The Great Glass Sea (20 page)

The next day, the crowd had swelled to twice the size. A thin drizzle pattered off umbrellas and hat brims, briefcases and newspapers held over heads, so many gathered there that what should have been soft murmuring turned to a rumble that threatened to drown Dima out. He shouted over it, picking up where he’d left off, reciting what he’d memorized that day—(Ruslan: “
Why came you to this wilderness?
” The hermit: “
Long ago I lived in Finland . . .
”)—shouting out the old Finn’s own tale, watching the faces in the crowd as they strained to hear him.

Alone, I shepherded the flocks to graze

In vales untouched by any other human’s eye.

A man in thick glasses beaded with rain, standing openmouthed, missing front teeth, his tie loosed around a neck red with razor nicks.

There, reclined in pastures,

I rested beside woods and streams,

carefree, even as I worked,

a poor man of simple pleasure.

A woman in a lunch counter’s aproned uniform, holding a food tray above her head, her hands encased in clear plastic, her eyes shut, her face slack.

But, alas, such a satiating life of silence

Wasn’t to be mine for long.

The woman opened her eyes, the man shut his mouth, others tipped their umbrellas back.
Why?
their faces seemed to ask,
Why was that life no longer his? How could he lose it? Who stole from him those carefree days?
Dima could feel them looking at him for the answer, but, even as he recited the rest of the tale, it seemed to him they were asking for more than he could give them with the poet’s words. All the hours he’d ridden around the city, bent over the book, memorizing verse, it had knocked beneath him, incessant as the seams in the tracks: Why
these
words? Why
this
story? This hermit who’d traded away his bucolic youth, this hero who’d lost his soul mate to some dark art he didn’t understand. How fast it happened—the loved one stolen, the rules of the world upturned—how hard to bring back anyone once a spell had snatched them. Maybe, he’d thought, it was that Pushkin had written his tale in the thrall of the same ones Dyadya Avya told. Maybe it was that he and Yarik had spent a summer of their own youth beneath the epic’s spell. All he knew was that the way the hermit found peace again in the seclusion of a second life, the fact that, in the end, the searcher got his loved one back, shook something in him far deeper than the rattling of the tram.

And different, too, from the faint tapping that touched his chest when he saw the girl. Even though she’d been there every day—unlacing her sneakers, shucking her socks, always barefoot by the time he was done—he’d worried the press of people might have kept her from getting through. But there she was, standing barefoot in the tall grass beneath the poplar trees. The Consortium had planted their own lupines to replace the wild ones that used to bloom, and behind her the trunks of the trees were buried in concentric circles of wet, deep blue. She was letting whatever rain got through the leaves land on her, and her shock of black hair was pasted over her forehead, her mascara smeared to bruises beneath her eyes.

The clang of steel on steel, the crash of boats smashed prow to prow: through the telling of it all, Dima kept glancing at her. She had come with a couple friends—a thin man with a twisted mouth, a fat one with a beard, the two pressed together beneath a detached road sign held horizontal above their heads—and, when Dima reached the words
I ached to see her
, the friends flashed smirks, leaned over, whispered something in her ear. She laughed (
O longed-for meeting!
), they all laughed (
O blessed hour!
), she rolled her eyes.

It caught him like a glimpse of another person’s yawn: he felt his own eyes roll and he snapped them straight, shut his lids. What right had he to roll his eyes at Pushkin? What right did she? Why did she come, then? When he looked at her again, she was staring hard at him, and when she saw his eyes on hers, she smiled. It was all he could do not to smile back. She rolled her eyes. He kept his still. She rolled her eyes again, smiled, as if to urge him on. Maybe it was the poem working him, the lines he was shouting out to the crowd—the way the old hermit had himself become a caster of spells—but the thought struck Dima that she came, that they all came, not just to hear the words he said but to see him say them, not just for the poem, but for the permission it gave them to spend time doing nothing but watch him.

Dreams aglow with new-stoked hope,

senses inflamed with with fresh desire . . .

When he let his glance slip to her again, she was still gazing at him. Between her smile she stuck out her tongue.

The lightning had flashed, the thunder had boomed, and the mage’s story was nearly done by the time Dima returned the following day to find an assemblage grown to fill the square. And he was almost finished recounting for them the rest of the first canto by the time the police showed up.

He saw the movement first, the crowd rippling away from a spot in its center, closing in again behind, the place they cleared coming slowly closer to the front, until he made out the black caps of the police: two of them, pushing through, looking back at him. Through the trees, at the edge of the park, he could see the gray roof of their car, the flashers off, blue and still as the lupines. One of the policemen, bullhorn in his hand, began shouting for the crowd to disperse. The other, carrying a billy club, kept coming, got to the plinth, stood looking up. Between the tsar’s feet, Dima sat looking down. On the man’s shoulders he could see a
starshina
’s stripes.

“Treasure your love,” the sergeant said. He bunched his face into a squint, seemed to think. “And love her?”

Dima glanced at the thinning crowd, one half working their way towards the street, the other half still, watching. Something stung Dima’s cheek. He snapped back to the policeman: the seargant, stooping to pick up another pebble, stopped and met Dima’s look and said, “Am I right?”

It was the very last line of the first canto, or close enough Dima wasn’t going to tell the starshina he was wrong. The man was over forty, heavy necked, small eyed. He stood up. As if to keep the distance between them, Dima got to his feet, too.

“Wrong way,” the starshina said. “You want to come down.”

Follow the rest of the crowd,
the bullhorn was blaring,
out of the square and towards the street.

Over by the near edge of the trees, the fare collector and her friends shouted back, the road sign held before them like a shield.

The starshina rapped the plinth below Dima’s foot with his club. “Get down,” he said.

“What am I doing wrong?”

