The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  All their years till then, work had been just another way the world had paired them. As children, they’d milked the collective’s cows in tandem, four small hands squeezing four synchronous streams. As teens, they spent each weekend of every Potato Month, bused out to the fields with all the other schoolkids, not caring how many hours they raked tubers from the finger-cracking dust so long as they were doing it together. Which was why, when all their former classmates scrambled after occupation placements that promised promotion, privilege, the brothers simply chose the first slot they could fill side by side: the floor of a factory where they passed their days shouting to each other above the din, pouring molten metal into casts of tractor doors, fitting windows into cabs, each pane held between them like a glimpse of the thing that had invisibly bound them since birth.

  Now, watching his brother turn away to find his new crew, Dima could feel it crack. Right then—with his new foreman, then his foreman’s manager, then whoever he hoped might listen—he began to try to get his shift aligned again with Yarik’s. But there was a manager for every manager, each tied to the orders of another above, and above seemed set against him for reasons he could not glean, until it felt as if he’d fallen back two decades into the old state system and, six weeks of bureaucracy later, he did what anyone in The Past Life would have done.

  Gennady Shopsin, in the apartment below, was an assistant to the manager of the office of scheduling for the sixty-first sector of the North-North-East Branch, but ever since he’d heard a rumor of promotion he’d been intent on securing an apartment adjoining his to renovate into a place more suitable for the associate manager that he’d soon be. Standing in the hallway last Unity Day, Dima and he had made an agreement: the day his mother died Dima would sell the assistant manager their home—a two-bedroom flat the state’s collapse had left her, assigned long ago to their long-gone family of four, now down to her and him—so long as, every day until then, Gennady would schedule Dima for whatever overtime could be had, even if it meant mirror-light and natural-light, eighteen hours on the glass, so long as it would let his shift overlap a little with his brother’s.

  For over half a year now, that had been the best that he’d been able to do: Yarik below the glass, himself above. If they were in the same sector they might manage to take their quarter-hour rest together. Lying on a cool patch of sod not yet ripped up, hard hats over their faces, voices muffled, they’d fill each other in on the last month of their lives. Yarik would ask after their mother. Dima, after his niece and nephew. But mostly they talked about what their lives had become, what had become of the world they lived in—the Oranzheria and the zerkala and work—about the time they would cut loose from it all, strike out together, live someday on the farm.

  Long ago, for one near-orphaned year—their father drowned, their mother lost to grief—they had. Slept nights alongside nesting hens in straw against one wall of the one room of their uncle Avya’s peasant house, woke mornings to the scent of fresh-laid eggs, the crackle of kindling catching, Dyadya Avya huffing the stove into heat, smiling at them through the smoke. All around the izba where Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov had lived there had stretched the kolkhoz’s vast collective versts, but, to them, that year that they turned ten, that their uncle took them into his care, the real farm had been the half-hectare the state allowed their dyadya to harvest as his own. He’d hoed up every inch of soil around the livestock lean-to, meager plots squeezed between the privy and the chicken coop. All day, while their uncle worked the kolkhoz’s wide fields, his nephews labored in his: what they grew in that small space, they knew, was all there’d be to eat. Most evenings they made it themselves—a bowl of boiled potatoes, soupy with grease; a torn chunk of hard bread dipped in milk to make it chewable—brought it out to the place where their father’s body lay. He was buried in the farthest corner of the plot their uncle claimed, far from the well, no fence, just heavy field rocks piled over his grave to keep the hog from digging him up. They would climb the mound, sit on a stone, and, crunching into an onion or cracking a chicken bone, watch the gloaming deepen over the fields, feel the sweat dry on their skin, wait for their uncle to come home. And at night they curled together in their beds of hay, hens warning them from nests, Avya’s old wolfhound, Ivan, stretched out beside him on the floor next to the stove, a bottle balanced on their dyadya’s belly, his voice like a snoring in his thick throat as—once upon a time—he would begin another of his tales.

