The Great Glass Sea (64 page)

The first one didn’t come close enough to even make Timofei look. The second hit him in the cheek. The boy jerked, slapped a mitten to his face. Dima gave a quick wave, the skates clanking. The boy said something he couldn’t hear. Gloved fingers flapping at his palm, Dima urged him closer. The boy shook his head. Dima put his whole arm into beckoning. But Timofei just shook his head again, turned, started for the steps that led to the building’s door.

“Timosha!” Dima unlooped the laces from around his neck, dangled the skates from his glove extended over the fence towards his brother’s son. Timofei paused. He was the only child still outside and while he stood there the school door shut. Through it came the muffled bellows of the
gymnastics coach. “Timosha!” Dima called again.

Slowly, head bent, eyes down, as if approaching an unsafe dog, the boy came. Behind Dima, a trolley clattered by. The snow in that far edge of the schoolyard was deep; it piled at the boy’s knees and sloughed away and Timofei neared slowly, as if pushing through sand.

He stopped close enough that Dima could see the weight on his nephew, the small boy bent over his chest like an old man. It made the skates feel heavy, too. He drew them back, hung them again around his neck.

“Timosha,” he said, “it’s me. Your dyadya.”

The boy’s eyes stayed on the snow where his legs were buried. “I’m not supposed to see you.”

Behind Dima, in the street, cars passed in steady shushing waves. “You mean you can’t even look at me?”

“Mama said if I see you, just act like I didn’t.”

Dima leaned his chest against the fence, his arms over it, the blade of a skate knocking at a bar with a quiet clank. “Well,” he said, “I bet you’re allowed to see
this
.” He held his arm out towards the boy. Between his gloved thumb and forefinger was a third bottle cap. When the boy looked up, Dima waggled it so it winked in the gray light. Then, with a flick of his thumb, he sent the cap arcing into the air. It spun, high above his head, and he opened his jaw wide as he could and leaned over the fence and caught the falling bottle cap in his mouth. With a chomping sound, he shut his lips around it. He made them big while he pretended to chew. Then he squatted down to the boy’s height, bent his neck back so the ribbing of his throat showed through his beard. Beneath the skin, he knew the bulge of his Adam’s apple would be huge.

“Come here,” he croaked.

From the other side of the fence: silence.

“Touch it,” he croaked.

With his face to the sky, he listened to the boy’s first hesitant step. When he could feel Timofei was close enough, Dima put his own finger on his Adam’s apple and croaked, again, “Touch it. Take off your mitten and touch it.” A faint spot of pressure joined the one from his own finger. He took his finger away. The boy’s stayed.

“Should I swallow it?” he croaked. He could feel, easily as if it had been Yarik, when his nephew nodded. “I can’t see you,” he croaked. “You have to tell me.”

“Swallow it,” Timofei said.

And with a gulp, he jerked his head back upright, his Adam’s apple disappearing. The boy’s finger stayed on his throat. He felt the other tiny fingers join it, until Timofei’s whole hand was searching his neck through the tangle of his beard.

“I ate it.” Dima watched the boy’s eyes go from big to huge. He opened his mouth, showed the gaping emptiness.

“It will
kill
you,” the boy whispered.

“No,” Dima said.

“Yes, you’ll
die
.” He sounded more in awe of the idea than scared by it.

Dima laughed. “You think?”

The boy nodded, very seriously. His eyes had not yet left Dima’s throat.

“Then I better get it out again,” Dima said and, standing up, made with his lips a bubbling imitation of a fart.

The boy jerked back. And in the second before his nephew’s shock shifted to laughter, Dima shook his left leg, shook it harder, shook out of his pants a bottle cap that plunked into the snow.

It seemed such a long time since he had heard a child laugh. Covering his own smile, he slipped the bottle cap out from under his tongue, told the boy, “I have something I want to give you.”

