The Great Glass Sea (12 page)

“I’m going to be a foreman,” Yarik said, and, right in front of all the other hard hats, pulled Dima into a hug.

The line of men getting on and off flowed around them, jostling as if to break them apart, sweep them away to bus and work, but when they loosed their grip it was only to lean back far enough to see each other’s face.

Yarik gave him a shake. “Bratishka, it’s good news.”

He did look happier than Dima had seen him all year, his smile so wide Dima could smell the cigarette smoke. Dima felt a sudden thickness in his lungs, told himself it was the smoke and, smiling back, began to ask how the job had come about, but his brother was already on to what it could mean—for them, their future. . . .

“Maybe now,” Dima cut in, “you can get me on your crew?”

Someone’s shoulder shoved past, seemed to knock Yarik back a little, his neck stiffening, his eyes suddenly a little more serious. Though no less bright. “Maybe now,” Yarik said, “I can really start to save.” On Dima’s nape, his brother’s hand gave one more squeeze. Behind Yarik the last of the stragglers climbed through the bus’s doors. He broke away—the air on Dima’s neck somehow more heavy than the hand had been—and started after them. “Maybe now,” he called back, “by the time we’re ready I’ll be ready, too.” Then the doors were closing and Yarik was jamming himself between them: his shoulder, his elbow, gone.

Out at the far eastern edge of the Oranzheria, the support crew had built the scaffolding across the Kosha River, and that night Dima worked a half-dozen meters above the water. Above him, small broken clouds mottled the sky. Behind the clouds the zerkala were albescent creatures in a murky sea, and, on the glass, the workmen wore headlamps strapped around their hard hats, their small yellow cones of light sliding from job to job, a thousand of them drifting like some current-borne school spawned by the mirrors above. Now and again, the zerkala would find a clearing in the clouds; their beams would pour down; the men would all shut off their lamps: a thousand candles blown out in one roving breath. Then, for a while, Dima could see the river below—its gleaming ripples rolling slowly towards the distant lake, the splash of fish, of night birds after them—before the clouds would close together again: a hundred sky-hung lanterns snuffed out.

He flicked on his headlamp. The glass showed him his own face back. He was preparing the brackets for the panes and he tried to focus on the adhesive strip that he was laying down, but in the reflection he kept seeing his brother’s face, the way Yarik’s eyes looked when concentrating on a task, the way his jaw jerked with frustration at himself. When the silicone ran out, Dima held the gun in the air, the old cylinder still in it, and sat there, leaning over his reflection, pressing his lips tighter, turning down the edges of his mouth, leaking a little more weariness into his eyes, until he had it right.

“Ey!” the foreman called to him. The panes shook under approaching boots. Dima reached out, put his palm over the reflection. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking up.

But when the zerkala cast down their light again, he could not stop gazing at the world they showed below. On the near bank, he could see what had once been a farm. The inside of an izba poked through its collapsed roof like the skeleton of a sun-shrunk corpse: the white of a woodstove, a mattress with its horsehair springing out, a kitchen cupboard spilling shards of china and glass. He saw a row of stumps where a windbreak must once have stood. The stone foundation was all that was left of what had been a barn. The last intact building, a chicken coop, he watched collapse: a bulldozer smashing through one corner, the wood crashing into its own cloud of dust.

Dima watched the earthmover shove the wreckage into a mound so high it almost touched the glass. There, just below the faint reflection of his face, were rugs that had once lined a wall, small white feathers clinging to torn patches of screen, fork tines glinting, the bowl of a tobacco pipe. Where its dark stem disappeared among the remains of soil and memory, Dima could make out the white of the teeth still clenching its tip.

His slow crawl stopped. In his headlamp’s beam: a dead man’s clench-jawed grimace. Dima bent his face down closer—his own eyes forming in the fog of the glass, the outline of his own tight jaw—until he could see the old dog’s teeth again, yellowed and stained with spots of brown, feel the receding gums, smell the breath, warm and gamy as meat left in the sun.

“What are you doing to that dog?” Dyadya Avya called across the floor from where he lay.

“Brushing his teeth,” the boys said.

