Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER EIGHT

For a while that last winter, Vladimir did try. He came home for meals. He seemed generally sober. Some afternoons, he and Aksinya and Lana would lie on the carpet like three sardines in a tin, watching movies, while Ilya did homework at the kitchen table. Ilya even saw him at school—granted, he and Aksinya were disappearing into the custodial closet, but still, he was in the building. There had been no more questions from teachers about Vladimir’s health, no more folders from Nikolay Grigorievich, and Ilya took all of this as a good sign.

That winter, Ilya’s last in Berlozhniki, was one of the coldest in the books. Snow swallowed the crosses in the field by the Tower completely. It was rumored that the Pechora was frozen solid, surface to bed, with whole schools of salmon trapped in the ice. A Nenets man parked his sleigh outside the clinic, unharnessed his reindeer, and dragged it inside. It was alive, but one eyeball had frozen in its head. The doctor said there was a clink when he touched it with the scalpel.

Sometime in the dregs of November, a month after the first freeze and a month still to go until the New Year’s festivities, a windstorm took down dozens of trees. Tatyana Andropova from Building 4 brought her dog out for a pee, and the dog was blown away like a tumbleweed. The doors to the stairwell were ripped off Ilya’s building, and all the radiators in the kommunalkas rattled, sighed, and went quiet. Babushka took the old Chukovsky books out of their storage spot in the woodstove, dusted off the baffles and firebricks, and sent Ilya and Vladimir down to buy satchels of wood from Daniil Chernyshev, who was crazy and kept birch logs stacked floor to ceiling along his walls in case of just such an occasion.

The wind shrieked up the stairwell, the sort of wind that feels barbed, and there were enough people who were too frail or too afraid to leave their apartments that Ilya and Vladimir each made a couple hundred rubles shuttling between their floors with satchels of wood curled under each of their arms. The wind got stronger and stronger, louder and louder so that they had to yell to hear each other. Ilya’s arms ached from carrying wood, but there was a giddiness to it all too, to the easy money.

“Motherfucker!” Vladimir said as they rounded the third-floor stairwell, headed down to Daniil’s again. The wind pulled tears up out of his eyes toward his temples. “This is amazing. Watch this,” he said. He stood at the top of the next flight, scooted his feet so that they were halfway over the edge of the stair, and leaned a couple of millimeters into the wind. It was strong enough to hold him. His jacket ballooned behind him. His jeans slicked to his legs. The wind rippled the skin of his cheeks like water. But then he got greedy—Vladimir had a tendency to get greedy—he stuck his chest out even farther, as though he were a figurehead moving over the waves. Ilya gripped the railing behind him.

“Try it, Ilyusha,” Vladimir said, and at that moment the wind stopped and Vladimir fell. Down three stairs, then four, then five, all the way to the landing where he crumpled into a ball.

Ilya ran to him, thinking of what he’d broken and whether they’d have to go to the clinic and whether it would be open and whether it had electricity, and then Vladimir sat up and began to laugh. Blood was trickling out of his nose.

“You saw that, right?” he said. “The way the wind just stopped.”

Ilya nodded. He wanted to say that if you leaned into the wind forever then it was bound to stop, that it was nothing personal, but then the wind began to whistle through the rungs of the railing, and then it was fully wailing again, the noise inhuman but seeming to speak of human pains, and Ilya wondered if somehow it was personal. Vladimir wiped at his nose and blood smeared across his cheek.

“Help me up,” he said, and Ilya could barely hear him over the wind.

That night they pulled the table as close to the stove as they could. The backs of Ilya’s calves burned, but his legs felt frozen in the center, like meat that’s failed to thaw. The windows were blanketed against the cold, and, as the wind went on and on, as their kommunalka, squat as it was, began to sway, Ilya wanted to pull the blankets down so that he could see the storm and make sure that it hadn’t taken on some new and terrible form.

The buses were not running to the refinery, and his mother had found a mostly empty bottle of peppermint schnapps, and she’d had a few shots and was ruddy with it, with all of them together at the table. As Babushka heated dinner, she prayed to St. Medard, who she said had once been shielded from a hurricane by a hovering eagle. He was a Catholic saint, but Babushka occasionally prayed to Catholic saints if there was one perfectly suited to the occasion.