He watched Timofei’s eyes flick to the ice skates around his neck. “Do you have your rucksack inside?” Dima said. The boy nodded. “It’s very important that you put this in it.” And, reaching into his coat, he drew from the inside pocket a sheaf of papers rolled around its leather-stitched spine. “It’s for your father.” He held it through the fence. He could see the disappointment in the boy’s eyes. “And for you, too,” he said. “But the note in it”—Dima tapped a paper clip with his thumb—“is for him. Timosha, will you give it to him for me?”

The boy didn’t take it. Instead, Timofei said, “Are those your skates?”

Dima nodded.

“No they’re not,” the boy said.

“Timofei,” Dima said, “please take this for me. Please put it in your rucksack and give it to your father.”

“They’re too small,” the boy said.

Dima lowered himself again to a squat. “Of course they are.” Through the fence, he smiled at his nephew. “That’s why I’m giving them to you.”

The boy beamed so broadly Dima could hear his teeth chattering.

“Now take this,” Dima told him, “and put it in your rucksack.” He watched to make sure the boy slipped the book safely inside his jacket. But starting to lift the skates off of his neck, Dima stopped. He could see how it would be: Timofei running back to the school, him watching until his nephew disappeared inside, and by the time Dima might see him again—maybe before the winter’s end, maybe not for another year—his brother’s son would already be a different boy. He left the laces where they were. Instead of handing them through the fence, he reached out with his empty glove and ruffled Timofei’s head. “Go inside,” he said. “Get warm. And when school is over, don’t follow your friends to the gym, OK? Run here right away, without anyone else, straight back to this fence, and I’ll take you to the lake. I’ll tie these on your feet. I’ll show you how to use them.”

That afternoon, he reached across the fence, gripped Timofei under his arms, and, struggling with what should have been an easy weight, lifted him over the wrought iron spikes. Setting the boy down on the sidewalk, the ache leaking out of his atrophied shoulders, Dima bent his legs, put his hands on his knees. “Climb on,” he said.

They went like that, the boy riding the man’s back, down Antonova Street towards Lake Otseva. The sky was still as dark, as gray, but the slab of it had slid a little off the horizon, and there a bright strip attested to the nearness of the sun. Every now and then, Dima would shrug his shoulders, hefting the weight of the boy’s thighs on his forearms, leaning into the press of the arms around his neck.

“You’re bony,” Timofei said.

“You’re chubby,” Dima told him.

“You’re smelly,” Timofei said.

“Oh yeah? What do I smell like?”

“My papa,” the boy said.

At Dima’s chest, the small skates clacked.

“You smell like Papa after he comes home from work.”

Dima nodded. “Well,” he said, “you know your father and I—”

“Like Papa,” the boy cut him off, “but a whole lot worse.”

Down by the lake they passed beneath the statue and Timofei reached up, as if to grab the brass tsar’s finger, but he could not, and they went on out, over the guardrail, onto rocks half-covered in snow, and, Dima carefully shuffling forward, made their way onto the ice. All along the shore, old pleasure boats were sealed in, forgotten speedboats marooned in frozen water, abandoned sailboats with their hulls holding high banks of windblown snow. They looked like the gargantuan bodies of some ancient beasts cut down by giants, their bare masts jutting into the sky like great spears that had slain them. Way out, over the vast expanse of white, the island hovered, faint as a cloud, almost invisible in the middle of the lake, a place where the spear-throwers might have dwelled.

Holding Timofei’s hand in his, Dima led the boy out to the spot on the ice where he used to skate when he’d been his nephew’s age. Together, they brushed at the snow with their boots, clearing away a small circle, the two of them the only things moving on the lake. Above, jaegers rode the breeze, the most distant mere sharp-winged shapes cutting across the low strip of last light. As they widened their circle of ice, the man and boy passed before it, too, silhouetted by that crack between the horizon and the clouds, coming into the sun and circling back to cutout shapes again and circling again into the light.

When they had cleared enough, Dima took the rucksack off Timofei’s back. He loosened the straps, was about to slide his own arms through, when Timofei said, “Wait.” The boy opened it, dug inside, took out a small package of
sukhariki
crackers sealed in cellophane. “They’ll make you strong,” his nephew told him. Dima could feel his throat swallow his smile. “Let’s save them for after,” Dima said, and they sat on the ice while he removed the boy’s boots and laced the skates onto his feet. Then he helped Timofei stand. His hands around the boy’s waist, he walked with him, each small slide of his boot soles matching each small slide of the blades.

