“Try it, Ilyusha,” Vladimir said, and at that moment the wind stopped and Vladimir fell. Down three stairs, then four, then five, all the way to the landing where he crumpled into a ball.
Ilya ran to him, thinking of what he’d broken and whether they’d have to go to the clinic and whether it would be open and whether it had electricity, and then Vladimir sat up and began to laugh. Blood was trickling out of his nose.
“You saw that, right?” he said. “The way the wind just stopped.”
Ilya nodded. He wanted to say that if you leaned into the wind forever then it was bound to stop, that it was nothing personal, but then the wind began to whistle through the rungs of the railing, and then it was fully wailing again, the noise inhuman but seeming to speak of human pains, and Ilya wondered if somehow it was personal. Vladimir wiped at his nose and blood smeared across his cheek.
“Help me up,” he said, and Ilya could barely hear him over the wind.
That night they pulled the table as close to the stove as they could. The backs of Ilya’s calves burned, but his legs felt frozen in the center, like meat that’s failed to thaw. The windows were blanketed against the cold, and, as the wind went on and on, as their kommunalka, squat as it was, began to sway, Ilya wanted to pull the blankets down so that he could see the storm and make sure that it hadn’t taken on some new and terrible form.
The buses were not running to the refinery, and his mother had found a mostly empty bottle of peppermint schnapps, and she’d had a few shots and was ruddy with it, with all of them together at the table. As Babushka heated dinner, she prayed to St. Medard, who she said had once been shielded from a hurricane by a hovering eagle. He was a Catholic saint, but Babushka occasionally prayed to Catholic saints if there was one perfectly suited to the occasion.
“Even a saint’s gonna get shat on, standing under a bird,” Vladimir said.
“Hush,” their mother said, with the requisite sharpness, but her eyes had this bubbliness to them, like kvass poured into a glass, that they got only from Vladimir.
After dinner Babushka dealt out seka, and Ilya divvied up a box of macaroni to use for bets. Babushka beat them all for the first five hands, but then Vladimir started to pay attention. He got three of a suit twice in a row, and soon he had to get a bowl to hold all of his macaroni. He was gloating, talking about becoming a card shark and joining the weekly game the dedki played in the kitchen.
“I’m gonna rake it in. Those old fuckers are so busy moaning about Gorbachev and Yeltsin and how at least before you could count on your 120 rubles that they won’t even know what hit them,” he said, when a knock sounded.
Under the wind, it seemed that the knock was far off, on some other door down the hall, but then it came again, louder and clearer.
For a second they were quiet. The candles on the table gave their faces new shadows, made them all look strange, but Ilya saw a familiar panic flash in Babushka’s eyes. “You won’t last long if it takes a knock on the door for you to know they’re coming,” she liked to say, or sometimes just “A knock on the door is never good.”
“Maybe it’s Timofey,” Ilya’s mother said.
“Wanting company,” Babushka said. After three decades in the coal mine, Timofey couldn’t stand the dark. He kept the lights on all night despite his tiny pension. “He’s probably scared to death,” she said, opening the door with a sly smile meant for Timofey.
Maria Mikhailovna stood in the hallway. She was wearing a militia coat with a long fur collar and a gold badge. The coat swallowed her whole and made her look like a child playing dress-up. It must be her husband’s, Ilya thought, remembering that he was a policeman. Her nose was raw and running, and behind her glasses her eyes were leaking like Vladimir’s had been earlier.
“Izvinitye,” Babushka stuttered. “We didn’t know. Ilya didn’t—”
“Please.” Maria Mikhailovna put up a hand. “Hello, Ilya. Hello, Vladimir,” she said in her tiny voice. She was in a fur ushanka too, her braids trailing out of the ear flaps.
“Come in, Maria Mikhailovna,” his mother said.
“Zdravstvuyte,” Vladimir said, looking horrified, and then, in mangled English, he said something that sounded like “Good evening.”
As soon as Maria Mikhailovna stepped inside, the wind slammed the door shut behind her. She had never been to Ilya’s home. He had studied with her for almost four years now. He knew the way she sucked air through her teeth when she concentrated. He knew that she favored crisps over sweets and that she used a teabag five times before she tossed it. Each afternoon, she sat close enough for him to see the tiny brown hairs that lapped at the corners of her lips, but he had never imagined her here, and it seemed as though wires had been crossed somewhere. Characters from two different movies had been transposed and stranded in unsuitable settings.
“You were out in this awfulness?” Babushka said.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it? Dmitri drove me, and the wind was making the car wobble from one lane to the next.”
“He’s in the car?” Babushka said it like he might be dead.
“He has to make his rounds. He patrols the refinery,” she said.
“Ah,” Babushka said, “important duty,” which was exactly what she said about any job at all, but in this case it happened to be true.
Maria Mikhailovna bent to take off her boots, and Ilya’s mother said, “Keep them on, please. It’s too cold. The heat’s been off since this morning.”
In a flash, Babushka cleared the cards and, ignoring Vladimir’s protests, dumped the macaroni back into its box. She swapped the plastic tablecloth for a lace one, put a kettle on the stove, and produced a box of Malvina’s, which were Vladimir’s favorite biscuits and were supposed to have been a present from Babushka on his name day.
“I’m sorry to have interrupted,” Maria Mikhailovna said as Babushka ushered her to a seat at the table. “But I couldn’t wait.”
“It’s an honor,” Babushka said, and Vladimir rolled his eyes.
What couldn’t wait? Ilya wanted to say, but he felt a sudden shyness with her. There was always a textbook and a desk between them. A question or an answer. Now she was sitting at their table, and he couldn’t imagine what had brought her here in this storm. Ilya had needed school supplies occasionally—new installments of The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie and, once, a computer program—but she’d just sent him home with a note.
“I’ve finished the translation,” he offered.
Vladimir snorted.
“The translation?” Maria Mikhailovna was distracted, and for a second he wondered if she was here for him at all. Maybe she had come to talk about Vladimir. Maybe she had noticed the effort he’d been making of late, and she had some plan to help get him back on track. Maybe she would ask their mother if he had actually ever been sick, Ilya thought, and his stomach went sour, but Maria Mikhailovna just said, “Ah, the Pushkin. Good.”
Babushka pressed a biscuit on her, and she nibbled at its corner and then set it down on her napkin, and Ilya could feel Vladimir staring at it like a wolf.
“You have been well, I hope,” his mother said.
“Yes.”
Ilya twisted in his seat. The women, it seemed, would drag this out. “Do I need new books?”