Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“She was living with a friend,” her mother was quoted as saying, “because we had argued about her lifestyle.”

It was impossible to read the tone in this—whether it was said with regret or reproach. The article said that Lana did not appear to have been robbed and that the motive may have been sexual. It closed with a list of what she had been wearing when she was killed—jeans, a parka, and a pink T-shirt—and a plea for any information that might aid the police in their investigation. Ilya read this last line over again, sure that he’d misread or imagined. She’d been wearing a pink shirt that night in the Tower. Four weeks and a day earlier. He remembered the pink of it with the pink of her hair; he remembered wanting to ask her if she liked to do that, to match her clothes with her hair, but he’d been too afraid.

He looked up the weather in Berlozhniki from the past month, which was a flat line punctuated by one deep dip, like a heart giving one last twitch. The thaw had been the night after the boards, the night after Ilya had kissed Lana. He tried to think when he had last seen her at the Tower, whether she’d left the mess hall with all of them or whether she’d stayed and kept dancing, but all he could remember was that she’d been gone when he woke up.

Ilya walked home so fast that his lungs were burning when he got to the grove. It was just a thin cluster of birch trees that had grown around some long-departed spring and that, for some unknown reason, the loggers had spared. The police had marked off the entire area. The slim gray trunks were banded together with police tape like a bouquet. The police were not there, though, and Ilya could not tell the exact spot where Lana had been found, whether she’d been leaning against a tree or lying in the snow between them. There were crisp packets and plastic bags and cigarette butts everywhere. All the usual garbage. High up in the branches of one tree, a bra dangled. It had been there for years, fading from red to pink, and a tiny icicle had managed to find purchase on one of its straps.

Yulia Podtochina’s and Olga Nadiova’s deaths had been met with shock, but Lana’s was met with resignation. Look at where we live, people said, gesturing, vaguely, toward the camp and its crosses. Should we expect anything different? And yet defensive preparations were made. Lana was blond like Yulia and Olga, and so women started darkening their hair. Dye rimmed the sinks in the bathrooms and the communal kitchen, and the women—who went everywhere in pairs now—took on the look of actresses poorly cast as sisters.

When the police tape was taken down, the grove became a shrine. People left teddy bears and plastic bouquets and laminated postcards of Jesus and Axl Rose, who had been Lana’s idol. Ilya hadn’t known this. He hadn’t really known her at all, he reminded himself, and when he thought of her death, it was with wonder rather than grief. Someone he had touched had died. Someone he had kissed. Someone young. He had the feeling too that her death was a portent of worse things to come—whether for him specifically or Berlozhniki in general, he couldn’t say—and he found himself desperate to get to America, to leave before whatever happened next.

He drew a grid on an enormous sheet of newsprint, numbered the days until he left, and crossed off each one with a red X . One hundred and fifty-two. One hundred and fifty-one. If Babushka and his mother resented his eagerness, they didn’t show it. Babushka bought him supplies: a new sweatshirt and jeans, a watch that was also a calculator, a pair of Adidas knockoffs with four stripes instead of three, a St. Nicholas medal to wear when he flew, and a St. Sergius medal for after he landed. She washed the clothes and folded them, and Ilya stacked them carefully in the crate under the couch, and tried not to think of Vladimir and all of his tapes in that pink bag in the Tower.

At the Internet Kebab, Kirill took his passport photo. Babushka had given Ilya a fresh haircut, and he wore the shirt with the collar reserved for the Winter Festival and the official announcement of the exchange. He looked good, he thought, but Kirill was not impressed.

“Stop smiling,” he said.

Ilya thinned his lips and tilted his chin up like Vladimir did for photos.

“Now you look like a mole,” Kirill said. “Just relax.” Ilya tried to, but Kirill put the camera down and came over and unbuttoned the top two buttons of Ilya’s shirt. “Better,” he said. “Way better.”

He took three photos and the flash made Ilya jump each time. They printed instantly, and Kirill murmured over them approvingly. “I should charge for styling,” he said.

“I look like a thug,” Ilya said.

“Exactly,” Kirill said. “You can thank me when you don’t get jumped as soon as you get to America. It’s the fucking wild west there.”

“I’m going to Leffie, Louisiana,” he said. “It’s in the south.” The name of the town had been the latest tidbit from Maria Mikhailovna. She had stopped tutoring him, but sometimes after class she’d ask him to stay a moment. She’d told him that the Masons’ children were girls—three girls. One day she’d handed him a plastic envelope with his plane tickets inside, and, thinking of Vladimir and the way he’d robbed the apartment, Ilya had asked her to hold on to them for him. “Of course. Of course,” she’d said, embarrassed, as though it were insensitive of her not to have anticipated the request.

“When do you go?” Kirill said.

“One hundred and fourteen days,” Ilya said.

Kirill laughed. “We’ll miss you too, you fucker,” he said. “You want to see some young-but-not-too-young pussy? On the house.” He spread a hand and gestured grandly toward the computer monitors.

“Save it for Vladimir,” Ilya said. “Next time he comes in.”

“That thug,” Kirill said, with affection. “Nothing’s on the house for him.”

Ilya hadn’t expected there to be many people at the Winter Festival—not after Yulia and Olga and Lana—but the square was packed, and there was a feverishness to the crowd, as though they were all taking a risk being out, and they were determined to make it worthwhile. Women walked in tight groups, their hair—light or dark—hidden under fur caps, their eyes skidding toward the edges of the crowd, the shadows, the places that might hide a killer. They laughed too loudly, sipping at the kvass that vendors sold with pirozhki and shashlik. A few fights had broken out, and the police, who were normally patient enough to let things peter out as long as no weapons appeared, had carted the men off immediately.

Ice sculptures were scattered around the square, glowing under the lights strung up from the larches. A stage stretched from Gabe Thompson’s bench all the way to the Minutka. It was laced in bunting that must have been silver a decade earlier, but had faded to the color of slush. The stage was empty. Later, Ilya would stand up there as Fyodor Fetisov announced the exchange. Later still, girls from Ilya’s school would dance the chechotka and the Komis would spin in circles, their elbows and feet flying, and inevitably some drunkard in the crowd would get too excited doing a barynya and fall off the stage. For now, though, classical music blasted from speakers as Ilya, his mother, Babushka, and Timofey let the crowd press them from one sculpture to the next.

The theme of that year’s festival was “Wind & Fire,” and it was announced on banners that dangled from every lamppost in Berlozhniki, but most of the sculptors seemed to have ignored it or interpreted it liberally. There was a life-size ice replica of a Toyota Land Cruiser, with one door propped open and the steering wheel wrapped in leather and a real gearshift ripped from some less fortunate car. The line to get your picture taken in the driver’s seat wound past the stage and all the way to the Internet Kebab. There was an enormous television set with antennae so thin they seemed as if they might crack at any moment. A blue light glowed and flickered inside it. There were the traditional statues too—Leda and her swan and Pushkin and Yuri Gagarin standing in front of a mini Monument to the Conquerors of Space. Timofey stared at each sculpture as though he were at the Hermitage examining masterpieces. He liked the sculptures that had taken physical risks—the spider web with its thin filaments, the top-heavy St. Basil’s, Baryshnikov perched on his big toe.