That was not what people were staring at, Ilya knew, but he liked her modesty.
She took a cookie out and snapped it in two with her front teeth. They were shiny with spit, and Ilya remembered Vladimir’s leg. That wet bit of bone. The skin failing to cover it.
“Do you miss home?” she said. The question was a nice one, but her voice had a strange distance to it, like the idea of missing home was a curiosity. For her, it probably was.
“Yes,” he said.
“The whole no-English thing—did you just feel like messing with us?”
“I wasn’t in the mood,” he said. He could hear how cold his voice sounded, and of course that wasn’t the truth. But how could he explain to her that speaking English felt like cutting the last thread of a fraying rope? It was stupid, he saw now. An empty protest. As useless as the emails he sent Vladimir. What did it matter what he spoke? Russian, English, gibberish. He was still here, and his brother was still there.
She was looking at him with narrowed eyes. She had said something, and he had not heard her.
“What?” he said.
“I said, ‘Don’t you want to be here?’”
A few hours ago, the thought had almost made him cry, and he was afraid that he might, but instead he had the strange sense that he was solidifying, as though he were rejoining his old self, the one for whom this moment—a conversation alone in the middle of the night with an American girl—would have been an insane distillation of desire.
“I did,” he said, “but then my brother—” If he told her the truth—that his brother had been arrested for murder, that his brother had confessed to murder—she would look at him the way everyone in Berlozhniki had started to, as though he were guilty by association, and, of course, she wouldn’t think to ask whether Vladimir had actually done it.
“Your brother?”
“My brother died,” he said, and he was surprised at how easy it was to say, and for a second he found himself thinking how much easier it would be. He fought the urge to cross himself, to knock on wood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked him in the eye. “But that doesn’t mean you can be an asshole.”
Heat rushed to his face. She took a handful of cookies and pushed the box across the counter toward him. “Church is early tomorrow. You should sleep. And tell them about your brother—they’ll understand.”
She walked past him again, closer this time, and she smelled like cut grass and something acrid too, like oil. The dog followed her, its nails clicking gently against the floorboards. As they started to climb the stairs, he saw that the bottoms of her feet were dirty. The cuffs of her sweats were speckled with bits of grass and her ankles were crisscrossed by thin pink scratches.
“Sadie,” he said.
She stopped halfway up the stairs and looked at him, and the dog did the same. He hadn’t asked her what she’d been doing in the yard. I won’t tell if you won’t, she’d said, and he hadn’t even wondered what she meant.
“What were you doing?” He gestured toward the door.
“The dog had to pee,” she said.
He nodded. It may have been true, but from the look of her pants, she’d been walking outside for a while, and there were her sneakers, dangling from her hand.
“How did you know? That I spoke English?” he said.
She hesitated. “You just have a look. Like you’re listening. Most people don’t have that, even when you’re speaking their language.” She smiled at him, a lasting smile this time, and then she climbed the rest of the stairs, and he watched the flash of her dirty heels as they disappeared into her bedroom.
CHAPTER SIX
Immersed as he was in his studies, Ilya did not notice exactly when Vladimir first started cutting school. Babushka shooed them out the door at the same time each morning, and they still walked together across the Pechora, up Ulitsa Snezhnaya, past the bookstore where the window had been replaced, past the little wooden church where their father and Dedushka were buried and where Babushka lit her candles, past the abandoned Komsomol headquarters to School #17. They parted ways at the front doors, and Ilya assumed that Vladimir went inside to his classroom just as Ilya did, but apparently he did not.
“Is Vladimir sick?” Maria Mikhailovna asked him one day. For the second year in a row, Vladimir was in her Introductory English class, a class that Ilya had skipped altogether. Not knowing what else to do, Ilya said that yes, Vladimir was sick. Then Aksinya and Lana started sneaking to Ilya’s classroom. They’d stare in through the windows in the door, making Vs of their fingers and flicking their tongues between them. Ilya would ask to go to the bathroom, his face burning, and when he emerged, they’d giggle uncontrollably. Their hair was gauzy around their faces, the purple under their eyes somehow beautiful. They were always out of breath.
“Have you seen Vladimir?” they’d ask.
Every time Ilya hoped for a different question—something to do with him, not Vladimir. “We need help with our English paper,” or “Let’s go to the Internet Kebab,” or “There’s a party later, at the Tower.” But it was always “Where’s Vladimir? Where is that mudak, that asshole brother of yours?” and when Ilya didn’t know, they’d leave him in the hall, clutching his bathroom pass.
Another teacher gave Ilya a folder labeled HOMEWORK FOR SEPTEMBER to bring home to Vladimir. Ilya slipped it into his backpack and that night, once their mother had left for work, once Babushka had made up the couch for them and was snoring softly in the bedroom, he handed it to Vladimir.
“It’s from Nikolay Grigorievich,” Ilya said. “The math you’ve missed.”
Vladimir opened the folder and flipped through the pages. He looked at them closely, not casually, as though they were written in a code he might be able to unlock if only he knew the key. Ilya thought of him at the bookshop, sounding out the titles from Maria Mikhailovna’s list, and in that moment he wanted so desperately for school to be as easy for his brother as it was for him. Then Vladimir dropped the folder onto the carpet and began to undress for bed.
Ilya stared at it. “What should I tell him?”
Vladimir shrugged. “Tell him you gave it to me.” He fell backward onto his pillow, pulled his socks off by their soggy toes, and said, “Let me tell you, Ilya, a vagina is an alarming thing to look at.” Vladimir went on, detailing his latest exploits with Aksinya, and Ilya picked the folder up and slipped it back into his backpack.
The next afternoon, after he’d finished listening to Michael & Stephanie, after he’d done his translation for Maria Mikhailovna and all of the homework for his other classes, he began to chip away at Vladimir’s math. He didn’t do it out of loyalty, but out of this new anxiety that hit him sometimes like a fever. He was worried for Vladimir, worried when Vladimir was not home in the afternoons, worried even when Vladimir was home, was right next to him on the couch, watching one of Babushka’s telenovelas with one hand stuffed in a bag of crisps and the other stuffed down his pants.
It took Ilya a week to do all the makeup work. All those lines and figures. All those neat totals. He’d had to teach himself the basics of trigonometry, and when he finally presented it to Nikolay Grigorievich, the teacher said, “I’m afraid that ship has sailed.”
Vladimir began skipping dinner too, and Babushka would groan and say, “The boy never eats,” or, “He’s with that girl. The one whose parents are dead, and the sister who’s a you-know-what.”
“Aksinya,” Ilya would say, because he loved saying her name, and because the fact that such a beautiful girl liked Vladimir seemed to him something to be proud of.