The Great Glass Sea (35 page)

“But he does.” Baz slid his look to Yarik. “He’s thinking,
He carried coffee, not tea.
” They had reached the cafeteria trailer, and Bazarov stopped. “But, Seryozha, these students, they were, in secret, fans of the West. In secret they liked to smoke Marlboros. They liked to read Ricardo, Mill, Adam Smith. They liked to drink coffee.”

The kid glanced at the cafeteria trailer.

Bazarov rattled the glasses. “OK,” he said, “I’ll give you the quick and dirty, as the Americans say. By the time those students were scrambling to put what they’d been reading to practice, I was importing green coffee beans by the sackful. Also, inside the sacks, I hid diamonds.” He raised his eyebrows at Yarik, at the kid. “Not for myself,” he assured them, “but for the men who paid off the customs agents for the lying documents that let me bring in my shiploads of beans, untaxed.” Bazarov handed the tray back to the kid, plucked off a half-full glass, handed another to Yarik. “You know the place called Kofe Khauz on Lyzhnaya Street in town? Or the one on Chernishevskogo Avenue? Or maybe the Kirov Square branch?” He winked, held up his cup, and, in one shot, drank the cooled tea down. Replacing his cup, he asked the kid, “Want to know why I told you this?” He took Yarik’s glass and put it on the tray, too. “So that, when you bring the full cups back to your buddies, you’ll tell them you want ten roubles each for doing it. And tomorrow you’ll tell them twenty.”

When they had left the kid and the trailer and were walking fast again towards wherever Bazarov was taking them, Yarik told the billionaire he hadn’t realized the chain of American-style cafés that had cropped up in Moscow, St. Petersburg, even, in the last few years, Petroplavilsk, was owned by him.

“It isn’t,” Bazarov said.

“Or that you started it.”

“I didn’t.”

They walked in silence, passing workers passing them the other way, until another—a sack of concrete on one shoulder, a shovel on the other—seemed to grab Bazarov’s eye. The man’s face was slit from ear to lip by a raw scar, forearms blue with amateur tattoos.

“Now to him,” the billionaire turned to Yarik, “I wouldn’t have told that lie.” He flipped Yarik a smile. “To him I would have told a different one. Maybe I would have asked where he got his scar. Then I would have told him a secret of my own. A secret that showed the real me, something that he would take home with him and hold up against himself and recognize.” He peered ahead into the distance. At what, Yarik couldn’t see. “I would have told him I was there: Moscow, the putsch of ’93. That I was in the squadron they sent across the Moskva to seize the mayor’s office. I would have been twenty-seven then. Penniless. In the parliamentary police. We hadn’t seen wages for months. I would have told him about storming the old Comecon building, being sent into the basement to see if anyone was hiding, about what I found, instead. You know what was down there? Vouchers. Privatization vouchers. Eleven million of them. Worth fifty-five million American dollars. Tied in bundles wrapped with condoms. Honest to God: condoms. And all of it behind a flimsy wooden door, a cheap little padlock. The fact that none of my fellow countrymen storming into that basement thought to bust down that door still makes me ashamed to be a Russian.
That
was a lack of seeing the opportunity.
That
was a failure to seize it. If I had been there”—he turned his hands palm up—“that would have been the way I got my start.” He shrugged. “Or at least that’s what I would have told a man like that.”

Still staring ahead, Bazarov raised a hand, as if signaling to someone. Someone standing beside a distant crawler-crane, the iron boom rising high over the scaffolding of the Oranzheria’s unfinished edge, the outrigger big as a dump truck on treads, its cabin window open beside the small dark dot of a man. A man wearing a suit. A suit the blue of the one Yarik’s manager had worn. Bazarov dropped his hand. In the distance, the man turned from the crane, started walking away. Even from afar, Yarik could hear the whir of the winding drum starting to lower the line.

Listening to it, walking towards it, Yarik asked the man beside him, “What would you have told me? That you made your first two million dollars in seventy-two hours? That your mother was a seamstress and your sisters died in a fire? That you would show me things you’d never even shown your son?” He kept his eyes on the crane, the figure in the suit leaving. “That there was some way I could keep this job, and keep my brother, and I should trust you?”

