Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

When his mother was at work, Ilya sassed Babushka instead. Babushka who, it seemed, could never keep her fingers still, could never just do nothing. Babushka who saw portent in everything, who, one day, when she was making gogol-mogol, cracked open an egg and saw that it was yolkless.

“It could be good,” she said. “Or it could be very bad.”

“So it could be anything,” Ilya said, without looking up from his book. He was reviewing advanced algebra because a quadratic equation had been the only thing to trip him up on his last practice test.

“No yolk.” Babushka thrust the bowl under his nose, and he looked down at the egg white. It was perfectly clear except for a few milky particles. “Maybe he’ll come home.”

“I doubt it,” Ilya said. His voice came out sour, exactly as he’d wanted it to.

“You don’t miss your brother?” she said, and when Ilya shrugged, she said, “Maybe you’re missing your yolk.”

That winter, his mind was like a fire heap, doused and fumy with gasoline. He lived for any insult, any slight or spark. He slammed his book shut so that the table wobbled and his chair wobbled and the egg white wobbled in its bowl. His coat and scarf and hat were bundled on the couch, still thawing from his walk home from school, and he grabbed them, shoved his feet into his boots and stomped out of the apartment. Halfway down the endless stairs, he paused. He had nowhere to go. Five flights above him, three below. It was freezing. Here, and everywhere else in Berlozhniki. He’d forgotten his mittens, and his fingers were already tingling, halfway to numb. His breath stung with the cold. He’d have to be gone for an hour at least. If he went home any sooner, Babushka’s smugness would be unbearable. He’d skip dinner. He’d stay silent for the rest of the night. Maybe he’d stay silent through the winter, through the summer, until he said good-bye and left for America.

He was on the korichnevy floor, the brown floor, the worst floor, and it smelled of onions and cat piss. Every time Ilya climbed past this floor, babies were wailing and women were yelling and men were slamming doors—it had the general feel of humanity at war—but the long hallway was silent now. Across from Ilya, a door opened. A dumpy woman emerged from the bathroom in a robe with damp spots in terrible places.

“What are you lurking around for? Thought you’d sneak a peek?” She said it like she wouldn’t mind if he had snuck a peek, and he was terrified that she might whip open her robe and make him look at her.

“I wasn’t,” he said. According to Vladimir, middle-aged women—especially ugly ones—could be aggressive. “But you could do worse,” Vladimir had told him once, “if you’re in need of an education.”

“Which floor is… ” He stalled.

She rolled her eyes, and her mouth stiffened with impatience. “All your life you’ve been living here and you don’t know the floors. I thought you were the big brain.”

Ilya backed away from her and ran down the stairs.

“Seems like your brain’s shrinking!” she yelled after him.

He tucked his hands up inside his jacket sleeves and walked fast to the Internet Kebab on the square, where Vladimir had shown him his first porno over a stuttering, stalling connection. All those pauses, the endless buffering had been both painful and delicious.

“It’s tantric porn,” Vladimir had said. “A Berlozhniki special.”

Ilya gave Kirill, the horny Chechen who ran the place, thirty kopeks. He wanted to see if he could find out a little more about his host family, or the town at least, which Maria Mikhailovna had told him was in the south, in the state of Louisiana. First he had to wait for the homepage—the Vecherniye Berlozhniki —to load, and as it did, he felt Kirill hovering behind him.

By the time a third of the page had loaded, Ilya recognized the picture on the screen. It was Olga Nadiova. Everyone in Berlozhniki knew her. When she was little, she’d been an ice-skating phenomenon. She’d gone to an athletics compound in Sochi at seven. She’d been an Olympic hopeful. For years her likeness had been carved in ice at the Winter Festival. She was put on a pedestal right next to Father Frost and Yeltsin. She’d been headed for the Goodwill Games, but then at twelve, in the second spin of a triple jump, she’d sliced through her Achilles tendon with the toe pick of her other skate, and that was it. She moved back to Berlozhniki. She taught skating at the rink, started drinking, and gave impassioned, nonsensical speeches at the House of Culture, and now here she was on the screen, a child again, in full skating regalia. The headline said she was dead. She’d been murdered two nights earlier. Stabbed, just as Yulia Podtochina had been.

“Fuck me,” Kirill said, and Ilya knew it wasn’t out of sympathy. Olga Nadiova had split her salary between booze and the Kebab. Ilya had seen her here, plenty of times, watching videos of her best performances.

Panic set in after Olga’s murder, and it became hard to separate facts from rumors, to untangle the truth from the articles that ran in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki— which, after all, was edited by the mayor’s brother. The Vecherniye didn’t bring up any connection between Olga’s and Yulia’s deaths. Instead, it printed picture after picture of Olga in her red and yellow spangles, ice spraying off her skates. Olga midair, midaxel. The Pride of Berlozhniki, they called her, and they dredged up details of her skating career, her eleven medals in the Russian Youth Olympiads, her tragic injury. The articles always closed with a brief line about how her body had been found: “at 4 a.m. by a vagrant next to one of the trash bins behind the bazaar,” and there was an accusation implicit in this description that wasn’t lost on anyone. The trash bins. The vagrant. What had she been doing behind the bazaar at four a.m.? Nothing good.

Olga’s parents lived in the kommunalkas, across the courtyard from Ilya’s flat, and everyone brought candles and visited them, everyone listened to them insist that Olga had not done drugs—she had been a drinker, yes, of course, but never drugs —just as everyone had listened to them brag when Olga left Berlozhniki for the athletics compound in 1987. Olga’s parents said that she had been stabbed, just like Yulia. They had seen her body in the morgue and said that each cheek had been slashed, just like Yulia’s. They said that Olga had managed to call her mother while she was dying, but that her mother had been asleep and hadn’t answered. The message was nothing but static broken by two thumps. They said that she had been about to turn her life around.

Late at night, people gathered in the kitchens, poured shots of vodka, and talked about the details. Some said that Yulia and Olga had the same number of stab wounds. Some said that the killer had taken each of their ring fingers. Some said that both had been raped and others said that neither had been. There was talk of a serial killer, and a few even speculated about his identity: Anton Solomin, who’d been caught masturbating outside the school a decade earlier; Maxim Grinkov, who never made eye contact; Roman Rochev, who had come back from Chechnya with this shattered look in his eye, who could no longer even manage to lift a hand and say, “Privyet.”

Police cars appeared, sharking around the kommunalkas and the square. They trolled up and down the refinery road, where Yulia’s body had been found. Occasionally, walking home from school, Ilya saw Dmitri in his patrol car, his eyes scanning the horizon like he might happen upon a murder-in-progress, and if Dmitri saw Ilya, he would lift a hand and smile so heartily that it was easy to forget the few minutes Ilya had spent in his car.