The Great Glass Sea (57 page)

Through one open doorway he could see into what looked like a bedroom: a mattress big as the one he and Zinaida had just bought, smothered in a pampering of pillows, their cases worn, the edges split. Through another doorway: a mammoth television, its dead screen skewbald with mottled splotches. On top of it someone had placed an ironing board. From beyond, there came the chirrups of hatchlings: cages covered with once-bright towels faded almost free of the depictions dyed in their cloth: a dolphin, a starfish, two trunks of palm trees silhouetted by a sun.

When Mrs. Kartashkin brought Yarik his tea, the cup was monogrammed in silver:
LMK,
same as was stitched above the fraying edge of her robe. He pulled his glance from both: on her age-pilled sweater, he recognized the logo of some designer brand Zinaida had only recently been able to buy. But when the old kulak joined him at the table, he could not stop staring at Stepan Fyodorovich’s face. They had called him that—
old kulak
—since long before he was old. Now he had grown into it. It wasn’t the way his mouth had pinched, his skin sagged off his neck, not even anything contained in his eyes—his eyes were pit-hard and calculating as ever—but something inside the man, the life in him: it hung off his frame like the flesh left after a sudden loss of weight. Now that Kartashkin had taken off his coat, Yarik could see the old man was still in his pajamas.
SFK
over the heart. Half the buttons gone. Through the gaps, patches of gray hair curled.

He was glad he had worn his suit. The night before, he’d asked Zina to trim his hair. That morning, he had shaved, ironed his slacks, put on the new tie. The saddlebags had wrinkled his jacket—he had slid them off his shoulder when he’d come in, let them slump beside his boots—but they had left their leathery scent on him, and he was glad of that, too. The room stank of chicken feathers and bird scat and the smoke of the woodstove and of cigarettes. The old kulak drew on the one in his mouth, took out the stub, stuck it in a cake pan full of sand. The pan was already littered with a pack’s worth of butts, and in between them the sand was stabbed with deep small holes, too small for cigarettes, as if someone had poked it with a knitting needle, over and over again. Next to it, on the table, a cigar box sat: gold-foil seal, some coat of arms stamped on top. Kartashkin lifted the lid. Inside: a pack of the same cheap Troikas that Yarik smoked. The old man dug a cigarette out, offered it. Yarik shook his head. While the man lit up, his wife bent before the masonry stove, pot holders in her hands, opened the iron door, drew out another cake pan, and taking off the table the one full of butts, slid the new one in front of her husband. It was full of sand, too. Yarik could feel the heat come off it. The woman watched Kartashkin as if she expected him to do something with what she’d brought, but he hadn’t even seemed to notice. Smoke leaking out his nostrils, he stared past Yarik, at the floor, the leather bags.

“You want to know what’s in the bags?” Yarik asked him.

Kartashkin tugged his gaze away. He had dumped his handful of feathers on the table when he’d sat down; now he reached to the pile. “I thought,” he said, “you would come with your brother.”

“He’s at home.”

The old man nodded, drew a feather out. It was viridescent, speckled with flecks of blue and brown, long as his forearm. “You live together?”

“Money,” Yarik said.

“He told me . . .”

“In the bags.”

“. . . that when you had the money”—Kartashkin raised the feather over the cake pan—“you would come each with your half to buy it.”

“That was almost a year ago,” Yarik said, and watched the kulak stab the feather into the hot sand. “What are you doing?”

“Tempering,” Kartashkin told him. He left the feather standing straight up in the pan and, searching through the pile for another, said, “Does he know you’re here?”

Through the smoke the old man breathed out, Yarik could see his wife standing over the stove, picking the old butts out of the other pan.

Her husband’s fingers picked through the feathers, drew another out. It was a rich purple deepening to black, a gleaming plume that swooped down in an arc so long it swished against the table. “I gave him one of these,” Kartashkin said.

“A feather?”

The old man laughed. It was a phlegmy sound cut short by a cough. “The whole bird. He said he was going to give it to you as a gift.”

