Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER FOUR

By the time Ilya turned eleven, he’d skipped a level at School #17, and there was constant talk of his promise. “He’s sharp,” one teacher said. “A prodigy,” said another. They said that he might get a scholarship to Syktyvkar State or even to the Language Institute in Moscow. Convinced by his teachers of Ilya’s aptitude, his mother and grandmother started to hope. For a little more money, for a table that didn’t wobble, for a bigger apartment, for a car, but most of all their hope conjured his future: a degree and a good job in Moscow or St. Petersburg, neither of which they’d ever seen. They treated Ilya as tenderly as the brass samovar that came out from under the bed, from under its layers of felt, only for polishing. His grandmother mixed extra sour cream into his shchi. She scooped it onto his pelmeni.

“More smetana, Ilyusha?” she’d say. He’d watch the cream quiver on the end of her spoon and knew she’d give him all they had.

Vladimir noticed this favoritism—it was impossible not to. He teased Ilya about it. “Your big brain is oozing out of your ears,” he’d say, or, “Study, smart-ass, study!” But sometimes when Ilya pulled out his pencil case and his textbooks, Vladimir would go quiet. He’d shut off the TV and slink down to the stairwell where boys bounced tennis balls off the walls and smoked cigarettes.

Ilya started secondary school, and his new English teacher, Maria Mikhailovna, was a tiny woman with enormous glasses and a prodigious amount of hair that she wore in a thick, schoolgirl braid. Her husband was a policeman, so everyone regarded her with a bit of suspicion, but she herself was soft-spoken and sometimes seemed surprised to find herself at the front of the room and the center of attention. After Ilya’s first week in her class, she asked him to stay behind and said, quietly, “You have a gift.”

Ilya’s eyes fell like sinkers. He was used to hearing things like this by now, but still he never knew what to say in return. “Take the compliment like a boss,” Vladimir always told him. “Just say, ‘No shit.’” But, as always, Vladimir’s advice was only applicable if you had Vladimir’s balls, and Ilya did not.

“Thank you,” Ilya managed.

Maria Mikhailovna handed him a piece of paper. “Ask your mother to get what she can, and if it’s any trouble, tell me.”

He nodded. There was a Russian-English dictionary on the list, a book of idioms, a tape player, a set of tapes, and corresponding workbooks. He estimated the costs on his walk home, and the total was close to a week’s groceries, but his mother smiled when he showed it to her. She handed Vladimir a stack of rubles and told him to take Ilya to the bookstore on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, which was the more expensive of Berlozhniki’s two bookstores.

When they walked in the door, a tiny bell shook above them, and the shopkeeper looked at them and said, “Money on the counter.” The shopkeeper was a sour sort, with permanently pursed lips, and Ilya could feel Vladimir bristling next to him, could feel how badly Vladimir wanted to slam the door, head across the square, and spend the money on a dozen VHSs at the Internet Kebab, but instead he cleared his throat and showed the man Maria Mikhailovna’s list. When the total was more than their mother had given them, the shopkeeper allowed a smile.

“If I cancel the tapes you’ll have enough,” the man said.

“We’re not canceling the tapes,” Vladimir said.

“It’s OK,” Ilya said. “Maria Mikhailovna—”

“We’re getting the tapes.” Vladimir reached into the waistband of his jeans and plucked out a bill that was rolled thin as a straw. He handed it to the shopkeeper. “You do the math,” he said.

“Of course I’ll do the math,” the shopkeeper said, and, once he had, he said, “It’ll be two weeks at least.”

Vladimir nodded, and Ilya followed him out the door. When it had closed behind them, Vladimir said, “Did you see his mouth? He looks like he’s been sucking cock nonstop for a decade.”

Ilya laughed, but Vladimir was not joking. His eyes had gone narrow and sharp. “You’re not going to get anywhere, ever, if you let people like that push you around.” He was walking fast toward home, his steps making a staccato rhythm of his words. “That guy wants the whole world to fail. You. Me. Himself even. Just so he can say he saw it coming.”

“OK,” Ilya said.

“Not OK,” Vladimir said, ahead of him.

“Where did you get the money?” Ilya asked. He knew for a fact that Vladimir had spent his name-day money within an hour of receiving it, but Vladimir didn’t answer.

Two weeks later, when they returned to the shop, the shopkeeper hefted a box out of the storeroom and slid it onto the counter. Ilya could see that everything was there. The tapes in a cellophane stack. The books pristine, their pages so bright and white that Ilya could feel the way they would cut his fingers.

“Thank you,” Ilya said, but Vladimir, who lost his homework on a weekly basis, unearthed Maria Mikhailovna’s list from his pocket.

