Ilya and Lyudmila divorced. Soon afterward, Nanny Klava died. Six months later, when Ilya was visiting for only the second time since the divorce, Lyudmila requested his permission to take the child to Israel. This was just the time when everyone in Ilya’s circle was trying to emigrate; but, coming from Lyudmila, it was a shock.
“Lyudmila, why Israel all of a sudden? I don’t understand.”
“My mother was unbelievably fastidious, you know. She never lost track of a single piece of paper or document. After her death I had already found the death certificate of my maternal grandmother. She died in 1922. Her name was Barbanel. Alta Pinchasovna Barbanel. Her father was Pinchas Barbanel, from a famous line of rabbis. My mother saved all the papers—my grandmother’s birth certificate, and a note about the change of her family name after marriage. She became Kitaeva after she got married. And my mother’s papers have all been preserved as well. When Jews hear the name Barbanel, they nod their heads and cluck their tongues in recognition.” She spoke, as always, in a listless, expressionless voice—only her face was sweet and soft, with a perpetual half-smile.
A Proto-Slavic face, rounded mouth and brows …
“Why Barbanel? Where is it from?”
“It’s a distortion of the name Abrabanel. I discovered that it’s a well-known, ancient Sephardic family of Talmud scholars.”
“Amazing! I can’t wrap my head around it. You—in Israel! It’s all so unexpected. What are you going to do there?” Ilya said, incredulous.
“It’s all the same to me—maybe I won’t even stay there. I have an invitation to go to Israel, but where I’ll end up I have no idea. Maybe America.”
“All right, all right … but how in the world did you come up with the idea? Can you just explain that to me?” Ilya was terribly agitated.
“What is there to explain, Ilya? I’m nearly fifty, my heart isn’t very good. My mother died of a heart attack at forty-three. I have no one to leave Ilya with. And they have good medical facilities there. They’ll take care of him; he won’t perish. But here—can you imagine what would happen to him without me?”
Little Ilya came into the room. He was enormous for his age, and deformed from illness: his arms and hands were elongated, with thin, dangling fingers; he had a tiny chin and sunken eyes … poor, poor thing … In addition to autism, they had discovered another syndrome; but autism alone would have been bad enough …
“Without me, without me, without me…” He uttered the words almost threateningly.
Lyudmila sat him down and gave him an apple.
“Good clinics, humane interaction and care, the best possible treatment—it’s our only choice,” Lyudmila said calmly.
“Our only choice, our only choice,” little Ilya said with an absurdly happy intonation.
That same evening, Ilya signed the document that Lyudmila had already prepared. He didn’t raise any objections.
He saw his son a few more times after that. The last time was when he took them to the airport.
Before he left for the airport, Olga thrust an enormous stuffed teddy bear into Ilya’s arms.
“Give this to your little boy so he has something to remember you by.”
“It’s a pretty hefty bear,” Ilya said, feeling the weight of it in his arms.
“Like your son. He’s rather large himself, from what I know.”
Ilya had never given any stuffed toys to his son, and he was already getting too old for them. But little Ilya beamed when he saw the bear. He ripped off the cellophane wrapping and pressed his prematurely old face into its soft belly.
“Olga and Kostya asked me to give you this teddy bear,” Ilya mumbled, and was surprised at himself: he had said the names of his other family, names his unfortunate son was hearing for the first time.
“Teddy bear, teddy bear,” young Ilya said joyously, while his father frowned from embarrassment and pain.
Ilya was already approaching Rechnoi Vokzal metro station at the same time that Lyudmila was asking the flight attendant to move them to the front row, where the boy’s long legs would have more room.
Young Ilya settled in to his seat, repeating the last words he had heard in his homeland:
“A good ticket, a good ticket…”
* * *
In America, Lyudmila agonized for a long time before placing Ilya in a home. She might not have done it, had it not been for the fact that he had become more aggressive with time, and she found it increasingly difficult to manage him. He stayed in the home for two years. Then they transferred him to a special institution, where he was given job training so that he had skills for doing some limited but useful tasks.
Lyudmila visited him on Sundays. She brought him white chocolate, which he loved, and a big bottle of cola. It took her two hours, one way, to get there—from Brighton Beach, where they had settled her in low-income housing, to a distant part of Queens. Six hours every Sunday she devoted to her son, and each time, after she returned home, she would collapse onto the double bed given to her by a charity organization, close her eyes, and give thanks to God that the boy was well nourished, warm, and receiving good medical care. One Sunday she didn’t show up, but he didn’t seem to notice.
The socialization program went very smoothly, and a year later he received his first job: twice a week he sold papers in a kiosk one stop from his institution. He got ten dollars for the work he did, and in a tiny store where they already knew him, he bought some treats for himself—a bar of white chocolate, a bottle of cola, and a lottery ticket. He pointed his thumb at the candy bar, and the black salesclerk said:
“Chocolate?”
“Chocolate, chocolate,” Ilya replied.
Then he pointed to a lottery ticket, and the salesclerk held out the printed paper to him, saying, “Here’s a good ticket for you…”
“A good ticket,” Ilya replied.
His whole life seemed to fall in place. He had friends that he could watch television with. After Lyudmila stopped visiting him, Russian words seemed to evaporate completely from his strange memory, which still contained many verses, however. Now they had become foreign to him.
During the last week of May, Ilya worked in the kiosk until noon, received his ten dollars, and bought a bar of chocolate, a cola, and a lottery ticket. The ticket turned out to be better than just good—he hit the jackpot, winning $4.2 million.
His residence was intended for low-income people. They didn’t keep millionaires there.
The millionaire couldn’t quite fathom the complexity of the new situation. According to the law, Ilya was considered incompetent to deal with it. His mother had died. They tried to find his father, Ilya Bryansky. After lengthy correspondence and numerous inquiries, they established that his father lived in Munich. When they tracked him down, it turned out that he had died not long before. Then the lawyers contacted his stepbrother, Konstantin (Kostya).
Kostya was summoned, and he flew to New York. He remembered dimly that Ilya Isayevich had a son from his first marriage. The doctors warned him about his newfound brother’s illness. On seeing Ilya, Kostya was taken aback—but the expression on his face didn’t betray his shock. He clapped the skinny giant on the shoulder and said in Russian:
“Hey, brother!”
Ilya broke into a grin.
“Hey, brother!”
Kostya pulled a photograph of his stepfather out of his wallet.
“Here’s Ilya.”
Ilya took the photograph, and his face lit up.
“Ilya.”
“And I’m Kostya.”
Ilya dimly grasped who he was, and said with some effort:
“Teddy bear.”
But Kostya knew nothing about Olga’s parting gift.