Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,41
Yellow Pages. They were actual books—I’m aging myself—but now they’re databases.” Miss Janet sucked the tip of a finger and dabbed, absently, at stray sandwich crumbs.
“But what if you don’t know where he is?” Ilya said.
“Well, who is he?” Miss Janet said.
“He’s this American who came to my town on a mission, only I can’t remember where he’s from.”
“I guess you could search state by state,” she said. “What kind of mission was it?”
“He wanted to convert us,” Ilya said. He thought of Gabe, pleading with them for a minute of their time, for a chance to be saved, and the way that his pleas had gone from earnest to angry and had seemed, eventually, like rants.
“I figured that,” Miss Janet said. “But convert you to what? Was he Baptist?”
Ilya shook his head, thinking of Papa Cam, who hadn’t been allowed to dance or date or drink soda. “The Church of Later Day Saints,” Ilya said.
Miss Janet smiled. “It’s not ‘later,’ she said. “It’s ‘latter,’ like a ladder that you climb.”
“Ladder. Latter,” Ilya said, and out of habit his hand drifted to his back pocket, where he used to keep his notebook of unknown words, but he’d memorized all the words in it and left the notebook in Berlozhniki.
“So he’s Mormon. I don’t know much about Mormons, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in Leffie,” she said. She crushed the tinfoil into a tight ball and tossed it into the trash can under her desk. At home, they did not throw away tinfoil. Babushka rinsed it and hung it to dry on the laundry line, as did everyone else in the kommunalkas. And sometimes, when Ilya was walking home from school and the sun hit the balconies just right, the whole building seemed to sparkle.
CHAPTER TEN
Ilya woke the morning after the windstorm with the last bits of a dream melting in his mind the way sugar melts on your tongue. Had all of it—Maria Mikhailovna’s visit, the exchange program, America—been a dream? The heat was back on. All of the candles had burned down to nubs overnight. Frozen wax puddled on the countertops and windowsills. Babushka was chipping away at it with a spoon and collecting the shavings in a pot. Ilya watched her for a moment, then he sat up.
“Is it true?” he said.
Babushka nodded. She put the pot on the stove, walked over to the couch, and sat on its edge. “When I woke up this morning, for the first time in my life, I was thankful that your grandfather is with God instead of with me. Do you know why?”
Ilya shook his head. She leaned over him, the way she used to when he and Vladimir were little and still got good night kisses. She was beautiful as grandmothers go. Her spine was straight, her eyes clear and blue. She did not have any of the terrible and obvious signs of age—the knobs and growths, the shaking—but still it scared him to really examine her. Her veins were too apparent. Loose skin fringed her jaw like melting wax and every once in a while her voice slowed as she spoke, as though her brain were limping toward the end of the sentence.
“Why?” he said.
“Because he wouldn’t have let you go. America. Not in a million years. You suffer for a country, and either you find a way to love it or you go crazy. He found a way to love it. Even here.” Ilya’s grandfather had been in the camp for seven years. The day after he’d gotten out, he’d taken the son he’d never met fishing. The day after that he’d gone to party headquarters and begged for his membership to be reinstated. “But it’s different now,” she said. “It’s allowed.”
“Yes, it’s allowed,” Ilya said, gently. In theory he understood her awe, but it still seemed misplaced. The miracle wasn’t that someone was allowed to go to America, but that he had been chosen. “I dreamt of flying there,” he said, because a piece of the dream had come back to him. He’d been up in a plane, and the stewardesses’ faces all came straight out of Michael & Stephanie. They were a rainbow of races, but somehow identical, just like Stephanie’s friends, and they had taken turns offering him sodas and blankets and bonbons with the simple diction of the Level I tapes.
“Listen,” she said, “you’re smart—I know that, that you’re smart and that you work hard—but you’re lucky too. There aren’t places for