“I’ll check it,” he said, and he began to match the books’ titles to the ones on the list. Ilya knew that Vladimir meant to make a point, but his reading was a work in progress, his English abysmal, and it took him a long time to sound out each title. His lips moved, slow and labored, as though he were giving birth to each word. The shopkeeper pulled a toothpick from his pocket and began to flip it, end over end, between his teeth. He was watching Vladimir too.

“I have to piss,” Ilya said, because he could feel the shopkeeper practicing insults with each flip of the toothpick.

“Hold it,” Vladimir said. He moved his finger down the list and began sounding out and searching for the last title. Finally, he was done. He handed Ilya the tapes and stacked the books in his arms, and as Ilya followed him out the door the shopkeeper said, “Idiot.”

Vladimir did not react. He did not stiffen. He did not get the furious flush that usually preceded a tantrum of some kind. It didn’t seem as though Vladimir had heard the man, and so Ilya pretended he hadn’t either. They brought the books home. And because of the books they had a meatless dinner for the tenth night in a row, and Vladimir said nothing about that or about the shopkeeper. But a few days later, Ilya walked by the shop alone and found the glass storefront splintered. The glass had held, but cracks radiated out from a crystalline patch in the center of the window. Ilya looked down, wondering what Vladimir had thrown, but the sidewalk was clean. Inside, the shop was dark and empty. Ilya put a finger to the point of impact and pushed, just gently, and it seemed to him as though the window bowed inward—a millimeter, no more, but enough to make him whip his hand back. His fingertip came away coated in tiny shards, one of which brought out a bead of blood. Ilya sucked it, and then he looked up. The shopkeeper was behind the counter. He had come out from the storeroom and was watching Ilya through the cracks in the glass, and Ilya shoved his hand in his pocket and hurried away.

The set of tapes was called Learn English: The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie, and Maria Mikhailovna assigned him an hour of listening comprehension each night on top of his regular workload. Michael and Stephanie were an American couple. They went to the grocery store, to the beach, to the movies and the mall. All the while they’d talk in slow, happy, somewhat stoned voices, and Ilya would listen. Sometimes they’d ask him questions:

“What did you have for lunch today?” Stephanie would ask.

“Bread and cheese,” Ilya would say.

“What is the weather like today?” Michael would ask.

“It snows,” Ilya would say.

There were line drawings of Michael and Stephanie in the corresponding workbooks. Stephanie was decent looking, with pointy breasts that made twin tents in her sweaters. Vladimir claimed that she was good fodder for masturbation, and that Michael, who was gangly and wore glasses, was not satisfying her adequately. Her breasts excited Ilya, as did the pinch of her waist, but it was her eyes that he loved. They were big and liquid and sad, despite all the American fun she had.

In Maria Mikhailovna’s program, Ilya’s world narrowed. He was only ever at school or at the kitchen table with his workbooks spread before him. His ears were always bracketed by a pair of foam Delta headphones that had come with the tape player. But somehow the world felt expansive. He’d close his eyes and listen through the static until Michael’s and Stephanie’s voices grew clear and large, and it was as though he’d opened a tiny, secret door onto an incredible vista. It was as though he were moving through the door, shutting it carefully behind him and breathing this new, perfect sort of air. Before long, he didn’t even need to be listening to the tapes to be transported. Michael and Stephanie spoke to him constantly. Every time he looked at his watch, they told him the time in English. Every time he climbed the flights up to his apartment, they counted the steps in English.

“Uzhin gotov, Ilyusha,” Babushka would say, and Ilya would hear Stephanie say, “Ilyusha, dinner is ready.”

“What are we eating tonight?” Ilya would say, in English, and Babushka would look at him with the jolt of an old fear in her eyes. Then her face would soften, and she would say, “Even you can’t make English sound pretty.”

While Ilya studied, Vladimir gained his own sort of knowledge. He stole a carton filled with crisps from a truck broken down on the high road and sold them outside the school for ten rubles less than what crisps went for at the Minutka. He skated down the Pechora, smoked pot under the bridge, and broke his arm skating home. He watched porn over the stuttering connection at the Internet Kebab. He was held back a year in school and in his new grade, he got a girlfriend, Aksinya, who let him feel her breasts. He told Ilya that they were as small and hard as new potatoes. Aksinya gave Vladimir a hand job. Then a blow job. Each night, in bed, Vladimir reported all of these developments to Ilya with gusto, with hand motions, and for a while Ilya thought that he could do these things too, that he was making a choice to study instead. But one afternoon, when he was eleven, he went to find Vladimir in the stairwell of Building 4, where he and Sergey liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and smoke cigarettes. Vladimir wasn’t there. No one was. There weren’t any balls or cigarette butts on the ground. The graffiti had been painted over, the floor had been swept, and Ilya got the same feeling looking at that clean concrete that he got when the swallows departed on cue each August, when the gray sky was full one moment and empty the next.

