The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  “Wow, it’s all carved!” Ian said as we pulled up. He meant the building, with its elaborate scrollwork above the front door. I still had the sticker on my car, so we got waved right into the garage, and I parked in my parents’ empty space.

  “Have you ever been to Chicago before?” I asked him. I’d been too lost in my own thoughts as we entered the city to ask. And he’d been busy sticking his head out the window into the freezing air so he could see the tops of buildings.

  “No, but I’ve been to St. Louis a lot. But not even the fun parts.”

  We rode the shiny new elevator up to the fourteenth floor, and I opened the door onto the living room—its white leather furniture and glass coffee table and the row of windows overlooking the half-frozen lake.

  “Cool!” he said, and he leaned over the back of the couch to press his hands and face against the glass. “Can we eat on the balcony?” It was almost dinnertime.

  “Too cold. Windy City.”

  I showed Ian how to work the TV, regretted it for one horrible instant when it occurred to me that he might see himself on the news, then relaxed when he managed to find Nickelodeon. I left him there and took a shower and changed into my mother’s white blouse and blue wool cardigan and khakis. She was a couple of sizes bigger than me, but it was so nice to feel clean that I didn’t mind. I shoved my dirty clothes into the washer in the big bathroom closet. Ian wanted to do his laundry separately, and himself.

  We found spinach ravioli in the freezer and an unopened jar of marinara in the pantry. For myself, I opened a bottle of what was probably a very expensive Syrah.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” Ian asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  We sat at the long, glass dining table, and Ian was unduly excited to see his feet through it. He pretended to kick the plates from underneath.

  “Did you grow up here?” he asked.

  “Yep. Since I was two. Same apartment.”

  “Where’s your bedroom?”

  “They turned it into a library. Isn’t that funny? I’ll show you later.”

  It was dark out now, and I loved how the night turned the windows to black mirrors. There were sirens every few minutes—a sound I’d always associated with home, rather than tragedy, even now when I kept thinking they were coming for me. On the highway that afternoon, an ambulance had passed us with sirens blaring, and I’d very nearly stopped breathing. From up here, though, the sounds of the distant emergency vehicles were just the constant and reassuring accents of the city noise below, the reminder that life was going on without us, and so was death, and most people in the world had other things to think about than a hapless librarian and the boy she had inadvertently kidnapped. I loved standing there, fourteen stories above the streets. I thought of Robert Frost: “I’d like to get away from earth awhile.” Skyscrapers, birch trees, a nice big glass of wine.

  “I have a question,” Ian said. “If you grew up here, how did you ever play sports?”

  “I played them at school,” I said. “And there’s a workout room on the top floor.”

  “But what about on weekends?”

  “Nope. Except sometimes my father and I would move the barstools to make goals, and we’d play soccer with a beach ball. Soccer is a very big deal in Russia.” I’d been telling him earlier about my father’s escape.

  “Can we try it?” I was surprised this was so important to him. I remembered what Sophie Bennett had said about his lack of coordination in the cancan line. Then again, he was a ten-year-old boy who hadn’t run around much in the last two days, except up and down the sidewalks of highway rest areas.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I don’t think they have beach balls here anymore.”

  “We could definitely make a ball out of clothes.”

  Once we’d cleared the dishes, I helped Ian find a drawer of my father’s white undershirts, and he worked to tie them into a ball with kitchen twine. We moved the four barstools to make goals at either end of the living room, and we each stood in one. We kicked the ball of shirts back and forth, one shot each, trying to block and score. He wasn’t that good, but neither was I. The ball started to unravel every fifth or sixth shot, and Ian would stop to fix it.

  “Do you play soccer at home?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m on a team, but it’s pretty stupid, and mostly I’m just in charge of handing out orange slices. At recess I usually play something called Ian Ball, but I can’t show you here because there’s no Dumpster.”

  There was the sound of a key in the door, and Ian froze where he was bending over the ball to retie the string. “It’s the cleaning lady,” I said, but even before I heard my father’s loud voice I realized it was too late for Krystyna.

