The Great Glass Sea (21 page)

That night he was too late to catch Yarik on the bus home, and when he got to his brother’s apartment it was Zinaida who answered the door.
He’s at your mother’s place,
she said,
looking for you.
She had the radio on, tuned to one of the few independent stations. Through her grateful prayers of relief, he listened to its breathy babble, the same that he had heard on the trolleybus he’d taken across town: how the police had overreacted, how the people hadn’t been protesters at all, how more would surely show up tomorrow, how it was all started by a man clinging to the statue of the city’s founding tsar, a man on a plinth reciting Pushkin (a lunatic, some said; a bum, said others; an agent of the sinking West sent to embarrass a Russia ascendant; a Communist, an anarchist, a poet, a fool). The TV news was off (
They didn’t even mention it,
Zinaida said,
as usual)
, but in a corner of the room a square screen glowed, brighter even than the television, and in color, too: a new computer where the samovar once sat. Timofei dragged his uncle over to show what his daddy had been watching before he left. The boy reached up and moved a pointer, clicked a button: a video. There was Dima, caught by some long lens, the telephoto making him seem running hard and going nowhere, his beard shaking, his eyes wild, each hand clasped over the toe of a shoe that banged against his chest.

The next day, he made sure to get there early. Already, the park was packed with people. The police sat in their cars, stood at the edges of the woods, rested their hands on their pistols, their billy clubs, did nothing. This time the crowd rippled away from him, made room for him to squeeze through, helped him scramble onto the plinth. He stood there, gazing over them, looking for the trash sweeper, the pelmyeni vender, the shopkeeper or the women in their suits, the old Communists, the girl, for some face from sometime earlier that he might recognize. But there were too many. He had to shut his eyes. He could feel the shoes swaying on their laces around his neck and he reached up with one hand and steadied them. Then—“You, who raise your swords for warfare . . .”—he began.

This was why he never rode the 119: the tram doors opened, the passengers burst out, Dima barely managed to keep his feet in the jostling, barely managed to shoulder on before the doors folded shut again behind his back. Just as they did, one more man squeezed in, shoved at Dima, grunted as he got caught. The tram jerked forward, engine whining as it picked up speed. Through the gap in the body-jammed door the cold air came sharpened by lakewind and wet with downpour, sent shivers up Dima’s soaked neck. This was why he stuck to less crowded trams, ones where he could find a seat, move to a window, watch the outside slip past in peace. The 119 went out to the suburbs where the new megastores—supermarkets, retail outlets, fast-food chains—were being built, and it was so crammed with people so burdened with bags that Dima couldn’t even see where she was. Until the next stop, when enough people poured out that he could get up two steps into the aisle and spot her yellow fare collector’s vest. Its pockets bulged with tickets and change, and it struck him—as if each coin were a marker for each minute of her shift—that she rode the trams all day, same as him. The crowd shifted with a bend in the tracks. In the bits of space between the passengers’ bodies he glimpsed hers: baggy jeans hanging off bony hips; safety pins splicing a broken-zippered sweatshirt; she had a wide peasant’s face, heavy brow, thick nose, sturdy mouth, all whittled down to delicate by her near-starved thinness; that shock of black hair flopped over her forehead, the rest of her scalp buzzed so close the skin showed through the stubble. He wondered what she was wearing on her feet.

Her shoes had long ago dried out. He’d knocked the dusty mud from their soles, stuffed them in his rucksack, would have to fight the press around him to get it off his shoulders before she got to him—coming through the crowd, collecting money, checking passes, tearing tickets. When she handed his torn stub back, he’d take the shoes out, give them to her.

But as the tram rocked along he realized it was too packed for her to move. Instead, coins came towards her on a current of passing hands, tickets flowing back like flotsam on a tide going out. He reached in his pocket, felt out a ten-rouble piece, started to pass it forward. His hand jerked, stopped; someone had grabbed his wrist. He swiveled his neck. Behind him, the man who’d gotten stuck in the doors gave a little nod. They were so close his chin touched Dima’s shoulder. He was a short man, old, eyes blurry behind greasy glasses, fingers gripping tight as a rubber band doubled on Dima’s wrist.

“Allow me,” the man said. “Please.”

By the time Dima realized what he meant, the old man was already passing forward a twenty-rouble bill.

“I listen to you on the statue,” the old man explained, his breath blowing the beardhair on Dima’s turned cheek. He smelled like jam.

“Thank you,” Dima told him, “but I don’t do it for money.”

“No, no,” the old man said.

“I don’t need the money.” Turning away, Dima saw the man’s bill reach her, saw her glance up to see from where it had come, saw her see him. He lifted his chin a little. She looked away. The gray light leaking through the rain-streaked window had been too weak for him to see the color of her eyes.

“What
do
you need?” It was the man behind him, again. “A new coat? Some warm food?”

“Nothing,” Dima said, this time without turning around. He kept his gaze on the girl, waiting for her to lift her eyes again, but she just handed the tickets to someone in the crowd, turned away. The whole time it took for the tickets to come back, he watched her refuse to look at him, and when he finally reached to take them, the old man’s arm shot past Dima’s face, snagged the tickets.

“A gift,” the old man said, handing one to him.

“Thank you.”

“No, no. I want to give you a gift.” The old man smiled. “Maybe a haircut? A shave?” His teeth were full of poppy seeds.

“I don’t need—”

But the tram squealed, the crowd leaned forward in a wave, leaned back, the doors opened, a stream of passengers rushed out, the doors closed, the tram was moving, and the man was saying, “
I
know what you need.” His black-speckled smile. “You know what you need?”

