The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  Far off over the river, the egret rose towards the sky until its wings brushed the glass, then dipped again, skimming the water, and flew on, and tried again. Sipping his tea, Dima watched it—its sudden rise, the shock and flutter, swooping down in frantic flight and panicked rise again—until the last flicker of white disappeared into the small space between the distant river and the distant glass.

  Across the water, on the other bank, a woman stood staring at the same far-off place. In each hand she held a large wood-slatted crate; her shoulders, beneath her shawl, showed how heavy each was. Between the slats, white shapes stirred. Each crate must have held half a dozen chickens. He watched the stillness of her standing there, the boxed panic of the birds, dark hair loosed from beneath her kosinka, black strands hanging around her face. She was still looking upriver to where the egret had gone.

  “What happened?” their mother had said, so long ago, wringing the washrag out, a stream of hot water drumming at the bones of his bent neck, trickling down his spine.

  He had been seven, steaming beneath her hands, his hands still stinging, the whole of him still shivering. “We were trying . . .” The words knocked at his teeth.

  And Yarik, crowded into the corner of the tiny bathroom, the fleece of his coat still gravelly with frozen snow, the melt dripping around his boots, finished for him: “We were trying to catch enough.”

  “Fish?” their mother said. Beneath the warm rag she swabbed through his hair, Dima nodded. “Enough for what?”

  The brothers glanced at each other. Earlier that night when they had slipped out of bed, they had not even discussed it, had simply known between them what they would do. Their father had been gone all day, would be all night. Gone with their uncle to the dom kultura, gone into the bellowing and boot stomping, the spilled drink and the dancing and the fights, the smoke-and-song-filled night.

  The night before, their mother had forbade their father to go. Then she had pleaded with him—At least come home to fish tomorrow, to bring something for dinner so we won’t starve—and, after he had gone anyway, the two boys had crept out of their room, past their mother still crying in the kitchen, to the hallway closet where their father’s tackle waited and out into the quiet that was back then the middle of the night. All the way to the lake’s edge they encountered no one. Beneath the moon, only faint hints of tracks: the long lines where men had slid their winter fishing shacks out on their skids. At the end of each trail, a dark hut hunkered among the others, black and still.

  Inside their father’s, they lit the lamp, crammed in between the scrap-wood walls, Dima hugging the heavy spool of fishing wire to his chest, Yarik doing the same with the bucket of bait. Between them, a stool perched beside the hole. A lapping blackness in the lamplit ice. They listened to the water the way they might have to the noises of some animal from the safety outside the bars of its cage. Around them, outside the hut, the blind wind felt along the walls, found the window hole, whistled in. Through the opening they could see the distant cranes splintering the dock lights through their black bones. They took turns watching, one standing at the window with his gloves over his face against the sting of the wind, the other sitting at the edge of the hole, gripping the wood handles of the wire spool, the line dropping straight down into the dark water. . . . Which was where Dima was when the ice burst open beneath him.

  What broke it? What caused the crack? What came crashing through? Or was it simply the ice crashing down, the stool swallowed, the ground gone, the water there, the cold clamping onto him sudden and strong as jaws snapped shut. It cut his skin like a thousand teeth, chewed through his muscles till it hit bone. If something brushed against his body, he could not feel it. If something eyed him as it sank back down into the black, his shut eyes would not have seen it. If Yarik had not found his parka with his hands, had not lay flung out over what solid ice was left and held on and hauled back and got him out, he would not have had anything at all to tell.

  As it was, his mother did not believe him, didn’t want to hear it at all. She lay the steaming cloth over his face and worked her finger softly at the skin around his eyes, and called to Yarik to get out of his clothes, too, to climb in beside his brother, and as she ran more hot water in the bath, she sang them a lullaby over its rumble the way she used to when they had been too small to make up songs, or stories, on their own.

  The night has come

  And with her brought the darkness

  Mama has gone

  And behind her closed the shutters

  Sleep, sleep.

