The Great Glass Sea (54 page)

It didn’t take long for the worry to turn to anger, for the anger to get organized. Crowds began to gather wherever the Consortium had put pictures of its spokesman up, men and women clustering beneath the billboards on Chernishevskogo Avenue, collecting around the edges of Space Regata Square, shouting at the strikers still gathered in the middle and shouting back. Some had joined the strikers in anger at the shutdown of the Oranzheria, the billionaire’s stone-hearted redirection of the mirrors. But each day more of the strikers left, crossed the cobblestones into the growing mass of those who catcalled and cursed, who wanted their lives to go back to how they were, who wanted work.

But out at the Oranzheria it was quiet. No chain saws roared, no backhoes groaned, no bulldozers knocked anything down, no tractors plowed, no harvesters cut fields, nobody called to anybody on the glass, or beneath it. It was a sea becalmed. The only ones who still had jobs were the guards. Stationed along the Oranzheria’s edges, they faced those out of work, the ones that came each day, bundled in hats and coats, hands in their pockets, simply standing, silent, waiting. Behind the guards, through the glass, they could see the fields inside. Each day the plants were a little more dead.

At home, in the dark, Dima would sit with his mother on their square of cardboard beside the hissing heater, forks scraping at a barely visible pan. A bag heavy with wet potato skins, an onion from which to carve away the rot: in fish tin oil he’d fry whatever he’d found, popping and crackling over the balcony fire. He’d struck lucky with a sack full of sunflower seeds, and each night he put his mother to work splitting their shells—it was the kind of task he’d learned could keep her at peace for hours, the way her sewing had before he’d taken away her machine—and when he fried the seeds up with the rest they could elevate the dish to edible, even, on lunchless days when they were hungry enough, to good.

These nights, he left the bird unhooded. He left the kovyor-curtains up. Sometimes, before he went to bed, he would stand against the edge of his brother’s old cot, hands spread on the empty mattress, staring out at the city. The dark sky and the dark buildings and all the scattered squares of lamplit windows: it looked almost how he remembered Petroplavilsk from when he was a child. Then he would wonder where among those lights his brother was. At home, with Zinaida, in bed? Curled on his son’s cot, having read Timofei to sleep? Pacing the apartment with Polina bawling in his arms? Or was he still at work, still awake, trying to keep the Oranzheria safe, to keep his job, to keep things ready in case someday the zerkala came back? Unless he knew they wouldn’t. Or knew exactly when they would. Unless he wasn’t even nearby at all, was in Moscow, or even farther south, vacationing with his son and daughter and wife. Standing at the window, Dima would think about how any of it could be true and he wouldn’t know, how Yarik could be as close as a five-minute tram ride or as distant as the sea and either way as far from him.
Choice
, Yarik had once said, the choice he was making. But Dima had only ever wanted to keep the choices at bay. Once, they had just been two boys together in a boat. How still the stars above had seemed! How the skiff had rocked beneath them, as if held in place. But now he knew it wasn’t. Eventually the tide would have taken it, the current would have pushed it to some shore. Even if the search boat hadn’t found them. Even if his brother hadn’t stood up, so desperate to be taken aboard. All that he would think about. And then he would go to sleep and dream of Vika.

He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard from her since the night the mirrors disappeared. At first, he’d worried it was too dangerous for him to venture out, that the anger over the city’s plight would turn towards the myth that had been made of him. For three whole days he stayed inside, the food dwindling, his mother berating him for shirking work, even the rooster leveling at him a look of disgust, while over and over he tried to clear his mind of her, and couldn’t. Then, one dawn, he snuck out onto the snow-deep streets and found the posters with his face were all torn down, the statues in all the squares abandoned, the only finger pointing at his shorn face and close-cut hair the one on the heavy hand of the bronze tsar alone again down by the lake. Above Space Regata Square, the screens that had been hacked were back to watches, perfumes, Slava asking those below,
What next?
Once, standing at the edge of the roiling crowd, he thought he saw her amid the pandemonium. Once, he thought he heard her shout. One day, at last, he went to look for her in the old Pioneer House.

The cellar hatch had been locked shut. In the front, a sign was nailed to the double doors—a stick figure in the crosshairs of an
X
beneath the words K
EEP
O
UT
—
bright as if painted that morning just for him. Someone had nailed wood scraps over the windows; he went from one to the next, pressing an eye to the cracks, peering in. In the ceramics room the sink was empty, the counter bare, her pallet gone from the floor. Even the potter’s wheels had been stolen or sold. Through a pine-knot hole, he looked in at another stark room: model rockets and planes still hanging from the ceiling, dangling motionless, fighter jets and helicopters and something that looked like the giant hull of some sort of flying boat. Yarik would know what it was. He would know which of the rockets had launched Gagarin into space, which capsule had held the dogs.
This one,
he had said so long ago, showing Dima his sketchbook for the cosmonauts’ club he’d joined,
is going to take men to Mars. These are the landing pads. And these are the thrusters.
And
this
was something else he would invent, and
that
was the Martian station he would design. And this was how one day they would be able to live. And Dima could still remember looking at his brother’s careful scratches, wondering,
Why?

Why had he never asked? Why had he never allowed himself to wonder further? Had they always been so different, ever truly wanted the same thing? Had he simply wanted it so much he’d refused to see the signs his brother hadn’t? Maybe
that
had been his choice. Made so many times, so long ago, by such a small boy squeezing his eyes shut in that floodlit boat, and again in the darkness of that hidden warren, and again in the shaking dom cultura hall, again and again and maybe wrong.

