The Great Glass Sea (71 page)

They met on the phantom road halfway between the windmill and the pogost. The dog got to Yarik first, and he stopped to let it sniff at his legs and stood there watching Dima come. He wore a tunic down to his knees, some griseous sailcloth stained in patches and streaks. Over it: the same winter coat he had worn for years, the down coming out of splits in the chest and sleeves. Along the thin trail of trampled grass he walked in bare feet. And as he neared, Yarik could see what had become of his face: his black beard hung in matted tangles down to his collarbones, hid entirely his mouth, bushed out around his shrunken cheeks, below his cracked brown skin, his eyes blue as their eyes had always been.

They stood looking at each other, the dog between their legs, its huff of breath, its tail slapping. The wind tugged their hair, dragged at their coats. Dima’s beard moved around his mouth as if he might speak, but he didn’t. His hands hung in front of him, fingers working over each other, dirty. For a moment, Yarik wondered if his brother had gone mad. And the thought came to him that Dima had been going mad for a long time, and that he loved him and didn’t care. Watching his brother’s eyes, he felt his own begin to well. He looked down at the basket in his hand, held it out. He could feel his own mouth trying to shape the words that would be right and knew it was doing the same silent thing that Dima’s was inside his beard.

Finally, he said, “Happy birthday, bratishka.”

Dima took the basket then. And Yarik watched his brother peer through at all the jars and tins, the small boxes in their cellophane, the shrink-wrapped sausages and cheese nestled in the artificial straw, and then Dima was squatting on the ground, tearing the plastic open. The wind took it from his hands and blew it away—a shed skin crackling—and his hands roamed all the things inside, each box, each jar. Until he opened one. He dug two fingers in and lifted them gloppy with purple to his mouth, and squatted there with his eyes shut and his fingers buried in his wind-whipped beard, and beneath it his whole face gone still.

“I thought,” Yarik said, and waited for his brother to finish it for him. But Dima only drew his fingers out, sucked first one then the other, and Yarik went on: “I thought maybe I’d find you dead.”

His brother’s eyes—such pleasure in them, such joyful gleam—looked up at him. “Happy birthday, bratan,” Dima said.

When they hugged, Yarik could feel the jar still in his brother’s hand, its glass curve pushing against the bone of his shoulder; he could feel his brother’s ribs, his breastbone, the tunic’s rough cloth, the scratchy mossiness of the beard against his own cheek. His brother’s neck smelled so sharp it stung his nostrils. He breathed in. And into the warm and filthy skin he said, “I thought maybe the Chudo-Yudo got you.”

Into Yarik’s neck, his beard brushing against Yarik’s skin, Dima said, “Don’t you remember? He only eats the soul.”

It was as if once his brother’s lips had made words again they could not stop. The whole walk back to his house Dima chattered, hands raking through his beard, throwing themselves into gestures, trying to get the most out of each word he spoke. Yarik followed him along the faint path, wondering, Did he talk to the dog? Aloud to himself? Watching Dima’s hands flap about, Yarik tried to listen as intensely as his brother spoke.

But as Dima talked of the fields he’d planted, Yarik, turning to look where his brother pointed, could only hear how Dima’s voice mixed with the rustling grasses, the soft flapping of his frock. In the house yard, he knew Dima was telling him of how he’d fixed the fences, the wild cattle that he’d tamed again, the fowl he had trapped in the woods, but the words dropped in and out of the lowing blown over from the near pasture, the clanking of something stirred beneath the roof of a livestock shelter lined with hay, the clucking of hidden chickens, the breeze over woven mats on the threshing barn floor.

In there, through the open door, he could see a grain sack leaning against the wall. Slung over it: a flail, bent at the hinge that joined the handle to the club, the wood studded with knots, the handle carved with figures Yarik could not make out. While his brother talked to him of all the tools he’d found, the few he’d made, Yarik went from peg to peg touching them—the long-tined potato fork, a beet shovel’s iron-slotted spoonhead, a turnip chopper propped on its crossed blade—all of them whittled with simple patterns, hints of shapes worn down by how many hands, until he came to a measuring bucket overturned on a bare patch of pounded dirt. Its curved panels were made of wood warped beneath water, held together with iron strips, growth rings swirling on its sides. But it was the carving that held his eyes—a childish attempt at long-legged birds frozen midflight—the fact that it was half-finished, that the whittled wood was raw and bright and still ungrayed, that on the dirt beside the bucket the curls and slivers that had been carved off still lay. While his brother talked, he watched them come alive in some faint wind, heard it find the pitchfork tines, the teeth of the hay rake, listened to it whistling through.

