The Great Glass Sea (60 page)

“The envelope,” she said. “Each month.”

“You know about it?”

“It’s what he was going to set aside for me.”

He reached inside his coat.

“Spending money,” she said.

From the chest pocket of his shirt he drew a matchbook out.

“But how could I? How could we? When we knew you needed . . .”

He shook his head.

“Your mother, then.” And watching his other hand hunt the ashtray for a butt, she brought up her purse. “We couldn’t.” Rummaged in it. “But now”—she lifted out a pack of cigarettes—“we have to.” Passing it across the table, she told him, “At least this month. Next. Dima, I know how much you must rely on it, your mother, I know that without it . . .”

He reached over, stilled her hand. Softly squeezing her fingers around the pack, he told her it was OK. “I don’t rely on it,” he said. “I’ve hardly even used it. It’s all right, Zina. We’ll be all right.”

For a moment, her hand stayed under his, and in the twilight coming through the window, in the warm glow that fell on them from the studio lamp that had been set up in the corner, they might have looked like lovers come to some quiet decision about their lives. Then her hand slipped out from under his, and she took the cigarettes back, back all the way until she was holding them against her chest, and she said, “You haven’t been using it?”

“Only a little,” he assured her. “The rest—”

“What have you been doing with it?”

He drew his own hand back. “Saving it,” he said, and watched her mouth grow hard again.

“For what?” she asked, and before he could answer, “Why was she sitting in the dark?”

His fingers went to the table, searched blindly for the stub of a cigarette to hold.

“Galina,” she said. “Your mother. Why was—”

“It wasn’t dark.”

“Why hadn’t you turned on any lights?”

He found a butt and picked it up and sat there, picking the paper tube apart.

“Dima,” she said, “the refrigerator door was open.”

“That’s OK,” he said.

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because,” he told her, “it’s not using electricity.”

“Why?” she said again.

“We don’t need it.”

She shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose and she said, “Don’t let me get mad.” She said it again, and a third time, and then her eyes snapped open and she tore her hand away and her voice was rising even as she spoke: “You mean to tell me that all this time in your mother’s apartment . . .”

“Not all this—”

“. . . you’ve been taking the money we gave you to take care of her—”

“I didn’t take it,” he said. “I’ve been saving it.”

“In the name of God, Dmitry,” she said, “what were you saving it for?”

“The farm.”

Her hands hit the table with a smack. The coffee cup shook, the spoon on its saucer rattled off, all around them people looked, and she didn’t seem to notice. “
This
,” she said. “This is why you make it worse. Because this plagues him. It plagues
me
. His yearning, his hopeless plans to buy it. Every time you try to call, every time his son’s face reminds him of you, it gets worse, and worse, and the worst thing, the thing you cost him, Dmitry, is that it’s a yearning for the impossible.”

He had picked the cigarette almost entirely apart. His fingers kept working. “He’s trying to buy it?”

“And you say it’s not infectious. Look at you. You’re stricken with it. With some idea of the past. Of a Past Life everyone else knows was worse, everyone else is afraid we will return to. That’s the only thing crazy about you, Dmitry. Your refusal to see the reality of how the world is, instead of how you think it used to be.”

“It was,” he said. “It can be.”

“Stop,” she told him. “Please, stop. Why can’t you stop wanting more than what everyone else wants? You’re not just stuck in the past, you
want
to be stuck. You want to stay there. As if you alone don’t have to grow up.”

“Did you check for him out at the farm?” he said. “Yarik—”

“Yarik is more than just your brother,” she told him. “He doesn’t only love you. You aren’t the only person he can love. You know what Father Antipov told me? Months ago at liturgy? He told me to be careful, he told me that the way you are—this unreasonable clinging to the past, this inability to share your brother’s love, he said you were stunted, he said to be careful with my children—”

“Zinaida,” Dima whispered, his hands finally still. “You don’t believe that.”

“I believe,” she said, “that you might infect them, too.”

Slowly, his hands bunched into fists, tobacco flecks falling to the table from his fingers. He watched them fall. “Just tell me,” he said, quietly, evenly, “please, tell me if you checked out at the farm.”

“How would I get out there?” she said. “When was the last time you were?”

“Zina, how much did he take?”

She hushed him then—
Shh
—and with both hands reached across the table. “He’s not out there.”

“How much was in that account?”

And she held his fists in her hands and hushed him again.

“Aren’t you afraid to touch me?” he said.

“Shh,” she said, “shh. I’m afraid for him.” Outside, it was dark. The street was empty. “I don’t know where he is.” She closed her eyes.

He could see she was praying. And, looking at her—leaning across the table, holding his hands—he watched the slight shivering of her shut eyelids, the quaking skin, and thought how fragile it seemed, how, beneath the makeup she had armored it with, it must be as thin as his.

Fingers locked together, knuckles a seam along the top of his head, arms up and elbows out and the nose of a gun in the small of his back: this was not how Yarik had hoped to face his boss. One bodyguard walked him in while a second held the door. Behind him, Yarik could sense people watching from the atrium of the old sanitarium where his mother had once been held. Then the door shut. The guard who had closed it stepped forward, spoke—
unannounced
and
into your office
and
armed
—but Yarik was barely aware of what the man was saying; all his attention was on Bazarov.

