He and Ilya spent whole winters sitting cross-legged on the carpet. They watched blood fly and cars wreck and buildings crumble. They knew the dubbed Russian by heart. When the power went out, and the VCR whirred to a stop, they recited the dialogue. Kickboxer was their favorite. Vladimir could enact the final fight scene perfectly.
“Like he trained for the Bolshoi,” their mother would say.
“Oh, the Bolshoi,” Vladimir would say with a swoon because their mother had a crush on Alexander Bogatyrev.
“I just mean,” she’d say, “that if you can memorize this, you can memorize other things. Useful things. What’s eight times six?”
And Vladimir would groan and say, “Mama, you’re ruining it.”
One afternoon, when Ilya was seven and snow was falling lazily outside and they were watching the unlabeled VHS for the millionth time, Ilya found himself mesmerized by Jean-Claude’s lips, by the fact that he was speaking a totally different language. Halfway through the movie, the fighting lulled and there was a love scene. Vladimir had roamed out to the balcony to take a piss. On-screen, Jean-Claude’s character was in bed with a blond woman. They were both so tan that Ilya thought they were a different race. The woman’s hair was in a lascivious halo around her face. The sheets vined up her body, covering strategic areas, though Vladimir was convinced that for a half second half of her nipple showed. She was asking Jean-Claude if he’d ever give up and settle down.
“Yebat ’ne,” a husky voice said.
The Russian was ridiculous and the dubbing was off, so it took a second for Jean-Claude’s lips to part in a silent “Fuck no.” No sound came out, but Ilya could see the sounds he was making: the flash of his teeth against his lower lip with the “Fff,” the slight grimace of the “ck,” the pursed lips of that final “o,” and Ilya found himself stringing the sounds together until he could hear Jean-Claude’s voice clearly, as though he had whispered right into Ilya’s ear.
“Fuck no,” Ilya said softly.
It was English. He had said two words in English. Not only that: he knew what they meant. He looked to see if anyone had heard him, sure that the thrill he felt, a thrill like he’d cracked a code, was illicit. His mother was sleeping off her night shift, and Babushka was working the coat check at the Museum of Mining, and Vladimir had finished pissing and was doubled over the balcony railing spitting on the sidewalk.
The woman in bed was sitting up now, with the sheets clutched to her chest. Jean-Claude leaned over her.
“Yebat ’ne,” the husky voice said again.
“Fuck no,” Ilya said, his lips moving at just the moment Jean-Claude’s did, and again that thrill twirled up his spine.
“What did you say?” Vladimir stood in the doorway, his cheeks pink from being outside and upside down. He was ten then, with this haze of hair on his upper lip that Ilya wanted badly for himself.
Ilya said it in Russian.
“No,” Vladimir said. “You said it in English. Say it again.”
“Fuck no,” Ilya murmured.
Jean-Claude and the woman were kissing now, but in a minute the Chinese mob would kick down the door and shoot the bed with such vigor that feathers filled the air.
“You learned that? From watching their lips?”
Ilya nodded.
Vladimir clapped his hands. “Come here,” he said. He went back onto the balcony, and Ilya followed him.
The balcony was the size of a shower stall and webbed with so many strands of laundry line that you had to crouch to get to the railing. When they did, Vladimir propped Ilya on the rail. The courtyard was a muddy expanse, scabbed with spring snow. One man trudged across it, coming from the bus stop with a bagged beer. Behind him, the refinery was the whole horizon, bright and pulsing.
“Yell it,” Vladimir said. He had his arms around Ilya’s waist. The metal rail was so cold that it felt as though it were burning Ilya’s ass right through his pants.
“Go on,” Vladimir said. “Yell it.”
Ilya was quiet, and then Vladimir said the woman’s line in Russian, “‘Are you gonna give up?’”
“Fuck no,” Ilya said, and his voice wasn’t big enough to carry. The man with the beer kept trudging.
“Fuck no!” Vladimir yelled, and Ilya could hear the thickness of English on Vladimir’s tongue, could hear how his own had been clear in comparison.
Ilya opened his mouth and this time he yelled it. The insides of his cheeks tightened in a rush of cold, and the man with the bottle looked up. If he could understand them, he didn’t show it. Vladimir pointed at him just as he dropped his beer in a patch of slush and disappeared around the corner of their building.
“See,” Vladimir said, “you already know more than that old fucker.” He lifted Ilya down. “Jean-Claude wasn’t born American.”
“He wasn’t?” Ilya said. He’d thought Jean-Claude the epitome of all things American.
“He was French. Or Dutch or something. But he’s American now. He moved there. And you know who he brought with him?”
Ilya shook his head.
“His brother. They live in a mansion right on fucking Hollywood Boulevard.” They ducked under a line of Ilya’s underwear, which had been Vladimir’s before him and had turned the color of concrete. Vladimir nudged Ilya toward the TV. “Go see what they say next,” he said.
And because Ilya wanted that thrill again, and because Vladimir had told him to, he did. He spent the afternoon a meter from the screen, his fingers kneading the nub of Babushka’s carpet. Behind him, Vladimir practiced choke holds on pillows, while Ilya listened to the Russian and moved his lips like the Americans. The little, sharp words were the easiest to mimic: the “nos” and “thanks” and “fucks.” But as weeks and months passed, he learned to pause the videos, to play them in slow motion and tease out the vowels and cobble together longer words. Syllable by syllable he watched the way American tongues hit American teeth. There was a lot he didn’t understand, but that seemed inconsequential next to the miracle of what he did.
CHAPTER THREE
The sun was still high as Papa Cam pulled onto a smaller street and sped up a rise into a cul-de-sac where a lone house bit a chunk out of the sky. It was as graceless as a kommunalka. Over one of its shoulders, Ilya could make out the refinery, so small that its lights had merged into one light. Its smoke melted into the clouds. The Masons’ lawn was cut military short, but the lots on either side were full-grown with sawgrass.
“It was supposed to be a neighborhood, then the market crashed,” Papa Cam said. He slung Ilya’s duffel over his shoulder with a grunt and made his way up a brick walk to the door.
“We have it all to ourselves,” Molly said in a rote, uninflected way, as though that were the party line.
Inside, everything—the walls, the furniture, the pillows, the countertops—was the color of tea made for a child, with lots of milk. The ceilings went up and up and up, and there seemed a determination not to divide space into rooms. The kitchen bled into the dining room, which bled into the den and the foyer, where the stairs curled into an open-air hallway. Mama Jamie gave Ilya a tour, using game-show host gestures, and the house did seem like something on TV. It was all polish; it lacked dimension, lacked the smells and sounds and smudges that were life in the kommunalkas. Ilya’s duffel, in all of its dirtiness, suddenly seemed like the only real thing, and he wanted to grab it from the chair where Papa Cam had left it and run. He would head toward the refinery and figure things out from there, he thought, just as Mama Jamie reached out and took his arm. Ilya flinched, and there was this flash of fear in her eyes, as though he’d been the one to touch her. She looked at him and he looked at her, and his heart was beating so hard that he was sure that she could see it shaking his body. Then she smiled. And he was wondering how many times she would do that—let her goodwill trump her instincts—when footsteps sounded in the hallway and a girl appeared at the top of the stairs. The third daughter. The first daughter, he thought, because she was the eldest. She was his age. Maybe a year younger. Her hair was dyed a shade close to white, which was more unsettling than attractive, but still there was something beautiful about her. Like the girls in Berlozhniki, she was all long, pale lengths: her shins, her wrists, her neck, which she was stretching now, with an arm crooked over her head and an elbow pointing to the ceiling. Her voice was long and pale too.