Her name was Yulia Podtochina. If someone had not left the paper in the communal bathroom, Ilya would not have even read the article. If Yulia Podtochina had not worked at the refinery, he would not have taken much notice. There were a few deaths from exposure every year in Berlozhniki, drunks or junkies who got confused about where home was and wandered the wrong way. But Yulia worked at the cafeteria in the refinery: fitting the hot trays into their metal frames, wiping down tables, mixing the soda water and soda syrup in the machines, doling out pelmeni and cutlets to the neftyaniki. She had his mother’s exact job, except that she worked the opposite shift. She slept while his mother worked; she worked while his mother slept. She was like his mother’s shadow, in a way, and they were joined by that one moment each afternoon when their buses passed on Ulitsa Gornyakov, and each driver pressed the horn, and the two blasts were sharp and short in the cold.
She had been murdered. Killed with violent intent, the paper said, though how someone could be killed without violent intent, Ilya wasn’t sure. There weren’t any more details about her death, but the little Ilya read about her was a relief to him because it quickly became clear that she was nothing like his mother. Yulia Podtochina was young. Only twenty-four. She’d grown up in Arkhangelsk and moved to Berlozhniki two years ago. She was married to a childhood sweetheart who still lived in Arkhangelsk, working the ice barges. The paper had not been able to reach her husband for comment, and according to a cousin of Yulia’s who lived in Berlozhniki, she and her husband hadn’t seen each other in over a year.
One Friday after work, Yulia was supposed to meet up with this cousin—they were going to get a drink at Dolls—but when she didn’t show, her cousin didn’t worry. Their plans had been loose, and Yulia had friends at work, friends from her building, friends everywhere, it seemed, and her cousin figured that she’d found a better party. That Friday, she hadn’t boarded the bus with her colleagues. She told them that she wanted to walk home, which was strange, but not unheard of. The cold had abated a bit that afternoon—the pillow snow wouldn’t begin until that night—and it was only five kilometers to the kommunalkas and three more to town. Yulia set out. The departing bus passed her just outside the refinery gates, and a few people on the arriving bus—Ilya’s mother’s bus—saw her halfway to town, by the Tower, a cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other, and that was it. No one worried about her. No one called the police. She was missing for only a day before Mikhail Tukhachevsky felt her weight on his plow.
The picture of her was from her wedding day. She was in a white minidress, tight as a tourniquet, and white platform heels. Her legs were scrunched together at the knees like she was freezing cold, and a man’s Adidas jacket was draped over her shoulders. Her hair was curled and piled on her head. A papier-mâché dove stuck out of it like a cocktail decoration. She had a shy sort of smile, but there was a gloss to her cheeks and eyes that suggested that she wasn’t all that shy. She was pretty. Pretty enough was the thought that popped into Ilya’s mind when he looked at her, though he felt guilty thinking it, because he wasn’t even sure what he meant by enough and because she was dead. No one was in custody for the crime, and the police were pursuing all leads. Any information about the crime was to be reported to the Berlozhniki police department.
“Why would she walk home dressed like that?” Babushka said, when Ilya showed her the article.
“She wasn’t wearing that when she walked home,” Ilya said. “That’s her wedding dress.”
“Her wedding dress?! Case closed! You walk around in a dress that short and bad things happen.”
“She didn’t walk around in that,” Ilya said. “She got married in it.”
“Even worse!” Babushka said.
He asked his mother if she’d seen Yulia from the bus that day, and his mother had shaken her head and said, “She was a nice girl. But too dreamy. She served the golubtsy once and it was so frozen on the inside that Igor Zubkov chipped a tooth. She was a kid, you know. Into things.”
Ilya didn’t say anything. Since Vladimir had left, there was a new wistfulness to the way his mother spoke about kids, like the things they got into were inevitable.
In the communal kitchen, over the steam and bubble of their soup pots, the babki said that it was strange that she hadn’t seen her husband in a year. They said it was strange that she’d been found so close to the Tower.
