The Great Glass Sea (42 page)

And if it rained, or sleeted, or simply was too cold, they would sit inside and listen to the radio. In the bare apartment it had taken on the feeling of furniture, and he would carry it, cord dragging behind, to whereever his mother was—the sewing machine, the bath—and tune it to the Rachmaninoff or Mussorgsky that she liked. Between every piece, advertisements blared. The last notes of
Lilacs
were trickling away, and Dima had reached out to turn the volume down, the first time Yarik’s voice came on. His fingers stilled.

You know me,
his brother said.

A salvaged pirozhki slipped off his mother’s fork.

I’m your neighbor, your friend, your husband, your son.

His mother stared at the radio: “Yarishka!”

I used to be you.

“Your brother,” she said.

Dima nodded, not wanting to cover any of the radio’s sound.

Before I joined the team at the Oranzheria . . .

He shut his eyes, tried to strip the words away, to pare the voice down to just vibrations, to feel them on his face.

Next!
The word seemed to break against him. The Consortium’s theme song swelled.

Electricity was the next to go. The company warned him, but the letter seemed from such a distant entity, so far removed from what life had become, that Dima couldn’t work up much worry. So long as they still had heat—the steam that had all his life run through the pipes of the entire building—they would be fine. Without lights they would simply go to bed when the sun set. They would rise with it. Without power the radio could no longer haunt them. He sold it. The toaster, too. Traded the plug-in clock. In Dyadya Avya’s box he found a wind-up watch. That night, he turned the tiny knob with his thick fingers, listening to the sound of its spring tightening.

And in the morning, he carried the new electric samovar out to the bus. Back when his brother had brought it over, he’d taken his mother’s old coal-burning one and traded it away at the Universitetski Rynok. Now, he waded through the crowds, searched for the same kiosk, the samovar propped against his chest, his thinned arms straining with the weight, until at last he saw the stall, hurried to set the samovar down.

“Hey!” The stallkeeper’s voice was harsh as a gull’s. “Take that off my table.”

Hefting it again, he told her he wanted to trade it.

“A samovar?” She laughed, said she should have never taken his old one. “Just to get rid of it,” she told him, “I had to throw it in for free with one of these.”

On the long table of goods for sale sat some sort of white machines, larger than toasters, smaller than microwaves, cords hanging like limp tails.

“What are they?” he asked. And when she told him “bread machines” he stared. “For baking bread?” he said.

Modes for low heat and high, the stallkeeper told him, settings for half kilo loaves and full kilo ones. “This can even do two-thirds of a kilo.” Round shapes, rectangular, baguettes, sweet cakes, keep-warm features, variable crust colors . . .

“You mean,” Dima broke into the stream of her salespitch, “like an oven?”

She glared at him. “These do the baking
for
you. While you’re at work. Which you’d understand if you weren’t a bum.”

He could feel the samovar reflecting the low sunlight onto his neck, his face. The edge of its base dug into his fingers.

“Get out of here,” she spat, “before I throw a rock at you.”

Carrying the samovar away, he heard her say beneath her breath,
Feed them once, they come back forever,
but he was thinking of long ago, when he was a child, of the early morning every week he had accompanied his mother and her baking kooperativ. Of how, before light, thirty or forty neighbors—parents, kids, the whole apartment block—would walk together down the still-dark street, passing among them thermoses of tea, steam rising as they drank. He was remembering the bread factory, its huge ovens, everyone stripping off their coats and rolling their sleeves, and the smell of the baking, and how, when it was done, they would cut the steaming loaves, everyone—his mother, her friends, the neighbors he called aunt and grandmother and grandfather—eating a slice right there, their eyes shutting for a second, faces flushed with the heat.

At home, each evening, he would take the toothbrush from his mother’s shaking hand and squeeze the paste on for her, stand beside her at the bathroom sink brushing his own. A little longer, he would tell her, and, after, with a washcloth, wipe spittle from her chin. In her bedroom, she would give the mattress a pat. He would climb onto the comforter, lay back beside her, listen as she told him stories of his childhood. Sometimes, she confused Yarik and him. He let her. Sometimes she seemed to think they were still little. “Which one,” she would say, “would you like tonight?” And he would shut his eyes, hear in her age-deepened voice, her “Zhili-Byli . . .” at the beginning of a tale, the sound of his papa from so long ago. In his own, his brother’s boyish whisper, “One more.”

Afterwards, every night, Dima would sit in the living room on the floor beside the phone and call.

The first time Zinaida had picked up.

“It’s Dima,” he said.

“Hi,” she said.

“How are you?”

“He’s not home,” she told him.

The next time she heard his voice and hung up.

When they stopped answering at the time that he would call, he started calling an hour later, or in the morning, or as soon as he knew Yarik would return from work.

Sometimes he got Timofei. “It’s your Dyadya Dima,” he would say.

“It’s Dyadya Dima!” the boy would shout. And the phone would go dead.

After a few times, he called and simply said, “Hello.”

“Hello, Dyadya,” the boy had said.

Dima had paused. “Who?”

He could hear the boy’s breath come close to the phone. “I know it’s you, Dyadya,” Timofei whispered.

“Is your father at home?” Dima asked.

“Yes,” the boy whispered.

“Put him on the phone.”

“OK,” the boy whispered.

He sat there, feeling his rib cage jerk with the convulsions of his heart. Until the line went dead.

Still, the night he picked up the receiver and heard no tone he panicked. He tore out to the hallway, knocked at his neighbors’ doors. At each, he heard footsteps, saw dark spots where their shoes blocked the light, felt them peer at him through the small glassed hole, watched the light fill the crack of the door again, listened to their footsteps retreating. It was no different downstairs on the third floor at the Shopsins’.

