if he’d left Berlozhniki entirely. He imagined Vladimir and Sergey clinging to the back of one of the semis that braved the roads all winter. Sergey claimed that his older brother had done that once, though his brother had been in Berlozhniki for as long as Ilya could remember, working at an auto shop, father to three kids who’d all inherited his and Sergey’s skin, which was as patchy as a rotten potato.
The more Ilya thought about Vladimir, about the stolen tapes, about the fact that he had mustered the energy to rob them but had not bothered to try to see Ilya in almost three months, the larger his hurt grew, and over time he found that he could cook it into hatred. He should have hated Vladimir, of course, but it was hard to hate someone whom you never saw, so instead he hated his mother. He hated the way her eyes turned down at the corners. The noisy way she ate. The fatness of her ass. The skinniness of her legs. She couldn’t say his name without it sounding like a plea. He hated her blind hope and stupid trust. There were other mothers, he knew, who helped their children with schoolwork, who did not stink of yeast and sleep all day. Grigori Alexandrov’s mother had written out a five-year study schedule as soon as his talent in math had become apparent; Ilya’s mother did not even know the date of the boards, though that did not stop her from applying pressure that Ilya didn’t need. And there was the way she had picked him as the smart one and defined Vladimir by default: the idiot, the failure, trouble through and through. In more rational moments, he remembered the folder of math homework, the term card filled with 1s, the fact that Vladimir had said he would try and had not. He remembered that Vladimir had left of his own accord, but what sort of mother let her son leave? Why had she not gone to find him? And would she have if Ilya and his promise had never existed? At the hot center of his anger was a fact that he tried his best to ignore: Vladimir had not been home since the night Maria Mikhailovna had told them about the exchange. Vladimir had not wanted to be left, and when Ilya thought of that night, he hoped that he had looked his brother in the eyes, that he had at least considered not abandoning him, but of course that wasn’t the case. He’d said, “Yes,” more loudly and clearly than he’d said those first words of English nearly a decade before.
When his mother was at work, Ilya sassed Babushka instead. Babushka who, it seemed, could never keep her fingers still, could never just do nothing. Babushka who saw portent in everything, who, one day, when she was making gogol-mogol, cracked open an egg and saw that it was yolkless.
“It could be good,” she said. “Or it could be very bad.”
“So it could be anything,” Ilya said, without looking up from his book. He was reviewing advanced algebra because a quadratic equation had been the only thing to trip him up on his last practice test.
“No yolk.” Babushka thrust the bowl under his nose, and he looked down at the egg white. It was perfectly clear except for a few milky particles. “Maybe he’ll come home.”
“I doubt it,” Ilya said. His voice came out sour, exactly as he’d wanted it to.
“You don’t miss your brother?” she said, and when Ilya shrugged, she said, “Maybe you’re missing your yolk.”
That winter, his mind was like a fire heap, doused and fumy with gasoline. He lived for any insult, any slight or spark. He slammed his book shut so that the table wobbled and his chair wobbled and the egg white wobbled in its bowl. His coat and scarf and hat were bundled on the couch, still thawing from his walk home from school, and he grabbed them, shoved his feet into his boots and stomped out of the apartment. Halfway down the endless stairs, he paused. He had nowhere to go. Five flights above him, three below. It was freezing. Here, and everywhere else in Berlozhniki. He’d forgotten his mittens, and his fingers were already tingling, halfway to numb. His breath stung with the cold. He’d have to be gone for an hour at least. If he went home any sooner, Babushka’s smugness would be unbearable. He’d skip