by Josh Weil
Those times he could even understand how Zinaida liked the mirrors. The way night used to seem a black breach in the path of the sun, the zerkala now drawing day’s clear track through, as if their small bit of earth had been blessed with a new kind of light. She talked of a day when there would be so many mirrors they would seem simply a return of the sun, no difference at all between day and night, all that light warming their patch of the world, as if all Petroplavilsk was beneath a ceiling of glass. Winters without snow, lilacs in December. She spoke of their chosen city, their favored lives. And lying there, listening to her, his own dream—all of them out on Dyadya Avya’s, farming as a family together, suppers around one big table, nights huddled together around a stove, all day spent in the fields with his brother—seemed so simple.
On colder days, on evenings when clouds pushed the world back towards winter, they would take their plates to the big couch opposite the old rug that hung above the TV, squeeze all four together, watching Vremya or Gorodok while Polina toddled and tripped around their feet. Sometimes, he would take the children to the couch alone, watch them while Yarik went with Zinaida into their bedroom to spread out bills and papers on the mattress, to confer on matters of family and home.
Then, Dima would hold Polina in his lap, gather Timofei to his side, tell them stories his own uncle had told him: Emelya the Fool standing over the water hole punched through the ice, the hoary pike fish in his fists gasping through its flapping mouth, Let me go and I will grant you any wish; the way Baba Yaga would cut off a dead man’s hand, creep into homes, wave the severed palm over sleeping souls so they would never wake; how, to punish her, the townsfolk knotted her long hair to a horse’s tail and sent it—whirling, kicking, galloping—across a stony field until there was nothing left of her but her thumping head. He would tell them about the aged, lonely peasant couple who yearned so for a child that the old husband carved a piece of apple wood into a baby’s shape and the old woman wrapped it in her shawl and they named it Teryosha and rocked it and sang to it until one night they heard it gurgle, stared as it begin to stir.
Close your pretty eyes, Teryosha
Sleep, my baby child!
All the fishes and the thrushes,
All the hares and foxes wild,
Have gone good-bye in the forest.
Sleep, my baby child.
And when they were asleep, his words would slip into a quiet humming, and he would sit beneath the weight of their lolled heads and hear inside his own the one tale he never told: how one day, long, long ago, the Chudo-Yudo emerged from its lair and, arching its long back, leapt out of the water and into the sky. For a moment, all its heads were silhouetted against the heavens, its flailing body flickering in the light. Then it opened its jaws and swallowed the sun. In the sudden darkness there was only the sound of its body splashing back down into the lake. That was the day, Dyadya Avya would tell them, that all the land became a world without light. In the dawn it was as dark as noon and noon was as dark as night. And in this lightless land there lived an old couple who had two sons. One was clever and hardworking as an ox. The other was a simpleton. His name was Ivan, his surname Popolyov, but everyone called him Ivanushka the Fool. For twenty whole years he did nothing but lie at the foot of the stove, buried in the warm ashes his family shoveled out. Until, one day, he arose. He shook himself, shed a pile of ashes a meter high. Stomping over them, he called out, Make me a mace for I am going to kill that Chudo-Yudo snake!
Sometimes, Dima would have heard his uncle’s voice tell the whole tale, all the way through to the end, before the bedroom door would open and his brother would come out. Sometimes, Yarik would come out earlier and save him from hearing it. Then, his brother would help him ease out from under the sleeping children and they would go, the two of them together, into the dim hall and fill steaming glasses from the samovar and take a moment—short, and as time went on, shorter still—to simply be there with each other, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just standing by each other’s side, and Dima would know that he had done the right thing, that whatever would happen now, whatever might come next, it would be worth it just for this.
Weeks ago, when Dima had quit his job, had simply refused to return to work, to even stand, he had not understood that he was leaving, had only wanted to sit, watching the light of the newly risen sun slip slowly down the white birch trunks, had sat like that for hours, through the foreman’s fury, the urgent tugs from fellow workers’, until his brother had come. Crouched beside him, Yarik had whispered What’s going on? And when Dima hadn’t answered, he had slid his hands beneath Dima’s arms, and, gently as he could, dragged him away.
