so this is my attempt at depicting ilya rozanov’s horrible terrible no good very bad childhood in a collapsed state that’s about to get a brand new fascist government... warning for domestic violence, child abuse, suicide, references to sex trafficking/forced prostitution, mentions of russian military aggression in the caucasus at the time, a general miasma of racism/homophobia/misogyny/ableism throughout, and a (relatively brief) moment of sexual violence between ilya/alexei towards the end when he’s a teenager, that should be everything (i hope). let me know if any of the russia stuff is too confusing/ungoogleable!

1999

“You want to take the boys where?” Father asks, his fork scraping against his plate in a way that makes a shiver run down Ilya’s left side. He’s on his second glass of vodka tonight and cruising towards a third. Ilya wants to get back to watching the Treasure Island rerun on TV, but knows better than to ask, not when saying the wrong thing right now is going to blow up the room like it’s an unswept minefield. (Lyosha doesn’t even look up to meet his eyes when Ilya kicks him under the table. Lyosha has considered Ilya a loser baby bitch ever since he turned thirteen, or maybe ever since Mom stopped leaving the house to do anything but watch Ilya at the rink.)

“To the dacha,” Mom says, like he’s an idiot. With her blonde hair teased like Tatiana Bulanova’s, wearing powder blue eyeshadow and brick red lip liner just to sit around inside, Ilya’s always thought he has the prettiest mother in the world. “You never listen to me when I talk. I keep telling you, there’s no shame in needing hearing aids.”

“I’m not even sixty yet,” Father grunts, “I hear you fine. We just got back from there. Some of us have to work for a living.”

“And I don’t care what you do.” Mom pulls out a pack of cigarettes and her Playboy bunny lighter from the pocket of her jeans, ashing it on the lace placemat Aunt Nastya sent for their last anniversary. “I want to take my boys somewhere safe, even if it runs out of hot water. I don’t think the Chechens figured out where Zhukovka is yet.”

“Don’t wreck my dinner with your paranoid delusions, Ira, I’m not in the mood—“

“They’re blowing up half this city, and I’m being paranoid? You want to watch this family pulled out of the rubble on the next Channel 1 broadcast?”

“This has to be the most interest I’ve ever seen you take in current affairs.” Father’s fish-like eyes narrow, he raises the glass like a projectile. Lyosha starts wolfing down his last remaining pelmeni in case the table gets flipped over; Ilya trails his fork through the grease at the bottom of his plate. “Just who exactly were you planning on fucking at my dacha? Do you think you’re smart? Do you think I can’t always tell what you’re up to?”

“Do not use that kind of language around—“

“What, the boys don’t know their mother’s a whore already? They’ll figure it out soon enough watching you smoke at the table. Put that thing out and quit pissing me off.”

“I should’ve married the American,” Mom says petulantly, leaning forward, both elbows planted on the table. The cigarette smolders between her lips. “He was going to set me up in Dubai with a penthouse and a driver. He’d probably still be getting it up without Viagra, too.”

Father snatches the cigarette out of her mouth and drowns the tip in his vodka glass. Then he cracks her across the face hard enough to split her lip, as easily as he smacks suspects who aren’t smart enough to know when they’re beat. “I said put it out. You never listen to me, and then you get yourself in trouble. You’d be dead with a needle in your arm by now if I hadn’t decided to snatch you up.”

Mom takes the slap like it’s a round of applause, triumphant even in defeat. The blood spills into the edges of her lipliner, it’s impossible to tell them apart. “I’ve lost my appetite,” she says— she was picking at her food to begin with, subsists on a diet that’s mostly bone broth and black coffee— and stalks off. Father doesn’t bother to stop her boys from running after her. He’s flicked on the TV in the kitchen to monitor the situation himself.

“Mam,” Lyosha says on her heels, voice thready and high, as she retreats into her separate bedroom, “why did you have to pick a fight, he already had a shitty day at work, he told me, you always make everything worse—“

“Not right now, Lyosha,” she snaps, slamming the door in his face. “Mamochka needs a fucking Xanax while she thinks about you two burning to death.”

Lyosha slinks off, back into the kitchen, to let Father lecture him on what’s really happening away from any hysterical women. Ilya waits, one, two, three seconds, before he opens the door. The room is as dark as Lenin’s mausoleum, where he went on a field trip last week and got in trouble for running off, and Mom is lying in bed on her back just like Vladimir Ilyich. He doesn’t hesitate to climb in with her, as usual.

“Mama, I have a hockey game tomorrow,” Ilya says, burrowing his nose into her armpit, chin pressed against the underwire of her bra. Her tears land hot on the top of his head and drip down to the nape of his neck. “I can’t go to the dacha. I have to be there or Coach is going to kill me.”

It’s a winning argument, because Ilya is the team’s eight-year-old star and hockey is the only thing he’s any good at, and Mom’s always understood that. If she’d been good for anything, she wouldn’t have had to marry Father. “Of course you’ll be there, moya lapochka,” she mutters into his curls like it’s a prayer. “Of course.”

