The Great Glass Sea (8 page)

Looking over their shoulders, their red scarves flapping, the brothers watch it come. It grabs the lake and shakes, makes sails of their jackets, shoves their rowboat back. They hack faster, thrash their oars against it. The wind holds them in place.

And while they row the sun sinks, and the birds rise to spread across a sky gone red, and the wind comes on. The boat drives backwards against their struggling. They grip the handles harder, heave the paddles splash by splash, brother matching brother, one keeping pace with the other who rocks faster to keep pace with him until their backs burst into flame, their grunts to shouts, their fingers burning, their palms rubbed raw . . . And the oar jerks loose from Yarik’s hands. Just leaps free. How the boy lunges for it! How his fingers rake the air!

And Dima can see it: the pale sliver of wet wood rising and dipping on a wind-chopped wave, winking as it slips away. He can see the back of his brother’s head, so still and stiff against the seething lake, can see such mortification in that frozen neck, knows the way his brother’s eyes will look when Yarik has hidden the shame and fear, tried to pack it deep in his pupils, to keep it somehow from his twin. But Dima feels it, feels it like the splintery handle of the oar still gripped in his rubbed-raw palm. And then his fingers are free. Cold air kissing the torn skin.

One, two, three, four . . .

In his dream, he reaches down into the jars and soothes his blisters with the yolks of the eggs.

. . . five, six . . .

And with his dripping hands reaches up again and holds his brother’s. And soothes them.

. . . seven . . .

“
Kukareku
!” the boys shout.

. . . vosyem . . .

Such a long call! So drawn out and furious!

. . . devyat . . .

Wavery as a hurdy-gurdy’s wail! Listen: a
kolyosnaya lira
keening!

. . . desyat . . .

Hear the whooping of the crowd!

Dima woke to a sound in his throat like a bow striking a fiddle string, some strand of joy reverberating in his chest. Music. For a moment, he thought it came from out on the street—how many years had it been since he’d seen musicians play?—and then the chorus burst in, breaking with static, and he knew his mother had finally found her folk songs on the radio. That morning, after working his twelve-hour shift, he’d returned home to find her still dressed in her Red Army uniform, her cap replaced by a flowered scarf, turning the dials, confounded by the absence of her favorite evening show. Now, from the kitchen, he could hear her accompany it with clapping.

He lay on his cot, his eyes still shut, coming back into the world as slowly as he could. Outside his bedroom, the song wound down. The radio crackled with heavy gongs: the clock bells in the country’s capital keeping everyone on track.
One, two, three . . .
Each peal shook the daylight against his eyelids. He knew he should go back to sleep—in a couple hours he’d wolf a bowl of soup, catch the tram, get back on the glass, maybe pass Yarik returning from work—but he was watching windows in the distance: the lights of the cultural house pulsing, a celebration shaking the
dom kultura
’s walls. When he’d gone out to get the rooster, he hadn’t had time to travel farther down the road. Now, he was seeing it as it used to be: crammed with trucks and tractors, the fields to each side flickering with flashlight beams of farmers coming, the bonfire lighting all the faces of the kolkhozniki that swarmed the yard, clambered through the doorway into the hall. On his breastbone, he could feel their boot clomps, the beat of the double bass, and he kept his eyes closed, his breath quiet, tried not to leak out any of the air inside.

In the hall, it was thick with cigarette smoke, the waft of wet wool, alive with thuds of mud-matted boots as the crowd surged onto the dance floor, laughter in their eyes, vodka in their cheeks, whoops and cries and the guitar’s sudden strumming, the plucking of the gusli, the fiddler bending to his bow. Hands on hips and waists, boots banging down, the crowd began to dance.
Barinyas
and
troikas, kamarinskayas
and
khorovods
. The brothers wading in. Dima with his high-kneed stomps, Yarik’s horse-in-harness prancing. Until the musicians broke, the crowd cleared, the clapping began: the Cossack competition. Always, if the twins were there, they danced it. And if they danced it, they won.

At the bandleader’s call, the floor full of dancers would go still: crouched low, hovering on haunches, one leg stretched straight, the other bent beneath. The rules were simple: everyone at the same low squat, the same single kick per beat, the beats quickening, the legs tiring, the dancers collapsing until only one remained. There came the balalaika trill. The singer’s voice: long vowel swooping up and up. And the first beat would boom from the band, the second drowned beneath the crash of half a hundred heels hitting the floor as one, another hundred hands coming together in the rhythm-keeping clapping of the crowd. Everyone had their strategies: barefooters hitched heavy skirts high up their thighs; boot wearers padded their heels with hay; collaborators circled up, held shoulders for balance; singles crossed their arms, or pumped them, or flapped at the air as if hoping for lift. But Dima and Yarik would simply face each other, grip each other’s hands and, leaning back, lash their right legs out, their left, kicks so synchronized the muscles of one seemed to move the other’s, locked eyes blinking simultaneously at sweat, grins tighter and tighter until their jaws bulged, their thighs shook, the floor around them shook, the shaking floor emptier and emptier, and then just them, the thunderous clapping, the frenzied music, the brothers holding on.

