The Great Glass Sea (70 page)

The workers followed him above, flowing around the hole in the glass, moving in their fur-hooded parkas like a slowly blown cloud. And the black shapes of their boot soles were like flocks of geese flying beneath it, and their steps were like wing flaps. Occasionally, in the sun, one of their shovels gleamed.

Down there, Dima hauled his mother’s body in its heavy wrappings of wool. It left a wet dark trail in the dirt of the road. Then he was crossing the overflow ditch, and the water was splashing around him in the light, and the blanket came out dripping. The flowers of the rapeseed plants shook as he entered them, bright yellow in the sun and deep yellow in the shadows of the men who stood above. The field was mottled with all their shade, and Dima moved in and out of it, a row of bent plants shaking in his wake. When he stopped, the men above him stopped. The shadows held. He lay the bundle down in the yellow rapeseed flowers, and with the blade of the shovel began to cut at their roots.

He had dug away the first black layer of topsoil, a rough rectangle of dirt, when, across the field, back on the road, the company truck began to move. Even from above, the workmen could see how bashed in it was, how smashed the windshield, the missing side-view mirrors, the way it made a slow turn, forward and back and forward and back, between the edges of the road, until it was facing the way from which it had come. They watched it go. The dust hung in the air where it had been, and thinned, and was gone, too. Then, as if they had been waiting for a sign, the men themselves began to disperse, some scraping with their shovels at the last of the snow, some following with the wide brooms. Only a few lingered on, their heads bent over the glass, watching the figure down below: the sway and flap of the coat around his legs, the sparks of sweat and shards of glass flung from his tangled hair and beard, his thin arms driving the shovel blade over and over—flash and gone, flash and gone—into the dark hole slowly opening before him.

Tonight he will go down to the lake. The sky will be dark and murky as a river, the zerkala glinting in it like the Chudo-Yudo’s eyes on its two dozen heads. How huge the arm of the great bronze tsar beneath them. How small the shape that passes beneath its outstretched finger. How still the masts of the leisure boats. There, caught in the ice, a rowboat lies, its old wood white as some calcified fossil, extinct amphibian, gunwales for bones, hull for its shell, the two oars jutting out like frozen limbs. He wanders past it through the snow. In the place where he had cleared it the day before, the new snow is a slight depression. In the mirror-light it lifts before his boots: puffs of glow. Over on the industrial docks, the winter crews are repairing the summer ships, their headlamps small pinpricks of brightness, warm-seeming the way lamps used to seem on the streets in the hour between daylight and dark. But they are only headlamps. The rest of the light will stay like it is for the rest of the night.

Soon he will be far enough from them that they will seem part of the world of the shore, and he will seem part of the world of the lake. He trudges through the snow, over the ice, his long wool coat dragging at the drifts where the wind has lifted them like waves. His back is bulged with his rucksack. His rucksack is bulged with something tied to it. The rope dangles down—long, thin, black—into the snow. And when he reaches the wide open windswept plain where the gusts have cleared it of all but ice, and the ice is all a reflection of the sky, and he is a dark shape amid the countless gleams of the mirrors above and below, the rope seems to move. The rucksack shivers. For a moment, small black wings sprout from his back, flap at the air, and fold away again.

The ice had broken on the lake, and there remained only a thin cracking ring of it breaking up along the shore, and it was spring, when Yarik went out to Nizhi to see his brother. He caught a ride on one of the smaller fishing boats, paid the captain to take him out. The big trawlers were at work, and above them the flocks of jaegers and oystercatchers and gulls followed in dark swirls, as if caught in nets cast into the sky. Standing at the gunwale, out of the way of the milling crew, he could almost feel on his palms the rough wet rope two dockside crewmen were drawing out of the water; there was the strain in his shoulders, pulling the heavy net; Dima’s grunts beside him. . . . A tug at his mouth; he pressed his lips together, stilled it. Staring out at the waves, he tried to press the rest still, too: the rocking under him, the heartbeat pulsing in his fingertips. How long had it been since he’d been this far out in the lake? Never on his own. Around him the water was wide as a second sky. He looked away from it, up: his own boat’s own small cloud of birds. Where, once, there had been stars. Flickering with the barks of a distant dog. On that long gone night when his brother, lying beside him in the rowboat bottom, had let out one quiet bark of his own.
Gav!
Through his smile, Yarik had sent up a yip to join the sound. Together, quietly, they’d said
Gav! Gav! Gav!
up at the stars. He could still feel it. He could still hear his brother’s whisper, a while later:
I’m glad
that there were two of them together
. They had been studying the pre-Sputnik days in school—Cosmonaut Dezik, Cosmonaut Tsygan, first dogs to reach suborbital space, first living breath heard back on earth by mission control—and that night they had wondered: when the panting had paused was it the companions catching their breath at the sight of the moon rolling around the earth? When the world outside the capsule went up in flames, was the whimpering from fear, or pain, or were they simply trying to tell each other
I’m here
?

By his sides, Yarik’s hands had clenched. He stretched them open. The birds circled above. The cold wind came on. He zipped his jacket up. And, gripping the gunwale, tried to press the pulsing from his fingers. His hands, motionless, doing nothing. He looked up—all around him the fishermen were in their churn of work—and let go his grip and walked off the deck into the cabin.

