“You know this guy?” Papa Cam hollered down the basement stairs, and when Ilya came into the den and saw Fetisov’s face, his eyes so big that they seemed to greedily take in the room, he knew. He could picture Fetisov hitting Vladimir on the elevator, the ring slicing Vladimir’s cheek. He could feel the way it had snagged his skin when they’d shaken hands on the stage.
Then the picture shrank and was dispatched to a corner of the screen. A Moscow correspondent, a woman of unclear nationality with bright red curls and a face made fuzzy by makeup, said, “To give you a little background on Fetisov. He’s an oligarch, on the Forbes 500. He’s famous, even in his own set, for his decadence. . . .”
She went on, describing a maelstrom of champagne and caviar and fine art and prostitutes and private jets, all the decadence that Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had imagined as boys, sitting damp-assed in the snow by the refinery fence. Then she paused and touched the mic in her ear, and Ilya saw that she knew now too.
“We’ve just gotten confirmation that Fetisov’s death was likely a murder-suicide,” she said, and she described a note left by Dmitri accusing Fetisov of three murders in Berlozhniki, the “Gulag Murders,” as they were called by the American press for the hour they made the news, though the murders had had nothing at all to do with the gulag.
Online, Ilya found clips from Russia 1 on the story. The network summarized Dmitri’s suicide note in depth. Apparently he had begun to suspect Fetisov because the first two murders coincided with Fetisov’s visits to Berlozhniki, which were rare and brief. When Lana’s body was discovered, the date of her murder coincided with a visit from Fetisov as well, but it wasn’t until Fetisov asked Dmitri to get rid of a witness—Gabe, trudging along the lumber road at just the moment when Fetisov had returned to the grove—that Dmitri was sure of Fetisov’s guilt. And Fetisov had not seemed to care if Dmitri knew. He didn’t need to care, Dmitri explained, because he’d threatened to kill Dmitri’s wife if Dmitri didn’t take care of the witness and find someone else on whom to pin the murders. So the witness had been taken care of.
“Malikov doesn’t explain how he took care of the witness except to say that he didn’t kill anyone,” the newscaster said. “And apparently a local teen was put in prison for the murders.”
The newscaster paused. She was practically panting with excitement or horror. The wrong emotion, whatever it was, and Ilya wanted to throttle her weedy neck, to make her feel, for a moment, as trapped as Vladimir had been, as Dmitri had been. Then she gathered herself and said, “Unfortunately the final lines of the note are redacted. They were a last good-bye addressed to his wife, and she’s chosen to keep them private.”
As the news cycle wore on, Fetisov was linked to a handful of other murders in other refinery towns, to women stabbed in Ukhta and Krasnodar and Orsk. Other women who’d survived him came forward too—a waitress, an escort, a stewardess—to detail the abuses they’d suffered at his hands. The newscaster interviewed one girl with long brown hair and blue eyes, and for a moment Ilya thought it was Aksinya, or maybe her sister, but the newscaster identified her as Irina from Ukhta. Irina said that Fetisov had hired her for a week, and that all he’d wanted to do was to cut her cheeks.
“Why did you let him?” the newscaster asked. A stupid question made insulting by the way she tilted her head as if in commiseration.
The girl did not seem to mind. “He paid me so much,” she said. “It was a bad week, then a good year.”
Vladimir, the “local teen,” was never named, and Ilya worried it wouldn’t be enough, that somehow Vladimir would be allowed to languish in prison, innocent, but a victim of bureaucratic neglect nonetheless. Then his mother called, and for a full minute she cried so hard that she couldn’t get a word out.
“Mama,” he said. “Mama, what is it?”
“They’re letting him go,” she managed. “A lawyer called. After the arraignment, they’re letting him free. We’re going tomorrow—to Syktyvkar—and we’ll stay until he’s out.” She paused, and then she said, “How did you do it?”
Ilya told her about the tape, about calling Maria Mikhailovna. His mother paused, and he could feel her debating whether to tell him something.
“What is it?” he said.
