“Are you afraid he’s going to come piss on you? A revenge piss!” Sergey said.
“He said he’d kill us,” Ilya said.
This had sent Vladimir and Sergey into another round of hysterics, and Ilya had forced himself to laugh with them until he realized that Anatoly was no longer watching them. He was looking out the window, the safety of his merchandise forgotten, and Ilya followed his eyes to the sidewalk where Gabe Thompson was standing, staring at them.
“Stop it,” Ilya hissed, and Vladimir and Sergey quieted.
“Just our luck,” Anatoly murmured. “The only American we get is insane.”
Gabe didn’t move. His stare pinned Ilya in place, gave Ilya the sense that his own stillness was ensuring Gabe’s, that if he flinched, Gabe would spring into violent motion. So Ilya resisted the urge to hide behind the enormous case of birch juice to his left. He forced himself to look at Gabe’s eyes, which were puffy and bloodshot and horrible, and then Anatoly picked up the shovel he kept by the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“Shit,” Vladimir whispered.
Gabe took a step toward Anatoly. Anatoly gripped the handle of the shovel and raised it off the ground—a half meter, maybe less. Ilya would have hit Gabe with it. He knew that with certainty, but maybe Anatoly had been born brave, or maybe because he’d outlived Stalin and Beria and communism and had little left to fear, he did not hit Gabe. Instead, he turned and rammed the shovel into the centimeter of snow that had fallen that afternoon. Metal screeched against concrete. It was not enough snow to shovel, but still Anatoly flung the dusting of it into the street, and Gabe turned and walked back across the square.
It had been terrifying—surely Ilya hadn’t imagined that—but could Gabe have killed Lana and the other girls? Ilya wasn’t sure. Gabe was fervent, which was a close cousin to crazy. He was a drunk, probably an addict, possibly, as Anatoly had said, insane. Yet he was in a picture with Lana on the night she’d died. And Lana had posted a sultry picture of herself in Gabe’s hat like it was something to be proud of, like she wanted it to be recognized. At the thought, anger gathered, burning behind his eyes, and then another idea struck him: Berlozhniki was not the sort of place one chose to go; it was the sort of place you were sent. It had been part of the gulag. Prisoners had dug the mine. They had laid the train tracks and built the station and poured the roads that radiated from it. Everyone in Berlozhniki had assumed that Gabe had been sent there by his church on a conversion mission—but what if Gabe had not been sent to do anything, what if he’d been sent because of something he’d already done?
Ilya opened a browser window and typed Gabe’s name into the search engine. He’d never heard the name Gabe before, and so he’d assumed that it was rare, but as the results loaded, he could see that it was not rare enough. There were hundreds of hits. There was an NFL player with the name, a reality TV star, a professor at a school in Ohio. A Gabe Thompson was in the Guinness Book of World Records for toenail length. Another had been in the Summer Olympics that year. Ilya clicked on the image results. He scrolled through page after page. None of the faces were familiar. None of them were him.
Babushka had saved Gabe’s pamphlets. She was a hoarder by nature and too devout to throw out any image of Jesus, even if it was the paraphernalia of a ridiculous offshoot of Christianity. Instead, she’d cut out the sherbet-colored pictures—all of those angels and archangels—and pasted them to the windowpanes in her bedroom. In the summer, when the sun lit them from behind, they looked like stained glass, which had been her hope. CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS was stamped in tiny letters in the corner of each picture, and Ilya remembered sounding out those words and puzzling over the meaning of “Latter-day,” before deciding that it must be a fancy way of saying “tomorrow.” Now he added the church’s name to Gabe’s in his search. Again there were lots of hits. Congregations of clean-cut boys in suits and ties. Ilya scanned the pictures until his eyes blurred, but again none of them were him.
Ilya cleared the search window. In its empty box, the cursor blinked in synchrony, it seemed, with his heart. He typed Gabe’s name again, and this time he added the word “murder.” There were fewer hits this time: a dozen sullen-cheeked men in orange jumpsuits, and Ilya thought of Vladimir. But Vladimir wouldn’t be in orange; in Russia, prisoners wore black.
Upstairs there were footsteps, and Ilya looked at the clock on the computer, thinking that it might be Sadie, that it was the middle of the night and that she was about to sneak out again, as she had the night before. But it was much later—five a.m.—and the sky was lightening. In a few hours, it’d be his first day of school in America. He took one last look at the computer screen, at the violence in each set of eyes, and then he emailed Aksinya.
Did she sleep with Gabe Thompson? he wrote, and then, with a throb of love for Aksinya because she had been Vladimir’s or because she was beautiful but still wouldn’t ever get to leave, he wrote, Please stay away from him. He clicked send and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For a while that last winter, Vladimir did try. He came home for meals. He seemed generally sober. Some afternoons, he and Aksinya and Lana would lie on the carpet like three sardines in a tin, watching movies, while Ilya did homework at the kitchen table. Ilya even saw him at school—granted, he and Aksinya were disappearing into the custodial closet, but still, he was in the building. There had been no more questions from teachers about Vladimir’s health, no more folders from Nikolay Grigorievich, and Ilya took all of this as a good sign.
That winter, Ilya’s last in Berlozhniki, was one of the coldest in the books. Snow swallowed the crosses in the field by the Tower completely. It was rumored that the Pechora was frozen solid, surface to bed, with whole schools of salmon trapped in the ice. A Nenets man parked his sleigh outside the clinic, unharnessed his reindeer, and dragged it inside. It was alive, but one eyeball had frozen in its head. The doctor said there was a clink when he touched it with the scalpel.
Sometime in the dregs of November, a month after the first freeze and a month still to go until the New Year’s festivities, a windstorm took down dozens of trees. Tatyana Andropova from Building 4 brought her dog out for a pee, and the dog was blown away like a tumbleweed. The doors to the stairwell were ripped off Ilya’s building, and all the radiators in the kommunalkas rattled, sighed, and went quiet. Babushka took the old Chukovsky books out of their storage spot in the woodstove, dusted off the baffles and firebricks, and sent Ilya and Vladimir down to buy satchels of wood from Daniil Chernyshev, who was crazy and kept birch logs stacked floor to ceiling along his walls in case of just such an occasion.
The wind shrieked up the stairwell, the sort of wind that feels barbed, and there were enough people who were too frail or too afraid to leave their apartments that Ilya and Vladimir each made a couple hundred rubles shuttling between their floors with satchels of wood curled under each of their arms. The wind got stronger and stronger, louder and louder so that they had to yell to hear each other. Ilya’s arms ached from carrying wood, but there was a giddiness to it all too, to the easy money.
“Motherfucker!” Vladimir said as they rounded the third-floor stairwell, headed down to Daniil’s again. The wind pulled tears up out of his eyes toward his temples. “This is amazing. Watch this,” he said. He stood at the top of the next flight, scooted his feet so that they were halfway over the edge of the stair, and leaned a couple of millimeters into the wind. It was strong enough to hold him. His jacket ballooned behind him. His jeans slicked to his legs. The wind rippled the skin of his cheeks like water. But then he got greedy—Vladimir had a tendency to get greedy—he stuck his chest out even farther, as though he were a figurehead moving over the waves. Ilya gripped the railing behind him.