Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  Ilya laughed. “Whatever it is will be better than what my mother makes. She cooks everything ’til it’s carcinogenic.”

  “That sounds like my mother, which is probably why she has cancer. That or the cigarettes,” Dmitri said. His expression was the same: still that jolly, cherubic look that made Ilya feel in turns relaxed and like he was somehow a source of amusement. “You know I’m from here too,” he said, “not like Maria, not a cultured city kid.”

  “You were born here?”

  “Born and bred.” He hummed a few notes of “My Berlozhniki” with false bravado, but Ilya could tell that his voice was good.

  “I still had to leave people behind though. That’s a fact of life now. Simple. Some people are dead weight.” He made a “plop” with his lips, like a rock dropped in a pond. “I went to School #17. It was a better school back then, only there were no teachers as beautiful as my Masha.”

  “Stop it, Dmitri!” Maria Mikhailovna yelled from the kitchen.

  With a start, Ilya realized that Dmitri was the reason Maria Mikhailovna’s voice was different. They were in love, these two. Truly in love, and maybe that was why the air and the light felt like they did. Ilya finished his kvass, and Dmitri filled his glass with beer. It was bubbly and tart on his tongue, and his chair was incredibly soft. It seemed to have molded around his buttocks and spine, like it was meant for him. He imagined getting under the covers at home that night and having Vladimir smell the alcohol on his breath the way he’d smelled it on Vladimir dozens of times, and a sort of sprightly pride came over him. He had not felt so good since the day Maria Mikhailovna had told him about the exchange. In this chair, he could forget that Vladimir had not been home for more than a month. He could forget krokodil and the way his mother and Babushka looked at the door like dogs sometimes, hoping for a knock, for Vladimir to come home spun or sober or however. He felt like he was in a different world already, like the happiness he felt here was a preview of America. For dinner he had two helpings of macaroni and cheese, and enough beer that he lost his shyness and began to talk without thinking first.

  “How did you meet?” he asked them, and maybe it was the drink, but he thought he could actually see the love seep into their faces the way morning light seeps over the horizon.

  “Skating,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

  “How Russian,” Ilya said.

  Dmitri cackled.

  “At the Winter Festival,” Dmitri said, “if you can believe that. She is lovely, beautiful, brilliant, of course, but she is not so good on skates. In fact, her skating is a disruption of the peace.”

  “Luckily Dmitri was there, in uniform. And for the safety of others he removed me from the rink.”

  “So the Winter Festival is your anniversary,” Ilya said. The Winter Festival was three and a half months away. That was when Maria Mikhailovna planned to announce the exchange as long as Ilya passed the boards.

  They nodded. “It’s been too many years to celebrate,” Maria Mikhailovna said.

  “Isn’t that when you’re supposed to celebrate?” Ilya could feel himself glowing. It was silly, he knew, but he felt the same sense of accomplishment talking with these two, in this apartment, in this light, that he felt when he perfectly translated a dictation or when he understood a whole conversation between Michael and Stephanie without having to pause and rewind.

  “Exactly,” Dmitri said. “And, between us, she says this—‘No, no, I don’t want to celebrate, no presents, no flowers’—but I’ll be sleeping at the station for a week if I don’t plan something.”

  Maria Mikhailovna smiled, and a small silence settled over the table. It was comfortable, calm, the sort of silence that could never exist in his apartment. He thought of Babushka’s endless murmurings, his mother’s rants, the neighbors’ fights, which were audible enough to follow like soap operas. He had no memories of his mother and father together, but he could feel in his marrow that they had not been like this, and for a long second he let himself imagine that he was the Malikovs’ son. It made him feel guilty, of course, to imagine that, and he wondered—not for the first time—if everyone was as traitorous in their daydreams, if Babushka wished she’d married Timofey when they were young enough to have a different son, one who survived. Maybe his mother longed for children who were nothing like him or Vladimir, maybe she longed to leave them all behind and go to America herself. But he could tell that these two, at least, did not regret each other.

  Later, when Maria Mikhailovna was in the kitchen cutting the apple pie, Ilya asked Dmitri if he was a detective.

