Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Two days after Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna, the news of Dmitri’s suicide broke in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. He had driven his car off the Bolshoi Bridge and straight into the Pechora, the same river into which Vladimir had claimed to have thrown the knife. It was a mild day for October, the paper said, so a number of people were out picnicking at the tables that lined the river’s banks and had witnessed the crash. One man, who’d narrowly avoided being hit by Dmitri’s car, said he’d never seen a vehicle move so fast. Another man said it had been flying. And the car must have been, at least for a moment, because it sailed almost entirely over the river before crashing in the muddy shallows and bursting into flames.

Suicides were not so uncommon in Berlozhniki, nor were violent deaths. After suggesting that the refinery pay city taxes, the former mayor had been stabbed in broad daylight in front of the statue of Iron Felix. His wife shot herself the next day. But Dmitri’s death had been spectacular.

“It was like a meteor strike,” one woman said, to describe the impact. There had been enough petrol in the tank that for a full minute it seemed as though the river itself were in flames. And perhaps because of the fire, it took a while for the reports to shift from one casualty to two.

For a sickening hour, Ilya feared that the second casualty was Maria Mikhailovna. He imagined Dmitri taking her down in the elevator, down into that cavernous garage, where her footsteps would sound so small, but another article soon took over the paper’s home page announcing that the passenger had been Fyodor Fetisov, one of Russia’s richest men, the majority owner of Gazneft.

Dmitri had been driving Fetisov from the airstrip on Berlozhniki’s south side to the refinery—the newspaper explained that Fetisov made occasional visits to Berlozhniki and that Malikov was his driver—when Malikov lost control of the car, or, as bystanders claimed, drove it intentionally off the Bolshoi Bridge.

Ilya had noticed that Russia did not feature in the American news nearly as much as America featured in the Russian news, but evidently it was a drama-free day in America, because Fetisov’s death made the American news almost instantly.

“You know this guy?” Papa Cam hollered down the basement stairs, and when Ilya came into the den and saw Fetisov’s face, his eyes so big that they seemed to greedily take in the room, he knew. He could picture Fetisov hitting Vladimir on the elevator, the ring slicing Vladimir’s cheek. He could feel the way it had snagged his skin when they’d shaken hands on the stage.

Then the picture shrank and was dispatched to a corner of the screen. A Moscow correspondent, a woman of unclear nationality with bright red curls and a face made fuzzy by makeup, said, “To give you a little background on Fetisov. He’s an oligarch, on the Forbes 500. He’s famous, even in his own set, for his decadence… .”

She went on, describing a maelstrom of champagne and caviar and fine art and prostitutes and private jets, all the decadence that Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had imagined as boys, sitting damp-assed in the snow by the refinery fence. Then she paused and touched the mic in her ear, and Ilya saw that she knew now too.

“We’ve just gotten confirmation that Fetisov’s death was likely a murder-suicide,” she said, and she described a note left by Dmitri accusing Fetisov of three murders in Berlozhniki, the “Gulag Murders,” as they were called by the American press for the hour they made the news, though the murders had had nothing at all to do with the gulag.

Online, Ilya found clips from Russia 1 on the story. The network summarized Dmitri’s suicide note in depth. Apparently he had begun to suspect Fetisov because the first two murders coincided with Fetisov’s visits to Berlozhniki, which were rare and brief. When Lana’s body was discovered, the date of her murder coincided with a visit from Fetisov as well, but it wasn’t until Fetisov asked Dmitri to get rid of a witness—Gabe, trudging along the lumber road at just the moment when Fetisov had returned to the grove—that Dmitri was sure of Fetisov’s guilt. And Fetisov had not seemed to care if Dmitri knew. He didn’t need to care, Dmitri explained, because he’d threatened to kill Dmitri’s wife if Dmitri didn’t take care of the witness and find someone else on whom to pin the murders. So the witness had been taken care of.

