The Great Glass Sea (65 page)

Dima pulled him back so he would not bleed more.

“That’s my papa’s name,” Timofei told him.

“Yes.”

“I can read it.” Timofei struggled against Dima’s hand, got free long enough to read aloud “I am” and start sounding the next word before Dima pulled him back again and told him, “OK, OK. We don’t have time, Timosha. I’ll read it, and then the book, and then we’ll go home, yes?”

He could feel the back of the boy’s head nod against his chest.

“Dear Yarik,” he read. “Mama wanted you to have this. Last night I didn’t know why, but now I do. Do you remember how you would start to say an idea and I would finish it? Or I would start and you would finish. ‘Into the lake,’ I said. ‘Where they drowned,’ you said.”

Dima’s face felt too stiff with the cold to get any more words out. He cupped a glove to his mouth, blew into the leather. When the boy looked up at him, he nodded and took his hand away again.

“I am worried about Mama,” he read on. “I try to help her, but I think I am failing. I think she needs your help. You know what I am saying. If I come back one night and she is not there I will know you understand. I will miss her. But I will be grateful to you, big brother. Yesterday, the building turned off the heat.”

Dima coughed to free the air from his throat. The sun was almost down. He dipped his head until his face was against the top of his nephew’s head, and said with his lips in the wool of the boy’s hat, “That’s it.”

“What’s that.” Timofei pointed again with his mittened hand.

“That’s just my name.”

“No it’s not.”

Dima nodded his face against the wool. “It says, ‘Your little brother.’”

“OK,” the boy said. “Now let’s read the book.”

By the time he was halfway through, the sun had gone and the zerkala had come up. They were barely bright enough to read by. He had just reached the point where the brothers lost their oars, when he heard shouting from the shore. He turned. Back there, three men were climbing over the guardrail between the statue park and the rocks that edged the lake.

“How?” Timofei, in his lap, said. “
How
did they loose the oars?”

Behind the men, behind the rail: a car. It was the shape of the cars the city’s policemen drove, it was a police car—on its hood he could see the flashers—and he almost let go of the book.

“How—” Timofei started.

But Dima had looked down at the boy and seen the blood dried dark on his face and said, “Oh no.”

Then he was scrambling up, saying, “Stand, stand,” trying to steady Timfoei on his skates with one hand while, with the other, he shoved the storybook in the rucksack.

The men were close enough now that he could hear their words slapped across the ice at him, hitting like pucks—
don’t
and
boy
and
move
and
drop—
and he let go of Timofei and felt the air waver behind him where he knew the boy was and reached out again and pulled his nephew tight. The men were in uniform. Two ran with a hand on their sides, like men with cramps, or men who had hurt a hip, or men who carried guns. The third carried a long stick in his fist. He was the faster one. There were the boy’s words mixed in now, too—
who
and
who
and
who
—and Dima’s words back—
OK
,
OK—
and Dima tightened his arm around Timofei’s shoulders and stooped to grasp the bag and all the while shouted at the men things that came out—
uncle
and
nephew
and
skating
and
my brother
—and when he straightened up, the rucksack hanging from his free hand, he rose right into what felt like a hammer smashing the side of his head.

The second blow felt like the stick it was. It hit his stomach and his eyes saw it leave his body, saw the policeman’s boots stepping back on the ice, and his mind shot the thought through his head
thank god it’s just a stick
and then it hammered down against his skull again. There was a sudden wind on his face. There was the sound of Timofei screaming. There was a slab of rock, large as the lake, dropping from the sky, falling so fast all he could do was clench his teeth against it before it smashed full on into his chin.

Once upon a time there were two brothers. They were twins.

A double-headed axe.

They lived on a farm
.

A single-bladed hatchet.

But not with their papa
or their mama.

The cleaver Dyadya Avya used to crack the backs of the chickens and cut them into quarters.

With their uncle. His name was Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov. He was very funny and told good stories
.

That long-handled brush hook with its wide blade shining flat and straight before the sudden vicious curve at the end.

Stories almost as good as this.

That night, the night that their uncle had told them how their father died, that night while Dyadya Avya slept on the floor by the big woodstove, the empty bottle clutched like a kitten to his chest, that night they had lain on the straw, each boy pressed to one side of the dog, the dog breathing, its breath smelling of its organs, of the blood that their brushing had drawn from its gums, the crack beneath the stove door flickering with just enough firelight to find the boys in the blackness of the hut, that night they had decided to gather the tools they would need for killing.

One by one, week after week, they snuck them from the house or from the barns, brought them across the fields into the forest. They did it at night—carrying them through the birch woods, the white trunks long stripes of moonlight, the blades in their hands like chips of stars—while Dyadya Avya slept. And when he found his cleaver missing, his sickle gone, after a fit of furious searching, their uncle would stop, his belly heaving, and curse at the ceiling, as if to shame the heavens into giving back his tools. But they were no more above the roof than beyond the clouds. If God had had a hand in it, it was only in the perfect place that He’d afforded the brothers to hide them.

