10

In the metro, Gleb hugged Marina and Mitya so that they could pass through the gate using one token for all three of them. Then, on the train, Marina sat Mitya down next to herself, while Gleb sat across the aisle.

“Don’t you think he looks like Viktor Tsoi?” she asked Mitya, as Gleb grinned and made faces at her.

Mitya nodded. There was a vague resemblance.

“Don’t tell him. He hates it! Says that it’s not true and that he is Uzbek, not Korean, and I’m putting all Asians into one pot. But I think it’s because he doesn’t like Kino’s music. Says it’s too simple, govnorock, shitrock. He’s into all these weird underground bands who perform in apartments. Keeps taking me to hear them, but I’m not into that sort of thing, I guess.”

“I didn’t know you could have concerts in apartments,” Mitya said. He wondered how that worked. Did the musicians climb up on the kitchen table to perform?

“Are you kidding me? Even Tsoi started that way. There weren’t too many clubs that would have rock musicians in the eighties. It’s better now, but still. You have to rely on people to host concerts in their living rooms. And it’s kind of nice. I mean, I went to see Yuri Shevchuk in Gorbushka, and it was way cool. But you can’t get Shevchuk to sing to your ten friends. So I appreciate it, it’s special.”

“Can you take me too?” Mitya wasn’t sure why he’d asked. He didn’t particularly care to spend more time with Marina and Gleb, but he liked the idea of a living room where concerts happened. It seemed a more appropriate use of the space than the way his grandmother used it, to watch soap operas, or the way his cousin did, doing painful things to him. Maybe he could learn, and then he could do concerts in his living room too.

Marina nodded. “What kind of music do you like?”

“I like Bon Jovi,” Mitya said. It was the only kind of rock music he could think of. He had liked watching their video for the song “Always” when he was smaller. The singer was quite beautiful, though Mitya couldn’t figure out if it was him when he painted half-naked in the video, or if it was some other man. They looked alike, but the naked painter also had weird froggy lips that Mitya wanted to kiss but simultaneously found repulsive. “Not the music so much, but I sometimes kiss the singer in my dreams,” Mitya shared with Marina for no reason at all. He never had such dreams, but he wanted to seem like he was also living an exciting life, and this was what he came up with.

“Wait, so you like men?” Marina asked. “That is so cool! I heard about golubiye and always wanted to meet them, but we didn’t seem to have any. I knew I’d meet some in Moscow! Though you’re so young. I thought it was a grown-up thing.”

Mitya was taken aback. He knew what she was talking about, of course; he’d read about such things: the articles in his grandmother’s tabloids, or some briefly mentioned plotlines in the soap operas, of men who loved men. Golubiye, sky blue. There were some in A Próxima Vítima. But he had never thought to consider himself in such terms. He wasn’t a man, to begin with, just a child, who had nothing to do with romantic love as grown-ups described it. He loved his grandmother, his mother, sure, his father in some sense. Not Vovka. He loved Valerka and the crows. But he had never thought about romantic love. Would he ever experience it? For whom? Mitya had no idea.

“So where did you come to Moscow from?” he asked Marina, to change the subject.

“Donbass. It’s in Ukraine. I’m from this small place near Donetsk. Boring and rural. No place for a seventeen-year-old girl in bloom.”

“Did you run away from home to be here?” Mitya asked.

“You could say that,” Marina said, laughing, as her eyes remained sad. “Some places are made to be run away from.”

Mitya wanted to ask her what she meant. Was there a sure way to know that your home was not good enough for you? But before he could ask anything, they reached a stop.

“Okay, we’re here.” She pulled Mitya up by the hand and pecked Gleb goodbye on the cheek, as he would be staying on the train for another stop. As they walked down the platform and up the stairs out of the station, Mitya asked Marina if she missed home. “I do, but I came here for a better life. Not that it’s started yet,” she sneered. “I’m renting a bed from Vietnamese migrants, who are themselves renting in the National University of Science and Technology dorm. I live with two other girls in the room. I found some work selling lingerie at the market, but it’s only when the other woman is busy with her grandson, and it pays kopecks.”

They reached the top of the stairs and left the station, and Marina immediately whispered: “There’s one of the boys you wanted to see.” She gestured at a skinny boy with her head, barely taller than Mitya himself. He was dressed in soiled clothes and a beanie that covered his eyebrows. Marina said she had seen him at Tsoi’s Wall, selling counterfeit lottery tickets to some tourists. Now he was holding a few packs of cigarettes in his right hand and offering them to passersby. A lit cigarette was smoldering in his left hand.