2000

“You like the new car, Ilyusha?”

“I love it,” Ilya says, trying and failing to play it cool around Uncle Kostya, who’s letting him hold his gun for him too. It’s a black BMW Z8 Roadster and he’s got a lead foot on the gas. He never makes Ilya wear his seatbelt, either, the way Mom does.

“You want to take her out for a spin?”

“Oh my god, yes, please—“

Uncle Kostya shoots him a grin wide enough to flash his gold tooth, and just turns the radio up, Aquarium again. “Maybe once your feet touch the pedals, kid.”

Ilya isn’t 100% on what Uncle Kostya’s actual job is, but it leaves him with a ton of spare time to go on drives, and he has the world’s sweetest cars and a million sets of Adidas sweatsuits and his girlfriends all have giant fake boobs, so he must be rich like Dad without having to work in a boring office all day. If Ilya wasn’t already going to be a famous hockey player, he’d definitely be interested. “When I move to America,” he says, “I’m gonna have a garage full of these. Like, one in every color.”

“I bet you’ll have a new chick for every day of the week, too,” Uncle Kostya says, leaning over the console to give his hair a rough scrub. “You got your looks from our side, thank God.”

When they pull up in front of the apartment complex, Mom’s already waiting for them on the steps, getting her new Valentino skirt all sludgey. She yanks the car door open and rolls her eyes. “He’s late for practice, and where the hell is his seatbelt?” she asks Uncle Kostya, her hand warm on Ilya’s shoulder and moving to the small of his back as she guides him out. “That had better be unloaded— get it in the glove compartment before Grisha sees it—“

“There’s a bullet left in there for your husband, Irishka, you know that.”

“We’re getting along better lately,” she says, like she’s reciting a line she’s forced herself to memorize. “I’m trying harder to be happy, okay. Look at this new outfit he bought me— Natalia Vodianova would be jealous of my wardrobe. He’s given me so much. I need to work on my gratitude.”

“So happy you look like you’re about to put a slug through your own temple?”

“And leave my boys alone here with him?” She slams the car door shut. “Fat chance. Drive safe now.”

“What’s Uncle Kostya talking about?” Ilya asks as he speeds away, crinkling his left eye. “Why are you and Father shooting each other or whatever?”

“Uncle Kostya just has a dumb sense of humor. You need to listen to him less.” Mom gives him another one of her weak, sad smiles, like the sun breaking through winter clouds, and brushes the rock salt off her butt. “Hurry up and go get your gear, zaichik.”

2001

“I want to play hockey too,” Sveta tells Sergei Ivanovich, hands on her hips. He looks up from the glass of vodka he’s having with Ilya’s father, bemused but waiting to see where she goes with this. “Like Ilyusha gets to. I literally know everything about it already, so.”

Sveta goes to Boston to visit her mother every summer and comes back home to Moscow in September, and the first thing Ilya always does after her plane lands is take her to the rink to practice passes with him. She looks forward to it more than seeing him, and almost certainly more than seeing her father.

Sergei Ivanovich laughs like she’s a dog who wants to start walking on her hind legs. “That’s not for girls, malyshka, don’t be silly. If you want to be on the ice yourself so badly, I’ll find you a figure skating coach.”

“My friend Amanda plays hockey back home. Tons of girls play— you’re just so old-fashioned!”

“This is Russia.” Sergei Ivanovich shoots Father a can you believe this shit look; Father raises his eyebrows a little and diverts his attention back to his vodka. “Things are different here, you know that.”

“Yeah, there’s a women’s national team in Russia, too, so why can’t I do it?”

“Because you are going to have a hard enough time finding a husband as it is,” Sergei Ivanovich says, “without a crooked nose or missing teeth on top of that. Now go play outside with Ilyukha while I talk to Grigori Antonovich about boring political stuff.”

Sveta kicks the table leg. “Who cares about some stupid husband?”

“That’s enough, Sveta,” Sergei Ivanovich says sharply, pushed to the limits of his indulgence. “Do you want a spanking? Because that’s what you’re about to get.”

“No,” she mutters, hanging her head, cheeks flushing darker. Ilya hates watching this, even if he knows better than to speak up in her defense. He never wants an audience when he’s the one in trouble.

“Umnitsya,” he says, reaching out to her and tugging her into his lap. He runs his fingers through her curls, even though she hates that. “I know you want to be just like Dad, but come on, do you really want to get slammed into the boards by a bunch of dykes, or do you want to wear a pretty costume and learn how to do a triple lutz like Maria Butyrskaya?”

“I don’t know how you handle a daughter,” Father says ruefully. “She’s more headstrong than both my boys put together. And neither one of my boys ever listens to a fucking word that comes out of my mouth.”

Sveta picks pretty costume over nothing at all. Sergei Ivanovich doesn’t let Ilya shoot passes with her anymore, now that she’s got her first training bra. That wouldn’t be appropriate.

