The Great Glass Sea (50 page)

Yarik picked up his fork, his knife. Across the table, Bazarov filled his own plate.

“As you’ve probably guessed,” Bazarov said, “I’ve known your history from the start. Just as, from the start, we’ve both known another history: that of the land on which the Oranzheria is built. A history in which a small minority of former kolkhozniki have tried to play too big a roll. In Turgenev’s words, ‘The Russian peasant will have God himself for breakfast.’” He tore a turnover in half, bits of meat and onion spilling out. “In my words”—he put one half on Yarik’s plate—“those are some seriously stubborn sonsofbitches. And for too long they’ve kept out of my hands a swatch of land, not huge, but smack in the way of . . .” He wiped his fingers on his napkin, grinned at Yarik. “But now you’re starting to understand what I need you to do.” He took a bite of the sturgeon, hummed with pleasure. “You look skeptical.” He pointed with his fork. “Try more of the fish.” He laughed. “You’re thinking, why can’t I just leave that little swatch alone. Could I not still have my fairly luxurious car? Could I not still fly a friend to Moscow for a day just to take him out to supper? Could I not eat a delicious
shashlik
of sturgeon every meal, if I wanted, and I might, because you have to admit this is really fucking good? But you already know the answer. Because I’m a successful person, and nobody becomes successful thinking like that.

“Maybe, though, you’re thinking I could just build the Oranzheria right over it. Leave a little preserve. A kind of game park for old stubborn kolkhozniki. Maybe it could even be a tourist draw. Like one of those nostalgic outdoor museums, an ode to the old days, a real Russian mir with real Russian . . .” And with a shout he broke out into the old folk song—“
Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka moya, v’sadu yagoda malinka, malinka moya
!”—blasting at the top of his voice so everyone in the restaurant turned to look. “In the middle of the glass.” He sat chuckling, shaking his head. “Frozen like some bug in amber.” Lifting the bottle of pomegranate drink, he tipped it towards Yarik’s glass, saw Yarik hadn’t touched it, poured his own full. “Aside from the obvious impracticalities,” he said, “ask yourself this: what kind of message would that send to the other farmers farther north whose land I haven’t yet bought? Or to the ones outside Nizhnevartovsk and Salekhard and Lensk? Because I assure you, there are stubborn old sonsofabitches everywhere. But mostly,” he said, “what kind of a lesson would that be for the next generation, the people who are going to build this country up or let it sink, keep it on the track that we—me, the men you saw today—started it on twenty years ago, or twist it back towards the past, what kind of lesson would that be to the keepers of the flame, the ones who are like I was when I was starting out, the people, Yaroslav Lvovich, like you.” He took another bite of fish, paused midchew. “Oh,” he said, through his mouthful, “which reminds me,” and he turned and lifted a hand. The maître d’ looked up like he’d been waiting for just that motion. Bazarov nodded to him. The man disappeared.

While Yarik watched him go, Bazarov lifted a tureen of plum-colored sauce and leaned over the table and poured a stream of it over Yarik’s fish. “Try it with this.” He put the tureen down with a clank. “At least eat a few bites. You’re being rude.”

But by the time Yarik had picked his knife and fork back up, the maître d’ had reappeared. In his wake one of Bazarov’s black-suited men carried a leather bag as old and worn as it was strange: two twin pouches covered in heavy flaps, bound by a band slung over the man’s shoulder, one knocking at his chest, the other at his back. From one pouch a long hole-punched strip dangled like a belt, from the other, the buckle. The man stopped. The buckle clanked against the tabletop. Tooled into the leather of the bag closest to him, Yarik saw four words, two he recognized—
U
NITED
S
TATES
—and two he didn’t—
P
OSTAL
S
ERVICE
. Then the man shrugged the thing off his shoulder, deposited it in Yarik’s lap, and left.

“Open it,” Bazarov said, as if it were wrapped in a bow.

