down the hall just to take a shit in peace. Vladimir had reported this fact to Ilya. All Ilya remembered of his father was a pair of dark, expressive eyebrows, and the thrill he’d get when his father flipped him over and pretended that a piece of candy had fallen out of his hair.
Their apartment was tiny: a bedroom that Ilya’s mother and grandmother shared, and a living room where Vladimir and Ilya slept head-to-toe on a pull-out couch. The walls were crisscrossed with water pipes and studded with radiators. Above the couch hung a painting of a mother and child mushroom hunting that had been prized for its innocuousness long enough to become loved for its familiarity. There were striped curtains and a plaid tablecloth and mismatched floral cushions on each of the kitchen chairs. The woodstove was used for storage, and the red corner was papered with worker propaganda. When the shift occurred, Babushka had tacked a laminated icon right on top of Gorbachev’s portrait. She’d only used one pin, so it could be quickly removed if things shifted again, but it had been there for Ilya’s whole life: Jesus on the cross, the plastic clouded with grease, Gorbachev’s birthmark half visible over the thorny crown.
Ilya was the younger son, without much to distinguish him from his brother but a chipped front tooth and a lopsided sag to his shoulders. The tooth was a mystery, but the shoulder sagged because his collarbone had broken during birth and never healed properly. He had been born in ’93, when Yeltsin was impeached, and tanks were shelling the White House. His mother said that the doctor had been listening to Echo of Moscow, to Rutskoy as he pleaded with the air force to bomb the Kremlin, and that in the excitement of it all he’d gripped Ilya’s shoulders a bit too hard with the forceps. She said that she could still hear the snap. “Like a nut cracking,” she’d say, with the same wince every time, because Ilya’s pain was intertwined with her own. But the kids in the kommunalkas had a different story: “Your mama’s a bone breaker. Tight enough to crush a man,” they whispered, until the day Vladimir overheard and threatened to crack each of their collarbones one by one.
When Ilya was little, he was happy to be like Vladimir. Happy to have the same buzz cut, to wear Vladimir’s old snowsuits, which were too small in the waist and too long in the leg. Happy to time Vladimir skating up and down the Pechora on a knockoff Timex and to diligently log Vladimir’s times in a notebook, though they never really improved. When he was little, Ilya treated school like Vladimir treated school: as time spent dreaming up things to do when not in school. He learned to read from Vladimir’s comic books and hockey magazines, his chin hooked over Vladimir’s shoulder. Ilya was an observer and a mimic, Vladimir a natural performer who never seemed to mind the force of Ilya’s attention, though he did, from time to time, take advantage of it. Afternoons, when they were walking home from school, he’d ask Ilya to steal Fantas from the Minutka, and Ilya would stuff them under his sweater without a second thought. Once, ancient Anatoly, who worked the register, caught him and made him spend the day unloading beer crates as punishment. Ilya stole two beers to make up for the lost Fantas, and Vladimir accepted these as though they were his due.
When Vladimir and his best friend, Sergey, clung to the back of the #33 bus, the one that took the neftyaniki out to the refinery, Ilya clung to the back too. They would jump off just before the gates in snow that came up to Ilya’s knees. Everything—the snow, their skin—was blue-tinged by the refinery’s light. Vladimir and Sergey dragged sticks along the chainlink fence, which seemed so high that it even segmented the sky, and when they were far enough from the road, they took turns flicking matches through the fence and watching them burn little holes in the snow. They circled the refinery slowly, like sharks might, looking for a break in the fence, and inevitably Vladimir and Sergey began trading stories of Fyodor Fetisov, the oligarch who owned it all.
“Once,” Vladimir said, “he took a bath in beluga.”
“With two prostitutes,” Sergey said.
“That each cost two million rubles a night,” Ilya added, because this detail had stuck with him. Two million rubles