The Great Glass Sea (5 page)

Once, before the end of the world they’d grown up in, before the beginning of the one growing around them now, in The Past Life, on summer evenings after work, they had gone down to the lake together every day. There, amid the shore-swarm crowds, they’d launched each other from their shoulders. Whoops and laughter and one brother stirring beneath the curved soles of the other’s feet, three quick taps on Dima’s ankles, the same returned on Yarik’s head, the rush of water dropping away, of them rising together out of the lake.

In winter, they would join the others in a line a hundred wide, everyone side by side on skates, snow shovels in their hands, and, chanting
raz! dva! tri!
, in one cheering communal rush plow clear a smooth square of ice. All those whooping voices! All that thunderous scraping! Winter birds blasted up into the sky: a swirl of caws and wingflutter above the crowd of skaters as each began their swooping glides below. Someone always brought a boom box. Big brassy marches, orchestral strings, the wail of fiddles and the balalaika’s trill and a hundred voices singing
Ya shagayu, shagayu—
I am walking, walking—in a hundred synchronized puffs of breath.

Every evening, those same clouds filled the air around the statue of Peter the Great where poets, high on the plinth, clinging to the tsar’s bronze side, sang out their verse. Every weekend, the bread factory filled with even warmer steam, each apartment complex coming together to bake in the industrial ovens. Once a month each building’s kooperativ gathered to stitch rips and darn holes on the machines of a textile plant. And every time the Cultural-Educational Organization arranged a reading on the National Theater stage—actors reciting Akhmadulina, Tvardovsky, reading stories by Krylov and Gogol—the grand auditorium rang with the rhythmic booms of an entire city’s hands:
clap! clap! clap!

Free Time, economists had called it, and once had recognized its role in people’s lives (
new and substantial developments in self-education,
the director of the Institut Ekonomiki I Organizatsii Promyshlennogo Proizvodstva had written,
improvements in levels of culture
); once, it had even been the goal:
It is intended,
he had proclaimed,
based on the steady increase of labor productivity and reduction in labor time, to make a transition to an even shorter workweek. . .
.
Thirty-five hours, economists predicted. Thirty, they dared to dream. But no one, not even the director of the Institute Ekonomiki, foretold the zero-hour workweek that came.

Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, years of depression, devaluation, the decommissioning of the tractor factory, degeneration of Petroplavilsk, a time of worry and hunger, poverty and despair. For most. For Dima, those had been his favorite years. Workless, he and Yarik would wait together beside the Kosha River, at a bend in the road where traffic slowed, flapping their arms at farm trucks, jogging after tractor wagons, lying back in the coolness between cucumber crates, the river running beside them all the way out to the old kolkhoz. The kulak who had bought it up in the days of reprivitization had fired his fieldhands, let the fields go fallow, and, cutting the last of his losses, counting on a day when the worth of his land might remake his fortune again, shut down the farm. Out there, there had been nothing but the sound of the truck or tractor leaving, the thrum of crickets, sometimes their uncle’s old Yurlov Crower belting out his call, the long cry turned lonesome with all the bird’s brood gone. Someone had found Dyadya Avya’s old milch cow half-wild in the woods. Someone slew the swine. One by one the feral chickens were gathered up out of fields themselves gone wild. Cowbane and Gypsyweed and Rattle and Yarrow: the brothers still sometimes found a hen hunkered in the scrub. The only gun they had was Dyadya Avya’s old revolver, and neither could bring himself to use it, so they lured birds with rotted seed, set their uncle’s rusted traps, sat along the riverbanks angling for fish, cooked them over open fires, slept beneath the open sky.

And if the day darkened, if the evening threatened rain, they went to the woods, hurried beneath wind-rattled branches, the rush of raindrops battering leaves, until, in the twilight between white birch trees they caught a burst of color and, crouching low, on hands and knees, crawled in. By then their older eyes had recognized the remains of a bench, a broken ladle, half a metal basin filled with rocks, and they knew it was nothing more than some forgotten bathhouse farmworkers must once have used. But still, the old
banya
’s seclusion stirred their dreams, its darkness let them loose, and, lying there amid the scents of soil and each other, they would swear to one day make them real. Then they would go quiet, listening to the rain drum at the earth above, or two trees knocking at each other somewhere in the night, or sometimes the
wo-hoo, woho-uhwo-ho
of a Ural owl calling to its mate, before their breathing would fall in synch, the den filled with a sound steady as a single chest breathing peacefully in sleep.

Now, Dima could barely make out his brother beneath the glass. It had been weeks since he’d seen Yarik, and he was working overtime with a pane-laying team when he caught a glimpse of him through the steel frame just before a sheet of glass was settled in. Through the pane the scene below was blurred soft, but he knew that tall, thin shape, the way that hard hat hung forward on that long neck, how Yarik’s legs bowed when he was carrying something heavy, that voice—he was sure he heard it—reedy barking, quick yelp of a laugh. Kneeling, he rapped with his knuckles. The glass hardly made a noise against his gloves. He smacked at it with the flat side of his ratchet. Across the pane from him, a worker tightening a bracket down glanced over without slowing the cranking of his elbows. The crane had laid the glass a little off its frame, and, like a man drinking water from a creek, Dima dropped his face close to the gap. “Yarik!” he shouted through it. If his brother heard him, he didn’t show it. “Yarik!” The backhoe rumbled alive, its shovel crashing into the bricks. Dima slid to his belly, his face turned so the cheekbones bruised against the surface.