Snow was falling that afternoon, and his footprints were already soft at the edges as he followed them back across the courtyard to Building 2 and climbed to his floor. Babushka had recently struck up a friendship with Timofey Denisovich from down the hall, and they were playing prostoy durak at the table. Timofey was even more ancient than Babushka and had the sort of unkempt nostril hair that felt like an act of aggression. He and Babushka did not talk much, although sometimes Ilya would come home to find them humming songs from the Revolution or swapping sovok jokes.

“What’s the latest requirement for joining the Politburo?” Timofey would say.

“Tell me,” Babushka would say.

“You have to be able to walk six steps without a cane.”

“No, two. Two steps is enough.” Babushka would laugh, tears trickling from the corners of her eyes the way they did when she was happiest.

That afternoon they were quiet, though. There was just the click of cards against the table, and the hiss of air through Timofey’s nose when Babushka laid down a strong suit.

“Where is Vladimir?” Ilya said.

Babushka looked at him with a smile left over from a card she’d played. “God knows,” she said as though God really did. “Are you hungry?”

Ilya shook his head.

“I am,” Timofey said.

“He is the one who needs to eat, not you. What are you doing all day? Not studying. We know that,” she said, but she stood anyway, and got Timofey a plate and one for Ilya too.

And so Ilya spent the afternoon at home, as he always did, picking at a beef blini and paging through his Handbook of Commonly Used American Idioms. On the cover was an American flag, a baseball, and a hamburger. Idioms were messy, logic-less things, but each page of the book had been divided into two columns—on the left were the idioms, on the right their definitions—and usually Ilya loved this imposed order, the promise that if he learned a column a week he would know them all in a hundred and sixty-two weeks. He would know them all by the time he was Vladimir’s age.

“Above all,” he murmured.

“Ace in the hole,” he said, but that day he couldn’t quite make the words mean anything.

Vladimir was probably with Aksinya, cupping her new potatoes. Or he could be skating, but the ice wasn’t thick yet, and Ilya looked and could see the shine of Vladimir’s skates in the bin under the couch. Maybe he was clinging to the back of the #33 bus with Sergey, though Ilya didn’t know if they even rode out to the refinery anymore. And then, as though Ilya had conjured him, Vladimir burst through the door. His boots were untied, the laces wet and whipping at his ankles, and there were two girls following close behind him.

“We saw Fyodor Fetisov!” he said. “We were up on the bridge and all of a sudden all these black cars roll out—one after the other—and then this SUV that is—” Vladimir kissed his fingers the way Italians did on TV when they saw a beautiful woman. “He was going like one fifty. He almost hit us.” Vladimir grabbed the blini off of Ilya’s plate and took it down in two bites, as though his brush with death had left him famished. Then he said, in a softer voice, “I touched his car. Just reached out and touched it.”

Ilya could see it: his brother’s fingers touching that perfect paint job, the car shocking him with the import of the man inside.

“Bozhe moy,” Babushka said. “Why do you do things like that? You’re going to get yourself arrested.” She collapsed the fan of cards in her hand into a neat stack and said, “Who are you?” to the girls.

One of them was almost too beautiful to look at, with long, dark hair like the Nenets and blue eyes that were all Russian. “Aksinya,” she said, and then, to Vladimir, “I don’t know why you wanted to touch his car. He’s terrible. That’s what my sister says.”

“It’s no business of ours,” Babushka said.

“I’m Lana,” the other girl said. She was blond, softer, with a gap between her teeth that suggested a gentle stupidity.

“Lana Vishnyeva. I know your father,” Babushka said, and Lana nodded.

Ilya asked if they’d seen the oligarch’s face, and Vladimir shook his head. He said that the windows were as black as oil. “I saw Maria Mikhailovna’s husband through the windshield though,” Vladimir said. “He was driving.”

“Why’s Fetisov here? He hasn’t been here since—” Ilya paused. As far as he could remember, Fyodor Fetisov had never been to Berlozhniki.

“Some new pipeline project,” Vladimir said.

“Because the billions he has aren’t enough,” Babushka said, her tone sharp, and then it softened, and she said, “Are you hungry, girls?”

Once Vladimir had asked her if she ever got tired of asking people if they were hungry, of feeding them. “There’s nothing that makes me happier in the world than being able to feed a child,” she’d said in that tone that old people used when they talked about the Great War, and Vladimir had rolled his eyes.

“I’m starving,” Lana said, without any shame.

Aksinya nodded, and Babushka brought out more plates. Ilya cleared his books, and the prostoy durak game was put on hold. They crowded around the table, and the apartment got that feeling that it could sometimes have, like it was holding something golden and sweet, like it was filled to the brim with honey.