But Yarik just sat there, the heavy weight on his legs, the smell of old leather mixing with the scents of the food. “How much is it?” he said.

“Open it.” This time it wasn’t a request.

Inside there must have been enough to pay off the families of four or five dead guards, maybe enough to buy the restaurant they were sitting in. He shut the flap.

“The sturgeon,” Bazarov said, and when he saw that Yarik couldn’t eat it with the bag piled on his lap, got up and came around the table and, setting the bag on the chair between them, leaned down, took Yarik’s fork and knife, started cutting up his fish. He cut it into bite-size pieces, talking close in Yarik’s ear. “Next time, when all this is over, and you’ve done your good thing for me, we’ll eat something even better than this. Just wait till your first taste of roast boar. Wait till you pick your bullet out and put it on your plate.” Yarik could hear the smile in his voice.

“Do you remember,” Bazarov said, “a while ago, back when we were first getting to know each other, we discussed the idea of opportunity. Seeing it. Taking it.”

Yarik didn’t shake his head, or nod, or anything.

“Friedman,” Bazarov prompted. “Khodorkovsky.”

“I remember.”

“You remember Mizin? Yuri Mizin? No?” Yarik felt the warm breath of the word on the side of his face. “No one does.” Bazarov paused in his cutting. “Though back in ’92? Privatization? The state handing out shares to the old Soviet directors, workers . . . It was Mizin who saw how to take it: the geologias in the north where big gas was trying to expand, the shares held by the workers there. Goes up, tries to gain their trust, get them to vote the Red Direktors out, his directors in, and he might have, too, if he hadn’t found he
liked
the people so damn much.” With the knife he scraped a chunk of fish off of the fork. “Because when sweet talking wasn’t enough, when he would have had to push a little harder—cut someone up, break someone’s hand—he balked. Couldn’t do it. So?” Bazarov set the fork and knife down with a clank. “The Red Direktors stayed on, the geologias stuck in their Soviet ways, outdated, corrupt, until they folded, and the workers lost their jobs, and a year later the second most common cause of death was drunkards freezing on the streets. The first most common was starvation. Suicide?” He picked the fork back up. “It barely came in third. And what about Mizin?” He shrugged. “Who cares?” Bazarov speared a piece of fish and held the fork for Yarik to take it. “He’s not even why I’m telling you this now.”

He left Yarik holding the fork and went back around the table and pulled out his chair. “I’m more interested,” he said, sitting, “in what you think.” He opened his palms. “What do you think? Was what Mizin did a good thing or a bad thing? Was what seemed a good thing a good thing in the end? Or would more good have come from the thing that might have seemed at first to be bad? What do you think, Cossack?”

One by one Yarik speared pieces of food, the tines scraping against the plate, until his fork was stacked thick. Then he set it down. “How much is in there?” he said.

Bazarov smiled. “In that bag?”

“Is there enough to buy Kartashkin’s farm?”

“No,” he said, his laugh a quiet accompaniment to the small smile. “That’s only half of what the stubborn sonofabitch thinks he’s going to get for it. And he’s probably right. Which is why, even if he demands twenty million roubles from you, you’re going to say OK. And he’s going to trust you. Because you’ll have a quarter of it in cash. And a letter from me promising the other three-quarters as soon as he sells the land to you. And you sign it over to me.”

“Why a quarter?”

“Because,” Bazarov said, “that’s what’s in one of those pouches. The other is filled with another five million roubles for you.” He raised his hand, signaled in the air for the check. “Of course,” he said, “that’s only if you decide you want to do it.” He tongued at something in his mouth, then opened his jaws as wide as he could and, lips stretched, teeth showing, dug with his fingers at whatever was stuck. When he got it, he yanked it out and wiped it on his napkin and told Yarik there were other solutions, of course, that he could always use on the farmers who were holding out, the sort of tactics Mizin hadn’t had the stomach for, the sort of thing the businessmen they met with that afternoon had been talking about. After all, he said, Yarik and he both knew that half of what he’d spouted back there in that tent had been bullshit. There were plenty of things, he said, that the Consortium could do to Dima, and plenty of ways to do them, that would bring the workers back to the Oranzheria just as fast. “Eat up,” he said. “We have to get you back on the plane.”