  “Dad!” I said before he could find us and have a heart attack. “Dad, we’re in here.” My mother came around the corner first, her eyes big and white. She had her leather travel bag over her shoulder, and her hair looked slept on from the plane.

  “Lucy!” she said, walking toward me with her arms open, the bag falling, “Sweetheart, what’s wrong? We saw your car. My God, you look terrible.”

  “I’m fine, I’m okay,” I said.

  “We came home early, your father’s stomach is a mess, don’t even ask.” As she was hugging me, my father came into the room, that big Russian grin, yellow and crooked, already spread across his face. “Great God,” he said, “and who is this new boyfriend?”

  Before Ian could say something ridiculous, I said, “Oh, do you remember my friend Janna Glass, from high school?”

  Janna Glass was someone who’d been at Chicago Latin with me, a girl who once stole French fries off my plate, a name I’d pulled at random, but no one my parents would know. They shook their heads.

  “This is her son, Ian.” Why had I said Ian? Why not any other name in the world?

  Ian held out his hand to my father. “Ian Glass,” he said. “Ian Bartholomew Glass.”

  “She’s in the hospital, so I drove up to help out. We came over here for a change of pace.”

  “Well what’s wrong with her?” said my tactful mother. She took off her heavy green coat, and I could feel the cold fly off it as she did.

  “My mother tried to kill herself,” Ian said. He was a decent liar, I realized, a calm one. “My father ran off with a floozy, so she tried to kill herself with pills. But now she’s going to put her life back together.” He must have watched a hell of a lot of TV in addition to reading.

  “Oh, you poor lamb. You should both stay the night. We have the couch and the air mattress.” After they put their bags away, my mother gave us piles of blankets and blew up the mattress with a hair dryer. “Where shall we put it?”

  “Definitely the library,” Ian said. “I love to sleep in a library.” I watched down the hall as my mother made up the bed with pillows and sheets and one of my old teddy bears that she pulled out of a closet. My father clapped me on the back, and Ian too, and said, “Who will have a beer?”

  Ian looked horrified. “No, thank you,” he said. “I’m cool.” He looked at me to see if he’d done the right thing, and I tried not to laugh. It was clearly something he’d been coached to say during a school assembly on peer pressure.

  “You are ‘cool’? You are a ‘cool cat’?” My father grinned down.

  “Ian, you’re welcome to ignore my father.”

  My father got himself a tall glass of beer, then sat on the couch and pointed to a chair for Ian. “Come sit and I show you something you will not believe with your own two eyes.”

  Ian sat, probably relieved that the conversation had not progressed to an offer of crack.

  My father pulled back the light hair combed across his balding head, revealing his forehead. “Now you look closely here under the lamp, and you tell me what it is you see.”

  Ian leaned toward him. “Did you fall down?”

  My father was thrilled. “No! This I was born with! Two bumps, one per side!” He touched one, then the other. “Now,” he said t
o me, “you show yours.” I reluctantly pulled my hair back from where it normally sweeps down to hide the two knobs of bone. They aren’t terribly prominent, but about one out of twenty times that I have my hair back, someone will ask if I’ve hit my head. “Horns!” my father proclaimed. “You have heard of the French composer Debussy.” Ian nodded as if he had. “Debussy had this also, these two horns. And so it is proof that this is the sign of great genius. Extra room for the brain!”

  Ian clapped in appreciation. “That’s awesome!”

  “Awesome,” my father repeated, laughing. “Lucy, it turns out your dad is awesome.”

  18

  Chocolate Factory, Leningrad

  My father then started in on the Great Hulkinov Lineage, and I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. It was a relief, after three days, that someone else was engaging Ian in conversation. I tried to clear my mind, although of course that was impossible.

