by Josh Weil
Over the noise, Dima bellowed his brother’s name again. And there at last: Yarik looking up. The crack between the bracket and the pane was just wide enough for Dima to fit his fingers through. He shoved them down to the knuckles, waggled them.
His brother lifted a hand in a wave, started back to work.
“Come here!” Dima shouted, his fingers beckoning.
But only the workers around his brother looked: the tops of their hats, their faces glancing up, the tops of their hats again. He watched Yarik’s yellow hard hat, waiting for the moment when it must tilt back, too, waiting to glimpse once more the small blue spots of his brother’s eyes.
“You have to stop doing that,” Yarik said.
They were playing Zmei, the five of them stretched out in a line held hand to hand to hand: Yarik’s five-year-old, Timofei, followed by Yarik’s wife, Zinaida, then Yarik, then Dima, and their old mother, Galina Yegorovna, tugged along as the last swishing joint of the serpent’s tail. It was Dima who suggested the game (“Oh,” he’d told the pouting boy, “I’m pretty sure even Timofei—maybe especially Timofei —couldn’t manage to shake loose my grip!”) and, as they zagged and whipped around the apartment complex playground, he squeezed Yarik’s hand a little tighter. Three links of hands ahead Timofei was all loopy laughter, jerking the line sharply as he could.
“Squeeze, Yarik,” Dima said.
“You have to stop it.”
“I’m just saying hello.”
As Timofei wound them around the spring-mounted animals—the bear, the hedgehog, the goose with the broken bill—Dima loosed his grip on his brother’s hand just enough to clasp his fingers farther up and grip again.
“It’s distracting,” Yarik told him.
“You don’t want—”
“I do, Dima. That’s why it’s distracting.”
The boy led them through the cut-out fuselage of a rocket ship, all climbing bars and rusted fins, Dima stooping as he pulled their mother behind.”You aren’t even trying,” he told his brother.
“Bratishka—”
“Mama can grip better than you.”
“You’ll lose your job.”
The line whipped; Yarik’s hand jerked loose.
“So?” Dima said.
In front, Timofei whooped, “Break! Break! Dyadya Dima’s the Chudo-Yudo!” Behind Dima, still clinging to his hand, their old mother blew exasperation through her lips, leaned over, spat.
Yarik stood, still holding Zinaida’s fingers in his, separated from Dima by a black tractor tire half-buried in the dirt.
“So?” Yarik said. “So, I’ll lose my job.”
From the city center the booming began, the kettle drums and bass drums and snares, the tromping soldiers’ boots. It was May ninth, Victory Day. Soon the guns would fire—still celebrating the surrender of the Germans so long ago—and they had come back early from the parade, before the cannon could scare the baby into a fit. Galina Yegorovna hadn’t understood why they’d had to leave; she had gotten dressed in her old uniform—green jacket pinching the loose skin of her arms, buttons unbuttonable around her belly, gold epaulettes frayed as old rug tassles, hammer and sickle pin aslant, the kosinka with which she always covered the massive bun of her white hair replaced today by an army cap—and she wanted to stay to see the salutes.
“What will the Party think?” she’d hissed at Dima as they had left.
“The Party’s dead, Mama.”
“Oh!” She’d thrust her wrinkled papery palm against his lips.
“Mama,” he’d said, “you don’t want to make Polya cry on her birthday, do you?”
And, on cue, his mother’s eyes had begun to tear up instead.
Polina Yaroslavovna Zhuvova had turned one year old two weeks ago, but now that International Workers’ Day had been de-recognized by the Consortium, deemed tied to the worst backward ways of the past, Victory Day was the closest to her birthday that Yarik could get time off. Zinaida had made a cranberry pie. Their mother had brought blini. Dima had worked the last hour of his twelve, climbed down from the Oranzheria as the zerkala sank out of sight, boarded the bus just as the new sun rose to warm the back of his neck. But there had been no Yarik to pass him on the stairs. And Dima, forsaking sleep between his shifts, had taken a different bus, the opposite direction, all the way out to Dyadya Avya’s abandoned izba, where he had shrushed alone through the leaves to their mushroom warren, gathering milk-caps and morels for the blintzes he and his mother would bring. While he was out there, he’d gone to the old kulak who now owned the land and gotten the baby’s gift.
