The Great Glass Sea (51 page)

One day, long after the sun had set and the zerkala had risen in its place, when he had come again to the statue by the lake and was listening to another black-bearded tale teller recount another Ivanushka yarn, he saw his brother. Standing in the crowd. On the opposite side of the square. He had wrapped a scarf around his chin and mouth, sunglasses covered his eyes. Of course, Yarik, too, would have had to hide his doppelgängered face. His brother’s breath leaked through the knit of the scarf: faint puffs of steam. As if on its own, Dima’s breath settled into synch. Watching each distant wisp dissolve, he wondered how it was for Yarik always among effigies of
his
brother, surrounded by the guerrilla videos that still sprang up on advertising screens, having to hear impersonators tell him over and over the tale of his own twin.

“And so,” the one up on the statue was saying, “Ivanushka went to his second brother. And he saw how much gold he had dug out of his hill. And he went to his third brother. And he—”

“Wrong!”

The shout was so loud the impersonator stopped. The crowd: a hundred heads turning. Were they looking at Yarik? Had his brother called that out?

And, before Dima could think, he had done it: “Wrong!” Now the faces turned to him. “He had only one brother!” Dima shouted, his stare on Yarik. “They were twins!” On Yarik straining to see him. “Dmitry.” Yarik turning. “And Yaroslav.” His brother disappearing into the crowd. And Dima could hear the whispering, the eyes picking at his face, painting his beard, could sense the movement of all the others, faint as the pull of gravity when a train begins to roll. Except he was still. And everything else had begun to come at him. The police must have sensed it, too. They shoved their way closer through the crowd, clearing a path through the surging throng, and Dima was about to turn, to struggle out, break into a run, when something hard jabbed into his back.

“This time,” a voice said in his ear, “we know you know what this fucking is.”

They smuggled him out through the crowd, Volodya using his bulk like a screen, Fedya using his forehead as a distraction (a crack against whoever’s brow was in butting distance, a wail, the shave-skulled man sprinting away from the police); and through it all he followed the black buzzed back of Vika’s head as she pulled him behind her by a fistful of his beard.

Twenty minutes later she had still not let go. Rejoined by the others, they had headed along the back alleys of Petroplavilsk, wound up at an old stuccoed building, where they stopped. It was on the far side of the city from where Dima lived, and he hadn’t been there since he was a kid, but he recognized it right away: the old Pioneer Palace. Last time he’d been inside, it had still been The Past Life, the place teeming with children come after school, ringing with the shouts of komsomol sitters, the laughter of Young Pioneers.

For how long now had it been boarded up? Vika didn’t know. But she knew a cellar door through which they could get in. Following her past room after room, he saw tables still spread with chessboards, model airplanes spinning slowly from their ceiling strings, easels standing still, as if soon the painters’ club would be coming back, as if the building might burst again into the sounds of his childhood. But there was just the echoes of their footsteps, Vika’s voice telling him how she’d been squatting there since, in solidarity with the strikers, she’d quit her job taking tickets on the tram. He could still hear her from summer—
If you were working
and
We never would have met—
and he wondered if she’d spent any of her newfound free time looking for him. Or if she’d been too angry. Her fist in his beard, the jerk in her hips: she seemed it now. Though, in front of him, beneath the fuzz of her hair, the skin bunched at the base of her skull looked so soft. He had not remembered that, had not remembered how the fine hairs below it whisped to a point at the nape of her neck. Her scent: the fungal fresh and bitter smoky whole of it, unlike anything in his life since that day in summer.

Lost in it, he let her lead him down the hall into a room that must have once been used by the ceramics club. Volodya shut the door. Vika let go his beard. Fedya backed him up until his legs hit the hard edge of a potter’s wheel. The three of them stood, watching him. Rubbing his face where the hairs had been tugged, he watched them back.

“Our esteemed balladeer.” Volodya opened his hands, palms up, as if presenting Dima.

“Ivanushka,” Vika said, her voice all smirk.

“The Fool,” Fedya added.

