The Great Glass Sea (52 page)

Gradually he began to listen more carefully to what they said. How the only way to bring his brother back was to shake the city back to its senses, the only way that they could turn the country towards what they had always wanted, reclaim what had been taken from the people by the capitalists of the New Russia, by the Communists before them, by the autocrats before that, all the way back to the age of the miri. Back when each world was its own few versts, owned by people who owned themselves, their work, their play, their time. A time, they said, that would come next. The time, they told him, that he would start.

Vika had lit a fire in the kiln. Volodya had run a piece of string along his arms, his back, his waist, his inseam. Fedya had taken the pistol. Together, the two men had gone out to get him a suit.

She’d left the kiln door open; he could feel the heat on his bare skin. Take your shirt off, Vika had told him before she’d begun to dye his hair. She used the same black dye she used for her own, and it struck Dima as somehow significant to learn her real hair was a color he couldn’t guess, that she changed it to make it the same as his. The black that his had been. That she was dying his again. She wore no gloves, simply let her hands get stained, too, and he could feel the skin of her fingertips slipping over the skin of his scalp, and that was how the whole thing was, so different from how it had been when Zinaida had done the same, as if, then, trying to understand how it felt to be his brother, he had been unable to shed some impermeable shield. Which was gone now. Vika straddled him while she worked, the weight of her skinny legs so slight, his own thighs so thinned; even that seemed right, as if their bodies had been matched to let each sense the other’s bones. He could sense, too, her fingers slipping behind his ears, her body leaning forward, muscles shifting atop the muscles of his legs, the safety pins that ran up her chest brushing the tip of his nose, her belt buckle caught for a second in the curled hairs of his belly—every touch she made was alive with intent.

Then her dye-black fingers were in his beard. They inched into the rusty tangles, tugged a little, tilted his face up.

It was the first time in his near-forty years that he’d been kissed. Not the brush of his mother’s or his sister-in-law’s lips, but kissed. He had no idea that lips could be so soft. He had no idea a tongue could be so alive. He had no idea the breath released from someone else’s lungs would be such a different substance when unmixed with any outside air. He took it in.

When she was done, she pulled away, smiled down into his face, said, “So that’s what it’s like while you still have this crazy beard.” Then, without moving from his lap, she reached to the sink. It was piled with toiletries that seemed dumped from an upturned purse, but the scissors were large enough she found them by feel, so rusted that as she snipped through his tangled beard they squeaked. She seemed to get a kick out of the noise. Soon she was making it, too. Squeak, squeak
,
with each snip, until the hedge of hair was gone. Then, with a thunk, she put the scissors back, picked up a bar of soap, dunked it in a bucket full of filthy-looking water, and, still sitting on his lap, scrubbed Dima’s face into a cloud of charcoal foam. Which she proceeded to shave off. She didn’t seem to notice when the razor nicked him. She didn’t seem to care that the grayed soap, the cold water, dripped onto her as much as him. She didn’t even wipe his face before she kissed him. “And that,” she said, “is what it’s like without it.”

“Which is better?” he asked.

She shrugged. Then scooped a wet clump of beard hair off their laps and, holding handfuls to her cheeks, said, “You tell me,” and kissed him again.

In the center of the Oranzheria, at the edge of the woods that ran along the access line, they stood listening to the whisper of the others’ rail-boards disappearing down the tracks. Dima in his newly stolen suit beneath his old overcoat, his throat squeezed by a tie, his shaved chin cold, his shorn head strangely light beneath the knit of his same old hat. Beside him: Vika in her wig. A severe jaw-length wedge, it was black to match her brows. Her lipstick was the brightest thing in the shadows of the trees. She was bundled in the same man’s coat she’d worn since autumn; once inside the Oranzheria, she’d shuck it, Dima would strip away his winter wear, they would cross the fields to the old sanitarium, enter it as Slava and his wife.

