The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  Yarik sat with his hard hat in his lap. “Sir—”

  “Baz,” the man said.

  “Sir, it was—”

  “Bazarov.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Boris Romanovich Bazarov.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  “So why don’t you call me Baz?”

  “Baz?” Yarik said.

  “Baz,” the man said. “Baz, Baz.” He grinned, waited.

  For a second, Yarik dug with his tongue at one of the candy-jammed grooves in his teeth. Then he said, “Baz—”

  “Yes?”

  “I only wanted to say . . .”

  The oligarch nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “It was your driver who brought me here.”

  Bazarov nodded again. “And?”

  Through the closed door, Yarik could hear high heels clacking towards the room, louder and louder on the hardwood floor.

  “You were thinking,” Bazarov said, as he stood up, “about viewing platforms.” He came around to the front of the desk. “A tramline going”—with his index finger, he made a squiggly sign in the air between them—“along the underside of the glass.” He was facing Yarik, his back to the desk, and without looking away he reached behind him, pushed back the gun stand, put his hands on the desktop, and, with one quick shove, popped himself up. He sat there, legs dangling. He opened his hands, turned his palms upward, held them hovering above his knees. “And?”

  Yarik could still feel the way his words had dried up in his throat that day on the top of the glass when the man had begun to moo. He could still hear the sound, see the gleam in the billionaire’s eye, the look on the man’s face that said got you! and how much fun! at the same time.

  “You were thinking,” Bazarov said again. “You were telling me your thoughts. And I interrupted you. Rudely and even, perhaps, even a little ridiculously, I admit, a little bit of foolishness, I interrupted you, I’m sorry. I apologize. You were thinking.” He motioned for Yarik to resume his thoughts.

  Yarik could feel the gloves he’d shoved in his coverall pockets bulging against his hips. “We were just thinking.”

  “You were thinking.”

  “My brother and I were just—”

  “You were just.”

  “Sir?”

  “Baz.”

  “Baz?”

  “Did I bring your brother here? If I wanted to know what your brother was thinking, I would have sent two cars.”

  Yarik tried to imagine Dima there, next to him, the two of them getting through this the way they had always gotten through everything together, but he could only see his brother entranced by the paintings, or still stuck in the memory of passing The Dachas, and he knew he would have had to do all the talking on his own anyway. It struck him then that this man, this Bazarov, this Baz, must drive by The Dachas every day. And must dismiss them the way he had brushed aside Dima, as if he, too, could be stored away behind the blur of dark pines. Yarik could see that—his brother like their father that way, capable of making a choice that would land him living in there—and it chilled him. He leaned forward as best he could in the couch. He tried to straighten his back. He said, “But it was my brother’s idea.”

  Bazarov let his hands fall to his knees.

  “We were thinking of it together,” Yarik told him.

  The man looked down and, one after the other, flipped the picture frames around so their photographs were turned to Yarik.

  “He loves working on the Oranzheria,” Yarik told the man, “as much as I do.”

  They were photographs of Bazarov: falling through the sky in parachuter’s gear, his dark shades reflecting the sun; underwater, eyes goggled above his goatee, feeding a chunk of meat into the gaping maw of a shark; astride the mound of a blood-maned boar in a blinding field of snow, one hand gripping the beast’s upper teeth, opening its mouth, the other lifting one of the long-barreled pistols above the steam of Bazarov’s own breath.

  “He’s better at laying out dreams,” Yarik went on. “We were just dreaming about it, is really what we were doing.”

  Bazarov left his pictures where they were, slid himself off the desk.

  “About what it might be like for others,” Yarik said, “others from town, or from St. Petersburg, tours that could come up from the Volga into the lake.” As he talked he turned his head to follow the billionaire. The man was walking around the couch, towards the door through which Yarik had come. “It could be a whole added stream of revenue,” Yarik said to his back. “We were thinking that right now the Oranzheria is stuck in the area where it’s built. It has to ship the products grown under it out to the rest of Russia. But this would bring the rest of Russia to it.”