2002

“You see players like this once in a generation, maybe,” Coach Sakharov says, a paternal hand resting on Ilya’s shoulder; he lifted him up and spun him around after he managed to score the tiebreaking goal, fast enough to make him dizzy. Just last week he threw a puck at his head that he had to narrowly dodge— Rozanov, fucking focus, do you have any idea how many boys would kill their own mothers for half the chances you blow— but he’s never out of Coach’s good graces for long. Coach only makes him do bag skates until he pukes because he loves him. “By 2009, everyone’s going to be talking about this kid like he’s the next coming of Sergei Federov. I expect nothing but the best from him and he knows it.”

Father hasn’t spoken to Ilya in three weeks, ever since he broke the brand new flat-screen TV wrestling with Lyosha, and the only reason he’s picking him up now is because Mom can’t get out of bed today. He makes a show out of pretending to check his watch, before he tugs Ilya away from Coach’s grip and starts to lead him out of the rink. “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” he says over his shoulder, almost an afterthought. “I have a lot of faith in Ilya’s ability to fuck things up.”

2003

“Everybody loses their mother eventually,” Father says as he follows Ilya into the stairwell and sits down beside him. He pats Ilya’s knee once, twice, in a way he surely means to be comforting. “You are just getting a head start, son.”

He’d thought she was sleeping, when he came into the room and pulled the lace curtains open; she’d been doing that later and later in the past few months, not even always awake when he got home from school. It was only when he felt her frozen hand, still clutching the empty pill bottle, that he started to scream. Lyosha found him in the bed with her, had to pry him off the body before he could start peeling back her eyelids. What the hell are you doing? She’s dead. She’s gone. We need to get Dad— the police— wait, Dad is the police—

It was an accident, Father had said later, to the officer who took his statement. She took too many pills for her headache— I should’ve made her go in to that neuro specialist, I should’ve known something like this would happen, beautiful woman, wonderful mother to my boys, not the brightest bulb. Why would she have— do you understand who you’re talking to right now? Do you see the size of this house? She didn’t have a thing in the world to be unhappy about. I want to see exactly what you’re writing down there.

“I want to go home.” Ilya’s voice breaks on a sob; he buries his face in his lap, fast enough to make blood rush to his head. “Please, Father. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Father hauls his head up by the suit collar, momentary burst of patience gone as fast as it came. “And I want you to go back inside and start behaving yourself. My boss is here. Do you even understand what that means?”

The Minister of the Interior himself deigned to come pay his respects, after Father’s brand new promotion; Mom’s death couldn’t have come at a better time, really, gives the family man a patina of wisdom and sorrow and sober judgement. “I don’t care—“

Ilya is messy and loud and rambunctious and obnoxious, by nature. He speaks when he isn’t spoken to and when nobody wants to hear. He laughs far more than any mentally stable person should; smeh bez prichini priznak durachini is the soundtrack of his childhood. Right now, he might be less capable of controlling himself than he’s ever been in his life, even if Father dangles him out the window next.

The slap to the cheek is light and open-handed, not hard enough to leave a mark; Father’s only careless enough to hit him for real when he’s been drinking. It shocks him quiet. “Stop crying like a little faggot and listen to me,” Father says slowly and firmly, pulling out a handkerchief, “wipe your face— here, blow, good boy. You can’t show up looking like that in front of him, he wants to meet you, I told him how talented you are— don’t look so shocked, I did. How well you’re going to do at your game tomorrow. Come on, get up, let’s go.”

He’d forgotten all about it, but he can’t miss the game. Father won’t let him. Coach will kill him. And pretty much the only thing that had ever made Mom smile, a real one that made it to her eyes, was watching him play. She’d never forgive him if he let anything— even this— derail his career before it even starts.

So there’s no more tears left inside of him, as he schools his features and shakes the minister’s hand and agrees that it’s terrible Mom died younger than Princess Diana and almost as beautiful. There won’t be for another thirteen years.

2004

Father fumbles around in his desk drawer long enough to make Ilya’s bowels freeze, but then he pulls out a box of expensive Cuban cigars, not the belt. “You aren’t even worth my time to beat, Ilya,” he says, striking a match and lighting a thick one. Ilya wonders, for a petrified second, if he means he’s about to up the ante and start putting those out on him. That would, in fact, take quite a bit less effort. “Beating you would imply there’s some hope for improvement, and you’ve killed all of mine dead.”

Ilya is lazy and useless. Bez-tolk, Father’s favorite word, cracking like a palm against his face every time he whips it out. Nobody wants his excuses, at school or at home either, for why he’s skipping half his lessons to smoke in the toilets and can’t pay attention or sit still worth shit when he bothers to show up, talks back to the teachers like he’s competing for Olympic gold in it, gets into more fights in the hallways than he does on the ice. That’s why he’s bringing home yet another report that’s mostly 2’s, except his English grade, which is a 5. (The only thing he wants more than for Mom to come back to life is to drive a Jaguar down an American highway with Angelina Jolie in the passenger seat, and he’s going to need to string together more words than ‘my name is Ilya and I like milk’ if he’s going to charm her away from Brad Pitt.)

