The Great Glass Sea (56 page)

“Go,” he shouted into the darkness. “Get out of here!”

But the echo of his voice only brought with it the sound of their wingbeats falling back down on him again.

He spread his own arms and slid them, winglike, slowly up and down on the floor, up once and down once and his right hand hit the leather of the saddlebags. For one more flap his left arm worked on its own, and he thought, One more bad choice: why had he not emptied the pouch full of the cash Bazarov had given him to keep? Why had he been too afraid to leave it in the apartment, thought they wouldn’t trust him at the bank if he walked in with stacks and stacks of bills? Now, he would have to lock it in the car—five million roubles spilled out, shoved beneath the seat—while he carried into the meeting the other pouch full, the money meant for Kartashkin. Something about the thought stopped his left hand flapping, sent his right searching for the buckle. He found it, flipped the pouch open, dug inside, grabbed a stack of roubles, drew it out. The revolver came, too, fell out with a clank. He lay with his neck swiveled, his cheekbone against the floor, staring down the length of his arm to the roubles in his fist, to his knuckles nearly brushing the old revolver. The last person to pull the trigger had been his uncle. He saw it again: Avya’s face as he’d heard his nephews calling from the riverbank, the brothers splashing after him, their uncle turned, water swallowing his cheek, one eye above the surface, staring back. Yarik had thought the raw fear in that eye had been a pleading for them to save him, but he knew now that it was anger, anger that the old man had made his choice in life—three hammer clicks, four, five—and now, as the two of them rushed towards him, life was making him choose all over again. Yarik wondered, then, if their father had really fallen through the ice. No. Life gave you choices, and you made them. Chance, fate: they were no more real than the Chudo-Yudo. He wondered if that was why Dyadya Avya had told them the story of the devil snake, of their father’s soul, wondered if their uncle had thought them too young to understand. Well, he wasn’t young anymore. He thought how he was almost as old now as his father had been. And then he dropped the stack of roubles and his fingers closed around the grip of the gun.

His hand shook. The barrel rattled against the floor. He told himself it was just the awkwardness of the position, his arm stretched out, his wrist bent, his hand reaching, and then he laughed. He laughed at himself, at the idea that he would even think of doing it, laughed out loud, and the sound went up into the ceiling and brought down with its echo the panic it gave the crows, their wings whapping at the walls, the walls shedding dust, and in the sound of the dust tinkling to the floor he realized he wasn’t laughing anymore. He thought how nice it would be not to have to make the decision ten kilometers away. He thought how nice it would be not to have to make any more decisions at all. In the end, Zina always told him, that was how it would be. Everything clear, nothing left in the dark. The eternal light. She said it would be everlasting as the flame that hung above the tabernacle to remind them of the unceasing presence of the Savior, the Light of the World. He thought he understood why his wife had such faith. Why she believed in heaven. He wished he did, too.

Maybe then he would have been able to lift the gun. Instead, he had to slide it on the floor until his arm was bent, his elbow stuck out from his side, the gun upside down, its barrel touching the side of his head.
If there’s no such thing as chance,
he thought,
then what of Bazarov and his revolvers?
Maybe that day in Moscow the man had loaded one blank among the bullets; it would be just like him, the thrill he’d get knowing there was that little extra risk. He wondered if the game could be played with one chamber empty instead of one full. And, his finger touching the trigger, tentative as the nose of a dog brushing some stranger’s knuckles, he knew, with a sense as deep as any animal’s deepest sense, that all the chambers were full. He wondered if it would count as a game of chance simply due to the shakiness of his hand. Then he remembered the explosive tips.

How many times had Dyadya Avya pulled the trigger before the gun had finally gone off? Before Yarik, slipping down the muddy bank, splashing into the current, catching the hammer flash—
The gun!
Dima had shouted behind him—the flash again—
Get the gun!
—fought the weight of his boots, the shoving current, come so close to their uncle floating on his back—the hammer clacked—his eyes squeezed shut, his belly ballooned with the air in his lungs—clacked—so close Yarik had reached out, grabbed the barrel . . . The boom came so loud it stripped the sound from everything else. Ripped away even the feeling of Yarik’s bruised fingers, his burned palm, the coldness of the water, the warm blood. It sprayed from the lung pierced in their uncle’s chest, slicked Yarik’s face, his arms, as he tried to smother the spume from the hole Avery Zhuvov had blown in his fast-sinking self.