  Bazarov had opened the door and let the woman in. No: the same blond braid, and shawl, and dress, but a different woman wheeling a small cart. On it, two glasses rattled, empty. Between them: a silver teapot. The woman left the cart in front of Yarik, left the room again. Shutting the door behind her, Bazarov came back carrying an electric kettle in one hand. In the other, he held the cord.

  “You aren’t really interested in this tourism stuff, are you,” Yarik said.

  Bazarov set the kettle down on the top of his desk, turned. He was still holding the plug from the chord. “I’m interested in what goes on in here,” he said and, reaching out, touched the plug’s prongs to Yarik’s forehead. He held it there. Outside the door, the receding clacks of high heels echoed. Slowly, the sound was replaced by a low shushing. It grew louder, louder, until it was a rolling burble.

  Yarik watched the man make the noise with his lips. Then the lips split into that grin again, and the noise stopped, and the man laughed. He drew back the plug and reached under the desk and stuck it in a socket in the floor. Flicking the kettle on, he turned, stepped to the green plastic ball, rolled it back, and sat on it. The cart between them, he lifted the teapot and carefully poured the dark, strong tea into one glass, then the other. He filled each a third of the way. Behind him the electric kettle was already beginning to boil. He waited for the boil to roll, for it to click off. “Yaroslav Lvovich Zhuvov,” he said, filling one of the glasses the rest of the way up. “Yaroslav Lvovich.” He paused with the kettle over the second glass, looked at Yarik. “Do you mind if I call you Yaroslav Lvovich?”

  Yarik shook his head. They sat, Yarik on the couch, Bazarov on his inflated ball, both holding their glasses of tea by the rims.

  The billionaire blew on the surface, smiled. “Yaroslav Lvovich,” he said. “Son of Lev Leonidovich Zhuvov, fisherman. Of Galina Yegorovna Zhuvova, secretary, seamstress, Party member, mother, of course. Grew up in an apartment complex on Avtovskaya Street, went to the Secondary School Number Eight, lives now in the Varkayusa Apartments near Ilyinsky Square. With a wife who works in a ticket window at the railway station, a boy about to start first form in the Number Seventeen school downtown, a girl who goes to day care at an old woman’s apartment on the floor above. A good father, a good husband. A real son of Petroplavilsk. So how,” he spoke through the steam coming off the top of his glass, “did you come to live for a year out in the boonies with your uncle?”

  Yarik could feel his fingers burning. “How do you know all that?”

  Bazarov made his face look almost affronted. Hurt, even. He sat back a little on his ball. The rubber squeaked. “I was born on the Volga, in a small town to the east of Nizhni Novgorod. I remember watching the sunsets with my father, the light on the river, the silhouettes of the domes. He was a soldier. I rarely saw him. My mother? She was”—he acknowledged the coincidence with a pursing of his mouth—“also a seamstress. We lived on Gryiboedova Street, in a home that we shared with three other families. My first kiss was with one of the daughters of one of the families, an event brought about by our arguing over a cigarette we had found.” He rocked a little on the ball, smiled. “I had two sisters,” he went on. “They died in a fire.” He made his smile into not-a-smile. “Unrelated,” he said, “to the inci
dent with the cigarette. I went to school at Lobachevsky University. I did my service in Afghanistan, the last year that we were there. I got a wife, got a kid, got divorced—they’re all in Moscow—got rich, wound up here.” He leaned forward again, the ball sighing under him. “There,” he said. “Now we’re having a heart-to-heart.”

  Yarik held his hand over the top of his tea, felt the steam wet and warm on his palm. “Our father died,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Bazarov said.

  Yarik shrugged. “We were nine.”

  “And your mother?”

  “We stayed with our uncle while she was recovering.”

  “Your uncle must have been a real Russian muzhik,” Bazarov said, “right in the line of the good peasants of old. All the strength and future of Russia lies in the hands of the muzhik.” His smile widened, his voice deepened. “It is they,” he said, as if reciting, “who will start the new epoch, show us our real Russian language, our true laws.” He gave a little bounce, sat there beaming. “Turgenev?” he prompted. “Ottsy i deti? No?”