That morning, standing alone outside his home on Avtovskaya Street, listening to the receeding sibilation of the trolly taking his brother back to work, Dima had gazed up at the apartment he’d lived in almost all his life. In his childhood it had been a gray building, paint peeling down to concrete. Now, all eight stories were freshly blue. But it felt grayer. No grass greened the mud, no buds on the trees, just the dull orange dirt-filled flower pots provided by the Consortium’s Landscape Replacement Crew, one on each balcony, their gene-altered bulbs waiting to bloom. Years ago, each railing would have fluttered with laundry, each square slab alive with fowl. Now they were all empty. Even Dima’s. Even though he’d left the rooster out when he’d gone to work.
That got his legs going, got him upstairs. Inside, the apartment was freezing, the glass balcony doors folded open, a wind blowing in. “Good evening, lyubimy,” he heard his mother chirp, but when he turned to correct her, as he did every morning, she wasn’t even looking at him.
Atop the television, the rooster stood staring at them both, undeniable desperation in its eyes. He’d covered the defunct TV with a tablecloth to keep his mother from trying to turn its knobs, and beneath the bird the lace was smeared with scat. At his first step, the rooster leapt, stumble-landed, took off at a run. Its long tail trailed behind it. Across the room it went, beating its wings so hard Dima felt the wind, no closer to flying than a strange pathetic hop before the weight of its trailing plumage brought it down again.
Still, it took him most of a minute and all the energy he had left to corner the thing. He almost gave in, just stomped down on its tail feather train, but the idea of the six-foot plumes ripping out stopped him. Instead, he peeled one of the blankets from around his mother, advanced with it spread before him.
On the tiny square of balcony, he dumped the Golden Phoenix out. “Stay,” he told it, as if it were a dog.
Stepping back inside, he said, “Mama, you have to keep the doors closed, OK?”
But she was focused back on her sewing, bent again over the machine. Beneath the table, he could see her foot poking out from the folds of the blanket, working the pump. He crossed the room and, resting his sockfoot on top of her slipper, pressed her treadling still.
She looked up.
“What are you mending?” he asked her.
“Your shirt.”
He took the free sleeve in his hand.
“It was full of holes,” his mother said.
The cuff had been sewn shut. She was halfway through sealing up the other one. On the couch behind her, the rest of his shirts were piled. He could see their collars had been stitched closed, patches sewn over their buttonholes, turtlenecks turned to traps for an unsuspecting head.
He gave her back the sleeve, lifted his foot off hers.
The chattering of the needle again.
Flopping onto the couch, into the pile of ruined shirts, he watched her. Beyond her, the door to her room was open. At the foot of the bed, he could see his uncle’s old chest, the wood sides his father had whittled with wingspread shapes of geese in flight. He made a mental note to get a padlock before she dragged out Dyadya Avya’s last belongings and went to work on them. To work. It hit him then—tomorrow he wouldn’t go—hit him too hard for a mind so tired; he couldn’t think about it; he wanted only to be already asleep.
“Mama,” he said, his lids lowering, “have you been doing this all night?”
“I made you shchi for supper.”
“It’s breakfast,” he told her.
But she only bent forward, bit off the thread, and, smiling, proud, held up the shirt for him to see.
He shut his eyes.
So soft, the dry skin of her palm when she pressed it to his cheek. So soft, her voice: “It’s been a long day.”
“A long night,” he corrected her. “You should sleep while I’m gone, Mama, so when you’re up I can be here and . . .” His hands searched the pile of clothes, lifted some random part, dropped it again.
When he opened his eyes, she was looking out at the rooster, the sun-blasted concrete, the railing thinned to brittle by the brightness.
“It’s still light,” she told him, as if just discovering it.
