Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Maria Mikhailovna pulled her chin back into her neck. Her look was still incredulous, but it was no longer sympathetic. “Did you want me to let you fail? You want to spend your life drinking at the Tower? Puking in the snow? You know there are other kids who are smart. They might not be as smart as you, but they’re smart enough to be grateful.”

Ilya thought of Grigori Alexandrov with the doughy crescent of flesh that hung over the waistband of his jeans. He had been taken under the wing of the math teacher, but he was proficient at English too. He worked hard. Sometimes, walking home from school after a long session with Maria Mikhailovna, Ilya would sense Grigori walking behind him. He wouldn’t turn around, though, nor would Grigori say hello.

“It’s not that,” Ilya said. “It just doesn’t feel fair. It’s never felt fair.”

“Fair.”

“That I get to go.”

“It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s unfair. It’s terrible. But you don’t help anyone by spitting in the face—” She took a breath, tried to calm herself down. “Do you know that your brother came to me?”

A tiny bubble of something—hope or trepidation—shot up Ilya’s spine. Vladimir had kept a promise. He’d come to see Maria Mikhailovna, and he’d made her take the test. He’d made all of this happen.

“After I came to your house and told you about the exchange, he came to me, and he begged me to let him go. To America. He said that he would change, that he would turn it all around. He wanted to be the one. He said that you would succeed no matter what, that you’d get to go to university for sure, but that this would be the closest he’d ever come to an opportunity like this.” She took a breath, then looked at Ilya as though aiming at him through a sight. “I had to tell him that he wasn’t close at all.”

That was why Vladimir had not come home, Ilya realized. That was why he lived in that terrible room, and Ilya didn’t know if he felt more guilt or anger at the knowledge.

“Did Vladimir come to see you today?” Ilya asked, his voice so tired and sure of the answer that it didn’t come out sounding like a question.

“Today?” she said. “No. Why would he?”

“No reason,” Ilya said.

“He doesn’t know, does he? Ilya? No one can know.”

“He won’t tell anyone,” Ilya said. He thought of Vladimir begging Maria Mikhailovna to come to America. He had never heard Vladimir beg for anything, and he wanted to know what his voice had sounded like, and if it had happened here, where Ilya was standing, and whether Vladimir had been serious enough about the plea to stay sober. He didn’t need to know what Vladimir had done when Maria Mikhailovna had told him that he wasn’t close at all—he could already imagine that.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t,” she said, and then she sat heavily in her chair. The school was completely quiet, so quiet that the air felt like it was made of cotton. Maria Mikhailovna blinked and rubbed at the spot on her nose where her glasses dug into her flesh. Then she pushed a stapled packet across the desk. “I made a copy. Just in case. So you know the questions, and what you answered.”

The board results came with unusual speed. A week of snow, a week of no Vladimir, a week of memorizing the test that Maria Mikhailovna had taken, and then she presented Ilya with a gray envelope from the Ministry of Education in Leshukonskoye.

“I thought you might want to open it at home, with your family,” she said, with this lightness to her voice that made it seem far away.This was how she spoke to him now. “I have a copy as well.”

And though Ilya had always thought he’d open the letter at this desk where she’d tutored him, the desk with the tiny moon and stars etched in the upper right corner and the slight list that meant a pencil always rolled off the left side, he walked home with it, intending to do what she’d said and open it at home with his mother and Babushka. But when he got to the kommunalka, there was a cluster of boys—younger than him—smoking in the stairwell, and he didn’t want to murmur “Izvinite” and listen to them go quiet as he edged by them. Instead, he kept on walking toward the Pechora.

There was a slick path cut by cross-country skiers that followed the river for twenty kilometers and then circled back, across taiga to the south side of town. To his left, the Pechora was frozen solid, a blank strip of snow flanked by birches. Ilya slid along the path for a kilometer or so until he was sweating inside his coat and he’d found a spot that seemed both beautiful and desolate enough for such an occasion. He sat on the frozen ridges of the path and opened the envelope.

Maria Mikhailovna had scored in the ninety-second percentile. As he knew from the copy she’d given him, she’d done perfectly on the multiple choice. She’d lost all of her points on the written section. He’d read her essays and dictations and knew just the things that had tripped her up: the plural possessives and habitual aspect. Ilya’s personal information was clustered at the top of the page. His name, his birthdate, his school and address and identification number. That was it. Most of the page was empty. There was no “Congratulations!”, no personal note at all, and this reassured him. No one was looking too deeply into this test. The State had more important matters to attend to.

He walked home as the light was faltering. The boys were gone. When he showed his mother and Babushka the results, they both started to cry and then to laugh.

“I thought you were better at the written than the multiple choice,” his mother said, and then she said, “Listen to me, looking a gift horse in the mouth.” She kissed Ilya. “You’re my brilliant boy,” she said.

“Your papulya would be thrilled,” Babushka said. “He’d be yelling in the halls.”

“He’d be drinking,” Ilya’s mother said, but without the usual scorn, and she pulled down a bottle of vodka and insisted that they all—even Babushka, who only drank on religious occasions—have shots.

Then they borrowed the neighbor’s Lada and drove it to the place on the square that served pizza on red and white checked tablecloths and catered to the refinery apparatchik and the rare tourist. The one with the faded photo of Gabe Thompson eating pizza in the window. His mother ordered mushroom pizza for all of them, and Ilya did not even try to protest. He had never seen her so happy. Even when she called Vladimir’s cell—a cell that he hadn’t answered in weeks, that Ilya was sure he’d traded for drugs—the smile stayed on her face.

Just as the pizzas arrived, there was a knock at the window behind them, and they turned to see Maria Mikhailovna and Dmitri standing at the glass. She smiled and lifted a hand. Ilya stared, wanting so badly to thank her and to apologize. Then his mother was tugging at his sleeve.

“Get them to join us, Ilya,” she said. “Go, go! Our treat!”

By the time he was out the door, they were past the restaurant, giving Gabe Thompson and his bench a wide berth.

“Maria Mikhailovna!” he called. “Will you join us? Please?” He said it like he was saying sorry. He imagined that he was saying sorry, and she must have heard that in his voice, because her face took on this soft look that was the look his mother got when she thought of Vladimir, like all she wanted to do was forgive him.

“We’d love to,” she said. “Another time—Dmitri’s been working so hard with these cases. He needs rest.”

She meant Yulia and Olga. The police had not made progress on either case, and Ilya could see the wear of them on Dmitri’s face. There were rings that fully circled his eyes, like another set of glasses, and his skin was sagging in a way Ilya did not remember.