“You already go to a fucking hit-and-run,” Father snaps, running a thick finger from his free hand down the page. It lands on a comment from Ilya’s Russian literature teacher, who claims that a reasonably intelligent chimpanzee could better grasp the themes in Turgenev, and behave with more decorum in class. “There wouldn’t even be any ‘school’ there to begin with, if they weren’t legally obligated to make sure you wouldn’t become a bunch of gopniki if you tore your ACLs. I already knew you were stupid, but stupid and insubordinate is more than I can put up with.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” Ilya mutters, picking at a piece of torn skin around his thumbnail he never lets heal; the smell of the smoke is impossible to escape in this cramped room, settling deep inside his nostrils and making him dizzy, but he doesn’t dare grab the corner of Father’s desk to try to steady his slump. He’s so much less defiant at home, drained of all the bravado that propels him at school, because at school he’s the best hockey player there and a future NHL draft pick and that gives him a certain amount of clout if nothing else and at home he’s just a bad enough son it makes Dad wonder if he was sent as divine punishment. It’s not that he wants to be a disappointment, more that that’s his default state anyway and there’s no point in trying to pretend otherwise— but he can’t even begin to explain that to Father. That would just be another excuse.

“Even Lyosha gets better grades, and I’m going to have to pay off his physics teacher to make sure he graduates on time,” Father says with a disgusted snort. “If I wasn’t me, and you didn’t know how to shoot a puck into the net, you’d be cannon fodder in Chechnya.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything, just forces himself to maintain eye contact without flinching or letting his chin wobble— Father could have a dartboard with Ilya’s face in front of him right now, and it’d make little difference, for all the input he wants. “I should pull you out,” Father says, stubbing out the butt of the cigar on a lumpy clay ashtray Lyosha made in kindergarten. “Send you to an actual school. You’re retarded enough already without the sheer amount of concussions you’re about to get there.”

The thought is so horrifying, Ilya’s vision starts to slide out of focus, like he’s hovering above his own body and watching security footage of the scene. If he can’t play hockey anymore— if he can’t get out of here— if he has to move back home with Father and Lyosha’s awful smirks and Father’s new girlfriend of the week—

“You won’t do that,” Ilya says, suddenly so nihilistic about the future he’s landed back on calm, piecing himself together enough to focus on saying the right line. Just like when he’s on the ice: everything stays compartmentalized and locked away, no room in his mind for anything besides scoring his goal. “You don’t want me here with you any more than I want to be here.”

He braces himself for a slap for his insolence, but it never comes. “You look just like Mother did,” Father says with a rough laugh, shaking his head. “Same exact curls, pretty like a girl… would’ve been better on a girl. And about as bright. You use your body to get what you want.” He crumples up Ilya’s school report and tosses it onto the ground. “You’re right, I don’t need you sulking around here all day long and wrecking everybody else’s mood, the way she always did. The hockey’s doing you more good than harm, probably. Making you into a man, at least.”

Ilya isn’t quite thirteen yet, but he wasn’t born yesterday. He knows that men don’t usually talk about their sons like this. But right now he’s going to get to keep doing hockey and he’s not getting a whipping, so he tries not to worry about it. He goes to make himself a snack in the kitchen and then to try to sneak Lyosha’s Gamecube out of his room.

2005

Ilya gets his first blowjob from Yulia Kolokoltsova in a bathroom stall when he’s thirteen and a half, and they’re both giggling so hard, they can barely manage to keep his dick in her mouth long enough for him to finish. A few months later, he’s at his teammate Styopa’s end-of-term party, and his hot older sister Lena pulls him up the stairs and starts yanking his shirt off before she can get her bedroom door closed; when her friend Dasha says she’s waiting for marriage but she’ll let him eat her pussy if he wants, he’s happy to nose at it while she tugs at his hair, like she’s guiding a horse by the reins. It’s quite the sexual education. He’s finally found the second thing he’s any good at.

Sasha is different. He’s Coach’s son, though nobody would guess just by looking at them; he doesn’t play hockey or any sport at all, and like a reverse Sveta, lives with his mother in France and spends his school breaks in Russia. He reads big books with titles like Bonjour, tristesse and À la recherche du temps perdu on the bleachers while Coach screams at them to pick up the pace, legs crossed like a girl’s, bored and haughty. He thinks Moscow, a city of ten million people, is ‘provincial’. He wants to go to Paris College of Art to study photography, which Ilya only knows because he got stuck with him while Coach dragged Father off to talk about World Juniors. Because he’s inspired by the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Whoever that is.

Ilya doesn’t call him a pussy or a faggot or a bitch, because he’s Coach’s son, and he doesn’t care about anything but the game when he’s on the ice. But that’s exactly what he is, even putting aside the way he talks with his hands and pitches his voice. And that’s why he’s not surprised when Coach gives him a call in June.

