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Ilya and Alyosha learned it from Mama as children: you take care of your home and the family domovoy, he will take care of your home and your family in return.
It’s not Ilya’s fault he fails at it for the first months he’s in Boston. How could he have known the domovoy had followed him? Why would he even leave Moscow, Dad and Alyosha? Just to follow Ilya to a different country?! No!
That’s part of why it takes him close to six months to notice.
The other part is that Ilya’s out all day, training, trying, training even harder. When he’s home, it’s to eat, fuck, or sleep. He doesn’t have time to notice if things move around. If there are hundreds of fingerprints forming words on the glass of his windows.
A cleaner tidies up, the team supplies him with food, he doesn’t have time to notice shit.
Until he returns from a night out with the boys, a pretty girl hanging from him like an octopus, and the old man is there. Long, bushy beard; gaunt cheeks; little horns protruding from his forehead. When Ilya’s gaze meets that of the domovoy crouched on the back of the couch, those eyes like old fire, he knows he has fucked up.
Octopus girl doesn’t see him, doesn’t understand why the night is ending before it could really start. Still, she lets Ilya herd her back downstairs and into a cab. Car gone, Ilya goes to find an open corner store. He buys cheap, terrible vodka. Wonderbread. Tortilla chips and cheese-flavored snacks. A jar of dipping sauce. Three of the hot dogs rolling forever on a weird machine.
It sucks, but it’s better than nothing.
Ilya platters the food with care, pours a hearty glass of vodka, and leaves it all on his kitchen table.
“I’m very sorry, grandpa,” Ilya says to the old man who’s not his grandpa, but might wear the face of one of his ancestors, who knows how deep down the Rozanov bloodline.
The domovoy surveys him from the top of the kitchen cabinets, crouched there like a displeased gargoyle. Ilya has to crane his neck to look at him. It’s like being a kid once again, if on a deeper, more existential level.
“I didn’t know you were here,” Ilya tells him. “I’ll remedy that, I promise. I’ll take care of everything.”
The domovoy keeps on looking at him with that unblinking stare. Coals burn in his eyes and follow him as Ilya retreats out of the kitchen and to his bedroom.
His thumb hovers above the call button on Alyosha’s contact for an eternity, but he never taps it.
It’s useless to asks his brother why the fuck he said nothing about the domovoy leaving the Moscow house. The only answers he’ll get will be insults. Alyosha’ll find a way to turn it into something Ilya did, not the family spirit deciding that he wanted to see America without consulting Ilya or giving him a heads up!
***
There are several Russian delis in Boston. In the next few days, Ilya tours them all in his free time, looking for the right food, the right vodka.
Not the cheap stuff, now. No, good Russian vodka, handmade pelmeni. Bread that doesn’t come pre-sliced in a plastic bag. Sausages that make Ilya think of home and summer. A big bag of potatoes. Onions. Cabbage. Beets. Sour cream. Cheese.
He stuffs his fridge and pantry, orders a small table online and moves the living room furniture so he can set it near the window with the best view.
For the first time, he forces himself to pay attention, to notice.
Whether he cooks it or not, food disappears from the fridge. The vodka and dinners he sets out for the domovoy on his little table always disappear during the night. The greasy fingerprints on the windows stop spelling out dark omens of total failure, just warnings that tough times are ahead.
Maybe Ilya has not fucked up too badly.
***
Summer means planning his trip back to Russia and for the apartment to be empty.
He tries to consult the domovoy, asks what he should do.
The domovoy is silent.
Sveta is no use. Her family’s domovoy, she says, has never, during the last century, moved from her grandmother’s house. Messy as the Vetrov might be, Ilya and his family are still on a different level of fucked.
Internet has too many opinions, which is worse than no opinion.
In the end, after the CMM photo shoot and hooking up with Hollander, Ilya leaves the domovoy three bottles of vodka, a big Tupperware of syrniki, and an even bigger Tupperware of borscht. He hopes the domovoy will understand. He hopes he isn’t fucking this all up once more.
He’d never noticed them before. Maybe he’d never wanted to. Maybe he simply couldn’t. Whatever the reason, suddenly all Ilya can see are the many spirits accompanying people around the airport. Tiny clay people dangling from backpacks and rolling suitcases. Tall ladies in colorful regalias stalking the corridors with the humans they accompany. A vulture that hops and skips along the old man who looks lost but too proud to ask for help.
