The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  Inside the building’s lobby, the sound was gone. He felt too weak for the stairs, got himself to the elevator, the button pressed, stayed on his feet while the cables moaned. Inside the lift there was just the throbbing of all the parts of his face that hurt. And then the door opened and he was in the hallway, and there was that hammering again.

  At the apartment door it was twice as loud, as if his mother were still up inside, still had her sewing machine, was trying to stitch shut the holes in the tops of the cans he brought home. He opened the door and stepped into the sound. The apartment felt different. Not just the noise, not just the rugs still clamped above the windows, but something in the air itself that made night known. The deeper cold, the murmur of the TV show that leaked down through the ceiling, the sense of his mother asleep in the stillness of the room: it sent over him a faint breath of peace, that the world was bigger than anything man could send into the sky, that night was something more than just a rhythm in the lives of people, darkness or light. It made even the clacking seem small.

  And when he came into the living room and saw what was making the noise, he almost laughed. Out on the balcony, Ivan was banging his beak against the glass. The dark shape of a rooster silhouetted against the dimly glowing world framed in the doors. While Dima watched, Ivan exploded in a furious ridding of snow, tail feathers whipping, wings jerking out, comb slapping madly back and forth, and when he was done, he went utterly still. Watched Dima. Then started banging on the glass again.

  Dima glanced at his mother’s mattress by the bathroom door, the duvet a quiet pile. He set the rucksack down and, creeping towards the balcony, shook his head at himself: as if his footsteps were going to wake his mother over the racket of the bird. Ivan’s hood was still off. Maybe, Dima thought, the bird was going mad with wanting dark. Or it was simply unfed and throwing a tantrum. Sliding open the door, he blocked the bird with his legs as it tried to rush inside. “What’s with you?” he said. “I know you’ve been hungry before.”

  The rooster batted at him with its wings. It began running circles in the snow. The flakes felt good on his face when they first landed, soft and cool, and then they melted and were just cold, and he thought he understood—its box inside, its bunched blankets—and he wanted, then, his own bed, too. Squatting down, he spread the hood, clamped the bird between his thighs, dropped the felt over it, tied it on. The bird kept struggling. “What happened?” he said to it, the way his mother would when he was a child and came to her crying. With his palm he held its head from beating at the glass; with his other hand he stroked its back. “What happened?”

  In the quiet after his voice, the words came back at him. He stood, the rooster in his arms, its talons scrabbling at the air. All its movement made the inside more still. He peered through the glass. The rooster had freed a wing. It was whapping at his chest. He set the bird down in the snow. He opened the door and went inside and shut the door behind him. “Mama?” he whispered.

  Halfway across the room he smelled the urine. He didn’t have to crouch to the duvet and work his hands through it and pull it away and touch the sheets beneath to know she was not there, but he did. And he didn’t have to step to the open bathroom door, or stand in it, or look down, just as his hand didn’t need to search for the wall switch, or his eyes to wait for a light to come on that he knew wouldn’t, didn’t need to do any of that to know she was in there. His hand stopped rattling the switch. His eyes relented.

  She was lying on the floor. Her feet were swaddled in thick wool socks and her legs were wrapped in wool tights and above them her nightgown had fallen upwards so it showed her wool-covered knees, her thighs. Beneath her, the floor was wet. When he crouched he could feel its coldness on his shin, his knee, and he grabbed her nightgown and pulled her away from the toilet where her head lay buried in shadow. He crawled over her to reach her face. He held it. It was cold, too. On her cheeks, his hands shook. Shook her skin. Looking at it shake was bad and he yanked his hands away. Looking at it still was worse. He said her name, what her name was to him. In the last reaches of the window light, it was too dark to see if the wetness was just urine or also blood and, crouched over her, patting at her hair, around her skull, down her neck, finding the wetness on the nightgown by her belly and squeezing it and slapping his hands onto the tiles and sliding them back and forth in the wetness there, he still couldn’t tell, and he shoved himself up off the floor and ran to the kitchen for the flashlight.

