Hijau and other places I’d never heard of, and—without knowing the particulars—was able to venture a fairly accurate guess as to the type of explosives employed. As talkative as he was, he also had a secretive streak and I trusted him not to tell anyone without having to ask. Maybe because he himself was motherless and had formed close bonds to people like Bami, his father’s “lieutenant” Evgeny, and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywallag—he didn’t seem to think my attachment to Hobie was peculiar at all. “People promise to write, and they don’t,” he said, when we were in the kitchen looking at Hobie’s latest letter. “But this fellow writes you all the time.”
“Yeah, he’s nice.” I’d given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening so different from my father’s, but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.
Boris stuck his finger in the open jar of peanut butter on the table between us, and licked it off. He had grown to love peanut butter, which (like marshmallow fluff, another favorite) was unavailable in Russia. “Old poofter?” he asked.
I was taken aback. “No,” I said swiftly; and then: “I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Boris, offering me the jar. “I’ve known some sweet old poofters.”
“I don’t think he is,” I said, uncertainly.
Boris shrugged. “Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”
xxvi.
BORIS HAD GROWN TO like my father, and vice versa. He understood, better than I did, how my father made his living; and although he knew, without being told, to stay away from my dad when he was losing, he also understood that my father was in need of something I was unwilling to give: namely, an audience in the flush of winning, when he was pacing around jacked up and punchy in the kitchen and wanting someone to listen to his stories and praise him about how well he’d done. When we heard him down there jumped-up and high on the downdraft of a win—bumping around jubilantly, making lots of noise—Boris would put down his book and head downstairs, where patiently he stood listening to my dad’s boring, card-by-card replay of his evening at the baccarat table, which often segued into excruciating (to me) stories of related triumphs, all the way back to my dad’s college days and blighted acting career.
“You didn’t tell me that your dad had been in movies!” said Boris, returning upstairs with a cup of now-cold tea.
“He wasn’t in many. Like, two.”
“But I mean. That one—that was a really big movie—that police movie, you know, the one about policemen taking bribes. What was the name of it?”
“He didn’t have a very big part. He was in it for like one second. He played a lawyer who got shot on the street.”
Boris shrugged. “Who cares? Still is interesting. If he ever went to Ukraine people would treat him like a star.”
“He can go then, and take Xandra with him.”
Boris’s enthusiasm for what he called “intellectual talks” found an appreciative outlet in my father, as well. Uninterested in politics myself, and even less interested in my father’s views on them, I was unwilling to engage in the kind of pointless argument on world events that I knew my father enjoyed. But Boris—drunk or sober—was glad to oblige. Often, in these talks, my father would wave his arms around and mimic Boris’s accent for entire conversations, in a way that set my teeth on edge. But Boris himself didn’t appear to notice or mind. Sometimes, when he went down to put the kettle on, and didn’t return, I found them arguing happily in the kitchen like a pair of actors in a stage production, about the dissolution of the Soviet Union or whatever.
“Ah, Potter!” he said, coming upstairs. “Your dad. Such a nice guy!”
I removed the earbuds of my iPod. “If you say so.”
“I mean it,” said Boris, flopping down on the floor. “He’s so talkative and intelligent! And he loves you.”
“I don’t see where you get that.”
“Come on! He wants to make things right with you, but doesn’t know how. He wishes it was you down there having discussions with him and not me.”
“He said that to you?”
“No. Is true, though! I know it.”
“Could have fooled me.”
Boris looked at me shrewdly. “Why do you hate him so