Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,66

he’d slipped? he thought, over and over, panic bubbling in his gut until he’d replayed the night to its end: Dmitri turning into the kommunalkas, his headlights shining on nothing but the snow falling as endlessly and innocently as ever.

One day he came home from school to find Babushka crying on the couch. Timofey was sitting next to her, looking small and a little lost. He patted her knee and murmured, “Tchoo, tchoo,” which was exactly what Babushka used to whisper to Ilya and Vladimir when they skinned their knees or needed garlic in their ears to get rid of an ache.

“What is it?” Ilya said, though he knew: Vladimir was hurt. He’d broken something, had wound up in the clinic or prison or dead.

“We were robbed,” Babushka said.

The apartment looked as it always looked: clean but cluttered. His mother and Babushka were neat, but they could not bear to throw things away, and so every surface—the counters, the kitchen table, the top of the TV—had the feeling of space about to be engulfed. Ilya looked at the door. The lock was cheap—it would pop out with one knock from a hammer. But it was in place.

“What did they take?”

“The samovar, your mother’s spoon, her rings, your grandfather’s medals, the vouchers—” She stopped, and Ilya thought a new wave of tears might come, but she swallowed and was quiet.

Timofey patted her knee. “They left the TV, though,” he said, “and the stove and the space heater. The important things.”

“Those are not the important things,” Babushka said. “They were probably too lazy to carry the TV down the stairs.”

“It’s true,” Timofey said. “Even thugs are lazy nowadays.”

The medals were his grandfather’s—“For Distinguished Labor” and “Veteran of Labor”—and Babushka had kept them in a tiny felt satchel inside a box of Q-tips in the drawer by her bed. His mother’s silver spoon—with the unknown initials carved in the handle—lived in a dusty depression above the kitchen cabinets along with the vouchers that they’d been given during perestroika without ever being told how to exchange them. The samovar was nestled in the depths under his mother and Babushka’s bed, hidden from the world by a warren of shoeboxes full of pictures and newspaper clippings and socks that needed mending and summer clothes that they never ever wore. Everything that had been stolen had been precious and nearly impossible to find.

Ilya dragged his crate out from under the couch. His clothes were all still there. His textbooks and exam prep books, his skates, and the decade-old New York City travel guide that he’d found at the bookshop and bought himself for his birthday were too, but his tape player was gone, and the Delta headphones, and all of the Michael & Stephanie tapes.

“Did they take anything of yours?” Babushka said.

Behind her legs, he could see Vladimir’s crate. It had been completely emptied.

“No,” he said, because she looked so forlorn. “Everything’s still here.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “They probably wouldn’t know what to do with a book if it hit them in the nose.”

Ilya stood. His chest was tight. It must have taken Vladimir a half hour to catalogue exactly what they had that was worth taking, and to gather it all, and at the thought Ilya could feel blood pumping in his hands, as though they were growing rapidly, and he wanted desperately to use them on something, to punch the wall or splinter the door, the way men did in movies. “I’ll go ask if anyone saw anything,” he said.

“No,” Babushka said, with enough force that Ilya understood that she suspected Vladimir too. “We don’t want the police mixed up in this. It’s not worth it. You hear? Ilya?”

Ilya nodded.

“Will you put on the kettle?” Babushka said.

Ilya filled the kettle from the pitcher on the counter and lit the stove. He watched the flame, and after a minute he could feel his hands relaxing, shrinking back to normal.

On the couch, Timofey said, “At least they didn’t take the kettle.”

“Pravda,” Babushka said. “We have the kettle.”

* * *

—

Weeks passed. On New Year’s, Medvedev gave his speech, with the Kremlin ablaze behind him. Babushka kept saying that at least they still had their TV, that at least they got to watch the speech.

“Right,” Ilya’s mother said, “what luck,” and she disappeared into the bedroom, and then Babushka fell asleep, and Ilya muted the TV and listened to the sound of fireworks cracking in the sky.

Ilya didn’t see Vladimir in town anymore, and sometimes he wondered