Chapter Text
His English lessons were slow-going and very annoying. It had been an endless few weeks of nonsensical murmurs and rounded sounds, and he wanted out. So he got out.
Svetlana and Ilya in a twenty-person class was a disaster waiting to happen. It was the perfect size for disappearing after well-timed exits to the bathrooms, even if Svetlana’s beautiful hair and Ilya’s entire attitude made them a memorable addition to any room.
He didn’t care. They didn’t care about anything that Tatiana Victorovna-vy had left to teach them. They weren’t retaining shit. Or, Svetlana was, because she spent the occasional summer in America and was much too social to be kept out of society by a language barrier. After four weeks of consistent lessons, Ilya’s own proficiency went as far as ‘my name is…’ and he’d learned that when he was ten at his mother’s behest.
English was just so boring. And unpatriotic, according to his dad and his friends. Ilya didn’t care about that part, but he let others think he did, because it won him points at social gatherings and big dinners. The main thing was that it was boring, and — he hated to admit this — hard. His mouth just wasn’t making the sounds it needed to. After a month’s instruction, it was starting to feel hopeless.
So he jumped at the opportunity of an escape as soon as he got one. All it took was Svetlana’s eyes to sparkle the way they did when she had plans brewing in her mind, and he was sold.
“You go first,” Svetlana whispered to him from across the passageway separating her seat from his. She waited for the teacher to turn back around before finishing her instructions. “I’ll follow in ten minutes.”
He smirked at her, nodding slightly, and the plan was done and sealed right then.
The English class was removed from the city center, but Ilya and Svetlana were far from the only teenagers walking around the neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. It was the beginning of spring and the infernal cold that crept under your skin and soaked your bones was thawing. There were families taking their babies out for strolls in the park. Stray dogs walked beside Ilya on the street before disappearing into the subway tunnels. The sun was finally coming out after a gloomy morning.
Svetlana took Ilya’s hand and dragged him to her favorite restaurant around the corner. It had concrete floors and bright white walls and maybe a handful of two-seater tables. The lady who welcomed them in also shot them suspicious looks, and Ilya had to wonder if their crime was written on their face. Not that it was a crime to skip class, but.
They ordered — potato vareniki for Svetlana, and solyanka soup for Ilya — and they sat mostly in a silence that was only broken by their giggles as they played footsy under the table. Ilya had her foot trapped between both of his when the lady dropped the food off at their table, alongside their bottles of water. He let Svetlana go so she’d let him eat; she was kicking at his shins way too hard.
“We should do this more often,” Svetlana said, licking her fingers. She paused, thinking, then shot him a pointed look. “After class.”
Ilya raised his eyebrows. “It was you who suggested—”
“I know what I said. I just mean this is good, fun. And we don’t have to break the rules to do it again.”
Ilya rolled his eyes. The thing about being best friends with a girl who had a rule-breaking streak was that sometimes that streak dried up and died.
He loved Svetlana, she was his best friend and first kiss and she hadn’t made a big fuss about it at all — unlike some of his other friends’ girl friends who wanted to jump into being boyfriend-girlfriend immediately after — but Ilya had found that girls, no matter how bad, eventually had to return to the good side. They faced much bigger losses for keeping that rule-breaking streak going too long. A boy like Ilya could keep it going for as long as he wanted without feeling caught-out.
He tossed a napkin at Svetlana. She immediately swatted it away. “Boring.”
“Whatever, asshole.”
Ilya slurped at his soup, Svetlana continued to eat her vareniki, and when they were finished, they paid. They stopped at the nearby supermarket to buy some packaged medovik they could cut into together with the takeout cutlery the lady at the restaurant handed off to them for being so good and non-disruptive. They ate it at the park across from their English classes, and watched the sun change positions in the sky.
“You don’t like Tatiana Victorovna-vy.”
Ilya forked some more of the cake into his mouth. “It’s not that I don’t like her. I just don’t care.”
“About our teacher?”
“About English.”
“Oh.” Svetlana stole the piece Ilya had been eyeing. “Why not?”
“I don’t know.” Ilya sighed, already worn down by the conversation. “I’m not good at it. I don’t know when I’m ever going to use it. I like Russia. I don’t want to leave. My parents don’t need it, so I don’t think I will either.”
“I like English. I find it useful. And America is, it’s funny to say, but really fun. It’s nice. You should come spend a summer with me sometime.”
Ilya laughed. “Sure, I’ll spend the summer in—where is it you go?”
“Boston, you know that.”
“No, I always forget.” Ilya sounded out the name in the way Svetlana said it, “Bos-ton. Boston.”
“See, you’re good! You’re not trying, but you should if you want to make it in hockey. That’s where the best players are.”
“And you know I’m the best.”
“In your dreams. But I know that’s what you want.”
