Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Ilya collected the pamphlets in a neat stack and put them in his duffel along with the tape player, printouts of the photos from VKontakte, a change of clothes, and a pocketknife that Timofey had given him. The hinge was rusty, and the blade was not much larger than Ilya’s pinkie, but still it was better than nothing.

Vasili Vasilyevich was at the sink in the bathroom at the end of the hall, his face covered in shaving cream. The razor shook in his hand. “Takes me two hours to shave now,” he said.

“Oh,” Ilya said, because Vasili was a talker and Ilya did not want to encourage him. Ilya’s eyes were gritty, and he could still taste the Tower’s chemical haze in the back of his throat. He needed to talk to Maria Mikhailovna, but he needed a shower first. He’d spent the walk back to the kommunalkas imagining all of the terrible things Maria Mikhailovna would say to him. He’d blown his chance at America, but she might want to keep him out of university altogether. She might kick him out of School #17. Or maybe, he thought, his mind clenched around the hope, maybe, maybe Vladimir would somehow fix the situation, persuade Maria Mikhailovna to let him take a makeup test or go the next year.

“If you’re going to shit, give me some warning,” Vasili said. “I may be old, but I can still smell.” When Ilya didn’t laugh, he said, “You’re a bit sour, aren’t you?”

“No,” Ilya said, sourly.

Ilya peed, and Vasili listened and then lamented his own flow, which was, he said, more like a leaky faucet. Ilya brushed his teeth, and Vasili asked him if it hurt to hold such a terrible expression for so long.

“Does it hurt your tongue to talk so much?” Ilya said.

He looked at Vasili in the mirror, straight into his dull blue eyes. Normally he wouldn’t have had the nerve to make eye contact, let alone to insult the man, but he felt a new sort of recklessness that came, he guessed, from not having much of a future. Vasili paused, the razor trembling by his wattle. Ilya expected him to be stung, but he said, “Molodoy chelovyek,” which meant “little man,” and his voice was warm, familial even, as though Ilya were a grandson whose attitude was a source of gentle amusement. “Whatever it is that has you so upset, it will pass. Trust me. I’m ancient. I’ve lost two women that I love, and each time I thought I wouldn’t survive, and yet here I am, shaving my beard because my third wife doesn’t like stubble scratching her pussy.”

Ilya blushed and mumbled something about a stomachache, and after his shower, he walked to Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment so slowly that his toes tingled and went leaden in his boots. He pressed the buzzer. No response. He pressed it again. No response, and he was about to press it a third time when the custodian—old now and stooped, but the same one who used to kick them off the elevator all those years ago—told him to fuck off. Halfway across the square Ilya looked back. He had the sense that the custodian might be following him, might want to keep scolding him just for the sheer pleasure of it. The old man was watching him from the lobby, with an expression of grim determination. Seven floors above him, Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment was dark, but way up at the top of the building, the penthouse was ablaze. Ilya could see a figure inside, silhouetted against the glass. It was Fyodor Fetisov, he guessed, and for a moment it seemed as though Fetisov were watching him, but then he stepped away from the glass, and Ilya told himself that he couldn’t be seen anyway. He was invisible in the darkness of the square, just another patch of shadow on the snow.

Ilya trudged on to the school, not really expecting to find Maria Mikhailovna there. It was a Saturday, after all. But he could see the light on in her classroom from a block away. She was at her desk, as always, with a stack of graded papers on her right and a stack of ungraded papers on her left.

He stood outside the window for a long moment. He wanted her to sense him and look up, but she did not. When he knocked on the glass, her head snapped toward him. She had to walk halfway across the classroom before she recognized him, and then she nodded, and he walked around the school and met her at the front doors.

She did not say her usual “Hello! How was your weekend?” to which he was expected to respond in English and at length, even though his weekends were always the same, blocks of studying punctuated by Babushka reminding him to eat. Instead she led him down the hallway, past the dark rooms, in silence. Once they were in her classroom, she locked the door.

“I thought you were hurt. Or worse,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “What happened?”

The answer was simple: he had wanted Vladimir back. He’d thought that he could choose Vladimir, but now he saw that he’d built that choice on a false premise, because Vladimir being gone had nothing to do with him, and nothing he did could change the fact of it. This idea was like a little spur of bone lodged in Ilya’s chest, something he had to breathe around.

“Ilya, what happened?” She reached a hand out and touched his brow bone where Vladimir had hit him. Her eyes were huge. She thought something truly terrible had prevented him from taking the boards. Vladimir had said that he would try to fix the situation, but Vladimir’s plan was half-assed in the way of all Vladimir’s plans: Ilya had no idea if he had seen Maria Mikhailovna, no idea what he might have told her, or how to corroborate it, and so he just told her the truth.

“I was with Vladimir,” he said. “At a party at the Tower.”

“The Tower.” She paused, her brain taking a moment to process the unlikely combination of Ilya and the Tower. “Was he in trouble? Did he need help?” Ilya hesitated, and she said, “He forced you, didn’t he? To miss the test. Is that it? He wanted to sabotage you?”

Ilya was about to shake his head, and then he thought better of it. What in the world did Vladimir have to lose? “Yes,” he said, his voice small.

He looked at the empty hook on the wall where Aksinya’s coat had hung. He looked at the “Look Where English Can Take You!” posters that marched across the wall. Big Ben. The Statue of Liberty. The Sydney Opera House. The Wild West. He looked out the window to the hall, which was tiled in a yellow that was the color of butter, of winter sun.

She looked to the hall too, and then she spoke in a rush: “Listen,” she said, “I took them for you. I couldn’t not. Not after all the work you’ve done—all the work I’ve done.” She let out this strange little snort. “I sharpened five pencils. I even set the timer for myself. For each section. I didn’t give myself an extra second. I just did the best I could. And you know the thing that made me the saddest?”

Ilya was stunned. She would be fired. Arrested. She was insane, taking a risk like that. Of course she was insane, he thought. How else did someone from Moscow wind up teaching in Berlozhniki? He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even shake his head. And then, as if she knew he was thinking she was crazy, her eyes went glassy.

“What made me so sad— so angry—was the fact that you would have done better. You would have done perfectly.”

And then America burst into his brain like something held too long underwater, and with it the same huge hope. Her hope. His hope. His hands began to sweat. He could feel his heart beating in his palms, his pulse like something trying to escape him. It was absurd to be given such a chance twice; it was a sign of a universe completely lacking in logic. He felt sick, betrayed almost, like when he’d first learned that languages have as many exceptions as they do rules. He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.