The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  Thirty miles later, thirty miles farther away from yesterday morning, when I hadn’t yet thrown my life away and ruined his parents’: “Miss Hull, do you have any CDs?”

  “My car only plays tapes. But I don’t have either.”

  Ian stuck his finger in the tape flap, then pulled it out and pressed eject. A tape popped out, one I’d never seen before.

  “It’s not mine,” I said.

  I realized that I actually hadn’t used the tape deck since I’d bought the car two years before. I listened to NPR on my way to work and needed silence to navigate traffic on the way home. I’d bought the car from a guy in Kenton who handed it over caked in McDonald’s wrappers and golf tees and cigarette butts.

  “Maybe it’s karaoke!” He pushed the tape back in and pressed Rewind. The player churned backward, and I was momentarily surprised that it was capable of this.

  “AND NOW!” screamed the tape. Ian lunged and turned down the volume. “Our national anthem, as sung by. . . . Miss Gina Arena!” A stadium-sized crowd made happy noises, like they knew who she was. Ian suddenly popped upright in the seat, pulled off his baseball cap, and slapped it over his heart.

  “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free,” sang a woman’s voice, ringing and angelic. Behind her, the crowd sang along.

  “What is this?” Ian kept his hat hovering above his breastbone, unsure of the protocol.

  “We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea!”

  “That would be the national anthem of Australia.” I hadn’t even noticed the announcer’s accent, I was so focused on the road, on the million images of doom flashing across the windshield. “Our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare! In history’s page let every stage advance Australia fair!” We both laughed through the rest of the song, but Ian never put his hat down. When the song finished and some ancient World Cup game started, he rewound it.

  “Let’s learn it!” he said, and so we spent the next hour singing along and trying to understand all the words. We got pretty good, and when we tried without the tape we weren’t perfect, but “we had gusto!” as Ian put it.

  Watching him with his hat on his heart, singing the anthem of another country, I imagined an Ian born somewhere else, Finland or San Francisco or one hundred years in the future, in a world without Pastor Bobs. Most of America was like Hannibal, Missouri, no matter what was in the news about East Coast cities, no matter what was in the movies, no matter how many prime-time sitcoms featured spunky gay sidekicks. To be fair, maybe most of the planet was like Hannibal, Missouri.

  To get “Advance Australia Fair” out of our heads, I turned on the radio and flipped around. Ian wasn’t interested in anything until we got to what must have been a Christian station.

  “Turn this up! I love this song!” he said, and started singing along:When Jesus walked oh-oh!

  On the mountain tops oh-oh!

  He didn’t stop no-oh!

  No He didn’t stop!

  It sounded almost like a Seattle band from the nineties, but with Jesus lyrics. “Where did you learn that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I go to this thing. This class, with these kids. It’s okay. And we listen to music, and sometimes this one leader guy brings his guitar.”

  I didn’t want to push the subject, but I thought it would be good for him to talk about it. “What else do you do?”

  “Some stuff. We do, like, workbooks and we read stuff. And then we always play sports. We mostly play football, but it’s not tackle.”

  I looked out my left window so he wouldn’t see me biting my laugh. It was partly the image of Ian playing football. I remembered one Family Fun Day when I tried to toss him a balloon, and he ducked. And it was partly the fact that they wouldn’t let them tackle.

  “Do they teach you things?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of like Sunday school. Only it’s probably more fun, because you can wear jeans.”

  “Is it all good stuff? Do you believe everything they tell you?”

  He pulled down the passenger-side sunshield, and looked in the mirror while he stretched his cheeks back in a fish face. “Well, it’s all from the Bible, so it’s definitely true.”

  Hard to argue with, since I wasn’t about to assail his entire religion. Sadly, my primary motivation for silence was not empathy but strategy—the second he got mad at me, he might decide to use the next phone he saw to turn me in.

  So instead, in my most neutral voice, I said, “I know about that kind of class.” It was an invitation to skip the awkward part of the conversation and tell me more.

  But he didn’t say anything, just sat there looking out the window.

  16

  Head on a Pike

  When Ian did talk again, it was to ask about the Russian flag sticker on my rear window. My father had stuck it there the previous summer, in a sudden fit of national pride. It was around the same time he started asking if I wouldn’t like to change my name back to Hulkinov. He never volunteered to do it himself—too many business contacts would be confused—but for me, he said, it wouldn’t matter.

  My father had a complete narrative for every link in the Hulkinov ancestry, from the scholar-warrior of the notoriously impaled head on down. He wore the family crest on a gold ring, on the pointer finger of his right hand, as only someone European with a portfolio of shady business dealings can.

  “This young fellow,” he would say over the long Saturday breakfasts of my childhood, loosening the ring so it slid down his bent finger like a single brass knuckle, “was a swashbuckler. He took the bulls by their horns. Next Hulkinov is his son, who hides in the wheat fields when the enemy comes for revenge, trying to kill the only son of the great warrior. They think they will find him home, but off he goes to make his fortune, does not come home to roost for twenty-three years. Next Hulkinov, he charges to the battle on his horse, kills forty men in one day. Becomes a favorite of the czar.”