Under the drifting man-made moons the top of the Oranzheria gleamed like a frozen sheet of lightning laid flat. As far as Dima could see to either side, the wide glass wall facing the access line was fogged with steam. Through it, Dima could make out the silhouettes of the strike breakers, whispy and wraithlike farther out in the fields, the shapes of heavy equipment lumbering and indistinct as deep-sea beasts. Between the clouded wall and where he stood with Vika beneath the trees, the earth was made of all the things the clearing crews had shoved outside the glass, the remains of old izbas, residue of villages, all grown over, filled in, a rutty landscape of scattered mounds.

They made their way onto it, into the mirror-light, eyes squinting, hunting the wall of steam for the nearest portal through which they’d enter, arm in arm. The ground was all holes hidden by shadows or shadows shaped like holes, and unaccustomed to her heels, Vika stumbled, snagged Dima’s coat sleeve, slipped her hand a little early around his arm. Beneath her fingers his bicep seemed more part of him; he was aware of the way it hardened when she gripped, waited through the relaxing of her fingers for the moment when she might tighten again.

Part of him was just as eager to get inside the Oranzheria, dump the bulky coat that bunched between them, sense her through nothing but his jacket sleeve; to feel again the way she’d looked at him when he’d tried on the suit, her teasing whistle belied by the glimmer of her eyes; to see her shift again into the woman who, mince-stepping through the wave-and-smile of a politician’s wife, had made him laugh, who, in her slim-fitted dress, had made him swallow. But the rest of him was scared. In there, he would have to be the politician, the salesman, Slava. In a suit and tie amid the farm fields? He’d been sent out to bolster the strike breakers’ morale. And how to get from there to headquarters? On the bus beside workers from whose ranks he’d risen, or some manager’s sedan they would flag down, or maybe they’d even comandeer a dump truck; a photo shoot, he’d tell the driver, just like Volodya, back in the woods, had told him. Back in the woods it had all seemed a whole lot better. Now, with each step nearer to the vast glass wall, it seemed a little worse.

Still, catching sight of the portal, what could he do but tilt his cold chin towards it, touch her fingers on his arm, tell her, “There’s the door.”

Then it was gone. The Oranzheria was gone. So was she.

So were the zerkala.

Dima stood in the sudden darkness, utterly still, staring up.

“What the fuck,” he heard her say.

Up there, the blackness was so deep Dima could feel his pupils open for it, feel it flood his eyes, a pool of night. Strewn with stars. The Great Bear. The Hydra. The Milky Way. The whole universe of them that he hadn’t seen in years.

“What the
fuck,
” she said again.

In the dark, even the forest behind him sounded different, as if the wind in the trees was the woods’ own exhalation of breath. From within the Oranzheria, behind its blacked-out wall, came the thickening quiet of the machines shutting down. Each vanished engine left another hole until all the darkness in front of Dima seemed shot through with the same silent shock. And then the crescendo of voices swelling to fill it.

Beside him, he could hear Vika rustling. Something heavy and soft dropped to the ground. The strange intimacy in listening blind, trying to read her sounds: a faint clicking, tiny metal tings, the whisper of cloth on skin—and then he knew it. As if struck clear, his eyes began to make her out. Paleness by paleness, her form emerged: she was standing next to him naked. Then she let out a whoop, and was off.

Beneath the moon’s bare sliver she gamboled across the overgrown junk mounds, reveling in the wash of darkness as if it were a cleansing rain, leaping and whirling, a ghostly dervish loosed upon the night. In the starlight he could see her breath. Beyond her, blips had begun to glow behind the blacked-out Oranzheria wall. The workers’ headlamps: a thousand fireflies floating in the fog of the glass. And atop it, as far as Dima could see, they blinked on, too, clear and bright as a distant city aglister with its lights, the way Petroplavilsk had once looked from out in the farmland at night.

Now he could hardly see it. Looking left down the chute of darkness that was the access line, towards where he knew Petroplavilsk must be, he caught a dim flush—the fog lights of the trams and cars, the few lamps people still kept in their homes. And from there a far-off murmur, less sound than a sense of emanating panic.

