Chapter Text
The first time Ilya comes to America, he is fifteen, on tourist visa, and he watches the ocean through the airplane window alongside his mother. Last summer, his brother got married, so everything was about Alexei then. Now, however, Irina insists on making this Ilya’s year.
“I’ll be good for him to practice his English,” she argued when Ilya’s father turned his displeased scowl towards her. “He’ll need to be able to speak it, when the MLH scouts come knocking.”
“Is KHL not good enough now?” Grigori growled, but at last gave them his blessing to go.
His absence on the new continent makes Ilya’s breathing ease, despite the scent of tobacco clinging to his mother’s golden curls like perfume. Even though she pretends not to notice when he sneaks a cigarette from the packet in her purse.
“When I play for the MLH, I’ll buy you an apartment here,” he says in the middle of a crowded New York street. “Here, or in Los Angeles.”
“I’m too old to be a movie star,” Irina laughs.
“Ah, no one would notice. You’d say you’re twenty-five, fresh out of school, they’d believe you just fine. All the directors would want you in their movies. All the hot, rich actors would want to marry you.”
Her laughter rings brighter here. Louder.
Ilya thinks it’s perhaps less about where they are and more about who they aren’t with, but he doesn’t mention that.
“I’m already married, Ilyushka.”
Ilya rolls his eyes and doesn’t say how that could easily change, too. He suggested it once, maybe a year ago, when he came across her crying after a particularly rough argument with his father. ‘You could ask for a divorce,’ he said, and she shushed him, harshly, and told him not to speak about things he can’t understand. He hasn’t mentioned it since.
“On MLH salary, I can buy you an apartment in every big city,” he says instead.
***
There are so many galleries, and it seems like Irina drags him into each and every one of them. Towards the end, Ilya wants to throw himself on the floor and kick and scream like a toddler, tired of colors and shapes and abstract faces and hyperrealistic oil paint eyes following him around rooms. Irina loves every moment of it, however, so he must suffer.
“Do you know why so much art is about suffering? So much literature? So many great poems?” she asks him later, standing in the doorway of his hotel room, a glass of liquor from the minibar in her hand.
Ilya shrugs. “Artists suffer, isn’t that a thing?”
Irina nods. “Yes,” she looks into her glass. “But it’s not because you need to suffer to see beauty, you know? It’s because you need beauty to survive the suffering.”
***
They watch a movie. Something slow, old and boring. In English.
It doesn’t matter, because they talk through most of it anyway. Ilya is tucked in like he’s still a child, Irina is sitting on top of his hotel bed’s covers. She’s wearing her street clothes, a long flowing skirt and a nice blouse, a thick belt pulling the look together. Appearance is important, she has taught him. People look at you differently, if you put in the effort. Even on your worst days. Especially on your worst days.
“Father would like me to play in KHL,” Ilya mutters. “If I have to play hockey at all.”
“That’s just posturing. Pride.” Irina adjusts his duvet like he’s still eight. “MLH is the superior league. If you get drafted, your father will have something to brag about, and he loves to brag. And you will get drafted.”
“And you?”
“I always brag about you, Ilyushka.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She goes quiet. Still.
“I’ll worry about you so far away,” she speaks finally, words slow and careful. Not because she’s tired, or a little tipsy, although she is both. No, she’s choosing each word intentionally. “But I think I’ll worry less than if you stayed home. It’ll give you opportunities. Freedoms you won’t have at home. If you’re smart about it. If you don’t take unnecessary risks.”
She knows, Ilya is aware. Just as she knows he steals her cigarettes and breaks into the liquor cabinets, his mother also knows he sneaks off with the coach’s son sometimes.
“No unnecessary risks,” she repeats, her speech slowing down further. She lays her head on his pillow. “But sometimes it’s necessary. To survive, to be safe… That only has meaning if you are living, too. It you find the beauty in the suffering.”
Her glass on the bedside table is empty.
She’s past the relaxation and joviality, down in the melancholy that follows.
She’s drunk and she’s sad and she’s half asleep.
But her words ring deeply true.