They would crawl inside the buried banya, nestle a jar of sinkers in the leaves that lined the earthen floor, or add a blacksmith’s mallet to the pile of weapons they had stored, and sit, knees drawn up against the cold, shoulders hunched beneath the carved-out ceiling, hair catching in the roots, and talk of what they might use for a lure.

It could not be just a piece of meat, they knew. It had to be a soul.

Eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, chests to air thick with the ancient scent of mushrooms grown and died and decomposed above their heads, they debated where in a body the soul could be found. The lungs that allowed an animal to breathe? But then it would escape on every exhale. The brain? But then how could a headless hen still scramble feverish with life? They thought for a while that it might reside in the eyes. But they had seen their father’s blue, blue irises, his black, black pupils, staring back at them up through the ice. The heart: no one had reached down his throat, no one had cut into his chest, no one had sawn through his breastbone, wrenched it open, no one had seen whether or not their father had still had his heart.

In the threshing barn, hanging on ropes from the rafters, were all the parts of the hog their uncle had slaughtered and smoked that fall: hams, ribs, shoulders, hocks, all wrapped in muslin and frozen hard. The liver their uncle always cooked up fresh. The head he boiled into cakes of gelatin and brain. But there was a bag that hung by itself that held the ears, the snout, the cheek meat, and, somewhere among all the smaller parts, a rock hard heart.

But it’s frozen,
Dima said.

They debated whether or not the soul could be killed by cold. Or if it would slip out before the temperature got too low. Dyadya Avya had told them it was the part that God chose to bring up to Him, so they were sure it would not be stupid enough to let the heart’s walls freeze it in. Besides, even if the cold was of no concern to it, it would have surely left for heaven by now.

It leaves right after something dies,
Yarik said.

It leaves before,
Dima said.

It can’t,
Yarik said,
you can’t live without it.

See?
Dima said, as if that proved his point.

That was when they decided the soul was smart enough to know when the body was wounded too gravely to go on, smart enough to flee before it got trapped inside. Unless something snuck up and killed the body while the soul was unawares, caged it in there until it could be devoured still alive. And when did it come down from heaven? When did it enter the heart? At birth? No: they had seen the belly of a pregnant rabbit cut open to show the lingering life of her brood inside. They had seen in their breakfast the spots of blood in the yolk, even, once, the beginnings of a beak.

They left while Dyadya Avya was in his deafness of midday drunk, napping on the pallet upon the stove. They hitched the mule to his cart. They loaded the cart with their arsenal of blades and bludgeons. They took the jars and the eggs. They took the live goose, a hood on its head. Dima had it tight beneath an arm, one hand squeezing shut its beak, his other hauling him up onto the cart, when Yarik suddenly jumped down, ran back to the house, disappeared, and a minute later came back out holding something that gleamed: Dyadya Avya’s ancient revolver, gripped in his two small hands. Climbing up beside Dima, Yarik’s eyes had shown how scared he was by what he’d done. His mouth had shown how set he was on doing it. Towards the mule’s ears he made a click. They drove down to Otseva’s shore. They loaded up a little rowboat they found tied to the dock. They slipped the knot. And rowed together out towards Nizhi, into the lake, to hunt for the Chudo-Yudo.

“Until it came up,”
one of them said,
“and crushed the boat.”

“And they drowned,”
the other said.

“Or it ate them.”

“Or anyway—”

“Dima.”

His face was numb. All but his ear.

Or anyway.

His ear was burning with cold.

“Dima!”

Swooping away from his eye, carved in the ice: a long thin cut, smooth line arcing on the lake, the lake blurry with snow. The moonlight—no the sunlight—shone through the splinters of ice that the blade of the skate had lifted. Then something steamed between the groove and his eye and when he blinked the bottom of his eye had filled with red. No: the ice, filled with red. He watched the skate’s track turn color, the blood running along it, away from him, so fast, as if it meant to draw its line all the way across Otseva to the opposite shore. And then it stopped. Pooled against a thick black wall. The sole of a boot. The light of the mirrors: gone. His brother’s voice: “Dima.”

Even without it, he would have known the grip of his hands, known him by the way he hauled Dima up to a sit and crouched beside him on the ice and cradled Dima’s head against his chest, his hand patting harder and harder at his brother’s cheek.

“Yarik,” Dima said.

“Oh God,” his brother said. “What those fuckers did to your face.”

“
Your
face,” Dima said and, through the numbness, tried to smile.

He didn’t know whether the smile made it, but the pain came through like a nail. When he shouted, the nail drove the rest of the way in. Through the pain, he knew his brother was saying something, knew he could have even understood it if he could have thought about anything but the pain.

Then his brother was standing behind Dima, his hands beneath Dima’s arms, gripping the sides of his chest, dragging him slowly backwards, and it was almost worth it. The lake slid away: the clearing he and Timofei had made growing, the vast white plain of all the rest shrinking, the island of Nizhi too far to make out in the reflected light. His brother’s gusty breathing came from somewhere above his head. His brother’s hands slipped and gripped again. He tightened the insides of his arms around them, trying to keep them warm.