“Friend,” Volodya went on, “was it something we did?” He rubbed his greasy beard as if in sympathy with Dima’s sore skin. “How many restive nights have I lain awake face-to-face with that conjecture? Aggrieved by indigestion. Worrying myself thin.” He lifted his arm; his sweater sleeve jiggled with a flap of armpit flesh. “Was it something about Yura?”

Next to him, Fedya turned ventriloquist, thrust a puppet hand into the fat man’s pit, said, “Wash me!”

Volodya sniffed himself. “Surely, it’s not
that
bad.”

“I didn’t think—” Dima began.

But Volodya cut him off. “And what of Fedya? Did you think of him? Lying up on the roof, shooting his pistol all alone?”

“Fuck this,” Fedya said. He stepped away from the circle. “He didn’t think of anyone but him-fucking-self. I have to piss.”

“You fill it,” Vika told the harelipped man, “you empty it.” And, standing behind Dima, she reached around his head, to where he was rubbing at his chin, covered his hand with hers. His fingers froze. Hers kept rubbing. With tenderness? Or something too hard for that? “What did you think?” Her hand moved slowly up his cheek. “That we would see your new hair?” Her fingers brushed his sideburn. “And mistake you for a fox?”

Hearing the others laugh, Dima jerked his face away. But her fingers had slid up to hover over the very top of his hair, and it was as if around his head the air itself had suddenly grown stiff.

“We should cut his scalp off,” Fedya said. “Sell it to some Moscow wife for a scarf.” He was standing over by a counter, his back to the circle, his legs just far enough apart that Dima could see the bottom of the jar he held. It sloshed a dark yellow. The bright sound of a steady burble.

“No, my urinating friend,” the fat man said, speaking to Fedya, but gazing at Dima. “His head is far more valuable than that.” Volodya nodded thoughtfully. “We could learn from him. I think”—his eyebrows lifted—“I already have. All those fitful hours lying awake in bed, I never saw it. Till now. He was simply putting into practice the philosophy we all espouse.”

“Spit on that,” Fedya said.

“No,” Volodya said, “think on it: there we were working away towards our revolution, and all the while he was doing nothing, avoiding even the action inherent in seeing us, simply waiting. For the right moment. Weren’t you?” he asked Dima. “For the moment when doing what you wanted—simply ascending the Oranzheria provisioned with a pair of ice skates—would accomplish more than all our work.”

Shaking his head, Dima tried to ignore the feeling of his hair brushing back and forth beneath Vika’s still floating fingers. “No,” he said, “I never meant to do anything. I never even wanted to be in your video.”

“And yet,” Vika’s voice came from somewhere behind him, “you couldn’t help yourself.”

“Any more,” Volodya said, “than you can now.”

In the quiet, there was just the burble of Fedya’s still-flowing stream.

“What do you mean?” Dima asked.

And Fedya broke the quiet with a sudden, “Fuck!”

“I told you,” Vika scolded the pisser. “How fucking big is your bladder?”

“Bigger than this fucking jar.”

For a moment, they all listened to the tinkling. Then Vika said something to Volodya, who crossed to the sink, dug in a cabinet, came up with an empty jar. Fedya’s free hand flailed for it, had it. They all watched him make the switch, heard him sigh. The full jar thunked onto the counter. The high-pitched tinkle resumed.

“That,” Volodya said, coming back, “is what I’m talking about.” His whole face seemed lit with pleasure at the thought. “If that was you—”

“If he was me?” Fedya asked.

“No,” Volodya said. “If he was your . . .” His hand circled, as if trying with the gesture to conjure for them the word.

“If you,” Vika told Dima, “were Fedya’s cock.”

Volodya’s hand stopped. His massive shoulders gave a little shrug. “Then—”

“Then,” Fedya said, zipping up, “we’d have to get you a bigger suit.”

“A suit?” Dima asked.

“Then,” Volodya continued, “the first jar would be full.”

“What jar?” Dima said.

“Your deed,” Volodya told him. “You skating on the Oranzheria. The Collapse. If that is the jar, then it’s full of the result.”

“My deed is the jar?”

“The strike,” Fedya guessed, “is the result?”

