You do not remember the faces of those boys, just that one who never laid a finger on you; instead, he walked with you sometimes, and watched you get into the elevator, safe. Sometimes the boys under the stairs would beat him, and once they held his face down in the large puddle that manifested in your paved yard every spring and fall—held him until bubbles coming from his silted lips turned into stifled screams and only a chance passerby spooked the hooligans.
When you get home, you unwrap the kerchief and hate it for a while because your hair is now flattened and tangled and you’ll have to wash it again. Then you pick up the phone, since there’s nothing else to do but to hurl yourself toward the past, since the present refuses to surrender any answers or even passable lies.
Your mother sounds older than she did the last time you spoke, and you try not to feel guilty about her unseen decline in some sanatorium that costs you most of your uncertain salary, and of course it would be cheaper to have her live with you, here, over the black river that smells of gasoline and foams white in the wake of leisure boats. You sigh into the phone and try to ignore all of her unvoiced complaints.
“Mom,” you finally say, “do you remember that family that used to live next door, when I was little? The one with seven kids?”
“Vorobyev,” she says, her memory as flawless as always. “The youngest boy, Vasya, was such a sweet kid. Always running around in those girls’ coats from his older sisters.”
That’s right, you now remember, those were plaid, too-short girl coats. No wonder everyone teased him; no wonder his unperturbed demeanor incited them to violence—there was no point in such savage humiliation as a girl’s coat unless its victim would acknowledge it as such.
“Vasya Vorobyev,” she repeats. “Too sad about him.”
“What have you heard?” Your heart seizes up and it’s ridiculous, you haven’t thought about that kid in decades. In forever. “What happened?”
“Anya, his mother, used to call me sometimes,” she says. “He’s dead, in Osetia last year. Now she’s dead too—her heart gave out after that.”
“Too bad.” You are numb now, numb to the tips of your fingers, and they almost drop the receiver. A deep chill settles in at the loss you aren’t sure you’ve suffered. “Do you remember why was his father was defrocked?”
“No. Why would you care about something like that?”
“I don’t,” you whisper, and say goodbye. You spend the rest of the day watching TV and pacing and drinking buttermilk straight out of the bottle that fits so comfortably into one hand, and you keep thinking back to the days when you needed two to hold it.
The boy who defended you sometimes. You’re glad to have a name, but in your mind he’s still that boy—the boy. You’re glad to be dreaming about him the next night—at least there he is alive and little, even as other people’s hands press his face into the dirty pavement, his teeth making an awful scraping sound that makes you cringe in your sleep. They leave, but not before making lewd gestures in your direction, and you wait for the boy to stagger up, his feet shuffly and his knees buckling under him. He totters but remains standing. You feel lucid even though it is a dream and in it you are still small. “Why was your father defrocked?”
“Why does it matter?” He lisps a bit, his tongue thoughtfully exploring the ragged edge of the chipped front tooth. He doesn’t seem to know that he is in your dream.
“Because I need to know what did he do that was so awful, to bring you here. What was it that you were paying for?”
“Looking for the prime mover, huh?” He drops the pretense of childhood and for a second becomes terrifying—still a kid, but somehow older and deader. “I don’t know why. Who knows why shit happens, huh? Who knows why you don’t tell anyone about them dragging you under the stairs. Why you never told them—”
Your face burns with exposed shame and you snap away from him, the hem of your gabardine dress twirling around your legs, long and smooth and brown in your first pair of nylon pantyhose. “Fuck off,” you mutter darkly. And yet you understand his point, the essential impossibility of revealing one’s secrets—especially if those secrets are not one’s fault. We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness.
“Don’t be like that.” He catches up to you and walks with you across the paved yard, the large puddle in its center only nascent. It must remind him, you think, and then you are suddenly not sure whether the puddle incident happened before or after the chipped tooth.
You sit in your bed upright, your heart strumming against your ribs. You have to go to sleep, you tell yourself, you have to get up early tomorrow, but then you remember it’ll be Saturday. So you give up and pull on a pair of jeans and tuck your nightgown into them, throw on a jacket and run down the stairs and across the street—like a wayward moth that woke up in the fall by mistake—toward the fluorescent glimmer of an all-night kiosk.
You buy a gin and tonic in a can—make that two—and a pack of Dunhill’s, the red one. You buy a translated detective novel for good measure, and the guy behind the bulletproof glass smiles crookedly. “Got a wild night planned?”
You ignore the familiar sarcasm, so integrated into the national discourse that you notice its absence more than its presence. You spend the rest of the night sitting on the windowsill, the right angle of your legs reflected in the dark windowpane, drinking bitter gin and tonics and smoking with abandon, stuffing the butts into an empty can.
You wait until six in the morning, when the subway is open, and you walk to the station and take the subway and the bus to the street where you grew up. You hope that there’s no one there who will recognize you, and you get off at the familiar stop— forgotten just enough to feel uncanny, as if its coincidence with your memory is a miracle, like Jesus seen in a sandwich. Your hopes are dashed the moment your foot touches the asphalt—a high female voice calls your name.
“Look at you,” babbles a middle-aged woman, red coat, face painted with too much enthusiasm and not enough artifice. “You haven’t changed a bit.” She clearly expects you to say the same, and the lie would be easier if you could remember who she was.
“Natasha,” she reminds you. “Romanova. We used to be in the same class through the sixth grade. I live one building from yours.” She walks along with you, oblivious to your cringing away from her. “What are you doing here? Visiting someone?”
“Vorobyev family,” you say before you can come up with a decent lie.
“Oh,” she says. “I think they moved—well, the kids had all moved out.”
“I heard Vasya’s dead,” you say.
She looks at you strangely. “Well, stop the presses.”
“I just heard.”
She looks at you, concerned. “What do you mean? I thought it was you who had found him.”
You shake your head at her nonsense, and yet the quiet nightmare dread grabs you by the heart and squeezes harder, as you mumble excuses and break away from the talkative friend you don’t remember having and you race ahead to the poplar row that seems fatter and taller and more decayed than before. The asphalted path leads between the trees to the yard surrounded by six identical brick buildings, each nine stories tall with two separate entrances. Your house is the last one on the right, and you race past your entrance. You find their apartment not by the number but by muscle memory—your legs remember how to run to the fourth floor, taking two steps at a time, how to swing abruptly left and skid to a stop in front of a brown door upholstered with quilted peeling pleather diamonds, how to press the doorbell that is lower than you expected—you can reach it without getting on your tiptoes.
It rings deep within the cavern of the apartment, and you know by the apartment’s position (you’ve never been inside) that it has three rooms—barely enough for nine people—not counting a kitchen, and that the balcony looks out into the yard, above the puddle.
A boy with soft brown eyes opens the door, still the same, still in his coat, water dripping down his sallow face, his hair slicked into a toothed fringe over his forehead. You are mostly surprised by the differential in your heights now—something that was just beginning to manifest around the time you left home, when you were sixteen, and would rather have moved in with your first boyfriend (so much older than you) than stayed here, near those stairs that trained you in your lizard defense. Now you’re towering over him with your adult, aging self, crow’s feet and sagging jeans and all, and he is still twelve (thirteen?), and he looks up at you nearsightedly, his pale face looming up at you as if from under water. You accept it with the fatalism of someone who has bad dreams too often to even attempt to wake up.
“It’s you,” he says without much surprise. “Come on in.”
You do, as you would in a dream. The apartment has suffered some damage—there are water stains on the ceiling and water seeps through the whitewash, dripping down the browned tracks over bubbling, peeling wallpaper. The windows also weep, and the hardwood floors buckle and swell, then squish underfoot like mushrooms.