In the bathroom line, old men talked about how in winters like this one the spirits woke. They talked about the brothers who had jumped to their deaths off the top of Ilya’s building, about how many prisoners hadn’t been properly buried. They talked about how the snow had covered the crosses completely. They said the road was built on death and that ancient anger doesn’t die. A spirit had killed Yulia, they said. A guard or a prisoner, depending on who was talking and whether their ancestors had been guards or prisoners.
Ilya read everything about Yulia that he could find. A later article reported that she’d been stabbed, that her cheeks had been slashed. The Berlozhniki police finally managed to get in touch with her husband—he’d been out on an ice ship for months and knew nothing of her death. All he could offer was that Yulia was a partier and had gotten into some stuff that he didn’t approve of. After that, there were no leads and no new details released.
A week later a teenager was attacked by a bear outside of Syktyvkar, and there was an outbreak of listeria from some baloney sold at the Minutka, and the mayor began his reelection campaign. Posters of him were hung from all the light posts on the square, and he rode in circles around the kommunalkas, shouting into a loudspeaker about how Berlozhniki’s time had come, about how Berlozhniki’s youth needed to stay and procreate, and Yulia was pretty much forgotten.
“That girl?” someone might say. “The one who wasn’t from here? Who knows what trouble she got herself into.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On Ilya’s third day at Leffie High, a sexting ring run by a student who posted under the alias Madame Grandedoix was discovered, and the school’s collective attention shifted from Ilya to the Madame and didn’t look back. Ilya’s days settled into a pattern. He spent mornings and evenings online, compiling a list from the White Pages of all the Gabe Thompsons in America and checking the Vecherniye Berlozhniki site for news about Vladimir. He looked for news of other murders too, though he knew that the police would find a way of distancing any new murder from the ones for which Vladimir had been arrested just as they had initially insisted that the three murders were unrelated.
Days were devoted to school, and fortunately school in Leffie did not require much more from him than attendance. His science and math classes were remedial; home economics and gym were ridiculous. The English teacher was young and starry-eyed and obsessed with Chekhov, and he seemed willing to forgive any and all mistakes that Ilya made. Principal Gibbons had been right: American History was the hardest class. They were beginning the year with the Revolution, which was the driest revolution Ilya had ever heard of, mostly because it was discussed in such self-congratulatory terms, as though Americans had invented the concept of democracy. The Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress. Dozens of noblemen in pastel coats and tights. Ilya did not care. Plus Mr. Shilling spoke in a soft drone, like his voice couldn’t possibly project through the thicket of his beard, let alone inspire interest. It didn’t help that Sadie was in the class. It was impossible to concentrate with her there, her skin lit by the projector’s glow, J.T. constantly whispering in her ear.
Each afternoon, while Sadie was at track practice, Ilya trekked through a patch of woods that neighbored Leffie High to Bojangles’, used his snack money from the Masons to buy a chicken-and-biscuit meal, and brought it back to the front office. He shared it with Miss Janet and then did his homework while she updated her online dating profiles.
The drives home with Sadie were the high point of his day. In the mornings, she was sleepy-eyed and slow to talk
. She clutched a thermos of coffee between her thighs, scanned the radio with one hand, and rarely gave the road her full attention. But in the afternoons she seemed more relaxed, expansive. In the afternoons, she asked him questions—not about Russia, not about spies, or the KGB, or Putin, or vodka, which were the kinds of questions he got daily—these were simple questions about him.
“What do you like to do? For fun, I mean?” she asked one afternoon that first week, when they were driving home in a drizzle. The windshield wipers flicked across the glass, and the car had the damp, stuffy smell that his winter coat used to get when he left it on the radiator to dry.
Ilya thought of Michael and Stephanie. He knew that listening to them would not be anyone else’s idea of fun and that his dependence on them was definitely strange and probably unhealthy. Still, it was the closest thing to a hobby that he had. “I listen to tapes,” he said.
“Like music? Like Radiohead?” she said.
“Sort of,” he said, making a mental note to find a way to listen to Radiohead. “Do you know Kolyan?” he said.
She shook her head.
