Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

They were all silent.

“We’ll need to know to treat him,” she said, sounding infinitely patient in the way of the disinterested. She had tiny gold crosses in her ears, and she tucked her hair behind them.

Ilya looked to his mother for permission, and she shrugged.

“Krokodil,” Ilya said, and then, “I think that’s what they call it.”

The nurse looked up at them then. Her face was full of pity. “How long has he been using?” she said, though for a second it seemed that what she wanted to say was that she was sorry.

Across the street from the clinic there was a medical supply store that did a thriving business, and Ilya and his mother went there on a bright, cold morning, armed with a list from a nurse of what Vladimir would need. For three days, the nurses had not let them see him. “Today is not good. You don’t want to see him today,” they’d said, and, “He’s coming off it. Tomorrow will be better,” and, finally, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. Here is a list. Bring all of this, tomorrow.”

They loaded Vladimir’s old army duffel with a set of sheets, two IV bags, coils of plastic tubing, five papery polka-dotted hospital gowns, a bedpan, tape, ointments, and a plastic satchel of gauze that weighed nothing, that on a different day Ilya would have been tempted to throw into the air just to see how high he could get it.

Babushka was sitting in the clinic waiting room with an enormous container of marrow broth wedged between her knees. An old man slept in a corner chair, his fly gaping open and a tuft of underwear poking out. He woke up briefly upon their arrival and said, “My son,” and Babushka shushed him. Before long he was snoring again—a gurgle, wheeze, gurgle, wheeze that made Ilya wonder if he shouldn’t be admitted.

They waited, and they waited. Occasionally a nurse with too strong a jaw and a red braid as thick as a boa emerged from the door, marched over to a clipboard, squinted at it, squinted at them, and squinted at the old man, before disappearing back into the clinic’s bright white light. Ilya’s mother had given him an envelope of cash to tuck in the clipboard’s grip, and the nurse had taken it, but still they waited. Aksinya’s name had been on the visitor’s list, and Dmitri Malikov’s too. Maybe he’d been visiting his mother, Ilya thought, because he remembered Dmitri saying something about her being sick.

Ilya’s stomach rumbled. His own hunger did not seem like something he could mention, and so he eyed Babushka’s broth. He could see the paleness of the ox bone through the liquid.

Around noon, a young woman came through the front doors, so pregnant that her spine curved backward. Babushka looked at her as though she were about to give birth to Jesus.

“It’s a girl!” Babushka said.

The woman rolled her eyes, but Babushka no longer cared about the nuances of expressions, and she kept on, undeterred. “How far apart are the pains? That’s a low baby. Let me feel.”

Babushka began to get up, arms outstretched, but the woman said, “No,” loudly enough that even the old man stirred. She turned to her husband, a thin man who had been entirely obscured by her generous silhouette in the door, and said, “You have the money?”

He nodded, looking terrified, and when the nurse appeared, he handed her a thin pile of rubles—straight from the ATM—and murmured, “Soon, please.”

The nurse put her palm over the money in his and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Getting the baby out’s the easy part. It’s the next twenty years that will be hard.” She smiled, showing one long, gray tooth in a line of white ones.

“That’s the truth,” Babushka said.

The pregnant woman grunted and sank into a chair. “A room, please.”

The nurse smiled again, but without showing her teeth this time. “Be patient. I can tell from your face that you’re not even three centimeters.”

“It helps to pray,” Babushka said. “I prayed through my labor.”

The woman moaned, from annoyance and agony, and Ilya wanted badly to plug his ears. The idea that a baby was moving through her, would soon emerge from her, made his stomach seize, and he eyed Vladimir’s bedpan, thinking he might vomit. Then the doors to the clinic swung open again. It was a doctor this time, in a white coat that was too short in the sleeves, with a tiny stain of what appeared to be blood on the collar. The nurse started and strode toward her clipboard.

“Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov,” the doctor said, as though it were roll call, and Vladimir would raise his hand.

You have Vladimir, Ilya wanted to say. His mother jumped up from her chair. Ilya gathered the supplies, and as he was helping Babushka with the broth, he heard the doctor say, “We weren’t able to save the knee.”

Ilya had his back to his mother. He could not see her face. He eased Babushka down into her chair and turned. His mother’s neck was bent, her arms slack at her sides, and the doctor was looking at her kindly, sadly, but with a little embarrassment too. Then the doctor’s eyes met Ilya’s.

“You’re his brother?”

Ilya nodded.

“You can’t all see him. Only one of you. You brought all of the supplies?”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“Good.”

Ilya’s mother’s face had gone the gray it went when she had the flu, when Vladimir had kept her up all night with worry, but she managed to say, “Where did you cut?”

The doctor held a hand to Ilya’s leg, halfway between his hip and knee. “There,” he said. Ilya’s mother made a small, choking sound. Later, she would rant about the doctor, about how strange, how cruel it had been that he had demonstrated on Ilya’s leg and not his own. But Ilya thought it natural that the doctor could imagine taking another’s leg more easily than his own since that was exactly what had happened. And for weeks after, when Ilya thought of Vladimir, he would feel the pressure of the doctor’s fingers in that spot, and it would make him feel close to Vladimir. There, he’d think. Right there.

His mother was not crying, but Ilya could see that she would be soon—crying or yelling or both—and so he said, “I’ll go see him.”

The doctor shrugged, and in the silence, the pregnant woman gave her husband a shove forward.

“Izvinitye,” the husband said. The doctor looked at him, and then at his wife.

“How bad is the pain?” he asked her.

“Right now, not so bad, but—”

“Good,” the doctor said, “because it will be a while. The rooms are full. Your brother”—he looked at Ilya, with an expression both kind and pointed—“is not the only one to lose a limb. These kids are willing to die, to rot. Over what?” The doctor was shouldering through the doors now, and Ilya glanced back at his mother and Babushka. His mother had her head on Babushka’s shoulder, and Babushka was whispering in her ear, and Ilya knew what she’d be saying.

“Tchoo, tchoo. Tchoo, tchoo.” A nonsense word that she used for scraped knees and spilled tea and for this now too.

Vladimir looked healthier than he had in months. His eyes were clear, the whites like snow, and the bruised skin under them had faded to a respectable gray. His leg was bandaged in so much gauze that it was easy to ignore; it was easy to forget that there was not actually a leg under there but a stump. His room was halved by a curtain with a repeating scene of wild animals picnicking—a lion, an elephant, a zebra, and a tiger plopped down around a basket as though they’d all decided to ignore their baser instincts for a day and share some cucumber sandwiches. Ilya could see nothing of the patient on the other side but a pair of tiny, filthy sneakers under a chair.