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.
“Above all,” he murmured.
“Ace in the hole,” he said, but that day he couldn’t quite make the words mean anything.
Vladimir was probably with Aksinya, cupping her new potatoes. Or he could be skating, but the ice wasn’t thick yet, and Ilya looked and could see the shine of Vladimir’s skates in the bin under the couch. Maybe he was clinging to the back of the #33 bus with Sergey, though Ilya didn’t know if they even rode out to the refinery anymore. And then, as though Ilya had conjured him, Vladimir burst through the door. His boots were untied, the laces wet and whipping at his ankles, and there were two girls following close behind him.
“We saw Fyodor Fetisov!” he said. “We were up on the bridge and all of a sudden all these black cars roll out—one after the other—and then this SUV that is—” Vladimir kissed his fingers the way Italians did on TV when they saw a beautiful woman. “He was going like one fifty. He almost hit us.” Vladimir grabbed the blini off of Ilya’s plate and took it down in two bites, as though his brush with death had left him famished. Then he said, in a softer voice, “I touched his car. Just reached out and touched it.”
Ilya could see it: his brother’s fingers touching that perfect paint job, the car shocking him with the import of the man inside.
“Bozhe moy,” Babushka said. “Why do you do things like that? You’re