“He’s a rapper. From Russia. Very cool. He has white hair—like yours—and he wears these contacts that make his whole eye white, and he has these tattooed fangs.”
“Mama Jamie would love him,” she said. Most Americans spoke with this upward lilt, as though every utterance were a question, but Sadie had this deadpan sarcasm that reminded him of home.
“What do you do for fun?” he said.
“I draw.”
He nodded. “I saw you drawing in history.”
“My secret’s out,” she said.
“What do you draw?”
“Portraits,” she said. “You want to see?”
He nodded, and at the next stop sign she pulled a tiny red notebook out of her backpack. A pencil stub, well chewed, was jammed in the silver spiral. Ilya flipped open the cover. Papa Cam looked out at him from the first page with a sleepy innocence, a vulnerability that Ilya saw, now, from the way she’d drawn his eyes, was the essence of him. There was a half-finished sketch of Mama Jamie next, and then a finished one, and they were both of just her face, but still there was this energy to her, this thrust of optimism to her expression that was just right.
“These are good,” Ilya said. “The best I can do is a man with a line for his body and a circle for his head.”
“A stick man,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said. He flipped the page again, and there was Marilee, her face a study in scrutiny.
“She hated it,” Sadie said.
“But it’s her. She looks like she’s about to correct you,” he said, and Sadie laughed.
He flipped the page again. The next drawing was of him. In history, in that moment when he’d frozen at the front of the class. He glanced over at Sadie, but she was watching the road, fiddling with the windshield wipers. Ilya looked at his face. The lift of his eyebrows and gauntness of his cheeks suggested fear, and he had been afraid, he remembered, but there was also this kinetic quality to his eyes, as though somehow she’d been able to bottle all their infinitesimal movements.
“Do you like it?” she said. “I don’t mind if you don’t. No one ever likes their own portrait.”
He ran a hand over the page, could feel the dips and divots where she’d pressed hard with her pencil. It was him, but it looked like Vladimir too, and no one had ever seen Vladimir in him before. “I do,” he said.
* * *
—
It took Aksinya a week to write back and say that she had no fucking clue why the police had taken Gabe Thompson, that the police were not exactly forthcoming, especially not with her. A few days later, Ilya completed his list of all the Gabe Thompsons in America. There were close to a thousand. A hundred in California alone. They all had addresses, and most had phone numbers as well. Ilya imagined himself calling Gabe, or stealing the Masons’ car and arriving at his door. What would happen when Gabe opened it? Of course he wouldn’t confess outright, but surely Ilya would be able to tell something from his reaction. Seeing Ilya wouldn’t mean much to him if the police had booted him out of town for drinking or drugs, but if he’d committed the murders, Ilya and his Russian accent would mean everything.
Ilya had already found a database of Mormon churches online and that night he began the slow process of cross-referencing the addresses and towns with churches within sixty miles. An hour drive would be the limit, even for a zealot like Gabe, Ilya guessed. If there was no church within sixty miles, he crossed that Gabe off the list. He tried to go through ten Gabes a night, tried to make incremental progress the way he used to with his book of American idioms, and once he’d finished doing this and making his usual checks of VKontakte and the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, he’d email Vladimir.
I know you didn’t do it, he’d write. The same thing every night, and when that started to feel rote, he began to add things about his day: that he’d played American football in gym, that they ate their fries with ketchup here, that American girls never wore high heels to school, that Mama Jamie had a crush on Sting, that Papa Cam drank beer that had purposely had the alcohol removed. Vladimir would not be allowed to check email, Ilya knew, and so before long these emails took on the tone of a diary. He told Vladimir about Sadie, about how in moments it seemed that she liked him but in other moments it seemed that she was completely indifferent to his presence—to everyone’s presence. He told Vladimir about J.T., about how he was preternaturally developed and looked exactly like Sergey Fedorov in his prime, and how the fuck, he wrote, am I supposed to compete with that? He told Vladimir about the sexting ring, about Pastor Kyle and the way he sometimes made the pulpit seem like a strip pole. He attached the picture of himself that Papa Cam had taken on that first morning of school, looking terrible. It’s hard to sleep here, he wrote, and what he meant was, it’s hard to sleep without you.