  By the time he got to the Bolshevik revolution I was usually catatonic, but next came the best parts—his father and himself. His father, a man who peered half-starved out of photographs, his face stretched between giant round ears, had weaseled his way into the good graces of Stalin, only to perpetrate against Uncle Joe some unforgivable offense about which my father was always exasperatingly vague. I entertained various theories for years—Had he filched a left-behind Romanov Fabergé egg? Stolen Stalin’s mistress?—before I realized that if it were anything half that interesting, my father the fabulist would long ago have woven it into a cloth of finest hyperbole. It probably had to do with taxation laws or Party infighting. My grandfather, in any event, left his wife and eight-year-old son, took a box of cigars, a bottle of vodka, and a change of clothes, and told them he was off to Siberia before Stalin had the chance to ship him there. That was it, and all through my childhood I fantasized he’d come knocking on the door of our Chicago apartment, snow still crusted to his coat, beard thick with icicles. My father insisted he died only a few years later in Novosibirsk, but I knew better.

  My father’s older brother, Ilya, died trying to cross the border into Romania, but that was all I knew. There was one photograph of my father and his brother, and every time it was shown, my father would say, “This is my brother Ilya, who died crossing the border to Romania.” Period.

  And my father himself, the summer he turned twenty, a week after his underground chocolate company had been discovered by his neighbor, looked out the window of his mother’s house one night to see two men in thin brown coats bent over the back of his car. Ilya had built the car himself from scraps, and he and my father shared it. When my father dared to go outside an hour later, he found a fat potato crammed tight into the tailpipe. Who these men had been, and why they’d tried killing him with vegetables rather than just hauling him away at daybreak like everyone else, I could never quite get straight. In any event, my father removed the potato with kitchen tongs, packed a bag of clothes, kissed his mother’s cigarett
e-wrinkled mouth, and drove to the Volga, where he jumped from the dock to a shipping boat, clung for two minutes to a rope on the boat’s outer wall, and then plunged into the river, breaking his leg on the way. He lost his bag swimming, then filled his belly with air and lay flat like a floating log, letting the current carry him downstream. “I did the dead man’s float to stay alive,” he’d say, relishing the irony. For two hours he floated in the cold August water until two brothers in a little fishing boat pulled him up, waterlogged and half drowned, and laid him to dry on the boat floor like a prize catch. By the time he made it over the border, through Romania and Yugoslavia and into the Italian refugee camp, he’d lost twenty pounds and grown a beard.

  In third grade, when we studied Ellis Island, I imagined him sailing on a steamer past Lady Liberty with a blanket over his shoulders, getting chalked and checked for lice, sleeping in quarantine. I even raised my hand and said it, until Mrs. Herman’s puzzled look cut me short. Really, my father flew into Idlewild in mismatched refugee clothes. It was 1959 and he had yellow pants and a chest-length Rasputin beard and bulging eyes. The way he told it later was that as he gripped the cold railing and stumbled down the airplane steps to the tarmac, the Pan Am ground crew turned from their luggage carts to stare and laugh. Sometimes I wonder if he took that as permission to rip off every American he met, to cast himself as the scholar-warrior and everyone else as the head on the pike. He had very little with him—the clothes from the Italian camp, one hundred American dollars, and his papers—but he did have that ring and its four hundred years of warrior lore.

  In his Saturday litanies he billed the Hulkinovs as a line of adventurers charging bareheaded into battle, but I realized now that half of them were only runaways. And which was I, heading deeper into trouble with every mile I fled from home?

  We stopped at a burger place for lunch, our third fast food meal in two days. Because we were sick of grease, we both ordered anemic little salads in clear boxes, and after Ian bowed his head and sat in silence for about ten seconds, he drowned his iceberg lettuce in ranch dressing. I picked at mine with the plastic fork, not eating much. My God, I was turning into Janet Drake. Ian started recounting for me every shocking injury received by everyone he’d ever known. A girl’s teeth that got stuck in another girl’s forehead, a woman whose nose was bloodied by flying Mardi Gras beads, a classmate who caught his own ear with a fishing hook.

  “How did you get the scars above your eyebrow?” I asked.

  “I went like this.” He stood his plastic fork on end on the table, and pretended to ram his head down onto the prongs. So at least I’d been partly right. “I was mad at myself, I think. I forget.”

  It did sound like something he’d do, inflicting pain on himself for sheer dramatic impact. I believed him. But I realized now that the only vague evidence I’d had of any kind of physical abuse had just vanished. Ian popped a little tomato in his mouth and swallowed it whole.

  Back in the car, I checked my messages. Still nothing from the library, which was starting to seem a little eerie, but one from Glenn saying “We need to talk about the weekend.” We had been planning on Mexican and Blockbuster that Friday. When Ian fell asleep, his forehead on the window and his glasses in his lap, I called Glenn back. “Hey, I’m calling from the road,” I said. There was no point pretending I was still in Hannibal—for one thing, he might show up again at the library. “I’m actually on my way to Chicago.”

