Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

The hardest thing, by far, was being stuck in the middle of nowhere—no movie theaters or libraries, not even a corner store. “Isn’t there a bus or something?” I asked Xandra one evening when she was in the kitchen unwrapping the night’s plastic tray of Atomic Wings and blue cheese dip.

“Bus?” said Xandra, licking a smear of barbecue sauce off her finger.

“Don’t you have public transportation out here?”

“Nope.”

“What do people do?”

Xandra cocked her head to the side. “They drive?” she said, as if I was a retard who’d never heard of cars.

One thing: there was a pool. My first day I’d burned myself brick red within an hour and suffered a sleepless night on scratchy new sheets. After that, I only went out after the sun started going down. The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door. Xandra’s dog Popper—who lived, for the most part, in a brown plastic igloo on the shady side of the fence—ran back and forth along the side of the pool yapping as I floated on my back, trying to pick out constellations I knew in the confusing white spatter of stars: Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured—cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off—it was as if they’d flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.

x.

MY SCHOOL STARTED THE second week of August. From a distance, the fenced complex of long, low, sand-colored buildings, connected by roofed walkways, made me think of a minimum security prison. But once I stepped through the doors, the brightly colored posters and the echoing hallway were like falling back into a familiar old dream of school: crowded stairwells, humming lights, biology classroom with an iguana in a piano-sized tank; locker-lined hallways that were familiar like a set from some much-watched television show—and though the resemblance to my old school was only superficial, on some strange wavelength it was also comforting and real.

The other section of Honors English was reading Great Expectations. Mine was reading Walden; and I hid myself in the coolness and silence of the book, a refuge from the sheet-metal glare of the desert. During the morning break (where we were rounded up and made to go outside, in a chain-fenced yard near the vending machines), I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.” What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

At my school, the sense of transience was unsettling. There were a lot of army brats, a lot of foreigners—many of them the children of executives who had come to Las Vegas for big managerial and construction jobs. Some of them had lived in nine or ten different states in as many years, and many of them had lived abroad: in Sydney, Caracas, Beijing, Dubai, Taipei. There were also a good many shy, half-invisible boys and girls whose parents had fled rural hardship for jobs as hotel busboys and chambermaids. In this new ecosystem money, or even good looks, did not seem to determine popularity; what mattered most, as I came to realize, was who’d lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school.

The days were clear and beautiful; and, as September rolled around, the hateful glare gave way to a certain luminosity, a dusty, golden quality. Sometimes I ate lunch at the Spanish Table, to practice my Spanish; sometimes I ate lunch at the German Table even though I didn’t speak German because several of the German II kids—children of Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa executives—had grown up in New York. Of my classes, English was the only one I looked forward to, yet I was disturbed by how many of my classmates disliked Thoreau, railed against him even, as if he (who claimed never to have learned anything of value from an old person) was an enemy and not a friend. His scorn of commerce—invigorating to me—nettled a lot of the more vocal kids in Honors English. “Yeah, right,” shouted an obnoxious boy whose hair was gelled and combed stiff like a Dragon Ball Z character—“some kind of world it would be if everybody just dropped out and moped around in the woods—”

“Me, me, me,” whined a voice in the back.

“It’s antisocial,” a loudmouth girl interjected eagerly over the laughter that followed this—shifting in her seat, turning back to the teacher (a limp, long-boned woman named Mrs. Spear, who always wore brown sandals and earthtone colors, and looked as if she was suffering from major depression). “Thoreau is always just sitting around on his can telling us how good he has it—”

“—Because,” said the Dragon Ball Z boy—his voice rising gleefully, “if everybody dropped out, like he’s saying to do? What kind of community would we have, if it was just people like him? We wouldn’t have hospitals and stuff. We wouldn’t have roads.”

“Twat,” mumbled a welcome voice—just loud enough for everybody around to hear.

I turned to see who had said this: the burnout-looking boy across the aisle, slouched and drumming his desk with his fingers. When he saw me looking at him, he raised a surprisingly lively eyebrow, as if to say: can you believe these fucking idiots?

“Did someone have something to say back there?” said Mrs. Spear.

“Like Thoreau gave a toss about roads,” said the burnout boy. His accent took me by surprise: foreign, I couldn’t place it.

“Thoreau was the first environmentalist,” said Mrs. Spear.