  “Yes.” Dmitri laughed. “But it’s not so glamorous as you make it sound. Mostly I patrol for the refinery.”

  That explained the apartment. That explained why Maria Mikhailovna was the one teacher at School #17 who did not have a second job at a kiosk or café. Fyodor Fetisov probably paid Dmitri more than his salary from the police force.

  “Did you hear of the woman on Ulitsa Gornyakov?” Ilya knew that Dmitri had heard of Yulia, and what he meant was, do you know anything?

  Dmitri nodded. “It’s sad, no? She was poteryana.” Lost, he’d said, and Ilya didn’t know whether he meant that she’d been lost when she died or in general.

  “My babushka’s scared,” Ilya lied, “because my mother works the same job.”

  “She doesn’t need to be scared,” he said. “Your mother should take the bus to be safe. And stay away from the Tower. The woman was not so innocent.”

  “Did she die at the Tower?”

  Dmitri looked at him, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how when you roll over a log there are worms and zhuki and slugs all grubbing around in the muck?” Ilya nodded. “The Tower is like that, only there are getting to be too many bugs. They’re not staying under the log.”

  Maria Mikhailovna set the plates of pie on the table. “They need jobs,” she said.

  “Of course they do,” Dmitri said. “Welcome to the new Russia.” He sounded proud, because he had done just fine in the new Russia, but there was this tightness in his face that spread the way a crack spreads across ice. Maria Mikhailovna saw it too. She put a hand on his arm. Still he went on, “It’s not even their fault. They have nothing, and they have nothing to hope for. At least before, we had a big idea, with big flaws, sure, but now what have they got? Is it any wonder they’re killing themselves?”

  Yulia Podtochina had not killed herself, but Ilya knew there was no point in saying so. Dmitri was grandstanding the way Vladimir sometimes did, connecting dots until he could condemn the whole world and make himself feel like he was somehow outside it. Only Vladimir was outside it, and Dmitri was profiting from it.

  “That’s why we teach them,” Maria Mikhailovna said. Her voice was soft but firm. She had understood that for Ilya the conversation was more than ideological.

  “Teach them to leave?” Dmitri said, lifting a hand toward Ilya. There was a bubble of spit on his lip that he didn’t seem to notice. He was drunk, Ilya thought, or getting there.

  “They leave and then maybe they come back.”

  Dmitri laughed. “Sure,” he said.

  “OK,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “Pie.”

  “Pie. Yes. Sorry, pie and coffee too.” Dmitri smiled at his wife and then at Ilya. “And no more politics.”

  “Yulia Podtochina was pretty,” Ilya said. He knew he should drop the subject, but he wanted to say the pretty without the enough, and he had the feeling that Dmitri had slandered her somehow.

  “To pretty women,” Dmitri said.

  He raised his wineglass and drank the dregs, and they all ate their pie, which was studded with raisins and not as good as Babushka’s apple dumplings. Ilya reminded himself to tell Babushka this. “Shush,” Babushka would say, “who’s competing,” but she would be flattered.

  They ate in front of the enormous window, and from the seventh floor, the snow was be
autiful as it fell. They were too high to see the slush, the streaks of oil, the yellow spots where dogs and drunks had pissed.

  * * *

  —

  Dmitri offered to drive Ilya home, and Ilya demurred, but Dmitri insisted. He wanted to do a patrol of the refinery road anyway, and the kommunalkas were on the way. It was late enough and cold enough that Ilya said yes. In the elevator, Ilya looked at Dmitri’s boots. They were shiny, without any trace of snow or salt. They seemed to be brand-new, and Ilya wondered if he and Maria Mikhailovna had lived here a decade ago and whether it could have been Dmitri who had kicked Vladimir and him out of the elevator.

  “Who lives in the penthouse?” Ilya asked.

  “The penthouse?”

  Ilya nodded.

  “It’s been empty for a decade. Fetisov owns it. I go up a couple times a year to make sure the heat works and the pipes haven’t frozen. But he’s here occasionally with the new pipeline project.” Dmitri ran a hand lightly down the elevator panel. “Almost all of them are empty. They built them for the bigwigs, but then the bigwigs didn’t want to live here. They’d rather live anywhere else—fly in, fly out, not even spend the night if they can help it. So they’ve got no one who can afford the apartments, and they had to start cutting the prices. Ours is a perk of the job. But as you can see, the job never ends.”

