“This will hurt, Vova, but I’ll be quick,” their mother said. She had never talked to Vladimir so softly before, had not used his nickname since they were children. Always she said “Vla-di-mir,” the syllables a scale of disappointment.
The spoon clattered in Vladimir’s teeth, and Ilya couldn’t tell if he was nodding or shaking. He groped for Ilya’s hand and found it, and Ilya thought of war movies, of all those glorious deaths in the Great War, when it had seemed so clear who the enemy was and who the hero. Vladimir yanked at his hand, feebly, and spit the spoon out of his mouth. He wanted to say something—and this was like the movies too, Ilya thought, his heart racing. Vladimir had some last words, some assertion of love or apology, something for them.
“Pocket,” he said, his voice sounding full of sand. “Coat pocket.”
“Mama?” Ilya said.
His mother closed her eyes and nodded, and it was from her expression—that calm defeat—that Ilya knew what was in the pocket.
There was a vial and a syringe. The syringe was visibly dirty, the needle crusted with something yellow. The vial had a pathetic amount in it. Less than a teaspoon. Less than a lick, already mixed, with gray sediment at the bottom.
“Do I have to cook it?” Ilya said, thinking of the process he’d witnessed at the Tower, knowing that he couldn’t replicate it, that he hadn’t been watching it with the right sort of desire.
Vladimir shook his head. Ilya wiped down the syringe and sucked the liquid into it. He pressed the plunger down to get the air out because Vladimir had told him a story about a man, three floors down, who had filled his insulin syringe with air and pushed it into his veins in ’98, when the currency crashed.
“Mama,” Ilya said again.
She took the syringe from him, held it out, and started to cry. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t know how to find a vein.”
Vladimir’s eyes were clearer, now that the syringe was in sight, as though he could already feel the drug working. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a vein.”
So she stuck the needle into the bare skin of his thigh, in a spot that looked vaguely blue, and Vladimir leaned back onto Ilya’s lap and opened his mouth, and Ilya put the spoon back between his teeth though his jaw was too slack to hold it. Once she’d pushed the plunger down, his mother handed the syringe to Babushka, and Babushka opened the door to the balcony, disappeared into a gust of cold air, and came back without it.
“The water’s getting cold,” Babushka said.
His mother nodded and gripped the edges of his pants where they were stuck to his skin.
“Ready?” she said.
Ilya nodded and gripped Vladimir’s hand, and Vladimir’s mind was far away, gripping whatever memory it had found, and when their mother ripped the fabric away and bits of his flesh came too, he did not yell or move.
The leg was ruinous. The skin, where it remained, was the color of onions cooked in grease, and below the knee there was a crater where his shin should have been, and in the muck of flesh and blood and pus, there was the clean white flash of bone.
Ilya would remember the horror from this night. In America, he would dream of it, but he would remember this too: how his mother and Babushka had moved in concert, each seeming to find strength right when the other had lost it.
It was his mother who had ripped the fabric off, who threw up at the sight of Vladimir’s leg, but then looked again anyway. It was Babushka who spread a towel under Vladimir and bathed him with the water from the roast pan, which had been their tub when they were babies. Her hand plunged into the water over and over, as endlessly patient as an oil pump dipping into the earth.
“He’ll have to go to the hospital,” she said, when he was clean.
“I know,” his mother said.
Timofey sat at their table with his head in his hands. “It’s gangrene,” he said softly, then, “How the hell did he get gangrene?”
His mother brought her makeup kit from the bedroom and began to dab makeup over the puncture marks on Vladimir’s arms, between his toes, everywhere except the bone-deep sore on his leg. Her fingers shook as she put it on. The makeup was the wrong color—too orange for Vladimir’s skin—and the scabs made his skin look like rocky soil. It was ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop herself and neither Ilya nor Babushka tried to stop her. She was writing her hope out on his skin. Hiding the drugs so that he wouldn’t get arrested, blacklisted, or sent to a narc clinic, which was worse than prison. They dressed Vladimir in a sweater of Timofey’s and a pair of Ilya’s sweats—a respectable outfit for Vladimir—and still the nurse at the hospital took one look at his face and said, “Any idea what he’s on?”
They were all silent.
“We’ll need to know to treat him,” she said, sounding infinitely patient in the way of the disinterested. She had tiny gold crosses in her ears, and she tucked her hair behind them.
Ilya looked to his mother for permission, and she shrugged.
“Krokodil,” Ilya said, and then, “I think that’s what they call it.”
The nurse looked up at them then. Her face was full of pity. “How long has he been using?” she said, though for a second it seemed that what she wanted to say was that she was sorry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Across the street from the clinic there was a medical supply store that did a thriving business, and Ilya and his mother went there on a bright, cold morning, armed with a list from a nurse of what Vladimir would need. For three days, the nurses had not let them see him. “Today is not good. You don’t want to see him today,” they’d said, and, “He’s coming off it. Tomorrow will be better,” and, finally, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. Here is a list. Bring all of this, tomorrow.”
They loaded Vladimir’s old army duffel with a set of sheets, two IV bags, coils of plastic tubing, five papery polka-dotted hospital gowns, a bedpan, tape, ointments, and a plastic satchel of gauze that weighed nothing, that on a different day Ilya would have been tempted to throw into the air just to see how high he could get it.
Babushka was sitting in the clinic waiting room with an enormous container of marrow broth wedged between her knees. An old man slept in a corner chair, his fly gaping open and a tuft of underwear poking out. He woke up briefly upon their arrival and said, “My son,” and Babushka shushed him. Before long he was snoring again—a gurgle, wheeze, gurgle, wheeze that made Ilya wonder if he shouldn’t be admitted.
They waited, and they waited. Occasionally a nurse with too strong a jaw and a red braid as thick as a boa emerged from the door, marched over to a clipboard, squinted at it, squinted at them, and squinted at the old man, before disappearing back into the clinic’s bright white light. Ilya’s mother had given him an envelope of cash to tuck in the clipboard’s grip, and the nurse had taken it, but still they waited. Aksinya’s name had been on the visitor’s list, and Dmitri Malikov’s too. Maybe he’d been visiting his mother, Ilya thought, because he remembered Dmitri saying something about her being sick.
Ilya’s stomach rumbled. His own hunger did not seem like something he could mention, and so he eyed Babushka’s broth. He could see the paleness of the ox bone through the liquid.
Around noon, a young woman came through the front doors, so pregnant that her spine curved backward. Babushka looked at her as though she were about to give birth to Jesus.
“It’s a girl!” Babushka said.
The woman rolled her eyes, but Babushka no longer cared about the nuances of expressions, and she kept on, undeterred. “How far apart are the pains? That’s a low baby. Let me feel.”