The Great Glass Sea (14 page)

“A fork!” Dima would cry.

In his arms, Polina would gnaw, slobbering, on his neck. With Timofei clinging to a leg, he would lurch over to the coatrack that, long ago, their father had carved—the legs whittled into fish tails, the stem swirled like a narwhal horn—and, struggling one-handed to hang up his and Yarik’s coats, would glimpse, again, the earliest memory he and his brother shared (each twin’s little legs wrapped around their father’s waist as, holding them in his arms, building the muscles of his thighs, he groaned and roared across the living room, lunging back and forth before the open bathroom door where their mother stood, her face half-made, trying to do her lipstick through her laughs). Always, then, draping his coat over the back of his brother’s, adding his scarf to a rack already swaddled in the family’s own, Dima’s throat would fill with such a surge of happiness that all he could do was stand there, gone still, trying not to swallow.

But sometimes, in these daybloom weeks, the northern half of the world tilting ever closer to the sun, some evenings when the air was balmy with the scent of lilac blossoms, Yarik would scoop his children up or wrap his arms around his wife and suggest they all go on vacation. Then, Dima would keep his jacket on, toss his brother’s back to him, help Zinaida into her sweater’s sleeves, wrap a scarf around his nephew, niece, and with them all pile back out the door into the hallway, the smells of supper spilling out with them, the family bringing their plates into the stairwell, up four thumping, clattering flights, until they reached the doorway to the roof. Up there, they would spread out a towel stamped with a picture of palm fronds around the spire of the railway station far south in Sochi, adjust the squeaking backs of the rusty beach chairs till they lay flat. Zinaida called them chaise lounges. Timofei called the towel his chaise carpet. Dima, beside his brother, sharing a chair, the plastic strips sagging beneath their weight, would watch the sky for each new zerkalo, each new flash of reflected glow seeming to warm his face a little more.

Those times he could even understand how Zinaida liked the mirrors. The way night used to seem a black breach in the path of the sun, the zerkala now drawing day’s clear track through, as if their small bit of earth had been blessed with a new kind of light. She talked of a day when there would be so many mirrors they would seem simply a return of the sun, no difference at all between day and night, all that light warming their patch of the world, as if all Petroplavilsk was beneath a ceiling of glass. Winters without snow, lilacs in December. She spoke of their chosen city, their favored lives. And lying there, listening to her, his own dream—all of them out on Dyadya Avya’s, farming as a family together, suppers around one big table, nights huddled together around a stove, all day spent in the fields with his brother—seemed so simple.

On colder days, on evenings when clouds pushed the world back towards winter, they would take their plates to the big couch opposite the old rug that hung above the TV, squeeze all four together, watching
Vremya
or
Gorodok
while Polina toddled and tripped around their feet. Sometimes, he would take the children to the couch alone, watch them while Yarik went with Zinaida into their bedroom to spread out bills and papers on the mattress, to confer on matters of family and home.

Then, Dima would hold Polina in his lap, gather Timofei to his side, tell them stories his own uncle had told him: Emelya the Fool standing over the water hole punched through the ice, the hoary pike fish in his fists gasping through its flapping mouth,
Let me go and I will grant you any wish;
the way Baba Yaga would cut off a dead man’s hand, creep into homes, wave the severed palm over sleeping souls so they would never wake; how, to punish her, the townsfolk knotted her long hair to a horse’s tail and sent it—whirling, kicking, galloping—across a stony field until there was nothing left of her but her thumping head. He would tell them about the aged, lonely peasant couple who yearned so for a child that the old husband carved a piece of apple wood into a baby’s shape and the old woman wrapped it in her shawl and they named it Teryosha and rocked it and sang to it until one night they heard it gurgle, stared as it begin to stir.

Close your pretty eyes, Teryosha

Sleep, my baby child!

All the fishes and the thrushes,

All the hares and foxes wild,

Have gone good-bye in the forest.

Sleep, my baby child.

And when they were asleep, his words would slip into a quiet humming, and he would sit beneath the weight of their lolled heads and hear inside his own the one tale he never told: how one day, long, long ago, the Chudo-Yudo emerged from its lair and, arching its long back, leapt out of the water and into the sky. For a moment, all its heads were silhouetted against the heavens, its flailing body flickering in the light. Then it opened its jaws and swallowed the sun. In the sudden darkness there was only the sound of its body splashing back down into the lake.
That was the day
, Dyadya Avya would tell them,
that all the land became a world without light.
In the dawn it was as dark as noon and noon was as dark as night. And in this lightless land there lived an old couple who had two sons. One was clever and hardworking as an ox. The other was a simpleton. His name was Ivan, his surname Popolyov, but everyone called him Ivanushka the Fool. For twenty whole years he did nothing but lie at the foot of the stove, buried in the warm ashes his family shoveled out. Until, one day, he arose. He shook himself, shed a pile of ashes a meter high. Stomping over them, he called out,
Make me a mace for I am going to kill that Chudo-Yudo snake!

Sometimes, Dima would have heard his uncle’s voice tell the whole tale, all the way through to the end, before the bedroom door would open and his brother would come out. Sometimes, Yarik would come out earlier and save him from hearing it. Then, his brother would help him ease out from under the sleeping children and they would go, the two of them together, into the dim hall and fill steaming glasses from the samovar and take a moment—short, and as time went on, shorter still—to simply be there with each other, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just standing by each other’s side, and Dima would know that he had done the right thing, that whatever would happen now, whatever might come next, it would be worth it just for this.

Weeks ago, when Dima had quit his job, had simply refused to return to work, to even stand, he had not understood that he was leaving, had only wanted to sit, watching the light of the newly risen sun slip slowly down the white birch trunks, had sat like that for hours, through the foreman’s fury, the urgent tugs from fellow workers’, until his brother had come. Crouched beside him, Yarik had whispered
What’s going on?
And when Dima hadn’t answered, he had slid his hands beneath Dima’s arms, and, gently as he could, dragged him away.

