Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Why?”

“Because I drink.” (This was the understatement of the year; Boris drank beer the way other kids drank Pepsi, starting pretty much the instant we came home from school.)

“But who cares?” I said. “Why does anybody have to know?”

He made an impatient noise. “Because is wrong to profess faith if I don’t observe properly. Disrespectful to Islam.”

“Still. ‘Boris of Arabia.’ It has a ring.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, seriously,” I said, laughing, raising up on my elbows. “Did you really believe in all that?”

“All what?”

“You know. Allah and Muhammad. ‘There is no God but God’—?”

“No,” he said, a bit angrily, “my Islam was a political thing.”

“What, you mean like the shoe bomber?”

He snorted with laughter. “Fuck, no. Besides, Islam doesn’t teach violence.”

“Then what?”

He came up off the merry-go-round, alert gaze: “What do you mean, what? What are you trying to say?”

“Back off! I’m asking a question.”

“Which is—?”

“If you converted to it and all, then what did you believe?”

He fell back and chortled as if I’d let him off the hook. “Believe? Ha! I don’t believe in any thing.”

“What? You mean now?”

“I mean never. Well—the Virgin Mary, a little. But Allah and God…? not so much.”

“Then why the hell did you want to be Muslim?”

“Because—” he held out his hands, as he did sometimes when he was at a loss—“such wonderful people, they were all so friendly to me!”

“That’s a start.”

“Well, it was, really. They gave me an Arabic name—Badr al-Dine. Badr is moon, it means something like moon of faithfulness, but they said, ‘Boris, you are badr because you light everywhere, being Muslim now, lighting the world with your religion, you shine wherever you go.’ I loved it, being Badr. Also, the mosque was brilliant. Falling-down palace—stars shining through at night—birds in the roof. An old Javanese man taught us the Koran. And they fed me too, and were kind, and made sure I was clean and had clean clothes. Sometimes I fell asleep on my prayer rug. And at salah, near dawn, when the birds woke up, always the sound of wings beating!”

Though his Australo-Ukrainian accent was certainly very odd, he was almost as fluent in English as I was; and considering what a short time he’d lived in America he was reasonably conversant in amerikanskii ways. He was always poring through his torn-up pocket dictionary (his name scrawled in Cyrillic on the front, with the English carefully lettered beneath: BORYS VOLODYMYROVYCH PAVLIKOVSKY) and I was always finding old 7-Eleven napkins and bits of scratch paper with lists of words and terms he’d made:

bridle and domesticate

celerity

trattoria

wise guy = Kpymo a aH

propinquity

Dereliction of duty.

When his dictionary failed him, he consulted me. “What is Sophomore?” he asked me, scanning the bulletin board in the halls at school. “Home Ec? Poly Sci?” (pronounced, by him, as “politzei”). He had never heard of most of the food in the cafeteria lunch: fajitas, falafel, turkey tetrazzini. Though he knew a lot about movies and music, he was decades behind the times; he didn’t have a clue about sports or games or television, and—apart from a few big European brands like Mercedes and BMW—couldn’t tell one car from another. American money confused him, and sometimes too American geography: in what province was California located? Could I tell him which city was the capital of New England?

But he was used to being on his own. Cheerfully he got himself up for school, hitched his own rides, signed his own report cards, shoplifted his own food and school supplies. Once every week or so we walked miles out of our way in the suffocating heat, shaded beneath umbrellas like Indonesian tribesmen, to catch the poky local bus called the CAT, which as far as I could tell no one rode out our way except drunks, people too poor to have a car, and kids. It ran infrequently, and if we missed it we had to stand around for a while waiting for the next bus, but among its stops was a shopping plaza with a chilly, gleaming, understaffed supermarket where Boris stole steaks for us, butter, boxes of tea, cucumbers (a great delicacy for him), packages of bacon—even cough syrup once, when I had a cold—slipping them in the cutaway lining of his ugly gray raincoat (a man’s coat, much too big for him, with drooping shoulders and a grim Eastern Bloc look about it, a suggestion of food rationing and Soviet-era factories, industrial complexes in Lviv or Odessa). As he wandered around I stood lookout at the head of the aisle, so shaky with nerves I sometimes worried I would black out—but soon I was filling my own pockets with apples and chocolate (other favored food items of Boris’s) before walking up brazenly to the counter to buy bread and milk and other items too big to steal.

Back in New York, when I was eleven or so, my mother had signed me up for a Kids in the Kitchen class at my day camp, where I’d learned to cook a few simple meals: hamburgers, grilled cheese (which I’d sometimes made for my mother on nights she worked late), and what Boris called “egg and toasts.” Boris, who sat on the countertop kicking the cabinets with his heels and talking to me while I cooked, did the washing-up. In the Ukraine, he told me, he’d sometimes picked pockets for money to eat. “Got chased, once or twice,” he said. “Never caught, though.”

“Maybe we should go down to the Strip sometime,” I said. We were standing at the kitchen counter at my house with knives and forks, eating our steaks straight from the frying pan. “If we were going to do it, that’d be the place. I never saw so many drunk people and they’re all from out of town.”

He stopped chewing; he looked shocked. “And why should we? When so easy to steal here, from so big stores!”

“Just saying.” My money from the doormen—which Boris and I spent a few dollars at a time, in vending machines and at the 7-Eleven near school that Boris called “the magazine”—would hold out a while, but not forever.

“Ha! And what will I do if you are arrested, Potter?” he said, dropping a fat piece of steak down to the dog, whom he had taught to dance on his hind legs. “Who will cook the dinner? And who will look after Snaps here?” Xandra’s dog Popper he’d taken to calling ‘Amyl’ and ‘Nitrate’ and ‘Popchik’ and ‘Snaps’—anything but his real name. I’d started bringing him in even though I wasn’t supposed to because I was so tired of him always straining at the end of his chain trying to look in at the glass door and yapping his head off. But inside he was surprisingly quiet; starved for attention, he stuck close to us wherever we went, trotting anxiously at our heels, upstairs and down, curling up to sleep on the rug while Boris and I read and quarrelled and listened to music up in my room.

“Seriously, Boris,” I said, pushing the hair from my eyes (I was badly in need of a haircut, but didn’t want to spend the money), “I don’t see much difference in stealing wallets and stealing steaks.”

“ Big difference, Potter.” He held his hands apart to show me just how big. “Stealing from working person? And stealing from big rich company that robs the people?”

“Costco doesn’t rob the people. It’s a discount supermarket.”