  “Chicago?”

  “I didn’t tell you?” I said. “I was sure I told you. I have this old friend from high school who’s been sick, and I was planning to come up just for a couple days, but it looks like it might be longer.”

  “Chicago,” he said. “That’s so funny.” His tone was odd, as if he didn’t believe me. I wondered, briefly, if the police were listening in. He might be sitting in a detective’s office, sweating all over the table, trying to sound calm, hoping to keep me on the line as long as he could. But of course he wasn’t. This wasn’t a movie. Things didn’t work that fast in Hannibal.

  “Yeah. I’m staying with my parents.”

  We couldn’t stay any longer than the one night, though—even if Glenn wasn’t bugged now, the more time that passed the more likelihood there was of people reading the papers and pooling information. As soon as they suspected me, Glenn and Rocky would tell them where to look.

  “Hey, is your friend okay?”

  By friend, I thought he meant Ian. I recovered in time. “She will be, I’m sure. I’m just helping out a little.”

  “Just don’t donate any major organs, okay? That’s not what you’re doing, is it?”

  I laughed. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get back. When I get back.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  I was becoming a fabulous liar. I’d always excelled at embellishment, white lies, covers for unfinished homework, but I hadn’t had practice with something so serious, so consequential. And I wasn’t even sweating. I lifted my hands off the wheel to check. Not a drop of moisture. It was like I’d been born to the outlaw life. If I lost my library job, I could go pro.

  Submitted for the record, the entire history of my criminal career, up to that point in time:Age 4: Standing in line at the post office with my mother, I have a lollipop from the bank drive-thru. The boy behind me is maybe three, and I see him staring at my lollipop, on the verge of tears. I turn so he can see it better, and I take a huge, purple-tongued lick. He begins to scream, and his mother can’t figure out why. I’m the only one who knows. It’s the first deliberately cruel thing I remember doing. It might also be the model for all my future relationships with men, but this is beside the point.

  Age 5: My father begins sending me into the halls of our apartment building to steal various things left by the doorman outside our neighbors’ doors. Dry cleaning, UPS boxes, even milk in glass bottles that a family downstairs has delivered from a farm in Wisconsin as late as 1986. Note that we are far from poor. My father later says that he simply couldn’t help himself: in Russia, if someone had been so foolish as to leave unguarded milk outside the door, you would take it and then brag about it all over town, letting everyone at the bar laugh at the people who thought they were so rich they could leave their milk on the stoop. At the time, he simply tells me these are things our neighbors don’t want anymore, so they’ve put them in the hall for someone to take. He tries on the freshly pressed oxford shirts and sends me back with the ones that don’t fit, to hang back over the doorknobs in their plastic shrouds.

  Age 8: My father fills my coat pockets with nine little jars of caviar at Dominick’s. This I know is stealing, but I am too busy pretending I am a mother fish to care. I am a fish, and these are the millions of tiny eggs I’m carrying upstream.

  Age 15: I cheat on my sophomore Advanced Algebra final. It’s surprisingly easy, and no one finds out. I expect to feel guilty but don’t.

  Ages 17 through 20: Significant but unextraordinary underage drinking, etc. Nothing a presidential candidate would even bother denying.

  Ages 23-26: Theft from Hannibal Public Library of over one hundred books I deemed inferior, one stapler, one ten-year-old child, and several reams of computer paper.

  I reflected now that aside from the drinking, all these things involved stealing on some level—math answers, caviar, lightly starched shirts. Even the lollipop incident had felt like a kind of theft, like I was reaching out and grabbing that little boy right by his sucker-craving eyes. Perhaps we’re all hardwired for our crimes. Liars are always liars and thieves are always thieves, and killers are born violent. The form our sins take just depends on circumstance: how far we sink in the world, how badly we’re raised. Who walks into our little library and upsets the universe.

  17

  Debussy’s Horns

  After we fueled up and bought chocolate to stay awake, we were completely out of cash. “Count the change,” I said, and handed Ian my Tupperware of coins. He poured it all onto his lap and started building little s
tacks.

  “Guess how many dollars we have,” he said finally.

  “About two.”

  “No, one. Plus twenty cents. But you could also say that we have one to the millionth power. Then you could say we’re millionaires.”

  Time passed more quickly that afternoon with a specific destination in mind, and the scenery certainly improved as we passed through the Chicago suburbs. My parents live on Lake Shore Drive, in an apartment worth more than I’d make in fifty years. I don’t tend to tell people this. And I certainly don’t take my parents’ money, partly because I’m sure my father made most of it illegally, not on real estate. The Russian Mafia in Chicago is bigger than you’d think.

  I doubt my father has ever hurt anyone, not physically, but he does some funny things with numbers. Zeros are conjured out of thin air, decimal points moved, entire bank accounts erased or invented. His friend the travel agent went to jail in the eighties for printing false ticket receipts for his friends. His friend the restaurant owner vanished forever a few years back.