Except that this time, when he saw the darkened patches beneath the door, he said, “Gennady!” The footsteps started away. “Do you still want the apartment?” They stopped. He heard them come back.

“Dmitry?” Gennady said, as if he hadn’t already known. “Are you . . . ? Is she . . . ?”

“Can I use your phone?” Dima said.

“Is your mother . . . ?”

“I need to use your phone.”

“To call the ambulance?” His voice sounded tight as Dima’s.

“Yes,” Dima said.

The clack of the bolt, the rattle of the chain.

Inside, the apartment seemed so full, the walls so covered, the rooms so cozy with furniture, the light of the lamps so warm, the whole place so much a home, that, following Gennady into the living room, Dima almost wished it was true, about his mother, if only so he could sit in the room and Gennady would bring him a glass of vodka and put on the tea, and he could lie down on the couch and lay his head on the cushion where Gennady’s wife was sitting and nobody would tell him he couldn’t. But she was already standing, smoothing her skirt, saying to Gennady, “Oh, now you’re letting in the building’s bum?”

“Masha!” Gennady tried to hush her.

“Why don’t you ask him to bring his fucking rooster?”

“It’s his mother.” Gennady handed Dima the phone as he whispered to his wife. “She’s dying.”

They watched him dial. Four long rings. Someone picked up and he started to speak and whoever it was put their receiver down.

“They aren’t there?” Dima heard Gennady say in one ear. In his other: the dial tone.

“What kind of a city do we live in?” Gennady was nearly shouting. “The ambulance—”

“Yes,” Dima said to the dial tone. “I need an ambulance. My mother.” He felt his eyes swell and knew he would cry if he didn’t stop.

Gennady stared at him.

Into the phone, Dima whispered, “What if she
was
, Yarik?”

“What?” Gennady said. And then, coming close to Dima: “Three-eight-one-seven Avtovskaya Street, apartment number—” Dima hung up the phone. “You didn’t tell them . . .”

“What are you worried about?” Dima said. “You don’t
want
them to save her.”

He was halfway to the door when he heard Gennady’s wife shout, “Who did you call?”

Then there were footsteps thudding and Dima’s arm was yanked backward and there was Gennady’s face, furious. “She’s not dying at all,” Gennady said.

“No,” Dima told him.

“Who did you call?” the man’s wife shouted.

“Listen, you bum,” Gennady said. “You fucking tramp. I should have climbed up to that fucking balcony months ago . . .”

“Who did you call?” his wife shouted.

“. . . and tore the head off that fucking rooster. If we didn’t have a deal . . .”

“Who—” his wife began again.

But Dima shouted back at her over the man’s head, “The same person I’m going to call from here when I come back tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Gennady said. He breathed the word like he was clearing his lungs for all the worse words coming. “Oh,” he breathed. “I’m going to fucking teach you a—”

“Or”—Dima jerked out of the man’s grip—“when my mother does die, you sonofabitch, I won’t sell you a single knob off a single door.”

Back upstairs, he shut that door behind him and stood with his fingers still on that knob, looking at what he had done to his mother’s place. The coatrack was gone, the bench beneath it gone. There were only the nails he’d banged into the hallway wall, the two coats hanging. In the kitchen: a greasy square on the wall where the stove had been before he’d sold it. The living room was carpetless but for the rugs hung over the windows. They were still rolled, mirror-light spreading over the emptiness: the bare sockets, their covers unscrewed and bartered; the broom leaning alone in the corner; the clothes his mother had stitched up piled on the floor. She was still working at the old foot-powered machine.

“Mama,” he said.

She glanced at him, then back at her work, as if she didn’t know he had been gone.

He watched her pick a skirt from the pile of ones he had reopened. Carefully, she squeezed its waist together, slid the two parts beneath the metal foot, lowered the needle, began to sew it closed again.

He rushed to her, then, yanked the skirt out of the machine, the thread stringing out with it and, grabbing his mother by her arms, dragged her up out of the chair and shouted into her close face, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?”

Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth. “Who are you?” she screamed.

“Mama—”

“Who are you?”

His fingers slid off her arms and she jerked as if she meant to flee him, but he wrapped himself around her, pulled her to his chest, said into her hair, “It’s Dima, Mama. It’s Dima, it’s OK.”

He could feel the wetness of her mouth coming through his shirt. He held her tighter. Against his chest, she said something and he pulled away, looked down at her.

“Yarik?” she asked him.

“No,” he told her. “I’m Dima.”

“Where’s Yarik?”

“He’s at work.”

“He should be home by now.”

“Yes,” he said.

“He comes home and I make him cabbage soup and we listen to ‘Ochi chyornye.’”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m home now, Mama. OK?” He held her face in his palm and kissed her forehead and said, “I’m home, Mama.”

Around her eyes the skin was still red from her fright, but her eyes were calm. He watched them fill with something like happiness.

“Good evening, lyubimy,” she said to him.

“Good evening, Mama,” he said.

She sat back down at her machine, shook her head at the mess of the thread. She found her scissors and cut it and threaded the needle again and put the skirt back under the foot and began to sew. All the time he watched her. When the chattering of the needle had settled into its rhythm, he sank beside her, sat on the floor next to her chair, put his head in her lap, and could almost hear her ask, the way she used to when he was a boy,
What happened?
Beneath his head, her thigh rose and fell. Then stopped. He looked up at her. She was looking down at him. Her fingers stroked his hair.

“How was work?” she said.