  In the brightness of its beam she looked almost alive. Her long white hair was gathered into all its fullness at the back of her head, her eyes were closed as if in mere weariness, her mouth slightly open, as if he had just put her to bed and she was simply whispering to him good night. The yellow of her bathrobe looked yellower in the light, almost warm. Beneath it she had put on a sweater. Around her neck she had wrapped a knit scarf. Her hands were mittened. And he thought, She must have been so cold.

  Then he shut the flashlight off. He walked out of the bathroom. He walked all the way to the balcony door and he stood with his back to it, looking across the dim, still apartment to the dark doorway where she lay, and he could feel the thudding of the bird’s hooded head against the backs of his calves, and when he slid down and sat, he could feel the banging against his spine, the taps going all the way through his body to drum at his chest, and he leaned into them and put his face in his hands and cried.

  That night he cleaned her. Twice, running the water in the bath, he held his hand beneath it to make sure it wasn’t too warm or too cold, and then he realized what he was doing and simply sat on the edge of the tub and let it run. When he shut it off there was just the beat of the bird’s hood against the glass again.

  He had set the flashlight on the tank of the toilet, standing on its end, and, in the weakened light the ceiling reflected back, he pulled off her mittens. The way her gold wedding band shone it looked warmer than her finger, but they were both cold. He left the band on, crouched at her feet, pulled off her socks. On each foot, she had worn another sock beneath the first. When he saw that, he gripped his bandaged face and squeezed until the pain was so bad he stopped thinking about it, and then bent to her feet again and pulled off the second pair. He stripped her tights down her legs. Beneath them, she had put on a pair of long underwear. He took that off, too.

  Her nightgown wouldn’t come over her head. She had gone too stiff to get it off her arms. He went into the living room, and there was the quiet clack of her sewing box opening and the louder clack of it shutting and he came back with the scissors shaped like a heron. The metal of the handle-wings was freezing on his fingers. With the long sharp beak he cut her nightgown off. He cut her sweater off. He cut away the long underwear beneath. When he slid the lower blade under the front of her bra, he felt as if he were cutting through her breastbone and he looked away when he snipped. When he looked back, her breasts were hanging loose and large and with a heaviness that seemed it must have hurt such shriveled, wrinkled skin. He touched one of her nipples, drew his fingers back. He wished he could remember what it was like to be held by her. This time he touched the center of her chest. He pressed his whole palm to her, and pressed his weight against his palm, and knelt like that, his fingers spread over her old skin, her skin spread against the boniness of her chest, touching.

  Eventually, he rose. He turned her over. He pushed her to the wall and, with the dry parts of her clothes, mopped up the last of her urine. Then he rolled her onto her belly and, dipping a dishrag into the bathwater, washed her skin.

  When he had put her on her back again, and washed her front, he stood. She lay there naked, damp. Behind her head, the hairpin shone, hair still wrapped around it, a few loose strands wet. The thumping from the balcony door had stopped. He bent down again and lifted her head off the floor and pulled the hairpin out. It rustled strangely, as if her hair were made of paper. And when he reached behind her head and with his fingers began to draw her hair out of its twist, he felt it: it was paper. He w
orked it free: a torn strip, faint blue lines, wide-ruled like the papers he had used in elementary school, pierced on either end where the pin had gone through. One side was blank. On the other, in her old and shaky scrawl, she had written the word AVYA.

  He looked at the paper in his hands for a long time. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket and finished working his fingers through her hair. When he was done, it was all spread out, a wide white fan of it. It was so long. It reached to her fingertips, covered her breasts, her belly, all the way to her thighs. He looked at it for longer than he had looked at the paper, and then he looked at her old face framed in all her old hair. He tried to see it as his father must have once. Then he took the scissors and, slowly, carefully, cut it all off.

  A few strands at a time. The small beak opening, shutting. The tresses falling thick and soft. And when he was done he raked it all up with his fingers. He gathered it in his arms. He held his mother’s hair to his chest and put his face into it and breathed.

  Later, Dima stood in the nearly empty living room, in the nearly silent apartment, watching the strips of light cast by the windows. They were brightening, their glow becoming stronger, their outlines sharper, as if a full moon had broken out from behind the clouds.