Yes, Ilya did want— he wanted to be the best in hockey, because he was already the best in hockey. He was only twelve but his coaches hadn’t yet found someone who could match him in raw skill, which was something they’d told him once and he kept repeating to himself because he loved the sound of it. He had raw skill, real talent. He was the best and he would continue to be the best.
“Okay.” Ilya stole the rest of the medovik, ignoring Svetlana’s painful kicks to his shin. Again. “We practice, then.”
At this, she lit up. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously, you’ll put in some effort?”
“Yes, I already said I will.”
She clapped her hands together. “Okay, good. I’ve been dying to practice my English with someone here. None of the girls in our grade are taking classes yet.”
“Yes, because it’s usele—ow!”
“You said you’d try, asshole. Trying starts now.”
“Fine, fine.” Ilya rubbed at his ankle, which had knocked against the concrete slab they were sitting on when she jostled him. God, she was mean when she wanted to be. It was why they were such good friends, but he hated it when she directed that meanness at him for more than five minutes. “We start now.”
“Okay.” This, Svetlana said in an accent, her switch into English flawless. “How are you?”
Ilya pressed his lips together. “I’m fine, and you?”
Svetlana gave him a look before going back to Russian. “Can you say it without grinding your teeth, or is English painful to you now?”
“My accent is terrible.”
“Yes. That is why we practice. Repeat after me—’I’m fine, and you?’”
“I’m fine and you.”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“I’m fine, and you?”
“Not bad. One more time. I’m fine, and you?”
“I’m fine, and you?”
They spent the rest of the afternoon like that, going over the vocabulary that passed through one ear and out the other when Tatiana Victorovna-vy said it, and started making sense under Svetlana’s careful instruction. If she wasn’t such a diva, Ilya really believed she would have been a great teacher. Svetlana was sweet (when she wanted) and had a heavenly sort of patience that not many were born with.
As it stood, she was used to living under good conditions and aspired to luxurious ones. Wherever she went next, it wasn’t going to be an English school in Moscow. Maybe she’d bring him to Boston, like she said she would.
After an hour or so, they decided they’d kicked the shit long enough and headed back to their homes. With the sunset lighting their path and casting rays of buttery light across Svetlana’s face, Ilya figured it had been a very good day.
He just wasn’t counting on being caught.
Not by his father, this time, but his mother. As soon as he stepped through their home’s entrance, her usually golden face appeared pale and drawn from behind the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. Instantly, he knew something was wrong.
“Mama—”
“Ilya, I got a call today. From the school.”
He started cycling through all the different possibilities— did they call about how he and Pyotr had thrown that ball through the classroom windows? They covered their tracks so well, he was sure they weren’t seen. Oh my god, maybe it was about Svetlana. They’d seen them making out in the back of the school and were tattling on him to the only person in his family who would care. Bastards.
“Uh…”
“The English school, Ilyusha. They said you skipped halfway through your class.”
“Oh.” It was so low on his priority list that it hadn’t even crossed his mind. He rubbed the back of his head, heat climbing steadily up his ears. “I’m sorry, mama.”
The thing about Ilya is that he was a troublemaker to everyone in his world except his mother. He loved to have fun. He loved to go out, explore the city, fuck around with friends and with the assholes he didn’t call friends but hung around with anyway.
He liked how much there was to do in Moscow, even in the dead of winter when families should be stuck indoors but weren't. Especially then. Sneaking out felt like plain fun on summer days like today, but it felt illicit and dangerous on winter nights. It meant outsmarting his father, his brother, and even his mother. It meant not spending more time at home than he had to.
He didn’t love spending time at home, but he loved his mother, and he hated being the reason for her disappointment. Any sadness he could lift from her shoulders was an effort well-spent. Ilya didn’t like the face she was making now.
“Ilya, your father pays a lot of money for you to have your English lessons. And they are important. You can’t skip. You can’t sneak out. You have to make an effort.” She sighed, drying her hands against her apron.
The smell of ground beef and potatoes and onions wafted in from the kitchen. It was dinner time and Ilya wasn’t hungry. He felt bad for it. His mother rarely cooked nowadays. It was a good day when she did.
“Svetlana and I snuck out but she was helping me with my English,” Ilya said. He knew he was going to sound ridiculous but he went for it anyway. “Listen, ‘My name is Ilya. I am twelve-years-old. I am from Russia. How are you?’”
Instead of pointing out his stumbling words, his mother smiled. It bloomed so quickly on her face. He hated how easy it was to make her happy, because she so often wasn’t.
“That was very good.” She huffed out a laugh, but sobered as she considered Ilya. “This is important, Ilyusha. You need to learn English.”
“...Why?”
His mother sighed. She stared down at her hands, fidgeting, then took her apron off and hung it up on its hook. She walked into the living room and, once sat on their family couch, gestured for him to join her.
