“He looks old. Like twenty. Or there could be something wrong with him.” Marilee leaned forward and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Like from Chernobyl?”
It took Ilya a moment to understand her pronunciation of “Chernobyl,” to feel its sting.
“Hey now.” Papa Cam braked and flashed his eyes in the rearview. “Let’s give him some peace and quiet, girls. He’s traveled a ways to be with us.”
“Life is hard there,” Mama Jamie said.
“The life expectancy is only sixty-one,” Marilee said.
Molly tapped his thigh with her pointer finger. She had become his favorite by default. “What about a rooster?” she said softly. “Do roosters in Russia go cock-a-doodle-do?”
Her eyes were dancing over his face, the sort of eyes that hid nothing. For a second, she reminded him of Vladimir, and he wanted to answer her, to give in to her the way he’d always given in to Vladimir, but the second passed, and Papa Cam turned the radio on to a news station, and the low voices lulled the girls into silence.
On either side of the road was swamp. Kilometer after kilometer of swamp, and Ilya had learned the word, though he’d never known the thing itself. It was beautiful. Shimmering and still, you thought, until you looked closer and saw long-legged birds sunning with their wings spread and fish leaving ringlets on the surface. Buzzards picked at carcasses on the roadside and their feathers ruffled as the car sped by them. The sun was hidden behind a low shield of clouds, but still everything was bleached by it.
Way out across the water, in a tangle of swamp trees, Ilya caught the flash of metal. He narrowed his eyes and tried to follow it, and then the pipeline pierced the thicket, shot across open water, and curved along the road. Before long it led to a refinery and its crown of smoke. There were the stacks and the cooling towers and the lengths of chainlink fence. It was just like the one in Berlozhniki, and Ilya imagined the pipeline snaking through land and water, connecting this place and the place he’d come from. Oil pumping through it like blood. He knew, though, that it didn’t work that way.
“That’s my office,” Papa Cam said. He worked in human resources at the refinery. Maria Mikhailovna had told Ilya that, and that the Masons were getting paid to host him. “If they don’t feed you, if they’re treating you poorly, just call me,” she’d said, in a burst of worry. “You can use a code word if you need to. How about ‘Raskolnikov’? Just mention him like he’s someone you know.” At the time they’d been a third of the way through Crime and Punishment—an English version, poorly translated—and now it occurred to Ilya that they’d never finished it. Maria Mikhailovna had spared him the punishment part.
Papa Cam eased the car off the highway and onto a smaller one with traffic lights. There were shops now, fringing the swamp. Groceries and video stores and pizza places and a store with a sign saying, EVERYTHING’S A DOLLAR!, and through the windows Ilya could see that the shelves were completely full. There were gas stations, their crimson signs slashed by the white E of EnerCo. Each series of shops was larger than the town square in Berlozhniki, and they seemed to go on forever.
Ilya swallowed. He was exhausted. It had been two days since he’d left Berlozhniki. Thirty-six hours since he’d flown out of Leshukonskoye, but his stomach was still sour with the liquor he’d drunk there. Samogon, the man hawking it had told him, but it had tasted more like rubbing alcohol. He wanted to close his eyes, but when he slept he dreamt of Vladimir. For months—since the night of the Winter Festival—he’d been dreaming of Vladimir. On the flight to Moscow, he’d awoken to a stewardess’s hand on his arm, her face bent over his.
“You were screaming,” she’d said, her mouth tight, and then she’d moved off down the aisle.
Now Mama Jamie was pointing at something. “That’s our church,” she said. Up ahead, an ugly building rose out of a field. It was shaped like a pyramid, with two walls of concrete and two of glass. As they got closer, Ilya saw letters carved over the door. STAR PILGRIM CHURCH, they said, and otherwise he never would have known that it was a church. There was no cupola, no cross—Orthodox or not. Papa Cam slowed as they passed it and through the glass Ilya could make out rows of seats, a shadowed aisle that must lead to a pulpit.
“We go every Sunday,” Mama Jamie said. “I think that’s the same—in Russia, I mean?”
Ilya stifled a snort. He imagined Babushka hearing her say that, as though Americans had been the first to worship on Sundays.
“Is he Christian?” Marilee said loudly, like she was suddenly terrified to be sitting thigh-to-thigh with a heathen.
“I’m not sure, honey,” Mama Jamie said. “But whatever he believes is OK. Remember? We talked about that.” Then she aimed another invasive smile at Ilya. “We also have family dinner every night—all five of us. Six now, with you.”
Ilya knew this meant that there was another daughter, who would, no doubt, be waiting at home with questions about communism and American Idol, but he let himself imagine that Vladimir would be the sixth at the table, that somehow Vladimir had been able to come too, that he was with them now, in the back row of the car, with his duffel under his head and his boots propped against the window.
“Tell them to stop. We need some refreshments. I’m starving,” he’d say, pointing at one of the convenience stores whose windows were plastered with advertisements for lottery tickets and sausage sandwiches. “I bet these places put the Minutka to shame. I bet they have Doritos we’ve never even heard of. Did you see that sign? ALL YOU CAN EAT! They’ve got no idea how much this Russian can eat.”
Molly had fallen asleep with her mouth agape and her temple bouncing against Ilya’s shoulder, and Vladimir said, “The girls are a bit of a disappointment, no? One’s a bitch. And they’re both a little young. But just be patient, Ilyusha. Think of the long con. Trust me—the age gap will be a good thing down the road.”
Ilya turned around, suddenly sure that he would see his brother’s face, but the back row was empty. The leather was smooth and shining in the sun, and Ilya bit his lip to stop the burn in his eyes. The seams in the road ticked by, taking him farther and farther from Vladimir, and he could feel it in his gut, this growing absence, and, worse, he was sure that Vladimir, wherever he was now, could feel it too.
In the front seat, Mama Jamie was still talking about the family rules. She was saying something about praying every night. She put her hands together and bowed her head in supplication. “Pray,” she said, dragging the word out so that each letter was a syllable.
Behind him, Vladimir belched. “We’ll pray for your daughters to get hot,” he said, and Ilya looked Mama Jamie in the eye and made his face as blank as a field of snow.
CHAPTER TWO
At the train station in Berlozhniki, a billboard stretched across the tracks. BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE! it said, though the mine had closed decades earlier and in the winter, when the trains stopped running, there was no one to see the banner. On the town square, birds roosted on a concrete pedestal where a statue of Stalin had once stood, facing the labor camp, his overcoat unbuttoned as though he were expecting milder weather.
Two kilometers from town was a crescent-shaped complex of six huge kommunalkas, which had been built for the coal miners and their families. When the mine collapsed, the families stayed, without their miners. This was before perestroika, when living in a place was the closest you could come to owning it, and Ilya’s family had lived there for half a century without ever believing it their own.