“Ilyukha,” he says briskly, expecting his orders to be obeyed, “can you take… look, couldn’t you take Sasha out for the night? Introduce him to some girls, maybe? All his friends are at their dachi by now, but our renovations— I don’t even want to talk about it. You can’t trust an Uzbek to find their own ass with two hands and a map.”

“I’m fourteen, Coach,” Ilya throws out as a token protest, a grape popsicle melting down the side of his wrist; he tries to lick it back up before it drips onto the couch, Father’s going to kill him if it stains. He just had his birthday last week. “They won’t let us in anywhere.”

“Rozanov, don’t even try to bullshit me right now, I am not in the mood,” and that’s how he winds up with Sasha on his doorstep at seven and has to fix him a snack before they head out. (Sasha doesn’t like the brand of black bread their housekeeper buys. Ilya wants to flush his head down the toilet.)

There’s only so much shit he can get himself into at school, but home for the summer, Father’s never around anymore and Lyosha’s a willing accomplice. Lyosha escorts them into the club no problem, and Ilya’s tall and muscular enough he passes for older than he is, without even having to flash his fake. My baby brother, Lyosha says, slinging an arm around his shoulders, is going to be bigger than fucking Wayne Gretzky, top NHL draft pick— even if he’s just using Ilya as a lure for easy snatch, that’s nicer than anything he ever says to him in daily life, and he’ll take what he can get. Except it works like a charm and Lyosha’s being led off by a giggling girl with five centimeter long red nails and instead of trying to score his own hookup tonight, Ilya is responsible for getting Coach’s little princess laid. Fucking fantastic.

Ilya lets the vodka in his hand burn its way down his throat, as he works out his next move. He’s starting to understand why every man he’s ever met is a drunk. The alcohol blurs the sharp edges of his life, makes all his problems seem that much less insurmountable. “That one has nice tits,” he says, pointing at a woman who’s ten years older than them and surrounded by a protective flank of girlfriends. Testing the waters.

Sasha, face striated blue and purple and pink by the strobe lights, only has eyes for him. “Figured you’d be at your dacha already,” he says. His hipbone bumps against Ilya’s and stays there. “We were planning to go last week, but it’s got electrical issues or whatever.”

“We haven’t been since my mother died,” Ilya says, voice tight and boxed-in. Father doesn’t take them to Turkey or Egypt or want to be trapped out in Zhukovka with them for weeks at a stretch, and only returns to throw an end-of-the-summer blowout for his fellow apparatchiks, to which his children are categorically not invited. It’s fine. They’re more than capable of making their own fun.

“Sometimes I wish my mother would die,” Sasha says, and Ilya almost chokes on his own tongue. “Not really. I mean, I don’t mean that I want her to die. They just say every great artist works off of tragedy. And my only tragedy so far is getting stuck coming here every summer. Ugh.”

The tempo of the next song is so fast Ilya wants to sprint outside and gulp down fresh air, disoriented and tachycardic like he’s on E. Ilya should hit him. Anytime, anyplace else, he wouldn’t have even hesitated. Instead he can’t stop staring at Sasha’s lips, the neat cupid’s bow on top, fear and disgust and loathing all twined tight with arousal. Sasha’s managed to clock what his father and brother have known all along about him and Coach refuses to acknowledge. Spotted a fellow traveler.

“Ilyusha,” Sasha says, like he’s his girl, and takes hold of his upper arm. “Are you going to kiss me or not.”

Ilya likes to play with fire, but he isn’t an arsonist. “Not in here,” he says, shaking his hand off. “Obviously. Let’s find somewhere to go.”

2006

“Do you want to?” Ilya murmurs, slipping his hand inside the waistband of Sveta’s unzipped jeans and cupping her through her panties, breathing hard. She smells like Britney Spears Fantasy and tastes like strawberry Victoria’s Secret lip gloss, the promise of America written all over her. He can’t believe he’s known her his entire life and only just now realized how beautiful she is. He can’t believe they’ve only just now thought about fucking—

Well, that’s probably because Sveta decided to go to high school at Boston Latin and move in with her mother, so she can get into Harvard or at least Tufts and then get her MBA. This was a betrayal so acute Ilya ignored her texts for most of the year, until he finally broke in March (the latest one from February called him a stupid motherfucker she never wanted to hear from again who she hoped got stuck playing in the minor leagues forever). Ilya doesn’t have a lot of friends.

Sveta’s lying on top of him, tits pressed flat against his chest, and paws at his erection like she’s worried a firm grip will hurt him. He takes her hand and guides it down, shows her how to stroke it. “It’s my first time,” she says, shier than he’s ever seen her act before. “Doing anything. Don’t judge me, okay?”

This is the first time he’s done it with a girl he’s going to have to speak to the next day, but he can never stop a bad idea once he’s started going through with it. That is, until Father clears his throat in the doorway, and they jump apart like two magnets repelling each other. This was also about to be the first time he’d ever tried to do it in the house, and for good reason.

“Svetlana Sergeyevna,” he says stiffly, even though Sveta’s only fifteen and still a kid, “I think you ought to head home.”

