The Great Glass Sea (18 page)

“
A
potato.”

“And cucumbers.”

“I still eat potatoes, Dima, but now I have them with meat.
Beefshteks, cherbureki.
And I take them out of the freezer and put them in the toaster. In a
toaster,
Dima
.
Potatoes. Shredded into patties and precooked and crispy. And I love them.” He leaned towards Dima, low as if he would rest his forehead against Dima’s own. But he stopped, his face so close Dima could see the lines creased around his eyes. “Almost as much,” Yarik said, “as I love you. Even your fairy-tale ideas.”

Dima shifted the rooster in his arms, spoke with his lips moving against the hood, his eyes on his brother: “You didn’t think it was a fairy tale when you said we should sell the boat, sign up for jobs on the Oranzheria.”

Yarik straightened, began to gather his tie. “That was a long time ago.”

Dima lifted his cheek off the felt. “Don’t you still want it?”

“Of course.” Yarik stood there bunching his tie into the palm of a hand. “We were talking about what we
had.
Back then. Not what we
will
have. Someday.” He was staring at the silk, the red seeming to grow more red as it filled his hand. “Bratishka,” he said, “when I shut my eyes at night, when I finally go to sleep, do you think it’s about toasted potatoes that I dream?”

There was the mewl of a knob turning, the rasp of the bathroom door against the floorboards. Zinaida came out holding the baby. Polina was wrapped in a towel, her forehead smeared gray.

“Bring me a cushion,” she said to Timofei and the boy passed behind Dima and lifted the roof off the home and carried it to his mother who, laying the baby on it, ordered him to clean up the rest. Wending around the brothers, the child broke down the house, replaced the cushions, pushed apart the barn, gathered up the straw. And despite the ruination around him; despite the fact that Zinaida, zipping a jumper shut over the baby’s body, refused to look at him once; despite the way Yarik restrung the red silk over his neck as he prepared to leave; despite all that, when their mother came out of the kitchen with her oven mitt on and a look on her face that Dima knew meant she thought they had all just come in, that in a moment she would ask
How was work?
, he could not help but imagine that the words out of her mouth would be
How was school?
instead, that the soap-and-iron-scented steam was pipe smoke wisping from the bathroom, that their father was in there shaving, that their mother was not old, that her hair had never been struck white, that it was only he and Yarik left alone before supper in the home that was theirs again.

That night, and the next morning, and in the days that followed, his brother’s
Why?
refused to leave his mind.
Why are you doing this?
There was a time when they would not have had to ask that of each other about anything. Now, on the tram, shouldering some exhausted worker’s lolling head, Dima could not quit thinking of Yarik’s twelve-hour shifts. Reaching out to help up a woman his mother’s age too work-weary to climb the few bus steps, he could not keep from seeing how old his brother’s eyes had grown in a mere month. Could not help but ask it back:
Why?
Was it possible they had changed so much? That one day they would come to understand each other as little as their parents had? He remembered his father on the couch with his books in his lap and his pipe wagging while he spoke—
I
am
working, I’m working on myself
—remembered his mother standing there, shaking her head, as if she’d lost the ability to communicate with him through speech. Was it possible that they had started out like he and Yarik, that the tracks they had run on side by side had somewhere down the line simply hit a switch that sent them slowly separating?

More and more now, he got off the tram at a tall column topped with a small bronze model of the great tsar’s ship, its prow pointing west towards the lands young Pyotr had explored, a symbol of the spirit that had once filled the law school and the science labs and the steps that rose beneath the stern steel letters—
UNIVERSITET
—that overlooked the square. University Market, where now electronics and appliances were bought and sold. Each time Dima pushed his way through the throngs, into the Universitetski Rynok, he was surprised to find some hawker hadn’t scrambled up the plinth, wrenched off the ship, shouted down a price. But the brass sails remained unfurled above the maze of kiosks, the used goods stalls where Dima sometimes sold small things—a kitchen scale, a curling iron—brought from home.

Though these days he came with nothing, climbed the stone steps, pushed through the groaning doors. Inside, sales goods had usurped the classrooms, electric stoves gathered in place of scholars, sound systems rattling the remains of blackboard chalk. In the lecture halls where students once studied Akhmadulina, Yevtushenko, TVs shouted each other down. Dima would walk past it all to a stairwell at the far end of the first floor, where, behind the door, all the cacophony faded away. His footsteps tamped the noise further into quiet. In the basement, the building’s heating and cooling machines murmured, the clacks of his shoes muffled by a floor so thick with coats of paint it felt soft beneath his soles.

As far as he could tell, the door he’d found down there was the only unlocked way in. But if anyone else used it, there was no sign. He would shut it behind him and savor for a second the utter dark. Then he would reach to the wall, slide his fingers until they hit the switch. The fluorescent tubes hummed, flashed on. A few more flickered. Until a long row of bookshelves showed. At the dim edges of the light, more dark stacks stretched out. He walked down them, flicking the switches, each row shuddering into light, as if they were the night tracks of some great railway station and, as he passed, engines rolled in, flooding each platform with their beams—Karamzin, Leskov, Pushkin, Merezhkovsky—until he stopped at whichever one he chose to board.