“Even a saint’s gonna get shat on, standing under a bird,” Vladimir said.

“Hush,” their mother said, with the requisite sharpness, but her eyes had this bubbliness to them, like kvass poured into a glass, that they got only from Vladimir.

After dinner Babushka dealt out seka, and Ilya divvied up a box of macaroni to use for bets. Babushka beat them all for the first five hands, but then Vladimir started to pay attention. He got three of a suit twice in a row, and soon he had to get a bowl to hold all of his macaroni. He was gloating, talking about becoming a card shark and joining the weekly game the dedki played in the kitchen.

“I’m gonna rake it in. Those old fuckers are so busy moaning about Gorbachev and Yeltsin and how at least before you could count on your 120 rubles that they won’t even know what hit them,” he said, when a knock sounded.

Under the wind, it seemed that the knock was far off, on some other door down the hall, but then it came again, louder and clearer.

For a second they were quiet. The candles on the table gave their faces new shadows, made them all look strange, but Ilya saw a familiar panic flash in Babushka’s eyes. “You won’t last long if it takes a knock on the door for you to know they’re coming,” she liked to say, or sometimes just “A knock on the door is never good.”

“Maybe it’s Timofey,” Ilya’s mother said.

“Wanting company,” Babushka said. After three decades in the coal mine, Timofey couldn’t stand the dark. He kept the lights on all night despite his tiny pension. “He’s probably scared to death,” she said, opening the door with a sly smile meant for Timofey.

Maria Mikhailovna stood in the hallway. She was wearing a militia coat with a long fur collar and a gold badge. The coat swallowed her whole and made her look like a child playing dress-up. It must be her husband’s, Ilya thought, remembering that he was a policeman. Her nose was raw and running, and behind her glasses her eyes were leaking like Vladimir’s had been earlier.

“Izvinitye,” Babushka stuttered. “We didn’t know. Ilya didn’t—”

“Please.” Maria Mikhailovna put up a hand. “Hello, Ilya. Hello, Vladimir,” she said in her tiny voice. She was in a fur ushanka too, her braids trailing out of the ear flaps.

“Come in, Maria Mikhailovna,” his mother said.

“Zdravstvuyte,” Vladimir said, looking horrified, and then, in mangled English, he said something that sounded like “Good evening.”

As soon as Maria Mikhailovna stepped inside, the wind slammed the door shut behind her. She had never been to Ilya’s home. He had studied with her for almost four years now. He knew the way she sucked air through her teeth when she concentrated. He knew that she favored crisps over sweets and that she used a teabag five times before she tossed it. Each afternoon, she sat close enough for him to see the tiny brown hairs that lapped at the corners of her lips, but he had never imagined her here, and it seemed as though wires had been crossed somewhere. Characters from two different movies had been transposed and stranded in unsuitable settings.

“You were out in this awfulness?” Babushka said.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? Dmitri drove me, and the wind was making the car wobble from one lane to the next.”

“He’s in the car?” Babushka said it like he might be dead.

“He has to make his rounds. He patrols the refinery,” she said.

“Ah,” Babushka said, “important duty,” which was exactly what she said about any job at all, but in this case it happened to be true.

Maria Mikhailovna bent to take off her boots, and Ilya’s mother said, “Keep them on, please. It’s too cold. The heat’s been off since this morning.”

In a flash, Babushka cleared the cards and, ignoring Vladimir’s protests, dumped the macaroni back into its box. She swapped the plastic tablecloth for a lace one, put a kettle on the stove, and produced a box of Malvina’s, which were Vladimir’s favorite biscuits and were supposed to have been a present from Babushka on his name day.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted,” Maria Mikhailovna said as Babushka ushered her to a seat at the table. “But I couldn’t wait.”

“It’s an honor,” Babushka said, and Vladimir rolled his eyes.

What couldn’t wait? Ilya wanted to say, but he felt a sudden shyness with her. There was always a textbook and a desk between them. A question or an answer. Now she was sitting at their table, and he couldn’t imagine what had brought her here in this storm. Ilya had needed school supplies occasionally—new installments of The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie and, once, a computer program—but she’d just sent him home with a note.

“I’ve finished the translation,” he offered.