“For my daughter.”

“A daughter!” He turned his wrinkled neck till his cough-wet eyes caught his wife’s. “Little Yarik has a daughter.”

“How old?” she asked.

“For her first birthday,” Yarik told them.

“That bird?” the woman said.

The old man was shaking his head. “He told me it was for you. A Golden Phoenix is not a gift for a little girl.”

“I know,” Yarik said. “I made him take it back.”

“Back?” Kartashkin had stuck the feather in the sand, and he said the word with such force the black plume shivered from his breath. “He didn’t bring it back.”

“He kept it,” Yarik said.

“I wouldn’t have taken it back.” Kartashkin sucked at his cigarette, fished out a third feather, jammed it in, too. “It was a gift.”

Watching the old man hunt out a fourth, Yarik tried to glean from the word what it was that was really making him so mad.

“It was a gift,” Kartashkin said again, “from
me
.”

“My daughter—”

“Not to your daughter. To your
brother
.”

“I’m sure—”

“Do you know how much a full-tailed Golden Phoenix is worth?”

“No,” Yarik said.

“I could sell a bird like that—”

“But you didn’t.” This time Yarik cut the old man off. “You gave it to my brother as a bribe because you were hoping to get out of the contract you signed, because you were hoping to stab in the back the kolkhozniki . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“My uncle . . .”

“I have a right—”

“You have a right to sell the land only to one of their sons. Or—because my uncle had no sons—to me.”

There was the squeal of another stove door opening, and a flickering orange light flashed around the room. Kartashkin’s wife tossed her handful of butts into the fire and shut the door again. At the table, the old man stuck one feather after another into the baking pan, stab, stab, stab, in quick succession, until the entire handful he’d brought in stood straight up in the hot sand, brilliant reds and golds and green-tinged blacks shivering between the men. When he was done, he pointed through the feathers, his finger jutting palely between the colors. “Where did you get them?”

“The bags? They’re from America.”

“They look like something your brother dug out of the trash.”

“We’re not talking about my brother,” Yarik said.

“He said he had half.”

Yarik reached out and, with the backs of his knuckles, pushed the cake pan aside. The metal burned, but he didn’t take his hand away until the space between the two of them was clear again. “In those bags,” he said, “is much more money than my brother could ever come up with. More than you could ever get from both of us combined.”

Kartashkin finished his cigarette, stubbed it into an empty corner of sand. But instead of opening the cigar box for another, he reached past it and dragged across the table a knife. A pen knife, the blade folded away into the handle. “That’s the problem,” he said. “What you two could ever get could never be enough.”

Yarik watched the old man open the blade, test it along the hairs of his forearm. “I said,” Yarik told him, “that it was
more
than we could get.”

The kulak pulled out of the cake pan the first feather he’d stuck in the sand. Its stalk had gone from the clearness of fingernails to clouded as bone. “But you also say that you have it.” With the edge of the knife, Kartashkin began to scrape upwards along the opaque tube, millimeter by careful millimeter, stripping away the plume. “And,” he said, “although I am impressed with your suit and your tie, although I can see that you cleaned yourself up meticulously to come and see me, I once was clean and meticulous and had money, too, and I can also see that your tie is too short, and that you don’t know how to make a knot, and that your suit is old and worn-out, either by you or, more likely, by someone else before you even bought it, and I know that however much you’ve managed to get, it can’t be enough.” He had cleaned the quill smooth for a length as long as his long fingers, and he leaned forward now and blew the scrapings from the table. “Because,” he said, “you might be one of the few who have the right to buy it, but I’m the only one who has the right to sell it.” He held the feather as if it were a pen, moved it in the air a little, testing how it felt in his fingers. “I set the price.”