“You see,” Bazarov said, “I told you I knew I liked you. I wasn’t lying to you then, not about the millions, or my mother, or my sisters, or Pavel, and I’m not lying to you now. Half of success is knowing how to lie, Yarik. The other half is knowing when not to. And the key to that is
who
. Ask yourself: Why, if I wanted to deceive you, would I have just given you a demonstration of my methods of deceit?”

They were nearing the crane now. Yarik glanced up at the end of the girders, the beginning of open sky, the boom way up there, and, coming down on the line, swaying a little in the grip of its lower sheave, a square-sided metal bucket, huge and dark against the brightness of noon.

“I don’t know why,” Yarik told him.

“Because,” Bazarov said, “it was never in doubt that I liked you, that I trusted you. What you were asking is why I
need
you.”

They were a dozen meters from the crane, and the bucket was less than that above and dropping fast, and Bazarov walked to its shadow, stopped, turned to see if Yarik was coming. Yarik stood a few meters back, listening to the whine of the line lowering the bucket, watching the shadow shrink fast around the man.

“Why I need you,” Bazarov said, “is
your
history.
Your
story.”

The bucket dropped so close to the billionaire that Yarik could see his body shake with the quiver of the ground. Bazarov didn’t even shift his feet. He didn’t shift his gaze from Yarik, either. Then he turned, placed his hands on the bucket’s rim, pushed himself up, and, easy as stepping over a low fence, swung his legs in. From inside the bucket, he looked back at Yarik. “Come on,” he said. “Get in. I’m going to tell you the story of you.”

There was the unmistakable weight of the bucket beneath him, the solidity of the rim in his hands, and yet the tug of the line, when it lifted them off the earth, made even the heavy steel under his boots feel fragile. The winding drum moaned; the hoist rope sang; the bucket swayed a little. He watched its shadow slide on the ground, open up beneath them, spread wider as they rose.

“Yaroslav Lvovich Zhuvov.” Over the noise of the crane’s hydraulics, Bazarov had to half-shout. “Big blue eyes, black black hair. From good Karelian stock. Son of a good Russian fisherman, a lover of our great poet, our great drink. Son of a good Russian woman who worked hard all her life in our textile plants, on our local army base. Son of Petroplavilsk, of our city.”

Down below: their own shadows, side by side, jutting out of the patch of shade cast by the rising bucket. Their shapes rose with it. A strange sensation: even as Yarik’s shadow shrank from him, there it was among the men below, growing larger.

“But,” Bazarov continued, “a son of the countryside, too.” Bazarov waved his hands at the sinking trees, the fields they couldn’t yet see. “Out there”—he brought his hand back, made a fist of it—“in here”—gave his chest a gentle knock. “A boy of the woods and pastures. A farm boy. Pulling potatoes. Whistling as he works. Until . . .” Bazarov smacked his hands together. “Tragedy. Papa: dead. Mama: gone mad with grief. And yet, raised by his loving uncle—that stout kolkhoznik, red-chested man of the soil—he struggles on.”

Yarik watched the ground slip away, watched the shape of the bucket stretch with the changing slant of the sun.

“But what,” Bazarov said, “what, in the hard times that we all knew, the great collapse we still feel
here
”—again, he thumped his fist against his chest—“what, in those times, was a penniless boy, practically an orphan, an orphan raised by an uncle who was—let’s face it—afflicted by that devil all our Russian families know, an orphaned peasant boy alone in a drafty izba with his drunken uncle unable to make ends meet, what was he to do?”

And there was Yarik’s own shape stretching, too, already almost unrecognizable as something made by him.

“Persevere!” Bazarov raised his fist between them, shook it. “Survive! Make it through one day after the next until, finally, there comes a day that is different. Over the city”—Bazarov swept his hand like the whole world was drawn on a page and he was flipping it—“there appears a new star. His wife? And another. His child? And soon a whole sky full of them. The zerkala. The Oranzheria. Where our Yaroslav . . .” Bazarov paused. “Shall we call him Slava or Yarik?”

