The Great Glass Sea (25 page)

They had been staying far enough into the lake to be out of the algae but in sight of the shore—the distant line shifting from city to suburbs to the ceaseless, glinting strip where the Oranzheria came to Otseva’s edge—and he knew he could go on, keep the shore to his left, meet Bazarov eventually; eventually the man would come paddling back. He could almost see his grin, the way the man had mocked him, shivering, on the dock. Nothing of friendship in that act. Even the idea of it seemed as foolish now in the cold wind of the gray day as his wife’s insinuation had that night. The waves knocked at the boat like a memory of the man’s hand, three small pats. Nothing friendly in that touch. The wind blew lake spray across his back and brought a memory with it: the way Dima, crouched on his shoulders, waiting to dive into the lake, used to signal he was ready to be launched. And Yarik, under water, would echo the count back with his fingers against his brother’s feet. Tap, tap, tap. Swaying there on the surface of the lake, his own surface stretched tight from the cold, he wanted those boys back.

But he knew the only way to reclaim someplace for them, to set aside some corner of the world where they could return to, was to go forward. That was what his brother didn’t seem to understand; what their uncle had been unable to see; what their father had been unwilling to: when all the world was moving ahead, just holding on was falling behind; striving to stay the same was the same as giving up.

The paddle had torn his hands, and his shoulders felt ready to rip right off, and his teeth were clenched against their chattering, when he finally caught up with the billionaire. They had gone so far for so long that the shore had shed the glass. To Yarik’s left the land was a long strip of dark green trees. To his right, Lake Otseva opened up, gray to the horizon. In between, the red kayak floated. Bazarov had stretched out, his feet crossed over the boat’s long nose, the paddle resting on his chest like the bar of a bench press.

“You know,” Bazarov said, “the last time I went kayaking with someone was with Pavel.”

With?
Yarik thought.
Went with?
He wanted to shove the man’s boat, but he just waited, his kayak bobbing, the ache oscillating in his muscles, the rucked skin on his hands starting to stiffen up. Far out on the lake, one of the oligarch’s berg-sized ships droned. From the shore, almost too far away to hear, there came the low wash of wind through firs. And damned if he was going to ask who Pavel was.

“That,” the man said, goggles covering his eyes with reflections of sky, “was a long time ago. And also it was on the Black Sea. Have you ever been to the Black Sea?”

“No,” Yarik said.

“To the Caspian?”

“I’ve never been anywhere. Once, to Moscow, when I was—”

“On the Caspian,” Bazarov went on, “they have one of these. But theirs is up on dry land.”

“One of what?”

Slowly, the rest of his body staying still, Bazarov turned the paddle parallel to him, slid it down into the hole from which he’d drawn his legs, left it sticking up at a low slant. He let go, lay there, blade swaying against the sky.

“Have you ever heard,” Bazarov said, “of the Caspian Sea Monster?”

Then he rolled off the boat, slipped down the side, and splashed into the lake. Where—his hair floating like a patch of golden algae, his back like the top of a rock, his maroon rear, his legs, his kicking feet—he disappeared. For a moment, the water he’d churned shook Yarik’s boat. Then that was gone, too. Carefully, Yarik dipped a blade, drew a little closer to where Bazarov had been. Staring down, he could see browns and greens below, thought he caught a glimpse of something pale moving in the dark. Then: nothing. The depth. The murk. The silhouette of his own reflection. He looked over at the other boat listing lazily on the waves, the paddle knocking, knocking. For the first time since that long-ago night in the stolen rowboat, he felt the enormity of the lake, the power rippling across its surface, the unknowable everything beneath.

Something broke the surface. He heard it like a seabird landing next to his boat, and when he jerked around to look, there was Bazarov, treading, breathing hard. He lifted the goggles; they rested on his forehead like a second pair of gleaming eyes. His own eyes were the color of the lake, quiet, almost contemplative.

“Well, this is it.” The man shook his head, flung his wet hair from his face. “Each time I forget what a beast it is. A hundred meters long from head to tail. Stretched out on the bottom like some huge eel.”

Yarik leaned over a little to look. A tug on his paddle: Bazarov drawing himself closer to the boat.

“It’s down there,” the man said.

“Where?”

“Right under us.”

“Mr. Bazarov,” Yarik started. The man made a face, as if he’d been hurt. “Baz,” Yarik said, “what are we talking about?”

And Baz smiled. “Give me your paddle,” he said. Hanging an arm over it, he reached up, yanked his goggles off. “Really, you’ve never heard of it?”

“I don’t know what
it
is.”

“Then”—Bazarov held out the goggles—“swim down and see.”

The Caspian Sea Monster. Somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, he
had
heard of it. But he couldn’t see anything. The water was too clouded with particles of plant life rotting away in the lake, too murky with tannins, stirred-up silt, the churning of the waves. He could feel them moving above him, and then he couldn’t, and, his hands stinging, his arms aching, his lungs so full of air it fought his strokes, he swam down. Down towards the ever-darkening depths, the water getting colder and colder, and the light from above leaving him until it seemed he was swimming into nothing but black. Had it been a thing out of his old uncle’s fairy tales? A creature from the fables his father had carved on his boat? He could almost see his father’s mouth, the black mustache, the hole between the open lips, saying the words, could almost hear them.