  I had a silent film reel of the Drakes playing continuously in my head. Their minister would be sitting in their living room with them. Or maybe it would be Pastor Bob. Or three studious police detectives. I would like to think that I worried more for them than for myself. But if that were true, I’d have turned the car around, hand-delivered Ian to their door, and let the consequences rain down on me. The horns didn’t lie. My father and I were alike, wagging our forked tails and stealing what we wanted. The devil only thinks of himself.

  But no. The one I worried about most was Ian. Otherwise, why had I thrown my life away for him?

  “Okay,” my father was saying, “so I will tell you about my chocolate factory.”

  Ian sat straight up, tired as he obviously was. This was about the most intriguing thing you could possibly say to a Roald Dahl fan. I’d heard the story many times, and over the years it had mutated from a straightforward account of adolescent rebellion into something akin to the later works of García Márquez, and then into the key event of twentieth-century Russian history.

  “Now in Russia,” he said, “when I grew up, it was USSR. You have heard of this?” Ian nodded. “Very strict, very boring. And we had no good chocolate. And chocolate, it is my one true love.”

  “So now look at him, he’s diabetic!” my mother called from the library.

  “We had instead light brown chocolate that tasted like chalk. You could hold it in your hand five hours, and still it wouldn’t melt. But when I was seventeen years old, my uncle was allowed to travel to Switzerland, and he sneaked me back beautiful real chocolate. This is almost black, and it smells like a forest. Not like this Hershey nonsense. You are a fan of chocolate, yes?”

  For his answer, Ian panted like a dog.

  “So you are catching my drift. And I hogged my chocolate, but I described it to my friends. And they did not believe me! So I have the idea that I’m going to sell real chocolate to all the town. And do you know what the problem is?”

  Ian shook his head.

  “You could not start your own business in USSR! I have to do this in secret. So I go to my friend Sergei, and he could get what he wanted on the black market, and this included chocolate. He was the only one who could get jazz records.”

  “What’s a black market?”

  “Black market is where I sell you something, but in secret because it is against the law.”

  “Like drugs?”

  “No, like jazz records. Okay. So Sergei and I start a chocolate factory in the basement of my house. We realize it is cheaper to buy big blocks, and so we buy bricks of chocolate, each one as big as an encyclopedia set. We have to wheel them into my basement on a cart. And we take a hammer and a wedge of wood, and we hammer the chocolate into pieces, and then over the furnace we melt this into chocolate soup.”

  Ian rubbed his belly in appreciation.

  “Then we pour the soup into a mold Sergei has made, and we have 250 chocolate bars the size of my finger.” He held up his crooked pointer finger. “I will tell you, this is not a good idea. The chocolate turns gray colored if you melt it like this, but still it is better than whatever else. So we wrap these in paper that says ‘Chocolate Company, Leningrad.’ Now we were not in Leningrad, but this was to cover up. And we sold the chocolate bars to other boys. Girls we could not trust. Some boys gave us money, and some would trade us things like toilet paper.”

  Ian wasn’t going to let that one slip by. “Toilet paper?”

  “The bad kind was like a cactus. The good kind was worth more than gold. So we sell so much chocolate that at the stores, no one will buy any more of the disgusting old chocolate. Once they had one little taste of ours, one sniff, they knew they could never eat the horrible chalk again. And before long, the mayor gets the wind of this, that the stores could not sell chocolate bars, and he sends a letter to Joseph Stalin himself, saying, ‘In my town, the people are so happy, they no longer need to eat sweets!’ And this encouraged Stalin! He thought, ‘Aha! It has worked! My plan for a better Russia has worked!’ So without my chocolate bars, who knows, the world could be different.” But he said it with such a smirk, even Ian couldn’t take him seriously.

  “Did you ever get caught?”

  He laughed. “Very soon I was busy with school, and so I closed the chocolate factory down. But I was always on the black market. I could get for people good vodka, beer, cigarettes, gum, magazines of naked ladies. I was a very rich boy.”

