The Borrower (20 page)

Leo, meanwhile, looked confused. “No, the chocolate factory? No.”

“But was it real?”

And now Marta and Leo were looking at each other over Ian’s head, the look of perplexed and concerned movie characters silently debating how to handle a difficult situation.

But Leo surprised me: “Yes. The Leningrad Chocolate Factory. It was very real. I will tell you a secret: it was the best chocolate I ever tasted in my life. And the Hulkinov basement was full of people working, day and night, working for
free
, just so they could have the chocolate. They were like the Oompa-Loompas. It was a triumph of capitalism.” He could see that Ian was about to exert himself again, probably to ask what capitalism was. “But Marta is right, this talking is no good for you. I tell you what: I will take Lucy down to see the ferrets, and you sit here quietly with Marta.”

I didn’t want to leave him alone with someone else, but I was too tired to argue, and too upset at the prospect of having to walk Ian into an emergency room in the morning without insurance. I found myself halfway down the basement stairs, which were carpeted in bright green and which grew somehow softer and soggier with every barefooted step. And there were the ferrets—most likely the cause of all the asthma to begin with—in their long wire cages. There was wood paneling everywhere, too, and a bar, and an ancient weight bench, and laundry, but the room was dominated by those three cages in the middle, and the three slinky animals stretching elegantly as Leo turned on more and more lights. The one I reached first was peach-colored with a white nose, and the other two were nut brown. Leo sat down on the weight bench, while I paid polite attention to Clara, Valentina, and Levi (whose cages bore brass nameplates). The more I watched them, I really did find them fascinating, the way they snaked their vertebrae around in some kind of primitive, rodent yoga.

While I still had my back to him, Leo said, “Lucy, I have heard that story before. About the chocolate factory. Your father used to tell that to Anya, too.”

I laughed. “Oh, he was just trying to cheer Ian up.” I poked my finger through the wires to stroke Clara, the peach one, who seemed the calmest. “It’s a cute story, but I have no illusions that it’s real, don’t worry.”

His silence was somewhat alarming. I turned around and saw the strange contrast between the weight bench and the tired old man in pajamas, too frail and arthritic to use it ever again. “Lucy, this story has always bothered me. It bothered me even that he told it to Anya. But he is still telling it, this many years later.”

I shrugged and laughed and felt extremely uncomfortable. “No, I know it’s not real. It’s okay, seriously.”

“There
was
a Leningrad Chocolate Factory, when Jurek and I were young children—six, seven, eight. But it was not your father’s company. It was your grandfather’s. He ran it in the basement, just like I said.”

“I thought my grandfather worked for the government.”

“Yes.
Yes
. You can see the problem. He worked for the Ministry of Culture, but here he was going home on the weekends to his house just barely outside of Moscow, employing half the town in his basement. And the only step he took to hide his crime was to say ‘Leningrad’ on the labels. But it
worked
. The idiot government searched all over Leningrad. And Roman Hulkinov shows up for work every morning, his breath smelling of chocolate, and no one looks at him twice.”

The caffeine and the lack of sleep and the smell of the ferrets were swelling into one giant wave of nausea, but I was interested enough in what Leo was saying that I sat down on the moist green carpet rather than excusing myself for the bathroom. I breathed through my mouth. I was trying to piece it together. “But he got caught eventually,” I said.

“Well, yes. Yes. I will tell you something about myself: I do not believe in keeping secrets about the past. I think that when we have false assumptions about the world, we make the wrong decisions. When Anya was growing up, I never told her the nasty parts about escaping, and deserting my family, and leaving my sister to marry a drunk. I made it a happy story. And so what does she do? She runs away. She thinks it sounds like fun. Because she has false information.”

I wasn’t sure if this was an accusation, or a warning, or a justification of whatever he was about to tell me. And I couldn’t focus on the issue for more than a second, because of the nausea pulsing through my throat and face and chest. I tried burying my nose in Anya’s sweatshirt, but the stale must of it went up my sinus like dust.

“So I will tell you this, because I think it is useful. You understand?”

I probably managed to nod.