“Grigori Antonovich,” she says, flustered and fumbling with her pants, “I promise we weren’t—“

“Don’t insult my intelligence.” Ilya lies on the bed in painfully awkward silence and Father looms in painfully awkward silence and Sveta finishes fixing her clothes and grabs her purse and rushes out in painfully awkward silence. “Come to the kitchen and let’s talk,” Father says to Ilya, after the front door’s slammed shut behind her.

Almost catching his dick in his own zipper, Ilya follows behind him like a dog that’s waiting to be kicked. He didn’t tell Father he’s started having sex, obviously. Father wouldn’t remember he exists if his school didn’t call on occasion to get parental consent forms signed. “Ilyukha,” Father says, not quite angry but resolute, “you need to be careful.”

“Dad—“

“You can have fun with her, okay, I don’t care. I like Sveta very much, and you know I did not raise you boys to be racists. Or at least I fucking tried.”

Father still can’t believe the USSR is over, half the time— doesn’t want to, even though as a family, they’ve gorged themselves on its corpse. He has some noblesse oblige left over towards Africans because he was a devoted Mezhdunarodnaya Panorama watcher and liked the ones he'd met from Patrice Lumumba University, and when Lyosha called Sveta something foul under his breath after Ilya brought her home, he backhanded him right into Baba Ksusha’s tapestry. Sveta’s father is a national hero. Certain allowances have to be made.

“But Sergei Ivanovich did the right thing, sending that girl to America where she belongs,” he says, lighting a cigarette on the hob of the stove and then turning around to look at him. “This is Russia. This is a good family. You aren’t going to have children with her.”

The last sentence stitches together a question and an order. He shouldn’t have to order him not to do anything, because Ilya wouldn’t be stupid enough to repeat Sergei Vetrov’s mistakes in the first place. “They would be accepted nowhere,” he stresses. Ilya always needs a lesson beaten into his head. “And it won’t be you who gets the heat, at the end of the day. It’ll be her, and them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, Father,” he says, if only to avoid an argument he won’t win. Ilya can never tell him his secret, not that he’d ever planned to. That he put Coach Sakharov’s son’s dick in his mouth three weeks ago underneath the bleachers, that he wants to fuck him, that they both want and want and want far more than they’re allowed to have. Being a fag is Western decadence, counterrevolutionary, and deeply suspicious. Add him and Sveta together and you might get a whole, proper Russian.

“Ty vsegda ishish priklyucheniya na svoiu zhopu,” Father says, shaking his head— always looking for some shit to get himself into. That’s Ilya, his stubborn, wild youngest. He’s always struggled to grasp that rules apply to him, too.

“There’s none of this bullshit in America,” Ilya dares to say. It’s the land of milk and honey to him, yet. “When I move there—“

“You and everybody else in this country wants to move there. Who’s going to be left to clean this place up, is what I wonder.”

“Why’s that my responsibility, okay? I didn’t break it— I didn’t—“

“Ilyukha, just go play and stop bothering me already,” Father says, glassy-eyed, and Ilya does a double take. He’s— they just wrapped up a conversation about him— about politics— okay, you know what, never mind. He’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when that gift horse involves not getting hit. He can always go play, even if what’s on his mind almost certainly isn’t what was on Father’s.

2007

Ilya’s just turned the shower off when the bathroom door creaks open; blyat, the lock never works on that thing. “Lyosha, wait five fucking minutes for me to get dressed,” he snaps as he wrestles with the curtain, wrapping itself around his legs like seaweed. “I’m literally getting out now.”

Lyosha doesn’t say anything about just needing to take a quick piss, though, or for Ilya to hurry the fuck up and quit gelling his curls like some girl before he’s late for work. He just stares at him for a few seconds, dead-eyed and unreadable, and though it’s ridiculous to care— they’re brothers— Ilya wishes he was wearing more than a haphazard towel slung around his hips, while Lyosha’s fully clothed, already ready to head out in his police uniform. The tense silence between them right now, only broken by the sound of water dripping from the showerhead, is the same kind that always came before Father bounced Mom’s head off the radiator. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with Sasha lately.”

“What about it?” Ilya says with a careless shrug, even as his whole body locks up at the words. Lyosha can’t mean what he’s implying, he’s not smart enough to even know how to imply anything. “We’re friends. Coach thinks I’m a good influence. Little does he know.”

“I think he’s a bad influence on you,” Lyosha says with an ugly snort. Ilya makes sure to shoulder-check him as he heads over to the sink and pulls out the hairdryer, some expensive model from America Father got to impress his latest girlfriend. “Tyoma saw him at the club with his hand down some guy’s pants last weekend. He looked like he was really enjoying himself.”

“I wouldn’t trust Tyoma to tell me what’s a centimeter away from his face after a few shots.”