Where he stayed until the boat stopped. He had unlatched his case and taken a folder out and sat hunched over it, trying to read, trying not to think about his brother, about what his brother would think of all that had happened in the months since he had disappeared—their mother’s body reinterred in the cemetery of the Alexandro-Nevsky church, the apartment where she’d raised them sold to the Shopsins for little more than Gennady’s good will, the way Yarik needed allies, now that his office was four doors down from Bazarov’s, now that The She Bear kept him close in all ways but the one that had once mattered, the cub who’d acted out become a colleague now whose worth was soley in how much he could increase that of the Consoritum—and, shutting his eyes to the words that swayed with the rolling of the boat, Yarik did not see the island rise out of the lake like the back of some pelagic beast, nor the winter chapel shape itself out of the shadows of the clouds, nor the bell tower, nor the dock.

So when the captain called to him down the steps and he shut his case and gathered his gift in his other arm and climbed up onto the deck, he was not prepared for how huge the church was. As boys, they had studied the monks from centuries ago, the way they’d felled the pines, brought them on barges across the lake, each log and plank and sliver of wood scribe-fitted, round-notched, dovetailed, not a nail, not a pin, not a single piece of metal in the entire thing, each tiny shingle hand-hewn from an aspen’s heart, cut like lace, all fifty thousand of them covering all thirty swooping domes. He’d known the numbers. But not how the shingles would shimmer in the sun, flickering like ghosts of the leaves of the aspens they had come from. Not how the domes would crowd each other, tight as a phalanx of geese, an entire V-shaped flock bursting upwards towards the sky.

He sat in the skiff, facing the crewman the captain had promised to send back before dark, watching the island draw near. On his lap, he held the gift he’d brought. The plastic covering the wicker basket crackled in the wind. He bent his head around it, thought he saw someone running out of the aspen woods—but it was only a caught piece of cloth, flapping. He thought he saw the shape of a thin man in a distant field—but it didn’t move, and didn’t move, and was a post. The oars splashed, the boat creaked. He listened to the rower’s breath, his chest too tight around his own.

They pulled up beside the only part of the dock that hadn’t fallen in, and the crewman held the boat steady while Yarik heaved up onto the canted boards, and then the man passed him the basket and his briefcase, and was rowing away.

The wind tugged at Yarik’s hair. His jacket puffed, snapped. There were no boot prints in the mud along the shore, no muddy footprints on the old wood, either. Something about that made him need to swallow and something about the stillness of the island made him unable to. These things moved: reeds, grass, a few small specks of birds, flecks of straw lifted off a long-rotted haystack, the broad wooden sails of a far-off windmill turning slowly. He watched for a long time waiting to see anything else.

The pogost—the church, the bell tower, all that was inside the enclosure of the walls—was hidden by the bulwarks that surrounded it. They were high stone walls made higher by logs built on top, then covered with a shingled roof that ran the entire length of the stockade. But he could tell there was no chimney smoke, could see the broken glass in some of the windows, the lack in all of them of any shape stirring. Amid all that stillness he made himself move, walked off the dock, carried his briefcase and his basket through the wind and up the overgrown path towards the huge high cross that stood above the open gate.

Mud, wood, walls, windows. All the round stones of the enclosure. Standing inside it, he wondered what had happened to all the monks. If they had all left long ago, or if some had stayed, and if any who had had lived, and if they had, where were they? If there had just been one he would have gone to him, and spoken quietly, slowly, in case it had been a very long time since anyone had spoken on the island at all, and he would have asked,
Have you seen a man? Did he come out here in winter? Did he look like me?

The only people there were in the graves. A sparse crop of wooden crosses in the overgrown field in the shadow of the smaller church. Each marker was as tall as his chest and roofed in a small peak of boards, and all of them were weathered gray and splintery and half-hidden in the brittle stalks of last summer’s dead grass. He walked through it, feeling it scratch his hands, snap wind-whipped at his legs, looking for a cross of still-raw wood, a grave that was newly dug. But who would have dug it?

He set his briefcase and the basket down. For a moment, he stood in the high grass and the strong wind, still as if he had been planted there and would stay until he weathered and grayed, too. Then he began to run. He ran across the churchyard into the smaller winter chapel and shoved open the door and ran inside and his footsteps echoed as he tore around the dark of the room, and he ran out again and across the yard again and into the giant summer church and the cavernous wood-smelling world of the place and shouted at the broken candles and the window light streaming over them and the icons peering back from the walls, shouted his brother’s name, and he ran out and across the yard and into the bell tower and up through the close air that seemed as if it had hidden inside the deep well of the stairs for longer than he had breathed air at all, and when he reached the top he rose into the cold fresh wind again and the thin strings tied to the end of the ropes fell over his face, light and drifting as an infant’s fingers. He grabbed them in his fists. He wrapped them around his knuckles. He hauled down.

The sound of the clanging hit him as if the brass bells themselves had dropped. So loud, so close by his ears. He threw his weight into the ropes and slammed the knockers against the bells again. And then they were moving him, dragging his arms up and down, his weight caught in a dance with their weight, and lifting, falling, rocking back and forth, he watched the country that spread out from far below to far away. The scattered roofs of houses that had once belonged to peasants. The hayfields scrubby with saplings. The faint strip that ran through the high grass, connecting distant house to distant house, that must, once upon a time, have been a road. The bell clangs were coming further and further apart, his body slowing in their ropes, when he saw the dark square of a field. Nearly black newly turned soil. And standing in the middle of it: a dog. The sound came to him through his still ringing ears: high, wind-borne barking. The bells clanged, and slowed, and some stopped, and the others stopped, and he hung there in the ropes, in the quiet, listening. He thought he heard a whistle. He thought he heard the faintest hint of a man’s far-off voice. But when he saw the dog cross the field into the grass and saw the grass moving ahead of it, and ahead of the grass the shape of a man walking, he knew it was his brother.