Lying on his back, his own chest swollen with his own breath held, Yarik could feel it now: the slipperiness on his fingers, the bruise of his grip, that river’s chill. He listened to the boom. Why did it seem so much louder than that one time, even longer ago, when he had fired the gun? In his own hands, it had gone off just as close, shot the same kind of bullet. Even the water beneath them, even his brother’s voice shouting behind the blasts: it should have sounded the same. But in his memory the ones he’d fired from the rowboat when they were kids were so much smaller, quiet pops, pop, pop, pop . . . He let the pistol barrel fall from his temple. It thunked against the floor. Not just the same kind of bullet: they had been the very bullets their uncle had loaded in. He had not been trying to play with fate: years ago, their dyadya had loaded all seven chambers. He’d never used the gun since then, hadn’t know the boys had taken it, wouldn’t have thought to see if any bullets had been spent. What a shock it must have been to work up the nerve to pull the trigger only to hear it click. And to do it again, and again, each time thinking
this one must be the last
: how horrible. How horrible that on the last try it was. Horrible, Yarik thought, because it was such a small thing that made the difference: that night on the rowboat he had shot six shots.

When he drew in his breath, it was shaky with anger. How close he had come to making another. If he was so bad at choices, what had made him think that
that
one would have been right? How would it have helped anything, anyone? He imagined Zina having to identify his body—his
body
, not his face: the explosive tips would have left her nothing of that. Not even a body she could bury: the church wouldn’t condone such a sin with a cemetery plot any more than it had for his uncle, his father. He imagined Dima hearing the news, then, and knew there would be no one to hear the news of what Dima would surely do to himself. And, seeing two new piles of stones beside the two ones overgrown, he thought of his mother, of her home, and Zina moved into it, Polina crawling the bare floor, his little boy the last man left, and his anger hit him so strong he didn’t even know what it was or why until he had squeezed the trigger and the boom had blasted around the cavernous room and the echo was filtering down on him like the wing-brushed dust.

Except there was no dust falling. He lay on his back with his arm outstretched above him, the pistol pointing straight up at the roof. No tinkle of glass. No clatter of plaster blown loose and tumbling down. Surely an explosive-tipped bullet would have done some damage he could see or hear. But there were just the crows, cawing now, wild with frantic circling. He watched their shapes flit by the shards of light, watched until he could make out their full circles and the nose of the pistol circled with them and he followed one until his gun moved as if strung to the bird.

The boom again. Again, the jolt jerking his wrist. There flew the bird, circling just the same. And no sign of the bullet hitting anywhere.

“Sonofabitch,” he said.

He pushed himself up, pointed the gun at the low wooden wall of the stage a few meters away and pulled the trigger again. There was the sound. And nothing else. The boards stared back at him, blank and unmarred as before.

“Sonofabitch,” he said again, and fired two more shots, in fast succession, not aiming at anything, just shooting to hear the booms and feel the handle slam into his palm and clench his jaw and make himself watch the absence of any sign of anything fired at all.

“Explosive tips,” he spat, smacked the lock off the chamber, jerked it open, was about to shake the casings into his palm, the last unfired blank. . . . But the gun had gone still in his hand. He held his hand still beneath it. He looked at the saddlebags on the floor. Next to the one full of the money meant for him, the stack he’d pulled out lay wrapped in its bands. Crouching down, he picked it up with his free hand, thumbed slowly through it. It all looked good. But there were a lot of other stacks. He flipped the pouch open again, and pulled out another one, and had flipped through it, and another, and a fourth, when it hit him. It was all there, and if it was all there, it was enough. It would be enough. He would make it enough. At the thought, he stood, took a few steps, sat down on the edge of the stage. As if they had been waiting for him to leave the center of the room, the crows came down in the corner farthest away, landing, their wings flapping noisily, their talons clacking at the floor. He watched them gather, dark shapes clustering, the flock growing as if out of the darkness of that corner. He still had the gun in his hand, the shells still in it, and as he watched the crows amass, he slapped the chamber shut. Maybe it was useless, he thought, maybe it was a dud, maybe it wouldn’t do anything at all, but at least it was a bullet, the last one he had left.