“Your father and I had a schoolteacher, Sofiya Alekseeva. We were eight years old, and so we were in love with her. She had a long braid, this is why we loved her. She taught us songs about Pavlik Morozov. He was the thirteen-year-old boy who turned his father in to the Soviets, and then his own grandfather killed him. Number one Soviet martyr. There were statues and plays and books. I’m sure Sofiya Alekseeva taught us the songs because she was told to. But to your father, he must have thought she really loved Pavlik Morozov.”

Although I could see, starkly and horribly, where the story was going, it had the opposite effect it normally would: my head cleared, the nausea cleared, my sinus cleared.

“I get it,” I said, meaning,
stop
. More for his sake than my own. He was propping himself up with his hands against his knees, and he looked wretched and pale and old. “Okay. Thank you, I get it.”

“He left her a note, after school. I watched him put it on her desk, and I didn’t stop him, because I thought it was a love letter. Which it really was, I suppose, in a way. I teased him about it all the way home, until he told me what it said. He had given all the details of the operation. And because he was eight years old, he illustrated the letter. He drew a floor plan of the basement with all the equipment, and he drew his father standing beside a mountain of chocolate bars. I never saw the letter, but I’ve had always such a picture in my mind of what he drew! It was so innocent, really, to illustrate for the teacher like this. This is to me the saddest part.”

“So he ran off to Siberia then,” I finished. Leo looked up at me, blankly. “My grandfather.”

“No. Are you kidding? No. Your grandfather was arrested, there was a ridiculous trial, and he was sent to a work camp. He died six months later.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, yes, it was in Siberia. All the work camps were in Siberia.”

“Right.”

“Of course, they did not build statues of Jurek Hulkinov, and they did not write songs about him, and even after his father was arrested, the teacher did not say anything at all about the note. The police came to question him, et cetera, but there was of course so much evidence that he did not need to testify in the trial. Even his mother, I think, didn’t know what Jurek had done. I’m fairly sure I was the only one.”

There were colors swirling on the wall under the stairs, colors I was certain weren’t really there, and my throat was closing from the ferrets. Even though I hadn’t had a moment of asthma since I turned fifteen, my throat was closing up. I felt that I needed to rewind my life to the beginning and watch it again, to see what I had missed. For instance, the story of my father’s escape. Clearly the potato in the tailpipe was a lie, just like the chocolate had been. Though I knew he really did come at age twenty, because . . . no, I didn’t even know that. So I asked.

“Yes, your father was maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one. He was horrified at what he’d done. It wasn’t the
USSR
he was running from, you see that now. I came three years later. So yes, twenty. Lucy, you look not so good.”

“I’m fine.”

“You know, this is not so unusual, this story,” he said, as if trying to reassure me of something, but I couldn’t imagine what. “This is a nation of runaways. Every person comes from somewhere else. Even the Indians, they run once upon a time across the Alaskan land bridge. The blacks, they maybe didn’t run from Africa, okay, but they ran from slavery. And the rest of us, we all ran from something. From the church, the state, the parents, the Irish potato bug. And I think this is why Americans are so restless. I think about Anya, that she comes from the blood of runaways. Only that in America, there is no place left to run to. Lucy, raise up your head. You look very sick.”

“I could use more coffee.”

We walked upstairs to find Ian breathing much better, his shoulders down from where they’d been, and Marta telling him about
babka
and
kissel
and
pashka
.

Ian said, “We never changed the subject from desserts!” and I was relieved to hear him get a full sentence out like that. We joined them at the table and Marta poured everyone more coffee. I burned my tongue, and then managed to focus my numbed brain on that strange sensation for the next hour. I pressed my tongue against my teeth and felt nothing. I pressed it against the ridged roof of my mouth and felt nothing. I bit it and felt something. I started all over again.

We all finally went to bed at four thirty in the morning. We propped Ian up in the guest bed with six pillows behind him. “You are a prince carried on a litter,” Leo said.

“Litter?”

The Labaznikovs laughed without explaining, and Ian didn’t really seem to care. I was too sleepy to go back down to the shoebox, but I told myself if I got up early, before everyone else, I’d try again.