  On the balcony, it was no longer snowing. Through holes in the sky first one zerkalo and then another showed. In their light, Dima stood looking down at the world below, the white bandages on his brow and chin almost glowing, a few long strands of white hair stuck to his clothes almost glowing, the snow on the railing where his hands had not sunken through it. Down there, the world was filled with all its ceaseless movement: the night workers working, the day sleepers out on the streets, the trams clacking and clacking along their tracks. Beside him, in the glowing snow, the rooster stood perched on the rail, motionless beneath its dark felt hood. Dima reached over, untied the leather strip, and took the hood off. The Golden Phoenix shook its head, its comb flapping, the feathers of its neck shimmering in the mirror-light like flecks of mica. Its red chest heaved. It took a step, long black tail brushing the snow on the balcony’s floor. Then it looked up at the sky and crowed.

  Across the alleyway, window lights went on. Shapes appeared in the glass. People called out, shouted. Balcony doors slammed, and others opened, and voices were hurled at him, and someone threw something that clanged off the guardrail, and it went on like that, until, sometime later, Dima finally turned and opened his own balcony door, and closed himself back inside.

  In there, he could hear Gennady shouting up through the floor. He could feel the thumps of the broom handle that beat against his ceiling below. It followed his footsteps while he walked, as if the man could hear the creaks of his steps and was tracing his route one story down. When Dima got to the rucksack he stopped. The bag sat there, jouncing slightly, the broom handle beneath going boom boom boom.

  Bending, he found the zipper tab with his fingers. It was shaking with each knock on the floor, too gunked up with dried blood to make a sound. He gripped it and unzipped the bag, the zipper as quiet, the blood in its teeth as thick. When he let go of the tab, it fell as silently. When he stood up and the bag fell to rest on his pant legs, it sat there shaking just the same. Shake, shake, shake, it went against his shins. Gennady was shouting something with each bang of the handle. Dima couldn’t hear what it was. For a moment, he couldn’t hear anything—not the rooster, not the pounding. He could only feel the shaking of the bag, could only see the money spilling out from inside.

  “It’s too much,” Dima told him.

  “I know,” Yarik said.

  “It’s much more than I’d saved.”

  Yarik looked like he was going to say something, but his eyes began to fill, and he shrugged his shoulders, reached to the heat on the dash, turned it up.

  They were riding in the cab of a company truck, a pickup Yarik had borrowed to take their mother’s body out, and they wound along the old Kosha Road, the river meandering on its ancient course, and every time they went around a curve the coffin slid in the back and knocked against the plastic liner of the bed.

  Ever since they had entered the Oranzheria, they had driven in a dimness that didn’t deepen, and didn’t brighten, but remained the same tenebrous light. Above them, on the glass, lay a thick field of snow, as if the clouds had been pounded into a layer of felt. All around them: the green fields of corn, new shoots of wheat, the barley beginning to bend with the weight of its seeds.

  “You know what I wish?” Dima said. “That Dyadya Avya was still alive. He would have liked to see her buried there. He would have liked to see us burying her. He would have liked to tell it afterwards.” The air Yarik had turned up was blowing on Dima’s face, and he could feel his sweat coming. He looked for the crank to roll his window down. There were just buttons. He pressed one. The door locked. He looked at Yarik and he said, “And when the snow stopped . . .” He waited. He said, “And the Oranzheria was still covered . . .” After a moment, he went on, “They drove together . . .” and he reached out and pushed the vent so the air was directed at Yarik. “Beyond the great glass sea . . .” He stared at his brother. Yarik stared at the road. The road rumbled away beneath them. Finally, Dima said, “To the farm.”

  He found the button for the window. It opened a crack. The noise of the men and machines working the fields came in and the wind came in and Dima said, “That’s how he would have begun the ending.” And when Yarik didn’t even look at him, he said, louder, over the wind, “That’s how Dyadya Avya would have begun the ending.”