  Now, at the river’s side, Dima held his cooled tea to his lips. Across the water, the woman was trudging away up the bank. Everything about her seemed tired: the way her hair hung, the slope of her shoulders beneath her shawl. Dima watched each slow step—her crates of birds knocking at her knees, all wilding whiteness inside—then he drained his cup and climbed back up the bank on his side and onto the glass and went back to work.

  Or would have, if his foreman hadn’t stopped him. “Zhuvov,” the man shouted, and began a long stream of beratement over the heads of the rest of the crew as, bent over the brackets, they tried not to look at the one being rebuked. When the tirade ended, the foreman was pointing eastward with his stiff hand, towards the place where the Oranzheria ceased and the uncut woods began.

  Walking there, across the floor of new-laid glass, Dima could see her beneath his feet: the dark shawl, the panicked hens. She had come to the back of a flatbed truck and was heaving the crates onto its wood, handing them off to a man who stacked them with all the others already brought.

  So many times had he opened the door to his mother’s knock and seen her hunched like that, dragged down by plastic bags stretched heavy with other people’s clothes. So many times had he heard her breath gusting in the stairwell, found her halfway up the stairs, newly home from work, struggling with the weight of the tailoring she’d begun taking illegally on the side.

  Neck bent, peering down, Dima made his way slowly towards his new sector, looking through the glass around his boots at all that the woman below was leaving: the dried mud patterned with the hoofprints of cows, the flower beds of wet black soil still waiting for first green shoots, the doghouse with its chain stretched to its empty end.

  The bag full of bread ends stacked into a semblance of a loaf. The window boxes and the bright red begonias that their mother planted in them each spring. The way she beamed when she unloaded from her shopping sack a bloody slab of beef. Matching wristwatches, the first they’d ever owned. A new pipe for their father. A gold-plated chain hidden close to the skin beneath her blouse. So she could feel it when she went out—to work, to Party meetings, to other apartments where, in secret, she fit other people for her handsewn clothes—gone more and more from home.

  Down below there was the house, the wood shingles curling, chimney still blowing smoke. He walked over it, watching its gray billowing against the glass below his boots, the way it spread and crawled along the clear ceiling, searching for a way out, hunting a crack through which to gain release.

  Until he came to it: the end of the glass. What thin smoke had made it there curled up around the lip of the last pane, wafted into the air in front of Dima, and disappeared. Here, the cranes rose up between the girders, swung clear panels. The men steadied them, settled them into slots, secured them, went on to lay the next. He could see his new crew working a half-minute walk away. The new foreman. Not Yarik. He’d known it wouldn’t be, not tonight, not ever. The muscles of his neck were weary, as if he’d already worked all twelve hours of his shift, too tired to keep holding his head up, and he walked on, along the girders, boot before boot, until he was past the crew. If his new foreman called to him, he didn’t hear it; if other workers motioned turn back, he didn’t see. He was watching the fields below, the slow slipping away of their grass, the stone wall coming and going, the cattle pond muddied from their last gathering, its surface aswarm with insect clouds, until that was past, too, and there
was just the woods. There, the girders stopped. The Oranzheria ended. A forest of birches stretching away beneath the open sky.

  It was a sky cleared of clouds, filled only by the drifting zerkala now. Their glow lit the white birch bark, drew the shapes of the trees out of the darkness between. A forest full of bright branches forking into the shards of canopy twigs like a vast field of lightning frozen, the bolts reversed from ground to sky. A breeze stirred them. He could see on the closest ones the first green leaves unfurling from their buds. How long had it been since they had first felt the zerkala’s touch? Was it beneath spring sun or the mirrors’ semblance that those buds stirred to life inside the bark? And did they struggle so at their casings because they knew this was the one chance they had, that there would not be another season again? In the wan light their color was stripped from them, but he could feel it in his chest: the new green of the new leaves sprouting. Reaching behind him, he lowered himself and hung his feet off the girder’s edge and sat and watched.

  Once upon a time there was a man who rode the buses of the city every day, all day. Each morning, the sun would find him by a window, would warm his face, spread down his neck, flickering with the speed of all the things slipping by outside. Then stilled. The doors’ sigh. Their folding open. Good morning, bratan, the man would say. Good morning, bratishka, said the one stepping on. Together, they rode out of the city, towards the glass, one turning a hard hat slowly in his hands, the other with hands laid empty in his lap, sitting together until the bus hissed still, and the older brother lifted his hat and rose into the current of others flowing out and the younger lifted his hand and watched him go, and stayed.

