The Sun and Other Stars (24 page)

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Nonno asks as I wash my hands at the sink in back and wipe the sheen of fat off my face with a wet paper towel. I take the leather and chain mail off, and I feel like I might float away.

“It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”

“Ah, don’t worry. Ten years from now, you’ll be as fast as we are.”

Ten years. It rings in my head like a death sentence.

O
n Wednesday, the sporting judges hand down the sentences at noon. Five-year bans for the president of Genoa and the managing director of Venezia. Both teams kicked down to Serie C1 with three-point deductions. Six months for the Venezia keeper. Three months for Yuri.

“Madonna!”

“Maradona!”

“Porca vacca!”

“Mamma mia!”

“Dio Cristo!”

On Martina’s flat-screen, high-definition smoke billows over downtown Genoa. Via Balbi is up in flames, cars are flipped on their backs like houseflies, and the police are stomping out in riot gear. All because of the demotion. The screen flashes to footage of the Venezia keeper ducking behind the curtains in his villa, then to Yuri and Ihor throwing luggage into the back of an SUV, Tatiana in the front seat hiding behind a pair of giant sunglasses.

At Martina’s, everyone stares at the screen in a stupor. They look like a defeated army, the ripples from the bad news etched into their foreheads. I’m the only one celebrating, gilding the next three months as I count them off in my head. August. September. October.

Shit. Please, God. Please let them come back here. Please. Just give me a chance. Please.

For the next few days, Papà and I both hold our breath. Papà keeps his vigil by running back and forth on the field every morning, and I hold mine at night, up on the scaffolding in the aula.

The year before the liceo closed, the art teacher, Professore Latini, had big plans for a mural that all the scientific and classical students were going to paint together along the corridors of the school. Casella’s papà donated fifty cans of paint, and Professore Latini did the design. It was one of those peace-and-love hippie murals, and by making us do it, I’m sure he thought he was going to cure cancer and eliminate war. But one day Charon heard us talking about it, and he started to ask us questions about how much class time would be missed and what the mural looked like, and before we knew it, he had marched down the hall to the director’s office and quashed the whole thing. I don’t think he and Professore Latini ever spoke again.

Anyway, working on the aula is the only thing that speeds up the time. I pop the lids of paint with a screwdriver I find in the janitor’s closet and mix the colors on panes of replacement glass. I concentrate on the tip of the brush, and before I know it, the first swipe of gray-blue has spread into a sea, and four hours have passed. It’s like dropping through a wormhole in the universe or stepping out of my human skin and letting it fall like a robe to the floor. I don’t get hungry or thirsty or have to go to the toilet. I don’t have to deal with other people or fight my own thoughts. It’s like being trapped inside the belly of a whale or the pocket of snow under an avalanche, and when I finally hear the voices of the Ukrainians coming down the hill ten days after they left, it feels like a rescue team sent to save me.

I climb down the tables, my heart banging away at my chest like a silent bell. I wonder if Luca ever got nervous for a girl, or before his matches. I never asked him. Lots of things, so obvious, and I never asked him.

“Ciao,” she says.

“You’re back.”

“Of course we’re back.”

“I thought maybe you would stay in Genoa.”

“Ach. What is there for me to do in Genoa now?” Yuri says.

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“Eh. As the Americans say, shit happens. You are ready to play? We have new torture for you.” He rubs his hands together and forces a smile, but his face looks almost sinister, and I can see something dark pooling just beneath the surface.

Still, I roll my eyes and play along. “So what is it today?”

“Today, we are going fishing,” Zhuki says, and Mykola holds up several meters of bright blue polyester string. The kind they use for fishing nets. The kind Mamma picked up on the beach in Vigo and wore around her wrist for twenty years until she left it on my dresser. Mykola ties a loop around my wrist as deftly as if he were winding a bandage.

“What’s this for?” I ask, and Mykola ties the other end to one of Zhuki’s wrists.

“This is so you stop running around field like cat with no home,” Yuri says. “You must learn to work in team. You must pass. You must run plays. It is no good for man to be alone, to be lonely wolf on field. You must listen to voices around you. You must teach body to know where are your teammates. All time you must know.”

