The Great Glass Sea (59 page)

Late last night, or early that morning, or whatever time it had been when Vika had wrapped her legs around him, pulled him in, they had lain in the snow not even long enough for the elbows of his jacket to get soaked, his knees to grow cold. She’d reached to his face, drawn it so close he couldn’t help but shut his eyes, feel her breath on their lids, her lips at his ear . . . Then it was over and she was sliding out from under him, pulling up her pants, starting to walk away. Looking up from the snow, his whole side suddenly wet and going cold, he had called after her,
What are you doing?
And turning, walking backwards, still away, she’d told him,
Proving it to you.
For another few steps, she kept her eyes on him, as if trying to make him remember what once before she’d tried to make him understand—how, right then, she could have been so focused on him; how, tomorrow, she’d be focused on something else—until, her back to him again, she’d disappeared into the blackness before the crossroads fire. That was when he’d shouted to her the address where he lived.

So when, that afternoon, an hour before sunset, someone knocked on the apartment door—the rapping on wood as startling as a phone pealing in the middle of the night—his first thought was her.

I can want
. . . she had said,
and
tomorrow I can want
. . . and last night, walking home alone under the stars again, he had understood. She could want him that night and want another the next because that was the way of lovers. Maybe with some it took a little longer, months or even years, but in the end each would leave, whether with their bodies or only in their hearts, all eventually in some way disappeared. Crossing back beneath the sparking tram lines, Dima had known a heart could make that choice. Because if the thing he’d felt for her hadn’t been there before they’d met, then simply was, it could be let go again. And at home, in the bathroom, kneeling in the tub beneath a stream of steaming water, he had understood this, too: the thing they’d done, that he’d never done with anyone but her, was just another want, another desire pulling him another way, drawing him farther from the only one who could not leave, not in his heart, because no matter how the world tried to keep them apart theirs would always beat with the same blood.

The knocking, the knocking.

But when he opened the door, it was Zinaida. If she saw his surprise, she didn’t show it. He looked to her side, behind her.

“He’s not with me,” she said.

Of course, Dima thought; Yarik would be at work. And, he realized, she should have been, too. “You’re playing hooky?” His month-thick beard shifted with a nervous smile.

But instead of smiling back, her lips tightened. He had expected that, expected even the rebuke in her eyes. But he hadn’t expected her to look scared.

He stepped back, motioned for her to come in.

She shook her head. Last light was sifting through the windows, and he knew what she was seeing behind him: the open refrigerator, its half-rotten food; the living room tracked with soot; his mother on the floor between a bowl of seeds and a mound of shells, her hands dipping in and out of a giant sack. He had tethered the rooster close enough to keep her company, and he could hear the bird squawk each time she slapped it away from the seeds.

Down the hall, the elevator door opened. Zinaida turned to nod at whoever was coming out. The man shot Dima a disgusted glare; the woman whispered to her husband. The clicks of a key turning a lock. The smack of the door shut behind them.

“How do you stand it?” There was the old kindness in her mouth, her eyes soft. “I don’t think I could,” she said, and her voice caught. She cleared it, called past him, into the room, “Hi, Galina.”

“Good afternoon,” his mother called back.

“How are you?” his sister-in-law asked.

And his mother: “We’re very well, thank you.”

“She doesn’t know who I am,” Zinaida whispered to Dima. “Does she?”

“If you came in . . .”

“No.”

“Then . . . ?” He let the
why
hang, hoping she would reach for it.

But she only shook her head again. She told him she would pray for him, that she already did. He thought then that she would turn and go, but she just stood there and, instead, asked him if he prayed. When he said nothing back, she asked him what he would pray for if he did.

He knew he didn’t have to tell her for her to know.

She shut her eyes. “Dima,” she said. And her eyes flicked to the inside of the apartment. “Look at this. Look at you.”

He touched his cheeks, as if suddenly aware of them. “I shaved.”

“I see that. And then you grew it back.”

“Please.”

“Dima, you look thin,” she told him, starting to turn. “Take care of yourself.”

But he reached out and held her by the shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “I’m not sick. I’m not crazy.”

“I never thought you were.”

“It’s not like just seeing me . . .”

“If you were . . .”

“. . . is going to infect him.”

“. . . I would understand. I could accept it. Your mother couldn’t help it,” she said. “It was something her mind did
to
her. If it was that, Dmitry, I could forgive it. But it’s not. All this”—she gestured at the apartment, at him, the movement of her arm shaking off his hand—“is an excuse. I’ve seen it before. Every time I bring donations to The Dachas. I used to think it was horrible what was done there, to those people. I used to think Yarik was right to give so much to keep you out.”

“I told him he didn’t—”

“You don’t even know what he gave,” she said. “What he’s done for you.”

“I never asked him for anything.”