“He was also the first vegetarian,” said a girl in back.

“Figures,” said someone else. “Mr. Crunchy-chewy.”

“You’re all totally missing my point,” the Dragon Ball Z boy said excitedly. “Somebody has to build roads and not just sit in the woods looking at ants and mosquitoes all day. It’s called civilization.”

My neighbor let out a sharp, contemptuous bark of a laugh. He was pale and thin, not very clean, with lank dark hair falling in his eyes and the unwholesome wanness of a runaway, callused hands and black-circled nails chewed to the nub—not like the shiny-haired, ski-tanned skate rats from my school on the Upper West Side, punks whose dads were CEOs and Park Avenue surgeons, but a kid who might conceivably be sitting on a sidewalk somewhere with a stray dog on a rope.

“Well, to address some of these questions? I’d like for everybody to turn back to page fifteen,” Mrs. Spear said. “Where Thoreau is talking about his experiment in living.”

“Experiment how?” said Dragon Ball Z. “Why is living in the woods like he does any different from a caveman?”

The dark-haired boy scowled and sank deeper in his seat. He reminded me of the homeless-looking kids who stood around passing cigarettes back and forth on St. Mark’s Place, comparing scars, begging for change—same torn-up clothes and scrawny white arms; same black leather bracelets tangled at the wrists. Their multi-layered complexity was a sign I couldn’t read, though the general import was clear enough: different tribe, forget about it, I’m way too cool for you, don’t even try to talk to me. Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and—as it turned out—one of the great friends of my life.

His name was Boris. Somehow we found ourselves standing together in the crowd that was waiting for the bus after school that day.

“Hah. Harry Potter,” he said, as he looked me over.

“Fuck you,” I said listlessly. It was not the first time, in Vegas, I’d heard the Harry Potter comment. My New York clothes—khakis, white oxford shirts, the tortoiseshell glasses which I unfortunately needed to see—made me look like a freak at a school where most people dressed in tank tops and flip flops.

“Where’s your broomstick?”

“Left it at Hogwarts,” I said. “What about you? Where’s your board?”

“Eh?” he said, leaning in to me and cupping his hand behind his ear with an old-mannish, deaf-looking gesture. He was half a head taller than me; along with jungle boots and bizarre old fatigues with the knees busted out, he was wearing a ratted-up black T-shirt with a snowboarding logo, Never Summer in white gothic letters.

“Your shirt,” I said, with a curt nod. “Not much boarding in the desert.”

“Nyah,” said Boris, pushing the stringy dark hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know how to snowboard. I just hate the sun.”

We ended up together on the bus, in the seat closest to the door—clearly an unpopular place to sit, judging from the urgent way other kids muscled and pushed to the rear, but I hadn’t grown up riding a school bus and apparently neither had he, as he too seemed to think it only natural to fling himself down in the first empty seat up front. For a while we didn’t say much, but it was a long ride and eventually we got talking. It turned out that he lived in Canyon Shadows too—but farther out, the end that was getting reclaimed by the desert, where a lot of the houses weren’t finished and sand stood in the streets.

“How long have you been here?” I asked him. It was the question all the kids asked each other at my new school, like we were doing jail time.

“Dunno. Two months maybe?” Though he spoke English fluently enough, with a strong Australian accent, there was also a dark, slurry undercurrent of something else: a whiff of Count Dracula, or maybe it was KGB agent. “Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said—and was gratified at his silent double-take, his lowered eyebrows that said: very cool. “What about you?”

He pulled a face. “Well, let’s see,” he said, slumping back in his seat and counting off the countries on his fingers. “I’ve lived in Russia, Scotland which was maybe cool but I don’t remember it, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, Texas for two months, Alaska, New Guinea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Ukraine—”

“Jesus Christ.”

He shrugged. “Mostly Australia, Russia, and Ukraine, though. Those three places.”

“Do you speak Russian?”

He made a gesture that I took to mean more or less. “Ukrainian too, and Polish. Though I’ve forgotten a lot. The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for ‘dragonfly’ and couldn’t.”

“Say something.”

He obliged, something spitty and guttural.

“What does that mean?”

He chortled. “It means ‘Fuck you up the ass.’ ”

“Yeah? In Russian?”

He laughed, exposing grayish and very un-American teeth. “Ukrainian.”

