The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  I wanted to run away, to drive fast to another state or another country or another planet, but waking up Ian and then being seen with him as we fled the hotel was maybe the worst possible decision. I couldn’t think what was better, so I opted for smoking. I started to light a cigarette, my hands shaking, but the bartender scurried over. “Sorry, honey,” she said. “We’re on the historic register now. Won’t let us smoke.”

  The man next to me spoke up, his voice already sloppy. “Make you hope the librarians take over, practilly.”

  He was staring in a strange way. Was it an “I’m an undercover officer with a concealed weapon” kind of way? An “I saw your picture at the post office” kind of way?

  “Yain’t the librarian I heard about,” he asked. He meant me. I took the unlit cigarette from my mouth, afraid I’d swallow it.

  “Libertarian, Jake.” The bartender gave me a smile and walked down to the other end. She’d heard this particular rant before.

  Jake had a thick beard and was the only fat man in the room. He wore an actual lumberjack shirt, as if he were an extra in a movie about Vermont and his job was to stand endlessly in the background tapping a tree for syrup.

  “Just passing through,” I said. It was probably best not to attract suspicion by speaking in full sentences.

  He snorted. “We got a libertarian just moved to town. Couple years back, though, they had some plan come up here, take over. Chose New Hampshire instead. Good choice. Here, they woulda got shot. Want to all move up there in New Hampshire at once, then they’re gonna secede. Nation of New Fucking Hampshire.”

  “Libertarians,” I agreed, nodding. I looked at the same window again, this time checking the reflection. The black-haired man was still at his table, too far away to hear our conversation. I could tell Jake that that man right there, the one in the preppy blazer, was the libertarian, and send him over thirsty for flatlander blood while I made a run for it. But Jake was too drunk to do much good.

  “Everyone wants to come Vermont, make it something it ain’t. Got all these hippies in the sixties, built solar shit, tried to farm llamas. You seen those communes?”

  We actually had passed a star-shaped, wooden structure, with clotheslines sticking out in all directions and some old Volvos parked in front. “Sure,” I said. “Saw one on the way here.”

  “Got gays come get civil-unionized now, got college kids come in to ski. Everyone comes up, thinks they discovered the damn place, like they’re Christopher Fucking Columbus. Plant a flag in Montpelier, claim it for California. Turn us into Disneyland.”

  The bartender was back. “Jake,” she said, “leave the young lady be.”

  Jake snorted again and drank the rest of his beer. It left foam on his mustache. I turned back to my notebook before he could start talking again, and began making a list, the only list I could think of. It read:Rocky

  Loraine

  Glenn

  Sophie Bennett

  Labaznikovs

  Mom, Dad

  Drakes

  Man

  I wasn’t even sure what it was a list of. People who might betray me? People I feared? I looked at it awhile, then added Ian’s name to the bottom. A good half hour later, the black-haired man paid his bill, leaving his chicken fingers completely intact on his plate. He put the phone in his pocket and walked through the door that led to the rest of the hotel, not out to the parking lot. He was staying the night. Before the door swung shut behind him, he looked straight at me and nodded crisply. I’d had four vodka tonics by that point, more than I could afford, but I was thankful for the dulled nerves. I managed to stick to the barstool drinking water for another hour and a half, long enough that I figured even if the man had been waiting on the other side of the door with a crowbar or a television camera or a police badge, he would have given up and gone to bed.

  I walked upstairs still drunk, checking for the man around every corner, worried my feet would break through the rotten boards of the staircase. Ian was asleep, wheezing again, and I managed to turn his light out without waking him. I counted how many days we’d been gone (six, almost) and realized, suddenly, that it was my father’s birthday. Or rather it had been, all that day, and I had missed it. But it was an hour earlier in Chicago, and my father was a famous insomniac, and—more to the point—in my sloppy, liquefied state, I was glad for the excuse to call him. One of the things on my increasingly desperate and random to-do list was to give him an explanation for why Ian had come with me all the way to the Labaznikovs’ house, which he surely knew about by now. And even more than that, for some unexamined reason I wanted to feel him out about Leo Labaznikov’s story, to see if I still recognized him as the man I’d left in bed with his ice pack, or if the intervening time and incriminating information would make him sound somehow different. I wondered if I’d be able to hear a layer of guilt, of patricide, behind his accent.

