by Josh Weil
Now, on the car radio, the long knells of the Kremlin’s bell tower rang out. Three o’clock, Moscow time. His son would be with the neighbor they paid for after-kindergarten care, his baby crawling the rugs of the old woman’s apartment. His wife would be at work. His brother would be asleep. By now, Yarik would have been pushing through the toughest time of the day, out with his crew at the Oranzheria’s far edge, trying not to count the hours till the transport bus would carry him back along this road. The car sped on, passing heavy trucks and little Ladas that drove onto the shoulder to let them have their way. In every field he passed, the monstrous sprinklers slowly rolled, their long metal backs arched from one high wheel to the next, linked together for kilometers, darkening the earth with their artificial rain. Above, collection gutters ran like veins through the clear skin of the glass, tubes dropping to storage tanks, workers lining the irrigation ditches, manning the distribution valves, directing the flow of the canals. All paused when they saw the car. He saw the faces of the workers follow him and knew that he had felt that look before, felt it coming from his own face; he had simply never known till now what it felt like directed towards him.
It felt like he was someone else. As if, for a moment behind that tinted glass, he had become the man his mother had hoped her boy would grow to be. When he’d been born—he knew because she told him—she had brought him to her breast before Dima had followed into the world. Sometimes he wondered if his brother had come first would she have chosen Dima instead? Set Dima aside for success? Checked his schoolwork first? Insisted he learn to drink black tea while still too small for such bitterness, showed him how to suck it through a sugar cube, told her six-year-old son it would help him stay awake to study? Would she have brought Dima instead of Yarik to social evenings at the army base? Introduced Dima to the men who could pull strings, who she flirted with, cajoled, tried to ensure they’d tug just a little in just the right place for him?
By the time Yarik had turned nine, she’d found that place: his schoolboy fascination with Gagarin, Tsiolkovsky, Korolyov’s dream of men on Mars, the Mir space station orbiting above. He would be an engineer. And all her years as a secretary on the Petroplavilsk base, what favors she could nurse from her boss, what little she could save for bribes, had gone to opening a slot for him. One slot for one boy. All the pull she could put together would have never been enough for two. It was the way The Past Life worked, and all his earliest years he had worked towards it: memorized the multiplication charts their mother made him, learned his constellations—Ursa Major, Hydra—off a plastic place mat she gave him for his birthday, accompanied her to speeches by men who she said mattered. While their father, who had never understood ambition, took his other son to the park to hear the poets read; while their father, who was proof of what happened when a man had no will to rise, lay on his boat beside Dima beneath the stars, telling tales of the great bear, the sea serpent that swallowed the sun; their father, who suddenly, one day, was gone.
And then their mother, too. So subsumed by grief she had been taken away to a place where others could help her overcome her helplessness. And alone with Dima out at Dyadya Avya’s, month after month in only their old uncle’s care, what track had there been for Yarik to run on but whatever rail would keep him alongside his brother? What future was there to work towards but the end of the next day? And when, after that parentless year, the state gave them their mother back, when the three of them returned to the apartment on Avtovskaya Street, where was the woman who’d once wished for a bigger flat, a better life, who’d been so driven to drive her firstborn? Gone as her good secretary’s job, as her once-black hair, as her faith in him. Back then, he could feel the hollowness inside him where his mother’s hope had been scooped out: every connection she’d made, broken; every path she’d pushed him towards, closed; her hand too weak to pull him anywhere, let alone up. At night, back in their old room, he would leave his cot, crawl in with Dima, the two of them too used to sleeping together in the hay of their uncle’s izba to fall asleep apart. Curled into the curve of his brother, he’d stare across the room at the wall: behind there, he knew, their mother slept in a bed still sagged with the weight of her dead husband, knew she’d returned from the sanitarium stripped of the thing that had stirred her dreams of a bigger life for him, just as he’d known he had to let go of those dreams, too.
A slapping sound—the rubber strips that curtained the exit to keep the warm air in—and they were out of the Oranzheria: glass roof giving way to girders that became open sky, the earth preparation crews, and then the clearing crews, and then the logging crews, until the car was past everything but the receding din. Then that was gone, too. In the quiet, the car felt even bigger, the seat beside him emptier. Outside, the road was lined with tall pines, their needles new to the mirror-light, stands of birches still unaware of the pandemic winter would bring. He watched them flash by, nothing on either side but walls of woods. Until, up ahead, he saw the sign: THE DACHAS.
They weren’t really dachas, of course—no one had time to putter in cottage gardens on the weekend anymore; no one had weekends—but once the sign had pointed to a hundred summer cabins, each with its own flowering lilacs and vegetable plots, a village like dozens of others that used to surround the city, this last one still called by what it had once been, as if the people of Petroplavilsk wished to deny what it had become. A ghetto. Yarik had never seen it, but he’d heard about it from his wife: the flophouses, the fleas, the homemade vodka stills, the dogs she’d seen roasting over fire pits, the giant billboards mounted on the walls and tilted down to show those kept inside unremitting images—vareniki billowing steam, cucumbers gleaming with oil, personal computers and women’s glossy lips and men in suits smoking cigarettes. She said giant TV screens ceaselessly displayed the outside world—Moscow nightclubs, resorts on the Black Sea—surrounded the village with advertisements and, every now and then, a video of someone’s mother making a plea, a father breaking down in tears. I wouldn’t last a week in there, Yarik had heard others say, I’d want a job within an hour, or work with a smile the rest of my life, or kill myself, or come out cured, or they simply praised the way the city, guided by the Consortium, had kept such unproductive influences out of sight.
