The Great Glass Sea (69 page)

But Dima wasn’t listening. He was staring at the bridge. He knew the slightly arching back, knew the slope of the bank beneath, but he was telling himself it could not be the bridge over the Kosha where he and Yarik used to fish. It could not because where was the old stage road, the hay barns, the garage with its steel sheds full of farm machinery to be repaired? Why was there still the glass? How could they have driven long enough—they couldn’t have; it was too fast—and that glass still be blocking out the sky above. It couldn’t be because it was the Oranzheria, here, above them, and there ahead, and as far as he could see. And when they passed the two huge stumps at the side of the road, the place where the roadbank was broken, as if to lead to an old road that had, somehow, disappeared whole beneath the black soil of the new-plowed field, his hand grabbed at his face. It covered his mouth, his chin, and the throb went up into his teeth as if he was biting the pain out of his fingers.

They passed the bridge. It was the bridge.

And up ahead a streak of sunlight sliced down over the fields. Another: sudden brightness cutting through the dusky blue beneath the ceiling of snow. Another, another. Somewhere here lay the souls of a hundred thousand birches. The bones of the old house, the old barns: all buried now. Somewhere beneath that flat and endless simultaneity of all the mass cultivated fields was a place where once a patch of color had glowed amidst dark woods, a mound of collapsed logs and earth and roots dense and tangled and impenetrable as the muscles of a heart.

And their uncle’s body? Their father’s?

The truck stopped. The engine died.

From above them they could hear the steady scrape of the shovelers. Through the windshield they could see the glass panes coming clear. The snow disappeared in strips behind the rubber-tipped shovels of the workers who pushed them, and in the clear strips there walked the black boot soles of the men, and there were thousands of them. Where they cleared the sky there was the deep blue of late afternoon. In the silence between the brothers there was the creaks and sloshing of the shoved snow emptied through the release chutes into the colliquation tanks. The light hit it as it fell: brief avalanches, mirages of waterfalls, coming one after the other all over the landscape in small moments of thunder, flashing over the cisterns and gone, and flashing over another and gone, and another.

Then Dima was out in it. He stood beside the truck, the door hanging open, the dirt road in front of him, and across it, where Dyadya Avya’s farm had been, the endless yellow of the wide rapeseed fields. The driver’s side door opened; he heard it smack shut.

“Dima,” Yarik said.

Dima’s fist shot out, slammed against the fender of the truck. “Why?”

“Bratishka.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You must have known.”

“How could you let them buy it?” He swung his glare on his brother. “When you knew, you
knew
, Yarik . . .”

“I didn’t let them buy it.”

“. . . you knew that I had enough to buy at least
some
. When you”—his fist shook between them—“you had enough to buy all of it. Why—”

“I did. I did buy all of it.”

Dima started to speak again, but the sound died in his throat and there was just his fist shaking against his brother’s chest, and his eyes with the question shaking in them.

“Where do you think,” Yarik said, “all that money came from?”

“Why did you give it to me?”

“It was yours. It was half. Half of what I got for us when I sold the land to him. He was going to get it anyway, Dima. I just got it first so we would get
something,
we would have something of what Dyadya Avya left, something of what was ours.”

“Ours?”

“Put your fist down.”

Instead, Dima’s other came up. He stood there with both fists against Yarik’s chest, the knuckles touching, the hands shaking. “
Ours,
” he said. “Not yours.”

“If you hit me, bratets, I swear I will hit you back.”

Slowly, Dima lifted his fists away. He brought them together to his face, and clenching them in front of his mouth, he looked at the fields, tried to remember where the old izba had been, to see any sign of the chimney or the foundation or the gate, and there was nothing, and he said, “Why did you even bring me here?”

“You asked to come here.”

“To bury Mama.”

“To show you,” Yarik shouted. “To show you what the real world is. Mama wanted me to have our book? You think she wanted it to wake me up?”

