by Josh Weil
“Nothing more than social scum.”
“. . . believes this is a dangerous class.”
“A piece of passively rotting mass,” the man shouted, thwacking at the wood, “thrown off by the lowest layer of dead society.”
There was the thwack, thwack, thwack of Korzhanenko beating at the wood railing with his switch, then just the man’s hard breathing. In the silence a few others timidly whapped at themselves with their branches: the rustle of leaves, the smack of twigs on inner thighs, a few grunts.
The poppy seed man put a hand on Dima’s shoulder, gave him a look as if to reassure him all was OK, pushed on his shoulder a little harder. “Bend over,” he said. “I’ll do your back.”
Dima looked at the men beating themselves: some had stood, whacked away at bellies, calves, turned to let their neighbors get a swing at their rears. A roomful of switches slashing and leaves shaking and a dozen pairs of eyes watching him. He bent over his knees.
The old man started easy, a few light slaps along his spine. “I think,” the man said over the rustling and thwacks, loud enough the others could hear, “that what Comrade Zhuvova, a clearly learned man, a scholar of Pushkin, what our new comrade means is it takes time to cultivate the mind.” He gave Dima a playful whap on the back of the head. “For reading,” he said. “For making art.”
“For memorizing poetry,” someone offered.
“For reciting poetry,” another said.
“For Pushkin.”
“For self-improvement.”
“The cultivation of the mind,” the poppy seed man said. “After all,” he asked the gathering, “what else allows life its pleasure? From what else does a satisfied proletariat come?”
A flurry of rustling and whacking.
“The time?” the man said, as if to Dima. Then, to them all: “The time to pursue one’s natural inclinations.”
“One’s proclivity,” someone agreed.
“One’s passion in life,” another said.
“What”—the man leaned down a little, spoke to Dima’s bent wet head—“is your inclination?” He smacked at him with the branches, paused again. “What is your passion in life?”
Someone put more water on the stones. The heat rolled through the tiny room. Dima felt it wash across his skin, burn in his nose, steam away the breaths he was trying to take. Even their father had loved to carve, to fish. Their uncle to tell tales. Their mother to see her son succeed. His brother?
The man sat poised with the switch above Dima’s back. The others swatted at their neighbors and themselves in silence. After a minute, one of them offered, “Is it poetry?”
“Pushkin?” another suggested.
“Engineering?”
“Carpentry?”
Dima’s head felt dizzy. He tried to lower it between his knees.
“Music?”
“Automotive repair?”
He shook his head. Someone called out that he needed air. Someone held a plastic cup of water towards him. The poppy seed man pushed it away. “Your passion!” he said, and smacked Dima’s back. “Your proclivity!” He hit him again. “Your inclination!”
But how could he tell them the truth? That he didn’t have a what but a who.
“I guess,” Dima said. “Maybe . . .” The poppy seed man stayed his switch. The others leaned in. “Farming?”
A hearty rumbling of approval rose among them. “A man of the soil,” they called him, “solid peasant stock,” and, slapping him on the back, helped him down the stairs.
Outside the sauna, in the bathing room, they crowded around again. Someone filled his tub with cool water. Another poured it over his head. He sat on the bench, dripping, breathing, not even trying to clear his hair from his eyes. He drank from the cup that was handed to him.
The poppy seed man poured some shampoo into his hand, plopped it on Dima’s head, started sudsing his hair.
They were talking about agriculture, about the days of the giant collective farms, about how much wheat was harvested by how many machines, the biggest tractors they’d seen, the days when fieldwork was under open sky instead of ceilings of glass.
“But,” Dima interrupted them, “what if you can’t?”
“Can’t what?” they asked.
“What if someone is kept from it? From being able to pursue that inclination?” His eyes were shut, the suds dripping down his face. “What does that do to someone? What’s someone like that supposed to do?”
The poppy seed man’s fingers on Dima’s scalp went still. “Do?” he said, and they gripped Dima’s head. “You take it.”