Down there, they were taking the top off an old farm building. “Sizing” the Consortium called it: everything that was in the Oranzheria’s way smashed or sawed or toppled low enough to build the glass panes over it. Later, the razing crews would finish the job. After, the extraction crews would clear the rubble from the fields. Then the tractors would come. Here, at the edge of the advance of the glass, two wrecking machines twice the size of bulldozers rolled slowly past it all, a heavy chain—the links thick as a forearm—stretched between at five meters height. It lopped off whatever it hit—silos, chimneys, canopies of ancient trees—like a trimmer on a hedge.

Over the noise, Dima bellowed his brother’s name again. And there at last: Yarik looking up. The crack between the bracket and the pane was just wide enough for Dima to fit his fingers through. He shoved them down to the knuckles, waggled them.

His brother lifted a hand in a wave, started back to work.

“Come here!” Dima shouted, his fingers beckoning.

But only the workers around his brother looked: the tops of their hats, their faces glancing up, the tops of their hats again. He watched Yarik’s yellow hard hat, waiting for the moment when it must tilt back, too, waiting to glimpse once more the small blue spots of his brother’s eyes.

“You have to stop doing that,” Yarik said.

They were playing
Zmei,
the five of them stretched out in a line held hand to hand to hand: Yarik’s five-year-old, Timofei, followed by Yarik’s wife, Zinaida, then Yarik, then Dima, and their old mother, Galina Yegorovna, tugged along as the last swishing joint of the serpent’s tail. It was Dima who suggested the game (“Oh,” he’d told the pouting boy, “I’m pretty sure even Timofei—maybe
especially
Timofei —couldn’t manage to shake loose
my
grip!”) and, as they zagged and whipped around the apartment complex playground, he squeezed Yarik’s hand a little tighter. Three links of hands ahead Timofei was all loopy laughter, jerking the line sharply as he could.

“Squeeze, Yarik,” Dima said.

“You have to stop it.”

“I’m just saying hello.”

As Timofei wound them around the spring-mounted animals—the bear, the hedgehog, the goose with the broken bill—Dima loosed his grip on his brother’s hand just enough to clasp his fingers farther up and grip again.

“It’s distracting,” Yarik told him.

“You don’t want—”

“I
do
, Dima. That’s
why
it’s distracting.”

The boy led them through the cut-out fuselage of a rocket ship, all climbing bars and rusted fins, Dima stooping as he pulled their mother behind.”You aren’t even trying,” he told his brother.

“Bratishka—”

“Mama can grip better than you.”

“You’ll lose your job.”

The line whipped; Yarik’s hand jerked loose.

“So?” Dima said.

In front, Timofei whooped, “Break! Break! Dyadya Dima’s the Chudo-Yudo!” Behind Dima, still clinging to his hand, their old mother blew exasperation through her lips, leaned over, spat.

Yarik stood, still holding Zinaida’s fingers in his, separated from Dima by a black tractor tire half-buried in the dirt.

“So?” Yarik said. “So, I’ll lose
my
job.”

From the city center the booming began, the kettle drums and bass drums and snares, the tromping soldiers’ boots. It was May ninth, Victory Day. Soon the guns would fire—still celebrating the surrender of the Germans so long ago—and they had come back early from the parade, before the cannon could scare the baby into a fit. Galina Yegorovna hadn’t understood why they’d had to leave; she had gotten dressed in her old uniform—green jacket pinching the loose skin of her arms, buttons unbuttonable around her belly, gold epaulettes frayed as old rug tassles, hammer and sickle pin aslant, the
kosinka
with which she always covered the massive bun of her white hair replaced today by an army cap—and she wanted to stay to see the salutes.

“What will the Party think?” she’d hissed at Dima as they had left.

“The Party’s dead, Mama.”

“Oh!” She’d thrust her wrinkled papery palm against his lips.

“Mama,” he’d said, “you don’t want to make Polya cry on her birthday, do you?”

And, on cue, his mother’s eyes had begun to tear up instead.

Polina Yaroslavovna Zhuvova had turned one year old two weeks ago, but now that International Workers’ Day had been de-recognized by the Consortium, deemed tied to the worst backward ways of the past, Victory Day was the closest to her birthday that Yarik could get time off. Zinaida had made a cranberry pie. Their mother had brought blini. Dima had worked the last hour of his twelve, climbed down from the Oranzheria as the zerkala sank out of sight, boarded the bus just as the new sun rose to warm the back of his neck. But there had been no Yarik to pass him on the stairs. And Dima, forsaking sleep between his shifts, had taken a different bus, the opposite direction, all the way out to Dyadya Avya’s abandoned izba, where he had shrushed alone through the leaves to their mushroom warren, gathering milk-caps and morels for the blintzes he and his mother would bring. While he was out there, he’d gone to the old kulak who now owned the land and gotten the baby’s gift.

There it sat beside the sandbox: a pine green tarp cinched into the shape of a sack. The sack was jerking. They’d left the baby beside it, swaddled in blankets, while they’d played their game. Now Polya began to cry. Each boom of the drums ramped up her squall. Yarik stepped over the tractor tire and past Dima and jogged to her, Zinaida hurrying after, Timofei trudging behind, glaring at the baby’s wailing face, rolling his eyes. Dima’s mother still held his hand, her whole face gripped with eagerness, her eyes darting from street to square for a sight of the parade.

“It’s this way, Mama.” Dima turned her gently.

By the time they reached the sandbox, the guns had started in the distance and Polya was screaming as if the volleys had been fired at her. Beside her, the sack was in convulsions. Yarik cradled his daughter, his too-aged face bent nose to nose with her red and screaming one.