  “Of course,” Ilya said.

  The elevator let them out in a garage. Somehow Ilya had not expected Dmitri to drive a patrol car, but there it was: the siren, the blue stripe, the MILITSIYA across the hood. There was not a flake of snow on it, the door was barely cold to the touch, and this was a marvel to Ilya.

  “Maria is going to miss you, you know. She cares for you,” Dmitri said, as they pulled out of the garage. “She thinks of you like family, which means you’re family to me too.”

  Ilya nodded. He knew that he should say something more—that he cared for Maria Mikhailovna too, or that he wouldn’t forget her—but he’d let the silence go too long.

  “You want me to turn on the lights and sirens?”

  “No,” Ilya said with a smile.

  “I figured you were too old for that.”

  On the corner of Ulitsa Tsentralnaya and Ulitsa Lenina, Dmitri hit the endless traffic light, the krasny beskonechnyy, which seemed to never be green, no matter what direction you were coming from. Dmitri groaned, and Ilya looked out the window and saw two figures sitting on a bench. Their shoulders were dusted in snow. They were looking down at their laps. Bare fingers flashing above their knees. They were gloveless, rolling cigarettes, and Ilya recognized the motion of Vladimir’s hands before he recognized his face. On his lap was the little pouch that their mother had given him eons ago to hold pencils and pens and erasers and that he had only ever used for tobacco. A lighter sparked in his hands, and in the glow, Ilya saw that it was Sergey sitting next to him. Vladimir lit his own cigarette, as straight and even as a factory-made. It bobbed between his lips as he said something to Sergey that Ilya couldn’t hear. The heat was blasting in the car and the windows were up, and Dmitri said, “You want to know a secret?”

  Ilya nodded, his eyes on Vladimir.

  “They programmed this light to be red for double the usual time. So people would run it and the traffic cops could pad their pockets, but of course here I am, waiting and waiting.” He went on complaining, saying that they had all spent lifetimes waiting at lights like this even though there weren’t any other cars in sight.

  On the bench, Vladimir lit Sergey’s cigarette. Their hands cupped around the lighter. Their heads dipped toward each other. Their noses might have touched. There was ease there and symmetry. They stayed that way for only a moment, but it was a long moment for Ilya. He had always believed that some cord, some twine of genes and history and proximity, held him to his brother and held his brother to him, but he could feel the cord—or his belief in it—slacken as he watched them. He had the sense that he wasn’t looking out a window but at a screen, at a character whose fate he was invested in but powerless to change. And he had this feeling that he’d been getting more and more recently, that each time he saw Vladimir might be the last.

  Sergey looked up at the car, smoke rolling up over his cheeks. He elbowed Vladimir. Vladimir stuffed the pouch in his pocket, and they both stood. Two shadow shapes cut out of the snow. Ilya thought they would walk away, but instead they headed toward the car, and Ilya could feel Dmitri stiffen beside him.

  “Look at these two,” he murmured.

  Vladimir and Sergey cut across the street a few meters in front of the car, moving slowly, like they thought that might make them look innocent. Dmitri’s headlights caught the stripes on the track pants that Vladimir wore day in and day out. Then the traffic light turned green. Sergey didn’t notice, but Vladimir stopped and looked toward the car. He can’t see me, Ilya thought, the headlights are too bright, but Vladimir squinted and stared.

  Ilya saw him mouth, “Ilyusha?” and he hoped that Dmitri had not understood.

  “Is this fucker really going to test me?” Dmitri said. He dug his palm into the horn and blasted it. Sergey was past the car, but he stopped now too. Sergey, who was always ready for a fight, looked back at them, his face wild with anger. Then he raised a hand and lifted his middle finger and jabbed it in the air.

  “Run!” Sergey yelled just as the car jolted forward.

