The Great Glass Sea (32 page)

On rainy days the great glass sea became an endless awning, a translucent roof drummed hard by downpours, soft by drizzles, all the Oranzheria his porch. He would find a patch of grass beside a collection pipe, lie down, and listen to the rain spill down from duct to cistern: some days the babbling of a brook, others the muffled roar of a waterfall in a glade. And high above him, on the glass, there might stand a laborer in wet-weather gear, his poncho shedding rain like the canopy of a tree, his boot soles still as roots, his shadowed face staring. Until another splashed over to send him back to work. While, below, propped on his rucksack, leg crossed over knee, rereading books from his and Yarik’s school days, Dima might look up to see the foreman shouting down. But through the glass, the beating rain, he would not hear.

There were times someone from security would approach, tell him he had to leave. He would put away his book, put on his shoes, catch the next bus, take it to another sector. Sometimes, when he stepped off he would think that he could feel his brother. He would stand very still, surrounded by the scents of new corn silk or water-soaked soil or wheatheads baked dry in the sun, and let his beard grow heavy with the humidity, his arm hairs brown with dust. Sometimes he thought he heard Yarik’s voice. Once, he was sure he heard his laugh. He sat where he was and listened and when he heard it again, he didn’t call out, didn’t get up, simply laughed silently to himself. And pictured Yarik hearing that. Sometimes he liked to imagine Yarik feeling that he was near, liked to picture his brother taking a deeper breath. And Dima would take a deep breath. And that was all. He never went to look for Yarik. He would wait till his brother was ready. Till the trouble he had caused had died down. Till one day soon, when his bratan would come and find him.

The day he did it was hot, the beginning of July. Dima had hitched on the back of a supply truck and, climbing out of the hot wet air beneath the tarp into the hot drier air beneath the glass, he headed straight for the Kosha. Between him and the river was a vast field of corn, and while he waded through the waist-high stalks he unbuttoned his shirt, stripped off his sleeveless, and by the time he got to the bank his back was bare and he was tugging at his shoes. Not thirty seconds later, he was in his underwear. Then he was swimming.

He splashed out to the deep, tussled with the current, flipped on his back, floated downstream in tandem with a duck, flipped again and dove under, and when he came up, something smacked into him. Neck stinging, he swept his water-bleared eyes over the surface: a dark, wet shape, pointed as a snake’s head. He jerked away. And amid the sound of his splashing heard laughter. At the same moment, he knew what had hit him was his shoe. He whipped a look around for it—saw the men on the bank, the one holding his clothes—and slashed downstream after what he hoped was a glimpse of its sinking shape. Diving, he felt the laces, the leather, came up coughing with it.

On the bank, the men cheered. And the one with his clothes threw his other shoe. He threw it as far from Dima as he could and still be sure it landed in deep water. Turning, Dima scrambled through the current. Halfway across, breath gusting out and coming in half water, he lost sight of it and stopped. The men on the bank booed.

A dozen hard hats standing there, and more coming down the field rows at a jog. They were calling to each other. The calls sounded happy. At the edge of the bank, a foreman stood holding his clothes.

“You don’t want your shoe?” the man shouted. “How about your shirt?” It hung from his hand, flapping a little, like something he had by the throat.

“Those were my only shoes!” Dima shouted.

The man’s face leapt with mock surprise. His whole body bobbed a little with it. “Why would you need shoes?” he called back. “Aren’t bums supposed to be barefoot?”

When he threw the shirt, it spread out, caught the air, dropped close to shore. Dima watched the current sweep it into the reeds. One of the laborers waded out and grabbed it and flung it farther. Watching the river whisk it away, Dima could feel all his muscles tiring. When he shouted back at the man on the bank—“Please, nothing else!”—his lungs were working too hard to add much sound to his breath.

“What?” the man shouted as he threw Dima’s pants. This time he’d balled them up. They soared within reach before opening, stopping, falling. Dima didn’t even watch them slip away. He just started swimming for the shore.

In the time it took him to get there, the man threw his undershirt and socks and his
Dead Souls
. The book hit him in the ribs as he was splashing up out of the water. When the foreman reached down and snatched his rucksack, Dima rushed him, got a hand on the bag, turned to fish it from the reeds.

But the foreman grabbed his shoulder, turned him back. “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here.”

“OK.” Dima turned again.

Again, the foreman stopped him.

“Why the fuck did you come here, anyway?” the man said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Nothing,” Dima said.

“Bullshit,” the foreman told him. “Nobody does nothing.”

From the crowd came someone’s shout: “Maybe he’s waiting for his buddies.”

And another: “So they can put on their goggles together.”

“And their capes,” someone else called out.

“And change the world,” the first one said.

Then they were laughing.

The foreman wasn’t. He said, “You waiting for your buddies?”

“My brother,” Dima said. It just came out.

“Who’s your brother?”

Dima could hear some of the workers shout out Yarik’s name and some shout the last name he and his brother shared and he said, “All right, I’m going.”

But the man’s grip on his arm didn’t loosen. “Why don’t you just stand here a second.”

“I’ll go.”

“Why don’t you let these guys get a good look at you.” The man turned to the others. “What do you think, guys? Does it look so good now, being a bum? You think I don’t hear you bitching? Oh, that’s a good life. That’s a easy life. Oh I wish—”

Dima tried to jerk his arm free and the foreman shoved him backwards into the mud and before he could scramble up again the man was over him.

