in the world that can help him. Not after he’s admitted to it all.” Dmitri sounded sorry, truly sorry, and his apology felt like a dead end, as final as a prison cell. Then Dmitri reached out and put his palms on Ilya’s cheeks. He leaned in and kissed Ilya on the forehead. “Soon you’ll be gone. Soon you’ll start over,” he said. Ilya looked over the epaulets on his shoulder. The babushka was staring at him. Then she turned and climbed the stairs back into the station, the empty bucket banging at her hip.