In the flickering lamplight the brothers’ eyes passed laughter back and forth between them. Earlier that night, when Dima had gone to dump his bones into the dog’s bowl, he had found a chunk of ivory lying there with its rotted root. Yarik had suggested they brush old Ivan’s teeth. Dima had come back from the water basin with the toothbrush Dyadya Avya used.

“Oh,” their uncle said, his shoulders shrugging against the boards, as if he had been brushing Ivan’s teeth since the dog was a pup. His neck was canted back so that his thick red throat was arched and his felt cap was crushed, and his red face was upside down, staring at them. He said, “I thought you were trying to get him to smoke my pipe.” He belched. “My pipe,” he said again, and his eyes grew watery in the lamplight. Then he lifted his head on his neck and took a swig from the bottle and rested the bottle back on his chest. There was his upside-down red face again. But the eyes were shut.”Don’t let Ivan smoke my pipe,” he said. “It’s all I have left of your father.” The lamplight drew two wet lines from the corners of his eyes down to his temples where they disappeared in the dark felt of his hat.

The dog panted, slow and even. Yarik had stopped brushing. Dima, still holding Ivan’s lips away from his gums, could feel on his fingers the hot air of the dog’s insides.

“He loved his pipe, didn’t he?” Dyadya Avya said. And, when the boys didn’t answer, he answered himself: “He did.” Another swig from the bottle, another sigh. Then the man’s eyes snapped open. “I know what your mother says. I know she says he did it to himself. No.” His felt hat rubbed back and forth on the floor. “No, my children, don’t think it. It’s not true!” The old dog’s ears swiveled towards the shout. “It was”—Dyadya Avya’s voice guttered—“the Chudo-Yudo.” His upturned eyes looked from brother to brother. “That snake! That beast! That devil!” He tried to turn the bottle’s mouth to his without lifting his head and the vodka spilled around his lips and he shook his face, violently, coughing. “I warned him,” he said. “I told him he was tempting the devil. ‘No’, he said, ‘the Chudo-Yudo stays in the river.’ Ha! Where does he go when he grabs the girl from the bank? When he swallows the horse whole and cannot move? Where does the current take him as he rests? The lake! The lake, I told him. Into the lake! But still, there he was, every winter, sitting out there, cutting a hole in the ice just big enough for the Chudo-Yudo’s head to fit through. Up!” The man’s whole body jerked. “And grabs him!” He jerked again, once, like the last flop of a fish on a dock.

Dima, nine years old, his fingers on the teeth of the dog, jerked with him.

“In winter,” Dyadya Avya said. “I told him, ‘In winter what else is there for the devil snake to eat? Lyova,’ I said, ‘what are you doing out there? Every day? Alone? You don’t even bring home enough fish for supper! Why don’t you just work? Why don’t you come join the road crews with me? Where you’re supposed to be. We would clear the streets of Petroplavilsk together. Proscribed hours, state wage. Lyova, your family is hungry! Your wife is angry! Your sons . . .’” His words dribbled away. He quieted. He looked at them. “Oh, that beast!” he said. “Oh, that fucking beast.” He was crying.

Dima let go of the dog. The dog went straight to the sobbing man. It stood over him, licking at his face. “The teeth,” Dyadya Avya said, from the darkness beneath the thick hanging shag of the dog, “the teeth.”

“But, Dyadya,” Dima said, “I saw . . .”

And, because he couldn’t finish, Yarik said for him, “We saw them pull Papa from the ice.”

And, still, a quarter century later, Dima could see the dark blur of the body beneath the ice, feel his father’s frozen eyes staring up at him. Still, crouched on his hands on knees, looking down through the glass at the half-buried pipe—no, not teeth: just a few dried kernels of old feed corn spilled—he could hear Dyadya Avya’s reply: “Oh, my children, the Chudo-Yudo does not eat the body. It swallows the soul.”

On his first break that night, he climbed off the Oranzheria and walked down to the river’s edge to drink his tea. Small things fled his footsteps, shaking the reeds. The sounds of their splashes, the rustling of cattails and canary grass, were smothered by the rumbling of the earthmovers, the groan of shovels clawing rock, men bellowing back and forth through it all.