Someone else had started on Dima’s chest with a bar of soap and whoever it was said, “You rise up. You start—”
And the poppy seed man finished: “A revolution.”
Someone lifted Dima’s foot. Another’s hands were splashing water on him. He could feel all around him their crowded heat.
“Who is keeping you from it?” the man scrubbing his head said.
“Kapitalisti,” someone answered, “who have taken over your country.”
“And turned it into a bourgeois state.”
“To rival even America.”
“Even worse! Who took away your time?”
“Your time for your poetry.”
“For a garden.”
“The banya!”
“For yourself.”
“For your nothing.”
“For life.”
“Who?” the shampooer demanded.
“The Consortium.”
“The Oranzheria.”
“The corporation.”
“How?” the shampooer asked.
“Wages,” they said.
“And who put the wage system in place?”
“The bourgeoisie.”
“Why?”
“To break the power of the aristocracy,” someone to Dima’s right called out.
“To stem the power of the monarchy,” came from his left.
“To give it to the workers?” the shampooer asked.
The chuckles of the men came low and long as a dozen cannonballs rolling across the tiled floor.
“To gain it over the workers,” someone said.
“To turn them into commodities.”
“To turn time . . .”
“Their time.”
“. . . into a commodity.”
“And”—the shampooer withdrew his hands from Dima’s head—“once time is a commodity, leisure must be?”
“A loss,” someone said.
There was the sound of a water basin being filled.
“Unless . . .” the poppy seed man said.
“Unless . . .” said someone scrubbing at Dima’s shoulder with a sponge.
“. . . you take their watches from them.”
“And put them . . .”
“You take their watches.”
“. . . in the workers’ hands.”
“In your hands.”
There was the quiet dripping of water off the bench, the quieter dripping of soapsuds. Someone was carrying a basin, the slap slap at its sides coming closer.
“But,” Dima said, pulling his arm away from whoever was scrubbing it, wiping at his eyes, “didn’t you already do that?”
And then he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t hear anything, for the flood of warm water pouring over his head.
While they dressed, the man explained it to him: how, if they could only open the workers’ eyes—the limitless jobs the Oranzheria could provide if there was no Consortium to decree when it would stop, the wealth it would bring to everyone if they shared its profits equally, the power simply in the skills they had—they could change the city council, force the oligarch out, socialize the great glass sea. Would Dima have another kvass? He still looked parched. You can help us, the man told him, to make the proletariat see. Look how they flocked to hear him speak! Surely, oratory was his passion, too. And he must know about Artyom Nebogatov. How he was also a farmer at heart, how when h
is duty was done he returned to farming again. But in between? He was a Hero of the State! Duty. Surely in any decent man duty must come before even inclination, even passion, before himself. See how he would be honored to lend Dima a hat? It was raining out! It was cold! How could he in good conscience let the Party’s newest member go out in nothing but his still damp head, hair wet from water poured by the other members’ hands?
Dima nodded where he thought the man would want him to, and drank the kvass, and took the hat. It was an old Soviet officer’s hat, replete with polished black brim and bright red star, and he would have laughed at the sight of it if the coat-check woman hadn’t handed it over with such solemnity. He put it on. And, escorted by the man who’d brought him in, he walked back through the entrance hall, out the door, under the drizzling rain, and smack into a burst of lightning. No: a camera flash. He looked to his sides: they were assembled all around him, old people spread out to his left and right, each with a red sash strung across the chest, each staring solemn-faced down the crumbled pathway into a camera’s lens. He felt the light more than saw it, looked up: the cord had been plugged in, the bulb lit, the V. I. LENIN sign glowing there above his head.