“I saw her,” his mother said. “She was standing on the square, right by the bench where that American used to stand, and for a second I thought that she’d lost her mind, that she was handing out the same pamphlets that he used to. The ones I sent you. I was too afraid to go over to her, but it didn’t matter, because the letter was everywhere. In all the newspaper boxes. At every kiosk. In our mailbox. She taped them to the door of the House of Culture, the police station, every tree on the square.”
“His letter?” Ilya said.
“Yes,” his mother said, and Ilya imagined Maria Mikhailovna finding the letter on her pillow or on the kitchen table or on the chair by the window that had been his. She’d read it once, twice. With a thick marker she’d inked out the lines beginning with Masha, which only he had called her, and then she’d walked across the square to the school. She’d copied the letter on the ancient machine in the teachers’ lounge, the one that was half the size of a car and smelled of burnt oil and that sometimes expelled papers with such force that they took flight in that tiny room. She’d watched each copy slip out of the machine, each one a promise, a hope that what had happened could not be ignored or denied. Each one proof of Vladimir’s innocence.
Ilya was in the kitchen. The Masons were moving around him in the way water moves past an obstacle to which it’s grown familiar, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing, he decided, if they saw him cry.
* * *
—
That night, he asked them if he could give a testimonial.
“Of course,” Mama Jamie said. She’d held him after his mother called, and there was still a damp patch on her shirt from where his face had been pressed against her. “I can call Pastor Kyle and let him know,” she said.
“I want to do it now,” Ilya said. “Here.”
Mama Jamie looked at Papa Cam, and Marilee opened her mouth to explain that this was not how testimonials worked, that they came after the hymns and before the sermons, that it was not even Sunday, but Papa Cam did not give her a chance. He clapped a meaty palm over her mouth and said, “Of course.”
So Ilya stood on the fire skirt, where he’d posed for the picture on the first day of school, and the Masons sat on the couch, close enough that he could have stretched out a leg and touched their knees with his toes.
Sadie smiled at him, and Mama Jamie said, “Remember, you’re telling God, not us.”
Ilya nodded, though he was not telling God, he was telling them.
He started at the very beginning: “I was six years old,” he said, “when I learned my first word of English.” He told them that it was the sort of word you weren’t supposed to say, and then he said it aloud anyway because the whole point of this was admitting the truth. He told them how Vladimir had lifted him up onto the balcony rail and made him shout it out across the courtyard. And even now, a decade later, he still couldn’t say whether it was a moment that he would undo, because everything terrible that had happened to him was rooted in it, but so was everything good.
He told about Maria Mikhailovna, and the books Vladimir had bought him at the shop on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, and of Michael and Stephanie, and the hours and hours he’d spent listening to them, and studying, and the way each hour had seemed to lay a brick in a wall between him and Vladimir. Telling his story, something strange happened. Time folded back, or else it split open. It seemed somehow less linear, so that he remembered yelling from the balcony, his body small enough that Vladimir could hold him with one arm, but in the same moment he could see Lana’s birch grove with its wilting flowers and damp ribbons, and at the school, Maria Mikhailovna looked up, her hand poised above a test with his name on it. In the
square, on his bench, Gabe Thompson cried out in his sleep. Vladimir was behind Ilya, propping him up, his breath hot on the back of Ilya’s shirt, but he was in the Tower too, in that horrible room with the rug over the window and the tapes in their bag in the corner. He and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey, boney and desperate and doomed, dancing like children to some song from the ’80s that no one in America listened to anymore. And Dmitri Malikov was in his patrol car, his face milky in the refinery’s light, as he drove in an endless loop around the town.
It was a horrible story. He could tell from their utter silence, from the way even Marilee and Molly were still, mesmerized by the badness of the things people did to each other and themselves. Still, though, there was something beautiful in the telling of it. Vladimir had told him that krokodil made him remember, that it was like he was present in his memories and like he was holding them at the same time, and it was like that for Ilya now. They were all around him—Vladimir, his mother, Dmitri, Maria Mikhailovna—every version of them, the good and the bad, and he himself felt as though he were gaining dimension, becoming as solid and present as the stone he’d plucked out of the creek, which even in the hot damp of his palm had seemed endlessly cool, like it had a source of energy all its own.