“Malikov doesn’t explain how he took care of the witness except to say that he didn’t kill anyone,” the newscaster said. “And apparently a local teen was put in prison for the murders.”

The newscaster paused. She was practically panting with excitement or horror. The wrong emotion, whatever it was, and Ilya wanted to throttle her weedy neck, to make her feel, for a moment, as trapped as Vladimir had been, as Dmitri had been. Then she gathered herself and said, “Unfortunately the final lines of the note are redacted. They were a last good-bye addressed to his wife, and she’s chosen to keep them private.”

As the news cycle wore on, Fetisov was linked to a handful of other murders in other refinery towns, to women stabbed in Ukhta and Krasnodar and Orsk. Other women who’d survived him came forward too—a waitress, an escort, a stewardess—to detail the abuses they’d suffered at his hands. The newscaster interviewed one girl with long brown hair and blue eyes, and for a moment Ilya thought it was Aksinya, or maybe her sister, but the newscaster identified her as Irina from Ukhta. Irina said that Fetisov had hired her for a week, and that all he’d wanted to do was to cut her cheeks.

“Why did you let him?” the newscaster asked. A stupid question made insulting by the way she tilted her head as if in commiseration.

The girl did not seem to mind. “He paid me so much,” she said. “It was a bad week, then a good year.”

Vladimir, the “local teen,” was never named, and Ilya worried it wouldn’t be enough, that somehow Vladimir would be allowed to languish in prison, innocent, but a victim of bureaucratic neglect nonetheless. Then his mother called, and for a full minute she cried so hard that she couldn’t get a word out.

“Mama,” he said. “Mama, what is it?”

“They’re letting him go,” she managed. “A lawyer called. After the arraignment, they’re letting him free. We’re going tomorrow—to Syktyvkar—and we’ll stay until he’s out.” She paused, and then she said, “How did you do it?”

Ilya told her about the tape, about calling Maria Mikhailovna. His mother paused, and he could feel her debating whether to tell him something.

“What is it?” he said.

“I saw her,” his mother said. “She was standing on the square, right by the bench where that American used to stand, and for a second I thought that she’d lost her mind, that she was handing out the same pamphlets that he used to. The ones I sent you. I was too afraid to go over to her, but it didn’t matter, because the letter was everywhere. In all the newspaper boxes. At every kiosk. In our mailbox. She taped them to the door of the House of Culture, the police station, every tree on the square.”

“His letter?” Ilya said.

“Yes,” his mother said, and Ilya imagined Maria Mikhailovna finding the letter on her pillow or on the kitchen table or on the chair by the window that had been his. She’d read it once, twice. With a thick marker she’d inked out the lines beginning with Masha, which only he had called her, and then she’d walked across the square to the school. She’d copied the letter on the ancient machine in the teachers’ lounge, the one that was half the size of a car and smelled of burnt oil and that sometimes expelled papers with such force that they took flight in that tiny room. She’d watched each copy slip out of the machine, each one a promise, a hope that what had happened could not be ignored or denied. Each one proof of Vladimir’s innocence.

Ilya was in the kitchen. The Masons were moving around him in the way water moves past an obstacle to which it’s grown familiar, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing, he decided, if they saw him cry.

That night, he asked them if he could give a testimonial.

“Of course,” Mama Jamie said. She’d held him after his mother called, and there was still a damp patch on her shirt from where his face had been pressed against her. “I can call Pastor Kyle and let him know,” she said.

“I want to do it now,” Ilya said. “Here.”

Mama Jamie looked at Papa Cam, and Marilee opened her mouth to explain that this was not how testimonials worked, that they came after the hymns and before the sermons, that it was not even Sunday, but Papa Cam did not give her a chance. He clapped a meaty palm over her mouth and said, “Of course.”

So Ilya stood on the fire skirt, where he’d posed for the picture on the first day of school, and the Masons sat on the couch, close enough that he could have stretched out a leg and touched their knees with his toes.

