Chapter Text
Two weeks later, Svetlana flew in.
On foundation business — that’s what she said, although over the whole week she had exactly two calls — with one suitcase of clothes and a second, smaller one that held nothing but candy.
“This is mandatory,” she explained, laying them out on Ilya’s coffee table like a game of solitaire. “For the correct atmosphere. Without them, it doesn’t count.”
The wrappers were bright: polar bears on an ice floe on some, a round-faced little girl in a headscarf on others, some kind of bird on the rest. Ilya picked a bear, unwrapped it, popped the candy into his mouth, and closed his eyes for a second — with a look on his face that made Shane glance away, as if from something too private.
Rose had heard about the Sundays from Yuna — the two of them had their own group chat now, and Shane tried very hard not to think about what went on in it — and had been so convincingly offended that Ilya had to call her personally to apologize. In Russian, at her request. She didn’t understand a word, but said it sounded sincere.
Yuna and David came too, of course.
Now Rose was sitting beside Shane on the couch and Svetlana was on the rug at their feet, and both of them were looking at him with identical expressions. Shane felt uneasy. It dawned on him that he was witnessing the birth of an alliance he would never stand a chance against.
“So this is Mister Ears?” Rose asked, when something brown and big-eared flashed across the screen for the first time.
“This is Cheburashka,” Svetlana said.
“And what kind of animal is it?”
“Nobody knows,” Ilya, Svetlana, and — to his own surprise — Shane answered in unison.
Ilya looked at him as proudly as if Shane had just scored his first goal in the league.
🐊 🎂 🍊🪗
Gena the Crocodile worked at the zoo. As a crocodile.
“Wait,” Shane said. “He… works… as a crocodile.”
“Yes.”
“At a zoo.”
“Yes. It is a job. In the morning he comes in, lies under his sign. In the evening he gets dressed and goes home.”
And sure enough: after his shift, Gena dressed with care — jacket, bow tie, hat — lit his pipe, and walked home. On foot, down the street. Like a regular person. Like a regular crocodile.
“He smokes too!” Shane said.
“A pipe,” Ilya said. “That’s different. That is noble.”
“Why does everybody smoke in your cartoons?”
“It was the Soviet Union,” Svetlana said, unwrapping the next candy. “Everybody smoked. Even crocodiles.”
At home, Gena sat alone and played chess. Against himself. And sighed.
Rose pressed a hand to her heart.
“I have never felt so seen in my entire life,” she said. “You spend all day at work pretending to be a crocodile. Then you go home and play chess against yourself.”
Everyone laughed. Shane too.
And then — a little later than everyone else — he stopped.
He sat there with a candy in his hand, thinking that for eight years he had gone to work as a crocodile. For eight years he’d lain under a sign that said exactly what he was, and everyone walked past and looked and never doubted it for a second. And in the evenings he got dressed and went home. And at home, he sat alone.
Without turning her head, Rose found his hand under the blanket and squeezed.
She always noticed. Right from the start — from the kitchen, from the script, from the short words.
Gena got tired of sitting alone too, and he put up notices all over town: Young crocodile, fifty years old, wishes to make friends.
“Fifty is young?” Rose asked.
“For a crocodile,” Ilya and Svetlana answered at the same time, with the same shrug.
Meanwhile, in a crate of oranges, an animal turned up.
They pulled him out and set him on the counter — he toppled over. Set him up again — he toppled over again. “Cheburakhnulsya,” Svetlana translated. “He went splat.” Rose made her repeat the word four times.
The zoo wouldn’t take him: nobody knew what kind of animal he was, or which cage to put him in. So they gave him a phone booth. He lived in it.
“An animal unknown to science,” Ilya said out loud. In English, for everyone.
And Shane knew from his voice what was coming. Knew it a full second ahead — and still didn’t make it in time.
“This is about bisexuals,” Ilya announced.
Rose choked on her candy.
“Ilya,” Svetlana said. “This is a children’s cartoon.”
