The Great Glass Sea (2 page)

Until their crows turned to shouts, their shouts back to laughter, the laughter to breathing, the breathing quieting. They stood there, rocking. Above them, the stars filled the sky like sand filling a bucket of water until it seemed wholly comprised of grains of light. Below, Otseva’s surface filled with their reflection. All around the boat, the floating jars gleamed: a drifting constellation, waterborne.

“What if it comes back?” Yarik said.

And they passed between them the knowledge that that was why they had come out. For it to come back. So they could kill it. They stood thinking of their father, and how he must have tried, and they passed between them the truth that he had failed, and that they would fail, too, and they wondered again, silently, the thoughts they had wondered aloud in the night in their beds at Dyadya Avya’s—where in them lived their souls? And had they grown side by side, same to same, in their mother’s womb as well? And if one was swallowed up, or died, or simply left, would the other go, too?—and then they climbed down off the seat and went around the boat again, Dima with his axe, Yarik with the cleaver, cutting all the strings.

One by one, the jars floated away. The gleams separated from each other. The darkness between the boys and the boat widened and widened and then swallowed any sign of the jars at all.

“Out to see Nizhi,” Dima tried. And after a moment: “Into the lake.” And then: “Where they sank, and the water swallowed them up, and they drowned.” Dima grinned, waited to feel his brother grin.

But his brother was clambering for one side of the boat, and Dima was scrambling to the other to keep from tipping, and into the darkness that somewhere hid the island Yarik was shouting, “Help! Help!”

Dima reached for him and drew him down again, beside him on the bench, whispered it would be OK, they were together. On the island, Yarik’s shouting had stirred some dog of Nizhi. It barked, so far out its sound was quiet as a creaking in the dark, and the sky drifted above the drifting boat, and the cold came on, slow and steady, as if the creaking was its footsteps creeping across the night towards the boys, and they leaned into each other, shivering.

When Dima climbed off the bench, Yarik followed. They slid together along the bottom of the boat until they lay stretched out, boots to bow, out of the wind, side by side, rocking. In the sky, the stars flickered, flickered, as if each distant dog bark caused the night to blink.

In unison, the brothers unzipped their jackets. They slipped their arms out of the sleeves. They paired each strip of zipper with its mate on the other’s jacket, worked at the pulls along the teeth until they were zipped in, facing each other, their jackets become one jacket that encased them both. Inside, they slid their fingers into each other’s pits. Against his hands, Dima could feel his brother’s heartbeat. Or was it his brother’s hands beating beneath Dima’s arms? Or was it his own heart pulsing? The wind rushed by above.

He might not have woken if it wasn’t for Yarik’s struggling. Over them, the searchlight washed across the boat, sparked off the empty oarlocks, was gone again.

Yarik tore the zipper open, shoved loose, sat up. Dima stayed lying where he was. He watched the light find his brother.

“Look!” Yarik called down at him.

Instead he shut his eyes.

“Allo!” Yarik shouted. “Allo!”

Dima listened to the night swallow the shout, to the water shushing beneath Yarik’s banging scramble for the bow, his brother’s frantic
passed by, unseen, missed
—until the gunshot silenced everything. Its blast filled the boat fast as if the bottom had been blown out, water rushing around Dima’s ears. Through it, he heard another boom, another. Eyes squeezed tight, he counted the shots—
four, five, six—
waiting for the seventh that would mean the gun was empty. It never came. Instead, there was his brother saying his name, asking him to sit up, telling him to look.

But when Dima rose, he kept his eyes shut. He would have stayed in the hull if, without his brother, it hadn’t been so cold. He climbed by feel onto the bench, leaned against Yarik. When the light hit his brother’s face, Dima opened his eyes. Bright as a full moon, the searchlight came, sweeping the lake, them, the lake. Until it held, blasting. Dima shut his eyes again. Through the water, he could feel the ship coming, the shuddering of its engine, the small boat beginning to shake.

Sometimes, climbing up the steps of the autobus on his way to work, Dima would pass Yarik climbing down and feel, for a moment, his brother’s palm on the back of his neck, still warm from Yarik’s coat pocket. Or punching in at the entrance to the Oranzheria
he would spot his brother in the crowd shuffling out: Yarik would nod to him, too tired to speak; he would nod back. Sometimes, twelve hours later, Dima would hear his brother, returned for his next shift, calling to him:
Good morning, little brother!
And he would call back:
Good night, big brother!
Born a mere eight minutes apart, it was how they’d called each other since they were kids, and the whole tram ride home he would
play it over and over in his head—
good morning,
bratishka;
good night,
bratan;
good morning,
bratishka;
good night . . .
—trying to keep the voice just right, to hold the image of Yarik’s eyes.

And, though weekends were an idea discarded long ago, sometimes on Unity Day, or Defender of the Fatherland Day, or any of the half-handful that he got off, Dmitry Lvovich Zhuvov would go to his brother’s home. He would take a tram across town, shortcut through the playground, skirt the small lake puddled at the building’s entrance, climb the concrete steps inside the dimlit stairwell, knock on the apartment door, and step into his brother’s hug and kiss the cheek of his brother’s wife and eat with the children some sweet thing she had made, and they would gather—his little nephew leaping up and down on the couch, his infant niece nursing at his sister-in-law’s breast—while the two brothers, lying hidden behind the coffee table, raised hands: a mitten bear, a glove of a rooster, simple socks making a pair of horses to pull the sleighs in the tales the brothers told. Then Dima would turn his cheek on the rug and, watching so close he could feel the breath behind his brother’s whinny or roar, try to catch a glimpse of Yarik as he used to be.

