Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Yes, it’s allowed,” Ilya said, gently. In theory he understood her awe, but it still seemed misplaced. The miracle wasn’t that someone was allowed to go to America, but that he had been chosen. “I dreamt of flying there,” he said, because a piece of the dream had come back to him. He’d been up in a plane, and the stewardesses’ faces all came straight out of Michael & Stephanie . They were a rainbow of races, but somehow identical, just like Stephanie’s friends, and they had taken turns offering him sodas and blankets and bonbons with the simple diction of the Level I tapes.

“Listen,” she said, “you’re smart—I know that, that you’re smart and that you work hard—but you’re lucky too. There aren’t places for everyone in this world.”

He knew what she meant, knew that she was thinking of Vladimir, who had left before Maria Mikhailovna, while the windstorm was still raging outside. Ilya winced at the thought. Worry seeped into his brain, and then annoyance, at the way his happiness always had to be alloyed by Vladimir.

He was still dressed in a half-dozen layers from the night before, and all of a sudden he felt clammy, suffocated. His tongue thick and furred in his mouth. He needed to wash his face and piss before Marina Kabayeva began her endless ablutions in the bathroom. He needed to get to school, to see Maria Mikhailovna and have the reality of it all confirmed, but he could see that Babushka hadn’t gotten across whatever point she’d intended, or that, if she had, it hadn’t had the desired impact.

“Babulya,” he said, “what if I could go to university there? Get a job there. Bring you all over.”

“Sure, with your grandfather haunting me the whole way.” The pot of wax began to make wet, popping sounds on the stove.

“Go on,” Babushka said. “You can’t start being late now.”

Ilya washed, dressed, and was out the door faster than he’d ever been before. The stairwell seemed strangely silent without the wind. The air was thin and too easy to move through. Outside, the storm had raked the snow, made hard ridges like ribs on its surface. On the road that ringed the kommunalkas, an old fir tree had split in two. It had been there for all of Ilya’s life, and now its insides were exposed, a yellow so bright in all that white that it was unseemly, as though someone had dragged a highlighter across a blank page. The storm had rearranged the playground at the primary school. Snow splashed up the slide. The seesaw had been ripped off its mooring and flung into the parking lot and the swings were so twisted and tangled that they dangled out of reach.

Ilya took it all in with a new, distant sense of wonder. This world wouldn’t be his for long, he thought, and another piece of his dream came to him: the plane had landed, and it was only when the stewardesses paraded down the aisle and up the gangway that Ilya had noticed that he was the only passenger. In the dream, this seemed natural to him, a source of pride even, like he was Fyodor Fetisov and the plane was his own private jet. He didn’t have any bags, and he walked past row after row of empty seats toward the cockpit, which was empty too. The cockpit door was open, and Ilya could see panels of buttons and screens and the windshield, which was lit up by the shine of the American sun. For a second he’d basked in its glow, but then he’d heard a voice calling him from back down the aisle. And in one of those rare moments when your dream self listens to your rational self, he’d ignored the voice. It was speaking Russian, and he’d told himself he didn’t understand it. He’d studied the glint of sunlight against glass and walked off the plane.

“What’s wrong?” This voice was real and came from close enough to startle. It was Lana. She was in a miniskirt and heels. The girls all wore things like this despite the weather, as though their vanity were insulation enough, but Lana was visibly cold. Goosebumps brailled her thighs, and her cheeks were grayish-blue.

“Nothing. Actually I’m good,” Ilya said. He wanted to tell her the news about America, but Maria Mikhailovna had asked them all to wait until after he’d taken the boards and the exchange was officially announced at the Winter Festival in March.

“Good for you,” she said, her eyebrows pulling together like he’d said something unseemly. “Did Vlad walk you?”

He shook his head. There was a clump of what looked like eyelashes stuck to one of her cheeks. This was mysterious and slightly repulsive, one of those things about girls that Ilya filed in his mind for later exploration. She dug in her purse for a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“So he’s not in there?” She arched her neck in the direction of School #17. The wind had blown snow against the building, covering the front steps and the first-floor windows entirely. Ilya could already feel what the light would be like inside, the bottled-up, pinkish cast it took on when the snow was this high. It was late—three minutes until the first bell—and the stragglers were picking their way through narrow paths dug out of the snowbanks.

Ilya shook his head again.

“What about Sergey?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Ilya said. “Are you going?”

“I doubt it,” Lana said. She ran a finger over her lips, as though she were thinking of kissing him or remembering kissing someone else.

“How do you say ‘I love you’ in English?” she said.

Ilya blushed. He wondered if somehow America had already seeped into his appearance and altered his aspect, whether it had made him noticeable to girls, lovable even.

“I love you,” he said, in English.

“I love you,” she said, sounding out the phrase with such unabashed awkwardness that he knew it was not meant for him. “Is that right?”

He nodded. “I’m gonna be late,” he said, just as Sergey loped up.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Sergey said.

Sergey was squat and meaty, his face perpetually sullen until something made him laugh and his cheeks dipped into folds like a puppy’s. Ilya used to be comfortable with him, but they’d lost that ease recently. Or maybe it wasn’t recent. Maybe it had been months since Ilya had seen Sergey laugh.

“Sure,” Lana said, and then, to Ilya, “You better get in there.” She took another drag of her cigarette, dropped it into the snow, and wobbled off with Sergey, her heels sliding and clacking on the icy sidewalk.

In preparation for the boards, Maria Mikhailovna began tutoring Ilya after school and during lunch. She had the same lunch every day—a row of sprats in a tin—and afterward her lips were shiny with oil and her breath smelled like Ilya imagined the ocean might. Everything she said came with this tiny puff of salt. Ilya was trying to master the defective verbs, the ones that did not have a past tense, and he found himself conjugating all the time: as he walked through the halls at School #17, as he brushed his teeth in the communal bathroom. I can. I could. I must. I should . He’d spit toothpaste into the sink and in the hallway someone would yell for him to hurry up, and he’d realize that his gums were bloody from brushing so long.

Vladimir had not been home since the night Maria Mikhailovna announced the exchange. Ilya was rarely home himself. Between school and tutoring, it was dark when he arrived at school and dark when he came home, and it was easy not to think of Vladimir as gone. His absence wasn’t anything so dramatic. Plus, Ilya saw him around: sitting on a bench at the old bus stop with Aksinya straddling him, her butt pushing at the seams of her jeans; in the passenger seat of a car, sputtering off the square; smoking outside Dolls. Ilya didn’t hesitate in these moments. He’d raise a hand, yell Vladimir’s name, and Vladimir would wave back, would yell from the window of a car, “I’ll swing by tomorrow,” only he never did, and as weeks passed this tiny distance between them grew. Ilya would never have imagined it possible, but there it was, and the next time he saw Vladimir through the glass at the Minutka, he did hesitate, and instead of stopping, he walked a little faster until he’d rounded the corner toward home.