  But he was tremendously cheerful, wide awake, and his usual self.

  “Lucy! What is the story!”

  I was sitting on the hard, moldy bed, talking barely above a whisper, because I was too scared to go out in the hall. I told him I’d ended up driving Ian to Vermont to stay with his father’s mother. Woodstock, Vermont, I said, because I was fairly sure such a town existed, and I said the grandmother was in her fifties, a mosaic artist, perfectly capable of looking after Ian. “But he got to meet the Labaznikovs!” I said. “So that was fun! Little asthma attack, but he ended up just fine.”

  “Yes, yes, a birdie told me this.”

  “So Leo filled you in. Oh, wait, happy birthday! That’s why I’m calling!” I realized I must have sounded fairly drunk, and I tried to slow down my speech and enunciate, as if that trick had ever fooled anybody in the whole sorry history of drunkenness.

  “Yes! No present necessary!”

  I dove right in. I was in that particular state of functional drunkenness when you see the decisions you’ve just made flying past you like telephone poles on the highway. “So Uncle Leo told me the real story of the chocolate factory. Finally.”

  “Okay, yes.” He didn’t sound surprised. More like nonchalant.

  “The real story. Does Mom know?”

  “Listen, I tell you something. You think you don’t need your father’s help, and look, you do. You need the money, and you should take the car.”

  “Dad, I’m in Vermont. I can’t take your car.”

  “You should not be so surprised by this. The stupidity of children. This is the moral of the story, yes? Children think they know, and what do they know? Never as much as the parents.”

  I couldn’t rearrange his words to make sense. He seemed angry, but whether he was angry at me for not magically knowing the true story sooner, or just angry at himself, or (was it possible?) angry at Ian for betraying his own parents, for thinking he knew better than them, it was impossible to tell.

  “Crap,” he said, and I could hear a glass breaking. It finally occurred to me that he was drunk, that it was almost midnight on his sixty-seventh birthday, and I was the soberer end of the conversation.

  “Dad, we can talk about this later.” Over on his bed, Ian rolled over and made a little squeaking noise.

  “No, I will tell you now about the stupidity of adults. Okay, so we already know about stupid eight-year-olds, yes? This same boy Uncle Leo tells you, he grows up to be twenty and realizes what he has done. You realize something once, when you are nine, and then you realize it again when you are ten, and you realize when you are eleven, twelve, but every year you see that what you thought you understood a year ago, no, wait, it is ten times worse. And your heart fills up with lead.” He was almost shouting, and I found it miserably sad that he was speaking in everything but the first person, and I wanted nothing more than for him to stop, but stopping him would be the only thing crueler than having started him in the first place.

  “And by the time you are turning twenty, you have two choices: you can suicide yourself, or you can take out revenge on the world.
So I write a little book, eight pages long, about the brainwashing of Russia’s children, and I stick it into every doorway in Moscow in the middle of the night. Not every doorway, but okay, five hundred. And then I take potatoes and cram them up the tailpipes of the Party leaders outside the government buildings. Not to kill them, because in USSR no one is so stupid to turn on their car without an inspection. But I put my little book in the handle of the car door and I shove the potato, so it’s a clear message, okay? I have a huge sack of potatoes in my hands, and no one questions me. No one notices this young man with his sack of potatoes. To me this is a surprise because I thought I would get shot. Lucy, listen: I thought I would get shot, and I did not care. Not because I was suiciding myself, but because I knew I was right.”

