“Thank you,” Ilya said, but Vladimir, who lost his homework on a weekly basis, unearthed Maria Mikhailovna’s list from his pocket.
“I’ll check it,” he said, and he began to match the books’ titles to the ones on the list. Ilya knew that Vladimir meant to make a point, but his reading was a work in progress, his English abysmal, and it took him a long time to sound out each title. His lips moved, slow and labored, as though he were giving birth to each word. The shopkeeper pulled a toothpick from his pocket and began to flip it, end over end, between his teeth. He was watching Vladimir too.
“I have to piss,” Ilya said, because he could feel the shopkeeper practicing insults with each flip of the toothpick.
“Hold it,” Vladimir said. He moved his finger down the list and began sounding out and searching for the last title. Finally, he was done. He handed Ilya the tapes and stacked the books in his arms, and as Ilya followed him out the door the shopkeeper said, “Idiot.”
Vladimir did not react. He did not stiffen. He did not get the furious flush that usually preceded a tantrum of some kind. It didn’t seem as though Vladimir had heard the man, and so Ilya pretended he hadn’t either. They brought the books home. And because of the books they had a meatless dinner for the tenth night in a row, and Vladimir said nothing about that or about the shopkeeper. But a few days later, Ilya walked by the shop alone and found the glass storefront splintered. The glass had held, but cracks radiated out from a crystalline patch in the center of the window. Ilya looked down, wondering what Vladimir had thrown, but the sidewalk was clean. Inside, the shop was dark and empty. Ilya put a finger to the point of impact and pushed, just gently, and it seemed to him as though the window bowed inward—a millimeter, no more, but enough to make him whip his hand back. His fingertip came away coated in tiny shards, one of which brought out a bead of blood. Ilya sucked it, and then he looked up. The shopkeeper was behind the counter. He had come out from the storeroom and was watching Ilya through the cracks in the glass, and Ilya shoved his hand in his pocket and hurried away.
The set of tapes was called Learn English: The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie, and Maria Mikhailovna assigned him an hour of listening comprehension each night on top of his regular workload. Michael and Stephanie were an American couple. They went to the grocery store, to the beach, to the movies and the mall. All the while they’d talk in slow, happy, somewhat stoned voices, and Ilya would listen. Sometimes they’d ask him questions:
“What did you have for lunch today?” Stephanie would ask.
“Bread and cheese,” Ilya would say.
“What is the weather like today?” Michael would ask.
“It snows,” Ilya would say.
There were line drawings of Michael and Stephanie in the corresponding workbooks. Stephanie was decent looking, with pointy breasts that made twin tents in her sweaters. Vladimir claimed that she was good fodder for masturbation, and that Michael, who was gangly and wore glasses, was not satisfying her adequately. Her breasts excited Ilya, as did the pinch of her waist, but it was her eyes that he loved. They were big and liquid and sad, despite all the American fun she had.
In Maria Mikhailovna’s program, Ilya’s world narrowed. He was only ever at school or at the kitchen table with his workbooks spread before him. His ears were always bracketed by a pair of foam Delta headphones that had come with the tape player. But somehow the world felt expansive. He’d close his eyes and listen through the static until Michael’s and Stephanie’s voices grew clear and large, and it was as though he’d opened a tiny, secret door onto an incredible vista. It was as though he were moving through the door, shutting it carefully behind him and breathing this new, perfect sort of air. Before long, he didn’t even need to be listening to the tapes to be transported. Michael and Stephanie spoke to him constantly. Every time he looked at his watch, they told him the time in English. Every time he climbed the flights up to his apartment, they counted the steps in English.
“Uzhin gotov, Ilyusha,” Babushka would say, and Ilya would hear Stephanie say, “Ilyusha, dinner is ready.”
“What are we eating tonight?” Ilya would say, in English, and Babushka would look at him with the jolt of an old fear in her eyes. Then her face would soften, and she would say, “Even you can’t make English sound pretty.”
While Ilya studied, Vladimir gained his own sort of knowledge. He stole a carton filled with crisps from a truck broken down on the high road and sold them outside the school for ten rubles less than what crisps went for at the Minutka. He skated down the Pechora, smoked pot under the bridge, and broke his arm skating home. He watched porn over the stuttering connection at the Internet Kebab. He was held back a year in school and in his new grade, he got a girlfriend, Aksinya, who let him feel her breasts. He told Ilya that they were as small and hard as new potatoes. Aksinya gave Vladimir a hand job. Then a blow job. Each night, in bed, Vladimir reported all of these developments to Ilya with gusto, with hand motions, and for a while Ilya thought that he could do these things too, that he was making a choice to study instead. But one afternoon, when he was eleven, he went to find Vladimir in the stairwell of Building 4, where he and Sergey liked to bounce tennis balls against the wall and smoke cigarettes. Vladimir wasn’t there. No one was. There weren’t any balls or cigarette butts on the ground. The graffiti had been painted over, the floor had been swept, and Ilya got the same feeling looking at that clean concrete that he got when the swallows departed on cue each August, when the gray sky was full one moment and empty the next.
Snow was falling that afternoon, and his footprints were already soft at the edges as he followed them back across the courtyard to Building 2 and climbed to his floor. Babushka had recently struck up a friendship with Timofey Denisovich from down the hall, and they were playing prostoy durak at the table. Timofey was even more ancient than Babushka and had the sort of unkempt nostril hair that felt like an act of aggression. He and Babushka did not talk much, although sometimes Ilya would come home to find them humming songs from the Revolution or swapping sovok jokes.
“What’s the latest requirement for joining the Politburo?” Timofey would say.
“Tell me,” Babushka would say.
“You have to be able to walk six steps without a cane.”
“No, two. Two steps is enough.” Babushka would laugh, tears trickling from the corners of her eyes the way they did when she was happiest.
That afternoon they were quiet, though. There was just the click of cards against the table, and the hiss of air through Timofey’s nose when Babushka laid down a strong suit.
“Where is Vladimir?” Ilya said.
Babushka looked at him with a smile left over from a card she’d played. “God knows,” she said as though God really did. “Are you hungry?”
Ilya shook his head.
“I am,” Timofey said.
“He is the one who needs to eat, not you. What are you doing all day? Not studying. We know that,” she said, but she stood anyway, and got Timofey a plate and one for Ilya too.
And so Ilya spent the afternoon at home, as he always did, picking at a beef blini and paging through his Handbook of Commonly Used American Idioms. On the cover was an American flag, a baseball, and a hamburger. Idioms were messy, logic-less things, but each page of the book had been divided into two columns—on the left were the idioms, on the right their definitions—and usually Ilya loved this imposed order, the promise that if he learned a column a week he would know them all in a hundred and sixty-two weeks. He would know them all by the time he was Vladimir’s age.