“It’s always light,” he said.
The wrinkles on her brow seemed to deepen, the skin to shrivel a little more around her mouth. And meeting her confused gaze, her eyes milky and filmed as the mirror-faded moon, it was all he could do not to turn away.
They sat at the small table in the kitchen, hunched over their bowls, the two of them and the empty chair at the third place his mother always set. The room was filled with the warmth of the steam and the smell of boiled cabbage. He slurped spoonfuls with his eyes shut, the morning brightness bleeding through his lids, and wondered if this was the last bowl of supper fare he’d have to eat for breakfast. By feel, he tore off a hunk of bread, soaked it in the shchi, and chewed it (but what worse would they have to eat now?) and ripped away another piece (how would he bring home even this?), all the while aware of the empty space beside him (what would Yarik say if he was sitting there?). Squeezing his fist around the bread, Dima tried to feel the fingers of a hand squeezing back. Instead, for the first time since he’d sat down on the glass, he felt the full weight of what he’d done.
“Poor thing,” his mother said.
He opened his eyes. From beneath her flowered head scarf a few strands of white hair floated, backlit by the window, aglow with morning. For a moment, he thought something was fluttering against the glass behind her—some bird trying to get in—and then he realized the wing-clatter was coming from the balcony behind him.
His mother beamed. “A mute rooster.”
Wiping a wedge of bread around the inside of his bowl, he told her, “He’s not mute.”
But her smile only grew. “A cock,” she said, “that can’t crow.” And, sinking back against her chair, the old woman let out a hoot.
It was the wild unloosed laughter of a child. He tried not to look at her. Turning to the bowl she’d set out for her other son, he reached across the table for another helping. But there was the ache beneath his arm where Yarik had grasped him that morning, the rawness from being dragged across the glass, and he snapped, “Mama, can’t you understand that there’s no sunrise?”
In the window’s slant of morning light, that seemed to only make her laugh harder.
“There’s no break,” he told her, grasping his brother’s bowl, “between the night and the day, not enough, nothing but the zerkala, the Oranzheria, the goddamn—”
The hurled soup bowl, the smashed window glass: they seemed to disappear at the same exact time, nothing left behind but the sound of the crash.
A breeze prickled the hairs of Dima’s arms, shook the dish towel on its hook. He closed his hands around the back of the chair. He didn’t remember having stood up. But in his eyes he could feel the same desperate thing he’d seen in the rooster’s. Quietly, he pushed his chair in. He went to his mother. He knelt down, and kissed her cheek, and whispered a plea that she might stop crying.
Later, after he had gotten her to brush her teeth and put on her nightgown, after he had watched her shuffle to the couch, after he had bunched himself into the cushions beside her, silently handing her shirt after shirt, after she had sewn closed cuff after cuff until finally falling asleep over the machine, and after he had carried her into her bedroom and lowered her to her bed and shut the door, he went back to the couch and picked up one of the shirts and began to break the stitches she had put in.
Her sewing scissors were in the spools of threads in the wooden sewing box she’d had since he’d been born. They were shaped like one of the great herons of the lake, and he used its sharp beak to pry beneath a thread, cut it, pry beneath the next. Its handles were wings plated in gold. Years ago, most of his lifetime ago, sometime in the months after they had found his father, after his mother had stopped going to work, after she had refused to leave the house, and then the bed, after her hair had become streaked with white and crinkly as an old man’s, after they had gone—he and his brother—to live with their uncle, sometime in those months Dyadya Avya had told them about the scissors.
“Once upon a time,” he had begun, the way he always began, “there was a woman who had the most beautiful hair.” He was lying on his back on the worn wood floor beside the warm woodstove, a bottle resting on his belly below his bare chest sheened with sweat. “Even when she was a girl, strangers would ask to touch it. Her mother used to wake her long before dawn, long before the others in the house were up. She would burn half an hour of kerosene brushing her daughter’s hair by lantern light. She wouldn’t let anyone else near it. Not even the girl’s aunt was alowed to braid it for her. So much her parents spent on oils! On scents! Her father never touched her. Not a kiss on the cheek. Not a hug. Except when he would come behind her and lift her hair in his hands and admire the weight of what he called her dowry.