“If I promise to think about it more, can we forget about the string?”

“Think about? If is only in the head, so what? Body must learn.”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of dangerous? If I trip, or . . .”

Yuri shrugs. “Do not trip.”

Zhuki shakes out the line between us, ten meters or so. Little Yuri hustles to the center of the field, the only place where the light runs out and the darkness forms a blurry diamond. Yuri blows the whistle, and the match is under way.

When Yuri plays calcio, it’s much easier to read his emotions than when he’s standing still, and it’s as I watch him running back and forth that I realize just how pissed off he is. He’s going all out at Serie A pace, running and dribbling as if we’re professionals playing the last seconds of injury time in an elimination match. I feel the tug of the fishing line cutting into my wrist as I try to keep up with Zhuki. Yuri steals the ball from her and dribbles toward me. He feints to my left and I follow as he cuts back and dribbles easily around my right side.

“Stop,” he says, and everyone on the field jogs to a halt. “Stop, stop, stop!” I feel the line around my wrist go slack. “Etto! What are you doing?” Yuri spits out his words like nails. “You followed me
left.
I can’t
go
left.” He plucks at the line between Zhuki and me, his eyes firing blue sparks. “If I go left, my head get cut off! You must learn not to buy everything your opponent sell!”

Zhuki says something to her brother in Ukrainian and Yuri hangs his head.

“Forgive him,” Zhuki says. “He’s upset over the ban.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and Yuri looks up.

“You are sorry? Why are
you
sorry?” He laughs. “Are you sorry that calcio is crooked in Italia and the game is destroyed for money? Or are you sorry I am a stupid cazzone?”

“Yuri . . .” Zhuki says, and she puts her hand on her brother’s arm.

Yuri looks down at his son and covers his face with his hands. He turns around a couple of times, like a dog looking for a place to lie down, then trots up to the ball and kicks it as hard as he can. Through the darkness, I listen to it crash into some vegetation several terraces up. We all stare at him in silence.

Yuri swings around and looks straight at me. “Tell me, Etto-Son-of-Butcher. The people in the town. What do they say about me?”

I hesitate.

“Tell me,” he says.

“Well, they are big fans, and they think this ban is completely unfair.”

His eyes stay fixed on me and he shakes his head. “You know, Etto,” he says quietly, “when you are calcio star, there are many, many people who say you what they think you want to hear. But there are very, very few people who tell you the truth. I want that you tell me the truth. What do they say?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes, I really want to know.” He hunches his shoulders as if he’s preparing for the blow.

“Well, they say that you keep to yourself.”

“They do not say it so polite, I know. Tell me what they really say.”

I look at Zhuki, and she shrugs.

“Well . . . they say you are a snob. That Tatiana is a . . . well, a not-nice woman.”

“What else?”

“That you both think you’re better than everybody and don’t want to dirty your hands on our town. That you’re scared to leave the villa because you think the common people are going to jump you and rob you in the street like gypsies. That you do not respect them, and your silence is because you are guilty. . . .”

“Okay,” he says. “That is enough.”

“Except my papà,” I add.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Papà will defend you to the death.”

“He thinks I am innocent?”

“One hundred percent.”

Yuri looks down at the ground and shakes his head. “I am sorry, Etto. I cannot play today. We play tomorrow. Tell your father to come also. I will have better spirit tomorrow.”

Mykola and Ihor go around and collect the floodlights, and Yuri heads up the hill, Little Yuri running after him. Zhuki and I are left standing in the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” Zhuki says. “He is not himself today.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. But he didn’t mean to yell at you. He likes you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Really, it’s okay.”

She stares at me, her lips pursed in another apology. “We will see you tomorrow, I hope?”

“Tomorrow.”

She turns toward the back of the terrace, but she only takes a few steps before our arms jerk up in an involuntary wave. She looks at her wrist and laughs.

“I forgot,” she says. “This stupid fishing line.”

We work at the knots, which are more complicated than they looked when Mykola was tying them.

