The Great Glass Sea (4 page)

Watching, Dima thought he heard a humming sound. Low and quiet. There, then gone. Only when he saw his brother’s eyes flick to the man, did he realize where the noise was coming from. Yarik stopped talking. The man stopped the sound. Yarik began again. The sound, again: louder, heavier. The man opened his mouth, let the noise expand into a low, wavering, mournful vowel, round and long and nearly sung.

The foreman stepped back. The suits who had started forward stopped. Their boss stayed crouched, looking back and forth between the brothers, grinning. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Yarik cleared his throat, looked at the scribbles on the glass, once more began to talk of the money that could be made. And it was only then, when the blue-booted man sat back on his haunches, lifted his face to the sky, and let out the groaning moan like something boiled in his belly, a bellow fit for an animal twice his size, that Dima realized what it was: a moo. A cow’s moo. The man was mooing.

The next day, the brothers arrived at work to find their foreman come to send one of them home. Not fired, the man said, just rescheduled. Separated. Which one would switch from the natural-lit shift to the mirror-lit, who would get on the bus and return in a dozen hours just as the other was getting done, he left to them to decide. Dima stood there, silent. So Yarik chose the daytime (
If I’m only home when the kids are up I’ll never screw my wife
) and the new crew (
Dima, who’ll keep an eye on Mama during the day?
)
assigned to ground-level jobs. They were to work on different planes—Dima high up laying the glass, Yarik below in the stanchion crew—at opposite times. And life would split in two: the time of them together, the time of them apart.

All their years till then, work had been just another way the world had paired them. As children, they’d milked the collective’s cows in tandem, four small hands squeezing four synchronous streams. As teens, they spent each weekend of every Potato Month, bused out to the fields with all the other schoolkids, not caring how many hours they raked tubers from the finger-cracking dust so long as they were doing it together. Which was why, when all their former classmates scrambled after occupation placements that promised promotion, privilege, the brothers simply chose the first slot they could fill side by side: the floor of a factory where they passed their days shouting to each other above the din, pouring molten metal into casts of tractor doors, fitting windows into cabs, each pane held between them like a glimpse of the thing that had invisibly bound them since birth.

Now, watching his brother turn away to find his new crew, Dima could feel it crack. Right then—with his new foreman, then his foreman’s manager, then whoever he hoped might listen—he began to try to get his shift aligned again with Yarik’s. But there was a manager for every manager, each tied to the orders of another above, and above seemed set against him for reasons he could not glean, until it felt as if he’d fallen back two decades into the old state system and, six weeks of bureaucracy later, he did what anyone in The Past Life would have done.

Gennady Shopsin, in the apartment below, was an assistant to the manager of the office of scheduling for the sixty-first sector of the North-North-East Branch, but ever since he’d heard a rumor of promotion he’d been intent on securing an apartment adjoining his to renovate into a place more suitable for the associate manager that he’d soon be. Standing in the hallway last Unity Day, Dima and he had made an agreement: the day his mother died Dima would sell the assistant manager their home—a two-bedroom flat the state’s collapse had left her, assigned long ago to their long-gone family of four, now down to her and him—so long as, every day until then, Gennady would schedule Dima for whatever overtime could be had, even if it meant mirror-light and natural-light, eighteen hours on the glass, so long as it would let his shift overlap a little with his brother’s.

For over half a year now, that had been the best that he’d been able to do: Yarik below the glass, himself above. If they were in the same sector they might manage to take their quarter-hour rest together. Lying on a cool patch of sod not yet ripped up, hard hats over their faces, voices muffled, they’d fill each other in on the last month of their lives. Yarik would ask after their mother. Dima, after his niece and nephew. But mostly they talked about what their lives had become, what had become of the world they lived in—the Oranzheria and the zerkala and work—about the time they would cut loose from it all, strike out together, live someday on the farm.

