Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER SIX

Immersed as he was in his studies, Ilya did not notice exactly when Vladimir first started cutting school. Babushka shooed them out the door at the same time each morning, and they still walked together across the Pechora, up Ulitsa Snezhnaya, past the bookstore where the window had been replaced, past the little wooden church where their father and Dedushka were buried and where Babushka lit her candles, past the abandoned Komsomol headquarters to School #17. They parted ways at the front doors, and Ilya assumed that Vladimir went inside to his classroom just as Ilya did, but apparently he did not.

“Is Vladimir sick?” Maria Mikhailovna asked him one day. For the second year in a row, Vladimir was in her Introductory English class, a class that Ilya had skipped altogether. Not knowing what else to do, Ilya said that yes, Vladimir was sick. Then Aksinya and Lana started sneaking to Ilya’s classroom. They’d stare in through the windows in the door, making Vs of their fingers and flicking their tongues between them. Ilya would ask to go to the bathroom, his face burning, and when he emerged, they’d giggle uncontrollably. Their hair was gauzy around their faces, the purple under their eyes somehow beautiful. They were always out of breath.

“Have you seen Vladimir?” they’d ask.

Every time Ilya hoped for a different question—something to do with him, not Vladimir. “We need help with our English paper,” or “Let’s go to the Internet Kebab,” or “There’s a party later, at the Tower.” But it was always “Where’s Vladimir? Where is that mudak, that asshole brother of yours?” and when Ilya didn’t know, they’d leave him in the hall, clutching his bathroom pass.

Another teacher gave Ilya a folder labeled HOMEWORK FOR SEPTEMBER to bring home to Vladimir. Ilya slipped it into his backpack and that night, once their mother had left for work, once Babushka had made up the couch for them and was snoring softly in the bedroom, he handed it to Vladimir.

“It’s from Nikolay Grigorievich,” Ilya said. “The math you’ve missed.”

Vladimir opened the folder and flipped through the pages. He looked at them closely, not casually, as though they were written in a code he might be able to unlock if only he knew the key. Ilya thought of him at the bookshop, sounding out the titles from Maria Mikhailovna’s list, and in that moment he wanted so desperately for school to be as easy for his brother as it was for him. Then Vladimir dropped the folder onto the carpet and began to undress for bed.

Ilya stared at it. “What should I tell him?”

Vladimir shrugged. “Tell him you gave it to me.” He fell backward onto his pillow, pulled his socks off by their soggy toes, and said, “Let me tell you, Ilya, a vagina is an alarming thing to look at.” Vladimir went on, detailing his latest exploits with Aksinya, and Ilya picked the folder up and slipped it back into his backpack.

The next afternoon, after he’d finished listening to Michael & Stephanie, after he’d done his translation for Maria Mikhailovna and all of the homework for his other classes, he began to chip away at Vladimir’s math. He didn’t do it out of loyalty, but out of this new anxiety that hit him sometimes like a fever. He was worried for Vladimir, worried when Vladimir was not home in the afternoons, worried even when Vladimir was home, was right next to him on the couch, watching one of Babushka’s telenovelas with one hand stuffed in a bag of crisps and the other stuffed down his pants.

It took Ilya a week to do all the makeup work. All those lines and figures. All those neat totals. He’d had to teach himself the basics of trigonometry, and when he finally presented it to Nikolay Grigorievich, the teacher said, “I’m afraid that ship has sailed.”

Vladimir began skipping dinner too, and Babushka would groan and say, “The boy never eats,” or, “He’s with that girl. The one whose parents are dead, and the sister who’s a you-know-what.”

“Aksinya,” Ilya would say, because he loved saying her name, and because the fact that such a beautiful girl liked Vladimir seemed to him something to be proud of.

Ilya’s mother would bite a radish in half and make a bitter face and say, “What am I supposed to do? Put him in a straitjacket?” And it was true that there was little she could do. She worked the night shift, slept during the day. She was with Vladimir and Ilya for only two exhausted hours in the evening and one exhausted hour in the morning.

“He’ll be fine,” Timofey would say, his nostril hairs twitching. “Just give him some time. He’s running around. It’s what boys do.”

Then they’d all look at Ilya with this awkward sort of appreciation, because of course he would never do the things that boys do.