The three words sat stalwart in blocky letters upon a ribbon, and beneath the ribbon there was a photograph, and on either side of the photograph a forearm rose, sleeve rolled, fingers in a fist—on the left, it gripped a hammer; on the right, a sickle—and beneath the photograph a caption clamored: Your Comrade calls you: Join him! Join us! Take our country back! In smaller print, filling the bottom third of the flyer, there was the heading Putting the Oranzheria to Work for You, followed by a bullet-pointed plan for a return to The Past Life. But, for all of that, it would have been nothing without the photograph itself: cropped just wide enough to show an illuminated Lenin near the top, half a chest-bannered old Communist to either side, and, in the center, Dima, shirt damp, dark scraggle beard, a Red Army hat on his head, his mouth open, as if about to speak, his eyes caught in what Yarik knew must have been widened surprise but that would seem to anyone else a fierce, wild gaze staring out from the flyer on the wall.
He stood by the entrance to the new supermarket, staring back. Behind him, the parking lot still smelled of fresh-laid asphalt. Car doors slammed, the wheels of the carts rattled. He wondered if Zinaida had seen the poster. Earlier that afternoon, while he was still at work, she’d met Dima here, swapped charges—his brother taking Timofei, his wife taking their mother. Galina Yegorovna would not have been happy. Each year, every year, she insisted Yarik be the one to take her to her checkup: without his clout, she seemed to think, the doctor would keep her waiting for hours. But a foreman couldn’t get someone to cover him as easily as a laborer, and, anyway, they always waited just as long. That was what his mother really wanted: to pin him down beside her so she could talk of the dreams she held for his life, unload her expectations, pat him on the knee. With each touch, his leg would jerk as if knocked by a rubber hammer. Which was why, last night, Zina had come up behind him, laid her cheek against his back. I’ll take her, his Zinusha had said, and he could feel her smile against his shoulder blade. After all, I must have some clout too as such a big nomenklaturshchik’s wife.
So she had taken his mother and given his brother the shopping list, told Dima Yarik would meet him in the store after work, would pick up Timofei, bring the money, take the cart through the checkout line.
Now, standing in the early mirror-light, listening to the assibilation of the sliding doors, looking at his brother’s picture pasted to the wall, Yarik reached out—the asphalt smell making him feel sick—and tore the flyer down.
Inside, the supermarket seemed big as an entire section of the Oranzheria, wide aisles like field rows, shelves grown too high to see over. He walked between the towering walls of cans and boxes, looking for his brother. Zinaida loved this place. Ever since it opened a couple weeks ago, she wouldn’t shop anywhere else. Said it made her feel like Russia had caught up with the rest of the world. He could see why: so many strange products, so many labels he couldn’t read, so much to choose from. There must have been fifty kinds of canned fish, an entire aisle just for jars of pickled things. He wondered if Dima, used to tiny corner shops, had managed to find anything. He wondered how long it would take him just to find his brother. Then he heard his son. A small boy’s voice shouting three short words: “Farmer, Poet, Leader!”
Dima was in the produce section, standing utterly still, as if afraid to touch even a bag. Around him, everyone mobbed the machines, weighing their picks, punching in numbers, printing out prices, and Yarik could see Dima taking it all in, trying to learn without meeting the stares that were turned back on him. His eyes looked as flash-stunned as on the poster. “Farmer, Poet, Leader!” There was Timofei, sitting in the car-sized cart, crying out the slogan.
Yarik didn’t mean to snap so harshly at the boy, didn’t mean to stare so hard at the cashier. But he could feel her looking at Dima, as if her gaze was on his own face, and he caught her eyes with a look that lowered hers back to her work. He tried to do the same, worry about nothing but helping Dima unload the cart.
“I’m glad this worked out,” his brother said.
“Me, too,” Yarik told him. “Thank you.”
“I think I got everything.”
“Thanks.”
“It took me a little—”
“No,” Yarik cut him off, “I mean, I appreciate it. Thank you.”
In the quiet of the cashier staring awkwardly at her scanner Yarik could feel the confusion and worry coming over his son’s face. There were the small sounds of their unloading, then the clamor of Timofei climbing down off the cart. Holding a jar with both hands, he set it carefully on the moving belt. Gooseberry jam: his father’s favorite.