Ilya fell beside her, and she arranged him on his side, with his head on her knees. She carded her fingers through his hair, tousling the curls like she would her own. It was the same gentle back and forth motion he’d gotten used to as a child.
He was too old to allow her to baby him like this, but he was just glad she had energy enough to hold him tight.
“Ilyusha,” she began. His mother sighed after a moment. “I know you don’t like it, but you must go to your lessons. I know you have pride in who you are. I know you want more time with your friends. But learning English will open up a different world for you. A world we cannot follow you into.”
Ilya didn’t know how that was a good thing. A weight pressed into his throat. He swallowed to clear it away, but it only made it more obvious.
He looked up into his mother’s eyes just as she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. Her fingers were cool. Her eyes, the same color as his, met him with wrinkles that told of a smile.
His mother was only ever this soft when his father was out of the house, and, now more often than not, also only when Alexei was gone. It was hard not to resent them, and this house, for it.
Ilya and his mother were sitting on the sofa with patterned fabric softened by years of family gatherings and nights spent watching the television. To his left was the heavy wooden bookcase filled with his mother’s and father’s books—a collection of classic Russian literature, political analyses and history records, cookbooks (and the pages upon pages of loose-leaf paper containing recipes passed down through generations and family friends), and the children’s books Andrei hated but Ilya patiently sat through when his mother would insist for him to read. If he craned his neck, he’d catch a glimpse of the dining table, where they had silent dinners every night and Andrei did his homework. Ilya preferred to do it on the floor, in front of the TV, in case he got bored. Sometimes, he would even rest his back on his mother’s legs, when she sat on the couch to keep him company.
Everything he loved and everything he hated was here, and his mother wanted him to go somewhere neither of them had ever been. America had never seemed so far away or so strange. His mother had never seemed as distant as she was now.
Ilya didn’t want to learn English, but he didn’t want to disappoint his mother, and even as he thought of this, a little voice in the back of his head tried to convince him it wasn’t as serious as she was making it out to be.
“Did you ever learn English?”
“A little. I know a lot of German, but English was difficult for me.”
“Why?”
His mother bumped his nose with her knuckle. “Because of the pronunciation. It’s very different from Russian. You have to make your tongue heavy in your mouth.”
“Yes!” Ilya laughed. “Our teacher said that learning German is supposed to help your English. They sound similar.”
“Apparently, yes. I just never mastered either.” Ilya’s mother caressed his cheek before patting it, reminding him to pay attention. “Master another language, Ilyusha. It will open up doors for you. The KHL is good, but you are the best. Go to America, build a life for yourself there. Enjoy warmer weather.”
Ilya’s laughter sounded weak, even to his own ears. “Russia is warm enough.”
“Maybe for you, solnyshko. Because you bring sunny skies wherever you go.”
“Bah. Sunny skies are overrated.”
“No, they’re not.” With that, his mother gave him a final smile and pushed his shoulders up and away. He brought himself out of her arms, giggling alongside her. “Okay, now help me in the kitchen. I’m making one of those meals your coach recommended. There is too much meat, I can’t lift the pot.”
Ilya trailed after her. His father didn’t like to see his sons cooking—it was one of those things that Ilya didn’t know why he held onto so strongly, a belief from a bygone era. Ilya liked to cook. He wasn’t very good at it and he never really had the time to practice, unless his father was away on a work assignment, but when he did, it was always under his mother’s careful instruction.
She added seasonings in the pot while he stirred. Outside their little kitchen window, Ilya watched the sky lose its light. Alexei was away at the police academy this weekend, an intensive training occupying his time. Ilya didn’t know where his father was. Work often ran late, but so did after-work drinks. He could be anywhere in the city right now.
Ilya watched his mother’s baby hairs curl gently with the heat of cooking. He figured his own were doing the same. He could feel a sweat break on the nape of his neck.
Before he could wipe his brow, his mother swooped in to pat him dry with her apron.
“Don’t want you getting sweat on the food. It’ll be too salty,” she laughed as she said.
This was what Ilya didn’t want to lose to a country far away. He knew his mother would not follow him to America. But for all that he liked Moscow, for all that he told his friends that he would never leave, he had enough blind passion in him to want America—even if learning a language came as a package deal.
“Okay.” Ilya said, testing the sound on his tongue. The final -ay dropped heavy in the air, like an anvil anchoring itself back to ground. It sounded more like an eh, not rounded nor airy enough.
His Russian was too good. He was the only man in the house who was reading the classics (when his mother wasn’t hogging them). But if he could master one language, if he could master the ice in the way he had, he could just practice English until it became as good as his mother tongue.
All it would take was a lot of effort, and years—but America was not going anywhere.
Ilya continued to stir the pot while his mother danced around him.