There it sat beside the sandbox: a pine green tarp cinched into the shape of a sack. The sack was jerking. They’d left the baby beside it, swaddled in blankets, while they’d played their game. Now Polya began to cry. Each boom of the drums ramped up her squall. Yarik stepped over the tractor tire and past Dima and jogged to her, Zinaida hurrying after, Timofei trudging behind, glaring at the baby’s wailing face, rolling his eyes. Dima’s mother still held his hand, her whole face gripped with eagerness, her eyes darting from street to square for a sight of the parade.
“It’s this way, Mama.” Dima turned her gently.
By the time they reached the sandbox, the guns had started in the distance and Polya was screaming as if the volleys had been fired at her. Beside her, the sack was in convulsions. Yarik cradled his daughter, his too-aged face bent nose to nose with her red and screaming one.
“The booms are for you,” he was saying. “For your birthday!”
“No they’re not,” Timofei said.
“Timosha!” Zinaida scolded.
“Boom boom boom,” Yarik said into the baby’s belly.
“They’re for the heroes of Mother Russia,” Timofei said.
Galina Yegorovna’s face lit up: “The martyrs!”
“See?” Timofei said.
“Boom boom boom,” went Yarik.
“It’s not for Polya, is it Dyadya Dima?” Looking up at Dima, Timofei’s striken face was a picture of the sound the baby was making.
Dima could not remember what that face had looked like when it was as small and scrunched as Polya’s was now, but he had never forgotten the look on Yarik’s face—those hospital fluorescents flickering in that wet gaze—the first time his brother had laid eyes on his newborn son. It had been how Yarik used to look at him. Remembering that, he almost told the five-year-old, Yes. A whole parade just for your sister. A whole streetful of soldiers just for her.
“Boom, boom, boom,” went Yarik, looking into his daughter’s eyes just the way, before her, he had looked into his son’s.
Dima reached down and scrunched the small boy’s hair in his fingers. “No,” he said. “Of course not, Timofei. It has nothing to do with her at all.”
His words were followed by such a silence that he thought, for a moment, somehow the baby had understood. Yarik had quit his booming. Polya had quit her screaming. The air was drawing its breath in preparation for the next blasts. Dima glanced from his brother to his brother’s wife, expecting their reproval. But they were looking at the sack. Polya, too, her face unclenched, her eyes gone wide. Out of an airhole Dima had cut, a small head jutted: two tiny eyes, hard as cherry pits, staring back. Above them, its skull was crowned by a fin of flesh, bloodred and ragged as an ear chewed in a fight. Below its chin hung a flap like the part gnawed off. Its curved beak was smooth and pale as ivory.
Timofei reached for the thing; the sack sucked it back in.
In the distance, the cannons thudded.
“A rooster?” Yarik said.
“Not just any rooster,” Dima said.
“This is your gift?” Yarik’s face was spreading with a grin.
Dima grinned back. “It’s a Golden—”
“For Polya?” Zinaida cut in. “For a one-year-old?”
Around the baby all the other gifts were piled in a mound: tiny ones wrapped and sealed as carefully as candy bars, huge ones the size of samovars, ones with bows s
o big they hid the thing they’d been tied to, each one in bloom with a bright white card taped on—Polya, Polya, Polya, Polya. Beneath Dima’s hand he could feel his brother’s other child look up at him. Timofei’s thin hair was soft as the breast of a bird. Through it Dima could feel bone, skull, heat, pulse.
To his sister-in-law, Dima lied, “Of course it’s not for the baby.” To his nephew he said, “It’s for you.”
Pulse, pulse went the boy’s head.
“Really?” Timofei breathed.
“Yarik . . .” Zinaida prompted.
“Really,” Dima said.
And Timofei’s head was gone, the whole boy hurled forward, as if thrown at the bag by the expellation of his whoop.
“Don’t touch it,” Zinaida said at the same time Yarik said, “Careful with it.”
“How can he not touch it,” she said to her husband, “if you’re telling him touch it.”
“I only said—”
“He’s touching it.”
“Timosha!”