He sped up as he neared the end—the forced confession, Dmitri’s suicide, Fetisov’s guilt, Vladimir’s release. “Vladimir’s not good,” he said. “I know that. There’s plenty he’s done to be ashamed of. And there were so many ways that his plan could have gone wrong. So many ways. When I think of them, I’m so scared that I can’t breathe. But then I remember why he did this—”
Mama Jamie was wiping at her wet cheeks, and Papa Cam was staring at him with an expression of frank wonder.
“So that I could be here.”
This was the end, but somehow it gave him a feeling of vertigo, of running a step too far off a cliff. He thought of Sadie, and her nightly pilgrimage. He thought of Sadie’s mother slumped on that couch. He thought of Vladimir, of his confession and the way that each word had sounded like a wound so that by the end he’d barely been able to talk. Ilya had earned the Masons’ forgiveness—he could see that—but it wasn’t enough.
He cleared his throat. “I know that I don’t have the right to ask you all for anything,” he said. “I don’t deserve to be here, and you know that now—but still I have to ask: let Vladimir come here. Please. Let him come too.”
In the quiet that followed, Ilya could hear the hiss of cars on Route 21. Somewhere far off a siren whined. Sadie was crying silently. This smile shook on her lips, and Ilya smiled back at her.
“Please,” Molly said, as though Ilya had asked for a dog for Christmas and she wanted one too.
Marilee bit her lip and said, “Hmmm. That’s a lot to forgive.”
Next to her, Papa Cam reached for Mama Jamie’s hand. Ilya did not know whether he was asking for permission or giving it until Mama Jamie nodded. “OK,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marilee and Molly made a new sign with Vladimir’s name etched in deliberate letters, only this time Ilya helped them write it in Cyrillic, because, he explained, Vladimir really, truly didn’t speak any English at all. Sadie sat next to him on the ride to the airport, and though she was careful not to touch him, he could feel that she wanted to, and that was enough.
Vladimir had called two days earlier. Ilya and the Masons were just home from Star Pilgrim, where Pastor Kyle had told a whitewashed version of Vladimir’s story after which the collection basket had bobbed down the rows, filling with money to fund his stay. Marilee had been the one to answer the phone, and after a moment she had looked at the receiver with exasperation and said, “I think it’s a wrong number.” She punched the speakerphone button, and Vladimir’s terrible English had flooded the kitchen.
“Hello,” he’d said, over and over, only coming from him the word sounded like “Yellow.”
Ilya grabbed the receiver from Marilee and turned the speaker off just as Mama Jamie realized who it was and ushered the girls out to the deck, hissing something about privacy to Marilee.
“Vlad,” he said.
“You better stop emailing me about this girl and seal the deal. Just once, Ilyusha, think with your dick instead of your brain.”
“You got my emails,” Ilya said.
“Of course I got them. One day in the life of fucking Ilya Denisovich.” His voice was rushed, euphoric. There was no regard in it for the risks he’d taken. It was exactly as Ilya had expected it to be, as Ilya had wanted it to be, but still Ilya had to fight the urge to ask him if he was high. He wanted, so badly, not to ruin the moment.
“Are you home?” he said instead.
“At the Kebab, and Kirill the tight-ass motherfucker is the only one in this whole town not cutting me a deal so I have—I don’t know—a minute left, but I’ll see you soon, bratishka.”
“Wait,” Ilya said, wishing there were a way to keep Vladimir on the phone for the next two days until he saw him in person. “Tell me how you did it. How’d you get him on tape?”
Ilya had wondered this; he’d marveled at the planning it must have entailed for Vladimir to know that Dmitri was coming to the clinic and to record him.
“He came and threatened me,” Vladimir said. “He said he wouldn’t let you go if I didn’t confess to the murders. And the boards—he said you’d have it on your record for life that you’d cheated, that you wouldn’t be able to go to university, get a job. He said he was going to fuck you over so completely, and the whole time he’s talking, I’m thinking, I’m going to fuck you over, you fucker. I’m going to rip you apart. That’s the thing about everyone assuming you’re an idiot—every once in a while it gives you the upper hand.