  I lay down on the bed and tried to see only one window on the far wall instead of two, and absorbed that last sentence. If there was a common thread between the great warriors and runaways of my Hulkinov ancestors, and my father the pathological expatriate, and me, it was just that: hotheaded self-righteousness. And not the bad kind, either. We actually were right. We just cared more about being right than doing what was right. And we cared more about being right than about our own lives.

  “That’s why you ran away,” I said.

  “No.” I could hear more things in the background crashing, falling, breaking, getting shoved out of his way. “This is why Ilya ran away. This was your uncle Ilya, your real uncle, not some fake uncle, okay? Someone tells the police, I don’t know, something like ‘The Hulkinov boy did it.’ Or maybe they just say his name, because we look like peas in the pod. So he is sleeping with some girl in the woods, and the police come to our door at five in the morning asking for Ilya, and my mother proves that I am not Ilya, and by the grace of God they do not arrest her. Many times they did that, arrest the mother. This young stupid police says they are coming back the next night, and the older police slaps him on the face, pow!”

  I said, “So Ilya took off for Romania.”

  “He was shot in the chest at the border, six times. Our cousin Anton found this out, and he told my mother.”

  I said, “Dad, it’s not your fault.”

  “You are my psychologist now? I tell you something psychological: this is America. There is nothing here to run away from. This is why I come all this way.”

  I probably should have pretended he wasn’t talking about me, but I didn’t have the energy. “I’m not running away.”

  “And here is a furthermore. You see what happens when we do not trust our parents. Children do not know what is their best interest.”

  “Are you calling me a child?” I asked it mainly to ascertain whether he was talking about Ian.

  “Sure. You are a child and I am a very old man on my birthday. I go to bed now. I hit the hay.”

  I hung up when he did, and hoped my mother was still awake over there to make sure he got to bed safely. But I knew she wasn’t, or I’d have heard her voice in the background, telling him to calm down and hand her his glass.

  The only thing I dreamed that night was Leo Labaznikov drowning in a river, shouting something upstream. I had to come right down to the water to hear him, when I should have been running for help. “Lucy, what is half a Russian?” he shouted. “What is half a Russian?”

  I woke up, hyperventilating and sweating under the three heavy blankets I’d piled on the bed, and looked around the room in the red glow of 4:24 from the digital clock. Half a Russian was half a nihilist, a fourth of a game of chess, one sixth of a revolution. It felt accurate. Half a Russian was someone who carried inconsequential shoeboxes through the night, who played games with no strategy. Whose only revolution was to run.

  29

  Scam

  How to brush your teeth like a ten-year-old boy:1. Attempt to apply Crest to the brush in a perfect, swirly-ended cylinder, like in the commercials. When it doesn’t work, scrape the paste into the sink and reapply. Repeat three times, until perfect.

  2. Ask the nearest adult if she has a camera with which she can photograph your masterpiece.

  3. Sing your toothpaste the “So Long, Farewell” song from The Sound of Music.

  4. Brush vigorously enough to work up an impressive pale-blue lather.

  5. Ask the nearest adult if you look like a rabid dog.

  6. Stand three feet back from the sink and announce that you are going to spit like a camel.

  7. When mouth is clean, intentionally drop toothpaste tube on the floor, and say, “I’m so crestfallen! Get it?”

  8. Floss.

  That day, Sunday, we drove up to Burlington. I’d been there once before, when I was visiting colleges with my mother, and I remembered all the bookstores on Church Street. I told Ian about them and promised we could buy some books on local history and eat lunch in an Italian restaurant. I was hung over, but the throbbing in my head felt appropriate and necessary. This was how I should have felt all along, from the minute we left the library. If I threw up, all the better.

  We parked, and I let Ian fill the meter. “I never, ever, ever got to do that in my entire life!” he said, as if this were the major problem with his upbringing. We walked to Church Street, where no cars were allowed and where even in the dead of late New England winter, people filled the cobblestone arcade between stores and lit the space with their colorful coats and tasseled hats, and where a bundled-up vendor was selling coffee and hot chocolate from a cart. We bought one of each and began ducking in and out of shops. Ian picked out a sketch pad and colored pencils at an art store. “Just don’t draw me,” I said. I had a vision of the prosecuting attorney holding up as Exhibit H a picture of a woman with my face, and a head of pale, stringy hair not yet entirely recovered from the Ferret-Glo.