Pressing the feather against the wood, so its arc bent away from the table, he angled the blade carefully against the bottom tip of the stem. Kartashkin had just begun to cut when Yarik shoved back his chair and rose, the table creaking beneath his hands, shaking as he left it. The old man lifted away the blade, steadying the feather as Yarik strode to the saddlebags, hauled them up, back to the table, heaved them on it and, yanking their buckles loose, turned them over and shook. The stacks of rubber-banded roubles tumbled out. They mounded in the middle of the table and filled it and mounded higher until Yarik had emptied every last note from both saddlebags, and then he dropped them, buckles clattering, and pushed out his chair again and sat.

“Ten million roubles,” he said.

Kartashkin looked from the pile to Yarik. Then back down at the feather in his hand. With the tip of the knife, he began his careful cut again. Yarik stared at him, watched the old man make his cut and turn the feather and make a smaller cut from the other side, and the whole time he could feel Kartashkin’s wife standing in the room staring, too.

“Stepan,” she said.

The old kulak raised a hand to hush her. “This is the tricky part,” he said. “You squeeze the tip like this and press it flat until you hear . . .” From the quill beneath his fingers there came a quiet crack. He held the tip up, as if for Yarik to see. “Just a small slit. Just enough to guide the ink . . .”

“Styopa,” his wife said.

“ . . . into the nib.”

She took a step towards him, towards the table, and he whipped around. “Go outside,” he told her.

“Styopushka . . .”

“Get your coat on and go outside.”

“Styopushka, it’s a lot of money.”

“Go into the goddamn shed and feed the goddamn roosters and don’t come back until I call you.” He watched her until she was gone and then he put down the feather and he put down the knife and he looked at Yarik. “She’s right,” he said, “it is a lot of money. It’s probably about as much as a reasonable man could expect in reasonable times.”

“It’s more,” Yarik said.

“But let me ask you something. How long do you think a reasonable man would live like this?” He swept a hand at the room, the house. “How long, if he was sitting on land worth ten million roubles?”

“You couldn’t—”

“And at my age?”

“You couldn’t sell it until—”

“You think other sons of other kolkhozniki didn’t try?”

“Not with ten million roubles.”

“At my age!” Kartashkin said. “What in the world do you think I’ve been waiting for?”

Yarik reached down and lifted the saddlebags off the floor. He set the leather on his lap, opened a pouch, reached to the pile of money. The old man’s hand was on the back of his before he’d closed his fingers around the first stack.

“Then let me ask you something else,” Kartashkin said. “Do you think you and I are living in reasonable times?” His hand still gripping Yarik’s, the old man stood. He tugged at Yarik’s wrist. “Come,” he said, let go, patted Yarik’s knuckles once, and, in his unsteady gait, shuffled to the window.

The air in the room was so filled with smoke that, from a distance, the glass had looked fogged, but stepping beside Kartashkin, Yarik could see it was just old glass, wavery and flawed, but clear.

“Look,” Kartashkin said, as if out there existed the answer to everything the old man had asked: the brown slush of the yard; the old woman in her coat and curled hair hauling a heavy bucket of feed; the privy with its dark ditch at the back; the vast white field marred by all the scrub; the lone blue roof and plywood windows out in the distance; the church spire and the chimneys of town beyond that. And just on the other side, just a little farther, the long slit in the sky: a strip unending from one edge of all that could be seen to the other. “Half a year ago,” the old man said, “we couldn’t even see it from here. Half a year before that, it seemed a rumor.” He turned, his face close enough Yarik could smell the smoke on his breath. “How long do you think it will be before it reaches the village? How long after that before it gets here? That”—he jabbed a finger at the window, the tip pressed pale against the glass—“is what I’m waiting for. Because sooner or later that rich bastard is going to need this land. And if he needs it, he’ll find a way to buy it, or his lawyers will, or whoever he hires to get around the rules that other people can’t. I’ve set my price. And I’m sorry, Yaroslav Lvovich, but it’s twice what you have there. Twenty million roubles. Unreasonable? To a man like you, maybe. Even standing here now, saying it, it sounds unreasonable to me. But to Boris Bazarov? It’s nothing. If The She Bear wants it, he’ll pay for it.”