“This is a children’s cartoon about a bisexual nobody will take, because they don’t know which cage to put him in, so he lives in a phone booth.” Ilya spread his hands. “Am I wrong?”
“He’s not wrong,” David said.
“Dad.”
Yuna wrote something in her notebook.
“Mom, what are you writing?”
“Nothing, sweetheart.”
“The Soviet Union knew everything,” Ilya said with immense satisfaction, leaning back into the couch. “I told him. Already with the wolf.”
Shane laughed along with everyone else — until his eyes watered, face pressed into Ilya’s shoulder, because there was nothing else to do. And at the same time, he thought: this was what Ilya always did. Said the most important things about himself loudly, in front of everyone, as a joke — so nobody would notice they were important. So that if they weren’t accepted, he could say: I was only kidding.
Shane used to miss it.
Now he heard it. Every time.
🐊 🎂 🍊🪗
Toward the end, Gena and Cheburashka decided to build a House of Friendship — for everyone who didn’t have any friends. Everyone pitched in. The old woman Shapoklyak — with a rat in her handbag and an endless readiness to do something nasty — did everything she could to stop them, but they finished the house anyway. And by then, everybody who had built it had already become friends.
“I want to be her when I grow up,” Rose said about Shapoklyak.
“That is my grandmother,” Svetlana said. “Exactly. The whole building was afraid of her.”
“Your grandmother had a rat?”
“My grandmother had a temper. This is worse.”
And then Rose slowly turned to Ilya.
“Wait,” she said. “A house for everyone who doesn’t have anybody. That’s your foundation.”
“Our foundation is better,” Ilya said. “We have a budget. And lawyers.”
He said it lightly. But Svetlana looked at him — not the way you look at Ilya when he’s joking, but differently, for a long moment — and said something in Russian. Quietly. Very short.
Shane didn’t understand a word. Except one.
Sasha.
Ilya nodded. Didn’t answer. He just took a bear candy from the bowl, unwrapped it, and smoothed the wrapper flat on his knee for a long time, until there wasn’t a single crease left.
And then Gena picked up his accordion.
Shane didn’t understand the words. But he could tell right away that this was a song everybody knew: Svetlana straightened up at the first notes, Ilya at the second, and by the third they were singing. Both of them, at the top of their lungs, swaying side to side like fans in the stands.
In all these years, Shane had never once heard Ilya sing.
As it turned out: loudly, off-key, and with absolute faith in his own talent.
Svetlana sang no better. But they drew out the same words the same way, broke into yelling at the same spots, conducted with candies in the same rhythm — and suddenly Shane saw them not as they were now, but small. In some other apartment, in front of some other TV, in a country he’d never been to, in a childhood he had no way into. A whole world where the two of them had been together long before he ever showed up.
Something stung. Not much. Like an old bruise someone had pressed by accident.
Rose was filming on her phone and singing along — la-la-la — with deep conviction. Yuna was clapping, off the beat. David was smiling into his mug.
On the last verse, Ilya, still singing, reached over, hooked an arm around Shane’s shoulders, and pulled him into the swaying. And Shane swayed with everyone else, not knowing a single word — and the world he had no way into turned out to be exactly where he was. Under Ilya’s arm.
“They sing this at every birthday,” Ilya explained afterward, catching his breath. “Your whole life. We will sing it to you too.”
“Please don’t.”
“Me and Sveta. Together.”
“Ilya.”
“Very loudly,” Svetlana promised.
🐊 🎂 🍊🪗
In the front hall, buttoning her coat, Svetlana asked, as if in passing:
“Have you watched the mammoth yet?”
“No,” Ilya said. Too quickly.
“Oh.” Svetlana smiled at Shane like a co-conspirator. “Then you have not seen him cry yet.”
“I do not cry.”
“He sobbed over the baby mammoth every single time,” Svetlana informed Rose, who already had her phone out to take notes. “Every time. And he said it was allergies.”
“It was allergies.”
“To what?”
“Mammoths,” Ilya said with dignity, and held the door open for her.