That morning, standing alone outside his home on Avtovskaya Street, listening to the receeding sibilation of the trolly taking his brother back to work, Dima had gazed up at the apartment he’d lived in almost all his life. In his childhood it had been a gray building, paint peeling down to concrete. Now, all eight stories were freshly blue. But it felt grayer. No grass greened the mud, no buds on the trees, just the dull orange dirt-filled flower pots provided by the Consortium’s Landscape Replacement Crew, one on each balcony, their gene-altered bulbs waiting to bloom. Years ago, each railing would have fluttered with laundry, each square slab alive with fowl. Now they were all empty. Even Dima’s. Even though he’d left the rooster out when he’d gone to work.

That got his legs going, got him upstairs. Inside, the apartment was freezing, the glass balcony doors folded open, a wind blowing in. “Good evening, lyubimy,” he heard his mother chirp, but when he turned to correct her, as he did every morning, she wasn’t even looking at him.

Atop the television, the rooster stood staring at them both, undeniable desperation in its eyes. He’d covered the defunct TV with a tablecloth to keep his mother from trying to turn its knobs, and beneath the bird the lace was smeared with scat. At his first step, the rooster leapt, stumble-landed, took off at a run. Its long tail trailed behind it. Across the room it went, beating its wings so hard Dima felt the wind, no closer to flying than a strange pathetic hop before the weight of its trailing plumage brought it down again.

Still, it took him most of a minute and all the energy he had left to corner the thing. He almost gave in, just stomped down on its tail feather train, but the idea of the six-foot plumes ripping out stopped him. Instead, he peeled one of the blankets from around his mother, advanced with it spread before him.

On the tiny square of balcony, he dumped the Golden Phoenix out. “Stay,” he told it, as if it were a dog.

Stepping back inside, he said, “Mama, you have to keep the doors closed, OK?”

But she was focused back on her sewing, bent again over the machine. Beneath the table, he could see her foot poking out from the folds of the blanket, working the pump. He crossed the room and, resting his sockfoot on top of her slipper, pressed her treadling still.

She looked up.

“What are you mending?” he asked her.

“Your shirt.”

He took the free sleeve in his hand.

“It was full of holes,” his mother said.

The cuff had been sewn shut. She was halfway through sealing up the other one. On the couch behind her, the rest of his shirts were piled. He could see their collars had been stitched closed, patches sewn over their buttonholes, turtlenecks turned to traps for an unsuspecting head.

He gave her back the sleeve, lifted his foot off hers.

The chattering of the needle again.

Flopping onto the couch, into the pile of ruined shirts, he watched her. Beyond her, the door to her room was open. At the foot of the bed, he could see his uncle’s old chest, the wood sides his father had whittled with wingspread shapes of geese in flight. He made a mental note to get a padlock before she dragged out Dyadya Avya’s last belongings and went to work on them. To work. It hit him then—tomorrow he wouldn’t go—hit him too hard for a mind so tired; he couldn’t think about it; he wanted only to be already asleep.

“Mama,” he said, his lids lowering, “have you been doing this all night?”

“I made you
shchi
for supper.”

“It’s breakfast,” he told her.

But she only bent forward, bit off the thread, and, smiling, proud, held up the shirt for him to see.

He shut his eyes.

So soft, the dry skin of her palm when she pressed it to his cheek. So soft, her voice: “It’s been a long day.”

“A long night,” he corrected her. “You should sleep while I’m gone, Mama, so when you’re up I can be here and . . .” His hands searched the pile of clothes, lifted some random part, dropped it again.

When he opened his eyes, she was looking out at the rooster, the sun-blasted concrete, the railing thinned to brittle by the brightness.

“It’s still light,” she told him, as if just discovering it.

“It’s always light,” he said.

The wrinkles on her brow seemed to deepen, the skin to shrivel a little more around her mouth. And meeting her confused gaze, her eyes milky and filmed as the mirror-faded moon, it was all he could do not to turn away.

They sat at the small table in the kitchen, hunched over their bowls, the two of them and the empty chair at the third place his mother always set. The room was filled with the warmth of the steam and the smell of boiled cabbage. He slurped spoonfuls with his eyes shut, the morning brightness bleeding through his lids, and wondered if this was the last bowl of supper fare he’d have to eat for breakfast. By feel, he tore off a hunk of bread, soaked it in the shchi, and chewed it (but what worse would they have to eat now?) and ripped away another piece (how would he bring home even this?), all the while aware of the empty space beside him (what would Yarik say if he was sitting there?). Squeezing his fist around the bread, Dima tried to feel the fingers of a hand squeezing back. Instead, for the first time since he’d sat down on the glass, he felt the full weight of what he’d done.

“Poor thing,” his mother said.

He opened his eyes. From beneath her flowered head scarf a few strands of white hair floated, backlit by the window, aglow with morning. For a moment, he thought something was fluttering against the glass behind her—some bird trying to get in—and then he realized the wing-clatter was coming from the balcony behind him.

His mother beamed. “A mute rooster.”

Wiping a wedge of bread around the inside of his bowl, he told her, “He’s not mute.”

But her smile only grew. “A cock,” she said, “that can’t crow.” And, sinking back against her chair, the old woman let out a hoot.

It was the wild unloosed laughter of a child. He tried not to look at her. Turning to the bowl she’d set out for her other son, he reached across the table for another helping. But there was the ache beneath his arm where Yarik had grasped him that morning, the rawness from being dragged across the glass, and he snapped, “Mama, can’t you understand that there’s no sunrise?”