Long ago, for one near-orphaned year—their father drowned, their mother lost to grief—they had. Slept nights alongside nesting hens in straw against one wall of the one room of their uncle Avya’s peasant house, woke mornings to the scent of fresh-laid eggs, the crackle of kindling catching, Dyadya Avya huffing the stove into heat, smiling at them through the smoke. All around the
izba
where Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov had lived there had stretched the
kolkhoz’s
vast collective versts, but, to them, that year that they turned ten, that their uncle took them into his care, the real farm had been the half-hectare the state allowed their
dyadya
to harvest as his own. He’d hoed up every inch of soil around the livestock lean-to, meager plots squeezed between the privy and the chicken coop. All day, while their uncle worked the kolkhoz’s wide fields, his nephews labored in his: what they grew in that small space, they knew, was all there’d be to eat. Most evenings they made it themselves—a bowl of boiled potatoes, soupy with grease; a torn chunk of hard bread dipped in milk to make it chewable—brought it out to the place where their father’s body lay. He was buried in the farthest corner of the plot their uncle claimed, far from the well, no fence, just heavy field rocks piled over his grave to keep the hog from digging him up. They would climb the mound, sit on a stone, and, crunching into an onion or cracking a chicken bone, watch the gloaming deepen over the fields, feel the sweat dry on their skin, wait for their uncle to come home. And at night they curled together in their beds of hay, hens warning them from nests, Avya’s old wolfhound, Ivan, stretched out beside him on the floor next to the stove, a bottle balanced on their dyadya’s belly, his voice like a snoring in his thick throat as—
once upon a time
—he would begin another of his tales.

And a decade after he had died, buried beneath his own pile of rocks beside his own brother, a dozen years gone by since the farm where their uncle and father lay was sold, on the rare breaks—one a month, at most two—when Yarik and Dima might still manage to take their tea together, they would lie side by side upon the churned dirt beneath that glass sky, and talk again of what they’d promised long ago. “Soon,” Dima would say into the steam of his tea; or, “In six months . . . ,” the heat wetting his face; or, on one spring afternoon, “By June we’ll bring the money out there.”

It was always summer beneath the glass, but at the unfinished edge, where bare girders reached towards a forest in retreat, the April air still augured snow.

Yarik pressed his warm cup to his chin, rolled the Styrofoam against his stubble. “Maybe, bratishka.”

“By June,” Dima said, “I’ll have my half.”

Over the rim, Yarik raised his eyebrows.

“We’ll bring it all out to the farm, go into Stepan Fyodorovich’s house, empty our rucksacks all over his table.”

“The old
kulak
will have a heart attack.”

“Then we’ll take all the money and put it back in our rucksacks.”

Yarik grinned. “And bury the body in the woods.”

Dima raised his cup. “To heart attacks.”

They tapped Styrofoam rims. Yarik squeezed his to make it squeak.

But Dima was already listening to a woods whispering at the edge of a hayfield, the
shrushing
of footsteps that took him farther in, the wind in the canopy deep in that forest where white birch trunks dropped down like beams of sunlight around the place where he and his brother had long ago buried themselves beneath the leaves. “Baba Yaga’s,” he said, his look lost in the tea. “You think it’s still there?”

Once it might have been a hunting cottage, long collapsed, or perhaps an eremitic chapel reverberating with the mumbles of some wild-eyed recluse. When they first found it there seemed a small steeple engulfed by the caved-in roof, a bulbous dome subsided into rot, a door decayed as if to invite them in. And in they burrowed, hauling at rocks, digging a tunnel, two small boys with bruised arms and faces blackened but inside a hideaway opening up, just big enough for them. Through it tree trunks grew, their bark rough as rooster legs, their roots spread out like talons. Baba Yaga’s, they’d called it, lying in the soil-scented dark, trying to remember that part of Pushkin’s epic tale,
the windowless witch hut perched atop hen’s feet. Whispering into the blackness inside, they added their own scenes that wrote out Ruslan and Lyudmila, starred themsevles instead, told them to each other beneath a forest floor abloom with mushrooms. Hundreds of them grew on the mound above—purple wood blewits and golden chanterelles, ox tongues stiff and red, milk-caps and pheasants backs and puff balls huge and white—spread bright as a quilt beneath the trees. Each time the boys left they picked it apart, filled their baskets. And each time they returned to it regrown.

