something to be proud of.
Ilya’s mother would bite a radish in half and make a bitter face and say, “What am I supposed to do? Put him in a straitjacket?” And it was true that there was little she could do. She worked the night shift, slept during the day. She was with Vladimir and Ilya for only two exhausted hours in the evening and one exhausted hour in the morning.
“He’ll be fine,” Timofey would say, his nostril hairs twitching. “Just give him some time. He’s running around. It’s what boys do.”
Then they’d all look at Ilya with this awkward sort of appreciation, because of course he would never do the things that boys do.
Every once in a while, after Ilya was already in bed, half asleep, listening to Michael and Stephanie, Vladimir would poke his head through the door and say, “Ilyusha, I’m sleeping at Sergey’s tonight,” or “Night, night, bratik. I won’t be home until late.” His breath would be a beery fog, and behind him, in the light of the hall, Ilya would see Sergey and Aksinya and Lana, their hands clamped over their mouths to keep from laughing, to keep from waking him, as though he were a baby. Vladimir would click the door shut, and he would hear their voices echo up the stairway. And there were times—and this is what Ilya would remember—when he would simply not let the worry in, when he would not wonder where Vladimir was going or what Vladimir was doing, when he would stretch his legs out and revel in the expansiveness of the couch. It felt decadent and very adult to be sleeping alone, to have two pillows. The refinery lights sparked on the ceiling, and he would imagine that they were city lights, and that he was in his own apartment, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and that in the morning he would be heading to work, not school. Those nights, Ilya slept like the dead, but he’d wake and, in just the way your tongue finds the tender spot where you’ve bitten your cheek, his mind would find Vladimir.
* * *
—
One morning in October, as Ilya, his mother, and Babushka were eating syrniki with cream and apples, Vladimir walked in the door of their apartment wearing a tracksuit and smelling dank. He pulled a term card out of his pocket and slid it onto the table, right between Ilya’s plate and his mother’s. The card was filthy. It had been crumpled, stepped on, and partially incinerated—as though Vladimir had used it to roll a cigarette, lit it, and then thought better of it—but Ilya could still make out Vladimir’s grades: a neat column of ones. Ilya gasped. No one got ones. Ones were like zeros, just a place for the scale to start, the end of a ruler.
Their mother was in her work clothes: a hairnet, blue smock, and rubber clogs. At first she did not notice the card. She had a magazine next to her plate and was flipping the pages impossibly fast. She was angry—either because Vladimir had been out all night, or because she hated her job, or because Babushka had recently announced that she and Timofey from down the hall were romantically involved, and Ilya’s mother had not been romantically involved with anyone for a decade. But after a minute she saw the card there on the table and snatched it up. Her eyes went shallow.
“Are you an idiot?” she said. “Or did you just not go?”
Ilya thought of the man in the bookshop. How many times in his life had Vladimir been called an idiot?
Vladimir slumped into his chair at the head of the table. Vladimir had told Ilya that it had been their father’s chair, but Ilya couldn’t picture anyone but Vladimir in it. “I’m an idiot,” Vladimir said.
Ilya’s mother nodded very slowly, and the precision of the gesture, its economy and patience, reminded Ilya of the way lions stretch backward before they pounce.
Vladimir tucked his chin into his chest and looked at the empty patch of table before him. “The teachers are bitches,” he muttered.
“Ilya,” their mother said, “has he been there?”
His mother had white spots on her cheeks. Under the table, Ilya could feel her foot shaking. This was another way the apartment could be, with the refinery’s lights turning everything blue, like they were trapped in a cube of ice.
“Ilya?” his mother said.
“I don’t know,” Ilya said.
“You do know,” she said, and the words came out crushed