“When she grew older, of course, everyone wanted to touch it. To touch her. She had lovers. It was very wavy.” He lifted a hand, eeled it over the floor, as if riding the swells of the lake. “It was very black,” he said. “Black as this.” He looked at the iron stove door and drank from the bottle and shook his head violently. “No,” he said. “Blacker. Black as . . .” He looked at the two boys. His eyes widened, his face smiled. “Black as yours,” he said. “But by then, it was long. So long that when she held her skirt to her knees to wade across the creek, the tip of her hair would get wet. So long that in a strong wind it became a great flowing tail. When she tied it up beneath a kosinka it was so huge on her head that she looked like a Turk! But she almost never wore it up.
“Because, you see, she was ugly. At least she felt ugly. Because others made her feel ugly. Her lovers?” He looked at the boys. “How old are you?”
“Nine,” they said.
“Nine!” their uncle bellowed. “When I was nine what was there to think about but humping? Humping and humping. Are you humping yet?”
“No,” they said.
His sigh seemed too heavy to rise off his lips. “Her lovers . . .” He shrugged his shoulders against the floor, said, “Nine!,” needed another swig of the bottle to go on. “They would ask her to spread it out. If it was humping from the back. If it was from the front, and she was lying below them, they would lift it with their hands, her hair, and cover her with it. She told me this. She told me she preferred to be on top. So she could cover her face with her hair herself. Poor girl!” He drank again.
“Until your father. Your father gave her that.” He made to point at them with the hand that was steadying the bottle on his belly and caught the bottle and instead flapped in their direction with his other hand. Dima was holding the scissors. Yarik had asked about them. They were the one thing she had tried to take with her, the one thing that had been pried from her hands, the one thing that, in all the weeks since their father had been found, had brought her tears.
“He gave her them,” their uncle continued, “one night about nine months before you were born. Yup.” He belched. “Just before the act. They were naked. He lay down on the bed. He said, ‘Stand over me.’ She stood. She flung her hair over her head, down over her face, a curtain of it so long it almost touched his thing. Maybe it did. All right, it barely brushed his thing. She was about to s
it, when he brought the scissors out, when he held them up to her, when he told her, ‘Cut your hair.’”
Sitting on the couch with the heron-shaped scissors in his hand, Dima knew that his uncle must have told them the rest—how long it took with the tiny scissors, how they’d gazed into each other’s eyes each excruciating second of the wait—must have ended his story with the way his father had called her his beauty, the way he’d said, “Now, marry me,” but he was seeing it, again, the way Dima had seen it in the hot dry air in the house that smelled of liquor and old man sweat and his brother’s skin and the smoke of burning beech wood, seeing again the way she cut her hair in small strips, bit by bit, the lamplight slowly slipping in, flicker by flicker, where her black curtain had kept it out, the impossibly long strands falling onto his father’s chest, belly, thighs, until he was blanketed with them. How their oils must have shone! How soft they must have felt dropping to his skin! How warm and heavy before she was done.
By the time the door to his mother’s room opened again and she came out, the knob rattling in her hand, Dima had reopened only half of the sleeves. She was still in her nightgown, and the old yellow fabric was so thin he could see through it the shape of her, no longer a woman’s shape, but just an old person’s, with skin hanging heavier in places than it might have on an old man. Her mouth in the past years had shriveled inwards, as if her lips now found more comfort in their closeness to each other than to anything of the outside world. Her eyes were as blue as ever. Her thinned hair was wrapped in a white bun beneath her kosinka, as he had always known it, and her breathing the low whistling wheeze it had become, and the confusion in her face put a sadness on his as it had done now for years.