Every once in a while, after Ilya was already in bed, half asleep, listening to Michael and Stephanie, Vladimir would poke his head through the door and say, “Ilyusha, I’m sleeping at Sergey’s tonight,” or “Night, night, bratik. I won’t be home until late.” His breath would be a beery fog, and behind him, in the light of the hall, Ilya would see Sergey and Aksinya and Lana, their hands clamped over their mouths to keep from laughing, to keep from waking him, as though he were a baby. Vladimir would click the door shut, and he would hear their voices echo up the stairway. And there were times—and this is what Ilya would remember—when he would simply not let the worry in, when he would not wonder where Vladimir was going or what Vladimir was doing, when he would stretch his legs out and revel in the expansiveness of the couch. It felt decadent and very adult to be sleeping alone, to have two pillows. The refinery lights sparked on the ceiling, and he would imagine that they were city lights, and that he was in his own apartment, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and that in the morning he would be heading to work, not school. Those nights, Ilya slept like the dead, but he’d wake and, in just the way your tongue finds the tender spot where you’ve bitten your cheek, his mind would find Vladimir.

One morning in October, as Ilya, his mother, and Babushka were eating syrniki with cream and apples, Vladimir walked in the door of their apartment wearing a tracksuit and smelling dank. He pulled a term card out of his pocket and slid it onto the table, right between Ilya’s plate and his mother’s. The card was filthy. It had been crumpled, stepped on, and partially incinerated—as though Vladimir had used it to roll a cigarette, lit it, and then thought better of it—but Ilya could still make out Vladimir’s grades: a neat column of ones. Ilya gasped. No one got ones. Ones were like zeros, just a place for the scale to start, the end of a ruler.

Their mother was in her work clothes: a hairnet, blue smock, and rubber clogs. At first she did not notice the card. She had a magazine next to her plate and was flipping the pages impossibly fast. She was angry—either because Vladimir had been out all night, or because she hated her job, or because Babushka had recently announced that she and Timofey from down the hall were romantically involved, and Ilya’s mother had not been romantically involved with anyone for a decade. But after a minute she saw the card there on the table and snatched it up. Her eyes went shallow.

“Are you an idiot?” she said. “Or did you just not go?”

Ilya thought of the man in the bookshop. How many times in his life had Vladimir been called an idiot?

Vladimir slumped into his chair at the head of the table. Vladimir had told Ilya that it had been their father’s chair, but Ilya couldn’t picture anyone but Vladimir in it. “I’m an idiot,” Vladimir said.

Ilya’s mother nodded very slowly, and the precision of the gesture, its economy and patience, reminded Ilya of the way lions stretch backward before they pounce.

Vladimir tucked his chin into his chest and looked at the empty patch of table before him. “The teachers are bitches,” he muttered.

“Ilya,” their mother said, “has he been there?”

His mother had white spots on her cheeks. Under the table, Ilya could feel her foot shaking. This was another way the apartment could be, with the refinery’s lights turning everything blue, like they were trapped in a cube of ice.

“Ilya?” his mother said.

“I don’t know,” Ilya said.

“You do know,” she said, and the words came out crushed with anger. “Look at me, Ilya. How long since he’s gone?”

Ilya looked at Vladimir. His hair was dirty. Little zits bridged his eyebrows, and his eyes were red-laced. He did not look worth protecting. Ilya thought of the folder of homework and how Vladimir had dropped it to the ground and the hours he’d spent on it and how Vladimir’s teacher had said, That ship has sailed, and he wondered if Vladimir even wanted protection.

“Look at me, Ilya,” their mother said.

Babushka was ripping a hunk of bread into tiny pieces without eating a bite. She cocked her head, considering Ilya. “What can he do? Tattle on his brother?” she said, just as Ilya blurted, “A month.”

Ilya’s mother pulled her hairnet off her scalp and crumpled it in a fist. It left a thin, red groove across her forehead. Next door, Tatyana Zemskova was vacuuming. Across the hall, the Radeyevs had the television turned up. Someone was climbing the stairs, making the burners rattle gently on the stove. Outside, Ilya could hear the snow collecting, a silence like a giant, held breath.

“Where’s your term card, Ilyusha?” Vladimir said, with this clench to his voice that was usually reserved for their mother. “Let me guess: all fives again.”

“Yes,” their mother said, and her voice was just as hard, “all fives again.”

Vladimir rolled his head around on his neck, sighed, and said, “You know I’m not good at school. I’ll get a job. Aksinya’s sister—”

“Is a whore,” Ilya’s mother said, and Ilya thought of the oligarch, the prostitutes with their diamond nipples and thongs of gold, of Sergey’s voice when he’d said, “He can do whatever he wants with them.”

“The whole generation has no morals,” Babushka piped up. “Neither does yours,” she said, with a look at Ilya’s mother. “Maybe communism wasn’t such a bad thing. We gave it up for what? Salami and blue jeans and—”

“Not tonight,” his mother said.

“I just want to have some fun before I get shipped to Georgia,” Vladimir said.