Vladimir snorted.

“The translation?” Maria Mikhailovna was distracted, and for a second he wondered if she was here for him at all. Maybe she had come to talk about Vladimir. Maybe she had noticed the effort he’d been making of late, and she had some plan to help get him back on track. Maybe she would ask their mother if he had actually ever been sick, Ilya thought, and his stomach went sour, but Maria Mikhailovna just said, “Ah, the Pushkin. Good.”

Babushka pressed a biscuit on her, and she nibbled at its corner and then set it down on her napkin, and Ilya could feel Vladimir staring at it like a wolf.

“You have been well, I hope,” his mother said.

“Yes.”

Ilya twisted in his seat. The women, it seemed, would drag this out. “Do I need new books?”

“No.”

“He’s performing well? Doing his work?” his mother said.

“Da. Very well.”

“Good,” his mother said. “He works hard.”

“He gets that from you,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

Ilya’s mother smiled and shook her head. Maria Mikhailovna took another swallow of tea. “What brings me here tonight is an opportunity—a possible opportunity—and it could have waited, of course, until the storm is over, but I couldn’t wait.” She slid her lip between her teeth and then went on: “Gazneft has decided to sponsor an exchange program along with an American petrol company. One student from Berlozhniki is to be sent to a city in America. It’s only for a year. A year of upper school. He’d have to take the boards early, of course, and he’d have to get above the ninetieth percentile, but I believe he’s in that range, and it seemed—”

She hesitated, struck maybe by the silence of the room or by the force of the hope she was giving them. Babushka’s hands shook on the table, and his mother reached for them and covered them with her own.

“It seemed,” Maria Mikhailovna finished, “perfect for him.”

“Could he be chosen?” his mother said.

“Who, me?” Vladimir said, with a tight smile, and they all turned and looked at him because they had forgotten—or at least Ilya had—that he was in the room.

“He has a chance?” his mother said. “Won’t the spot be saved for someone?” She meant someone important. The mayor’s son or the daughter of some refinery bureaucrat.

Maria Mikhailovna straightened in her chair. “In this, I have some influence. It’s just a bit of luck really. Dmitri drives Fyodor Fetisov and mentioned to him that I teach at the school, and he’s asked me to choose the Berlozhniki student.”

Ilya’s mother’s eyes went huge and wet, and when she turned them on Ilya, the happiness in them was terrifying.

Vladimir got up from the couch, walked to the table, and shoved a Malvina in his mouth. “What city?” he said. “New York? Orlando? Florida?” He was chewing aggressively, all the power of his body collected in his jaw. “I’ll do it. What are my chances?”

“Vladimir, go in the bedroom,” their mother said.

Maria Mikhailovna looked at Vladimir. There was still a crust of dried blood under his nostril from his fall, and Ilya expected a look of disgust from her, but she smiled. “Third period is much more lively with you back, Vladimir Alexandrovich.”

Vladimir let out a sudden laugh. “It’s an exchange?” he said. “So you’re saying that an American is coming here?”

“Not next year,” she said, “but in the future, maybe.”

“Of course,” Vladimir said, “in the future, maybe.”

“What would it cost?” Babushka said.

“It’s funded, Mamulya. She already said that.” His mother glanced at Maria Mikhailovna as though she and Babushka were failing some oral exam.

“Gazneft and EnerCo pay for everything. The flight and visas and everything.”

“Everything.” Babushka said it like it was a word she’d never heard.

“Ilya can stow me in his suitcase,” Vladimir said. “I promise to behave.”

“I need your approval before I can submit his name and register him for the boards,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

His mother and Babushka nodded. Maria Mikhailovna nodded.

“Ilya?” Maria Mikhailovna said.

Ilya imagined himself in the big belly of a plane. His mother, his brother, the kommunalkas, the refinery, even, shrunk to a pinprick of light. A lesser star. Ilya didn’t hear her say his name again. He didn’t notice the candle sputtering out under the plastic icon or the way his brother’s face was buckling. He had left. In his mind, he was up high and far away.

Maria Mikhailovna put a hand on his arm. “Would you like to go?”

Ilya looked at her. “Yes. I want to go,” he said, just as Vladimir slipped out the door and into the storm.