After a while, Dima was only holding his hand, standing in the middle of the circle, like a trainer with a horse, their arms the tether, and a while after that the boy was skating one length and then the other, unsteadily and slowly with Dima shuffling along beside. By the time the sun’s color had deepened towards orange, Timofei was skating on his own. By the time it had gone red, he was going so fast he could have broken something when he fell.

Before the boy even hit the ice, Dima was running after him. Timofei landed all sprawled out, but by the time Dima got to him he had curled up on himself, a dark still lump. At first, he hoped that the red on his nephew’s face was just tears and snow caught by the setting sun, but as soon as he was bent low he knew it was blood.

“You’re OK,” he said, scooping the boy in his arms. “Are you OK, Timosha?”

As if the ice against his face had sealed all sound inside him, the moment Dima lifted the boy his wailing came. It blew over the frozen lake. Sitting, Dima pulled his nephew to his chest, wiped at his face, asked over and over, “Where does it hurt?” The boy shook his head and wailed, and Dima shucked his gloves, lifted Timofei’s lips, felt his teeth. He wasn’t missing any. All the blood was coming from his nose. Dima wrapped the boy in his arms then and let him wail. It was only when he realized that his nephew, held over his shoulder, was broadcasting his pain towards the shore, the city, that he turned him to face the darkening lake, set him on his lap.

“Timosha,” Dima said, “it’s a bloody nose. Only a bloody nose.” He stole a glance over his shoulder at the shore—just the tsar’s brass back—and leaning his face close to the crying child’s, asked, “What do you want me to do?” The boy bawled on. “Do you want me to take you home?” The boy shook his head, flinging drops of blood. “Do you want to skate some more?” More droplets flung. “I know,” Dima said. “I know. Do you want me to read you a book?” The head shaking, twice as violent; the wailing turned up a notch. “It’s what I gave you to give to your father, Timosha.” The wailing kept on, but this time the head stayed still. “Don’t you want to know what it is?” Just a little, the head nodded. “Your father and I wrote it,” Dima told him. “When we were very young, barely older than you.” Timofei had gone quiet. He tilted his face up to look back at Dima.

“Good,” Dima said. “Hold your face up just like that. And with your hand”—he took Timofei’s hand, the mitten still on, in his bare one—“squeeze the tip of your nose like this. Good, Timosha. Stay just like that, and the blood will stop, and I’ll get the story out of your rucksack, OK?”

Face to the sky, blood half-hidden by the mitten at his nose, Timofei nodded.

They sat facing the last of the sun, the nephew cradled in his uncle’s chest, the uncle holding the loose-bound papers before them both. Dima had put his gloves back on and his fingers were thick and cumbersome.

Once upon a time
. . . In the low light, the cold stinging his eyes, he could hardly read his childhood scrawl. But the words had lodged in him long ago and he read as if reading from the memory inside instead of from the page.

“Once upon a time there were two brothers. They were twins. They lived on a farm. But not with their papa or their mama. With their uncle. His name was Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov. He was very funny and told good stories. Almost as good as this.”

Timofei made a pinched noise through his nose that sounded like “No.”

“What?” Dima asked.

From beneath his mitten, the boy said, “Start at the beginning.”

“That is the beginning. Once upon a time . . .”

“No,” the boy said again, and with his free mitten pushed at the page opened over Dima’s left hand, the back of the cover. There, he had clipped the note to Yarik.

“That’s for your father,” Dima told the boy. “Remember I asked you—”

“But you said you were going to read what you gave me to give to Papa.”

“I meant the book.”

The boy pulled away from Dima’s chest, leaned over, sounded out the first word. “Dear,” he said, very slowly, and a drop of blood dripped off his face and spotted the first page. He didn’t seem to notice, only sounded out the next word: “Yarik.”