  And a decade after he had died, buried beneath his own pile of rocks beside his own brother, a dozen years gone by since the farm where their uncle and father lay was sold, on the rare breaks—one a month, at most two—when Yarik and Dima might still manage to take their tea together, they would lie side by side upon the churned dirt beneath that glass sky, and talk again of what they’d promised long ago. “Soon,” Dima would say into the steam of his tea; or, “In six months . . . ,” the heat wetting his face; or, on one spring afternoon, “By June we’ll bring the money out there.”

  It was always summer beneath the glass, but at the unfinished edge, where bare girders reached towards a forest in retreat, the April air still augured snow.

  Yarik pressed his warm cup to his chin, rolled the Styrofoam against his stubble. “Maybe, bratishka.”

  “By June,” Dima said, “I’ll have my half.”

  Over the rim, Yarik raised his eyebrows.

  “We’ll bring it all out to the farm, go into Stepan Fyodorovich’s house, empty our rucksacks all over his table.”

  “The old kulak will have a heart attack.”

  “Then we’ll take all the money and put it back in our rucksacks.”

  Yarik grinned. “And bury the body in the woods.”

  Dima raised his cup. “To heart attacks.”

  They tapped Styrofoam rims. Yarik squeezed his to make it squeak.

  But Dima was already listening to a woods whispering at the edge of a hayfield, the shrushing of footsteps that took him farther in, the wind in the canopy deep in that forest where white birch trunks dropped down like beams of sunlight around the place where he and his brother had long ago buried themselves beneath the leaves. “Baba Yaga’s,” he said, his look lost in the tea. “You think it’s still there?”

  Once it might have been a hunting cottage, long collapsed, or perhaps an eremitic chapel reverberating with the mumbles of some wild-eyed recluse. When they first found it there seemed a small steeple engulfed by the caved-in roof, a bulbous dome subsided into rot, a door decayed as if to invite them in. And in they burrowed, hauling at rocks, digging a tunnel, two small boys with bruised arms and faces blackened but inside a hideaway opening up, just big enough for them. Through it tree trunks grew, their bark rough as rooster legs, their roots spread out like talons. Baba Yaga’s, they’d called it, lying in the soil-scented dark, trying to remember that part of Pushkin’s epic tale, the windowless witch hut perched atop hen’s feet. Whispering into the blackness inside, they added their own scenes that wrote out Ruslan and Lyudmila, starred themsevles instead, told them to each other beneath a forest floor abloom with mushrooms. Hundreds of them grew on the mound above—purple wood blewits and golden chanterelles, ox tongues stiff and red, milk-caps and pheasants backs and puff balls huge and white—spread bright as a quilt beneath the trees. Each time the boys left they picked it apart, filled their baskets. And each time they returned to it regrown.

  “You think,” Dima said now, his words made visible in the steam, “we could still find it?”

  Beneath the sound of hammering from above, his brother breathed out a sudden, small laugh. “My God,” Yarik said, as if he hadn’t thought of it in years. “All those mushrooms!”

  “Hundreds!” Dima said.

  “Thousands!”

  “We could be picking them right now.”

  Reaching over—“And what?”—Yarik plucked the top of Dima’s ear. “Slave in the kitchen? Instead of taking it easy like this?”

  Dima ducked his head away, his face
brightened, as if his brother’s fingers had flicked a switch. “Your kids would be slaving in the kitchen,” he said. “We’d be telling them stories.”

  “The last time I got home early enough to tell Timosha a bedtime story . . .” Yarik’s smile slipped. “I can’t even remember.”

  “Soon,” Dima told him, “we’ll tell them stories every night.”

  “In the summer we’ll be too beat.”

  “But in the winter,” Dima said, “after the harvest, there’ll be nothing to do but sit by the stove.”

  “And starve,” Yarik said.

  “And eat soup.”

  “Without meat.”

  “With mushrooms,” Dima said.

  “I do love mushroom soup.”

  “We’ll have it all summer.”

  “And in the fall?”

  “In the fall, Mama will bake them in sour cream.”

  “And in the winter?”

  “We’ll have the ones she pickles.”

  “And in the spring?”

  “By the spring I’ll kill you if you say another word about mushrooms.”

  “By the spring,” Yarik said, “we won’t be speaking to each other.”

