The Great Glass Sea (67 page)

But Yarik jerked his leg away. He sat there, feeling Dima’s gaze on him, gazing past through the glass at the TVs. Some of them were on ads. One, he knew, would be the Consortium’s. There it was, the last few seconds: him in a suit and tie stepping out of his office, down from the trailer into a hard-hat crew, slapping their backs, returning their smiles as he got into a sedan—new, black; it had been one of Bazarov’s—and the camera closed in on one of the laborers watching. It was him, looking as he had a year ago. The old him lifted a hand and the camera cut again to the man in the suit, sliding into the leather interior, lifting a hand back, as if to say so long. But before the car drove off, before the camera showed the crowd of working men again, before the one word caption he knew would come, Yarik told Dima: “Him.”

Dima turned then, as if to try to see what his brother was looking at, on which TV, but by then Yarik had stopped watching the screen. He was staring, instead, at the wide window hazed over with mirror-light, and in it, their own reflections, their two ghostly faces peering back.

At first, he hadn’t believed her—this stairwell woman claiming to have been his brother’s lover—and then he didn’t want to: the way she’d told him how Dima had stopped her straying hands by speaking of his love for Yarik.
Why do you think,
she’d said,
he chose that poem?
And how had he never seen it till then:
two souls joined only to be torn apart, one taken captive by a wizard, within a strange world’s walls, the other seeking nothing but to bring his lost half back. Though in the end it was his very need to not believe—in the idea of her with Dima, of Dima wanting to be with anyone but him—that had trapped him with the truth: the bond between them that had so skewed his twin still lay buried inside him, too. If he had made a different choice, chosen the same as Dima, allowed them to live out their lives alone with each other, simply two brothers together, he might have been as happy, just in a different way. A way that might—he shut his eyes to it, shook his head, shoved down the gas, turned back—have been a better life.

The rest of the way they drove in silence, as if each was waiting for something to happen before they reached their mother’s apartment block. Then they were there. Yarik pulled to the side of the street. He let the motor idle. He knew that if he looked at Dima he wouldn’t be able to tell him to go.

“Did you read it?” Dima said.

“Your letter?”

“The book.”

“Why?”

“I gave Timofei—”

“Why did you give me that?”

“I thought maybe you’d remember . . .”

“I remember,” Yarik said. “But I’m not Mama. The situation . . .” He reached down and pulled up the parking break and sat back against his seat, sat there with both hands on the steering wheel. “It’s different, Dima. Then it was about Mama. This was never about me, or you. It was always the situation. And the situation hasn’t changed.”

“So change it.”

“What did you think? That I would read a storybook we made when we were kids and give up my job and sell my apartment and move with you out to Dyadya Avya’s and bring Zinaida and Polina and Timofei and Mama out there and . . .”

“Yes.”

“And what? We would all farm?”

“Yes,” Dima said. “That’s what I thought.”

“We won’t.” It was as if by saying the words he’d broken something open inside him, loosed an occlusion in his veins, released his blood, and his grip eased on the steering wheel, his head lay back against the seat, and he said it again: “We won’t.”

“Maybe not now,” Dima said. “But someday . . .”

And Yarik could see he’d broken something in Dima, too. “Bratishka,” he said, he could only hope that whatever had become ruined inside his brother would wash away with it, “when was the last time you were out at Dyadya Avya’s?”

“You told me not to go.”

Go,
Yarik thought.
Go and see it and bleed it all out.

“Maybe now,” Dima said, “now that you have a car. Maybe we can go together for a day—”

“No,” Yarik told him. “Not for a day. Not ever.” He reached to his brother then, just wanting to touch him, somewhere, as if his fingers might find the break, stanch the flow, for a moment. “Bratishka,” he said, “can’t you see that we were never really going to?”

But before his fingertips could brush Dima’s face, Dima’s fingers had clamped around his, squeezing them tight in a fist.

They sat there, the two of them in the idling car, and someone driving by, glancing through the window, might have thought they were holding hands. A first few flakes of snow landed on the windshield.

