had not
“What’s the difference between a contraction and the possessive?” she said. He watched her lips move in the spastic way they did when she spoke English. Like the words were sharp and hard to maneuver. He thought of Lana’s lips. How they paled in the cold. He imagined them opening, singing, “Krok-o-dil.”
“A contraction,” Maria Mikhailovna said, “and the possessive.”
“A contraction is a combination of two words. And a possessive shows ownership.”
“How do you form one?” She leaned back, and her glasses caught the overhead light.
“With a hook.”
“A hook?” she said, smiling. She curled a finger, slashed the air with it.
“An apostrophe.”
“Good. Now use ‘there’s’ in a sentence.”
There’s a new drug, he thought. There’s nobody left.
“There’s America,” he said. He’d have his nose against the window. He’d see it for the first time at night. The lights would be bright enough to blanken his mind, and he’d feel nothing but right.
“Again.”
“There’s nothing in the cupboard.”
“Good,” she said, “but you don’t say the ‘p’ in cupboard. It’s quiet.”
Silent, not quiet, he thought, but he nodded and wrote “cupboard” in his notebook, the last in a list of words he’d practice that night. He’d say them over and over until his voice had smoothed out all the bumps, and sometimes as his mother wiped down the table, he’d hear her murmuring them too.
Later, when Maria Mikhailovna took one of her bathroom trips, Ilya yanked Aksinya’s coat from the wall and stuffed it into his backpack. The backpack bulged, and fur sprouted from the zipper, but Maria Mikhailovna didn’t seem to notice. When they’d finished for the day, she turned out the lights and locked the classroom. They walked through the school’s empty corridors, and their footsteps sounded out a slow beat. It was strange, he thought, that she was the one person in the world that he spent the most time with. This tiny woman with the plain face and the pretty smile. They pushed through the main doors and out into the cold. It was four-thirty and pitch black. Maria Mikhailovna’s glasses fogged, and she swiped at them with her mittens, smiling apologetically.
“So this weekend,” she said, “we’ll see you for supper.”
* * *
—
It was around this time—December of Ilya’s last winter in Berlozhniki—that a body was found in a snowbank on Ulitsa Gornyakov.
Seventy years earlier, prisoners had laid Ulitsa Gornyakov, pouring hot asphalt down the gentle slope from Berlozhniki, past the mines, to the camp. Over the years, through the Great War, through Brezhnev and glasnost, through seventy freezes, the asphalt had cracked and furled and canted until it jarred even the sturdiest of axles. Then the refinery was built, and the road was dug up. It was widened and smoothed so that two tankers could pass with a meter margin. Most of the roads in Berlozhniki disappeared under snow each winter, leaving the buildings lonely and illogical without their connections, but Gazneft cleared Ulitsa Gornyakov religiously, and the body was found by a plower named Mikhail Tukhachevsky early one morning.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky told the Vecherniye Berlozhniki that each type of snow feels different to the plow. There is snow that’s crusted with ice, which makes the plow buck then dip, buck then dip. Wet snow is heavy enough to drive the plow toward the shoulder, heavy enough to have your forearms aching at the end of a shift from holding the wheel straight. And then there is pillow snow, Tukhachevsky said. Light and dry, easy as breathing. It had been pillow snow that morning, and so Mikhail Tukhachevsky had noticed the instant the plow took on weight, dragged left, and went light again. He climbed down from the cab and circled back behind the truck. In the red of his taillights he saw a woman’s leg slanting up out of the snow. Straight up, he said, like a joke, except that she was barefoot, and so he’d known that she was dead. He dug for her face anyway, just to be sure.
Her name was Yulia Podtochina. If someone had not left the paper in the communal bathroom, Ilya would not have even read the article. If Yulia Podtochina had not worked at the refinery, he would not have taken much notice. There were a few deaths from exposure every year in Berlozhniki, drunks or junkies who got confused about where home was and wandered the wrong way. But Yulia worked at the cafeteria in the refinery: fitting the hot trays into their metal frames, wiping down tables, mixing the soda