Once, when they were crossing the field that had been the prison yard, a woman had flagged them down. She was in nice clothes, city clothes, the high heels of her boots sinking in the mud. She’d asked them where the graves were. The graves were unmarked and everywhere—babushkas found bones in their vegetable patches—but Sergei had demanded five hundred rubles for information, and then pointed the woman toward a pile of stones at the edge of the field. The woman thanked them, her voice clotted as though she might cry, and then she’d picked her way toward the stones, which were the remains of an outhouse. Sergei had bought some comics and an enormous cake with the five hundred rubles, and they’d all eaten it until they felt sick.
Ilya had never liked the Tower much. It was a hike from the kommunalkas—a place where you could yell and hear it echo, but places like that weren’t hard to find in Berlozhniki. That night, though, the place seemed to have a spirit, a sort of throb. They walked into a giant room—the mess hall, Ilya remembered. There were no lights, but Vladimir had brought a flashlight, and the beam lanced the air and showed snatches of sloppy graffiti and glass crushed so fine underfoot that it looked like snow. Vladimir and Aksinya wove through the room, and Ilya followed them to a set of stairs that smelled of urine. They climbed up two flights, or maybe it was three. In the dark it was hard to tell. There was music playing somewhere, punctuated every once in a while by a shout or groan. Vladimir pushed aside a curtain and led them down a long corridor. Ilya looked into each room as they passed. Figures huddled by a stove, which gave off the smell of things that shouldn’t burn. In one room, a girl sat on a mattress staring at a phone. In another, two guys were wrestling. Their necks flashed in the light, and Ilya couldn’t tell if they were joking or serious until one yelled, “Mercy!” and the other started to laugh. Ilya gripped the vodka bottle, glad to have something to hold, and from time to time he took a sip so that he didn’t have to look into any more rooms. As they neared the end of the corridor, Aksinya tilted her head back and called, “Lana!”
Lana poked her head out of a doorway and closed her eyes against the flashlight’s glare. “Hi,” she said. “Hi, Ilya.”
“This is us,” Vladimir said, and he led them into a room with four folding chairs in a circle around a pile of blankets. A rug hung over the window, and a poster of Sylvester Stallone was tacked to one wall. Ammo rounds were draped around his neck and machine guns weighed down each of his arms. On the opposite wall, Putin smirked in a suit, with a marker-drawn cock in his mouth.
“What do you think?” Vladimir said. He opened the stove door and poked it with a stick. A weak wave of heat hit Ilya.
“Cool,” Ilya said, though what he felt was closer to incredulity. Vladimir was homeless. Worse, he had chosen this over home. The vodka gnawed at Ilya’s mind. The floor pitched a little. He sat heavily in one of the chairs.
Lana sat next to him. Her hair had grown in—the pink streaks began below her ears now. She’d lost weight, like Vladimir and Aksinya, only she had had some to lose, and she looked better for it. She reached for the vodka bottle and took a long sip.
“How’s school?” she said. She was drunk, and it made her voice even softer and sweeter than usual.
“It’s school,” he said. “You know.”
Aksinya laughed. “Like you don’t love it,” she said.
“Like you weren’t little miss bookworm in primary,” Vladimir said.
“Yeah,” Aksinya said, “before you came along and fucked up my life.” She picked up one of the blankets, shook it, and spread it out again. In the corner, there was a heap of Vladimir’s clothes, a paperback with the cover torn off, a pink plastic bag, and a pair of red high heels.
“I just got a headache every time I walked through those doors,” Lana said, sounding mournful. Ilya believed her. For all her sweetness, she had never been smart.
Aksinya folded another blanket into a pillow and laid it on the ground too. Then she nudged Vladimir and said, “We need to find Sergey.”
“Bottoms up, tovarishch,” Vladimir said. “Be back in a bit.” He and Aksinya backed out the door, and Ilya could hear the echo of Aksinya laughing.
Ilya looked at Lana. There was this acid burn in his throat, and his stomach felt boggy, and he wanted to ask her if she felt the same way when she drank, but he knew better.
