The Great Glass Sea (46 page)

That was what most people watched—leaning together over tables at supper, or alone in apartments silent but for the scrape of skates—and that was what everyone else blamed for what happened next.

The cold spike stabbed short and fast, left Petroplavilsk laid out under ice, palsied by downed power lines, but by the following day the weather had withdrawn, fast as it came, the city waking to a frigidity no worse than the common rawness of early winter. The sun returned, the streets were cleared, the buses began to run. And yet the laborers on the Oranzheria did not go back to work. The strike started with barely a hundred, a small crowd lining the road up to the greenhouse entrance, all stirred by something they couldn’t fully explain, didn’t understand any more than this: they didn’t want to go back in.

Some were still wearing bandages, others knew ones who had died, all had witnessed the crawling injured, helped drag out the too badly crushed, been given, on the day of the collapse, the rest of the day off. Buried in bed for more straight sleep than they had had in weeks, or curled beneath blankets with their wives, nothing more pressing than how to keep their children entertained, something had seeped into their bones: memories of a time when there had been two days off in a row, two again a week later; a time when there were only a bare few things to eat but their families had spent hours, whole evenings, cooking together, eating together late into the night; a time when apartments were crowded and cramped but all the doors were open to all the other apartments’ open doors; when there was always someone visiting or inviting a visitor in; when there were no ready-made cakes in the corner stores, but if you smelled a baking
kulich,
you knew that each family in every apartment on that floor would come together that night, sharing small slices, drinking tea from the samovar until one in the morning, or two, or three. . . .

And all along the southern wall of glass, the laborers inside paused, their shovels stuck in the heaps of dead birds. The workers on top of the Oranzheria quit the repairs they had begun, came to the edge instead, looked down. Some raised their hands in solidarity, some shouted calls of support; one reached up and—Did he know what he was doing? Was he only preparing to go back to work?—slipped his safety goggles on and pressed them to his face. Outside the Oranzheria, one of the strikers did the same. For a moment, the two looked at each other through their goggles and the looks on their faces said that if they hadn’t known what they were doing, they knew it now. One by one, the others up on the glass began lowering goggles over their eyes while, on the ground, as if in a reflection, worker after worker did the same. Outside, all in the crowd who had brought goggles put them on, the gathering thickening with those fresh off the buses, growing with others leaving the Oranzheria, workers leaking out like heat drawn to cold, until, by evening, the throng outside was over a thousand strong.

By the next day, it had tripled. They gathered down by the lake, overflowing the statue’s square, flooding out onto the esplanade, filling Kuibysheva Prospect, a legion of laborers bundled in winter parkas and knit hats, long wool coats and huge fur shapkas. The few who still owned ice skates hung them around their necks, blades flashing at their chests. Nearly everyone was wrapped in a scarf. And all who had a pair of safety goggles wore them; some brought a second pair for wives or children or strangers: thousands of be-goggled faces moving en masse up Onezhskoi Flotili Street towards the erstwhile parade grounds of Space Regata Square.

The goateed, stone-browed statue had long since been torn down. But even had it been there, there was no leader to scramble up the revolutionary’s back, cling to his pate, cry out above the crowd. Instead, the square reverberated with cacophonous voices in disarray. Over by the locked post office doors some stood atop the mail collection boxes, others clinging to the flagpole, a mob below shouting for better safety procedures, more time off. Amassed across the Kosha Bridge, another cluster bellowed about overtime pay. In the center of the crowd, around the bronze model of a space mirror that had replaced the disgraced Vladimir, the Communists gathered, chests stiff with medals, Red Army hats on their heads, a knot of old pensioners half-smothered in the moth-eaten, water-stained banner they unfurled.
Power to the proletariat!
they shouted, and shook the crimson cloth.
Strength in our collective struggle!
They raised it above their heads. Until a rabble of shaved-skulled goons waded in with boots and bottles and roars for a return of the tsar. Above it all the loudspeakers mounted on onetime lampposts blared out a voice boomed from some cavernous chest:
The day has come! The day we’ve chosen! The day we choose to take back time!
Each phrase followed by another voice howling affirmation:
Fuck yes!
Or
Fucking right!
Or
Fucking zerkala!
The big voice bellowed:
What we must do! What we
will
do!
And between the shouted slogans there thundered down long disquisitions on the senselessness of work, and between the disquisitions the lamppost speakers played a crackly recording:

I was once there: I drank of mead;

I saw the green oak by the sea;

I sat beneath it, while the cat,

that learned cat, told me his tales . . .

Someone had hacked the advertising screens that flickered from rooftops around the square, and in the place of glossy lips and silvery sedans there now loomed the image of a bearded man: perched on the plinth of Peter the Great, or flat on a rooftop pointing a pistol at the sky, or dancing across the Oranzheria on skates.

Among the multitudes below, the wondering ran like a thread through all the strike’s disparate swatches—the slight reciter’s frame, the skater’s thick-bundled body, the black beard that might be hidden beneath the scarf, the eyes behind the shooter’s goggles, whether the goggles were even the same—all waiting to see if someone would step forward, pick up the needle, draw tight the stitches, knot the thread.

But no one watched for him here, in the lobby of the old train station, standing in the ticket line, no goggles or scarf of padding beneath his coat, just his fingers worrying his knuckles, his teeth chewing at the beard hairs below his lip, his blue eyes trying to catch the cashier’s glance. On her window, a posting declared her break times, and as the clock ticked towards the next, the line began to thin—the customers behind him breaking away first, and then the ones in front—and remake itself before another window where another sheet signaled a new cashier would soon sit down. He stood in the ghost of the line, still the same half-dozen steps back, nobody before him but the last customer complaining at the window, nobody behind him but the people giving him stares as they passed by. From outside, down Space Regata Prospect, the scending din of the demonstrations pressed through the lobby’s walls, pulsed in the air.