Ilya catches the eyes of a many-limbed thing made of copper wires and circuit boards, perched on a woman’s shoulder. They hold eye contact for a minute through the waiting area, before the spirit nods in salute.
On the airplane, the seat next to Ilya’s is empty, and yet, impossibly, he can feel the presence of the domovoy filling it.
That evening, in the Moscow house, Ilya sets up cookies and vodka for the domovoy. Nobody has done it yet. They’re gone come morning, and he knows it was not a human who took them.
***
The domovoy follows Ilya back to Boston, back to the apartment he occupied last year, owned by the team and inhabited, before him, by a slew of players too young to be set free into the world and yet trustworthy enough to not need to billet.
It’s Ilya’s rookie year. It’s heady. It’s fun. It’s comforting to know that the domovoy is taking care of the apartment when he’s gone. No matter how long the roadie is, Ilya comes back to an apartment that smells clean, and no, he knows it’s not just the cleaners. The same team clean Nilsson’s and Marlow’s apartments, and neither has ever smelled as clean as Ilya’s does.
It’s the old man, and Ilya thanks him every time he comes home.
***
Ilya does things the right way, or as close to the right way as he can, when it’s time to move to a new apartment.
He print outs info on all the places the realtor’s suggested and sets the papers on the domovoy’s table before heading out for a short roadie.
“Think about them, grandpa,” he tells the house.
When he’s back, only one sheet is still on the table. The rest are on the kitchen counter, carefully ripped into pieces.
The only furniture that follows Ilya to the new, domovoy-approved apartment is the little table. Ilya makes sure to place it once again near the window with the best view. As soon as he and the couple of teammates who helped him move are done lugging all the boxes up to the apartment, he offers chicken blood and good meat to the domovoy.
Cliff goes back to his car and returns with a bottle of wine and a small ceramic jar full of salt.
“My grandpa always said you can’t build a new home without them,” he says as he hands the bottle and jar to Ilya so he can put them on the domovoy’s table.
When he wakes up the next morning, the smell is so familiar that Ilyas forgets he’s in a whole new apartment.
The steak and chicken blood are gone.
The wine is halfway drunk despite being still sealed.
Ilya’s trophies and medals are lined up with geometrical precision on the shelves in the office. Even the ones he never brought to America.
***
The domovoy comes with him to Sochi. Ilya can feel him on the airplane, occupying the empty seat by his side, and again on the bus to the Olympic Village.
It shouldn’t surprise him that the Village is chock full of spirits, why would his family’s domovoy be the only one to follow a human to such a big event? Still, he has to stop himself from staring in awe.
The constant feeling like he could see the old man, if only he turned around fast enough, never leaves him. It doesn’t make Russia’s elimination weigh on Ilya any less. If possible, the weight in the air worsens with each of Hollander’s texts, with his attempt to give Ilya his sympathies.
It becomes unbearable when Dad fixes Ilya’s clothes and tells him how much of a disappointment he managed to be.
Dad forgets that Mama is dead and Ilya wants to ask the domovoy if this is, at last, his punishment for those months of neglect.
***
They use hotel rooms, at first, and then Hollander buys a whole fucking building, “As an investment.”
Ilya, magnanimously, doesn’t chirp him with the truth. Doesn’t ask if Hollander gets a good RoI in less paranoia. Instead, he welcomes the change of scenery and fucks Hollander until his voice goes hoarse and his begging incoherent.
And so it goes. The fuck condo in Montreal. Hotels in Boston. Places that aren’t really anyone’s. Where everything’s fleeting, just like they should be. Meet, fuck, come, leave. Back to being the two best hockey players in the world.
Ilya entertains the idea of his own fuck condo for exactly a second, then focuses back on the videogame he’s playing with Cliff. What a waste of money and effort it would be.
Sometimes he tries to imagine what Hollander’s actual home looks and feels like. Boring, probably. White on white with white accents. A boring apartment in the most boring neighborhood of Montreal. So boring no family spirit ever wanted to follow him there.
The Hollander domovoy, if they have one, is not with his parents either, Ottawa is the most boring city in Canada. No, he’s with a grandparent who lives in a place like Toronto, and doesn’t move for fear of catching the boring.
He envies them.
