Dmitri leaned toward Ilya and put a hand on his thigh, and his posture reminded Ilya of pictures he’d seen of politicians in the thick of deals. “I bought us frozen pelmeni,” he said, “just in case the macaroni doesn’t work out.”
Ilya laughed. “Whatever it is will be better than what my mother makes. She cooks everything ’til it’s carcinogenic.”
“That sounds like my mother, which is probably why she has cancer. That or the cigarettes,” Dmitri said. His expression was the same: still that jolly, cherubic look that made Ilya feel in turns relaxed and like he was somehow a source of amusement. “You know I’m from here too,” he said, “not like Maria, not a cultured city kid.”
“You were born here?”
“Born and bred.” He hummed a few notes of “My Berlozhniki” with false bravado, but Ilya could tell that his voice was good.
“I still had to leave people behind though. That’s a fact of life now. Simple. Some people are dead weight.” He made a “plop” with his lips, like a rock dropped in a pond. “I went to School #17. It was a better school back then, only there were no teachers as beautiful as my Masha.”
“Stop it, Dmitri!” Maria Mikhailovna yelled from the kitchen.
With a start, Ilya realized that Dmitri was the reason Maria Mikhailovna’s voice was different. They were in love, these two. Truly in love, and maybe that was why the air and the light felt like they did. Ilya finished his kvass, and Dmitri filled his glass with beer. It was bubbly and tart on his tongue, and his chair was incredibly soft. It seemed to have molded around his buttocks and spine, like it was meant for him. He imagined getting under the covers at home that night and having Vladimir smell the alcohol on his breath the way he’d smelled it on Vladimir dozens of times, and a sort of sprightly pride came over him. He had not felt so good since the day Maria Mikhailovna had told him about the exchange. In this chair, he could forget that Vladimir had not been home for more than a month. He could forget krokodil and the way his mother and Babushka looked at the door like dogs sometimes, hoping for a knock, for Vladimir to come home spun or sober or however. He felt like he was in a different world already, like the happiness he felt here was a preview of America. For dinner he had two helpings of macaroni and cheese, and enough beer that he lost his shyness and began to talk without thinking first.
“How did you meet?” he asked them, and maybe it was the drink, but he thought he could actually see the love seep into their faces the way morning light seeps over the horizon.
“Skating,” Maria Mikhailovna said.
“How Russian,” Ilya said.
Dmitri cackled.
“At the Winter Festival,” Dmitri said, “if you can believe that. She is lovely, beautiful, brilliant, of course, but she is not so good on skates. In fact, her skating is a disruption of the peace.”
“Luckily Dmitri was there, in uniform. And for the safety of others he removed me from the rink.”
“So the Winter Festival is your anniversary,” Ilya said. The Winter Festival was three and a half months away. That was when Maria Mikhailovna planned to announce the exchange as long as Ilya passed the boards.
They nodded. “It’s been too many years to celebrate,” Maria Mikhailovna said.
“Isn’t that when you’re supposed to celebrate?” Ilya could feel himself glowing. It was silly, he knew, but he felt the same sense of accomplishment talking with these two, in this apartment, in this light, that he felt when he perfectly translated a dictation or when he understood a whole conversation between Michael and Stephanie without having to pause and rewind.
“Exactly,” Dmitri said. “And, between us, she says this—‘No, no, I don’t want to celebrate, no presents, no flowers’—but I’ll be sleeping at the station for a week if I don’t plan something.”
Maria Mikhailovna smiled, and a small silence settled over the table. It was comfortable, calm, the sort of silence that could never exist in his apartment. He thought of Babushka’s endless murmurings, his mother’s rants, the neighbors’ fights, which were audible enough to follow like soap operas. He had no memories of his mother and father together, but he could feel in his marrow that they had not been like this, and for a long second he let himself imagine that he was the Malikovs’ son. It made him feel guilty, of course, to imagine that, and he wondered—not for the first time—if everyone was as traitorous in their daydreams, if Babushka wished she’d married Timofey when they were young enough to have a different son, one who survived. Maybe his mother longed for children who were nothing like him or Vladimir, maybe she longed to leave them all behind and go to America herself. But he could tell that these two, at least, did not regret each other.
Later, when Maria Mikhailovna was in the kitchen cutting the apple pie, Ilya asked Dmitri if he was a detective.
“Yes.” Dmitri laughed. “But it’s not so glamorous as you make it sound. Mostly I patrol for the refinery.”
That explained the apartment. That explained why Maria Mikhailovna was the one teacher at School #17 who did not have a second job at a kiosk or café. Fyodor Fetisov probably paid Dmitri more than his salary from the police force.
“Did you hear of the woman on Ulitsa Gornyakov?” Ilya knew that Dmitri had heard of Yulia, and what he meant was, do you know anything?
Dmitri nodded. “It’s sad, no? She was poteryana.” Lost, he’d said, and Ilya didn’t know whether he meant that she’d been lost when she died or in general.
“My babushka’s scared,” Ilya lied, “because my mother works the same job.”
“She doesn’t need to be scared,” he said. “Your mother should take the bus to be safe. And stay away from the Tower. The woman was not so innocent.”
“Did she die at the Tower?”
Dmitri looked at him, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how when you roll over a log there are worms and zhuki and slugs all grubbing around in the muck?” Ilya nodded. “The Tower is like that, only there are getting to be too many bugs. They’re not staying under the log.”
Maria Mikhailovna set the plates of pie on the table. “They need jobs,” she said.
“Of course they do,” Dmitri said. “Welcome to the new Russia.” He sounded proud, because he had done just fine in the new Russia, but there was this tightness in his face that spread the way a crack spreads across ice. Maria Mikhailovna saw it too. She put a hand on his arm. Still he went on, “It’s not even their fault. They have nothing, and they have nothing to hope for. At least before, we had a big idea, with big flaws, sure, but now what have they got? Is it any wonder they’re killing themselves?”
Yulia Podtochina had not killed herself, but Ilya knew there was no point in saying so. Dmitri was grandstanding the way Vladimir sometimes did, connecting dots until he could condemn the whole world and make himself feel like he was somehow outside it. Only Vladimir was outside it, and Dmitri was profiting from it.
“That’s why we teach them,” Maria Mikhailovna said. Her voice was soft but firm. She had understood that for Ilya the conversation was more than ideological.
“Teach them to leave?” Dmitri said, lifting a hand toward Ilya. There was a bubble of spit on his lip that he didn’t seem to notice. He was drunk, Ilya thought, or getting there.
“They leave and then maybe they come back.”
Dmitri laughed. “Sure,” he said.
“OK,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “Pie.”
“Pie. Yes. Sorry, pie and coffee too.” Dmitri smiled at his wife and then at Ilya. “And no more politics.”
“Yulia Podtochina was pretty,” Ilya said. He knew he should drop the subject, but he wanted to say the pretty without the enough, and he had the feeling that Dmitri had slandered her somehow.