“Stop smiling,” he said.
Ilya thinned his lips and tilted his chin up like Vladimir did for photos.
“Now you look like a mole,” Kirill said. “Just relax.” Ilya tried to, but Kirill put the camera down and came over and unbuttoned the top two buttons of Ilya’s shirt. “Better,” he said. “Way better.”
He took three photos and the flash made Ilya jump each time. They printed instantly, and Kirill murmured over them approvingly. “I should charge for styling,” he said.
“I look like a thug,” Ilya said.
“Exactly,” Kirill said. “You can thank me when you don’t get jumped as soon as you get to America. It’s the fucking wild west there.”
“I’m going to Leffie, Louisiana,” he said. “It’s in the south.” The name of the town had been the latest tidbit from Maria Mikhailovna. She had stopped tutoring him, but sometimes after class she’d ask him to stay a moment. She’d told him that the Masons’ children were girls—three girls. One day she’d handed him a plastic envelope with his plane tickets inside, and, thinking of Vladimir and the way he’d robbed the apartment, Ilya had asked her to hold on to them for him. “Of course. Of course,” she’d said, embarrassed, as though it were insensitive of her not to have anticipated the request.
“When do you go?” Kirill said.
“One hundred and fourteen days,” Ilya said.
Kirill laughed. “We’ll miss you too, you fucker,” he said. “You want to see some young-but-not-too-young pussy? On the house.” He spread a hand and gestured grandly toward the computer monitors.
“Save it for Vladimir,” Ilya said. “Next time he comes in.”
“That thug,” Kirill said, with affection. “Nothing’s on the house for him.”
Ilya hadn’t expected there to be many people at the Winter Festival—not after Yulia and Olga and Lana—but the square was packed, and there was a feverishness to the crowd, as though they were all taking a risk being out, and they were determined to make it worthwhile. Women walked in tight groups, their hair—light or dark—hidden under fur caps, their eyes skidding toward the edges of the crowd, the shadows, the places that might hide a killer. They laughed too loudly, sipping at the kvass that vendors sold with pirozhki and shashlik. A few fights had broken out, and the police, who were normally patient enough to let things peter out as long as no weapons appeared, had carted the men off immediately.
Ice sculptures were scattered around the square, glowing under the lights strung up from the larches. A stage stretched from Gabe Thompson’s bench all the way to the Minutka. It was laced in bunting that must have been silver a decade earlier, but had faded to the color of slush. The stage was empty. Later, Ilya would stand up there as Fyodor Fetisov announced the exchange. Later still, girls from Ilya’s school would dance the chechotka and the Komis would spin in circles, their elbows and feet flying, and inevitably some drunkard in the crowd would get too excited doing a barynya and fall off the stage. For now, though, classical music blasted from speakers as Ilya, his mother, Babushka, and Timofey let the crowd press them from one sculpture to the next.
The theme of that year’s festival was “Wind & Fire,” and it was announced on banners that dangled from every lamppost in Berlozhniki, but most of the sculptors seemed to have ignored it or interpreted it liberally. There was a life-size ice replica of a Toyota Land Cruiser, with one door propped open and the steering wheel wrapped in leather and a real gearshift ripped from some less fortunate car. The line to get your picture taken in the driver’s seat wound past the stage and all the way to the Internet Kebab. There was an enormous television set with antennae so thin they seemed as if they might crack at any moment. A blue light glowed and flickered inside it. There were the traditional statues too—Leda and her swan and Pushkin and Yuri Gagarin standing in front of a mini Monument to the Conquerors of Space. Timofey stared at each sculpture as though he were at the Hermitage examining masterpieces. He liked the sculptures that had taken physical risks—the spider web with its thin filaments, the top-heavy St. Basil’s, Baryshnikov perched on his big toe.
In the center of the square, the most coveted spot, Gazneft had sponsored an enormous replica of the refinery. It was shot through with multicolored lights that flashed and pulsed, and it was encircled by a red velvet rope. It was entirely unnecessary—the refinery itself was visible from the square, as were the gray columns of its smoke, which had not been replicated—but Fyodor Fetisov did not normally attend the Winter Festival.
“Don’t tell Fetisov, but they forgot the cafeteria,” his mother said.
“It’s a gift to him, from him,” Timofey said, fingering the velvet rope. “Heaven forbid we touch it.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Babushka said. “It’s an honor Ilya will meet him.” Babushka hated Fetisov more than any of them, but not as much as she feared any disrespect of authority.
“I’m just shaking his hand,” Ilya said. Maria Mikhailovna had told him that it would be entirely transactionaclass="underline" Fyodor Fetisov would detail plans to expand the refinery, he would announce the exchange, the handshake would occur, and that was it.
They wandered over to the amateurs’ section, to a Snow Queen whose ice nipples jutted through her fur coat like a force of nature. Her face had been so crudely hacked that it looked manly, and at some point her chin had melted and refrozen into a Lenin goatee.
“What are you grinning at?” Timofey said.
“The cross-dressing Snow Queen,” Ilya said, and Timofey laughed.
“Ridiculous,” Babushka said. She looked at the little card that listed the sculptor. “And it’s Mikhail Kolchin. He just gets worse and worse every year. Remember the bear?”
Ilya’s mother started to laugh. “It was the skinniest bear ever. It looked like a weasel.”
“A demented weasel.”
The next lot seemed to be empty. His mother and Babushka strolled past it, but Ilya stubbed his toe on a ridge of ice. He bent and dusted snow off the ridge with the sleeve of his jacket. The ice was curved into a long, low hump, and Ilya swiped more snow off until he’d uncovered the whole thing. A crocodile. It was poorly done. It looked more like the pedestal for a statue than the statue itself, but the primitive shape was there: the tapered snout, the bulbous eyes and bulging body, the long, ridged tail. Half of the creature had been gouged with crude scales before the sculptor had lost interest.
Ilya stared at it, remembering how Vladimir had said, “We don’t really call it krokodil. We don’t really call it anything.” Still, it seemed to Ilya like more than a coincidence. It seemed like a sign. A declaration. The crowd was still by the Land Cruiser and the refinery. Babushka and his mother had joined a line of women to get their pictures taken with a bust of Vladimir Mashkov. They yelled Ilya’s name and waved at him, and he waved back before leaning over and brushing the snow off the card by the crocodile’s snout. It was blank.
A half hour later, Fetisov arrived in a cavalcade of sirens, and the loudspeakers announced that the speeches and performances would soon commence. Ilya’s mother ushered Babushka and Timofey to a bench by the stage, and Ilya waited in a sort of holding pen between the portable toilets and an ice cream cart. A ten-year-old girl in an orange tutu and too much makeup waited next to him. She was dancing the solo from The Firebird for Fetisov, she told him, with no small amount of pride. Every few minutes she twirled spontaneously, kicked one leg into the air, and wiggled her toes up by her ears.