By the time he saw it through the murk, he was so close a few seconds more and he might have touched its back. That was what he’d thought was the blackness of the water beneath him. That was what had seemed the unseeable bottom of the lake. That was how big it was. His arms stopped moving, his legs stilled, and, for a second, he was suspended there, staring down at what looked like a blue whale’s back, so wide he could barely make out where it sloped away at the sides, so long he couldn’t see the beginning or end of it at all, only a few places where scales seemed to glint, where the slime that he sensed smothering the rest of it must have been washed away. Then his lungs burst. The last of his air erupted from his mouth, his chest crushed in on itself, and he was kicking, thrashing for the surface, away from whatever was down there. As he flailed upwards, he kept his head bent, his eyes on it, his own voice telling him it wouldn’t move, couldn’t, wasn’t alive . . . But was that a shiver? A ripple? His sight blurred, the goggles pressing into his sockets, and then his breath was gone and his arms were unable to work and the lake water burst into his nose, filled his throat . . .

For a second he didn’t know what grabbed him. Then, somewhere in his skull, came the realization they were hands, hands clasped around his chest, arms beneath his own, his own face in the air, a body against him, its breath, Bazarov.

“What did you think,” the man said, breathing hard close to Yarik’s ear, “that it was going to eat you?”

Yarik flapped his arm, coughed. Bazarov’s laugh brought him around as much as anything else. “What the fuck
is
that?” he said, and kicking—“I’m OK”—tried to pull out of the man’s grip.

“You sure?”

“What the fuck is it?”

“Not missing any toes?”

“Fuck off.”

And Bazarov was laughing again, heaving him up onto one of the boats, hauling himself the rest of the way, and Yarik remembered who he was talking to. He lay flopped over the kayak, belly breathing against the hard plastic, arms clutching the side. “I’m sorry,” he said.

There in front of him the billionaire, The She Bear, his boss, treaded water, looking up into his eyes. “You want to know what the fuck it is?”

“I’m sorry,” Yarik repeated.

But Bazarov only beamed. “I call it the Serpent of Otseva. The Americans called it—the one they saw in grainy pictures—the Caspian Sea Monster. But what it is is an ekranoplan. Wait.” Bazarov gripped Yarik’s forearms with his hands. “I know.” He held on, still treading with his legs. “I know, Cossack. What the fuck is
that
?”

On the way back, he told him. How, over half a century ago, the bureau for hydrofoil design had built the first: five hundred tons, a hundred meters long, a colossal cross between airplane and ship whose eight head-mounted engines would hurl it forward at such speed its winglike fins would compress the air against the water’s surface and give it lift. How, at seven hundred kilometers per hour, twenty meters above the sea, it would rise out of the realm of hydrofoils into one that existed only for it. How, though eventually they’d be built down on the Caspian, the prototype was tested on Otseva first. Then, to keep it from the spying eyes of satellites, sunk. The first creature of its kind, a genius’s lifework, and all these years buried in the lake. As if, Bazarov said, he was one day to collapse the entire Oranzheria, let it simply disappear in hundreds of hectares of weeds, woods grown up, a forest hiding the great glass sea.

“You,” Bazarov told him, “are the first person I’ve brought to see it.”

They were paddling side by side, the wind now coming from behind, the waves helping them along. And maybe it was his relief at that, maybe just the rhythm they were in, blades lifting and falling in synchronicity, but Yarik glanced at the man beside him and asked, “What about Pavel?”

Bazarov’s paddle-blades dipped, rose, dipped again. From the shore there came the distant boom of trees being felled, the first gleam farther up of the Oranzheria’s glass. And then: “Stop paddling.”

Yarik watched his blade streak by Bazarov’s stilled one. The man gave the water one more stroke to bring him back beside. They floated, still slipping forward over the waves, the wind still pushing them.

“Give me your paddle,” Bazarov said. And as he took hold of the near blade, he slid Yarik his own. “Hold both.” Reaching past his lap into the kayak’s hole, he brought out a square of something. Shiny, crinkled plastic. Watching Bazarov unfold it, Yarik realized it was a tarp. And when they’d tied each corner to a pole, and held the poles between them, and opened them up, it became a sail. And their kayaks, sailboats. The wind, a gale. The lake shot by.

Between them, the tarp billowed. Their arms shook. The wave spray blew over their bows and wet their faces and Yarik could feel its sting all over his cheeks, and he squinted into it, let it rush his teeth.

Beside him, Bazarov let out a whoop. Through his whipping hair, his eyes glinted at Yarik. “The Yaroslavoplan!” he shouted.

“The Bazoplan!” Yarik shouted back.

“The Bazoslavoplan!”

And they blew across the lake, the surface a blur, the waves machine-gunning against the bottoms of their boats.

“Pavel,” Bazarov shouted, “was always too afraid to do this. Afraid of everything. That picture of the boar? Me and the boar? On my desk? He was even too afraid to take it! A picture! Of a dead boar! The dog handler had to take it. And I had flown him all the way up, brought him on the hunt, hoped to make a hunter of him.”

Bazarov’s eyes held on him, seemed to take him in, appraise him, and then they left him and the man gazed straight ahead again. “This winter,” Bazarov shouted, “we’ll go together. Along the northern shore. I have a hunting lodge there. Those woods grow boars the size of bulls. You with one Colt .45, me with the other. None of this big-game rifle bullshit. Cowboy,” he shouted, “you haven’t lived till you’ve seen a couple hundred kilos of boar charging at you through the snow and nothing between its tusks and your balls but the barrel of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old pistol.”

Bazarov laughed, the sound flung away by the wind, the wind Yarik could feel gusting against the tarp, feel in his throbbing hands, in the way all his skin felt whipped to life. And flying across the lake, the glass now shining on the shore, Otseva stretching out on the side all the way to the horizon, he knew who Pavel was. But it didn’t feel to Yarik like Bazarov was trying to turn him into a replacement for a son; it didn’t feel like his boss wanted to become some sort of a father. In that moment, Yarik felt, instead, what it might have been like to have had an older brother.