But not Zinaida. Not his gentle-hearted wife. It was part of what he loved about his Zinusha: her certainty that she could do something to help. Once a month she went with a busload of women from her church, brought cans of food, bags of clothes, got off the bus and stayed outside, withstanding the scolding of their friends (enabling shiftlessness, encouraging sloth), the sneers of guards (Why don’t you go in and give them the rest of what your husbands work for!), while the gates opened (a guard drove the bus inside) and closed again and from behind them there rose the hoots and bellows, the whistles and whoops and jubilating clamor of those who had no work, who refused the work there was.
After each trip out there his wife came home and cried. It was un-Christian, she would sob into his shoulder, that they should be rounded up and kept inside those walls and made, each minute of every day, to face their decision not to work. As if it was their fault. Surely, she would say, they were too sick, or feebleminded, or emotionally scarred to make that choice; surely, such souls deserved pity, instead. He would nod, his lips against her hair, and think of how in the old system they would have simply been made to work, driven at hard labor beneath a harder hand. He didn’t know which way was worse.
But, passing by the turnoff to The Dachas, peering out at the tops of the billboards, their bright colors splashed above the dark pines, he knew this: his Zinusha was wrong. It was a choice. It always had been. To roll over in bed and go back to sleep, to stay out drinking one hour more, to steal that first sun-warmed strawberry from some roadside field, to eat half a bowl of kasha and put the rest away for lunch, to scrape it onto the plates of your kids, to get up and leave for work before your wife could notice you’d had no breakfast at all, to accept the way things were, to fight to
change them for those around you, to slip quietly to the side—it all led back to some decision. Who is to say which is the right one? In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes flicked to Yarik. He wondered if he’d spoken it out loud. Of course, he thought, people said which was right all the time, people in power. And some listened to them, and some didn’t, and that was a choice, too. Watching the last glimpses of the billboards through the trees, he felt for the crank on the door, found a button, instead. The window slid open a crack. The rush of air whooshing by the car, the dwindling sounds of the homeless shelter, some loudspeakered lamenting voice. Probably one of the videos of the fathers, Yarik thought. And it struck him then that if his own father had lived he never would have been on a video like that. It would have been his mother on the screen. She would have been the one making the visits, taking the bags of clothes out on the bus like Zina. Because his father would have been inside. That was the choice his father would have made.
Then the last of The Dachas was buried beneath the rush of air, the hum of the asphalt beneath the tires, the pines whipping by. Yarik slid his window up, took off his gloves, stuffed them inside his hard hat. He turned it over, flat on the brim so it wouldn’t roll. He put the mint in his pocket and felt the pack of cigarettes and sat there, smelling the clean car, wanting to pull the Troikas out and smoke. Because now that they had passed The Dachas there was no question where he was being taken, or to whom.
Once a northern palace built for the tsar, for royal hunts of bear and wolf and wild boar, it had become a camp for the apparatchiki in the Party, a private place where Stalin went to mull his purges, where Kosygin recuperated from the failure of his heart, where only army generals and directors of the GRU, politburo secretaries and the occasional chest-starred Hero of the State, were allowed through gates still topped with twisted spikes, still attached to the two stone pillars that had always lined the drive. But the brass hammer that had replaced the double-headed eagle once mounted on the leftward pillar was now gone, the brass sickle that had matched it on the right removed. In their place: a rough-hewn crossbar made of cracked, grayed wood. And in its center, staring out at the road: a bleached-white skull. It had the eye sockets and muzzle of what Yarik thought to be a cow, but from its head sprung horns too huge, more like elephant tusks. Above them, centered over frontal bone, sat three iron letters: БРБ. Boris Romanovich Bazarov. The gates slid open. Yarik looked behind as he passed through in the hope they might not swing closed. And, watching them shut, he noticed, for the first time, the base of the pillars: below each post the marble had been carved into the talons of a giant eagle’s foot.
That was when he wished Dima was with him. He would have liked to see his brother’s face. Their uncle’s whispers: fowl feet beneath a witch’s house. Pushkin’s lines: lanterns made of tree-spiked skulls. He would have liked to hear Dima tell the story of this. For a moment he wished he could see it through his brother’s eyes, that his own first thought wouldn’t be, instead, how foolish.
But it was foolish. Gold domes like a boy’s trophies shelved in the sky; the topiary like a toy model of the Petrodvorets Palace grounds; the marble statues of Rus warriors in chain mail, of high-headdressed Indians brandishing spears, Greek maidens replaced by reclining squaws; the filigreed horse sleigh sitting at the end of the drive, the fact that someone had shot arrows into its sides.