  I was shocked—not that he told a ten-year-old about the naked ladies, but that he’d alter his story this much. His exaggerations normally accrued little by little, but he’d never changed the substance of the story like this before. It must have been for Ian’s benefit, to give the tale a happier ending than a potato in a tailpipe. Or maybe he’d intuited that we didn’t need a story right then about getting caught.

  “Why did you leave Russia if you were very rich?” Ian asked.

  “No one was really rich in the USSR. Because what would you buy with your money? Not a Mercedes.”

  I tuned out again as my mother came back in the room. She rolled her eyes at me and took my father’s empty beer glass into the kitchen. Come to think of it, I had no idea if even the basics of the story were accurate. Sometimes, he said that Stalin gave a famous speech on the radio about the town that needed no chocolate. Other times, he and Sergei were originally caught by the town mayor, but bribed him with one hundred chocolate bars, and he kept his silence, until two years later, when the mailman caught them. Sometimes they made a fortune, and sometimes the chocolate was given away free, as a gesture of political resistance. But it really hadn’t occurred to me till then that the entire thing might be a lie, that the whole idea of an underground chocolate factory was just a little too good to be true. It bothered me more than I would have expected.

  Even now, five years later, I know that my whole Russia, the one in my mind, is still a lie. My mental map of the motherland is dotted with fictions, the way old Atlantic maps showed mermaids, sea monsters: here, north of Moscow, is my father’s chocolate factory; here is Raskolnikov, pausing on his staircase; here is Ivan Ilyich, hanging curtains; here flows the Volga, polluted with refugees; there trots Gogol’s nose; here the brave citizens throw rocks at Stalin’s statue; there flee the Romanov children into the night, their pockets stuffed with gold; and up there lies Siberia, my grandfather crunching his way back home. Through it all, a thin line of truth: the road my college choir bus took from Perm to Yekaterinburg to Chelyabinsk, from concert hall to cathedral, past graffiti-covered concrete walls, past cottages with clotheslines.

  But then, the America of my father and his friends had been a lie, too, before they landed on the tarmac: toilets that never clogged, children singing in the streets, a movie star on every corner, Marlboro cigarettes for free. Maybe in some ways they all still lived in a dream America. The land of milk and honey, after all—so why not free milk from the hallway? Why not free honey from the store?

  It makes me wonder what kinds of fiction I’m capable of, by nature and nurture. I wonder, looking back at tha
t time in Hannibal, how much I projected onto Ian. And I wonder how truthfully I remember our drive, and what he said, and whether I might have seen him crying in the rearview but blocked it out.

  And I wonder if any of this happened at all. Occasionally when I wake up, and before I open my eyes, I’ll try remembering that I never left Hannibal, to see if I can shake myself out of this dream. Or I’ll try remembering that I’m in jail. But when I do open my eyes, I see the wall of my new apartment, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe that’s why I prefer this new library to my own bedroom: looking at the million book spines, I can imagine a million alternate endings. It turned out the butler did it all, or I ended up marrying Mr. Darcy, or we went and watched a girl ride the merry-go-round in Central Park, or we beat on against the current in our little boats, or Atticus Finch was there when we woke up in the morning.

  Or better still, I can imagine it’s a story that hasn’t been written yet, that there’s still time to change everything.

  Ian went to bed early, excited by the room and the air mattress, and my parents made coffee and plied me with questions about Janna Glass. We moved to the table, and I tried mightily to sit up straight, to appear awake and unpanicked. “Which one was she?” asked my mother. I was glad I’d taken my yearbooks to Hannibal a year before, so she couldn’t look Janna up and see her frizzy black hair and huge eyes. She could never be Ian’s mother any more than I could.

  “So finally you have an adventure,” my father said.

  “Not really. Just helping out.”

  He gave me a conspiratorial look, a look that said, Listen, we used to steal dry cleaning together. You got your first cashmere sweater this way. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He drank his coffee while my mother asked about Janna Glass’s suicide attempt.

  “Did he find her like that?” she asked. I had said she took a bottle of pills, that I didn’t know what kind, that she’d called 911 for help just in time.