Listening to Michael and Stephanie would have helped, but Ilya kept thinking of all the nights when he’d lain in bed and listened to them instead of Vladimir, when Vladimir and his stories had seemed unimportant, an interruption. So Ilya didn’t ask the Masons for new batteries, and the tapes gathered dust on the dresser. When he did finally fall asleep, his dreams were horrible. There was Babushka washing the blood off Vladimir. There was the doctor touching Ilya’s leg just where he’d cut Vladimir’s. He dreamt of the Tower too. Of Lana’s hair—those pink streaks—and the way they’d snaked around his face when she kissed him. He saw the grove where she’d been killed, with the crosses nailed into the molting birch bark and the flowers that someone had planted inside an old tire. There was Vladimir, opening up his pencil case and pulling out their mother’s silver sugar spoon and holding a lighter under it. There was the stove in the Tower, the flames burning a strange blue, and next to it, Vladimir and Aksinya were fucking, both so high that they’d forgotten shame, and Ilya would wake up sure that he was still there, that he’d never left. Sometimes, in the heights of his nostrils, there was this acid burn as though somehow he’d actually breathed the Tower’s air. But bad as the dreams were, he craved them, craved sleep, because they gave him Vladimir. Vladimir’s face bent over the spoon. Vladimir’s face bent over Aksinya’s. Vladimir’s face bent over his, saying, “This is not for you, bratishka.”
Sometimes he managed to sleep through the dreams, to wake up with his pillow reeking of sweat and the light slanting through the deck supports onto that pile of abandoned bicycles. But most nights the dreams would wake him, and he would get out of bed and let his forehead cool against the sliding glass doors until he felt tired enough to try for sleep again.
He was standing like that one night, his forehead slick against the glass, when he saw the shadow of someone climbing down the deck stairs. The silhouette of calves and bare feet. Then Sadie walked past the pool, sat on the alligator wall, and lifted a knee to tie one shoe and then the other.
/> Ilya opened the basement door. He meant to say her name, but when she didn’t turn at the sound of the door, he stayed quiet. She slid off the wall and into the neighboring lot, and it wasn’t until he was at the wall, his hand on the bricks where she’d sat, that he realized he was going to follow her. She was a hundred meters away now, small enough to fit in his palm. He jogged after her, the sawgrass stinging his ankles, giving him the shallow, cross-woven cuts that Sadie’s ankles had had that first night in America. He tried to be quiet and keep a safe distance. He thought of Jackie Chan, who always stepped toe to heel, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and the way that, despite his bulk, he moved with such stealth.
At the end of Dumaine Drive, a house had been abandoned half built. Tarps were draped in place of walls, the slick plastic shuddering in the dark like an organ, like something that shouldn’t be exposed to air. Sadie stopped in the shadow of the house and pulled something out of her pocket. Ilya had assumed that she was going to meet J.T., but as she gripped whatever it was, it occurred to him that it could be drugs. A syringe or a pipe. He waited to see her creep into the half-built house. He thought of Lana high in the Tower. The way her lips had parted, the pink bud of her tongue between them, and how his dick had pulsed at the sight of it. He’d felt a weird sort of power looking at her, an awareness that he could touch her, that he could reach out and hook the hair back behind her ear, that he could go further, even, open her mouth a little wider and push his tongue deep inside it, and he’d wondered if all boys—all men—came upon these sudden pricks of violence in their fantasies. Maybe he was only different from the man who’d killed Yulia and Olga and Lana by a degree, and by the fact that he’d felt powerless, not powerful, knowing that the white puffs of her breath might simply stop. He could already see Sadie’s face the same way, and he could feel the same mix of lust and fear and helplessness gathering in him, and he began to walk down the slope of the lot. He didn’t know what he’d do, even as the distance between them collapsed, and then whatever she’d pulled from her pocket began to glow. Ilya stopped. It was a phone or an iPod. Her thumb twitched over the screen, and she pulled loose a tangle of headphones, stuck one in each ear, and kept walking.
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