Children stepped out of the kommunalkas, blinking, their eyes adjusting from the TV to the world as it was. They yelled. They ran. They remembered, suddenly, how full their lungs could get.
There was talk that the snow would melt and reveal another body. Multiple bodies. There was talk that Vladimir had killed others that winter and buried them in deep drifts. Sometimes Ilya was tempted to believe these rumors. As the snow grew patchy, he eyed the piles that were still big enough to hide a body, and he wondered if there might be someone in there. A victim with a clue that would absolve Vladimir: a chunk of the killer’s hair gripped in a fist; the knife with fingerprints frozen on its handle; or a note, written in the throes of death, naming the killer.
By July the snow was gone entirely. The ground was swampy, and they’d all traded their felt boots for rubber ones. No more bodies appeared, and the Vecherniye Berlozhniki began to cover other news besides the murders and Vladimir’s arrest. A twelve-year-old girl collected enough change in the melting town’s nooks and crannies to pay her family’s rent for a month. She smirked in the picture in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, each hand hoisting a tube sock filled with rubles.
“What a ferret,” Babushka said, slapping the paper down on the table. “She steals people’s change, and they call her a hero.”
“You’re jealous you didn’t beat her to it,” Ilya’s mother said. It was her day off, and she’d spent it watching Simply Maria and smoking cigarettes out the open window. Ilya was not used to her smoking—she’d quit when she was pregnant with Vladimir and begun again after his arrest—but he liked to watch her slim fingers pinch the tobacco into a neat row. She rolled a cigarette just like Vladimir did.
A week before Ilya left for America, he walked out to the Tower. It was empty. Daylight streamed through glassless windows. Puddles had collected in the dips in the concrete. It didn’t seem to Ilya like a place he’d ever been before, and it took him a while to find Vladimir’s room. The posters had been torn down and left in long strips on the ground. The blankets were gone, and so were Vladimir’s clothes, but sitting there in the middle of the room was the pink plastic bag. Vladimir’s camouflage sweatshirt was inside, and as Ilya pulled it out, he heard the familiar, plastic clatter of his Michael & Stephanie tapes beneath it.
Ilya spent much of that last week in the kommunalkas, on their tiny balcony. If he leaned over the rail a bit and looked to the right, he could see the polyana, where they’d found Lana. The police tape was long gone, but there were still these snatches of color from the photos people had left. Someone had painted a tire in rainbow colors and planted flowers inside it. Sometimes Ilya thought that if he stared hard enough he’d be able to see what had happened. He’d see Lana walk to the trees. He’d see who was with her. He’d see it all, and he’d know that it hadn’t been his brother.
That was where Maria Mikhailovna found him. It was early morning, but already light. He hadn’t slept, and he tried not to think of the only other time she’d been in their apartment.
“It’s time to go,” she’d said, in English, as always.
His mother and Babushka hugged him good-bye, and Timofey pressed a thousand-ruble note and a tiny knife with the hammer and sickle on it into his hands.
“It’s a lucky one,” he said.
Two hours south of Berlozhniki, halfway to Leshukonskoye, they stopped at a petrol station with faded yellow pumps.
“Two hours to go,” Maria Mikhailovna said, and Ilya filled the car while she went inside to pay. It wasn’t until the tank was full that he noticed a wind chime above the door. There was something familiar about it, about the hollow clatter it made when the door opened. And the yellow pumps. Ilya touched one, picked at a flake of paint with a fingernail. He walked toward the road. A truck was coming. A pale splotch on the horizon, far enough away that he could barely hear it. He could feel a memory growing like a bubble within him. He remembered running, laughing. Vladimir was chasing him, reaching out for him. Behind him, the wind chime made its rattle. The truck was close now, its horn blasting. In a second, Vladimir’s arms would be around him. He waited, and he waited.
“Ilya!” someone called, and then a hand yanked him backward, and the truck passed, close enough that the pressure of it made his body shake. Maria Mikhailovna gripped his hand in hers. The sun was hitting her glasses, turning them into mirrors.
“Ilya,” she said again, in this way that meant he was forgiven, and he forgot what it was that he’d been trying so hard to remember.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Emily Cunningham and Samantha Shea for their passion for this project, their brilliant edits, and their calm guidance, without which both this novel and I would be lost. And thank you to Kate Griggs and Michael Burke for turning these pages into a book, and to Gail Brussel, Matt Boyd, and Grace Fisher for bringing that book out into the world.
Thank you to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the University of Michigan M.F.A. program, and the Elizabeth George Foundation for their generous support. And to Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Adam Johnson, Judith Mitchell, Michael Byers, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, and Malena Watrous for their patience and insight.
To Austin, Brad, David, Helen, Juliana, Monique, Nicole, NoViolet, Tony, Shannon, and Lydia C. for helping me see what this novel might be.
To Karolina, for reading this not once, but twice, and for her expertise in editing and in all things Russian; and to Alex Raben for the late night spent in the labyrinth of transliterations.
To Hannah Tinti at One Story and to Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown at Glimmer Train for taking a chance on my writing.
To Svetlana Alexievich for her brilliant and heartbreaking Secondhand Time; to Ian Frazier for Travels in Siberia; to Johann Hari for Chasing the Scream; and to Donald Weber for the photographs in Interrogations, especially Vorkuta and April 26, 2008, Vorkuta, Russia, both of which I turned to time and time again for inspiration.
To Patricia, for being a “Bacca” to my girls every time I disappeared to reckon with this story.
Thank you to my families, the Fitzpatricks and the Davids, for your encouragement and enthusiasm. To Jan, for your endless faith in me. To my brother, whom I look up to even more than Ilya does Vladimir. And to my mother, for inspiring me every day, in every way. Thank you for all the books on tape we listened to, sitting in the car, in the driveway; and thank you for all of the adventures—especially the Russian ones.
To my grandfather, the first writer I knew, and to my father, who wanted to be a writer. I wish you could hold this book in your hands.
Thank you, with every bit of my love, to Margot and Win, who, in acknowledgment of themselves, have typed their names here. And to Grainger for all the moves, all those midwestern winters, for all the drafts you’ve read, and all the love you’ve given. How lucky I am to have you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Fitzpatrick’s work has appeared in the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She graduated from Princeton University and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.