“I will kill that Mykola,” she mutters. “He did it on purpose.”

We end up having to sit down on the ground, hunched in the dim moonlight, her hands working to free me, and mine, her.

“Finally!” She rubs at her wrist. But instead of jumping up and running after the rest of her tribe, she flops back on the grass, wriggling a little to fit her back into the ridges of the earth. I lie down next to her, my heart thumping in my chest.

“I just wish I could do something for him,” she says. “Something that would make him happy. These past few days have been terrible for him.”

She turns her head to look at me, but I don’t dare look her in the eye. I can feel us crashing toward the moment when something has to happen, and I’m scared I already know what it is. I have, since puberty, always been the Friend. Maybe it was because I was always standing next to Luca and it was a simple process of elimination. Who knows? In its best case, the Friend is the guy the girls go to when they need to cleanse their palates between Stronzo #1 and Stronzo #2, but at its worst, being the Friend is a perpetual purgatory—the guy who always gets the brotherly grip around the shoulder in all the photos and the kiss on the cheeks instead of the lips. I know multiple variations of the Friend speech, enough to know that I feel it here, stalking around the terrace in the dark.

“Look, there’s the Big Bear,” she says instead. “And Venus.”

“Where?”

“Right there.” She scoots closer to me, and I smell the mix of soap and sweat on her skin. It would be so easy to reach over and put my hand on the bump of her hip, lean over and kiss her, but I can’t get the night at Le Rocce out of my head. Or what she said to me the next day. My muscles lock, my arms pinned to the ground.

“How can you tell?” I ask.

“Venus is easy. It’s the brightest one. The earth only reflects half the light Venus does.”

“I didn’t know you could see any planets without a telescope.”

“You can see five of them. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Not tonight, because the moon is bright. And not all at the same time. But if you look for them, they appear.”

“How do you know where to find them?”

“The same way you find everything else. You look where you last left it. Most of the time, they have the same orbit. Sometimes they go back and . . .” She draws a loop with her finger. “But if you keep looking, it gets easier every time.”

I stay quiet as she tells me about the Perseid showers in the middle of August, and how most people think shooting stars are actually stars, but really they’re only flaming bits of rock and dust. Her hand hovers in the air, hypnotizing me as it floats above us in space, drawing arcs across the sky.

“I’m sorry,” she says suddenly. “I’m boring you.”

“Not at all.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re not. It’s interesting. How do you know so much about stars anyway?”

“We all knew a little growing up. You are in the country, and you see them every night. But I had a friend in Scotland who taught me properly. When Yuri was playing for Celtic. He went and got his PhD in America,” she adds, and I can tell by the way she says it that he was an old boyfriend. “I like it because wherever you are in the world, you can see the same stars. Glasgow. London. Kiev. Genoa. Strilky.”

“San Benedetto,” I add.

“San Benedetto.”

She tilts her head to the side, and her eyes flash a distant freedom, like they have seen and encountered it all and still manage to find wonder in the world.

“Do you like moving around?” I ask.

“It is good for some things. I think it has made us closer, me and Yuri.”

“And why don’t you ever go back to Ukraine?”

“Ah, my mother is with a man now who is . . . let us simply say that he is not a good man.”

“Your stepfather?”

“Nooo. He is only her boyfriend. But he acts like she is his property. He drinks a lot. And he tries to make money from Yuri.”

“How can he do that?”

“Oh, he finds ways. One year we came home for Christmas and he made Yuri sign a hundred calcio balls for him. The next time, there were things missing from our room. Things of Yuri’s. School notebooks. His old cleats. His favorite toys. We found out this guy had sold them on the Internet. He says it is because Yuri does not give our mother any money, but that is only because Yuri knows she will give it to this man and she will never see any of it.” She shakes her head. “Now he makes my mother borrow money from the neighbors and say the next time Yuri comes home, he will pay them back. These are our neighbors, the people we know since we are children. And now when we do not come back to Strilky anymore, they think Yuri is the good-for-nothing one, who is cruel to his mother and is not paying back the money he owes.”