But Yarik was silent, looking down at the tops of the trees where his shadow had been broken up and swallowed by the woods.

“Where Slava,” Bazarov went on, “signs up to work. He works hard, our Slava, a new husband, a new father. He works well. Is he rewarded? Not right away. But”—Bazarov held up a finger, let his smile break out behind it—“eventually, after a few years—but not so many years; really, not very many at all—his hard work is, yes, at last, recognized. He is promoted to foreman. Then to manager. And next . . .”

Yarik could feel Bazarov looking at him as steadily as he was looking down, and when he lifted his eyes Bazarov let go of the bucket’s edge, raised his hands, palms up.

“Next?” Yarik said.

“I don’t know,” Bazarov said. “Is there a next? Or does he throw it all away?” Palms still raised, he leaned back against his side of the bucket.

Through the metal, Yarik could feel the slight shake, an almost imperceptible shift, and he leaned a little against his own side, as if, though his mind knew it wouldn’t tip, his body was telling him it might.

“I hope not,” Bazarov said. “Because that story? That history? That’s a history almost everyone here can relate to. That’s a story people will take home with them.
These
people.” He leaned over the edge, looked down, and Yarik, feeling the bucket shift again, looked down over his edge, too. “These people will hold that story up before them. And in it, they’ll see themselves.”

Down there, the yellow hard hats of the logging crews floated amid the forest, the green pines and bright birch leaves, like bees in a field, the roar of their chain saws reduced by the height to a buzz broken only by the rumbling of the machines, the crack and crash of trees coming down. All along the edge of the woods they fell, and looking at the trunks laid out on the ground it was almost as if the ground itself had flipped ninety degrees and the line of fallen trees down there was the new forest’s edge, and for a moment Yarik felt he couldn’t tell if he was leaning over at all, or standing straight. . . . But there was the ground, the churned soil, the skidder machines dragging the logs across it, and the tub grinders chewing them to pulp and the graders rolling over the dirt to push it flat, and then the girders going up, the bright metal scaffolding reaching out from the south, and he had the feeling again of the earth being tilted, as if the scaffolding was rebar at the top of a skyscraper, erected upwards into a muddy sky and, far below, the finished exteriors gleaming with glass, towering too high, too far from the ground, to even see where it was rooted to the earth.

“You were right,” Bazarov said, “it is beautiful.”

Yarik looked up from the sight.

“The first time we met,” Bazarov reminded him. “You said it should be turned into an attraction. Not just someplace people worked, but a place people wanted to come to. You were right about that. Just not about
which
people.” He smiled at Yarik. “It’s OK. You haven’t seen the surveys. You don’t have a team devoted to figuring this stuff out. You haven’t studied the past fifty years in the part of the world we’re trying to outdo. Productivity, retention rates. Do you know the secret to their success?”

“Whose?”

“Tomorrow. The belief in tomorrow. That it will be a better day. Work hard, play fair, make something of yourself. The chance to get ahead, to climb a little higher. Or at least the fact that they believe the chance exists.” He turned and spread his arms and leaned farther out over the edge and flapped them—once, twice, big slow flaps—and when he turned back he was beaming. “Fly high!” he said. “You’re going straight to the top!” He squinted at Yarik. “Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. You
are
there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yarik said.

And standing in that steel bucket in the sky, their clothes bright in the blasting noon, one’s head dark as a distant bird, the other’s a speck of sun against the blue, Bazarov laid it all out: how his managers had come to him, the warnings they had brought of the rumblings they had heard, the laborers growing dissatisfied, the workforce that had been so grateful in the first years now starting to raise complaints—hours, pay, safety, breaks—how beneath it all there was the same murmuring stream: What now? Where next? Is this it?
No
, he told Yarik. Not for them, not for the Oranzheria. They just had to make the workers see it. They had to make them believe it. They had to show them him, Yarik. Posters, flyers, billboards, TV. A publicity campaign built around his story.