That afternoon he took apart his brother’s bed. He lay the narrow mattress against the wall, tipped the metal frame, unscrewed the legs. He carried it through the living room he had long ago stripped bare, and into the elevator, and out to the Universitetsky Rynok, where he sold it. And that night, he lay awake in his cot, staring at the space where all his life the other cot had been. The room seemed not just emptier, but quieter.

The valley hereabouts
was lonely, secluded . . .
Watching the pool of night where Yarik once had slept, Dima could see the river so remote it didn’t have a name, the cottage silent on its bank, the current slipping through the rushes, the rustle of the breeze, the Khazar kahn out on his boat, setting his nets, singing as he rowed towards the shore.

And from the cottage there ran out

a pretty lass: her graceful figure,

her hair, left simple and unbraided,

her smiling lips, her gentle eyes,

her bosom, her bare shoulders.

Nothing like her. Nothing but the bare shoulders. And yet it was as if he sat with Ruslan on that bank and at the same time watched himself step off that boat, and when the khan spoke it was both to him and, inside his head, sounded like his own voice.

And here I am, contented now,

a peaceable, obscure recluse,

in this remote spot here with you, dear,

with you, sweet friend, my life’s bright . . .

That Korochun he lit a trash fire on the balcony. Nearly a month since the mirrors first disappeared, the longest night of all the year; by three it was already nearly dark. He cooked an early supper, ate with his mother by the flickering light, got her to bed and fed the rooster, and by six was standing in the near-black hallway putting on his coat. Lifting his old Oranzheria worker’s headlamp off its hook, he replaced its long-dead batteries with the new ones he’d exchanged for the pillow from his brother’s bed. He picked up the broken broom handle. And, for the first time since The Revisitation had begun, he went out into Petroplavilsk at night.

Avtovskaya Street was still unplowed. Cars, unmoved for a month, hunkered beneath drifts at its sides. In the moonlight, the ground was bright enough to see without his headlamp. Bright enough, too, to show the shapes that loped across the snow, the ghostly figures far ahead floating on what must have been skis. He could hear their susurration, the barking of dogs, sirens howling somewhere police cars could still reach. He kept his headlamp on. Walking in the middle of the street, where others had packed down a trail in the thigh-high snow, he passed the makeshift igloos the homeless had built, didn’t look at them, didn’t want his headlamp beam hitting their translucent walls. Sometimes they were silent, and sometimes there were faint voices, and always they stopped at the sound of his footsteps. What dogs came stalking he scattered with a cocked arm—they had grown to know a throwing motion—and set his beam back on the path, and went on.

The closer he got to the outskirts of the city the worse the path was, and by the time he reached the Kosha Road his legs were too tired to take advantage of the swath the plows had cleared. How weak he was. How much his muscles had atrophied in the last half-year.
Pick up your pace,
he told himself. I can’t, his body answered. Once in a while, a bus would pass, rolling carefully behind fog lights so faint they barely yellowed the road. He would step aside, stand breathing hard, walk on in its fading red wake.

It was nearly two hours before he saw the moonlit Oranzheria floating out in the dark like an ice shelf at the edge of an arctic sea. And it was a half-hour more before he saw the fire. That was how he knew he’d reached the crossroads with the old highway. And it was how he knew, long before he was close enough to make her out, that he had found her. He was still too far away to see more than the shapes of people in the firelight, too far to shape words out of their singing, when, pausing to let some strength leak into his legs, he seemed suddenly transported close. For a moment, he didn’t understand—the singing abruptly loud,
right beside his ear—and then out of the corner of his eye he sensed some bulk, a man; he jerked back, stepped to the side, saw him: massive neck bent forward over massive shoulders hunched atop a massive torso—Volodya in his headlamp beam. The gastronist must have been drunk; he didn’t seem to notice the light. His eyes were closed and he was singing while he peed.

How I love my dear brown cow,

And how I’ll mow her stinging nettles!

He was peeing into the trees at the side of the road, and with each beat, he swung his stream against their trunks, back and forth, keeping in rhythm if not in tune with his distant friends.

Eat what you want, my dear brown cow!

Eat your fill, my dear brown cow!

Then all at once his eyes flew open, his neck swiveled, his face caught the light. He held a hand up to his eyes. “Who the fuck . . .”

“It’s me,” Dima said.

“Who the fuck is me?”

“Dima.”

The piss started up again. It was loud hitting the snow. And without warning the fat man tilted back his head and bellowed at the top of his lungs, “It’s Dima!” He grinned into the beam, and turned, and still zipping his fly lurched into a belly-swinging jog back towards the fire.

Dima followed at a walk, the whole way listening to Volodya shout his name. Soon the fat man was out of range of his headlamp. There was just the blackness and the fire and the singing and—
Dima! Dima! Dima!—
the slowly growing shapes of the others. Until another figure took shape in the faint far reaches of his beam. She grew brighter as she came. Then, halfway to him, stopped. Held out her arms. And fell backwards into the snow.

He was surprised to find his legs could hurry. And when he was standing over her, out of breath again, his headlamp carving a circle of light out of the dark around them, he was even more surprised to see her eyes stay squinted tightly closed. “Are you OK?” he asked. And she surprised him again with a snort, a rattling wheeze; she started to snore. He held his breath above her. She let hers out below. It clouded her face like smoke, and cleared, clouded and cleared.

Finally, she said, her eyes still squeezed shut, her voice tight with exasperation, “Oh, come on!”

He knew then what this was—her playacting the poem, Lyudmila out cold, the wizard’s sleeping spell denying Ruslan the consummation of their wedding night—knew it but still felt foolish saying it aloud. “Vika?” he said instead. And then, again, a little louder. And finally gave in and whispered down at her still face, “Lyudmila?”