He stood outside the window for a long moment. He wanted her to sense him and look up, but she did not. When he knocked on the glass, her head snapped toward him. She had to walk halfway across the classroom before she recognized him, and then she nodded, and he walked around the school and met her at the front doors.
She did not say her usual “Hello! How was your weekend?” to which he was expected to respond in English and at length, even though his weekends were always the same, blocks of studying punctuated by Babushka reminding him to eat. Instead she led him down the hallway, past the dark rooms, in silence. Once they were in her classroom, she locked the door.
“I thought you were hurt. Or worse,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “What happened?”
The answer was simple: he had wanted Vladimir back. He’d thought that he could choose Vladimir, but now he saw that he’d built that choice on a false premise, because Vladimir being gone had nothing to do with him, and nothing he did could change the fact of it. This idea was like a little spur of bone lodged in Ilya’s chest, something he had to breathe around.
“Ilya, what happened?” She reached a hand out and touched his brow bone where Vladimir had hit him. Her eyes were huge. She thought something truly terrible had prevented him from taking the boards. Vladimir had said that he would try to fix the situation, but Vladimir’s plan was half-assed in the way of all Vladimir’s plans: Ilya had no idea if he had seen Maria Mikhailovna, no idea what he might have told her, or how to corroborate it, and so he just told her the truth.
“I was with Vladimir,” he said. “At a party at the Tower.”
“The Tower.” She paused, her brain taking a moment to process the unlikely combination of Ilya and the Tower. “Was he in trouble? Did he need help?” Ilya hesitated, and she said, “He forced you, didn’t he? To miss the test. Is that it? He wanted to sabotage you?”
Ilya was about to shake his head, and then he thought better of it. What in the world did Vladimir have to lose? “Yes,” he said, his voice small.
He looked at the empty hook on the wall where Aksinya’s coat had hung. He looked at the “Look Where English Can Take You!” posters that marched across the wall. Big Ben. The Statue of Liberty. The Sydney Opera House. The Wild West. He looked out the window to the hall, which was tiled in a yellow that was the color of butter, of winter sun.
She looked to the hall too, and then she spoke in a rush: “Listen,” she said, “I took them for you. I couldn’t not. Not after all the work you’ve done—all the work I’ve done.” She let out this strange little snort. “I sharpened five pencils. I even set the timer for myself. For each section. I didn’t give myself an extra second. I just did the best I could. And you know the thing that made me the saddest?”
Ilya was stunned. She would be fired. Arrested. She was insane, taking a risk like that. Of course she was insane, he thought. How else did someone from Moscow wind up teaching in Berlozhniki? He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even shake his head. And then, as if she knew he was thinking she was crazy, her eyes went glassy.
“What made me so sad—so angry—was the fact that you would have done better. You would have done perfectly.”
And then America burst into his brain like something held too long underwater, and with it the same huge hope. Her hope. His hope. His hands began to sweat. He could feel his heart beating in his palms, his pulse like something trying to escape him. It was absurd to be given such a chance twice; it was a sign of a universe completely lacking in logic. He felt sick, betrayed almost, like when he’d first learned that languages have as many exceptions as they do rules. He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
Maria Mikhailovna pulled her chin back into her neck. Her look was still incredulous, but it was no longer sympathetic. “Did you want me to let you fail? You want to spend your life drinking at the Tower? Puking in the snow? You know there are other kids who are smart. They might not be as smart as you, but they’re smart enough to be grateful.”
Ilya thought of Grigori Alexandrov with the doughy crescent of flesh that hung over the waistband of his jeans. He had been taken under the wing of the math teacher, but he was proficient at English too. He worked hard. Sometimes, walking home from school after a long session with Maria Mikhailovna, Ilya would sense Grigori walking behind him. He wouldn’t turn around, though, nor would Grigori say hello.
“It’s not that,” Ilya said. “It just doesn’t feel fair. It’s never felt fair.”
“Fair.”
“That I get to go.”
“It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s unfair. It’s terrible. But you don’t help anyone by spitting in the face—” She took a breath, tried to calm herself down. “Do you know that your brother came to me?”
A tiny bubble of something—hope or trepidation—shot up Ilya’s spine. Vladimir had kept a promise. He’d come to see Maria Mikhailovna, and he’d made her take the test. He’d made all of this happen.
“After I came to your house and told you about the exchange, he came to me, and he begged me to let him go. To America. He said that he would change, that he would turn it all around. He wanted to be the one. He said that you would succeed no matter what, that you’d get to go to university for sure, but that this would be the closest he’d ever come to an opportunity like this.” She took a breath, then looked at Ilya as though aiming at him through a sight. “I had to tell him that he wasn’t close at all.”
That was why Vladimir had not come home, Ilya realized. That was why he lived in that terrible room, and Ilya didn’t know if he felt more guilt or anger at the knowledge.
“Did Vladimir come to see you today?” Ilya asked, his voice so tired and sure of the answer that it didn’t come out sounding like a question.
“Today?” she said. “No. Why would he?”
“No reason,” Ilya said.
“He doesn’t know, does he? Ilya? No one can know.”
“He won’t tell anyone,” Ilya said. He thought of Vladimir begging Maria Mikhailovna to come to America. He had never heard Vladimir beg for anything, and he wanted to know what his voice had sounded like, and if it had happened here, where Ilya was standing, and whether Vladimir had been serious enough about the plea to stay sober. He didn’t need to know what Vladimir had done when Maria Mikhailovna had told him that he wasn’t close at all—he could already imagine that.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t,” she said, and then she sat heavily in her chair. The school was completely quiet, so quiet that the air felt like it was made of cotton. Maria Mikhailovna blinked and rubbed at the spot on her nose where her glasses dug into her flesh. Then she pushed a stapled packet across the desk. “I made a copy. Just in case. So you know the questions, and what you answered.”
The board results came with unusual speed. A week of snow, a week of no Vladimir, a week of memorizing the test that Maria Mikhailovna had taken, and then she presented Ilya with a gray envelope from the Ministry of Education in Leshukonskoye.
“I thought you might want to open it at home, with your family,” she said, with this lightness to her voice that made it seem far away.This was how she spoke to him now. “I have a copy as well.”
And though Ilya had always thought he’d open the letter at this desk where she’d tutored him, the desk with the tiny moon and stars etched in the upper right corner and the slight list that meant a pencil always rolled off the left side, he walked home with it, intending to do what she’d said and open it at home with his mother and Babushka. But when he got to the kommunalka, there was a cluster of boys—younger than him—smoking in the stairwell, and he didn’t want to murmur “Izvinite” and listen to them go quiet as he edged by them. Instead, he kept on walking toward the Pechora.