“No.”

“No?” The smile spread to show Dima the wedges of poppy seeds mashed into the man’s gums. “That’s because,” the man said, “you don’t have to stand here with your nose smashed up against your neck.”

Dima nodded, as if he knew what that meant, looked back at the girl; she looked away.

“Don’t be offended,” the man said. “Don’t take it the wrong way, my friend.” The man leaned in close enough his stubble scratched Dima’s neck. “Comrade”—the tram lurched, the man grabbed Dima’s shoulder—“Comrade, let me treat you to a bath. A nice hot bath. Who doesn’t need a good hot banya on a day like this?”

“A banya?” someone said.

Another, packed close by: “Who’s got time for a banya?”

“There aren’t any,” a third said, talk bubbling up around them. “Not anymore.”

“Maybe in his apartment.”

“His tub.”

“Come on,” the old man said, taking hold again of Dima’s wrist, “this is our stop.”

The brakes started their squeal. Dima yanked his wrist free just as the tram jerked, almost fell forward into the person in front who was reaching a hand back to him. In the hand: a piece of paper. A tram ticket.

The doors opened. The cold wet air. “Come on,” the old man said again.

The hand shook the ticket at him. Dima glanced around to see who it was meant for, heard the man who was holding it tell him, “She said to give it to you.”

A tug at his back: the old man grabbing his coat. Next to him, the people getting off shoved by. She had written something on it. He held it up, squinted at it, sensed behind it, in the distance, that she was looking at him. She was. She shook her head, gave it jerk, as if she wanted him gone, looked away again.

Pvilsk rail yard, car
#
38, tomorrow, 21.00, don’t be seen

By the time he had read it, the doors had shut, the tram was pulling away, there was the clacking of the contactors on the wires as it disappeared down the street.

The iron fence was more rust than paint, the courtyard it guarded all weeds, the same few strains of night-blind scrub spread wild in the stead of photoperiodic flowers, grasses too confused to produce seeds. Over them, a past life’s evergreens were exploded with root-sprung branches, strange shapes of trees trying to replace their winter-burned boughs farther up. Between them a path buckled towards the bathhouse door, the black-cracked pink of the flaking stucco walls, the entranceway an arch below a plastic picture of V. I. Lenin—red star and wheat sheaves and hammer and sickle and all—that trailed a long electric cord as if harboring a hope of one day lighting up again.

Passing beneath it, something plucked at Dima’s inside, told him
turn around, leave,
but the man was pulling at his arm and by the time Dima had tugged his elbow free they were already in the foyer. As if he’d loosed Dima’s arm on purpose, the man slipped behind him, started easing off his coat. From the window of a cramped coat-check booth, an old babushka in a scarlet shawl reached out with heavy arms. Their coats, their wallets: once he’d relinquished those, there seemed nothing left but to climb the steps behind his balding guide, past plastic plants missing half their leaves, walls stuck with pictures that looked ripped off calendars decades out-of-date: photos of factory workers with sleeves rolled up, farmers beaming as if about to sing.

The changing room was packed with men, most old, all either wrapped in towels or nude. They greeted Dima by name, as if guests at a party planned for him. Passing between the benches, he nodded back, silent but for his squishing footsteps. Did he know them? He didn’t think so. The man with the poppy seed–flecked teeth set down his bag on the rubber mat, took out two towels, two pairs of flip-flops, two brown bottles of kvass. He popped their caps, handed one to Dima, raised his own. “To chance meetings,” he said and tipped his back.

Chance?
The word plucked at him the way
leave
had a moment ago. What, he wondered, could this man want with him? What could any of them? Weirder, yet, how could the man have been so right about how much Dima had missed this: the malty sweetness of the kvass, his bare skin prickling in anticipation of the steam. Because the other passengers had been right, too: in the past years, watching the city’s bathhouses close one by one, he’d wondered if any would be left, if he’d ever enter a banya again.

The quiet squeaks of their flip-flops on the wet tile floor, the pocket of warmer air between the first door and the second, the way the sounds of all the bathers washed over him with the steam, the heat: Dima could feel his muscles relax their grip on his bones. Outside, the rain beat against the fogged window glass. Inside, a dozen naked men moved through the steam-soft light, filling plastic basins from rumbling taps, scrubbing their skin with soapy sponges, chatting and laughing, their voices mixed with the slosh of water, the murmur of pipes. Dima lifted a basin off a wet bench, splashed some water in. Swirling it around, he asked the man who’d brought him how often they all came.

“We don’t,” the old man said. “I mean, we can’t, not anymore, not regularly.” He scrubbed at his basin with some soap. “Only on special occasions,” he said, and handed Dima the bar.

Dima glanced at the other men. Some nodded, some just watched him back. “What’s the occasion?”

The old man smiled his poppy seed smile. “You.” He walked to the other end of the bench, slopped his soapy water over the grated drain. “To congratulate you.”

“For what?”

The man passed by, flip-flops squeaking. Filling his basin at the faucets again, he said, “To
welcome
you.”

From all around: a rumble of mumbled greetings.

Dima stood with his soaped-up basin in his hands. “Welcome me to what?”

“To the Party.”

“The Communist Party?”

“Of course,” the man said, and in one heave dumped the entire basin of hot water over his own head. Wiping at his eyes, he blinked them open, smiled. “We’re so glad,” he said, “to see you following in your mother’s footsteps.”