“I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine.”

“Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They’re not so different languages, the two. Well—” click of the tongue, eye roll—“not so very much. Numbers are different, days of the week, some vocabulary. My name is spelled different in Ukrainian but in North America it’s easier to use Russian spelling and be Boris, not B-o-r-y-s. In the West everybody knows Boris Yeltsin…” he ticked his head to one side—“Boris Becker—”

“Boris Badenov—”

“Eh?” he said sharply, turning as if I’d insulted him.

“Bullwinkle? Boris and Natasha?”

“Oh, yes. Prince Boris! War and Peace. I’m named like him. Although the surname of Prince Boris is Drubetskóy, not what you said.”

“So what’s your first language? Ukrainian?”

He shrugged. “Polish maybe,” he said, falling back in his seat, slinging his dark hair to one side with a flip of his head. His eyes were hard and humorous, very black. “My mother was Polish, from Rzeszów near the Ukrainian border. Russian, Ukrainian—Ukraine as you know was satellite of USSR, so I speak both. Maybe not Russian quite so much—it’s best for swearing and cursing. With Slavic languages—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, even Czech—if you know one, you sort of get drift in all. But for me, English is easiest now. Used to be the other way around.”

“What do you think about America?”

“Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”

He was, like me, an only child. His father (born in Siberia, a Ukrainian national from Novoagansk) was in mining and exploration. “Big important job—he travels the world.” Boris’s mother—his father’s second wife—was dead.

“Mine too,” I said.

He shrugged. “She’s been dead for donkey’s years,” he said. “She was an alkie. She was drunk one night and she fell out a window and died.”

“Wow,” I said, a bit stunned by how lightly he’d tossed this off.

“Yah, it sucks,” he said carelessly, looking out the window.

“So what nationality are you?” I said, after a brief silence.

“Eh—?”

“Well, if your mother’s Polish, and your dad’s Ukrainian, and you were born in Australia, that would make you—”

“Indonesian,” he said, with a sinister smile. He had dark, devilish, very expressive eyebrows that moved around a lot when he spoke.

“How’s that?”

“Well, my passport says Ukraine. And I have part citizenship in Poland too. But Indonesia is the place I want to get back to,” said Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Well—PNG.”

“What?”

“Papua, New Guinea. It’s my favorite place I’ve lived.”

“New Guinea? I thought they had headhunters.”

“Not any more. Or not so many. This bracelet is from there,” he said, pointing to one of the many black leather strands on his wrist. “My friend Bami made it for me. He was our cook.”

“What’s it like?”

“Not so bad,” he said, glancing at me sideways in his brooding, self-amused way. “I had a parrot. And a pet goose. And, was learning to surf. But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May—we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Dead boring up there,” said Boris. “Heaps of dead fish, and bad Internet connection. I should have run away—I wish I had,” he said bitterly.

“And done what?”

“Stayed in New Guinea. Lived on the beach. Thank God anyway we weren’t there all winter. Few years ago, we were up north in Canada, in Alberta, this one-street town off the Pouce Coupe River? Dark the whole time, October to March, and fuck-all to do except read and listen to CBC radio. Had to drive fifty klicks to do our washing. Still—” he laughed—“loads better than Ukraine. Miami Beach, compared.”

“What does your dad do again?”

“Drink, mainly,” said Boris sourly.

“He should meet my dad, then.”

Again the sudden, explosive laugh—almost like he was spitting over you. “Yes. Brilliant. And whores?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, after a small, startled pause. Though not too much my dad did shocked me, I had never quite envisioned him hanging out in the Live Girls and Gentlemen’s Club joints we sometimes passed on the highway.

The bus was emptying out; we were only a few streets from my house. “Hey, this is my stop up here,” I said.

“Want to come home with me and watch television?” said Boris.

“Well—”

“Oh, come on. No one’s there. And I’ve got S.O.S. Iceberg on DVD.”

xi.