“So I told Dmitri I needed a couple days to think about it, and then I convinced that nurse to give me a little warning, and two days later, when he comes back, I stuck the tape player under the sheets. Right where my knee should be.”
“But how’d you get the tapes?” Ilya said.
“Aksinya brought them. I’d been listening to them for a while. Like you,” he said, sounding almost bashful at this confession. “I figured if I could just learn a little English then you’d find a way to get me there.”
Someone called Vladimir’s name in the background.
“I’m talking to my brother, asshole!” Vladimir shouted. And then he lowered his voice, so that it was just like it had been when they were little and would whisper in bed even though their mother was at work and Babushka was sleeping and no one was trying to overhear them. “You and me, Hollywood Boulevard, right?” he said, and the call ended.
* * *
—
Ilya and the Masons waited by the arrivals door for fifteen minutes, more even, until the people coming from the gates slowed to a trickle. The security guard stationed by the NO RE-ENTRY sign took out a pen, gave it a cruel click, and began to do a crossword puzzle. An airport employee pushed past him with an old woman in a wheelchair. Something was stuck in one of the wheels, making a ticking sound with each revolution. Surely the old woman was the last passenger, Ilya thought, which meant that Vladimir had missed the flight. He’d found some party in Moscow and had ended up using his tickets as roll papers. Or he’d never left Berlozhniki at all.
Sadie pulled her hair back, twisted it into a bun, and then let it drop again, which was something that she did when she was nervous. She saw him looking at her, saw him see her nervousness, and perhaps to make up for it, she took his hand and squeezed it. Mama Jamie noticed without understanding, and she gave Ilya this small, close-lipped smile. It was a smile meant to temper expectations, and it made Ilya’s chest hurt.
“Maybe he missed it,” he said, just as a figure appeared at the end of the corridor. He was silhouetted by a bank of windows, and far enough away that Ilya couldn’t be sure. His first day in America he had conjured Vladimir in the back of
the Masons’ car, and he thought he might be doing it again. The loose-jointed walk. The laces of his boots dragging on the carpet. How slowly he moved! Had always moved, as though he had nowhere in the world to be. And often he didn’t. He was meters from them now, but Ilya was afraid to look at his face, afraid it might disappear under scrutiny.
Papa Cam said, “Is that him?”
Marilee and Molly raised their arms over their heads, locked their elbows, and held the sign high.
The figure seemed to hesitate there, by the NO RE-ENTRY sign, by the chubby guard and his crossword puzzle. His face was bland and friendly. His eyes bovine in their lack of guile. He looked at Ilya with a mild disinterest that felt like a kick in the gut. And, of course, he had two legs, and Vladimir had only one.
“No,” Ilya said.
Papa Cam and Mama Jamie left Ilya and the girls, and went to have Vladimir paged. That same terrible Russian blared through the bathroom’s empty stalls, each of which Ilya checked and rechecked, hoping that somehow he had missed Vladimir, that he might be lost, hiding, as scared or hesitant as Ilya had been two months earlier. They got pretzels from the vending machine, took over a bank of chairs, and waited until the next flight from Atlanta had arrived and departed, until the security guard had finished his puzzle, and then his shift, and finally Papa Cam said, “Let’s go, troops. We can always come back tomorrow.”
There was a message waiting on the Masons’ machine, and as soon as Ilya saw the flashing light, he knew what it would say. Or maybe he’d known sooner, when that other boy, that American boy, with his two perfect legs, had walked past them, and then out the door to the curb, where he’d stood and blinked in the light.
Ilya’s mother’s voice was detached, formal, as though the Masons might be able to understand her. Vladimir had gone to Aksinya’s on his last night to say good-bye, only he hadn’t come home in the morning. He’d taken krokodil again. They both had, and Aksinya had woken up with his arm around her, and his mother said that she had lain that way for minutes, because she hadn’t been so completely happy in a long time, and then Vladimir’s arm began to take on a strange weight, and he wouldn’t answer when she said his name.
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