W
hen Ian woke me up, though, it was nine thirty and the house was filled with clanging and sizzling and the smell of bacon. He opened the door without knocking, fully dressed but with a towel wrapped like a turban around his hair. “Miss Hull!” he said. His face was bright again, and he seemed to be breathing well. “Just wait till you take your shower!”

“Why?”

“It’s a surprise!”

When I did stumble down the hall and into the guest bathroom, I looked carefully at the bottom of the tub, checked for towels, checked the soap, and couldn’t see anything unusual besides the green and orange design scheme. It was nice to use non-hotel soap. The water pressure was better here, too, and although the tub was olive colored, it seemed clean. I reached for the one bottle of shampoo on the little suction-cupped shelf, and saw what Ian meant. It was yellow and runny, like baby shampoo, with a coat of congealed soap slime covering a paper label that proclaimed FERRET-GLO! in big red letters. A beady-eyed ferret, washed pale by years of Labaznikov shower water, stared out from under the logo. I squeezed a thin puddle of yellow into my hand and sniffed it. It smelled like puppy shampoo, not totally unpleasant. I put it on my head and scrubbed around quickly, but it didn’t really lather. As I rinsed and ran my fingers through my hair, everything felt sticky and clumpy.

When I got out, I wiped the mirror and stood looking at my waxy hair and then at my body. I must have lost five pounds, at least, in the four days we’d been on the road—enough to make a visible difference. It wasn’t until just then that I remembered what Leo had told me about my father, and I had a few foggy moments of trying to figure out what parts I’d dreamed. I was getting used to the feeling: waking up in the morning relieved that I hadn’t taken Ian from Hannibal, then remembering that yes, I had, in fact, taken Ian from Hannibal. But this story about my father for some reason seemed even darker than that other daily revelation. Here was something I wasn’t
supposed
to know, and wasn’t supposed to remember.

I quickly got dressed and, towel around my hair, ducked into the guest bedroom where Ian had been staying. I could hear them all downstairs, talking and eating. On a corner desk sat what I thought I’d remembered from four thirty that morning: a thick gray Dell computer, old but not ancient, its screen uniformly dusty, a phone cord running out the back and into the wall. I turned it on and managed to get online—it made that loud phone-dialing sound I’d forgotten about after a few years of instant access at the library, and I had to jump up and close the door—and ran a search on “Ian Drake” and “Hannibal” and “suspect.”

My blood froze when eight links popped up, but on closer look they all seemed to be using the word
suspect
as verb, and numbers two through eight seemed to refer to the first, an article from Loloblog.com, posted on Wednesday night. Loloblog was a very artsy, very liberal online magazine I used to read occasionally in college and had all but forgotten about. The writers were all around twenty-three years old, living in the same square mile of Brooklyn, and hopelessly opinionated. They were smug about being smug, and they had, apparently, no fear of being sued. They also tended to be horrendously ill-informed, but not this time:

THE
BIGOT
AND
THE
RUNAWAY

by Arthur Levitt

Smoking gun of the week:

In Loloblog’s obsessive stalking of Reverend
Bob Lawson
, founder and director of
Glad Heart Ministries
, one of the most egregious of the many organizations that claim to turn gay adults and children straight, we found the following item, posted Wednesday: “Please pray for Ian D., a young sheep in our St. Louis fold that the Lord has allowed to let wander. We pray for his return, and for his loving parents who have been my loyal supporters.”

Okay, let’s ignore the awkward syntax. Let’s ignore the obvious sheep jokes. Let’s start collecting circumstantial evidence.

1. Our tireless interns found the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reporting Tuesday that Ian Drake, a 10-year-old resident of Hannibal, MO, has gone missing, and that no criminal play is suspected. (Read: runaway.) No Amber Alert issued, no parents arrested. (Again, read: runaway.)

Conclusion:
Well, let’s not jump to any, quite yet. Let’s just note the interesting coincidence, and the fact that what has always singled Glad Heart Ministries out for our especial vitriol is the fact that they start brainwashing young lads at the age of ten.