“Stay the
fuck down there,” the foreman said. And to the men, “You wish you could be useless as
that
?” He swept a hand towards Dima. “What if this country was full of men like you? We should stomp you out.” And he raised a boot. Mud from its sole spattered against Dima’s chest. He started to jerk away, but the boot came down, slammed into the mud centimeters from where his hand was splayed.

“We’re going to get back to work,” the man said. “And you’re going to get the fuck out of here. And you’re not going to come back.”

Then he turned and started through the men back up towards the cornfield. The men went with him. In the cornfield, the ones who had not made it to the bank stopped and watched the others come. A few asked what had happened, but most had made it close enough to see over the bank where Dima sat in his underwear, elbows hooked around his knees, chest sunken, his face looking up at them, up at the face of his brother, before Yarik, too, turned and started away.

He could not seem to leave that riverbank. Sending his crew off to punch out that evening, the shoulders Yarik had slapped had been the ones wedged against his in the crowd above the river; the necks his hand cupped, the same that had stretched to see the spectacle. Sitting on the stool by the front door, putting on his slippers, he had watched that shoe sink out of sight. All supper he couldn’t stop thinking how thin Dima had looked. When it was time to put Timosha to bed, his son, undressed to his underwear, had run from him, playing their nightly game—the frightened muzhik fleeing his undead dog—shouting for his papa to give chase. He had stood stiff-kneed by the hole punched in the wall, trying not to match it with another. Even now, watching his wife stark naked beneath him, Yarik could not stop seeing his brother.

Yes, he told himself, you can.

The sight of her had always seemed to strip his thoughts of everything else. The first time he found that out he’d been standing just as still, but alone, listening over the pulse in his ears, his too-loud breath, to the others moving through the woods at night. They carried candles, lanterns, a few flashlights. His own was dark. In the blackness beneath the trees, he’d felt the beam drawing eyes to him, told himself it was just superstition—
foolish!—
and felt the eyes—
a festival to draw the spirits of the drowned!
—and stopped—
rusalki rising from the rivers
—shut his flashlight off. Only in fables did wraiths claim companions for their suffocated souls: he knew that. What he hadn’t known, hiding there in the dark, listening to the others whispering through the underbrush, was how she’d found him.

They’d flirted across the bonfire earlier that evening and, as she took shape behind a candle, it occurred to him he had only ever seen her face in firelight. Holding her candle closer to his, she’d asked him what was wrong. It must have been his shame at the fear he knew she saw that made him tell her about his father. It must have been the heart in her that he would grow to love that made her take his hand.

But emerging from the woods, he had heard, beneath the sounds of women singing, the gurgle of the Kosha’s current flowing by beneath. He’d pulled his hand from hers, stepped back, asked,
Where are you taking me?

And taking his hand again, she’d told him,
To the river. So you can look in and see nothing there but us.

Now, he stood at the edge of the mattress, looking down at only her, his dark belly hair still wet from the bath, the sting of the aftershave all but gone from his face, his hands holding her feet, his fingers curled over her toes, concentrating on the feel of her with everything he had. It was their Sunday night ritual: once a week, after the seventh workday had come and gone, and the next seven were about to start, after supper and putting the children to bed, after the housework and the paperwork, even if Yarik’s neck ached just holding his head, even if Zina’s eyes itched with needing sleep, they made the time to make love to each other.

He would press each of her fingers to his lips, pinky to thumb, one by one, slipping them into his mouth, telling her with his tongue
I know this crevice, I remember this crease.
Each place on each foot he would match with some part of him: the heels of his palms fitting her arches, his tongue between her toes. Slowly, he would work his way along her arms, the soft insides of her elbows, her collarbone rising and falling with his own breath, so that by the time he kissed her pulse through the heat of her thigh, he could feel his own blood pumping at his neck. And she would push him onto his back and put him in and go at him with a fury like all his touches packed together, balled up, and burst.

But that night, beneath her, his brother at last shoved from his mind, he could not keep from confronting himself: his mouth mashed against his wife’s sweet-scented neck, he saw his own, raw and red, the aftershave slapped on to hide his smell; his face hidden between her breasts, he pictured his own chest, a mangy pelt, nipples pink as sores; trying to stay inside her warmth, he imagined his own blood-filled sex, his hanging sack, thought
how grotesque.
As she surely would have thought if she had seen her husband that day on the bank. As, surely, his brother would see him now. That made him pull out. She reached down, bent for him, but he lifted her face in his hands and shook his head.

Hours after she had gone to sleep, he was still in the kitchen, still sitting in his robe and slippers on the chair he had dragged to the window, his arms still crossed on the sill, another cigarette smoking in his hand. The teacup on top of the stove was stuffed with butts. Beside it, the percolator he’d brewed the coffee in was empty. The sweet-cheese pie he’d taken from the fridge was gone but for a few lumps stuck to the cardboard disk. On the windowsill, beneath his crossed arms, lay his uncle’s old snub-nosed revolver. His home was quiet. His daughter asleep in her crib, his son in his bed.

He was imagining a dog like Dyadya Avya’s stretched out beside his sleeping boy, Timosha’s face buried in the wolfhound’s side, thick fur fluttering with his breath. He imagined the dog following Polina as she toddled around the house, nudging her with its nose. He could almost hear the clacking of its nails, the thump of it lying down by the stove, the quiet keening it would make in its dreams.