“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 vi
sas 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.
CHAPTER NINE
Breakfast that first day of school was a chaotic affair. The kitchen reeked of bacon. The radio by the sink bellowed Christian rock, and Papa Cam sang along, cracking eggs with gusto. The microwave beeped and beeped, and the dryer churned, desperately fluffing things that had wrinkled overnight. Mama Jamie ripped tags off Ilya’s and the girls’ new book bags and cut crusts off their sandwiches and threw them in the trash. Babushka had always wiped the crumbs from her cutting board into the palm of her hand and eaten them. “The best bits,” she called them, and when Vladimir and Ilya were little they used to fight over who would get them. He imagined telling the Masons this story. Fighting for crumbs, they would think, though that wasn’t the point; his family was not that poor.
Sadie was sitting at the table, eating a slice of toast and staring out the sliding glass doors. Her lips were buttery. Her knees were tucked into another huge black T-shirt, and again Ilya had the sense that she was separate from them all. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that they were together in their separateness, but at least they were similar for it. She was looking toward the refinery, and he sat next to her and said, “My home is so close to the refinery that it lights up our whole apartment.”
She looked at him, but it took a second for her to focus on him, as though her mind were returning from some distance.
“There are houses like that here too,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”
“You get accustomed to it,” he said. “But at first people were awake all the time, and they complained. And Gazneft manufactured a study saying the lights would be healthy for us, make us less sad, since it’s dark so much of the time.”
“That’s a new one,” Papa Cam said.
“I meant how’d you sleep last night,” Sadie said, and Ilya wondered if she could tell from his face that he’d barely slept at all.
“I don’t like the dark,” Molly said. She squeezed between Ilya and Sadie with a plate of waffles and began to systematically pour syrup into each of the waffle’s tiny trenches. “That’s why I have ten nightlights.”
“Let me guess,” Marilee said, from across the table, “your longitude is very far north.”
Papa Cam emerged from a closet with what looked like a tripod. “Latitude,” he said, and Ilya got the sense that even patient Papa Cam found satisfaction in correcting Marilee.
“In the middle of winter there are only a couple of hours of light each day,” Ilya said.
Sadie smiled. “That sounds kind of nice,” she said.
“In what way?” Mama Jamie said.
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you,” Sadie said, and Mama Jamie wiped her hands on a dishcloth and said, “Photo time. Everybody to the fireplace.”
Marilee, Molly, and Sadie groaned in unison.
“This is something we do every year on the first day of school, Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “and if the girls don’t appreciate it now, they will later.”
The girls slumped over to the fireplace, and Mama Jamie scooped up the dog, which they were now routinely calling Durashka, and climbed onto the brick fire skirt so that her head jutted above her daughters’ shoulders. Molly’s shirt was tucked into an inch of exposed underwear. A citrusy stain traversed the entirety of Papa Cam’s tie, a rash had sprouted on Marilee’s cheek, and the vacancy had not quite left Sadie’s face. Ilya watched them arrange themselves, and they were not much to look at, but still he thought of his mother and Babushka alone in their apartment, and he felt a bit of bile rise in his throat because on top of everything else the Masons had each other.
“Why’s he staring at us like that?” Marilee said.
“Nobody’s looking any which way,” Mama Jamie said.
“Yes he is,” Marilee said, and Ilya looked at his feet because he knew that in this case she was right.
Papa Cam lifted an arm like some sort of lamed bird. “Front and center,” he said.
“No, please,” Ilya said. “I’ll take the picture.”
“No you don’t!” Mama Jamie cried. “Get in here.”
Ilya wedged himself under Papa Cam’s arm, and Papa Cam clicked a button on a tiny remote, and a red light on the camera began to flash. “Timer’s on,” he said.
Next to him Marilee began to itch the rash on her cheek.
“Stop it,” Mama Jamie hissed.
“I can’t help it,” Marilee said.
“Are you sure you set it?” Sadie said as the camera clicked, whirred, and went silent.