Lyosha grabs his arm hard enough to give him a spiral fracture; he grits his teeth and tries to school his face, but Lyosha’s taller and heavier than him, and he can’t manage to wrench himself out of his hold. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing—“

“Are you sucking each other’s cocks too? Is that what you’re doing when you don’t come home at night? Are you out with him?” Lyosha’s grip tightens like a blood pressure cuff, hard enough to cut off his circulation, hard enough to bruise. “Fucking pidor, don’t lie to me—“

He’s having as much fun as a coyote cornering a house dog. Too bad he doesn’t know Ilya half as well as he thinks he does, or his endless capacity for spite. “Pidor— trust me, that’s not what Vika was saying last month.”

Vika is eighteen and studies economics at Plekhov and is far too pretty for his brother, but Russia’s got a chronic shortage of men, and Lyosha’s rich, so. It was a pleasant surprise for her to find out that he had a better-looking younger brother, and one without much in the way of morals. Ilya didn’t take anything that wasn’t freely offered, or that Lyosha deserves to keep.

Lyosha lets out a nervous laugh. He can’t believe it’s true— can’t let himself believe it’s true. Then he smacks Ilya in the nose with the heel of his free hand. “She’d never— you’re a fucking kid. You’re full of shit. Shut up.”

“She’s got this little birthmark on her left ass cheek,” Ilya says, teeth stained red from the blood dripping into his mouth, “that looks just like a heart—“

Ilya thinks he’s won with that— didn’t even mention the way she had to bite down on her fist when she came, hard enough to leave toothmarks on her knuckles, because Lyosha and Dad were downstairs watching soccer on TV. He forgot that his brother’s made a career out of violence, likes to roll around and luxuriate in it like a pig in filth. He strikes before Ilya can even realize the road his mind’s gone down.

“You like that, huh?” Ilya’s body doesn’t belong to him anymore— he’s floating above it, watching from a distance, as Lyosha strokes him. As Lyosha. He’s not doing that, he can’t be doing that. This isn’t happening to him, it’s happening to someone else’s brother. Right. He can’t stop his reaction, the same way you can’t stop a sneeze halfway through, can’t will himself down. “Gonna jack off to this later, aren’t you— you’re probably the one bending over for him, is that what you want, too, pretty boy wants to get fucked—“

The towel moves— Lyosha moves the towel— he’s jabbing at his— Ilya isn’t about to find out what comes next. He’s a dirty hockey player and even as his mind’s failed him, his muscle memory kicks in anyway. It’s right next to him, still on the counter that Lyosha’s boxed him into. He wrenches free and picks up the new American hairdryer and cracks him across the skull with it. “Don’t touch me!”

“What the fuck is going on here? What’s with all the racket?”

Father stands in the doorway with a mug of coffee, ready to scold his two impossible children; Ilya doesn’t know how much he saw. He hauls the towel back up around his hips, struggles to catch his breath like he’s just been running drills for an hour, chest closing in on itself. Because if Lyosha tells him the truth— anything even approximating the truth— Ilya is going to be in more trouble than he’s ever gotten into in his life. More than the million times he’s brought home bad school reports. More than the time he crashed Father’s new Audi after taking it out without permission or a license. More than the time Liza Kuznetsova’s dad was banging on the door, convinced Ilya had knocked his daughter up. He’d never believe Ilya’s denials over the word of another cop.

“Nothing,” Lyosha says, sullen and embarrassed. He won’t meet Ilya’s gaze; he’s bleeding from the corner of his scalp, dripping into his hairline. “Just a bunch of bullshit. It got out of hand. Obviously.”

“I’ll say. Ilyukha, if you broke that thing, it’ll be your ass.” Father punctuates the sentence with a hard slap upside the skull. “I told you boys a million times, it’s a Western import, it’s worth more than your hides. And instead of being careful, you’re beating Lyosha over the head with it? I really can’t trust you with shit.” He plugs it in, pushes down hard on the button, heaves a sigh of relief when it whirs to life. “Okay, good, now knock it off and get dressed. You two are both too old to be acting like this, you hear me?”

Ilya towels his hair off and scrubs the dried blood off his face and rinses his mouth until the water stops running pink, hands shaking like he’s just come off a week-long bender. He needs to get out of this fucking house before he dies here too.

2008

il can you come home dad’s fighting with the slut again and i’m taking zhenya to go see stilyagi for the millionth time

please

she’s been going into mom’s old room and taking stuff ??? he’s super pissed

i’ll bring home some of the good shit from the evidence locker again i swear just deal w this for me and i will owe u one big time thnx

Ilya would like to think if he was a cop, he’d be smarter than to write texts this incriminating, but he still mutters a handful of curses and heads out the door as he shoves his Blackberry back into his pocket, making a half-assed excuse to the girl he was grinding on in the club. The last thing he wants to do is be anywhere near those two on a Friday night, but shit’s finally getting back to normal with Lyosha after their nasty fight last year. He won’t risk jeopardizing that fragile peace just because he was about to score— he can score whenever he wants.

The caged caracal in the living room snarls at Ilya as he heads inside, and he makes an equally nasty face back. Dad’s gotten into exotic animals lately, and Ilya and Lyosha are in a rare moment of agreement: he should focus on the zookeeping. It’s a cheaper hobby.

