Ilya was in the kitchen. The Masons were moving around him in the way water moves past an obstacle to which it’s grown familiar, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing, he decided, if they saw him cry.
That night, he asked them if he could give a testimonial.
“Of course,” Mama Jamie said. She’d held him after his mother called, and there was still a damp patch on her shirt from where his face had been pressed against her. “I can call Pastor Kyle and let him know,” she said.
“I want to do it now,” Ilya said. “Here.”
Mama Jamie looked at Papa Cam, and Marilee opened her mouth to explain that this was not how testimonials worked, that they came after the hymns and before the sermons, that it was not even Sunday, but Papa Cam did not give her a chance. He clapped a meaty palm over her mouth and said, “Of course.”
So Ilya stood on the fire skirt, where he’d posed for the picture on the first day of school, and the Masons sat on the couch, close enough that he could have stretched out a leg and touched their knees with his toes.
Sadie smiled at him, and Mama Jamie said, “Remember, you’re telling God, not us.”
Ilya nodded, though he was not telling God, he was telling them.
He started at the very beginning: “I was six years old,” he said, “when I learned my first word of English.” He told them that it was the sort of word you weren’t supposed to say, and then he said it aloud anyway because the whole point of this was admitting the truth. He told them how Vladimir had lifted him up onto the balcony rail and made him shout it out across the courtyard. And even now, a decade later, he still couldn’t say whether it was a moment that he would undo, because everything terrible that had happened to him was rooted in it, but so was everything good.
He told about Maria Mikhailovna, and the books Vladimir had bought him at the shop on Ulitsa Snezhnaya, and of Michael and Stephanie, and the hours and hours he’d spent listening to them, and studying, and the way each hour had seemed to lay a brick in a wall between him and Vladimir. Telling his story, something strange happened. Time folded back, or else it split open. It seemed somehow less linear, so that he remembered yelling from the balcony, his body small enough that Vladimir could hold him with one arm, but in the same moment he could see Lana’s birch grove with its wilting flowers and damp ribbons, and at the school, Maria Mikhailovna looked up, her hand poised above a test with his name on it. In the square, on his bench, Gabe Thompson cried out in his sleep. Vladimir was behind Ilya, propping him up, his breath hot on the back of Ilya’s shirt, but he was in the Tower too, in that horrible room with the rug over the window and the tapes in their bag in the corner. He and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey, boney and desperate and doomed, dancing like children to some song from the ’80s that no one in America listened to anymore. And Dmitri Malikov was in his patrol car, his face milky in the refinery’s light, as he drove in an endless loop around the town.
It was a horrible story. He could tell from their utter silence, from the way even Marilee and Molly were still, mesmerized by the badness of the things people did to each other and themselves. Still, though, there was something beautiful in the telling of it. Vladimir had told him that krokodil made him remember, that it was like he was present in his memories and like he was holding them at the same time, and it was like that for Ilya now. They were all around him—Vladimir, his mother, Dmitri, Maria Mikhailovna—every version of them, the good and the bad, and he himself felt as though he were gaining dimension, becoming as solid and present as the stone he’d plucked out of the creek, which even in the hot damp of his palm had seemed endlessly cool, like it had a source of energy all its own.
He sped up as he neared the end—the forced confession, Dmitri’s suicide, Fetisov’s guilt, Vladimir’s release. “Vladimir’s not good,” he said. “I know that. There’s plenty he’s done to be ashamed of. And there were so many ways that his plan could have gone wrong. So many ways. When I think of them, I’m so scared that I can’t breathe. But then I remember why he did this—”
Mama Jamie was wiping at her wet cheeks, and Papa Cam was staring at him with an expression of frank wonder.
“So that I could be here.”
This was the end, but somehow it gave him a feeling of vertigo, of running a step too far off a cliff. He thought of Sadie, and her nightly pilgrimage. He thought of Sadie’s mother slumped on that couch. He thought of Vladimir, of his confession and the way that each word had sounded like a wound so that by the end he’d barely been able to talk. Ilya had earned the Masons’ forgiveness—he could see that—but it wasn’t enough.
He cleared his throat. “I know that I don’t have the right to ask you all for anything,” he said. “I don’t deserve to be here, and you know that now—but still I have to ask: let Vladimir come here. Please. Let him come too.”
In the quiet that followed, Ilya could hear the hiss of cars on Route 21. Somewhere far off a siren whined. Sadie was crying silently. This smile shook on her lips, and Ilya smiled back at her.
“Please,” Molly said, as though Ilya had asked for a dog for Christmas and she wanted one too.
Marilee bit her lip and said, “Hmmm. That’s a lot to forgive.”
Next to her, Papa Cam reached for Mama Jamie’s hand. Ilya did not know whether he was asking for permission or giving it until Mama Jamie nodded. “OK,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marilee and Molly made a new sign with Vladimir’s name etched in deliberate letters, only this time Ilya helped them write it in Cyrillic, because, he explained, Vladimir really, truly didn’t speak any English at all. Sadie sat next to him on the ride to the airport, and though she was careful not to touch him, he could feel that she wanted to, and that was enough.
Vladimir had called two days earlier. Ilya and the Masons were just home from Star Pilgrim, where Pastor Kyle had told a whitewashed version of Vladimir’s story after which the collection basket had bobbed down the rows, filling with money to fund his stay. Marilee had been the one to answer the phone, and after a moment she had looked at the receiver with exasperation and said, “I think it’s a wrong number.” She punched the speakerphone button, and Vladimir’s terrible English had flooded the kitchen.
“Hello,” he’d said, over and over, only coming from him the word sounded like “Yellow.”
Ilya grabbed the receiver from Marilee and turned the speaker off just as Mama Jamie realized who it was and ushered the girls out to the deck, hissing something about privacy to Marilee.
“Vlad,” he said.
“You better stop emailing me about this girl and seal the deal. Just once, Ilyusha, think with your dick instead of your brain.”
“You got my emails,” Ilya said.
“Of course I got them. One day in the life of fucking Ilya Denisovich.” His voice was rushed, euphoric. There was no regard in it for the risks he’d taken. It was exactly as Ilya had expected it to be, as Ilya had wanted it to be, but still Ilya had to fight the urge to ask him if he was high. He wanted, so badly, not to ruin the moment.
“Are you home?” he said instead.
“At the Kebab, and Kirill the tight-ass motherfucker is the only one in this whole town not cutting me a deal so I have—I don’t know—a minute left, but I’ll see you soon, bratishka.”
“Wait,” Ilya said, wishing there were a way to keep Vladimir on the phone for the next two days until he saw him in person. “Tell me how you did it. How’d you get him on tape?”
Ilya had wondered this; he’d marveled at the planning it must have entailed for Vladimir to know that Dmitri was coming to the clinic and to record him.