“The protests,” Volodya explained, “have stalled. Hit their peak. The inspiration of your deed has filled the jar—”

“Wait,” Fedya said, “I thought his deed
was
the jar?”

Volodya shushed him with an open hand. “Your deed,” he went on, “has filled as much as it can hold.”

“So what you’re saying,” Fedya cut in, “is the fucker’s pissed out. His bladder isn’t as big as mine.”

“No,” Volodya corrected him. “His bladder is immense. Bottomless. More full of piss than ever before.”

“OK,” Fedya said. “So, if the jar is the deed—”

“Then”—Volodya cut him off—“now is the time for another jar.”

“Now,” Fedya said, “is the fucking time to act.”

Dima stared at them. He had no idea what they were talking about. But he was sure he didn’t want any part of whatever it was. “Look . . .” he started.

But Vika’s hand was covering his mouth. Her other hand pressed at the back of his head. “If he’s Fedya’s cock,” she said, “then what happens if I go like this?” And all at once she rubbed her hands up and down, fast, one through the bush of his beard from chin to nose, the other from his pate to the curled pelt of his neck, down and up, rubbing, laughing, the others laughing, too. “A third jar!” Vika shouted.

And Dima knew it didn’t matter what she might once have felt; it had turned into this. “Ey!” Twisting his head, trying to jerk his shoulders away, he wrenched loose, grabbed her hands, held them still. “Ey!” This time his voice was loud enough to quiet them. “And what if I don’t want to act? What if I don’t want to
do
anything? What if I don’t want anything to do with you?”

He had meant them. But had he felt her flinch? When he looked at her he couldn’t tell whether it was from anger or hurt.

“Then why,” Vika said, no hint of either in her smile, “are you holding my hands?”

He let them go. Her smile: it scared him how fast he could feel her pull inside him. “Whatever it is,” he said, “I don’t want to do it.”

“You?” Volodya came closer. “Who’s talking about you?” And nose to nose with Dima now, he grinned. “We’re talking about your brother.”

On Dima’s shoulders, the fat man’s hands seemed to contain his entire weight. Slowly, Dima let them press him down till he was sitting on the smooth stone of the potter’s wheel. Volodya’s face sank with his, the man’s massive legs somehow bending to a squat. Around Dima, the others did the same, like three campers crouched around a fire. And telling him of their plan, their faces were no less lit. This was the moment they’d been waiting for, why they’d made the video, what they’d meant when they said they were going to
do
something.

Dima remembered—how they would break into the headquarters, the control room,
redirect the sonsofbitches,
turn the mirrors off,
all of them, all at once, one giant wink—
and as they spoke, each reaching out to turn him towards them, as the wheel slid beneath him and his eyes tried to focus on each face, he felt again a little of what had come over him on the roof—distant echoes of explosions in his chest,
paf, paf, paf,
and that is going to be some serious propaganda by the deed
—until, by the time they were laying out how they would get him in, how they would help him out again, he had to shut his eyes. They turned him and talked and turned him until he began to feel as if they had filled him a second time with their hallucinogenic drink.

He told them to stop. He told them: even if it could be done he didn’t want to do it. He told them why.

And, holding him still, Vika said, “Oh, because things are going so well with your brother right now?”

They had been following Slava, told Dima they’d seen him boating with the billionaire, getting on The She Bear’s private plane, wearing a suit. The Consortium, they were sure, was planning something big. Some new venture? Some event meant to crack the protests, increase their dominance yet again? The only thing they knew was that Dima’s brother was part of it. And that they had to do
their
something first.

Hearing them talk of Yarik—in suits, in Moscow, in meetings with the man who’d taken away their uncle’s land, their lives together, the way they once would have never thought to hide such a thing from one another—sitting in the old ceramics room in the old Pioneer Palace where he and his brother had once played, Dima felt smaller than he had even then, as if, were he to wander back to that time, he would be one of the youngest there, the seven- or six- or five-year-olds set on the rug to hear the stories, that even then he would have been eclipsed, impuissant, that never before in his life had he been so powerless.