All the girlfriends never used to last long, but one weekend Father ‘went skiing’ in Zvenigorod and came back with a marriage license and a new live-in stepmother. Polina is twenty-two years old and has triple D cup implants (‘big enough to look sexy, but not, you know, tacky’) and platinum blonde extensions down to her ass; she ‘wants to be a model’, but given that she’s 5’3 in platform heels, it looks like she’s had to pivot from her big dream fast. Ilya refuses to feel like a pervert or a bad person for thinking like this, because she would’ve been a grade ahead of Lyosha in school, if not in the same one. She also couldn’t be more obvious about what attracted her to the old man.

“That room is off-limits,” Father intones, surrounded by shards of china, as Ilya makes the poor choice of wandering into the kitchen. “I told you that my wife’s room is off-limits, many times. How are you worse at listening to what I tell you than that fucking feral cat?”

“My wife— I’m your wife, why do you still have some kind of shrine to her? I can’t even set up a couple of clothesracks in there? You think she was any better than me, a real lady?” Polina’s fucking sloshed as she savages the cabinets, ass cheeks hanging out of her miniskirt, eyes glossy from booze and tears. Father claims to want a sophisticated society bride, the kind who’ll make polite conversation at dinner parties about opera and ballet and Pushkin’s best works, but he’ll always come back to this kind of girl— he likes the struggle and drama of trying to mold them into what he wants, punishing them when they inevitably fail. “I don’t understand—“

“What you don’t understand could fill a set of encyclopedias, cyka— that is Lomonosov porcelain, if you break that, I am going to put you in the hospital—“

The Lomonosov porcelain is in pieces on the floor for half a second before Father starts reaching for her throat, and Ilya puts himself between them without thinking, the enforcer in front of the star player. Father’s in his late sixties and while he can still intimidate some girl easily enough, Ilya is taller than him now, stronger. “Calm down,” Ilya says, taking him by the shoulder like he’s the parent and Father’s the child. He’ll do it if he has to. He almost wishes he’d give him an excuse. “Go have a fucking drink, okay. Mom’s dead. She’s not here to care about any of this anymore.”

“This, from the world’s biggest mama’s boy,” Father sneers, but he yields anyway, starts fixing himself a drink to take into his study and brood with. “One of you had better pick this up before somebody cuts their foot open.”

“Thank you, Ilyusha,” Polina hiccups through her tears once he’s retreated. “I keep telling Grisha he’s so harsh on you for nothing. You’re such a good kid.” Then she starts unzipping his jeans and drops to her knees, like she’s paying off a debt. Gospodi, is there anybody in this house who isn’t drooling at the chance to fuck him? Ilya isn’t sure even he wants to be this desirable.

“Get up,” Ilya says as he fights hysterical laughter, batting her hands away. Fucking shameless slut, he wants to say, but he can’t, because he’s a slut too and she’s right, Mom was a hooker, you’ll never wash the filth off this family no matter how high Dad climbs the ministry ladder. Just like this whole miserable country, the Rozanovs are rotten to the core. “And I don’t care what you put in there, but if you touch any of my mother’s shit, throw any of it out, you’re going to wish you were dealing with him.”

He leaves her crying on her knees, crawling around and trying to collect the mosaic of shards, overwhelmed by how to clean up her own mess. If he hauls ass, that girl might still be there, willing to accept his apologies and pick up where they left off.

2009

“I’m going to America and you can’t stop me,” Ilya reminds Father, biting down hard on his banana for emphasis. It tastes like ass, which is about the quality of tropical fruit you’re getting in Russia in the winter. He’s seen pictures of American grocery store shelves, the bajillion brands of colorful everything. He cannot wait to have his own Boris Yeltsin moment.

“Ungrateful little shit,” Father takes the bait from behind his newspaper, “did you even know their economy is collapsing? Forget it. You wouldn’t understand what a ‘subprime mortgage’ was if I drew you pictures.”

He doesn’t mind the insults as much anymore, both because he has a one-way plane ticket booked and because Father’s memory has gotten weird lately, started glitching out at random intervals— last week he kept calling Polina by Mom’s name and getting confused by why it pissed her off so much. It’s a relief when he’s back to his usual self. “Like this place’s is worth bragging about?” Ilya doesn’t bother to look back as he gets up from the kitchen table, he’s making a beeline for Mom’s room for one last thing. The whole rest of his life’s been packed up in two suitcases already, about to be placed in Aeroflot’s safekeeping.

Her cross, untouched since he shoved it into the back of her lingerie drawer the day she died, is feminine. Pretty. He still fastens it around his neck so that he can take her with him. In America, he thinks he’ll be able to get away with it.

alexei dies of an overdose when ilya’s 31 and he mentions as a funny story to galina how alexei couldn’t even let him dry off first before jumping him and he’s completely baffled by why she’s giving him handouts about sibling-on-sibling sexual violence and when he tries to tell *that* as a funny story when he gets home shane starts hugging him like he’s going to break apart… he’s literally fine? nobody appreciates his sense of humor around here