Sometimes Dima would almost feel that Yarik still was as he’d once been. Helping hang an icon for his brother’s wife, Dima would stradle Yarik’s shoulders, whoop and flail as his brother, roaring, tried to stand beneath the weight, bellowing until they both collapsed into a laughing heap. Clearing away the dead lilacs that lined Yarik’s street, they’d taken turns with the bow saw, one brother urging the other on with hollered bursts of folk songs, each banging out the beat with the flat of his hands on the sawer’s back. It was the way they’d always worked together, and, later, pouring a drink, Dima would stare across the table—Yarik’s hands full with his daughter’s diapers, ears with his son’s babble, face flush from shouting over it to his wife—and tell himself,
I am seeing him
,
here, right now,
and know it wasn’t true. Always, then, Dima would think of the lake and the rowboat and the blanket of stars. His eyes would ache. His lips would shiver. He would cover them with his fist.

They had the same big fists, were the same high height, had grown the same thick bones. Heads round as ball-peen hammers, hair black as raven wings, eyes like the gray of that bird’s breast feathers stirred with the blue of its sky. Their father used to call them his two tsareviches, claim they had flown to him as crows, morphed into infants before his eyes, would one day turn back into birds and fly away again. Instead, with each year, they only turned a little more into themselves: Yarik’s shoulders a little wider, his forehead a little higher, the skin around his eyes a little more cragged; Dima’s eyes seemed to grow more blue, his face to lengthen, a mole marking his cheek. Still, until a couple years ago, strangers had struggled to tell them apart. Now it was easy: one was brown as their farmer uncle after a summer in the fields, the other pale as his wraith-white skin in winter.

The first year Dima worked at the Oranzheria, it had scared him—watching his face turn wan and wrinkled—each shift beneath the mirrors’ thin light leaching his color a little more until he was as pallid as any other night worker high on the surface of that great glass sea. Vast hectares of panels stretching across an endless scaffolding of steel, it spread northward from the lakeshore, creeping over the land like a glacier in reverse: the largest greenhouse in the world. On the news they talked of its unceasing expansion, of the whole country’s future in ever brighter bloom, of a Russia risen again on the wings of her space mirrors.

Kosmicheskie zerkala
. An idea born during Brezhnev (
Oh for a satellite to reflect the sun into our Siberian night! Oh to snatch day from the earth’s bright side, expel our long darkness from this northcold land!
) and designed under Andropov (
These giant dragonflies! Their steely abdomens the size of submarines! Their solar module wings!
), built in Gorbachev’s last years, scrapped by Ivashko, reborn with the oligarchs and launched in the last decade of the past century, rocketed through the exosphere on the arching backs of freshly molted entrepreneurs. It was a man from Moscow who built the first (the people of the city shook their heads, took it for just what this new breed of billionaire did when it got drunk), and it was his corporation that quieted their laughter to whispers (
he was going to launch it for science, for Russia, for Petroplavilsk, for free
), and finally to awestruck silence the day the Space Regatta Consortium put the first one up: belly to belly with the world, it slid the planetary curve, in its wake a gleaming disk of Kevlar, big as Red Square, reflecting the sunlight down. But it was the Ministry of Energy that paid for the Consortium to send up another, and another, and the next, and the one after that.

Soon there were five floating in the night sky above Petroplavilsk. Petrovskaya Plavilnya, Peter’s Foundry. Once the city had clanged and glowed with the workyards of the tsars—monstrous anchors forged for Baltic men-of-war, Great Catherine’s cannons rolled out to disembody Turks—but for many years it had manufactured little but melancholia. A place of concrete buildings, busted piers, skeletons of trees beneath streetcar wires scratched into sky, graveyards gray with snow, the absurdity of crocuses, of even the color purple, of old people standing in their underwear on the shore of the still-frozen lake beneath the cries of gulls, the birds’ solitary drifting and sudden frenzied flocking like the days of the work-hungry men, their job-starved wives.

That was how it was after perestroika. That was how it was until the mirrors came. Until the oligarch proposed to make an experiment of the city, the first place on earth illumined by the sun for every hour of every day of all the seasons of the year. He would take the most depressed, torpid town in Russia and grow its productivity as if beneath a heat lamp, sprout a work rate unparalleled in the world; it would be a hothouse of output, a field of ceaseless yield. No long months of winter brooding, darkness drawn over Petroplavilsk like goose down. No twilight melancholy, no dreaminess of dusk. No midnight urge to lie on dewy grass between the trolley lines inhaling summer’s scent. No evening-ushered crime spike. No streetlamps. No car headlights. No night.

The first
zerkalo kosmosa
lit only the center of the city. It painted gleam on the bronze pates of scowling heroes, flared pilfered sunlight off the memorial cannons and stacks of iron shot. The people of Petroplavilsk gathered at the light’s circumference, their backs bathed in blackness, their faces aglow. Some crept to the edge, their hands held as if to dip their fingers in the light, faint shadows blooming beneath their bodies, their edges sharpening to noonlike, until they found themselves bathed whole in the caromed sun. In those first nights of that first mirror the city’s heart thumped to the sounds of celebrations. Parents brought their children. Sons carried in their dying mothers. No one slept. They would lie in bed looking through their windows at the glow, or shut their curtains and lie there thinking of it.

The second zerkalo lit the rest of the city. The third, the sprawl of concrete apartments to the west. The fourth, the eastern same. The fifth one lit the dockyards and a swath of the sea-sized lake.