Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Ilya hadn’t seen Lana in months, not since the morning he’d run into her and Sergey outside the school. Lana with the pink hair, who wasn’t as pretty as Aksinya, but wasn’t as brittle either. Lana bit her nails sometimes. Sometimes Lana didn’t know what to say. “On board with what?”

Vladimir turned to Ilya. “Congratulations, tovarishch. This is a big night for you.”

Aksinya cackled.

“A big night?” Ilya said, wondering if it was a coincidence that the boards were the next day, whether this big night was Vladimir’s way of forgiving him for America, and at the thought, Ilya felt himself forgive Vladimir everything: his jealousy, his absence, the robbery. Everything.

Aksinya slowed, parked on the side of the road and looked back at him. “What’s that?” she said.

Ilya looked down and realized that he was still clutching the packet of pelmeni from Maria Mikhailovna.

“Pelmeni,” he said.

“Perfect. We don’t have anything for dinner,” she said, and she took the pelmeni from him and handed him the vodka bottle.

The Tower was a square, concrete building not any different in shape from the kommunalkas or the school or the old office buildings that framed the arbat. Each floor was a string of a dozen rooms. A few had rusted stoves and cots with sagging springs. Other rooms were totally bare: four walls, a drain in the center of the floor, and the feel of a cell. On the roof there was a crow’s nest, where the guards had stood, eyes narrowed, scanning the horizon for escapees. When they were young, in the summer, Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey would come out to the Tower, pry loose tiles from the showers, pitch them off the roof, and watch them shatter on the ground.

Once, when they were crossing the field that had been the prison yard, a woman had flagged them down. She was in nice clothes, city clothes, the high heels of her boots sinking in the mud. She’d asked them where the graves were. The graves were unmarked and everywhere—babushkas found bones in their vegetable patches—but Sergei had demanded five hundred rubles for information, and then pointed the woman toward a pile of stones at the edge of the field. The woman thanked them, her voice clotted as though she might cry, and then she’d picked her way toward the stones, which were the remains of an outhouse. Sergei had bought some comics and an enormous cake with the five hundred rubles, and they’d all eaten it until they felt sick.

Ilya had never liked the Tower much. It was a hike from the kommunalkas—a place where you could yell and hear it echo, but places like that weren’t hard to find in Berlozhniki. That night, though, the place seemed to have a spirit, a sort of throb. They walked into a giant room—the mess hall, Ilya remembered. There were no lights, but Vladimir had brought a flashlight, and the beam lanced the air and showed snatches of sloppy graffiti and glass crushed so fine underfoot that it looked like snow. Vladimir and Aksinya wove through the room, and Ilya followed them to a set of stairs that smelled of urine. They climbed up two flights, or maybe it was three. In the dark it was hard to tell. There was music playing somewhere, punctuated every once in a while by a shout or groan. Vladimir pushed aside a curtain and led them down a long corridor. Ilya looked into each room as they passed. Figures huddled by a stove, which gave off the smell of things that shouldn’t burn. In one room, a girl sat on a mattress staring at a phone. In another, two guys were wrestling. Their necks flashed in the light, and Ilya couldn’t tell if they were joking or serious until one yelled, “Mercy!” and the other started to laugh. Ilya gripped the vodka bottle, glad to have something to hold, and from time to time he took a sip so that he didn’t have to look into any more rooms. As they neared the end of the corridor, Aksinya tilted her head back and called, “Lana!”

Lana poked her head out of a doorway and closed her eyes against the flashlight’s glare. “Hi,” she said. “Hi, Ilya.”

“This is us,” Vladimir said, and he led them into a room with four folding chairs in a circle around a pile of blankets. A rug hung over the window, and a poster of Sylvester Stallone was tacked to one wall. Ammo rounds were draped around his neck and machine guns weighed down each of his arms. On the opposite wall, Putin smirked in a suit, with a marker-drawn cock in his mouth.

“What do you think?” Vladimir said. He opened the stove door and poked it with a stick. A weak wave of heat hit Ilya.

“Cool,” Ilya said, though what he felt was closer to incredulity. Vladimir was homeless. Worse, he had chosen this over home. The vodka gnawed at Ilya’s mind. The floor pitched a little. He sat heavily in one of the chairs.

Lana sat next to him. Her hair had grown in—the pink streaks began below her ears now. She’d lost weight, like Vladimir and Aksinya, only she had had some to lose, and she looked better for it. She reached for the vodka bottle and took a long sip.

“How’s school?” she said. She was drunk, and it made her voice even softer and sweeter than usual.

“It’s school,” he said. “You know.”

Aksinya laughed. “Like you don’t love it,” she said.

“Like you weren’t little miss bookworm in primary,” Vladimir said.

“Yeah,” Aksinya said, “before you came along and fucked up my life.” She picked up one of the blankets, shook it, and spread it out again. In the corner, there was a heap of Vladimir’s clothes, a paperback with the cover torn off, a pink plastic bag, and a pair of red high heels.

“I just got a headache every time I walked through those doors,” Lana said, sounding mournful. Ilya believed her. For all her sweetness, she had never been smart.

Aksinya folded another blanket into a pillow and laid it on the ground too. Then she nudged Vladimir and said, “We need to find Sergey.”

“Bottoms up, tovarishch,” Vladimir said. “Be back in a bit.” He and Aksinya backed out the door, and Ilya could hear the echo of Aksinya laughing.

Ilya looked at Lana. There was this acid burn in his throat, and his stomach felt boggy, and he wanted to ask her if she felt the same way when she drank, but he knew better.

“You live here now? The three of you?” he said.

“Sometimes. Aksinya and I usually stay at her sister’s,” she said. She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and scratched at the edge of a scab on her arm. “It’s not as bad as it seems.”

“It doesn’t seem bad,” Ilya lied.

Lana laughed, leaned back in her chair, and stretched her toes out toward the stove. She handed Ilya the bottle again, and he drank a gulp big enough to make his eyes water. He could hear the wind breaking itself against the walls. He could hear it seeping through the concrete. He scooted his chair closer to the stove and wondered what time it was, whether his mother and Babushka had started to worry.

“You know, I’m shy too,” Lana said. “Not like those two.” She waved a hand toward the door. “They’d talk a rock into moving. And Sergey. He never shuts up. Aren’t men supposed to be the quiet ones? Between him and Vladimir, Aksinya and I can’t get a word in.”

She stood, and grabbed one of his hands. “Come here,” she said. She had a loose sort of grin, and when he stood he could see that her eyes were glazed, and he wondered just how much she’d had to drink, or whether she was high too.

“I’m cold,” she said. She took his other hand. He tensed despite the vodka, and she could tell. “That means you should hold me,” she said.

He swallowed, nodded, and did not move.

“Here.” She arranged his arms around her waist like they might begin slow dancing. He’d seen Babushka and Timofey dance like this once, when Muslim Magomayev had come on the radio and they’d thought Ilya was asleep.