And yet there was something about it all that made Yarik reach for the candy in his pocket, work at the wrapper with his hands; something that, when the driver stopped before the wide stone steps, made Yarik shove the mint into his mouth just to keep his jaw unclenched; something that, when the driver got out and opened Yarik’s door, made Yarik grind the mint up in his teeth. It was the foolishness itself that made it worse: the man who’d brought him here knew what he’d think, what men a million times more important would think, knew it—and shrugged. If it made Yarik smile, good. If it made others laugh, so be it. If it made the visitors who the billionaire had brought here swallow sharp chunks of unchewed candies at the crack of the front doors opening, that was probably the point.
“Mr. Bazarov,” the driver said, motioning with his hand to the top of the steps.
Instead, a woman stood in the doorway. She’d gathered her blond hair in a white kerchief rimmed with the red needlework for which the region was famed, wrapped herself in a similar Karelian shawl, and when she turned and led him in he could see, following, how it was cut to slip down her arms and leave her shoulders bare, how her cool blue dress barely reached to her thighs, how her heels were dyed to match the needlework, how she walked in them in a way that made her long braid swish, that made him have to turn his head away.
The parquetried floor and velvet drapes, panels of mirrors and painted ceiling and all the glass chandeliers: none of it compared to what hung from the walls. There were enough weapons along one side to have given pause to a Tartar horde—long swords, rapiers, battle-axes, bludgeons—while along the other enough tomahawks and arrows and eagle-feathered lances to pull a cavalry regiment up short.
The clacking of the woman’s heels stopped so suddenly he almost ran into her. She took a swift step aside, as if she’d been blundered into before, then took another step to the closed door, knocked, spoke to the wood—something in English—stepped aside again, pushed the door open for him to go in.
The billionaire was standing in the middle of the room. Not behind a desk, or with hands on a chair, or near any furniture at all, but just standing there. He looked Yarik straight in the eyes. “What do you want?” he said.
Behind Yarik, the woman, or some automatic thing, shut the door.
“Excuse me?” Yarik said.
“I asked you, what do you want?”
Yarik tried not to look away. The bits of mint he’d mashed into the depressions of his molars had hardened and stuck; his teeth felt glued together. The billionaire watched him, motionless. He was dressed in another shiny metallic suit, another leather string tie. This time the tie was orange. So were the boots. They were cowboy boots, Yarik realized, made from the kind of scaly leather he’d seen used on women’s handbags. Something about that gave him the strength to get his teeth unsealed; they came apart with a pop.
As if the sound was a latch coming loose in the billionaire’s cheeks, the man’s face sprung a grin. He whistled, a piercing, high-pitched noise that came through his teeth and lifted his eyebrows and brightened his eyes, and died fast as it had come, leaving the man grinning even wider. “Look at you jump,” he said. “You are nervous. You better sit down.”
“Sir—” Yarik started.
“Sit down,” the man said. “I’m just joking, sit down.”
Yarik didn’t know if the man meant he was joking about the sitting, or about what had come before. With one hand, he hitched the hard hat up where he held it against his side.
“Sit!” The man shot the word through his smile, finished it off with a smack on the back of the couch.
It was a leather couch, plush and deep, and it was the only seat in the room. The room was an office—a big-windowed, beige-carpeted, airy, vast office—but in the whole office the only other piece of furniture was the desk. Behind the desk: no chair. On the desk: a computer, a phone, a lamp, three glass picture frames on clear glass stands with their black felt backs turned to him. Beneath the lamp, in the center of the desk: a pair of wooden hands carved out of burl-whirled Karelian birch. In the hands: two guns. They were antiquated, long-barreled, cylinder-loaded pistols with ivory handles and brass trigger guards and heavy-looking muzzles, and taking in the scenes of galloping horses scratched into the gold plate over their chambers, Yarik wondered if they had ever even been fired, and then if the billionaire had been the one to fire them, and at what, at whom. He had not touched a gun in more than a decade, since the day that Dyadya Avya—drunk, said the kulak who’d bought their uncle’s land; sober, Yarik knew—waded out into the Kosha with his old army pistol in his hand, the day the brothers had splashed in aft
er him, shouting for their dyadya out in the current, the day that Yarik had grabbed the gun too late.
He looked away. In one of the corners, a huge wood-burning oven made of blue and white china stretched from floor to ceiling. In another: a sea green orb of translucent plastic. One wall was completely covered by a painting Yarik remembered from some high school textbook: a field of heavy horses thundering forward at full charge, on their backs Rus knights in plated mail and glaring helmets, lances lowered, swords drawn. Across the room, on the opposite wall, another painting just as huge: grassy plain, hot blue sky, white teeth gritted beneath wide brimmed hats, bandannas unfurled like flags, a cavalry coming on in a dust-billowing stampede. Between the two, there was the desk, the couch.
Yarik sat down on it. Tall as he was, it sucked him in. He sank so low that he felt like he was in his first day of first form, six years old and sitting at his tiny desk before the teacher’s full-size one, until he realized he wasn’t that low at all; the man’s desk was just that tall. The billionaire went behind it now. He lay his forearms on top. He smacked his hands down flat. The revolvers in their wood hands shook. “So,” the billionaire said, “show me what you’ve got.”