Marina led Mitya down the street toward the cluster of kiosks, where she stopped as soon as they turned a corner.

“Look, I’ll wait here. They don’t trust grown-ups, if you can call me that,” she said coquettishly. “I’m going to stand in the distance and watch so that he doesn’t do anything bad to you. Can’t trust those wild boys, especially with someone as sweet as you.”

Mitya shrugged and made his way back to where the boy was standing. He felt less nervous about approaching him because he had spent some time around Marina.

“Marlboros 4,000, L&M 3,000,” the boy told him, flaunting the packs as Mitya approached.

“Can I please ask you a question?” Mitya tried to look the boy in the eyes, so as not to betray his nervousness.

“Slysh, patsan, either buy this or get the hell out of here, I’m working,” he said sternly, menace in his eyes. But Mitya couldn’t think of anything that the boy could do to him that hadn’t been done before, so it didn’t make him afraid.

“Look, I’ve heard you hang out in the Old Arbat, and I’ve been looking for my friend from there. Maybe you knew him?”

“I hang out wherever I want, that’s what makes me free,” the boy said, boastfully. Mitya saw that the skin around his nose was raw, and there were sores in the corners of his mouth. He realized he had to employ his previous tactics of speaking frankly and to the point.

“My friend was killed. His name was Valerka. Did you know him?”

“Why should I know your tsivilniye friends? Go back to your school, patsan, and eat Babushka’s soup.”

“He was a bomzh, this Valerka. And he kept birds. You sure you don’t know him?”

The boy’s face enlivened in recognition.

“Blya, you should have said so. Valerka . . . of course, I know him! Used to beg with my koresh Dlinniy next to the Old Arbat McDonald’s, before Dlinniy died. Have you seen him, skinny chuvak with wounds on his body?”

Mitya briefly remembered seeing a slightly older boy with unhealing sores on his skin who asked for change next to the entrance, along with Valerka and the older woman from his building whose son beat her. Mitya asked Alyssa Vitalyevna why he had the sores, and she said that it was some cancer. But the boy hadn’t been begging there for quite a long time. Mitya nodded.

“So, you say Valerka’s dead too? You sure? Maybe he moved to a new place? I was never that comfortable on the Old Arbat. Too many militsia. But Dlinniy liked the tourists. Some fat American woman once wanted to adopt him. He stole like two hundred bucks from her and had to lie low for two weeks.” The boy tittered as if he were remembering the funniest thing, and Mitya had to put some effort into not letting his brows rise.

“I know he died; that’s what the militsia says.”

“Why d’you trust the militsia, patsan?”

“I don’t.” Mitya quickly clarified, and it sounded about right. “But my grandmother does.”

“See, I knew you were a grandmother’s boy.”

Mitya ignored that.

“Somebody beat Valerka up by Tsoi’s Wall, and he died. I want to find out who did it.”

“How should I know?”

“You know any other boys who hang out on the Old Arbat? Someone should know something.”

“Maybe they do, but it’s going to cost.” The boy raised his palm upwards and rubbed two extended fingers against his thumb.

Mitya thought about it for a second but decided that he didn’t want to dig out the money he had buried under Valerka’s tree to give the boy. He wanted more time to see if the magic of planting the money would work.

“I don’t have money, but I can bring you food. Or toys.” Mitya said.

“Patsan, how old do you think I am? Two? I’ll take vodka or glue, though.”

“Okay, I can do that,” Mitya said to the boy, although he wasn’t sure how.

“Now we’re talking. When you’re ready, find me. Or ask other patsany for Chervyak.”

“Chervyak?” Worm. Why would anyone want to go by such a nickname?

“I fit into places other people don’t,” Chervyak responded with a crooked smile.

Mitya did not ask further questions. He nodded to Chervyak, which seemed like a proper way to say goodbye, and went toward the bus stop where Marina was hiding.

“He doesn’t know too much but has agreed to introduce me to the others if I bring him vodka or glue,” he relayed to her.

“He’s what, thirteen?” she said with horrified eyes.

“If not vodka or glue, he said he’d love money. But where can I get money?” Mitya wondered if she had any thoughts.

“I’ll think of something,” Marina replied. It was all coming together in her head. She wanted to help. As simple as that—the exact kind of impulsiveness everyone was always accusing her of. She didn’t care. Kindness was not the same as meddling.

They decided to meet up the next Monday afternoon at the wall, and see Chervyak together afterward. Mitya wasn’t sure why Marina chose to start helping him, but it felt nice that someone else was also taking part in his adventure. She probably liked being able to speak to someone who was not in love with her, unlike Sasha and Gleb.