“You’re wrong,” Dima said. “You’re wrong about that, just like you’re wrong about the situation. It
is
about us.”

“No,” Yarik said. “No, Dima, it’s the situation
I’m
in. It’s
my
situation. And it isn’t going to change.”

It was a wet snow, and the flakes became wet blurs on the windshield, and where enough had landed some had begun to stick.

“You know it has to,” Dima said. “It has to, Yarik. Because when I open the door and go upstairs and you disappear again, it will have changed. A little more. A little worse. And you will have been the one to change it.” He stopped, and Yarik could see him wait for the ache in his jaw and chin to begin to subside, and then, as if Dima meant to shoot it through his face again, he said, “You always could change it. Just like you always could have chosen to save the money, to go to Dyadya Avya’s with me.”

“Please,” Yarik said.

“You could have chosen me.”

Yarik reached up with his free hand then, and cupped it around Dima’s, and pulled until he had pried open his brother’s fist. He drew his bruised fingers to him. “Please,” he said. “Take your rucksack and open the door . . .”

“But the situation,” Dima said, “it did. Because you’re wrong about that, too, Yarik. It’s
our
situation. It’s the situation
we’re
in. It has become
us
.” He opened the door and stood up out of the car into the snow. He held the door by its cold edge. He began to close it.

“Wait.” Yarik sat holding his fingers in his hand as if they hurt, but there was no anger in him, not even any strength, just the same stripped-down sorrow he had felt when he’d first seen Dima come out into the waiting room. Except this time he made himself look Dima in the face. “Take the rucksack,” he told him.

Dima glanced down at it. The fabric around the zipper at the top was stained with blood, sagged into a hollow. He didn’t touch it.

There was the sound of the engine idling, the faint smell of the exhaust, the snow beginning to cling to Dima’s hair, his bandages, a few flakes drifting into the car. “Take the rucksack, Dima,” Yarik said, again. He shut his eyes. “Please, take it and go.”

“Look at me,” Dima told him.

But Yarik only squeezed his eyes more tightly shut. “Go,” he said. “Go far away. You’re not safe here. You’re not safe anywhere in Petroplavilsk. Or anywhere near the Oranzheria. Or near me.” Behind his shut lids his eyes were shaking. “Bratishka,” he said, “take the rucksack and go far away from me.”

He heard his brother reach down, take hold of a strap, lift the bag out of the car. At the sound, Yarik opened his eyes. He reached for the door handle. Dima held on to its edge. His brother stood there with it open and the snow falling all around him and said, “No. I won’t. I won’t because I know how you knew it was me when you heard the police were looking. I know because, no matter what you tell me, or won’t, I knew you were in trouble that night you took the gun. And even if I can’t see you, even if I can’t talk to you, I won’t live somewhere so far away that I can’t even feel you anymore.”

For a moment, Yarik sat leaning across the empty seat, towards Dima holding the open door, the snow swirling in and blurring his eyes, looking out at his brother’s blurring ones. Then he shut his own. And when he opened them again, he could see Dima’s face so clearly. The stitches must have pulled, or the crusted blood must have softened from the flakes, because the snow that had settled in his brother’s beard had turned a watery red.

Dima watched the taillights go, small red spots in the gauzy air. On his cold face, the stitches burned. In his mouth, his pulse pounded at his gums. He could hear it in the hammering beneath the cotton where his lower front teeth used to be. No: the sound was too erratic, sharp. He listened through the pain, through the snowfall and the traffic, to a distant tapping like fingernails drumming glass.

Inside the building’s lobby, the sound was gone. He felt too weak for the stairs, got himself to the elevator, the button pressed, stayed on his feet while the cables moaned. Inside the lift there was just the throbbing of all the parts of his face that hurt. And then the door opened and he was in the hallway, and there was that hammering again.