  The tires shimmied on the ice—Dmitri had pressed hard on the gas—and the tail twisted out so that the car was almost sideways in the street. Dmitri cursed. Vladimir and Sergey were moving now, running sloppily, but gaining distance nonetheless. They were half a block away. Sergey tripped once, caught himself on one hand, and was up again. And then Dmitri righted the car and gassed it, more gently this time, so that it glided smoothly over the snow, gaining on Sergey and Vladimir until the bumper was only a few meters from their feet. The bottoms of Vladimir’s shoes—ancient sneakers, with no treads—rose like shadows in the headlights. His boots were at home, by the door, under the picture of their father in the red plastic frame that Babushka liked to touch each time she left the apartment, but of course Vladimir wasn’t wearing them. Ilya shut his eyes. He was sure that Vladimir would fall, that he would hear the thump, thump of his body under the tires.

  “Urody,” Dmitri said, which was the word for freaks, but also for babies born with something wrong, for black sheep, for imbeciles. Dmitri’s face was thrust forward over the steering wheel. His tongue moved over his lips. “Fucking urody.”

  They were almost at the corner, the turnoff to the kommunalkas, and as Vladimir ran into the intersection, sinking ankle-deep into the crisscrossing mounds of snow left by the plows, Ilya managed to say, “Here. Right here. This is my turn.” As though Dmitri were just driving him home.

  Dmitri glanced over at him, and then he twisted the wheel right, and the back tires shot out from under them again. Ilya could hear him breathing through his mouth, as though he too had been running. Then he started to laugh.

  “Can you believe them?” he said. “They were too high to even think of running out of the road.”

  The kommunalkas were ahead of them, a cluster of darkness blocking the refinery’s light.

  “Like ants, right? Too stupid to break the line,” Dmitri said.

  Ilya didn’t say anything. Dmitri could easily turn the car around—Vladimir was still only a minute away, probably standing in the middle of the street, rehearsing the story with Sergey between jagged breaths. And Dmitri had power over Ilya too, over his whole future, over America, and Ilya thought that if he could just hold himself incredibly still and silent, he could protect it all.

  “Not a word of this to Masha,” Dmitri said. “You hear me?”

  Ilya nodded.

  “She’s a pacifist,” he said. “She’s meant for a better world. That’s why I love her.”

  Ilya nodded again.

  “Li
sten,” Dmitri said, as he pulled up to Ilya’s building. His hand was on Ilya’s thigh again. “Those two will be fine. Maybe even better for this. Maybe I scared them sober, right?”

  Ilya could feel his leg shaking. He knew that Dmitri could feel it too. This wouldn’t be over, he wouldn’t be released, until he said something. So he smiled at Dmitri and managed to thank him for dinner and the ride home, and then he got out of the car and watched Dmitri drive over the bridge and down the road until his lights merged with the refinery’s.

  That night Ilya waited for Vladimir for a long time, pacing the stretch of carpet between the TV and the couch. He knew that Dmitri was right, that Vladimir had been too high, too stupid to just run off the road, to run up into the square, into the trees where the car couldn’t follow him. And though he knew that that was beside the point, though he could hear the thump of Vladimir under the car so clearly that he had to remind himself that it hadn’t happened, he was angry too. Vladimir was always in these sorts of situations. Vladimir was always the one out until two a.m., the one sneaking out of school, sneaking in the back door of Dolls; the one never, ever doing what he was supposed to, and it was infuriating to always worry that his latest mistake might be the one that was too big, too deep and stupid for him to escape. Ilya burned the beer off pacing. Eventually he burned his anger off too, and there was just this acidic film of fear on his tongue, lining his stomach. He lay on the couch. He was tired. He felt young. He wanted to tell Vladimir that he’d been in the elevator, that he’d seen one of the apartments. He wanted to tell him that no one even lived in the penthouse. He waited and waited, but of course Vladimir didn’t come home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sadie didn’t go to the trailer by the refinery the next few nights, and Ilya began to wonder if he’d inflated the importance of the woman. Maybe there was some simple explanation. Maybe it was J.T.’s house, and they’d arranged to meet, but his mom had been home and foiled their plans. Then in history one day, Sadie began a new portrait, and as it took shape, he realized it was the woman. Sadie spent five minutes shading under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, somehow capturing her exact lassitude.