The Great Glass Sea (11 page)

On the way back, he noticed that the forest around the mansion had been logged. Old pines clear-cut and, in their place, new ones planted. He wondered if this new woods was Bazarov’s preparation for the day when mirrors would reach here, too. And when they passed The Dachas, the place seemed different to him—the trees less dark, billboards less garish, even the sounds simply background noises of any busy store—and he felt so far away from the kind of people who were in there. Turning from the window, he lay his head back on the headrest. He pulled his gloves out of his pockets. He put them over his face and shut his eyes.

It had begun long ago, his brother slipping away from him. Sometime in the years when they were young and living off what they could scavenge out at the old kolkhoz, when the country was still scavenging, too, picking the bones of its dead empire to feed the dreams of Western wealth perestroika had begot, its people ever more desperate as there was ever less of it to have, sometime in the first years of the new century when the onetime citizens of the old superpower chose for their next president an oil oligarch who shouted over the swelling orchestration of his ads:
I am Kirill Andreievich Slatkin, and I will run Russia like I run my business!
Watching the chained-down TV in the corner of a blini shop in town, Yarik had wondered just what that meant—
Unfetter the free market! Shed the last vestiges of old socialist ways!
—until the new president turned his promises into laws: gone was the winter hardship supplement; gone, the assurance of a job; doctors turned away the sick; pensioners opened their checks from the state, squinted at the minuscule amount, used all they had left to buy some padding for their shoes, a better cane, returned to work. And just two years after she had retired—her pension just enough to live on, her apartment assured—Yarik’s mother left for the textile plant again. Two years: in this new land, that was too long ago to measure. Such was the speed of life in the new Russia.

While, inside their buried den, Yarik had lain beside his brother, Dima still flipping through the same old fables, and turned to science fiction instead, books by
inventors as much as authors, stories about
how
,
why
, ideas with practical use in the actual world, the one of work and responsibility and caring for their mother that, halfway through their twenties now, Yarik insisted they had to face, had to choose to set aside their wandering days, turn back together to the city at the edge of the lake.

There, the man they’d called The She Bear, The Baron, was building ships. Fishing vessels the size of the factory trawlers that plied the northern seas. No one had known why he would need ones so huge, only that he was paying men to build them. Fishermen eyed the better wage, grounded their old wood drifters, went to work on the docks. Yarik had watched them go, seen the lake grow empty of boats, gone instead back to their father’s old gillnetter, retooled its motor, patched its hull.

Each day, before dawn, in the years when dawn had still been a lifting of the dark, he and Dima would load the skiff with bait, push off the beach, row out. All day they fished among their father’s memory, leaning over gunwales he’d carved, hauling in nets he’d repaired. And, in the evening, heading back to shore while Dima cleaned the catch, the day just good enough to keep them until the next, the next day promising the same, Yarik could feel his brother’s contentment, his own peace.

Maybe it would have stayed that way if Bazarov had never launched his mirrors. By the time the fifth was drifting through the sky, the fishing industry, paused by all the shipbuilding, had boomed again.

In the unending light, algae spread across the surface of Otseva, tadpoles flourished, fry multiplied, carp swelled to twice their size, sturgeon lived as if in everlasting spring, their roe harvested easily as berries from a bush—but all of it slipping out of the brothers’ reach. Seeking waters cool and dark the fish swam down, down too deep for the tackle of their small smack. But not for the oligarch’s leviathan trawlers, his sea-size seiners, their fog lights crowding the lake, their nets smothering it.

Above the boat, the sides of giant ships slid by like cliffs, their nets claiming ever greater swaths, the lake shrinking around the brothers, their catches, too. But the more Yarik worried, the more Dima swore all they had to do was shrink their needs as well: new clothes given up for secondhand ones, movie theaters forgone for evenings of reading aloud, shots of vodka savored instead of swigged, meat made luxury, sometimes a whole meal skipped.

His brother hardly seemed to notice, though Dima must have seen how it hit Yarik: the way the older twin spat back onto his plate the chicken bones he’d cracked for marrow; the evenings he stood outside the theater’s exit door, ear pressed to metal, eyes shut tight, trying to imagine the sight; the hours at home, back from the boat, that he spent slumped before the television, flipping through channel after channel of news.

All the stories of all those men in Moscow: one who made a killing on fish flown overnight from Asia, another who ran a mountain range of pastures efficiently as factories, shepherds to meatpackers, management rocketing overhead on shuttles launched into the exosphere by yet another who, in The Past Life, had been a low-level apparatchik, a failed actor, a farmboy, heir not to fortune but to a state of mind, the same that once drove the Soviets to try reversing their rivers’ flow, to drill in search of the center of the earth, the sort of wonders that the USSR had failed to realize, that only the Russia which replaced it—oligarchs bred beneath the clamp of communism let loose upon loot-fueled dreams—could make come true.

Even in those early days there had been an entire TV channel devoted to Petroplavilsk: the Consortium, the space mirrors, the great glass sea. News stories about another satellite sent up. Progress reports on the Oranzheria’s increasing reach. Documentaries on the ecosystem chain that led from Lake Otseva’s blooming algae to its bigger yields of fish, the scientific feats that reached into plants’ cells and found the genes that felt sunlight, knew to blossom, bear fruit beneath a longer or a shorter night. Sometimes, after watching a story on some new flower the Consortium was planting in the parks, Yarik would shut the TV off, wander outside, crouch down, touch a petal. Sometimes, on the boat, laying out nets in what once would have been dark, he would gaze up at the zerkala, eyes watering at their light, and hear again the television’s voice:
spectrums
and
non-special-case geosynchronous orbit
and
a thousand kilometers up in the sky
.