“You live here now? The three of you?” he said.
“Sometimes. Aksinya and I usually stay at her sister’s,” she said. She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and scratched at the edge of a scab on her arm. “It’s not as bad as it seems.”
“It doesn’t seem bad,” Ilya lied.
Lana laughed, leaned back in her chair, and stretched her toes out toward the stove. She handed Ilya the bottle again, and he drank a gulp big enough to make his eyes water. He could hear the wind breaking itself against the walls. He could hear it seeping through the concrete. He scooted his chair closer to the stove and wondered what time it was, whether his mother and Babushka had started to worry.
“You know, I’m shy too,” Lana said. “Not like those two.” She waved a hand toward the door. “They’d talk a rock into moving. And Sergey. He never shuts up. Aren’t men supposed to be the quiet ones? Between him and Vladimir, Aksinya and I can’t get a word in.”
She stood, and grabbed one of his hands. “Come here,” she said. She had a loose sort of grin, and when he stood he could see that her eyes were glazed, and he wondered just how much she’d had to drink, or whether she was high too.
“I’m cold,” she said. She took his other hand. He tensed despite the vodka, and she could tell. “That means you should hold me,” she said.
He swallowed, nodded, and did not move.
“Here.” She arranged his arms around her waist like they might begin slow dancing. He’d seen Babushka and Timofey dance like this once, when Muslim Magomayev had come on the radio and they’d thought Ilya was asleep.
“Better, right?” she said.
He nodded, and she pressed her hands against his thigh. He guessed she was aiming for his crotch, and it didn’t really matter that she’d missed. His dick prickled and warmed, this feeling of gathering tension that surged as she repositioned her hand and began to rub him. He was shorter than her, and when he tried to kiss her, his lips didn’t meet hers. They landed on her jaw instead, and so he kissed that. He kissed her shoulder, where her bra strap edged out from under her shirt. It was see-through, like a thin strip of plastic wrap, something he would have wondered about at any other time, but she took her hands off of his crotch long enough to direct his lips to hers. She tasted like vodka, or maybe that was him, and he couldn’t tell if the swimming, spinning feeling in his head was from kissing, from the way her tongue was dipping into his mouth, or whether he was drunker than he’d thought.
She swayed a little, giggled, her lips vibrating against his.
“Let’s lie down,” she said, lowering herself onto her knees, with her hands still on him. Together they slumped down onto the blankets like some sort of clumsy, lame beast. And just as he thought how glad he was that the blankets were there, that they didn’t have to lie on broken glass, he realized that Vladimir and Aksinya had planned this, that Aksinya had made this bed of blankets for just this purpose. The thought terrified him, and he twisted, looking for the door. Lana pressed her lips into his ear. “You’re going to America, huh?” she whispered. “Hot shot. Big hot shot.”
She tried to pull his sweater up over his head, but it caught on his ears long enough for him to say, “It’s too cold,” and pull it back down.
“You don’t want to show up a virgin, do you?” she said. Behind her, people walked past the doorway. Just smeared silhouettes. One paused, a dark shadow that seemed to take them in.
“Let’s shut the door,” he said, but there was no door in the frame.
“We burned it,” she said. Then she saw his face, saw that he was
imagining a bonfire, girls dancing, things sacrificed. She pointed to the stove in the corner. “There,” she said, laughing.
She leaned in and sucked at his earlobe, flicked her tongue against it.
“Lana,” he said. “I don’t feel good.”
“How about now?” she said, as she grappled with his jeans, searching for the zipper, and his dick swelled at the prospect of escape.
“Stop,” he whispered. “OK. Stop.”
She let her hands drop. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. He couldn’t see much of her face, just light and dark, dips and curves.
She considered him for a moment and said, “Fine, let’s stop, but you’ve got to tell your brother we fucked.”
He nodded, and she kissed him again, but more lightly this time, like he was something very fragile. “You know, you’re cute,” she said. “You don’t have to be so nervous.” She kissed him one more time. “That was just for you. On the house,” she said. “I might see you there, you know.”
“Where?”