Yarik sat by himself behind the dark windows in the backseat of the sedan. In his lap, one hand lay palm up, holding the mint the driver had made him take, the red and white cellophaned swirl shaking like a pinwheel on the edge of starting to turn. His other hand held tight to the rim of his hard hat, upturned on the seat beside him and shaking, too. He was still wearing his work gloves. When the foreman had called him over, told him to brush off his coveralled ass, shoved him towards the car—some new model of some non-Russian make, all gleaming black and glinting chrome—he had been too surprised to do anything but walk. When the driver had stepped out of the car to open the rear door, Yarik had waited for whoever was inside to climb out. But the backseat was empty.
Gospodin . . .
the driver said. Yarik couldn’t recall another time in his life when he’d been called “sir.” Ducking in, he had clanked his hard hat on the car’s roof, and by the time he’d yanked the hat off and shoved it down on the seat beside him, the driver was sitting in front, turned to face him, a smirk barely hidden in his eyes. The man held out a small silver box.
For the ride,
he said and flipped open the top. Inside: a dozen candies in shiny foils—rubies, sapphires, small squares of gold. The pinwheel mint was the only one with a wrapper clear enough to see through. Too late, he realized his fingers were still bulky with gloves. The driver, smirk slipping over his entire face, fished the mint out for him, held it until Yarik turned up his palm.

Now, on the car radio, the long knells of the Kremlin’s bell tower rang out. Three o’clock, Moscow time. His son would be with the neighbor they paid for after-kindergarten care, his baby crawling the rugs of the old woman’s apartment. His wife would be at work. His brother would be asleep. By now, Yarik would have been pushing through the toughest time of the day, out with his crew at the Oranzheria’s far edge, trying not to count the hours till the transport bus would carry him back along this road. The car sped on, passing heavy trucks and little Ladas that drove onto the shoulder to let them have their way. In every field he passed, the monstrous sprinklers slowly rolled, their long metal backs arched from one high wheel to the next, linked together for kilometers, darkening the earth with their artificial rain. Above, collection gutters ran like veins through the clear skin of the glass, tubes dropping to storage tanks, workers lining the irrigation ditches, manning the distribution valves, directing the flow of the canals. All paused when they saw the car. He saw the faces of the workers follow him and knew that he had felt that look before, felt it coming from his own face; he had simply never known till now what it felt like directed towards him.

It felt like he was someone else. As if, for a moment behind that tinted glass, he had become the man his mother had hoped her boy would grow to be. When he’d been born—he knew because she told him—she had brought him to her breast before Dima had followed into the world. Sometimes he wondered if his brother had come first would she have chosen Dima instead? Set Dima aside for success? Checked his schoolwork first? Insisted he learn to drink black tea while still too small for such bitterness, showed him how to suck it through a sugar cube, told her six-year-old son it would help him stay awake to study? Would she have brought Dima instead of Yarik to social evenings at the army base? Introduced Dima to the men who could pull strings, who she flirted with, cajoled, tried to ensure they’d tug just a little in just the right place for him?

By the time Yarik had turned nine, she’d found that place: his schoolboy fascination with Gagarin, Tsiolkovsky, Korolyov’s dream of men on Mars, the Mir space station orbiting above. He would be an engineer. And all her years as a secretary on the Petroplavilsk base, what favors she could nurse from her boss, what little she could save for bribes, had gone to opening a slot for him. One slot for one boy. All the pull she could put together would have never been enough for two. It was the way The Past Life worked, and all his earliest years he had worked towards it: memorized the multiplication charts their mother made him, learned his constellations—
Ursa Major, Hydra—
off a plastic place mat she gave him for his birthday, accompanied her to speeches by men who she said mattered. While their father, who had never understood ambition, took his other son to the park to hear the poets read; while their father, who was proof of what happened when a man had no will to rise, lay on his boat beside Dima beneath the stars, telling tales of the great bear, the sea serpent that swallowed the sun; their father, who suddenly, one day, was gone.

And then their mother, too. So subsumed by grief she had been taken away to a place where others could help her overcome her helplessness. And alone with Dima out at Dyadya Avya’s, month after month in only their old uncle’s care, what track had there been for Yarik to run on but whatever rail would keep him alongside his brother? What future was there to work towards but the end of the next day? And when, after that parentless year, the state gave them their mother back, when the three of them returned to the apartment on Avtovskaya Street, where was the woman who’d once wished for a bigger flat, a better life, who’d been so driven to drive her firstborn? Gone as her good secretary’s job, as her once-black hair, as her faith in him. Back then, he could feel the hollowness inside him where his mother’s hope had been scooped out: every connection she’d made, broken; every path she’d pushed him towards, closed; her hand too weak to pull him anywhere, let alone up. At night, back in their old room, he would leave his cot, crawl in with Dima, the two of them too used to sleeping together in the hay of their uncle’s izba to fall asleep apart. Curled into the curve of his brother, he’d stare across the room at the wall: behind there, he knew, their mother slept in a bed still sagged with the weight of her dead husband, knew she’d returned from the sanitarium stripped of the thing that had stirred her dreams of a bigger life for him, just as he’d known he had to let go of those dreams, too.

A slapping sound—the rubber strips that curtained the exit to keep the warm air in—and they were out of the Oranzheria: glass roof giving way to girders that became open sky, the earth preparation crews, and then the clearing crews, and then the logging crews, until the car was past everything but the receding din. Then that was gone, too. In the quiet, the car felt even bigger, the seat beside him emptier. Outside, the road was lined with tall pines, their needles new to the mirror-light, stands of birches still unaware of the pandemic winter would bring. He watched them flash by, nothing on either side but walls of woods. Until, up ahead, he saw the sign: T
HE
D
ACHAS
.