But the boy was on his knees, hand already through the hole, arm buried up to his shoulder, fingers grasping for the panicked, squawking, sack-trapped body inside.
“Yarik!” Zinaida shouted, and, as if Yarik’s free arm had been waiting for the starting gun of his wife’s voice, he lunged forward, baby in his other arm, his fist snagging his son’s pants’ waist, hauling him away from the roiling bag of bird. Beaming, Timofei held his own fist up into the air. In it: a hunk of golden feathers.
“My God!” Zinaida said. “He’s bleeding.”
But he was not. The small streaks of blood on his wrist and knuckles were from the quill tips of the feathers that had been torn out.
Yarik passed the baby to his wife and with his two big hands pried open his son’s own. A few sticky feathers dropped in clumps; the others fluttered off: bright gold flakes. In Zinaida’s arms, the baby reached out, tried to catch one in its tiny hand. Dima’s mother echoed its grasp with her own old fingers.
“Why would you do that?” Yarik said to the boy, but Zinaida, holding the baby, looked at Dima as if the words were meant for him.
“It’s not a regular rooster,” Dima told her.
“It’s a rooster,” she said. “People use those things for fights.”
“Not these.” Untying the top of the sack, he said, “Let me show you,” and brought the bird out. It was as big as Polya, and he gathered it in his arms and held it like a mirror of Zinaida holding the baby. All along its back, from neck to tail, golden feathers shimmered in the late orange light. They draped down its shoulders, over its chest, in dense soft flows, glistening patches of dark blue beneath gleaming like wet rocks behind a waterfall. But all that paled next to its tail: feathers so black they seemed almost purple, so long they swished in the air, unfurling upwards in sweeping arcs, spilling over, cascading down, dropping past Dima’s forearms all the way to brush the dirt.
“It’s a Golden Phoenix,” Dima said.
It tucked in its neck, let out a quiet cluck. The baby, in Zinaida’s arms, made a noise so purely happy all of them smiled.
“It’s beautiful,” Yarik told him.
“It is,” Zinaida said.
“Can I touch it?” Timofei asked.
“Gently,” Yarik said.
“Be gentle,” Zinaida said.
“Reach out very slowly,” Dima told him, “very smoothly. Good. Good. Like that. Feel how soft—”
The bird’s head jerked up and struck down, quick and hard as the needle of a sewing machine: stab, stab, stab.
“Because,” Yarik said, “we don’t even have any chickens.”
The playground petered out at a brightly painted merry-go-round tilted so badly its edge grooved the mud, and the mud from the playground to the street was littered with trash tossed by children, the last mostly melted snowbank black with the leavings of auto exhaust. Dima stood beside it, the Golden Phoenix in his arms.
Beside him, Yarik kicked the snowbank with his boot toe. “And its crowing?” He flipped a hand towards the apartment complex, the playground abandoned now by all but their mother. “The neighbors would kill it.”
“He doesn’t crow.”
“Zinaida would kill me.”
“I’ve had him for two days and . . .”
“He put a hole in Timosha’s hand.”
“ . . . he hasn’t crowed once.”
“What’s wrong with the thing?”
“Timofei tried to grab his—”
“I mean about the crowing.”
Dima smoothed the golden feathers on the bird’s long neck. Between the buildings to the west the red sun slipped lower; in the east, the sky was already aglow with the start of mirror-rise. Oktrovskogo Avenue was full of people coming back from the parade: babies in strollers, soldiers with guns, couples holding hands with the earnestness of knowing this was the last full day they’d have together for weeks. More and more of the men let go their girlfriends, or handed the baby to their wives, or swigged the last from a bottle and peeled off from the crowd and gathered at the trolleybus stop where Dima and Yarik stood. Some of them wore old medals; most of them carried hard hats; all of them looked tired. None seemed to notice the bird in Dima’s arms.
“You’re taking it to work?” Yarik said.
Dima grinned. “Can you imagine?”
“I can imagine you doing it.” Far down the street, there came the rumble of a tank heading back from the parade. “I guess you have to take Mama home, anyway.” Behind them, in the playground, their mother wandered the mud, stooping to gather the feathers Timofei had dropped. “You can leave it with her while you’re at the Oranzheria.”