  The bus filled again with the weary quietness of other men, their few words to each other, and, alone in his silence, he would sit and watch the river slip by. On its surface, the sun painted the shadows of the girders, vast plaid markings cast by the huge panes blanketing its banks. Beneath, they passed hectares of fresh-turned earth, of cut brown stalks, of cornsilk gleaming like spiderwebs in first light, bright green wheat shoots beside ripe golden fields, the dust boiling behind the threshers, rolling in clouds against the glass.

  And then they were out from under it, and, bursting past the windows as if at the break of a tidal wave, there came the rush of concrete, bleak buildings rising around tram tracks slick with sun, the wires strung above, the morning sky. He pressed his cheekbone to the shaking window, cold on his skin, watched the city pass.

  All the lampshades gone from all the streetlamps, and, bolted in their place, loudspeakers shouting advertisements at passersby. Fairgrounds reborn into a life devoid of leisure, repurposed as a site for dealerships, sparkling cars beneath streamers bright as those that once flapped over the merry-go-round. New Ladas and Zaporozhtsy driven out through the gate where coachmen on their horse-drawn sleighs once offered rides. Between the granite pillars of the old art museum, the used hardware market spilled down the steps, the clatter of the kiosks filling the square. The sports stadium had been converted into a multilevel parking lot. The university into an outdoor market. People thronged the streets, swarmed the maze of tin-roofed shacks sprung up on lawns where students used to lounge, the crowd achurn with an air of panic at all there was to do.

  Sometimes, after he had sat for hours watching what the world had become—the shaking of the tram tracks in his face, their clacking buried in the bones of his spine, the city blurring before his eyes—he would feel the driver’s glare. The ticket collector would wade through the crowd towards him. A woman in a suit jacket might lean over and ask his name; a man covered in concrete dust might shake his shoulder, ask where he worked. A few times he had even seen policemen gathered around a dark figure down some sidestreet; once, he had watched them carrying a bearded, rag-wrapped, wild-eyed man away; occasionally, they would be waiting at a bus stop, or getting on through one of the doors, and he would rise and slip through the crowd and get off through the other.

  Sometimes, then, he would go to see the lake. He would pass beneath the giant statue on its pedestal, the long dead tsar’s long bronze finger pointing down at the city, as if to put it in its place. He would hear in the whispering of the aspen leaves the voices of the poets who so long ago had climbed the plinth and stood with an arm around the ruler’s waist, a hand gripping his bronze sword’s hilt, and read: sometimes their own words, sometimes others’—Batyushkov, Bryusov, Tsvetayeva—but always to a gathering crowd, always him among them, a small boy come down after school to meet his father, who always brought his boat in early to stand beside his son and listen.

  Now, he would go down to the shore. He would stand by the cold metal railing, lean against the cold cut stone. No one passed. No one climbed out of the icy waves and stood in their underwear, warming in the sun on the dark rocks. There were only the old pleasure boats, the day sailers and fishing skiffs, decaying in piles of broken glass and rusting motors, splintered masts hung with rotted rope. Beyond them, the shipping yards clanged and boomed, the high cranes moaning their way from tanker to dock. When he would walk back to the trolley stop he would pass beneath the statue again: the Consortium’s tulips at its base, their bright redness horded beneath the green of the buds, the wind shaking them as if to spill it.

  Sometimes he got off at a movie house and stood on the sidewalk before a marquee that hadn’t changed in years. Reflected in the dark glass of the empty ticket booth: a stream of people flowing around him, giving him berth, faces lifting only long enough to scowl.

  Sometimes he climbed the cracked stone steps of the once-grand Russian Theater, slipped between the grooved columns crowned with gilded dancers, crawled through a broken window into the dark. Where he would lie down in an aisle, look up at hints of chandeliers lost in the blackness, listen to the echoed wind of his breath. Once, he took the tram out to a different park, different statue: Marx and Engels, their bronze hands caught in the excitement of their conversation, their metal eyes catching each other’s thoughts. And standing before them he felt them catch in his eyes, too. Then turned and went back to the bus stop and got on the next tram, his chest tight with the churning ache of his own small insurrection.