THE SCHOOL BUS DIDN’T actually go all the way out to the edge of Canyon Shadows, where Boris lived. It was a twenty minute walk to his house from the last stop, in blazing heat, through streets awash with sand. Though there were plenty of Foreclosure and “For Sale” signs on my street (at night, the sound of a car radio travelled for miles)—still, I was not aware quite how eerie Canyon Shadows got at its farthest reaches: a toy town, dwindling out at desert’s edge, under menacing skies. Most of the houses looked as if they had never been lived in. Others—unfinished—had raw-edged windows without glass in them; they were covered with scaffolding and grayed with blown sand, with piles of concrete and yellowing construction material out front. The boarded-up windows gave them a blind, battered, uneven look, as of faces beaten and bandaged. As we walked, the air of abandonment grew more and more disturbing, as if we were roaming some planet depopulated by radiation or disease.

“They built this shit way too far out,” said Boris. “Now the desert is taking it back. And the banks.” He laughed. “Fuck Thoreau, eh?”

“This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.”

“I’ll tell you who’s fucked. People who own these houses. Can’t even get water out to a lot of them. They all get taken back because people can’t pay—that’s why my dad rents our place so bloody cheap.”

“Huh,” I said, after a slight, startled pause. It had not occurred to me to wonder how my father had been able to afford quite such a big house as ours.

“My dad digs mines,” said Boris unexpectedly.

“Sorry?”

He raked the sweaty dark hair out of his face. “People hate us, everywhere we go. Because they promise the mine won’t harm the environment, and then the mine harms the environment. But here—” he shrugged in a fatalistic, Russianate way—“my God, this fucking sand pit, who cares?”

“Huh,” I said, struck by the way our voices carried down the deserted street, “it’s really empty down here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A graveyard. Only one other family living here—those people, down there. Big truck out front, see? Illegal immigrants, I think.”

“You and your dad are legal, right?” It was a problem at school: some of the kids weren’t; there were posters about it in the hallways.

He made a pfft, ridiculous sound. “Of course. The mine takes care of it. Or somebody. But those people down there? Maybe twenty, thirty of them, all men, all living in one house. Drug dealers maybe.”

“You think?”

“Something very funny going on,” said Boris darkly. “That’s all I know.”

Boris’s house—flanked by two vacant lots overflowing with garbage—was much like Dad and Xandra’s: wall-to-wall carpet, spanking-new appliances, same floor plan, not much furniture. But indoors, it was much too warm for comfort; the pool was dry, with a few inches of sand at the bottom, and there was no pretense of a yard, not even cactuses. All the surfaces—the appliances, the counters, the kitchen floor—were lightly filmed with grit.

“Something to drink?” said Boris, opening the refrigerator to a gleaming rank of German beer bottles.

“Oh, wow, thanks.”

“In New Guinea,” said Boris, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, “when I lived there, yah? We had a bad flood. Snakes… very dangerous and scary… unexploded mine shells from Second World War floating up in the yard… many geese died. Anyway—” he said, cracking open a beer—“all our water went bad. Typhus. All we had was beer—Pepsi was all gone, Lucozade was all gone, iodine tablets gone, three whole weeks, my dad and me, even the Muslims, nothing to drink but beer! Lunch, breakfast, everything.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

He made a face. “Had a headache the whole time. Local beer, in New Guinea—very bad tasting. This is the good stuff! There’s vodka in the freezer too.”

I started to say yes, to impress him, but then I thought of the heat and the walk home and said, “No thanks.”

He clinked his bottle against mine. “I agree. Much too hot to drink it in the day. My dad drinks it so much the nerves are gone dead in his feet.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s called—” he screwed up his face, in an effort to get the words out—“peripheral neuropathy” (pronounced, by him, as “peripheral neuropathy”). “In Canada, in hospital, they had to teach him to walk again. He stood up—he fell on the floor—his nose is bleeding—hilarious.”

“Sounds entertaining,” I said, thinking of the time I’d seen my own dad crawling on his hands and knees to get ice from the fridge.

“Very. What does yours drink? Your dad?”

“Scotch. When he drinks. Supposedly he’s quit now.”

“Hah,” said Boris, as if he’d heard this one before. “My dad should switch—good Scotch is very cheap here. Say, want to see my room?”

I was expecting something on the order of my own room, and I was surprised when he opened the door into a sort of ragtag tented space, reeking of stale Marlboros, books piled everywhere, old beer bottles and ashtrays and heaps of old towels and unwashed clothes spilling over on the carpet. The walls billowed with printed fabric—yellow, green, indigo, purple—and a red hammer-and-sickle flag hung over the batik-draped mattress. It was as if a Russian cosmonaut had crashed in the jungle and fashioned himself a shelter of his nation’s flag and whatever native sarongs and textiles he could find.