Sadie smiled at him, and Mama Jamie said, “Remember, you’re telling God, not us.”

Ilya nodded, though he was not telling God, he was telling them.

He started at the very beginning: “I was six years old,” he said, “when I learned my first word of English.” He told them that it was the sort of word you weren’t supposed to say, and then he said it aloud anyway because the whole point of this was admitting the truth. He told them how Vladimir had lifted him up onto the balcony rail and made him shout it out across the courtyard. And even now, a decade later, he still couldn’t say whether it was a moment that he would undo, because everything terrible that had happened to him was rooted in it, but so was everything good.

He told about Maria Mikhailovna, and the books Vladimir had bought him at the shop on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, and of Michael and Stephanie, and the hours and hours he’d spent listening to them, and studying, and the way each hour had seemed to lay a brick in a wall between him and Vladimir. Telling his story, something strange happened. Time folded back, or else it split open. It seemed somehow less linear, so that he remembered yelling from the balcony, his body small enough that Vladimir could hold him with one arm, but in the same moment he could see Lana’s birch grove with its wilting flowers and damp ribbons, and at the school, Maria Mikhailovna looked up, her hand poised above a test with his name on it. In the square, on his bench, Gabe Thompson cried out in his sleep. Vladimir was behind Ilya, propping him up, his breath hot on the back of Ilya’s shirt, but he was in the Tower too, in that horrible room with the rug over the window and the tapes in their bag in the corner. He and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey, boney and desperate and doomed, dancing like children to some song from the ’80s that no one in America listened to anymore. And Dmitri Malikov was in his patrol car, his face milky in the refinery’s light, as he drove in an endless loop around the town.

It was a horrible story. He could tell from their utter silence, from the way even Marilee and Molly were still, mesmerized by the badness of the things people did to each other and themselves. Still, though, there was something beautiful in the telling of it. Vladimir had told him that krokodil made him remember, that it was like he was present in his memories and like he was holding them at the same time, and it was like that for Ilya now. They were all around him—Vladimir, his mother, Dmitri, Maria Mikhailovna—every version of them, the good and the bad, and he himself felt as though he were gaining dimension, becoming as solid and present as the stone he’d plucked out of the creek, which even in the hot damp of his palm had seemed endlessly cool, like it had a source of energy all its own.

He sped up as he neared the end—the forced confession, Dmitri’s suicide, Fetisov’s guilt, Vladimir’s release. “Vladimir’s not good,” he said. “I know that. There’s plenty he’s done to be ashamed of. And there were so many ways that his plan could have gone wrong. So many ways. When I think of them, I’m so scared that I can’t breathe. But then I remember why he did this—”

Mama Jamie was wiping at her wet cheeks, and Papa Cam was staring at him with an expression of frank wonder.

“So that I could be here.”

This was the end, but somehow it gave him a feeling of vertigo, of running a step too far off a cliff. He thought of Sadie, and her nightly pilgrimage. He thought of Sadie’s mother slumped on that couch. He thought of Vladimir, of his confession and the way that each word had sounded like a wound so that by the end he’d barely been able to talk. Ilya had earned the Masons’ forgiveness—he could see that—but it wasn’t enough.

He cleared his throat. “I know that I don’t have the right to ask you all for anything,” he said. “I don’t deserve to be here, and you know that now—but still I have to ask: let Vladimir come here. Please. Let him come too.”

In the quiet that followed, Ilya could hear the hiss of cars on Route 21. Somewhere far off a siren whined. Sadie was crying silently. This smile shook on her lips, and Ilya smiled back at her.

“Please,” Molly said, as though Ilya had asked for a dog for Christmas and she wanted one too.

Marilee bit her lip and said, “Hmmm. That’s a lot to forgive.”

Next to her, Papa Cam reached for Mama Jamie’s hand. Ilya did not know whether he was asking for permission or giving it until Mama Jamie nodded. “OK,” she said.