“You’ll get shipped there even sooner if you drop out,” she said.

Vladimir grinned, like he’d suddenly found something funny in the idea of conscription. He stood, snapped his legs straight, and held his right hand to his head in a military salute. “Can you imagine me in uniform?”

The longer he tried to stay stiff and still, the more he swayed. Babushka was clutching her podstakannik, staring up at him, and as Vladimir grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself, her tea sloshed onto the tablecloth.

“Bozhe moy,” she said. “He’s drunk before eight a.m.” Her voice sounded dramatic, but they’d all seen Vladimir drunk. She just didn’t want it to go unsaid.

“You go to school tomorrow or you’re out,” Ilya’s mother said. “Out of school and out of here.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Vladimir said. “I doubt they’d want me to show my face.”

“Then sleep it off until Monday,” she said. Her features had gone stiff—she was trying to keep herself from crying. Babushka had no such control. She put her face in her hands and splayed her fingers so that they could all see her tears. Ilya pushed his spine against the back of the chair, the pressure somehow holding him together. He didn’t look at his mother. He tried not to listen as Babushka muttered choked little prayers. He understood that they weren’t grieving over Vladimir’s expulsion. They weren’t grieving at the thought of conscription, of Georgia or Chechnya. They knew, as Ilya did, that it would be a miracle if Vladimir made it to eighteen.

That day Babushka left the dirty dishes on the table as a reproach to all of them. Their mother went to bed with a wrung-out look in her eyes, and Vladimir slept for ten hours straight. When it got dark, Ilya climbed into bed next to him and slid a Michael & Stephanie tape into his player. It had been nearly four years since Vladimir took him to buy the tapes, and the Delta headphones were disintegrating. When he turned the volume all the way up, there was this high, quavering whine in the background.

“The cup is red,” Michael said.

“The bowl is red and blue!” Stephanie replied.

It was a Level I tape—colors, meals, domesticated animals. Ilya had memorized it but still he liked to listen to it before bed. In it, Michael and Stephanie used only short, declarative sentences, each word a tiny, enthusiastic nail. They spoke slowly and never ventured out of the present tense.

Sometimes, Ilya had the feeling that the more English he learned the less Russian he spoke, as though the languages were worlds and he could only exist in one or the other. That night, he wanted that feeling, wanted very much to leave this world. That was why he’d chosen such an easy tape—so there would be no effort of translation, so that he could be transported—but Vladimir’s feet were stuffed under his pillow, and they smelled of mushrooms and sweat, and the ridge of one of his shins pressed against Ilya’s ribs, and he couldn’t conjure the feeling. Instead he found himself waiting for the swampy tide of Vladimir’s breath to wash over his face. He flipped the tape to the B-side and kept listening. Not long after eleven, when the Radeyevs’ clock tolled endlessly, the quality of Vladimir’s breathing changed, and Ilya realized that he was awake.

“Vlad,” he said.

“Ilya,” Vladimir said.

The refinery light was pouring through the windows, giving the ceiling the glow of the moon. Right over Ilya’s head, there was a smudge that looked like a footprint, and Ilya liked to pretend that the footprint was Yuri Gagarin’s, though he knew that Gagarin had never made it to the moon.

“What if I just stopped?” Ilya said.

“Stopped what?”

“Stopped studying. Stopped going to school.” Just saying it gave him a pain in his sternum like there was a shard of glass lodged there.

“Why would you do that?” Vladimir said. He was yawning as he said it. He didn’t understand Ilya’s point yet, couldn’t know that Ilya was remembering the two of them out on the balcony and the way Vladimir had held him and made him yell his first English words over the courtyard, or the way Vladimir had given the shopkeeper the extra money for Ilya’s books.

“Why would you?” Ilya said. “You think I don’t ever want to be lazy too?”

“No,” Vladimir said. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s possible for you to be lazy.” Then he propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at Ilya. The radiator in the corner began its nightly orchestra: a rattle like there was a whole pocket of change in its pipes. And Vladimir smiled. “Are you threatening me?” he said.

“Just tell me you’ll try,” Ilya said.

“Or what?” Vladimir said.

“Or I stop too.”

“What if I try?”

“Hollywood Boulevard. You and me. Vladimir and Ilya Van Damme.”

“You fucking punk,” Vladimir said, but his grin was huge. Each tooth lit up like a tiny candle. Ilya was joking, of course. In all the talk of Ilya’s future, with all of the English he’d learned, no one had ever mentioned America. America was a place that existed only in Michael & Stephanie, in the television, in the Cold War corners of their mother’s and Babushka’s minds.

“Fine,” Vladimir said. “I’ll try.”