“It’s to keep out alligators,” Papa Cam said, pointing at the wall. “Vicious, but they can’t even climb a foot.”
The pool was square and still, the water taking on a dark shine, like oil, in the dusk. Papa Cam seemed to have taken the idea of immersion less literally than Mama Jamie, or maybe he was more comfortable with silence. He leaned against the deck rail and let Ilya look for himself. Eventually he said, “It took us two years to get the pool built. For a while there I thought it just wasn’t in God’s plan.”
Part of Ilya wanted to express his awe, but what he wanted to say more—the thing burning his tongue like acid—was that if God did exist then he was a motherfucker if the Masons’ pool was part of his plan, was even a blip on his radar.
Ilya thought of his mother and Babushka, wondered what they were doing at that moment. He did not even know what time it was at home, whether they were sitting on the wooden bench in the hall of the police station, waiting for someone to talk to them, or whether his mom was halfway through her night shift, eating the boiled eggs on rye that Babushka packed her every evening. He couldn’t imagine where Vladimir was. The only prisons he’d seen were on TV—American prisons—and he knew that wherever they were holding Vladimir would be worse. But then, suddenly, he could picture Vladimir: his back against a rough concrete wall, the kind that crumbled slightly under your fingertips. His lips were moving like he was praying, but of course he wasn’t. He was reciting the lines from Kickboxer, the movie unspooling behind his eyelids, his fists clenching with the muscle memory of the fight scenes.
Behind him, Papa Cam flipped a light switch on the wall of the house, and the pool jumped into being. Turquoise and glowing, with a rim of blue tiles and a lone leaf resting on the bottom.
“There,” Papa Cam said. His voice was exalted, and Ilya thought he might vomit.
For almost a year, since the night Maria Mikhailovna had knocked on their door, he had thought about America constantly. On some level he had imagined the wide, smooth streets, the car-size refrigerators, the tank-size cars, the carpets that went all the way from one wall to another. He had even anticipated the faith with which the Masons clicked their seat belts; the way Papa Cam had paid for the airport parking with a lazy swipe of his credit card; the fact that, in the one grocery store they’d driven past, there had been no lines. But he hadn’t ever thought of this: in America, they light their pools. This was the detail for his mother. He imagined telling her. He could almost hear her silence, the quick suck of air through her teeth.
“Sometimes,” Papa Cam said, “the girls like to swim at night.”
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Ilya turned eleven, he’d skipped a level at School #17, and there was constant talk of his promise. “He’s sharp,” one teacher said. “A prodigy,” said another. They said that he might get a scholarship to Syktyvkar State or even to the Language Institute in Moscow. Convinced by his teachers of Ilya’s aptitude, his mother and grandmother started to hope. For a little more money, for a table that didn’t wobble, for a bigger apartment, for a car, but most of all their hope conjured his future: a degree and a good job in Moscow or St. Petersburg, neither of which they’d ever seen. They treated Ilya as tenderly as the brass samovar that came out from under the bed, from under its layers of felt, only for polishing. His grandmother mixed extra sour cream into his shchi. She scooped it onto his pelmeni.
“More smetana, Ilyusha?” she’d say. He’d watch the cream quiver on the end of her spoon and knew she’d give him all they had.
Vladimir noticed this favoritism—it was impossible not to. He teased Ilya about it. “Your big brain is oozing out of your ears,” he’d say, or, “Study, smart-ass, study!” But sometimes when Ilya pulled out his pencil case and his textbooks, Vladimir would go quiet. He’d shut off the TV and slink down to the stairwell where boys bounced tennis balls off the walls and smoked cigarettes.
Ilya started secondary school, and his new English teacher, Maria Mikhailovna, was a tiny woman with enormous glasses and a prodigious amount of hair that she wore in a thick, schoolgirl braid. Her husband was a policeman, so everyone regarded her with a bit of suspicion, but she herself was soft-spoken and sometimes seemed surprised to find herself at the front of the room and the center of attention. After Ilya’s first week in her class, she asked him to stay behind and said, quietly, “You have a gift.”
Ilya’s eyes fell like sinkers. He was used to hearing things like this by now, but still he never knew what to say in return. “Take the compliment like a boss,” Vladimir always told him. “Just say, ‘No shit.’” But, as always, Vladimir’s advice was only applicable if you had Vladimir’s balls, and Ilya did not.
“Thank you,” Ilya managed.
Maria Mikhailovna handed him a piece of paper. “Ask your mother to get what she can, and if it’s any trouble, tell me.”
He nodded. There was a Russian-English dictionary on the list, a book of idioms, a tape player, a set of tapes, and corresponding workbooks. He estimated the costs on his walk home, and the total was close to a week’s groceries, but his mother smiled when he showed it to her. She handed Vladimir a stack of rubles and told him to take Ilya to the bookstore on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, which was the more expensive of Berlozhniki’s two bookstores.
When they walked in the door, a tiny bell shook above them, and the shopkeeper looked at them and said, “Money on the counter.” The shopkeeper was a sour sort, with permanently pursed lips, and Ilya could feel Vladimir bristling next to him, could feel how badly Vladimir wanted to slam the door, head across the square, and spend the money on a dozen VHSs at the Internet Kebab, but instead he cleared his throat and showed the man Maria Mikhailovna’s list. When the total was more than their mother had given them, the shopkeeper allowed a smile.
“If I cancel the tapes you’ll have enough,” the man said.
“We’re not canceling the tapes,” Vladimir said.
“It’s OK,” Ilya said. “Maria Mikhailovna—”
“We’re getting the tapes.” Vladimir reached into the waistband of his jeans and plucked out a bill that was rolled thin as a straw. He handed it to the shopkeeper. “You do the math,” he said.
“Of course I’ll do the math,” the shopkeeper said, and, once he had, he said, “It’ll be two weeks at least.”
Vladimir nodded, and Ilya followed him out the door. When it had closed behind them, Vladimir said, “Did you see his mouth? He looks like he’s been sucking cock nonstop for a decade.”
Ilya laughed, but Vladimir was not joking. His eyes had gone narrow and sharp. “You’re not going to get anywhere, ever, if you let people like that push you around.” He was walking fast toward home, his steps making a staccato rhythm of his words. “That guy wants the whole world to fail. You. Me. Himself even. Just so he can say he saw it coming.”
“OK,” Ilya said.
“Not OK,” Vladimir said, ahead of him.
“Where did you get the money?” Ilya asked. He knew for a fact that Vladimir had spent his name-day money within an hour of receiving it, but Vladimir didn’t answer.
Two weeks later, when they returned to the shop, the shopkeeper hefted a box out of the storeroom and slid it onto the counter. Ilya could see that everything was there. The tapes in a cellophane stack. The books pristine, their pages so bright and white that Ilya could feel the way they would cut his fingers.