Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,5

was more than a thousand Fantas. Two million rubles could probably buy the Minutka and everything inside it.

“That’s right,” Vladimir said. “And they had on thongs made of gold.”

“And diamonds for nipples,” Sergey said. They all went silent for a moment at the power of this image. “He can do whatever the fuck he wants with them. Anything,” Sergey said, with a cruelness that sometimes surfaced in Sergey and that made Ilya wish it were just Vladimir and him leaning against the fence.

“Where does he live? On the square?” Ilya said.

Vladimir and Sergey looked at each other and laughed.

“He doesn’t live here,” Vladimir said. “He’s probably been here once, to cut the ribbon.”

“No one lives here,” Sergey said.

“Not even the prostitutes?” Ilya asked.

“Ilyusha,” Vladimir laughed, “I like the way you think.”

* * *

—

When it was too cold to be outside, Ilya and Vladimir watched movies. Vladimir was obsessed with American movies, and Ilya liked them because Vladimir did. The pure action movies were Vladimir’s favorites—anything with Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Willis, anything with roundhouse kicks and explosions and sparse dialogue—but he would settle for badly dubbed dramas or sitcoms with too-loud laugh tracks or whatever Kirill the cranky Chechen was hawking at the Internet Kebab. The movies were all a decade old. The tapes were all bootleg.

In The Bodyguard, the dubbing turned to Chinese five minutes in, and a wave of static washed across Whitney Houston’s face. In Die Hard, the Russian had been added without removing the English, so every line Bruce Willis said was a tangle of the two. One VHS was unlabeled, and Vladimir had bought it hoping that it was porn, but it was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, the title of which they never learned because the tape began at some point a third of the way in and ended right before the climax. Vladimir kept the VHSs stacked, according to genre, next to the TV, and when the VCR jammed, which it did with regularity, Ilya would hold the player’s mouth open, and Vladimir would use Babushka’s tweezers to unsnag the tape with a patience and attention that were rare in him.

He and Ilya spent whole winters sitting cross-legged on the carpet. They watched blood fly and cars wreck and buildings crumble. They knew the dubbed Russian by heart. When the power went out, and the VCR whirred to a stop, they recited the dialogue. Kickboxer was their favorite. Vladimir could enact the final fight scene perfectly.

“Like he trained for the Bolshoi,” their mother would say.

“Oh, the Bolshoi,” Vladimir would say with a swoon because their mother had a crush on Alexander Bogatyrev.

“I just mean,” she’d say, “that if you can memorize this, you can memorize other things. Useful things. What’s eight times six?”

And Vladimir would groan and say, “Mama, you’re ruining it.”

One afternoon, when Ilya was seven and snow was falling lazily outside and they were watching the unlabeled VHS for the millionth time, Ilya found himself mesmerized by Jean-Claude’s lips, by the fact that he was speaking a totally different language. Halfway through the movie, the fighting lulled and there was a love scene. Vladimir had roamed out to the balcony to take a piss. On-screen, Jean-Claude’s character was in bed with a blond woman. They were both so tan that Ilya thought they were a different race. The woman’s hair was in a lascivious halo around her face. The sheets vined up her body, covering strategic areas, though Vladimir was convinced that for a half second half of her nipple showed. She was asking Jean-Claude if he’d ever give up and settle down.

“Yebat ’ne,” a husky voice said.

The Russian was ridiculous and the dubbing was off, so it took a second for Jean-Claude’s lips to part in a silent “Fuck no.” No sound came out, but Ilya could see the sounds he was making: the flash of his teeth against his lower lip with the “Fff,” the slight grimace of the “ck,” the pursed lips of that final “o,” and Ilya found himself stringing the sounds together until he could hear Jean-Claude’s voice clearly, as though he had whispered right into Ilya’s ear.

“Fuck no,” Ilya said softly.

It was English. He had said two words in English. Not only that: he knew what they meant. He looked to see if anyone had heard him, sure that the thrill he felt, a thrill like he’d cracked a code, was illicit. His mother was sleeping off her night shift, and Babushka was working