And lying in his bed in the room he had still shared with his brother, listening to the night sounds on the street that in his childhood had been the sounds of day, he would wonder how the billionaire had done it, what The Baron had been in the life before—A brigade manager on some factory floor? A beetle-browed student? An aspiring engineer?—who Boris Bazarov had been as a boy. Behind the wall, his mother coughed in her sleep. His twin tossed in the cot they used to share. Dima’s unsettled breath, the creaking of the springs. Yarik had known that if he got up and lay beside his brother the tossing would stop, the breathing would calm. From the apartment upstairs: a tinkling of water; the rush of it flowing down through the pipes. Sometimes he could feel time trickling between him and his brother. Eroding, gullying. Until the gulf between them seemed wide as the space between their beds. His own breathing would ruffle. He would sit up. And, rising, pad to his brother’s cot, climb in.

There were nights, too, when he didn’t, when he never even climbed into his own, nights when he left Dima at the docks and, claiming some chore that needed doing, went behind the clanging yards to an old shipping container where a woman or two sat on the ledge, inside the open loading door, swinging legs in zerkala light. There were nights when he went out to clubs, stood against the wall until some dance-slicked girl came up to him; others when he went to the dom kultura without his brother, danced with girls out there, instead.

Sitting in the back of the billionaire’s car, watching the tree-splintered light flicker over his shut eyelids, listening to the tires’ ceaseless hush, he knew Dima would have said it had been his need for a wife that had carved the gulley between them, his son that eroded one shore, his daughter the other, their work on the Oranzheria, day after day, rising like a flood.

When he’d first told his brother about the jobs—how much the Consortium would pay, how fast they’d be snatched up, the fact that he was going to apply—Dima had listened silently, gathering the mooring rope hand over hand, watching it coil at his feet. Until Yarik reached over and stopped him.

“Bratets,” he said, “I have to. We have to move out.”

“Where?” Dima asked.

“To our own apartment.”

“Why would we need our own apartment?”

This was September. Zinaida had been living with them since July. Yarik waited for Dima to understand, listened to the waves slap at the hull, the sharp cries of the gulls, said at last, “She’s pregnant.” His brother turned away. The faint thuds felt through the boat. The deck swept by the shadows of the birds. When Dima finally spoke it was only about fishing: how he couldn’t continue by himself. Yarik had reached up, then, buried his hand in Dima’s hair. Half of Yarik had wanted to grip hard with his fist—nothing about a nephew, an Uncle Dima, the fact that Yarik would soon be a dad?—and half of him had needed more than ever then to hold his brother in a hug. But Yarik had only given Dima’s head a little shake. “Why would you need to fish,” he’d said, “when you’ll be working on the Oranzheria with me.”

He could feel right through Dima the same rocking that he could feel below his own feet—the wake of the steel ships that plowed by in endless embarkation and return, to and from the new built dock, The Baron’s fisheries—and suddenly he hadn’t wanted to let go. He let his fingers knead his brother’s head.

Dima shut his eyes. “What will we do with Papa’s boat?”

“Sell it,” Yarik said.

And then Dima’s hair was gone from his hand and his brother was lowering himself unsteadily to the deck. At Yarik’s feet, Dima lay down, his back on the boards. Yarik stood above, watching him. Then he crossed to the engine house. “I need to get an apartment,” he said, before ducking his head inside. From in there he shouted, “And you need to buy a baby gift.” He cut the motor, ducked back out. “A really big one.” He came back, crouched down in front of Dima, held his gaze. “A hundred hectares big.” Lying down beside his brother, he had lain it out: how much more quickly they could buy the land, live on it there together, with wives, children . . .

“A dog,” Dima had said.

“Named Ivan.”

“The Second.”

“The Terrible.”

“No,” Dima had told him, smiling at last, “that will be your baby.”

Out there, in the becalmed boat in the middle of the lake, beneath the sky that would have long ago been night, they had lain quietly side by side, the boat rocking their bodies together and away, together and away.

“Yarik,” Dima had said, “do you remember?”

Yes, he thought in the stillness of the car’s smooth speed, he did. All these years later. That night, all those years ago. But this—this leather seat, this road unfurling beneath him—was now. And his brother was wrong. What had risen between them wasn’t anything more than simply time, the steady drip of years, the way life was. Lifting the gloves off his face, he went to shove them in his jacket pocket, felt the cellophane-wrapped cigarette pack, and drew the Troikas out. He could still see the steadiness of Bazarov’s hand, the pistol motionless, as if soldered to the side of the man’s head. Where, he wondered, had Dyadya Avya’s old gun gone? Had Dima taken it from the izba after the farmhouse was sold, buried it with all the other remnants in their uncle’s trunk? Yarik shook free a cigarette. Soon, he would go look. In their mother’s apartment, in the chest she kept in her room. And if he found the pistol he would bring it home, hide it somewhere safe. No one would know. He stuck the smoke between his lips. Until—he lit a match—the day he’d mount it on his desk.

That evening, in the strange light of the switch, they met each other as they had met each other every evening for years, Dima in the shuffle getting off the bus (“Good morning, bratan”), Yarik in the line to get on (“Good evening, bratishka”). Except this time Yarik’s neck looked a little less bent, his face less caked with dust, his eyes more alive. Instead of a quick cupping of his hand on Dima’s neck, he held it there till Dima stopped.