Inside the house, Yarik heard how Dima had found the izba half-fallen in, how he’d used an old metal pipe as a chimney for the stove. But he didn’t catch how Dima had gotten the pipe, or if it was really warm enough—these sooty walls, that cracked stove, those ancient blankets and seed-sack pillow and the heat of his lone body—to live in all through the freezing winter. Though Dima was talking about the cows, the straw around the edges of the room where they had slept last night, and Yarik saw the hens nestled in a corner, heard the rustling of their feathers, the lowing of cattle beyond the walls, a deep and ceaseless hushing that might have been the swaying of the aspen trees, or the brushing of the lake against the shore, or the sound of the clouds drifting across the sky. The longer he listened, the more he was sure that’s what it was. He recognized their sound from the echo of sometime long ago when he had lived a life that let him hear it. His brother’s voice, then, seemed simply part of a world that had been left alone to drift. He stood there, listening.

Dima’s hand touched his shoulder. “Yarik,” his brother was saying.

“Yes?” Yarik could tell from his brother’s smile that Dima had asked him a question. “What?”

“Do you want to see it?”

When he reached the top of the hill, Dima turned so he was facing Yarik, still climbing, and pushed aside the tall grass and sat. Behind Dima, on what must have been the island’s highest point, Yarik could see the windmill turn against the darkening sky. As he climbed, he watched its sails spinning slowly behind his brother sitting still. By the time he reached Dima and turned and sat beside him, he was breathing hard.

Somewhere behind the thickness of cloud the sun was going down. And south of there the sky was dim. And beneath it the lake was a harbinger of how much dimmer yet the sky would become. Between them was a thin dark strip of land. The southern shore. A distant hint of a place Yarik had never seen before, so far across the water it seemed almost a different world.

They watched it. The dark shapes of the ships passed back and forth out on the lake, and the pale spot in the sky slid down, and the wind grew slowly stronger, and slowly the creaking of the windmill behind them sped up, and the first fog lights of the ships blinked on, and they passed back and forth out on the lake, and the brothers sat there for a long time.

Somewhere below, a rooster crowed. Listening to the sound, Yarik thought he could feel on the back of his neck the glow of the mirrors beginning to rise behind them. He wondered if they had reached all the way to here, if his brother was subsisting on what few crops could grow without a stretch of dark. The woods below looked as woods should, the spruce boughs heavy and full, white birches budding with vernal green. If the zerkala had come, this was their first year. Next year, the birches would be gone. The year after that, the hemlocks, too. He shut his eyes. And saw, instead, the single birch he had once glimpsed from up in the sky, that spot of yellow surrounded by all the brown rest, and as he watched he saw its offspring slowly spread, imagined the entire island covered with them, a world of silver trunks, golden leaves.

There: the rooster’s call again. He opened his eyes, looked at his brother. “Ivan?”

Dima shook his head. “Soon as it was warm enough,” he said, “he wandered off.” His mouth kept moving after the word, a small shifting beneath his beard. “Sometimes, I think I see him. A black arc out of the grass. A little gold in the woods. But he never could crow as long as that.” It went on and on and before it was done another had begun. “The monks’ long crowers,” Dima told him. “They must have let them go, too.” And he smiled. “Maybe Ivan learned from them.”

Long drawn-out throaty calls coming from the forest spread below, from somewhere beneath the canopy catching the first light cast by the first mirror risen, joined by another, and another, and they listened to their sound and watched the lake drawn back by the zerkala from the darkness it had nearly reached and Yarik said, “Do you remember why Ivan Popolyov went out to kill the Chudo-Yudo? Why he went in the first place?”