“Yarik, where did they bury—”

“I’m awake, Dima! I live awake.”

“Where can we bury her now?”

“You live in a fucking dream.”

“At least—”

“We’ll bury her in the cemetery.”

“At least, if I live in a dream . . .”

“Where people bury people.”

“. . . it’s
my
dream.”

“Your dream,” Yarik said, “is what killed her.”

It felt to Dima like his fist must have hit the truck again, but in the second afterward he watched his brother’s face whipping back to him, and then his own eyesight whipped around, a crack of pain ripping up his jaw into the socket of his eye.

“You had half the money,” Yarik shouted at him. “You had that much! And she was freezing! She was starving! And she blamed me! Me! She had to. Who else was going to take care of her? You? When did she ever expect anything of you? Why did I? Get up,” Yarik said. “Get up and get the fuck back in the truck.”

Above him, Dima could see the men gathered, looking down at where he lay, shovels in their hands, pools melting in the sunshine around their boots. The sun came down on his face and warmed it and he felt like he could lie there forever, like the men would stay forever leaned over, still, looking at him, and if they would just stop and stay there, and the sun would stay as it was, and he could stay in it . . . But there was the sound of his brother’s boots on the dirt road. The driver’s side door opened and smacked shut. The truck engine shook awake. He heard the passenger side door open.

“Bratets,” Yarik said, and in his voice there was a pain as if each word was stitched to his throat and each utterance yanked them out one by one. “You think this is about Mama. You think it’s about us. It’s not. It never has been. It has always, always, always been about
you
. Your selfishness. Your jealousy. Because I married? Because I had a child? Because I refuse to cling to some fairy-tale time of our lives? Because when I go swimming in the lake it’s Timosha’s feet on my shoulders, my son’s fingers that I feel tap the top of my head, not my brother’s, not
yours
. Jealous of a
child
. Of a six-year-old. That’s what this is about, Dima. The fact that every morning I wake up beside my wife and you wish it was still you.”

“No,” Dima started to say, “all I wanted . . .”

“. . . is for me,” Yarik finished for him, “to wish it, too. But I don’t. I don’t even
wish
it. Can’t you see that? If I wished it I would have kept the land. But I didn’t want that. I don’t. I don’t want my dream to be my own, Dima. What I want is for it to be real.” There was the chiming of the open passenger door. “Come on,” Yarik said through it. “Get in.”

Slowly, Dima rose. The men above him seemed to back away straight up, as if they thought he would rise through the glass and into them. His brother was saying, “I didn’t make the deal just for the money, Dima. I made it for
that
. To keep it safe, all of it, work and life and my family and you. But now you know—we both know—that it’s not. You’re not. Dima . . .”

But Dima was walking past the open door. He went around the truck to the tailgate, opened it, let it bang down. Through the rear windshield, he could see his brother, neck twisted, staring at him, saying something. Reaching in, Dima found the handle of the shovel. He dragged the metal head out along the plastic bed.

“Where are you going to dig?” his brother said from inside the cab. “Where would you bury her?”

And then Dima pulled the shovel back like a logger about to swing an axe, and his brother stopped talking, and a second later there was the crash. He slammed the shovel head into the rear taillight. He brought it back and slammed it again.

When his brother’s shouting came at him—“You think I wouldn’t have had them move Dyadya Avya?”—it was louder—“Papa?”—nothing between it and him but the air, and he spun and saw his brother stop at the sight of the shovel raised and, without taking his eyes off Yarik, he pulled back and slammed the metal into the side of the tuck. It buckled in. He slammed it again. And, his brother a still shape standing, watching, the men above standing as still, watching, the sun flinging off the shovel blade and up at the glass and over his brother and down to dissipate into the fields, he made his way around the truck, smashing the fenders and the side-view mirror and the grille and the glass, until he was back where he had started. Everything was silent. Above the truck the crowd on the cleared patch of glass had grown, and all except off in the distance the scraping had stopped, the snowfalls in the ditches had ceased, the fields were quiet.