“You did this?” I said.

“I fold it up and put it in a suitcase,” said Boris, throwing himself down on the wildly-colored mattress. “Takes only ten minutes to put it up again. Do you want to watch S.O.S. Iceberg?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome movie. I’ve seen it six times. Like when she gets in her plane to rescue them on the ice?”

But somehow we never got around to watching S.O.S. Iceberg that afternoon, maybe because we couldn’t stop talking long enough to go downstairs and turn on the television. Boris had had a more interesting life than any person of my own age I had ever met. It seemed that he had only infrequently attended school, and those of the very poorest sort; out in the desolate places where his dad worked, often there were no schools for him to go to. “There are tapes?” he said, swigging his beer with one eye on me. “And tests to take. Except you have to be in a place with Internet and sometimes like far up in Canada or Ukraine we don’t have that.”

“So what do you do?”

He shrugged. “Read a lot, I guess.” A teacher in Texas, he said, had pulled a syllabus off the Internet for him.

“They must have had a school in Alice Springs.”

Boris laughed. “Sure they did,” he said, blowing a sweaty strand of hair out of his face. “But after my mum died, we lived in Northern Territory for a while—Arnhem Land—town called Karmeywallag? Town, so called. Miles in the middle of nowhere—trailers for the miners to live in and a petrol station with a bar in back, beer and whiskey and sandwiches. Anyway, wife of Mick that ran the bar, Judy her name was? All I did—” he took a messy slug of his beer—“all I did, every day, was watch soaps with Judy and stay behind the bar with her at night while my dad and his crew from the mine got thrashed. Couldn’t even get television during monsoon. Judy kept her tapes in the fridge so they wouldn’t get ruined.”

“Ruined how?”

“Mold growing in the wet. Mold on your shoes, on your books.” He shrugged. “Back then I didn’t talk so much as I do now, because I didn’t speak English so well. Very shy, sat alone, stayed always to myself. But Judy? She talked to me anyway, and was kind, even though I didn’t understand a lick of what she said. Every morning I would go to her, she would cook me my same nice fry. Rain rain rain. Sweeping, washing dishes, helping to clean the bar. Everywhere I followed like a baby goose. This is cup, this is broom, this is bar stool, this pencil. That was my school. Television—Duran Duran tapes and Boy George—everything in English. McLeod’s Daughters was her favorite programme. Always we watched together, and when I didn’t know something? She explained to me. And we talked about the sisters, and we cried when Claire died in the car wreck, and she said if she had a place like Drover’s? she would take me to live there and be happy together and we would have all women to work for us like the McLeods. She was very young and pretty. Curly blonde hair and blue stuff on her eyes. Her husband called her slut and horse’s arse but I thought she looked like Jodi on the show. All day long she talked to me and sang—taught me the words of all the jukebox songs. ‘Dark in the city, the night is alive…’ Soon I had developed quite proficiency. Speak English, Boris! I had a little English from school in Poland, hello excuse me thank you very much, but two months with her I was chatter chatter chatter! Never stopped talking since! She was very nice and kind to me always. Even though she went in the kitchen and cried every day because she hated Karmeywallag so much.”

It was getting late, but still hot and bright out. “Say, I’m starving,” said Boris, standing up and stretching so that a band of stomach showed between his fatigues and ragged shirt: concave, dead white, like a starved saint’s.

“What’s to eat?”

“Bread and sugar.”

“You’re kidding.”

Boris yawned, wiped red eyes. “You never ate bread with sugar poured on it?”

“Nothing else?”

He gave a weary-looking shrug. “I have a coupon for pizza. Fat lot of good. They don’t deliver this far out.”

“I thought you had a cook where you used to live.”

“Yah, we did. In Indonesia. Saudi Arabia too.” He was smoking a cigarette—I’d refused the one he offered me; he seemed a little trashed, drifting and bopping around the room like there was music on, although there wasn’t. “Very cool guy named Abdul Fataah. That means ‘Servant of the Opener of the Gates of Sustenance.’ ”

“Well, look. Let’s go to my house, then.”

He flung himself down on the bed with his hands between his knees. “Don’t tell me the slag cooks.”