His boss was barefooted. He stood with his toes half-buried in the carpet’s soft pile, his metallic black suit jacket still buttoned at the waist, bolo tie clasped to his throat by a silver-set stone. That the formality was unbroken even by his bare feet seemed only to strengthen the seriousness of his face.

Bazarov had been talking into an earpiece when they came in; now he pushed the boom away from his mouth, took the thing off, set it on the table. The room was so quiet Yarik could hear the person on the other end of the line still yammering: a pinched vibration of a voice.

The guard who had been talking stepped forward, put Dyadya Avya’s revolver on the table, too, slid it closer to his boss. It spun, came to a stop with its barrel against the earpiece. Whoever was on the other end shut up.

Bazarov looked at the gun, looked at Yarik, told the two guards to go.

The earpiece made a noise like a voice asking a question.

“I said leave him here,” Bazarov told the men, “and leave the gun, and get out.”

When they were gone, Bazarov reached to the table and turned the earpiece off. Then he picked up the pistol. He unlocked the chamber and clicked it slowly through seven slots, the six empty ones and the one still filled, and pushed it shut again and looked at Yarik. He raised his eyebrows. He made his mouth into a picture of shock.

How stupid to bring the gun. Last night, after all the papers had been signed, after Kartashkin had taken the cash and returned to the izba to get his wife and pack to go, after Yarik had gone back as near to home as the plowing allowed, after he had walked to the apartment block where five stories up his own wife sat waiting, he’d veered away from the stairwell door and walked out into the playground and, ducking inside the rocket ship, hanging by his arms from the bars, thought about what Bazarov had told him that day in Moscow sitting in his armored car. He had tried to come up with a way of getting bullets for the gun. If it had been a rifle, he might have been able to find a shop in the morning; if it had been registered, they might have sold him some, but it was a pistol and illegal to own and the only way would be to flash enough roubles on the street. He had hung there, feeling his weight pull at his elbows, his knuckles, let his body sway. He had looked up through the bars, scanned the lit windows for his home, found it, let go. He didn’t want to live his life scared. He didn’t want his children to, his wife. He didn’t want to be one of those people. The kind who would go down near the dockyards where the lowlife lived, who would buy bullets off someone as likely to put one in him, who would be the kind of person to load the gun and carry it into the billionaire’s office. . . . He couldn’t do it. He would bring the gun in as it was, he’d decided, not as a weapon, but as evidence: how Bazarov had betrayed their trust first. Yet here he was, hands on his head, empty saddlebags over his shoulder, his heart pumping blood as if he had already been opened up.

He watched the revolver in Bazarov’s hands. With his thumb, the man gave the chamber a whirl. “You lied to me,” Yarik said. The click, click of it turning over, stopping. “You said they were explosive tips.”

Bazarov looked at the gun as if it had just been handed to him. “You didn’t fire them all,” he said. “Maybe one is.” And, setting the gun back on the table, he flicked its butt to make the whole thing spin. “Look at you.” He showed a hint of the old grin. “Wearing those bags. Wearing that
face
.” And the grin busted loose. “You look less like a cowboy than the horse.”

Unclasping his fingers, Yarik lowered his hands, the leather strap shifting on his shoulder. “I’m bringing them back.”

“I told you,” Bazarov said, “they’re yours.”

“I don’t want them.”

At that, the man turned his knuckles on the table. And began to knock a quick, galloping rhythm against the wood.

“I only wanted what was mine,” Yarik said. It was an imitation of hoofbeats, he realized, mockery to accompany the smile Bazarov turned on him, and he hauled the saddlebags off and threw them down. They hit the table in a clattering slap, sent the gun skidding, almost bashed the man’s hands, and, watching Bazarov jerk his fists away, Yarik told him, “And so I took it.”

Bazarov shook out his fingers. “That was very dramatic,” he said. “I feel . . .” He scrunched his toes in the carpet, looked down at his feet. “Maybe I should put on my boots. I think it would help me get into character.” His shoulders hitched a little. “Here,” he said, “let me try.” And looking straight into Yarik’s face, his smile died. His eyes hardened. He said, all hints of humor gone from his voice, “You took the cash?”

“No. The cash I gave to Kartashkin.”

“OK.”

“All of it.

“Five million rubles?”

“Ten. My share, too.”

“Why would you do that?”

“In exchange for the land.”

“Exchange?”

“Bought,” Yarik told him. “I bought the land.” He could see Bazarov’s eyes beginning to crinkle. “For myself. I bought the land for myself.”

“Oh,” Bazarov said. It was a small sound that told Yarik nothing, made with a movement of lips so small it that showed nothing, either. “He sold it to you for that little?”

“I own it,” Yarik said. “We signed the documents. Had them notarized.”

“Oh,” Bazarov said again. He shook his head. “You
are
a cowboy.”

“I did what you taught me to do. What Slava would have done.”

The man’s smile was small and brief and held nothing in it of a smile at all. “Well,” he said, “welcome to the Wild West.”

“I saw an opportunity—”

“And you grabbed it.” Bazarov lifted his palms. “But why?”

“You were the one who told me playing it safe was the most dangerous thing to do.”

“True.” And in his smile this time there was a little bit of pleasure. “But this is pretty dangerous, too.” He held his hands forward, as if presenting Yarik to Yarik. “Why are you here?”