The whole time, Yarik had stood in the shovel’s gusts, the flashes off its blade, stood still, watching. But when Dima began climbing into the bed of the truck, he moved. Stepping close, he shot out an arm, tried to grab whatever he could of Dima, saw the shovel head glint, the glint rushing at him. Then he was ducking, low, half-fallen into a crouch, one hand on the ground, the other on the tailgate, the blade ripping by above his head with an air-slicing whoosh that filled his ears, until another sound smashed down and knocked it away: metal slamming wood, wood cracking, the shovel crashing, the pine lid shattering. It was as if, instead of the shovel, the sound had hit him. For a second, his hearing left, his sight bleached, the world slipped his hold. And when it came back he was standing behind the tailgate pointing a pistol at his brother.

He must have said something. Or Dima simply felt it. The last crack of the wood hung in the air, dwindled away, was lost in the sounds of distant snow swept down. Dima stood above the caved coffin, shards scattered around the truckbed, the shovel still in his hands, his hands still. Above them: the slight shifting of the workers’ boots, all their soles on the glass, a smothered thunder. From the truck’s cab the door chime tolled, over and over, like some paltry imitation of church bells. And on his brother’s face, Yarik saw a thing that drained the life out of his own: Dima looking back at him as if he didn’t know who his brother was.

Yarik’s throat wouldn’t work. The muscles of his hand were failing, too, the gun too heavy; it would have dropped if Dima hadn’t reached out and taken it. It was as if the weight came off his throat. “It’s not loaded,” Yarik said. “They’re blanks.” And then his words were rushing out: “Dima, there’s one left, but it’s a blank, believe me, I wouldn’t . . .”

But Dima’s eyes were fixed on their uncle’s old revolver in his hand. “Try it,” Yarik was saying, “you’ll see,” and Dima let the shovel drop out of his other. He held the gun in both. “Believe me,” Yarik was saying, and the handle fit Dima’s palm just as it had his brother’s, as it had Dyadya Avya’s, their hands shaped by tools, by blood . . .

The blast tore between them, smothered Yarik’s voice, filled his ears, loud as two shots, as three, and as the sound scattered and fell away he could hear breaking through it, slowly finding his ears, the tinkling. It came distant and accruing as bird chatter at dawn, and then he was seeing it: the glittering air, the tiny shards sparkling through the light, the chips of glass hitting the truck cab, the bed, the coffin, ricocheting and rattling like hail. All over the road, in the ditches at its edge, pieces of the exploded pane lay scattered. He could feel them in his hair, stinging his face, could see them on his brother’s, and he saw again Bazarov’s eyes as the man had watched him from across the table—the glimmer of fear, the sneaking smile—and when Dima turned away, when he set down the gun, when he picked up the shovel, when he broke the coffin open and hauled their mother out, Yarik let him.

She was still wrapped in the blanket Dima had bound her in, and as he heaved her up, her cut strands of long white hair fell out over the black liner of the truck. She had lost her stiffness, begun to smell. The blanket was soaked heavy. Dima tried to get her over his shoulder without letting go of the shovel, felt his brother watch him fail at it, take a step as if to stop him, and, holding to the shovel with his other hand, Dima simply dragged her out. The chips of glass fallen onto her through the broken pine lid fell off, clattering, as he pulled. At the edge of the truckbed he climbed down and lay the shovel on top of her body and, gripping just above where her ankles would be, backed up until she hovered between him and the truck end, her shoulders and head on the bed, and then, as her shoulders dropped and her neck bent and her head was about to smack into the ground, his brother was there, holding her. Slowly, Yarik lowered her until her top half was resting on the dirt, the shovel still resting on her, her blanket-wrapped legs still under Dima’s arm. For a moment, the blanket was touched by them both, their mother’s body stretched out between their hands. Then Yarik let go and, walking backwards, dragging her, Dima made his way across the road.