***
The domovoy sometimes leaves comfy clothes out for Ilya after a home game. A baseball hat on the doorknob on a day that starts rainy as fuck and by midday turns so sunny it hurts. Adds extra socks in Ilya’s gym bag on cold days. Hides Mars bars in the side pocket of his backpack.
Every time Montreal is in Boston or Ilya’s packing for a game in Montreal, his favorite deodorant and cologne disappear from the house. It doesn’t matter how much Ilya looks for them, they’re nowhere to be found, but there are several cans of a different, mildly scented deodorant scattered around the whole fucking house.
“Oh, Jane’s in town, isn’t she?” Marly says after the third or fourth time it happens. He’s a blockhead, sometimes, yet too good at putting two and two together when most inconvenient.
“So what?”
“Nothing, nothing. It’s just sweet you don’t want to smell extra obnoxious to her.” He bats his eyes coquettishly at Ilya: “Oh, my delicate nose!”
The fucking disrespect!
He leaves a can of deodorant at the rink before the next home game against Montreal. He sprays it before leaving for the hotel where he’ll meet Hollander, no stop back home this time around.
He’s in the shower five minutes after setting foot in the hotel room, Hollander won’t come in his vicinity for more than a second otherwise. He washes the offending smell away with Hollander’s soap and all gets forgotten in the frantic haze of not wasting a single minute more.
The next time the domovoy interferes with his toiletries, Ilya just sighs and reluctantly trusts his judgment.
***
Ilya’s been more nervous than this only a couple of times, which is crazy, because you can’t compare the day of the fucking Draft to inviting your fuck buddy to your actual house. And yet, here Ilya is. Checking and rechecking that everything’s where he put it. It wouldn’t be the first time the domovoy hides stuff. It’s normal to worry he just hid the ginger ale, right?
Hollander arrives on time, holding an elegant black box tied up by a red bow.
“For the house,” he says, as he offers him the box. Its content rattles a bit, the sweet smell perceptible even through the packaging.
Ilya sets the box on the little table and can feel the domovoy’s approval.
A few hours later, once all has gone to shit in the worst possible way Ilya could have imagined and Hollander has run away, the box and Shane’s forgotten clothes remain as reminders of how Ilya fucked up with just a word.
He sits on the couch, empty and lost, and stares at the TV screen. Day turns into evening. The domovoy appears on the cushion to Ilya’s left and changes the channel. They watch infomercials long into the night.
Ilya falls asleep on the couch. He dreams of showing Shane his collection of kitchen knives, in a house that smells clean and safe.
***
“Get ready,” the domovoy says. His voice is older than Moscow, startles Ilya almost out of his skin as he’s cooking eggs.
“For what?” Ilya asks once he can muster words again.
The domovoy doesn’t answer. He perches on top of the kitchen cabinets and stares, eternal.
Ilya spends the whole day on edge. He checks on Shane and for once tells him the truth: a bad omen. Shane texts back that he’ll be careful, to keep him posted. Despite it all, Alyosha’s phone call still surprises Ilya.
The domovoy has his suitcase ready when he comes home after the game. He catches the first available plane to Russia. For the first time ever, the domovoy shows himself during the flight.
A distant aunt is the only one who comments on the domovoy following Ilya, and just to say, “Oh, thank God, he’s with you.”
In the cold of the cemetery, the domovoy roams from tomb to tomb in a silent pilgrimage. The death dogs stalking the cemetery come to sniff first the domovoy, then Mama’s tomb and Ilya.
“It’s the last time,” Ilya says. He knows that the death dogs understand. Mama and the domovoy too.
***
Shane’s cottage looks better in person, even from the car. Bigger. Warm in a way that has nothing to do with summer.
Ilya can’t look away from the a sculpture of a moose made of driftwood, just outside the house.
The domovoy had left a message out for him, this morning: a post-it with drawings of an animal with big horns, a bottle, a bowl of fruits.
The closest Ilya can come to fulfill it is settle between the moose’s forelegs a bottle of the most expensive, stupidly fancy organic fruit juice available at the airport.
Shane watches and chuckles. The moose shakes, stretches. It's taller than them, old-forest ancient. Ilya feels it welcoming him home.
“I think it likes you.”
“My family spirit likes you too,” Ilya says, and Shane’s smile has rarely been this wide and blinding.
Ilya’s got a good feeling about these two weeks, and their whole future.