  But, always, at the end of the Oranzheria shift, he would meet his brother beneath the glass to take the bus back home again. Yarik wore a foreman’s windbreaker now, the Consortium’s logo above his chest, and when he talked of work there was a heaviness in his voice, as if even his sounds sagged with the weight of new responsibilities, and he seemed, if anything, more tired than before. Watching Yarik rearrange the bills in his wallet, sorting them small to large, all facing the same way—as he always had, now simply with more to arrange—Dima would press his shoulder against his brother’s, in case Yarik needed a place to lean, a cradle for his head, a few minutes of sleep. Beneath his brother’s weight, Dima would try to absorb the jolts of the road, to take the juddering of the bus into himself. And on these lengthening days of spring into summer, he would wake his brother at their stop and walk with him to Yarik’s building door; they would climb together up the stairs; he would take his brother’s hard hat from him, his rucksack, his coat on the days—rare, and then rarer—that they would go inside the apartment together.

  There lay Timofei, stretched out before the black-and-white TV, its fuzzy screen silhouetting the boy’s static-feathered hair as he turned to see who had come in. “Dyadya Dima!” he would shout, and scramble up, kicking his sister’s toys out of the way, charging into his uncle’s swooping arms. And Dima, lifting his nephew up, would bare his teeth and roll his eyes and bury his face in the boy’s belly, slobbering and snorting, smacking his lips, chewing at the small fingers, the toes. Through Timofei’s squealing he would bellow, “A fork! I need a fork! Somebody bring me a fork!” And Zinaida would come from the kitchen with the baby on her hip, unsling Polina, hold her out. “Take this instead,” she would say, and, “I see we’re feeding the riffraff tonight.” Kissing Dima once on each cheek, she would scrunch her lips and bemoan the fact of hi
s growing beard. He would tell her that she had too kind a mouth to hold such a shape, that her cheeks were warm and greasy from the stove, smelled like fried oil and fish. “I like it,” he would say, and she would leave him with the baby and over her shoulder tell her husband, “You better grab your brother, Yarik. He’s getting ready to eat my cheeks.”

  “A fork!” Dima would cry.

  In his arms, Polina would gnaw, slobbering, on his neck. With Timofei clinging to a leg, he would lurch over to the coatrack that, long ago, their father had carved—the legs whittled into fish tails, the stem swirled like a narwhal horn—and, struggling one-handed to hang up his and Yarik’s coats, would glimpse, again, the earliest memory he and his brother shared (each twin’s little legs wrapped around their father’s waist as, holding them in his arms, building the muscles of his thighs, he groaned and roared across the living room, lunging back and forth before the open bathroom door where their mother stood, her face half-made, trying to do her lipstick through her laughs). Always, then, draping his coat over the back of his brother’s, adding his scarf to a rack already swaddled in the family’s own, Dima’s throat would fill with such a surge of happiness that all he could do was stand there, gone still, trying not to swallow.

  But sometimes, in these daybloom weeks, the northern half of the world tilting ever closer to the sun, some evenings when the air was balmy with the scent of lilac blossoms, Yarik would scoop his children up or wrap his arms around his wife and suggest they all go on vacation. Then, Dima would keep his jacket on, toss his brother’s back to him, help Zinaida into her sweater’s sleeves, wrap a scarf around his nephew, niece, and with them all pile back out the door into the hallway, the smells of supper spilling out with them, the family bringing their plates into the stairwell, up four thumping, clattering flights, until they reached the doorway to the roof. Up there, they would spread out a towel stamped with a picture of palm fronds around the spire of the railway station far south in Sochi, adjust the squeaking backs of the rusty beach chairs till they lay flat. Zinaida called them chaise lounges. Timofei called the towel his chaise carpet. Dima, beside his brother, sharing a chair, the plastic strips sagging beneath their weight, would watch the sky for each new zerkalo, each new flash of reflected glow seeming to warm his face a little more.