“Because,” Dima said, “the Chudo-Yudo had cast a spell on the land.”

“And it was all darkness,” Yarik said.

“All the time.”

“And he wanted to bring back the light.”

Hidden by his beard and covered by the wind, Dima did something Yarik could feel was almost a laugh.

“Maybe,” Dima said, “the Chudo-Yudo swallowed our hook. He might have choked on it.” He raised his eyebrows at Yarik, almost a smile. “Maybe we killed him after all.”

“No,” Yarik said, surprised by the loudness of his voice, the insistence in it when it said, again, “no.” And he could hear again, the way he had said it that night on the rowboat so long ago—
No!
—not when he had felt the oar slip from his hands, or heard it splash into the water, watched it slip away on the waves, but when he had turned and seen his brother lifting his own oar out of the lock, seen Dima—ten years old and watching Yarik’s face—throw his own oar purposefully away. He did not think that until now he had ever understood why.

He reached out and put his arm around his brother’s thin shoulders. Dima drew up his knees, pulled the hem of his frock over them. It was getting colder. Watching the fog lights of the boats, Yarik thought he saw one coming slowly towards the island. He wished it wouldn’t. He wished it would turn around and go back without him. He would stay there on that hill, under the darkness of the clouds, the wind growing into a night wind the way it had for all of time before the mirrors and would for all of time after them, he wished he could stay there, stopped, still as a hand on a wound-out clock, listening to the roosters crow, watching the lights fill the lake like a memory of stars, feeling Dima’s shoulder filling the warm hollow between his arm and his chest. He wished that, wished it forever, and wishing it he tried to surround his brother with as much of himself as he could.

Acknowledgments

When I was a teenager I lived for a while as an exchange student in the Soviet Union. My experiences there set me on the path towards the writing of this book. So I owe thanks, first, to the Tarasov family, who took me into their home back then. And second, to Raisa and Oleg Kuznetsov, who did the same, two decades later, when I returned. While in Russia, Ludmila Chernova, Jesse Loeb, Julia Ioffe, and many others helped me understand the ways in which the country had changed. None of which I would have come to know if not for the ways my high school Russian teacher, Jude Wobst, helped change me long ago.

This novel, too, changed greatly over the course of its life. It found its shape due in large part to hard work and huge help from my agent, PJ Mark, who sustains me with his good judgment and generous friendship, and my dear and dedicated editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, who, along with Katie Raissian and Shelly Perron, gave this book the kind of attention most writers can only dream of. I am so lucky to work with such a team.

Josh McCall gave me extensive and thoughtful notes that improved the earlier manuscript immeasurably. As did my friends and first readers Mike Harvkey, Elliott Holt, Robin Kirman, Irina Reyn, Suzanne Rivecca, Jen Sheffield, and Laura van den Berg.

Their support is evidence of one of the great joys of writing a book like this: discovering, over and over, how giving of their time good people can be. This novel, in particular, required that I ask much of many. Dr. Helen Michaels, Dr. Michael Geusz, Dr. George W. Keitt Jr., and Florian Sicks helped me understand the details of photoperiodism in plants and animals. Dr. Ann Martin, Sarah Scoles, and Chelsea Cook did the same for the physics surrounding the space mirrors. I had help in translating the Russian from Peter Blackstock, Dr. Natasha Simes, Nikita Nelin, and Jude Wobst (no doubt dismayed at how much her former student has forgotten).

I got a lot out of a great many books, too, chief among them
At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past,
by A. Roger Ekirch
; Why Work? Arguments for a Leisure Society
, edited by Vernon Richards;
Sale of the Century,
by Chrystia Freeland;
Labour and Leisure in the Soviet Union
, by William Moskoff;
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,
by Juliet B. Schor; and
Russian Fairy Tales,
compiled by Aleksandr Afanasev. Although the snippets of Pushkin’s
Ruslan and Lyudmila
are my own interpretations, they were cobbled together from various translations, most notably Roger Clarke’s. This book benefited from the generosity of institutions, too: the MacDowell Colony, the James Merrill House, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts all gave me the gift of time and space. As did my ever-supportive friends Ken Banta and Tony Powe.