On Timofei’s face Yarik could see the disquieting desperateness to fix whatever was going wrong. Occasionally, it happened: this glancing at his child and seeing, instead, a small version of himself.
“It’s OK,” he assured the boy. And to his brother, “It’s all right. I’m not mad, I’m not, Dima. I just don’t understand.”
While they crossed the parking lot, Dima recounted it for him, from dragged off the bus to a real banya to Bolsheviks! “Mama would have fit right in.” His grin searched for its twin on Yarik’s face. “It was like taking a bath inside her crazy head.”
“Except they got pictures,” Yarik said.
“One picture. Clearly they needed two. Maybe I’m the poet, but everyone knows you’re the leader.”
“Foreman,” Yarik said.
“And we’re both farmers. They should have got a picture of you and me—”
“Dima,” Yarik cut him off. “This isn’t funny.”
They took the shortcut to the bus stop, stepping over the curb onto a footpath that crossed the hill where dirt dug from the parking lot had been dumped. The Consortium reclamation grass had grown into tall scrub, and the plastic bags they carried brushed against it, banging at their thighs, handles stretched with weight.
“No one takes them seriously,” Dima said. “They’re just washed-up old men. They brought speakers to the square today. Played the old marching songs. All these old dedushkas stomping around singing along at the tops of their lungs! Everyone was heckling. They’re a joke, Yarik.”
“Yeah? You should hear the ones going around at work about you.” In Dima’s silence, Yarik could hear his crew’s laughter. Some were jealous, some bitter, but Yarik knew that hearing about his brother had only made them hate their work a little more. And it wasn’t just the laborers; he heard it from the foremen, from his bosses, knew it was talked about even higher up. “Maybe you’re not taking it seriously,” he said, “but other people are. You’re being used, Dima, and you don’t even know for what, and that makes it dangerous. That’s why it’s serious.” At the tram stop, a small crowd was already waiting. Yarik dropped his voice. “Something’s going to happen if you keep on like this, something’s going to happen to
you. Someone’s going to see you. Living like this.” His shoulders jerked at the weight of the bags. “See you and snap.”
Dima shook his head. “Who?”
“Anybody. Some guys just off eighteen hours of work. Some fucking drunk.” He glanced at this son, leaned in even closer, till he was almost whispering against his brother’s cheek. “Or what about the cops? Any of these people could go to the . . .” He felt the strangeness of how close he was, felt the others at the bus stop sense it, straightened back up. But he kept his voice low. “What then? They come. Asking questions. Where do you think you’ll end up?”
“Dyadya,” Timofei peered worridly up at his uncle, “where are you going?”
Trying a smile, Dima swung his bags lightly against the one in the boy’s hand, let them clunk. “To help bring the groceries home,” he said, “so we have something to put in the oven with you.”
“Dima”—Yarik’s stare hadn’t softened—“have you ever seen The Dachas? That’s how you’ll wind up. Or worse.”
The bags shushed against Dima’s leg, slowly stilling. “What do you want me to do?”
“Worry,” Yarik told him. “I want you to worry about me. About Mama. About Timofei. I want you to think what that would do to us. Think, think, Dima, what that would do to me.”
Then the bus was there. Packed in with the crowd, they rode in silence. Yarik set the bags down at his feet. They shifted, crackling, pressing against his shins with every jerked stop, falling away again as the bus went on.
“Bratets,” Yarik said, after a while, “do you remember the cat?”
Once, when he and Dima were kids, they had found a dead cat outside their mother’s apartment. Someone had used a piece of rebar to beat it flat. The iron pole was still there, jammed right through the animal’s belly and out in a ragged explosion of spine. The night before, they had heard drunks laughing below the window. Perfectly normal men.
He could see in his brother’s eyes that Dima remembered. He could feel his son looking at his uncle’s face. Then up at his father’s.
“We’re next?” the boy asked.