  “To what?” Yarik said. He sat behind the wheel in the suit he had put on that morning to go to work, the tie he had been knotting in the hallway mirror when Dima had knocked at the apartment door. Zina was out, driving Timofei to school, dropping Polya at the day care center, and Yarik had laced his boots, pulled on his gloves, wrapped a scarf around his neck and, thinking of the state his brother was in, of what he knew Dima now would surely see, of what the Oranzheria security might do, of the way even Bazarov had paused simply at the sight of the gun, he had slipped the small revolver between his pants waist and his back. He could feel it there now, just one more thing he’d kept secret from his brother, and he knew that, for him, the ending had already come and gone.

  “Yarik,” Dima said, across from him in the cab, “I want you to know that last night, when I found the money—as soon as I saw it—I knew you weren’t giving it to me so I could buy the farm for us. Not for us to farm together. But for me. I knew that, Yarik. I know. I understand.” He spoke slowly, and carefully, trying to move his split mouth, his bruised jaw, as little as possible, and his voice came out too thin to fight the noise of the rushing air. He slid the window shut again. In the quiet, he said, “But I hope that, maybe in a month, on Defender of the Fatherland Day, you might come out with Zinaida and Polya and Timosha, and we’ll go fishing with them on the Kosha. And maybe, next Victory Day, you’ll drive out in your new car on your own and spend the day with me in the fields.” With each word, the ache spread further into the muscles of his face, and he paused to let it drain back out until it was back to just the dull pain that was there like part of his skin, and when it was he said, “And at the end of the day maybe we can go into the birch woods. Maybe we can find the old banya and all the mushrooms growing over it. We might sometimes pick them together there for a while. That’s all I want, Yarik. That’s it. A small wish.” And he held up his hand to show how small with his fingers. Then, looking at his brother through the gap between his thumb and his forefinger, he said, trying to put into his voice the smile it hurt too much to make, “But compared to your head, it’s so damn big.” He reached out as if to shrink the space compared to Yarik’s head, and his fingers brushed Yarik’s cheek. His brother looked at him.

  “You know what I wish?” Yarik said. “I wish Mama was still alive, too.”

  Ahead, there was a crack in the ceiling, a gap between two panes where too little adhesive had been laid in: a thin strip of water s
heeted between, splattering in a straight line right across the road, and through it the other side was all ablur. They hit it and it drummed from the hood to the windshield and on the cab over their heads and the coffin and the tailgate, and then they were through, and it was quiet again, and the road was the road going through the fields again and the windshield was wet with the wind blowing the rivulets, and Dima said, “Yarik, why did you go to Moscow?”

  Yarik stared at the rivulets until they were just a few long upward-streaking trickles, and it was as if he were looking from high above at the landscape of winding, forking rivers, and beyond it was the real river and the vast cropland all around, and he heard his brother say something about Bazarov. For how long? Dima was asking.

  A bus came and passed and went towards the way from which they’d come, and Yarik drove through the cloud of its dust, and the dust turned the rivulets brown and the world a map of dry creekbeds on the windshield glass. Beyond them, in the distance ahead, Yarik could just make out the shape of a bridge. He knew Dima would be seeing it, too. He looked over at his brother. Dima didn’t look back; he was staring through the windshield. And, watching him, watching the slow affliction of his face, Yarik told him about the first meeting and the day out on the lake and the promotions and what had happened in Moscow. “Why do you think they put me in those ads?” he said. “How else could I have made the policemen stop? They would have kept on, Dima, they would have . . .”

  But Dima wasn’t listening. He was staring at the bridge. He knew the slightly arching back, knew the slope of the bank beneath, but he was telling himself it could not be the bridge over the Kosha where he and Yarik used to fish. It could not because where was the old stage road, the hay barns, the garage with its steel sheds full of farm machinery to be repaired? Why was there still the glass? How could they have driven long enough—they couldn’t have; it was too fast—and that glass still be blocking out the sky above. It couldn’t be because it was the Oranzheria, here, above them, and there ahead, and as far as he could see. And when they passed the two huge stumps at the side of the road, the place where the roadbank was broken, as if to lead to an old road that had, somehow, disappeared whole beneath the black soil of the new-plowed field, his hand grabbed at his face. It covered his mouth, his chin, and the throb went up into his teeth as if he was biting the pain out of his fingers.