“America,” she said, and Ilya was trying to parse the implication of this as someone began shouting in the corridor.
“It’s Sergey,” Ilya said.
“Fucking Sergey the drama queen,” Lana said. She smoothed out her shirt and tucked the one bra strap back under the fabric. “Stay here,” she said, and disappeared into the corridor.
He followed her as far as the doorway. It was dark, but he could still see figures huddled a few doors down, and as his eyes adjusted, he picked out Vladimir and Sergey and Lana and Aksinya, and someone else lying on the floor at their feet. It was one of the guys Ilya had seen wrestling earlier, only he wasn’t smiling now. His jaw was slack and there was blood trickling out of his nose. Then Sergey said, “Pizdun,” and kicked the guy. The guy groaned, and Sergey kicked him again.
Aksinya put a hand on Sergey’s arm. “He’s not going to pay if you knock him out,” she said, sounding more tired than alarmed.
Ilya took a few steps toward them, and something sharp and metal tripped him. He caught himself with his hands, and felt glass and rocks dig into his palms. The group turned at the noise.
“Ilyusha?” Vladimir said.
Ilya was silent for a second, like that might make him invisible, and then Vladimir said, “Give me a minute,” as though he were finishing up in the bathroom or jamming the last blini in his mouth before they left for school.
“Tomorrow, you hear me?” Sergey said to the guy on the ground.
Ilya turned back into the room. He held his hands out by the stove and brushed the grit off them. He wanted a glass of water, badly, or at least a handful of snow, but the idea of finding his way outside was dizzying, so instead he took another drink from the vodka bottle.
When Vladimir came back, a cigarette glowed in his mouth. Lana and Aksinya were with him. Sergey had gone to meet his girlfriend.
“So,” Vladimir said, toeing the nest of blankets on the ground.
“Don’t be nosy,” Lana said. Ilya was quiet, and Lana reached out, took his hand, and swung it in hers. “It was good,” she said softly, and from the way she said it, he could tell that she meant it, at least a little.
“Of course he was fucking good,” Vladimir said. His words came out thick. He needed the doorjamb to stand. “He tell you about America?”
“You told me about America,” she said, but Vladimir went on. His eyes stretched past them, past Lana who was wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, past the smoking stove and Sylvester Stallone and the walls and wind.
“He’s gonna be a fucking mobster. You think this is big-time?” he said, swooping his cigarette through the air in a gesture that could have meant the room, the Tower, or the whole of Russia. “Selling teenths and handling a whore or two? Ilya. Ilya’s gonna go to America. There are Russians galore there, managing shit. Then he’s gonna—”
“Come back and run this whole machine.” Lana and Aksinya said it just as Vladimir did, and Vladimir pointed at them.
“Exactly,” he said. A long tail of ash dropped off his cigarette. Ilya stared at Vladimir. He’d said this—all this gangster America shit—before. He’d said it enough for Lana and Aksinya to memorize it. It was ridiculous, of course, but still this sweet sort of warmth grew in Ilya’s belly.
Ilya reached for Vladimir’s cigarette and took a puff. “You and me. We’ll run shit,” he said.
Lana looked over at him, as though he’d only just now come into focus, or just now slid out of it. She licked at her lips, and he could feel them, damp and pillowy against his own. “Why the fuck would you come back?” she said.
“He comes back,” Vladimir yelled, “for his brother!”
“Enough already,” Aksinya said.
“Are you getting antsy?” Vladimir said. He hooked a finger through one of Aksinya’s belt loops, pulled her close, and looked over her head to Ilya.
“Ilyusha, I think the ladies are ready for the next phase of the evening.”
They all sat on the blankets, and so Ilya did the same. Vladimir pulled his pencil case out of his backpack, and then, out of the case, came their mother’s silver spoon. Vladimir’s eyes met Ilya’s for a second, and then Vladimir stuck the spoon in his mouth, smiled around it, and dug a vial and a bottle of what looked like eye drops from the case.