The starshina turned, swept a hand at the crowd. “Because of you nobody’s cleaning up the park.”

“It’s only a half-hour—”

“Nobody cleans up the park, the park gets full of trash. The park gets full of trash, the birds come down.”

Cease this disturbance,
the bullhorn said.

“Then,” the starshina said, “it gets full of shit. Nobody wants a park full of shit. Nobody comes to a shit-filled park.”

“Nobody comes anyway,” Dima said.

The starshina looked behind him, as if the action proved Dima wrong.

. . . Disperse . . .

“What happens,” the starshina went on, “if nobody comes to the park?” He clanked his club against the plinth again. “Crime. Robbery. Muggings. Murders. Rapes. Who knows? All I know”—he flipped the club like a juggler’s torch—“is this miserable situation begins with you.” He jutted the club at Dima; its tip touched his shin.

“You don’t believe that,” Dima said.

“Of course not,” the starshina told him. “I’m just doing my job.”

The blow caught Dima on his ankle, though he didn’t know until he had already fallen, his hands scrambling to slow the drop of his body towards the steps, his elbow smacking the plinth where half a second ago his feet had been, and then he was lying half in the flower bed, the orange of the blooms all around him, the starshina in the marigolds, looming over him, his ankle throbbing.

Go back to work,
the bullhorn said.

Dima tried to sit up—he could hear the park sweepers shouting, could just make out the fare collector’s friends starting to throw things, the girl herself swinging her shoes by their laces, as if about to let loose—then the tip of the club pressed at his chest and his back was flat on the dirt again.

The policeman leaned over him. “That’s why,” the starshina said. “It’s not just the park that goes to shit. It’s every place that every one of them works. Now where are you hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“You aren’t hurt?”

“My ankle.”

The starshina nodded. Then he kicked Dima on the side of the knee. Dima grunted, tried to roll. “You’re supposed to shout out,” the starshina said. “This time shout out.” And he kicked Dima in the back. He didn’t kick hard enough for it to really hurt, but Dima shouted like it did.

The starshina laughed. “No wonder they like to hear you do the story.” Kneeling beside Dima, he whispered, “Don’t get up for a while. Don’t come back tomorrow. Tomorrow there’ll be more than only my partner who needs a show. You come back tomorrow, I guarantee you there’ll be guys who aren’t just doing their jobs. Guys who do what other guys pay them to do while pretending to do their job. You see what I’m saying?” The starshina didn’t wait to hear his answer. “Now yelp,” he said, and slammed his billy club down.

That evening, when he got off the tram at his brother’s stop, Yarik asked what had happened to his ankle. Dima told him he had fallen off a statue.
What were you doing on a statue?
Yarik said.
Reciting Pushkin,
Dima told him.
To who?
Yarik asked.
The birds?
But Yarik hadn’t laughed, not even smiled, just wiped at his forehead with the gloves he’d bunched in his hand, left them over his eyes for second, shook his head.
Whose shoes are those?
he finally said. Dima lifted the shoes hanging from his neck, let them drop back. They knocked lightly against his chest.
One of the birds,
he said. Yarik said nothing to that, but going up the stairs he wouldn’t let Dima carry anything; he made Dima lean on him instead. And once they were inside, Zinaida kept the kids clear of their uncle, took off his shoe, sat Dima on the couch while she eased his foot into a basin of water and ice. Later, he sat there, telling tales to Timofei, Polina sleeping on his lap, listening to his brother and his sister-in-law whisper behind the bedroom door, to the hushed sound—pleasing and troubling, both at once—of them saying his name. But only after he’d helped put the kids to bed, kissed Zinaida good night, felt her hold her arms around him a little too long, after he’d hobbled down the steps beside his brother, stood outside the stairwell listening to Yarik climb back up by himself, his footsteps dissipating with each flight until the distant hint of the closing door, only after Dima had hauled himself alone onto the tram for the ride back to his mother’s place, only when he felt once more the rail seams knocking at his chest, the question rattling up through him again, did he finally understand.

And the next morning, meeting Yarik at the trolley stop, riding with him out to the Oranzheria, Dima told himself that
that
—the fact he couldn’t tell his brother which poem or why without adding to the worry he’d heard in Yarik’s voice last night—that was why he would not go back to the statue today. Returning from the Oranzheria on his own, he told himself it was just one more reason to add to all the others why he should not go to the park that afternoon. Though, sneaking into the dim auditorium of the old National Theater, sidling down a row of ragged velvet seats to settle beneath a beam of light leaked through the dilapidated roof, he told himself there was no harm in simply opening the book. And when he’d memorized the start of the next canto, he crept back into the open air and got back on another tram and, holding the shoes against his chest to keep them from swinging with the starts and stops, told himself he would just stay long enough to see if she was there. She’d want them back, hold out her hands; he’d take them off his neck, give them to her, go.

By the time he got there, the statue’s square was full. But not with an audience waiting for him. The crowd was in chaos, bodies churning, scrambling, clawing their way over each other, trying to climb trees, tearing away through the grass, their shouting muffled by the noise of the tram until the brakes stopped squealing, the car jerked, the doors folded open to let in the blast of screams, bullhorn barking, swears and high-pitched calls and the sounds of hitting cracking through it all like shots. As he ran closer, he could distinguish wood on wood and wood on stone, the thud the billy clubs made on flesh, the thwack of hitting bone. He could see the old Communists fleeing through the trees, tripping over their canes, toppling to the ground, others already on their backs, holding the plastic buckets before their chests, their faces. Policemen moved among them like they were whacking weeds. A few fought back, hacked with ragged branches, lobbed what stones they could grab. He saw her there, clamped to a policeman’s back, her arms around his neck, her legs clenched to his waist, her bare feet flashing, flashing, as the man she rode turned round and round.