  “We won’t need to.” Dima took another sip of his tea. “We’ll just wake up, together, without trying, like we used to. The smell of the chickens, the stove. I’ll make the fire. You’ll take Polina from her crib. Timofei will crawl into the straw, get us eggs. And we’ll eat them, all of us around Dyadya Avya’s old table, before we go out to the field. That’s how it’ll be in spring.”

  Yarik had tipped his cup and was staring up into the empty bottom. The Styrofoam filtered the light and softened it on his face, and about his mouth there was the hint of a distant happiness Dima knew meant he was thinking of something else.

  “These days,” Yarik said, “I usually wake up to Zina snoring.” His eyes slid to Dima. “You know, I go to sleep with my nose against the back of her head? I love the smell of her hair. Ever since our first time, you know what she’s smelled like to me? Crushed weeds. I know, I know, but I love it.” The hint was gone; the happiness was there. “When we . . .” Yarik’s smile widened. “I like to bury my face in her armpits. Like this,” he said, and flopping over, launched himself against Dima’s side, pushing at Dima’s clenched arm with the top of his head, and Dima, spilling his tea, clamping his arm tight to his side, squirmed away until they were both sprawled out, Yarik stretched on his belly, Dima half-collapsed onto his back, their laughter for a moment swallowing all the din of the Oranzheria. Amid sounds of men and machines that swept back over Dima’s quieting, he propped himself up on his elbows, watched Yarik still chuckling into the dirt. He could still feel the tug at his ear, the sweaty head nuzzling his chest, the thing in him only his brother could brighten still filling his face with its glow.

  Wiping his hands on his pants, he found his overturned cup, sat chewing the edge, smiling through the sound of his teeth on the Styrofoam, until they had both gone quiet again. Always, with five minutes left, they would stop talking and silently exchange their hard hats, each brother using the other’s to shade his face for a few stolen moments of sleep.

  That day Dima said, “You know what your hair smells like? Birch. Like a birch switch run under the hot water in the baths.”

  Yarik lay with his face turned down to the soil. And when he turned to look up, his neck bent at a crazy angle, he was grinning again. “You know, bratishka,” he said, “we really need to find you a wife.”

  Once, before the end of the world they’d grown up in, before the beginning of the one growing around them now, in The Past Life, on summer evenings after work, they had gone down to the lake together every day. There, amid the shore-swarm crowds, they’d launched each other from their shoulders. Whoops and laughter and one brother stirring beneath the curved soles of the other’s feet, three quick taps on Dima’s ankles, the same returned on Yarik’s head, the rush of water dropping away, of them rising together out of the lake.

  In winter, they would join the others in a line a hundred wide, everyone side by side on skates, snow shovels in their hands, and, chanting raz! dva! tri!, in one cheering communal rush plow clear a smooth square of ice. All those whooping voices! All that thunderous scraping! Winter birds blasted up into the sky: a swirl of caws and wingflutter above the crowd of skaters as each began their swooping glides below. Someone always brought a boom box. Big brassy marches, orchestral strings, the wail of fiddles and the balalaika’s trill and a hundred voices singing Ya shagayu, shagayu—I am walking, walking—in a hundred synchronized puffs of breath.

  Every evening, those same clouds filled the air around the statue of Peter the Great where poets, high on the plinth, clinging to the tsar’s bronze side, sang out their verse. Every weekend, the bread factory filled with even warmer steam, each apartment complex coming together to bake in the industrial ovens. Once a month each building’s kooperativ gathered to stitch rips and darn holes on the machines of a textile plant. And every time the Cultural-Educational Organization arranged a reading on the National Theater stage—actors reciting Akhmadulina, Tvardovsky, reading stories by Krylov and Gogol—the grand auditorium rang with the rhythmic booms of an entire city’s hands: clap! clap! clap!

  Free Time, economists had called it, and once had recognized its role in people’s lives (new and substantial developments in self-education, the director of the Institut Ekonomiki I Organizatsii Promyshlennogo Proizvodstva had written, improvements in levels of culture); once, it had even been the goal: It is intended, he had proclaimed, based on the steady increase of labor productivity and reduction in labor time, to make a transition to an even shorter workweek. . . . Thirty-five hours, economists predicted. Thirty, they dared to dream. But no one, not even the director of the Institute Ekonomiki, foretold the zero-hour workweek that came.

  Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, years of depression, devaluation, the decommissioning of the tractor factory, degeneration of Petroplavilsk, a time of worry and hunger, poverty and despair. For most. For Dima, those had been his favorite years. Workless, he and Yarik would wait together beside the Kosha River, at a bend in the road where traffic slowed, flapping their arms at farm trucks, jogging after tractor wagons, lying back in the coolness between cucumber crates, the river running beside them all the way out to the old kolkhoz. The kulak who had bought it up in the days of reprivitization had fired his fieldhands, let the fields go fallow, and, cutting the last of his losses, counting on a day when the worth of his land might remake his fortune again, shut down the farm. Out there, there had been nothing but the sound of the truck or tractor leaving, the thrum of crickets, sometimes their uncle’s old Yurlov Crower belting out his call, the long cry turned lonesome with all the bird’s brood gone. Someone had found Dyadya Avya’s old milch cow half-wild in the woods. Someone slew the swine. One by one the feral chickens were gathered up out of fields themselves gone wild. Cowbane and Gypsyweed and Rattle and Yarrow: the brothers still sometimes found a hen hunkered in the scrub. The only gun they had was Dyadya Avya’s old revolver, and neither could bring himself to use it, so they lured birds with rotted seed, set their uncle’s rusted traps, sat along the riverbanks angling for fish, cooked them over open fires, slept beneath the open sky.

  And if the day darkened, if the evening threatened rain, they went to the woods, hurried beneath wind-rattled branches, the rush of raindrops battering leaves, until, in the twilight between white birch trees they caught a burst of color and, crouching low, on hands and knees, crawled in. By then their older eyes had recognized the remains of a bench, a broken ladle, half a metal basin filled with rocks, and they knew it was nothing more than some forgotten bathhouse farmworkers must once have used. But still, the old banya’s seclusion stirred their dreams, its darkness let them loose, and, lying there amid the scents of soil and each other, they would swear to one day make them real. Then they would go quiet, listening to the rain drum at the earth above, or two trees knocking at
each other somewhere in the night, or sometimes the wo-hoo, woho-uhwo-ho of a Ural owl calling to its mate, before their breathing would fall in synch, the den filled with a sound steady as a single chest breathing peacefully in sleep.

  Now, Dima could barely make out his brother beneath the glass. It had been weeks since he’d seen Yarik, and he was working overtime with a pane-laying team when he caught a glimpse of him through the steel frame just before a sheet of glass was settled in. Through the pane the scene below was blurred soft, but he knew that tall, thin shape, the way that hard hat hung forward on that long neck, how Yarik’s legs bowed when he was carrying something heavy, that voice—he was sure he heard it—reedy barking, quick yelp of a laugh. Kneeling, he rapped with his knuckles. The glass hardly made a noise against his gloves. He smacked at it with the flat side of his ratchet. Across the pane from him, a worker tightening a bracket down glanced over without slowing the cranking of his elbows. The crane had laid the glass a little off its frame, and, like a man drinking water from a creek, Dima dropped his face close to the gap. “Yarik!” he shouted through it. If his brother heard him, he didn’t show it. “Yarik!” The backhoe rumbled alive, its shovel crashing into the bricks. Dima slid to his belly, his face turned so the cheekbones bruised against the surface.

  Down there, they were taking the top off an old farm building. “Sizing” the Consortium called it: everything that was in the Oranzheria’s way smashed or sawed or toppled low enough to build the glass panes over it. Later, the razing crews would finish the job. After, the extraction crews would clear the rubble from the fields. Then the tractors would come. Here, at the edge of the advance of the glass, two wrecking machines twice the size of bulldozers rolled slowly past it all, a heavy chain—the links thick as a forearm—stretched between at five meters height. It lopped off whatever it hit—silos, chimneys, canopies of ancient trees—like a trimmer on a hedge.