But Yarik couldn’t touch the fork. All across the table, the meat had gone lukewarm, the grease congealed, the smells settled into the cloth like mold. In his stomach he could feel everything he’d eaten sitting there, could taste it on the lining of his throat, and looking across the table at Bazarov, at his sated eyes and full cheeks and small dark slick of something stuck in the hairs of his goatee, all he could think was how hungry his brother must be.

He seemed to have rusted all around his face. His hair had turned an iron orange, stiff and brittle as the bristles of a neglected wire brush. Zinaida had done his beard, too, and, with the streaks of black she hadn’t reached, his cheeks and chin looked like corroded metal scraps, his eyebrows—bleach applied by her mascara brush—like bent nails discarded to the weather.

His mother’s eyes had widened at the sight, gone sad. “What happened?” she’d whispered, as if only some terrible loss could have turned his hair like that. The Golden Phoenix froze, head cocked, glaring like it had met its match at last, then launched itself at him, beating its russet wings against his head, his beard, his face. And when, after too many days hunkered inside—the protests a distant clangor still going on, the last of the bread peeled of its mold, dipped in the last of the oil—he at last went out onto the street it was true that other people’s faces turned to his. But it was also true that, after a glance, they turned away again.

The city was full of faces that looked more like his. There: his old visage plastered to telephone poles, sooty mustache sticking out from the scarf over his mouth. There: posted on the sides of bus stops, black curls beneath a thick knit hat, goggles obscuring his eyes. Some bore slogans about the “sky-skater of Petroplavilsk.” Some urged,
Remember!
Some had been spray-painted across Consortium ads, his likeness stenciled beside Slava’s. All day Dima wandered among them both: the echoes of his brother, the immitations of himself.

At Peter the Great Square a man climbed the plinth, a pretender in a coat and hat like his, black beard and safety goggles, crying out over the crowd. For a long time, Dima listened. Gradually, he began to understand. This false twin was shouting out a story, the story of
him
—or at least what the immitator imagined that to be.

They stood on statues scattered around the city. In Kirov and Ilyinsky squares, alongside Maria Bochkaryova brandishing her sword, seated on the bronze back of General Kutuzov’s wild-eyed horse. Some claimed he was a Lap come south from Finland; some insisted he had lived all his life in Petroplavilsk; some told of a boy born to Pakhomova and Gorshkov, love child of the golden ice-dancing team. He was the son of a literature professor, a steelworker, a ballerina forced to sell her body on the streets, even of Boris Bazarov himself, The She Bear’s cub come back to haunt him. To remind them. To stir Petroplavilsk to life. Because his father had beaten him with a bear’s claw, his mother had starved on her meager pension, the Oranzheria leveling crews had destroyed their home. They had dug up his sister’s grave. His son had worked too many trawler shifts, fallen asleep, off the side of the ship, was ground up in the propellers, scattered across the lake. His brother was that fucking Slava. Which was how he could afford the helicopter that dropped him on the Oranzheria that dawn. The dawn he plummeted out of the clouds, parachute on his back, ice skates glinting. The dawn he was delivered by a flock of geese. Shaped like a golden eagle, he soared in; in the form of a hawk, he dove; it was a heron from the lake that settled onto the surface of the great glass sea and became a man.

Stanislav. Rodion. Vadim. For the first few days, an argument raged among the impersonators until, inevitably, they began to coalesce around the only name there ever really was, the same that all their antecedent fable makers, all the way back to old Kievan Rus, had come to call the heroes of their tales: Ivan. Ivan the Tsarevich. Vanya the Mare’s Son. Ivanushka the Fool.