Hours later Dima would emerge, mind still buried in some book, hurrying back through the market to catch the next tram to the lake. With the windows open, he could smell Otseva as the tram drew close: a scent like rain hitting soil, wet feathers in silt. No one else got off there. Down at the lakeshore he would lean alone against the railing, the iron warm from the sun, and watch the small shapes of the massive ships drifting in the distance among their invisible nets. Farther down the shore, at the harbor, the cranes clanged, swung their bony arms around the sky. But here, where he stood, the water was empty of all but birds: a flock of black jaegers afloat on a breeze, below them seagulls bobbing white on the waves.

When he and Yarik were boys the calls of children would have chorused with the caws of birds, swimmers bobbing between the smacks and sailboats, the small skiffs moored near the shore where, each early light, fishermen would gather to row out.

In summer, Dima and Yarik would go down there with their father. Dawn would have already cracked the dark, the distant edge of the lake rimmed with a swelling strip of red as if the night sky was a lid lifted by some unseen hand. The low-flung light would find them all there on the littoral—the men and their boats, the spools of nets and the upslanted oars—all casting long shadows onto the gravelly beach behind them, where the boys would help their father haul the heavy bait boxes, the coolers of ice, his clanking wood-carver’s case. And on mornings when Dyadya Avya had spent the night, stayed up drinking vodka and smoking pipes, slept over on the couch, he would come down with his only family, sit in the sand sharpening filleting knives, the two boys crouched near, fingering a net for tears, and tell them his tales of Nizhi. He had been there, once. Their father, too.
When
I was not much older than you. Your papa was not much younger. We were both in the Young Pioneers.

They had gone out as a troop, the boys and girls crowding the deck, their blue pants fluttering, blue skirts held down against the spray, around each neck a Pioneer scarf, blood-red and snapping in the wind. The schoolmarms and Komsomol minders who led them out had arranged with the monks for a tour of the churches enclosed by the wood walls of the
pogost
, but their uncle and father had hidden on the ferry, slipped out after the rest, escaped to see the world beyond the gates instead: the wind-whipped pines and vast stands of reeds and the life the monks lived on that island so far out in the middle of that sea-sized lake.

Out there,
Avya said,
they still make fishing nets from rope rolled out of bark.
They use a drawknife to skin green aspen trees, soak sheaves of the long strips in the bog water beneath boards weighted down by stones.
And when it’s dry it’s soft and golden as a young girl’s hair and they roll it between their hands.
He would set down his knife and sharpening stone, place his palms on his knees, and show them. He told of looms that looked medieval, of the intricate cloths the weavers turned out, the crosses and icons the monks carved into everything from soup ladles to cowbells. There were plows fashioned of ropes and planks, blades made in the island’s forge.
They curved downward,
he said,
long as your arm, like teeth pulled from a Chudo-Yudo’s mouth. And do you know what pulled them through the earth?

Working at the tangles of the nets, their fingers red in the red of the sun, the boys guessed mules, oxen, even goats.

Men,
their uncle said.
A monk behind pushing at the handles, another in front, hauling a rope around his waist, and both of them chanting while they worked.

He spoke of men singing as they threshed the flaxseed; of others rolling themselves across cut fields, frocked bodies smashing stalks back into soil, a dozen monks turning over and over among the shadows of the clouds.
One’s sole work was to ring the bells. He’d climb the bell tower, wrap himself in the ropes: around his forehead, looped over his chest, attached to each elbow, ten strings tied to his ten fingers. When he played them the sound was like a dozen men each ringing a dozen bells. But it was the sight of him you never forgot: strung up in ropes, his whole body flailing, his mouth hanging open, his face twisted by bliss.

Like this,
their father said, and, gathering his fists full of the net, threw his head back, dropped his jaw, and spasmed so wildly his boys leapt back, laughing against their laughing uncle’s lap.

On those long summer days they spent every hour of light out on their father’s boat. He had named it Once upon a Time, the words—
ZHILI-BYLI
—
carved in its stern like the name of any other fishing smack, but in its gunwales, in the door to the catch well, in all the places their father had carved, it was unlike anything else on the lake. Sunrise to sunset they worked surrounded by scenes he’d chiseled. The gurdy’s thick shadow slipping away from fur-hatted Ivan Popolyov lifting the lid off a pot: inside, the snowball half-turned into a maiden, blushing pink with early sun. Midmorning blasting the transom bright where, on either side of the motor, a water pail danced on legs. Around the corner of the wheelhouse, another Ivan gaped at them, his face gone golden in late light. And, lit by the moon, he was on top of the structure, too, in kaftan and boots, straddling a carved branch beside a carved nest while a carved owl taught him the language of birds.

Once school started up again, their father went out alone, returned while the other fishermen were still at work, sunlight still full, his hold still half-empty, in time to meet one son waiting on the strand for him. Their mother kept Yarik home to study, but Dima was always there: together, they would walk up the shore to stand, father and son, in the last hour before sunset, listening to the poets atop the statue of the tsar.

Now, an hour before the mirrors rose, Dima would leave the lakeshore and walk back through the park, and pass beneath the giant pointing arm of Peter the Great and to the bus that would take him out to the Oranzheria to meet his brother.

One day he stopped at the statue, instead. It was raining and the wind blew in off the lake, streaking at a slant against the tsar’s bronze back. In the lee of the plinth the low step leading up to it was the one dry place. He had left the railing early, his face raw from rain, his shirt wet, and so he let himself sit for a while, leaned his back against the base, watched the trees shake.