At the apartment door it was twice as loud, as if his mother were still up inside, still had her sewing machine, was trying to stitch shut the holes in the tops of the cans he brought home. He opened the door and stepped into the sound. The apartment felt different. Not just the noise, not just the rugs still clamped above the windows, but something in the air itself that made night known. The deeper cold, the murmur of the TV show that leaked down through the ceiling, the sense of his mother asleep in the stillness of the room: it sent over him a faint breath of peace, that the world was bigger than anything man could send into the sky, that night was something more than just a rhythm in the lives of people, darkness or light. It made even the clacking seem small.

And when he came into the living room and saw what was making the noise, he almost laughed. Out on the balcony, Ivan was banging his beak against the glass. The dark shape of a rooster silhouetted against the dimly glowing world framed in the doors. While Dima watched, Ivan exploded in a furious ridding of snow, tail feathers whipping, wings jerking out, comb slapping madly back and forth, and when he was done, he went utterly still. Watched Dima. Then started banging on the glass again.

Dima glanced at his mother’s mattress by the bathroom door, the duvet a quiet pile. He set the rucksack down and, creeping towards the balcony, shook his head at himself: as if his footsteps were going to wake his mother over the racket of the bird. Ivan’s hood was still off. Maybe, Dima thought, the bird was going mad with wanting dark. Or it was simply unfed and throwing a tantrum. Sliding open the door, he blocked the bird with his legs as it tried to rush inside. “What’s with you?” he said. “I know you’ve been hungry before.”

The rooster batted at him with its wings. It began running circles in the snow. The flakes felt good on his face when they first landed, soft and cool, and then they melted and were just cold, and he thought he understood—its box inside, its bunched blankets—and he wanted, then, his own bed, too. Squatting down, he spread the hood, clamped the bird between his thighs, dropped the felt over it, tied it on. The bird kept struggling. “What happened?” he said to it, the way his mother would when he was a child and came to her crying. With his palm he held its head from beating at the glass; with his other hand he stroked its back. “What happened?”

In the quiet after his voice, the words came back at him. He stood, the rooster in his arms, its talons scrabbling at the air. All its movement made the inside more still. He peered through the glass. The rooster had freed a wing. It was whapping at his chest. He set the bird down in the snow. He opened the door and went inside and shut the door behind him. “Mama?” he whispered.

Halfway across the room he smelled the urine. He didn’t have to crouch to the duvet and work his hands through it and pull it away and touch the sheets beneath to know she was not there, but he did. And he didn’t have to step to the open bathroom door, or stand in it, or look down, just as his hand didn’t need to search for the wall switch, or his eyes to wait for a light to come on that he knew wouldn’t, didn’t need to do any of that to know she was in there. His hand stopped rattling the switch. His eyes relented.

She was lying on the floor. Her feet were swaddled in thick wool socks and her legs were wrapped in wool tights and above them her nightgown had fallen upwards so it showed her wool-covered knees, her thighs. Beneath her, the floor was wet. When he crouched he could feel its coldness on his shin, his knee, and he grabbed her nightgown and pulled her away from the toilet where her head lay buried in shadow. He crawled over her to reach her face. He held it. It was cold, too. On her cheeks, his hands shook. Shook her skin. Looking at it shake was bad and he yanked his hands away. Looking at it still was worse. He said her name, what her name was to him. In the last reaches of the window light, it was too dark to see if the wetness was just urine or also blood and, crouched over her, patting at her hair, around her skull, down her neck, finding the wetness on the nightgown by her belly and squeezing it and slapping his hands onto the tiles and sliding them back and forth in the wetness there, he still couldn’t tell, and he shoved himself up off the floor and ran to the kitchen for the flashlight.

In the brightness of its beam she looked almost alive. Her long white hair was gathered into all its fullness at the back of her head, her eyes were closed as if in mere weariness, her mouth slightly open, as if he had just put her to bed and she was simply whispering to him good night. The yellow of her bathrobe looked yellower in the light, almost warm. Beneath it she had put on a sweater. Around her neck she had wrapped a knit scarf. Her hands were mittened. And he thought,
She must have been so cold
.