He shut his eyes, lowered his face till he could feel the tea’s warmth on his lids, the waft of it filling his nostrils, and wished it was the scent of his brother’s hair instead. Foreman! He thought of what Yarik had said, how now he’d be ready with the money by the time the Oranzheria was done. But how long would that be? And what if they were wrong? If the expansion was never meant to stop? Opening his eyes, he watched an egret sail between the glass sky and the surface of the river, skimming low, its plumes pearly in the mirror-light, its reflection slipping through the shaky reflections of the artificial moons. Was it possible that the Oranzheria would simply go on like this forever? A sea of glass that never stopped growing, creeping outward over the land with a hunger that could not be sated? Was it possible that this was what the new way meant? Yesterday, his brother a laborer. Today, his brother a foreman. Someday, his brother a manager. Years from now. When they were old and life was almost gone. And he would get off the bus, gray-haired, and greet his gray-haired brother and his brother would cup his neck and tell him,
Bratishka, I have good news.

Far off over the river, the egret rose towards the sky until its wings brushed the glass, then dipped again, skimming the water, and flew on, and tried again. Sipping his tea, Dima watched it—its sudden rise, the shock and flutter, swooping down in frantic flight and panicked rise again—until the last flicker of white disappeared into the small space between the distant river and the distant glass.

Across the water, on the other bank, a woman stood staring at the same far-off place. In each hand she held a large wood-slatted crate; her shoulders, beneath her shawl, showed how heavy each was. Between the slats, white shapes stirred. Each crate must have held half a dozen chickens. He watched the stillness of her standing there, the boxed panic of the birds, dark hair loosed from beneath her kosinka, black strands hanging around her face. She was still looking upriver to where the egret had gone.

“What happened?” their mother had said, so long ago, wringing the washrag out, a stream of hot water drumming at the bones of his bent neck, trickling down his spine.

He had been seven, steaming beneath her hands, his hands still stinging, the whole of him still shivering. “We were trying . . .” The words knocked at his teeth.

And Yarik, crowded into the corner of the tiny bathroom, the fleece of his coat still gravelly with frozen snow, the melt dripping around his boots, finished for him: “We were trying to catch enough.”

“Fish?” their mother said. Beneath the warm rag she swabbed through his hair, Dima nodded. “Enough for what?”

The brothers glanced at each other. Earlier that night when they had slipped out of bed, they had not even discussed it, had simply known between them what they would do. Their father had been gone all day, would be all night. Gone with their uncle to the dom kultura, gone into the bellowing and boot stomping, the spilled drink and the dancing and the fights, the smoke-and-song-filled night.

The night before, their mother had forbade their father to go. Then she had pleaded with him—
At least come home to fish tomorrow, to bring something for dinner so we won’t starve
—and, after he had gone anyway, the two boys had crept out of their room, past their mother still crying in the kitchen, to the hallway closet where their father’s tackle waited and out into the quiet that was back then the middle of the night. All the way to the lake’s edge they encountered no one. Beneath the moon, only faint hints of tracks: the long lines where men had slid their winter fishing shacks out on their skids. At the end of each trail, a dark hut hunkered among the others, black and still.

Inside their father’s, they lit the lamp, crammed in between the scrap-wood walls, Dima hugging the heavy spool of fishing wire to his chest, Yarik doing the same with the bucket of bait. Between them, a stool perched beside the hole. A lapping blackness in the lamplit ice. They listened to the water the way they might have to the noises of some animal from the safety outside the bars of its cage. Around them, outside the hut, the blind wind felt along the walls, found the window hole, whistled in. Through the opening they could see the distant cranes splintering the dock lights through their black bones. They took turns watching, one standing at the window with his gloves over his face against the sting of the wind, the other sitting at the edge of the hole, gripping the wood handles of the wire spool, the line dropping straight down into the dark water. . . . Which was where Dima was when the ice burst open beneath him.

What broke it? What caused the crack? What came crashing through? Or was it simply the ice crashing down, the stool swallowed, the ground gone, the water there, the cold clamping onto him sudden and strong as jaws snapped shut. It cut his skin like a thousand teeth, chewed through his muscles till it hit bone. If something brushed against his body, he could not feel it. If something eyed him as it sank back down into the black, his shut eyes would not have seen it. If Yarik had not found his parka with his hands, had not lay flung out over what solid ice was left and held on and hauled back and got him out, he would not have had anything at all to tell.