“You think,” Dima said now, his words made visible in the steam, “we could still find it?”

Beneath the sound of hammering from above, his brother breathed out a sudden, small laugh. “My God,” Yarik said, as if he hadn’t thought of it in years. “All those mushrooms!”

“Hundreds!” Dima said.

“Thousands!”

“We could be picking them right now.”

Reaching over—“And what?”—Yarik plucked the top of Dima’s ear. “Slave in the kitchen? Instead of taking it easy like this?”

Dima ducked his head away, his face brightened, as if his brother’s fingers had flicked a switch. “Your
kids
would be slaving in the kitchen,” he said. “We’d be telling them stories.”

“The last time I got home early enough to tell Timosha a bedtime story . . .” Yarik’s smile slipped. “I can’t even remember.”

“Soon,” Dima told him, “we’ll tell them stories every night.”

“In the summer we’ll be too beat.”

“But in the winter,” Dima said, “after the harvest, there’ll be nothing to do but sit by the stove.”

“And starve,” Yarik said.

“And eat soup.”

“Without meat.”

“With mushrooms,” Dima said.

“I
do
love mushroom soup.”

“We’ll have it all summer.”

“And in the fall?”

“In the fall, Mama will bake them in sour cream.”

“And in the winter?”

“We’ll have the ones she pickles.”

“And in the spring?”

“By the spring I’ll kill you if you say another word about mushrooms.”

“By the spring,” Yarik said, “we won’t be speaking to each other.”

“We won’t
need
to.” Dima took another sip of his tea. “We’ll just wake up, together, without trying, like we used to. The smell of the chickens, the stove. I’ll make the fire. You’ll take Polina from her crib. Timofei will crawl into the straw, get us eggs. And we’ll eat them, all of us around Dyadya Avya’s old table, before we go out to the field. That’s how it’ll be in spring.”

Yarik had tipped his cup and was staring up into the empty bottom. The Styrofoam filtered the light and softened it on his face, and about his mouth there was the hint of a distant happiness Dima knew meant he was thinking of something else.

“These days,” Yarik said, “I usually wake up to Zina snoring.” His eyes slid to Dima. “You know, I go to sleep with my nose against the back of her head? I love the smell of her hair. Ever since our first time, you know what she’s smelled like to me? Crushed weeds. I know, I know, but I love it.” The hint was gone; the happiness was there. “When we . . .” Yarik’s smile widened. “I like to bury my face in her armpits. Like this,” he said, and flopping over, launched himself against Dima’s side, pushing at Dima’s clenched arm with the top of his head, and Dima, spilling his tea, clamping his arm tight to his side, squirmed away until they were both sprawled out, Yarik stretched on his belly, Dima half-collapsed onto his back, their laughter for a moment swallowing all the din of the Oranzheria. Amid sounds of men and machines that swept back over Dima’s quieting, he propped himself up on his elbows, watched Yarik still chuckling into the dirt. He could still feel the tug at his ear, the sweaty head nuzzling his chest, the thing in him only his brother could brighten still filling his face with its glow.

Wiping his hands on his pants, he found his overturned cup, sat chewing the edge, smiling through the sound of his teeth on the Styrofoam, until they had both gone quiet again. Always, with five minutes left, they would stop talking and silently exchange their hard hats, each brother using the other’s to shade his face for a few stolen moments of sleep.

That day Dima said, “You know what your hair smells like? Birch. Like a birch switch run under the hot water in the baths.”

Yarik lay with his face turned down to the soil. And when he turned to look up, his neck bent at a crazy angle, he was grinning again. “You know, bratishka,” he said, “we really need to find you a wife.”