  Yes, Yarik thought, his uncle had been a real muzhik: he had loved his land. And lasted less than a year after the half-hectare he’d lived on all his life had been sold. Yarik could see him out in the river, floating on his back, his bare white belly huge with held breath, the gun glinting as he pressed it to his chest. Yarik could feel his reaching arm, the sting in his palm, the bruise in his fingers, the heat. He put his tea down. “Mr. Bazarov . . .” he said.

  “Baz.”

  “. . . why did you bring me here?”

  The man’s smile spread itself into a grin. “Yaroslav Lvovich,” he said, “why did you come here?”

  “Because you asked me.”

  “But what did I ask you?”

  Yarik wanted to shove the grin away. He kept his hands flattened to the curve of the hard hat in his lap. He said, “What do you want?”

  Bazarov laughed. A short happy yip of a laugh that made Yarik grip the hard hat tighter. “Yes!” Bazarov said. “Yes, exactly. What do you want?” Reaching out with one hand, he pushed the tea cart away, rolled the ball beneath him a little closer, sat with his knees almost brushing Yarik’s. When he spoke again the mirth was gone from his voice. “Yaroslav Lvovich,” he said, “what do you want?”

  The longer Yarik looked at the man’s eyes, the more their color seemed to change, the closer it seemed to come to the color of his own. He leaned back a little. “From you?” His back pressing into the couch. “You mean what do I want from you?”

  Bazarov’s face stayed where it was. “I mean”—his eyes held—“from life.”

  There was nowhere farther for Yarik to lean. So he sat with his shoulders pressed against the couch’s back, looking down at his hands on the hard hat in his lap, and, for a moment, he could almost smell the scent of Dima’s hair when he would set his brother’s hat over his face, his wife’s sweat when they made love, his son’s morning breath when the boy kissed him good-bye before work, the life shared between his daughter and her mother and himself that almost overcame him when he bent to blow on his baby’s belly button, and when he looked up from his hard hat again, he said, “Time.”

  Bazarov sat back.

  “Time to be a good father,” Yarik said. “A good husband. A good son. A good brother.”

  “A good choice,” Bazarov said. “And how do you plan on getting this time?”

  Yarik looked at him straight. “I don’t know.”

  “Through work.” The billionaire got up and reached behind him to the desk. “Work equals time,” he said. “Time gone, but also gained. An exchange you pay up front. So that eventually, with a little luck”—out of a birch-carved hand, he lifted one of the long-barreled, heavy-looking guns—“you make enough so you can pay others to pay out in the exchange for you.” Sitting back on the ball, he held the old pistol between him and Yarik. “So that, with a little luck, you have time to lounge about, paying your own employees their hourly wage while you drive them out to your home and share with them a little heart-to-heart over tea.”

  Yarik watched the revolver where it dangled from the man’s hand. “Then I guess what I’m missing must be the luck.”

  Lifting the gun, the billionaire pressed the barrel to his temple. “That,” he said, “is why I keep this around.” His smile was so wide it wrinkled his skin against the metal. “A Colt Walker. 1847. From Texas. Cost me half a million U.S. dollars. That one”—he tilted his head, the gun barrel tilting with it, at the revolver’s twin, still on the desk—“cost me the other half.” With his free hand, he reached up and gave the cylinder a spin. “They remind me how much of it is luck.” The chamber clicked around, and clicked, and was still. Bazarov waited, as if what happened next was up to Yarik. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t,” Yarik said.

  The eyebrows rose farther. Pulling the barrel away from his temple, Bazarov held the gun out to Yarik, instead. “You want to try?” But before Yarik could answer, the man was reaching with his other hand for Yarik’s lap. He lifted the hard hat off. “Maybe,” he said, “I’ll even let you wear this.” He held the hat for a moment. “No?” Then, turning it over, put it on his own head. It was too small for him. He grinned. “Good choice,” he said and rapped the tip of the Colt’s long barrel against the hard plastic atop his head. “Because you don’t need a gun to tell you your luck has changed.” He took the hat off again, reached over, put it on Yarik. “Now that you’re a foreman.”