“You don’t even know what you take.” Her voice had risen. Somewhere down the hall a door opened, a woman called out for them to hush. When the door shut again, Zinaida’s voice was quieter, and worse. “Don’t you feel it?” she said. “Their scorn? Their disgust? No, more than that. They hate you, Dima. How can they not? When they see what’s happening to this city, everything already lost, everyone so scared of what we’re going to lose next, and they see you, what you’ve done to yourself, to Galina, your own mother, they see you like a warning of what’s to come, and how can they not hate you, Dima, when they know none of this is being done
to
you. Not by the Consortium. Not by your brother. Not by me. Not by anyone. Not even your own mind. Not for any reason but that you
choose
it.”

“But I’m not costing anybody anything,” he said.

“Except your brother.”

“Zinaida . . .”

“Have you ever thought, even for a second, of what you’re costing him?”

“Zina,” he said, “has something happened to Yarik?”

In the time it took the quiet of the hallway to absorb the echo of their voices, he watched the anger fade from her eyes, watched them fill instead with the worry he had seen when he’d first opened the door.

She must have seen something fill his face, too, because she stood there looking at it, and when she spoke her voice had lost its hardness. “Let me buy you a coffee,” she said, her words almost too soft to hear. “Let me get you something to eat.”

On the corner of Avtovskaya and Yremiva streets, in the place where a bare cafeteria once served blini and soups in Soviet days, an American-style café had opened up. It was the same chain as the half-dozen others that had appeared in Petroplavilsk, big windows plastered with bright posters advertising ever more elaborate ideas of coffee. Over the door, on one side, big brown letters spelled out К
О
ф
E
Х
АУЗ
;
on the other, in English, K
OFE
K
HAUZ.

A month ago, it would have been crammed with people on break grabbing a jolt to get them through the hours to come, but now it was almost empty, almost no one able to afford the frothed foam, drizzles of chocolate.

When Zinaida asked him what he wanted, Dima asked her to choose for him.
Americano
, she told the girl behind the counter. All they had to eat were pastries he’d only ever seen in ads. She ordered him a blueberry muffin, then chose a small round table by the big plateglass windows. Outside, the sky was beginning to streak with pink. Soft jazz spilled from the speakers. On the table, an ashtray sat, filled with cigarette butts.

While she spoke, Zinaida watched his fingers picking through it. “We never had a lot of time together—you know that—but now we have almost none. And when we do . . .” Dima stopped digging, looked at her. “He’s not like he used to be,” she said. “He hardly ever plays with the kids. And after they’re asleep,
he
goes to sleep. Or tries.”

The waitress put a cup in front of Dima. In the middle of the table, she set the plate with the muffin, and a pitcher of milk and, instead of a bowl of sugar cubes that he could hold between his teeth, some packets printed with the logo of the café. Then she reached to clear the sooty cigarette ends Dima had gathered on the table. Guarding them with his hand, he told the waitress thanks. She gave him the look his neighbors gave him, whittled to a point he could feel prick his skin.

When she was gone, Zinaida pushed the plate towards him. “Eat,” she said. She reached to the muffin, tore off a small chunk. “This is all I want.”

He brushed his hands of the cigarette ash, tore off a bit as small as she had. It was sweet and soft in a way that he thought at first was strange, almost troubling—before he realized it was just fresh. He tried to chew it slowly, tried not to let her see how much he wanted to grab the thing off the plate and cram it whole into his mouth.

“He eats twice as much as he used to,” she said. “But he’s always hungry. Every day, he’s more and more nervous.”

“About what?”

She looked out the window at the people hurrying along paths in the snow, rushing for home, urgent as if a blizzard threatened. But the sky was clear, its roseatted streaks deepening to crimson, the blue beginning to darken towards dusk. “Last night,” she said, “when he came home and took off his coat and sat down to eat, he reached behind him and pulled out that old pistol of your uncle’s, just set it on the table and picked up his fork. He wouldn’t tell me why he’d been carrying it. And today, when I went to the bank . . .” She reached to the muffin, took another bite, rolled it into a ball between her fingertips. “Everything we’d saved is gone.”

Dima stopped chewing. “Where?”

“He left for work before I was awake. I tried calling him. He won’t answer.” She dropped the marble of muffin onto the table, let it sit. “I found someone to swap shifts with me, went to his sector. But he wasn’t there.”

“So you came to me?”

“Nobody there knew where he was.”

“Maybe he’s there now?”

“I’ll go back.” She looked out the window again. The clouds were leaching their color into the sky, the emptiness around them darker. “When I woke up this morning,” she said, “he’d left his plate half-full on the table, his potatoes cold. The pistol was gone.”

Dima sat with the piece of muffin in his motionless fingers, his untouched coffee a still black pool in the cup. “What can I do?”

She looked at him. “Nothing.”

“I need to do—”

“Please,” she said, a panic in her voice so clear it quieted him. “Anything you do will only make it worse.”

“We don’t even know what
it
is.”

“You will make it worse, Dima,” she said. “I know that. I thought maybe he might have come to you, maybe I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have said anything, but I know now the best thing you can do is stay away. Please.”

“Zinaida.”

“And take care of your mother,” she told him. She put her hands on the table, then, as if she meant to push back her chair, stood. But she stayed there, sitting, and said, “That’s the other reason I had to come to you.”

Dima placed the bit of muffin on the edge of the plate.