And then the customer was done and there was nothing but the ticket window glass between Dima and his sister-in-law. For a moment, Zinaida’s stare contained the shock of all that had happened since she’d last seen him. Then he stepped forward, and her face recovered the blank bored annoyance that was the mien of her profession. She looked away, pointed to the work-break sign, scribbled at some last bit of business, gathered up her papers, and left. He stared at the empty window. Around him people had begun to whisper. The roar of the distant protests washed up against their sound. In the slot where money and tickets were exchanged she’d left a scrap of paper. He turned it over.
Track 1, go right, last door.

Near the end of the platform, Zinaida was waiting, her blond hair and her uniform and a cigarette’s smoke lit up in the half-open door. He’d never seen her smoke and thought the cigarette was to make her look like any cashier on break, but once she’d waved him inside and shut the door to the dim hallway she brought it to her lips and took a draw.

“Is he OK?” Dima said.

The smoke she exhaled shook.

“Was he hurt?”

And she reached out and pressed her palm against his cheek. “We didn’t know what to think,” she said.

“Was he there?” he asked her. “The collapse? Zina, was Yarik—”

“I came by the apartment,” she told him. “After I saw the news. We didn’t know, we didn’t have any way of knowing, we couldn’t tell if you were still up there when . . .”

“He came, too?”

She took her hand away.

“To Mama’s apartment?”

“Dima.”

“Tell him—”

“Dima. You can’t go around like this.”

“Like what?”

She swept the cigarette between them, as if to indicate all of him.

“I didn’t do it,” he told her.

“But it was you? Up there?”

“I didn’t—”

“I know,” she said. “But they want you to do something now.”

“Who?”

And she swept the cigarette at the shut door, the outside, as if to indicate everyone else. “Haven’t you watched the news?”

He had tried. After he’d made it home, made sure his mother was OK, he’d gone straight to Gennady’s apartment, banged on the door. Through it, he could barely hear the breathy reports from the scene of the collapse, even kneeling with his ear to the crack above the floor, couldn’t make out any word of his brother. He’d run back downstairs, out onto the street, into a blini shop filled with the blare of its TV, but the reporters gave no names, and when people had begun to stare, he had left, gone to Yarik’s building, stood in the stairwell, torn between worry about what might have happened to his brother beneath the broken glass and what might happen if he broke his promise and went up.

“Where is he?” Dima asked Zinaida now.

She ashed her cigarette. “Follow me,” she said.

But the bathroom she led him into was empty and cramped, a single stall. She told him to stay, went out, shut the door. He listened to the sounds of her disappearing down the hall. The one window had been painted opaque and the room was dim. He left the light off. When she came back, she slapped it on. She was carrying a janitor’s bucket. Inside it, a large bottle of laundry detergent. In her other hand, one of bleach. While she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves she explained to him what they were going to do. Then she shut her eyes, and Dima knew she was explaining it to God, or asking him if it was right, and when she opened them they held a certainty as if she had heard back.

He watched her mix the soap and bleach into a thick goop in the bottom of the bucket. “Can I see him?” Dima asked.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“Can I—”

“And your mouth.”

Sitting on the toilet lid, his eyes shut, breathing through his nose, he felt her massage the mixture over his head. Her fingers, inside the rubber of the gloves, felt strange, good. She worked the bleach into each long strand, each clod of curl at his neck, the unwashed tangles clumped over his scalp, and when she moved in front of him, as she pulled the paste through his greasy bangs, it occurred to him that she hadn’t touched him this much in all the past year. No one had. Except, maybe, his mother. And, one night last summer, the fleeting pressure of another’s hand on his chest, a few warm breaths that had brushed his neck. A tingling. A prickling over his scalp. The strange scraping of the comb’s teeth as she dragged it through his hair. Slowly she worked his tangles loose. How close her body was to his. He could feel her warmth. His sister-in-law. He missed his niece, his nephew. He wondered if this was what his brother felt beneath his wife’s touch, this soothing calm, these fingertips on his skin, the heat of her on his face.

This was not how Yarik had imagined flying. He’d always thought the first time he left the ground his fingers would be entwined with Zina’s, that he would feel her slight squeeze. On their first plane trip the family would take up a row, Timosha between the two of them, Polya traded back and forth on their laps. They had even begun to save up sick days for it: a week’s vacation a year from now. To the Black Sea. They had found a resort in Sochi. It had its own beach with lounge chairs and palm trees; he and Zina had leaned close to the computer screen, seen the mountains rising up behind the high-rise hotel. Another night, Zina on his lap while the two of them reread every page of the site, they had discovered the palm trees were fake. Who cared? They were palm trees.
With plastic coconuts,
Zina said, and pretended to drop one on his head.
Bonk!
she said. Timosha heard their laughing. They hoisted him up to see. He didn’t seem to care about the palm trees, but when he heard they’d fly there in a plane he went completely still. His eyes locked on the wall somewhere above the computer screen. Yarik bent over him, gave his head a shake, said,
Breathe, Timosha, breathe.
And, as if bursting with air, the boy had leapt off Yarik’s lap, gone racing around the room, arms stiff wings, lips revving wet burbling, as if he thought airplanes moved by passing gas. That was how it had been the past month. To the Black Sea. If Yarik thought of it like that it seemed like a command, something simply bound to happen.