At first, he thought Kartashkin’s farm had been abandoned, too. The fields were stubbled with spindly knapweed spikes, cagongrass gone brittle and gray, tamarack bushes lifting hummocks of snow on their backs. In the pastures, the snow was unbroken and smooth as the fields should have been. Where were the cows? Not in the milking parlor; it was silent, doors shut, feed paddocks empty. Between it and Kartashkin’s house stood the giant equipment shed where once the combine harvesters had been kept, the harrows and hay rakes with their curved metal teeth, the new Belarus tractors hosed down and gleaming. Now the inside gaped cavernous and empty.

At the turnoff to the house, Yarik stopped. The car idled. The driveway wasn’t plowed. A slight depression in the snow, it led to the garage, a glassed-in porch, two stories of wide windows below a bright blue roof: it looked like one of the houses he’d seen in the new-built subdivisions outside of Moscow. Except there was no door on the garage, no car in it, the windows plywooded over, the porch wrapped in plastic, no smoke rising from the chimney. Instead, way in the distance a faint wisp unfurled above a smudge so far off no one but him, or Dima, or perhaps their mother if she could still remember, would have known what it was.

He parked in front of an old Ural dump truck turned snowplow, pulled his even older Mercedes up till its nose nearly touched the big metal blade. Behind the truck, a door split away from the farmhouse and a woman shoved her head out into the cold. She looked old as his mother, and she wore a sweater over a nightgown and track pants under it, and it took him a second to place her as Kartashkin’s wife. It was the curls of her uncovered hair, the way she dangled her cigarette when she looked at him and said something. He couldn’t hear over the engine any more than that it was a shout, and by the time he’d shut the engine off she had ducked back inside and closed the door behind her. But she hadn’t been shouting to him: farther back in the yard, beside the privy, the door to the big shed where Dyadya Avya once kept his geese swung open as if knocked loose by the house door slapped shut. In it: Kartashkin, bundled in a coat, one hand pushing the door, the other holding a burst of colors blooming upward from his fist, riotous and shimmering in the light. Feathers. As the man stepped out, Yarik glimpsed inside: dim shapes moving, thin glints of cage bars. From in there, a rooster shrieked, another shot its call in answer, the whole shed exploded with the racket of the birds. Kartashkin closed the door on it and started for the house, the feathers shaking in his fist, walking carefully on the beaten path of snow and ice, looking at Yarik’s car the whole time. When he got to the steps that led to the izba door, he took hold of the rail and stopped. His stare kept on. No raised palm, no call hello, just the impatience of his coat-wrapped body waiting there in the cold.

Inside, Yarik bent to shuck his boots, watched Kartashkin lower himself to a stool, ease out one creaky leg, call to his wife to tug off his own. She pulled out a chair at the table, motioned for Yarik to sit, said, “
Dobro pozhalovat,
Yaroslav Lvovich. It’s been a long time.”

It had. Sitting at the table, feeling the floorboards with his toes through the holes in the slippers she’d slid towards him with her own slippered foot, he took in the room. When he had lived there with Dima, it had all been one open space, but the Kartashkins had put up partitions that ran from the log walls to the whitewashed masonry stove in the center, each room warmed by a section of its heat-holding brick. The partitions had been wallpapered, and the log walls plastered over, and, at first, it must have hardly felt like an izba at all. But that must have been a while ago, back when they had begun to build the big new house they’d never finished; he remembered hearing that they had sold their place in town, were going to make do with Avyeri Zhuvov’s old izba until their new home was done. When had that been? He couldn’t remember, but he knew it must have been before the Oranzheria.