After the robbery, Timofey had gone to the two pawnshops in town and found Dedushka’s medals and their mother’s rings and the samovar, and he had presented them to Babushka as though they were precious samizdat, The Gulag Archipelago or The White Book hand copied, and Babushka had acted as though it were the loss of the things that had broken her heart, as though it could be mended by their return. Timofey hadn’t been able to find the vouchers or the spoon, and Ilya hadn’t ever told him about the Michael & Stephanie tapes or the player. As Vladimir shook a mound of powder into the spoon’s dip, Ilya wondered whether he’d sold them too, whether some other kid was listening to Michael and Stephanie right at that moment. Vladimir squeezed a few drops from the bottle on top of the powder and the powder let out a weak hiss as it turned liquid. Aksinya was sitting next to him, and she held a lighter under the spoon. She and Lana and Vladimir all watched the liquid, and Ilya watched them and wondered whether their concentration had ever been so complete. Their faces looked like the faces of the men who’d first made fire and had stared at it with a hunger and happiness they couldn’t hide.
Lana went first, and when Vladimir filled the needle and held it over her arm, Ilya closed his eyes and thought of blank paper, just as he did before vaccines and after nightmares.
“There,” Vladimir said. Ilya opened his eyes and watched Lana’s shut. Looking at her felt like a violation. Her mouth went ajar and he could see her tongue perched there on her teeth, as though she were about to speak. Vladimir slipped the needle out of her arm, wiped the tip on his jeans, and turned to Aksinya. Aksinya had pulled a hair elastic up her arm and was doing hand curls and squeezing her fist.
“Gotova,” she said. She straightened her arm. There was a vein, fat and gray as a grub, at her elbow, and Vladimir poked the needle into it without a bit of hesitation.
“You always get the ladies high first,” he said. “Common courtesy.”
Aksinya sighed and slumped back so that one of her arms was pressed against Ilya’s. Somewhere in the depths of the Tower he heard a boy yell, “Marco!” It echoed, and then a girl called back, “Polo!”
“You ready for this?” Vladimir said. Vladimir was sucking the last of the liquid into the syringe. Ilya was terrified. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but the girls seemed to be unconscious or close to it—Lana was making a sort of purring sound—and they had presumably done it before. He thought of the rumors at school. How you could die from one hit, how it turned your skin to scales. But Vladimir is here, he thought. Vladimir will take care of me
. Ilya pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Vladimir was tapping the syringe.
“Ready,” Ilya said.
Vladimir looked at him. “Are you fucking kidding me, Ilyusha? Finish the vodka, but none of this. OK? This is not for you.”
It was a relief; it was embarrassing. Ilya’s arm was still outstretched, and so he grabbed the bottle and took as big a swallow as he could manage.
“It’s krokodil?”
Vladimir nodded. He was tying himself off with a bandana, his teeth on one end, and Ilya thought—too late—that he should have offered to help. “We don’t really call it that, though. We don’t really call it anything.” There was a warmth to his voice. It was a tone he only used with Ilya, when he told Ilya things about the world, about women, about music, about how to act. He would make a good teacher, Ilya realized, though of course that would never happen.
“What does it make you feel like?”
Vladimir laughed. He ran a finger down the length of his arm, where there was a bruise that stretched from his bicep to his forearm. Ilya couldn’t see any of his veins, but Vladimir stuck the needle in anyhow.
“It’s funny,” he said. He was moving the syringe around, fishing in his flesh for a vein. “Mostly it makes me remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Stuff,” Vladimir said. He pushed the plunger down. “Do you remember the time Papa took us to Leshukonskoye?”
Ilya shook his head, though there was something about it that rang a bell.
“You were little, I guess. I don’t know—four or five, maybe. We were supposed to go visit a friend of his, but there was something wrong with the Lada. It was guzzling petrol, making this thumping sound, and Papa kept joking that he’d kidnapped Stalin and stashed him in the trunk. It took us forever, even to just get to the end of Ulitsa Lenina. We had to stop at every petrol station along the way for gas and to see if there was a mechanic in. Papa would get a beer at each, and so then we were stopping for him to piss every half hour.”
Lights All Night Long Page 18