“No, but she works in a bar with a buffet. Sometimes she brings home food and stuff.”

“Brilliant,” said Boris, reeling slightly as he stood. He’d had three beers and was working on a fourth. At the door, he took an umbrella and handed me one.

“Um, what’s this for?”

He opened it and stepped outside. “Cooler to walk under,” he said, his face blue in the shade. “And no sunburn.”

xii.

BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was. And I suppose if either of us had lived in an even halfway normal household, with curfews and chores and adult supervision, we wouldn’t have become quite so inseparable, so fast, but almost from that day we were together all the time, scrounging our meals and sharing what money we had.

In New York, I had grown up around a lot of worldly kids—kids who’d lived abroad and spoke three or four languages, who did summer programs at Heidelberg and spent their holidays in places like Rio or Innsbruck or Cap d’Antibes. But Boris—like an old sea captain—put them all to shame. He had ridden a camel; he had eaten witchetty grubs, played cricket, caught malaria, lived on the street in Ukraine (“but for two weeks only”), set off a stick of dynamite by himself, swum in Australian rivers infested with crocodiles. He had read Chekhov in Russian, and authors I’d never heard of in Ukrainian and Polish. He had endured midwinter darkness in Russia where the temperature dropped to forty below: endless blizzards, snow and black ice, the only cheer the green neon palm tree that burned twenty-four hours a day outside the provincial bar where his father liked to drink. Though he was only a year older than me—fifteen—he’d had actual sex with a girl, in Alaska, someone he’d bummed a cigarette off in the parking lot of a convenience store. She’d asked him if he wanted to sit in her car with her, and that was that. (“But you know what?” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I don’t think she liked it very much.”

“Did you?”

“God, yes. Although, I’m telling you, I know I wasn’t doing it right. I think was too cramped in the car.”)

Every day, we rode home on the bus together. At the half-finished Community Center on the edge of Desatoya Estates, where the doors were padlocked and the palm trees stood dead and brown in the planters, there was an abandoned playground where we bought sodas and melted candy bars from the dwindling stock in the vending machines, sat around outside on the swings, smoking and talking. His bad tempers and black moods, which were frequent, alternated with unsound bursts of hilarity; he was wild and gloomy, he could make me laugh sometimes until my sides ached, and we always had so much to say that we often lost track of time and stayed outside talking until well past dark. In Ukraine, he had seen an elected official shot in the stomach walking to his car—just happened to witness it, not the shooter, just the broad-shouldered man in a too-small overcoat falling to his knees in darkness and snow. He told me about his tiny tin-roof school near the Chippewa reservation in Alberta, sang nursery songs in Polish for me (“For homework, in Poland, we are usually learning a poem or song by heart, a prayer maybe, something like that”) and taught me to swear in Russian (“This is the true mat—from the gulags”). He told me too how, in Indonesia, he had been converted to Islam by his friend Bami the cook: giving up pork, fasting during Ramadan, praying to Mecca five times a day. “But I’m not Muslim any more,” he explained, dragging his toe in the dust. We were lying on our backs on the merry-go-round, dizzy from spinning. “I gave it up a while back.”

“Why?”

“Because I drink.” (This was the understatement of the year; Boris drank beer the way other kids drank Pepsi, starting pretty much the instant we came home from school.)

“But who cares?” I said. “Why does anybody have to know?”

He made an impatient noise. “Because is wrong to profess faith if I don’t observe properly. Disrespectful to Islam.”

“Still. ‘Boris of Arabia.’ It has a ring.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, seriously,” I said, laughing, raising up on my elbows. “Did you really believe in all that?”

“All what?”

“You know. Allah and Muhammad. ‘There is no God but God’—?”

“No,” he said, a bit angrily, “my Islam was a political thing.”

“What, you mean like the shoe bomber?”

He snorted with laughter. “Fuck, no. Besides, Islam doesn’t teach violence.”

“Then what?”

He came up off the merry-go-round, alert gaze: “What do you mean, what? What are you trying to say?”

“Back off! I’m asking a question.”

“Which is—?”

“If you converted to it and all, then what did you believe?”

He fell back and chortled as if I’d let him off the hook. “Believe? Ha! I don’t believe in anything.”

“What? You mean now?”

“I mean never. Well—the Virgin Mary, a little. But Allah and God…? not so much.”