Papa Cam stared at the camera screen. “Well, we sure captured the real deal,” he said.
“I didn’t want to capture the real deal.” Mama Jamie sighed. “Ilya, do you want one of just you? To send to your mom? First day of school in a new country—can you imagine, girls? Ilya is brave, right?”
A picture of him here, safe, would soothe his mother.
“Yes,” he said. “She’d like that.”
His eyes were gritty with tiredness, but as Papa Cam crouched behind the camera, he tried, for his mother’s sake, to look happy. “Cheese,” he murmured. The flash blinked, then burst. Papa Cam showed him the photo, and he had expected to look as grim as the convicts online, but the flash had collected in his pupils and made his eyes look like the lights of a train pushing through a dark tunnel. It was a look of purpose. He told himself to temper his hopes. All the picture of Lana in Gabe’s hat proved was that they had been involved. It wasn’t enough, but still it was more than he’d had the day before.
* * *
—
Leffie High was a concrete slab hunched under a big sky. Behind it, playing fields stretched into the distance, and kids ran back and forth between the goals with a sort of grace, like birds rearranging in the sky. Sadie had her own car and, much to Ilya’s delight, was in charge of driving him to and from school. She pulled into a parking spot between two pickups with huge, rutted tires. A melancholy rock song blasted from the radio—“Smashing Pumpkins,” Sadie said, when he asked who it was—and she mouthed the words while dabbing something that smelled like coconut on her lips.
“It’s familiar,” Ilya said, though it was not.
“Oh yeah? They’re big in Russia?”
“Very,” Ilya said.
Kids surged around the car, headed for the front doors. They yelled hellos, shrieking over new haircuts and new outfits. The song ended, and Sadie said, “Ready?” softly, as though she were talking to herself more than to him.
Inside, the press of bodies, the thin clanging of lockers, the sheer energy of teenagers colliding were all familiar to him, but that made it all no less terrifying. Ilya watched Sadie’s white hair slip through the crowd, and as she got farther from him, he began to sweat. Someone stepped on his foot. Someone else yelled, “The Russian!” He didn’t realize that he’d stopped walking until he saw Sadie’s slim shoulders sliding back through the crowd for him.
“You’re famous,” Sadie said, and when she saw his face, she said, “I’m just kidding. Everyone will get over it by tomorrow.”
Sadie brought him to the principal’s office first. “This is Miss Janet,” she said, nodding at a woman behind a desk. The woman couldn’t have been much older than his mother, but her skin had been sunned so that it crinkled like the brown paper lunch bag that Mama Jamie had given him that morning.
“And is this Ilya?” Miss Janet said, pronouncing the “I” like the letter.
“It’s Ilya. He’s supposed to see Principal Gibbons,” Sadie said, and her pronunciation wasn’t perfect, but still this heat seeped into Ilya’s chest at hearing her say his name, at the fact that she’d bothered to correct Miss Janet.
“He’s on a call, sweet pea,” the woman said, “but you head on, and I’ll take care of Ilya here.”
Sadie paused at the door. “We have history together,” she said. “So I’ll see you then,” and then she was gone, and Ilya was left alone with Miss Janet, who was baring too-white teeth at him.
“Russia, huh?” she said. “Now that is a far way to come.”
The phone on Janet’s desk rang, and she rolled her eyes in a conspiratorial way and ignored it. “I went to Alaska once. On a cruise. A long time ago. And at one point—I’ll never forget this—the captain came on the loudspeaker and said that we were close enough to swim to Russia.” The phone rang again, and this time she was moved to put a hand on the receiver. “Of course the water was too cold to actually do it but I just thought it was so exciting. Swim to Russia. Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” Ilya said, and if she noticed the sarcasm in his voice, she didn’t show it.
The phone rang once more, a door opened behind Janet’s desk, and a small, powerful man said, “The phone. Please.”
Janet looked back over her shoulder, unperturbed. “Principal Gibbons,” she said, “this is Ilya from Russia.”
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