Then she was there. Close, shivering, pulling at his coat. “Let me in,” she said, her voice shuddering, pressing herself to him. He wrapped her in the wool flaps. She was so thin he could have rebuttoned his coat around them both, up the line of her back, but he simply held it shut, his arms around her. He could feel how cold her skin was through his suit, her legs clamped against his, her quivering ribs, the jut of her nipples just beneath his chest.

“What do you think happened?” he said.

They stared up, as if expecting any moment the mirrors to flash back on.

“Maybe the Consortium found out,” she said. “Decided to preempt our plan.”

“Why?”

“To deny us the moment.”

“And now?”He pulled the coat closer around her. “What do we do now?” He waited for her to look back at him. And when she didn’t, he said, “We weren’t really going to be able to, were we?” Her eyes found his. “Did you even really know,” he said, “where the control room was?”

“We could have found it.”

“And then?”

There was the glint of her smile. “What does it matter now?” she said. “What we do, what we might have . . .” A shiver shook her body and her hands rose from beneath his coat, found his jaw, tilted his face back. “It
is.
” He could feel her voice on his throat. “Someone already
did.
” She leaned against his chest. “Dima”—he could feel his name in the movement of her cheek—“it’s done.”

He let his own cheek lower to a rest on the top of her head. A surprise to feel, instead of the fuzz of her shorn scalp, the long hair of the wig. And strange to sense their breathing slip into synch, her body swelling and ebbing alongside his. He imagined her mushroom tattoo riding the rise and fall of her belly. He could almost feel the touch of it. He watched all the lights moving in the Oranzheria’s mist.

“Come,” she said, and he thought,
Where?
but she was only pulling him down. They crouched together, a mound made of them, covered by his coat. “My calves were cold,” she told him.

Her shiver, his heat: maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed to him the wall of glass was already losing a little of its fog. In there the lights moved with an urgency that made the night around the two of them all the more still. “What do you think they’ll do?” he whispered.

She looked behind her at the workers, too. “That,” she said, “is what
we
do. Now that the deed—”

“The propaganda.”

She nodded. “That’s what we start tomorrow. Tonight. . .” His coat shifted with her turning back and he tried to catch her gaze, but it went past him, lost in the blackness of the woods behind. When her voice came again—“I wish we had firecrackers”—it sounded young as a girl’s. Or simply happy. He swore he could see the brightness in her eyes when they turned to him. “We should make a fire.”

He hated to shake his head: they’d be seen; someone would come.

But she was looking back at the woods. “In a month then,” she said. “On Korochun. If it’s still dark, we should go and . . .” She trailed off.

If it’s still dark.

Dima rested his cheek against the softness of her wig again. “When we were kids,” he told her, “we used to go with our uncle, out to the graveyard and light the fires to keep the dead warm. Dyadya Avya would kill a chicken. We’d roast it on a spit, and for each bite we took we’d toss some skin or bones or even meat down on the grave to keep him fed. When we were older, my brother and I used to bring whatever we could catch—a rabbit, a squirrel—and do the same.”

Her head shifted beneath his cheek, but she didn’t look away from the woods.

She said, “After my parents left, I made the fire with friends. We’d do it on the Kosha Road, just outside the city, at the crossroads with the old highway. When a car would come we’d hoot and howl and throw burning sticks at it. Sometimes, we’d line up between the fire and some truck’s headlights and dance the khorovod.”

He nodded. “We danced it, too. Did you used to tell the story? The old tired sun that shuts its eyes just for a second, lets night creep up and kill it?” He could see Dyadya Avya’s face bright with firelight, the sounds the old man made to dramatize night’s dark knife cutting out the flaming heart, the moaning of the dying sun shifting seamlessly into the crying of the newborn one: from winter’s womb it would come, return in spring aflame with vengeance, spend all summer hunting down the night.

“Sure,” she said. And he could feel her smile. “But mostly we just went off into the woods and fucked.”