  The same woman who led him in led him out. This time, he didn’t even try to look away from the sway of her braid. At the car, the same close-shorn driver got out to help him in. He waved the man off, tugged open the back door himself. Before they left, the driver turned around and offered him the box of candies again. This time he took one wrapped in gold.

  On the way back, he noticed that the forest around the mansion had been logged. Old pines clear-cut and, in their place, new ones planted. He wondered if this new woods was Bazarov’s preparation for the day when mirrors would reach here, too. And when they passed The Dachas, the place seemed different to him—the trees less dark, billboards less garish, even the sounds simply background noises of any busy store—and he felt so far away from the kind of people who were in there. Turning from the window, he lay his head back on the headrest. He pulled his gloves out of his pockets. He put them over his face and shut his eyes.

  It had begun long ago, his brother slipping away from him. Sometime in the years when they were young and living off what they could scavenge out at the old kolkhoz, when the country was still scavenging, too, picking the bones of its dead empire to feed the dreams of Western wealth perestroika had begot, its people ever more desperate as there was ever less of it to have, sometime in the first years of the new century when the onetime citizens of the old superpower chose for their next president an oil oligarch who shouted over the swelling orchestration of his ads: I am Kirill Andreievich Slatkin, and I will run Russia like I run my business! Watching the chained-down TV in the corner of a blini shop in town, Yarik had wondered just what that meant—Unfetter the free market! Shed the last vestiges of old socialist ways!—until the new president turned his promises into laws: gone was the winter hardship supplement; gone, the assurance of a job; doctors turned away the sick; pensioners opened their checks from the state, squinted at the minuscule amount, used all they had left to buy some padding for their shoes, a better cane, returned to work. And just two years after she had retired—her pension just enough to live on, her apartment assured—Yarik’s mother left for the textile plant again. Two years: in this new land, that was too long ago to measure. Such was the speed of life in the new Russia.

  While, inside their buried den, Yarik had lain beside his brother, Dima still flipping through the same old fables, and turned to science fiction instead, books by inventors as much as authors, stories about how, why, ideas with practical use in the actual world, the one of work and responsibility and caring for their mother that
, halfway through their twenties now, Yarik insisted they had to face, had to choose to set aside their wandering days, turn back together to the city at the edge of the lake.

  There, the man they’d called The She Bear, The Baron, was building ships. Fishing vessels the size of the factory trawlers that plied the northern seas. No one had known why he would need ones so huge, only that he was paying men to build them. Fishermen eyed the better wage, grounded their old wood drifters, went to work on the docks. Yarik had watched them go, seen the lake grow empty of boats, gone instead back to their father’s old gillnetter, retooled its motor, patched its hull.

  Each day, before dawn, in the years when dawn had still been a lifting of the dark, he and Dima would load the skiff with bait, push off the beach, row out. All day they fished among their father’s memory, leaning over gunwales he’d carved, hauling in nets he’d repaired. And, in the evening, heading back to shore while Dima cleaned the catch, the day just good enough to keep them until the next, the next day promising the same, Yarik could feel his brother’s contentment, his own peace.

  Maybe it would have stayed that way if Bazarov had never launched his mirrors. By the time the fifth was drifting through the sky, the fishing industry, paused by all the shipbuilding, had boomed again.

  In the unending light, algae spread across the surface of Otseva, tadpoles flourished, fry multiplied, carp swelled to twice their size, sturgeon lived as if in everlasting spring, their roe harvested easily as berries from a bush—but all of it slipping out of the brothers’ reach. Seeking waters cool and dark the fish swam down, down too deep for the tackle of their small smack. But not for the oligarch’s leviathan trawlers, his sea-size seiners, their fog lights crowding the lake, their nets smothering it.

  Above the boat, the sides of giant ships slid by like cliffs, their nets claiming ever greater swaths, the lake shrinking around the brothers, their catches, too. But the more Yarik worried, the more Dima swore all they had to do was shrink their needs as well: new clothes given up for secondhand ones, movie theaters forgone for evenings of reading aloud, shots of vodka savored instead of swigged, meat made luxury, sometimes a whole meal skipped.