Dima yawned as if at the word. The tank was going slow, cars beginning to pile up behind it. Its hatch was shut and on the barrel of its gun the red light of the setting sun glinted. Through its cloud of dust he could just see the first canescent orbs rising. “What would be so bad about it?” he said.
“About what? Getting fired?”
“I mean just not working . . .”
“Everything.”
“ . . . at the Oranzheria anymore.”
“Then you mean not working, period.”
“I mean not working like this.”
“What would you do?”
“I mean us, bratan. I mean us living out at . . .”
The tank passed, roaring, covering the rest of his words, then took its roar with it and there was just its dust and the cars and Yarik said, “You better call Mama. The tram will be here and you’ll miss it. And then this won’t be just some idea, but the real fucking disaster, Dima, that you know it would actually be.”
Dima turned and shouted for her—“Mama!”—and when he turned back, Yarik was holding out his hand, knuckles curled and fingers hanging down, as if the rooster was a dog. “I hadn’t been out there,” Dima said. “Not for a year.”
“To Dyadya Avya’s?”
One hand cupped over the bird’s eyes, Dima’s other stroked the top of its head. “This morning, when I went out to get him”—he smiled at the rooster—“to get you—the bus took thirty minutes before it got beyond the Oranzheria.”
Yarik glanced up from the bird.
“But once you’re past it?” Dima said. “Once you’ve finally got out from under the glass? Into the villages, along the Kosha . . .”
“Then it must feel like thirty years. Gone backwards.”
“No,” Dima told him. “Remember how full the village used to be? All the farm trucks on the road? Now there’s nobody. Nobody in the fields, nobody fishing in the Kosha. Not even any old people sitting on the benches outside their gates. Everything’s changed, Yarik. Even out there.”
“God.” Yarik reached the rest of the way to the bird’s head, cupped his hand over Dima’s, gave it a squeeze. “Listen to us. We sound like old people.”
“Even them.” Dima kept his hand still beneath his brother’s. “Even the dedushkas and babushkas who went out there to retire—seventy, ei
ghty years old—even they’re working again.”
“And you want to quit?” Yarik slid his hand off Dima’s down to the bird’s beak, gave it a wiggle. The bird jerked its head, glared. “We’ll retire at ninety,” Yarik said, trying to force a smile. Dima’s face stayed as serious as the bird’s. He felt Yarik take his head in his hand, shake it as if he had a beak. “Just hold on another fifty-four years, bratishka,” Yarik said. “OK?” And, leaning in, kissed his brother on the temple.
Sometimes it seemed to Dima they had already waited that long. Sometimes it seemed half a century since their uncle had sold the farm, since they had pulled his body from the river, since the day—could it really have been only a decade and a half ago?—that Dyadya Avya had gathered together in the threshing barn all the other farmers from the old kolkhoz. By then it had already been a kooperativ. And the last century had already begun its close. And God—or the people’s poverty, or their greed, or a hundred million hearts yearning for freedom—had picked up the world as if it were no weightier than a snow globe, turned it over, and shook. But for all the blizzard of new laws that had swirled down—On the Peasant Farm, On Development of Agrarian Reform, On Realization of the Constitutional Rights of Citizens Concerning Land—the scene itself, the izba, the fields and barns, though now turned upside down, stayed pretty much the same: the managers remained the managers, the brigade bosses still bossed the brigades, the nomenklatura became the oligarchy, the ones who once had worked the black market became the ones who saw how it could work once it was brought into the light. The kolkhozy splintered, their shards divvied up by free market laws: here a farmer got a few hectares of land, there another received the seed; one a milking parlor, another the cows; somewhere a tractor, elsewhere its plow. There had been nothing for them to do but salvage some semblance of the collectives they’d had before: cooperatives owned piecemeal, and without the backing of the state. They had failed. The cooperatives incorporated, the farmers suddenly shareholders in farms too big to work themselves. Then came the men who all along had pulled the strings of state-run collectives, who in The Past Life had scraped salaries off the backs of the kolkhozniki, had fattened off the old corruption, men who now saw how much they stood to gain from impoverished farmers with no clue how much they stood to lose.