  He said, “I’m going to draw some pictures for my grandmother, to give her as a gift when I see her. Because I forgot to bring her a present.”

  He said his breathing was fine, and it sounded okay, but his shoulders were up around his ears, and his face was pale. But that could have been from stress, who knew.

  After Ian used the bathroom in the basement of the courthouse (an irony that seemed lost on him), we headed back north to the independent bookstores down by the big Unitarian church. We bought a book on Vermont history that must have been a required seventh grade public school textbook at some point in the 1970s. Each chapter was followed with a page of questions like “What is the job of the Lieutenant Governor?” and “Name the three major patterns of settlement.” We also found a guidebook called Highways and Byways of the Green Mountain State, and I bought him the two Lois Lowry books he’d been too afraid, back in Hannibal, even to sneak home in his pants. He’d once told me his mother had read something about Lois Lowry believing in Satan. Lois Lowry, the sweet white-haired Newbery winner from Maine. (“Doesn’t your mother believe in Satan?” “Yeah, but she doesn’t like him.”)

  He started Number the Stars before we were even out of the store. “The only problem is, I already know how it ends,” he said. “Because once when I looked at it back at the library, I found out.”

  “I do that too,” I said. “It’s a bad habit.”

  “But I never mean to.” He was walking, talking, and reading all at the same time. “It’s that I always have to look back and see how many pages there are, so I know when I’ll be exactly halfway through, but then when I see the last page it’s like my eyes suck up all the words.”

  I said, “At least you know there’s a happy ending.”

  I was glad for Ian’s sake that half the people we passed would have been stared at in Hannibal, Missouri. Mohawks, piercings, a man in a sarong, girlfriends in matching green hats holding hands. UVM was in session, and there were lots of dreadlocked nineteen-year-old boys making their slow ways up the street to the coffee shops under the snail shells of full backpacks, nodding along with their headphones.

  After a while, he said, “People here have dirty hair.”

  “It’s just a different hairstyle.”

/>   “No, that guy actually had a twig sticking out of his hair.”

  “I see your point.”

  When we found an Irish pub, Ian decided that was better than Italian. We sat in a booth made of what seemed to be ancient church pews. I told Ian I wasn’t hungry. He said, “My mom only ever eats tomatoes.” I ordered a coffee, knowing it would come with bottomless refills and I could get some calories from the cream and sugar. When Ian’s food came, he bowed his head over his cheddar soup for a suspiciously long period of time. I went ahead and kept drinking my coffee, because you never knew how long he’d stay like that.

  When he looked up, I said, “I gotta tell you, we’re almost out of money. I have some saved for getting back. After we see your grandmother. But we only have about a hundred dollars left besides that.”

  “What about your credit cards?” He was blowing so hard on his soup that it was flying off the spoon in little droplets and landing all over the table.

  “I’d rather not use those,” I said. “Because then someone could find where we are.”

  “Don’t worry too much,” he said. “I have an idea for later.” He took the Vermont books out of their plastic bag and laid them out on the table. “But for now, we definitely have to find out where the Green Mountain Boys lived.”

  I opened up the history book and he took the tourist guide. Skimming through the first few chapters, it appeared that Jake the drunken lumberjack had been correct. The state was a constant battleground, from the Iroquois chasing out the other tribes to the French claiming the land for New France, to the Dutch, to the English, to the French, to the English, to Massachusetts and New York and New Hampshire. Vermont was its own country for fourteen years, long enough to print its own money, long enough that its brave citizens had every reason to think they’d made it, to think that hundreds of years into the future, schoolchildren would look back on the Green Mountain Boys as founding fathers and visionaries. They were independent enough to be their own strong military presence in the Revolutionary War, to fight someone else’s battle for freedom.