by Josh Weil
“I must have slept late,” she said. She was looking out the window, a tremoring hand shielding her eyes from the morning’s light. “But I feel like I haven’t slept at all.”
“You haven’t,” he told her.
And when she came and sat at the machine and reached for one of the shirts he had unsown, he gave her the scissors instead. They shook with the unsteadiness of her hand. “We’re opening these up,” he told her, giving her one of the sleeves. But she just sat there, the cloth in one hand, the scissors in the other, both shaking.
“Aren’t you going to work?” she said.
“Yes.”
That day, he tore down the light-bleeding curtains from the windows, the winter-heavy rugs from the walls, and nailed the kovry up where the curtains had been. He hung an especially long one over the glass doors to the balcony, the rooster standing on its railing perch watching him make it and all the world outside disappear. Inside, it was so dark he had to stumble to the foyer to find the flashlight. In its yellow beam he hunted in his mother’s sewing box for her larger shears, went to her bedroom and dug through his uncle’s carved chest, found Avya’s old felt vest and hat, but could not do it. Instead, he cut the dead man’s heavy felt boots into strips. He took the apartment door off its hinges and nailed the strips all around its edges and put it back up. All the while his mother kept asking what he was doing, and when he was done he shut the flashlight off again. In the blackness he went to her. He felt with his hands until he touched her and then he knelt behind her chair and put his arms around her and could feel beneath his forearms the insubstantiality of her breasts. He kissed her where her kosinka covered her temple.
“Go to sleep, Mama,” he said.
Sometimes he could see in the confusion and sadness and fear in her eyes a glimpse of what had happened to her when he and Yarik were boys. Sometimes he felt the same tightness twist through his chest. Though then, at least, it had happened fast, weeks instead of years: by the time the men had come to carry her out of the apartment and down the stairs and to the sanitarium she had refused to leave her bed for almost a month. He and Yarik had sat beside her on the mattress, one son’s fingers trying to smooth her brow, the other with his hands buried in her stiffened hair. But her shoulders had refused to ease, her face to soften. Her eyes had stayed open, found her children, held them hard, as if gripped by her hands. What had she been trying to make them understand? That she loved them? That they would be all right? That she would be?
Sometimes, now, he wished that he could tell her the same. Sometimes he thought what was happening to her now was worse. Then, at least, they had had hope that there was something they could do to help bring her back. Visit her, the doctors had said. Bring her things that will remind her of her life before. And each Sunday, squeezed beside their uncle on the bench seat of the old Ural the kolkhoz loaned him, they had ridden in the loud quiet of tires rumbling on the Kosha road, holding in their laps the gifts they’d brought: craft projects from school, photographs from field trips with their Pioneer Group, wax paper wrapped around river fish they’d caught and kippered the way she liked. Rounding a bend there it would suddenly be, the compound, those high ivied walls that hid the gardens, its high stone towers, wrought iron lampposts standing sentry, the ancient oaks spreading their heavy canopies over the entrance road. Their uncle stopped the truck. In their chests, the gravel kept on crumbling. He left them at the cloister’s gates, went to wander on his own among the gardens, scared of the inside of that place in a way they had never seen him scared before, and together they had gone up the wide stone steps to the big double doors and raised their hands—two small fists side by side, pale against black paint—to knock.
Inside, a nurse led them through the rotunda, down a green-walled hall, past the open double doors that leaked a ceaseless clattering of work—the cavernous chamber where patients sat all day at long rows of sewing machines, doctors pacing between them scribbling notes—past the patients’ rooms, doors sanded down to try to hide the scratches, heavy brass racks bolted to the floor, some holding men’s shoes, some women’s, one their mother’s.
Always, before they entered, Dima would open his hand. He would feel his brother’s fingers slip in between his own. He would hold on as they went in together. In their other hands they would hold the gifts they hoped might help to make her better. They would put them on the blanket beside her body.
“Mama,” they would say, “how are you feeling today?” And wait for her to turn to them and show them the answer in her eyes.
Always the same. Except for the day they brought her the book.
In Dima’s memory it seemed like a story Dyadya Avya might have told: how he and Yarik had almost drowned or froze or died some other way that night out on the lake; how the state had threatened to take them out of their uncle’s care; how their uncle had cried about it, and then laughed about it, and then, as always, turned it into a tale; how in his telling it had turned into a fable worthy of a book; how with his help they had turned it into a real one, each scrawling the words beneath the pictures the other drew, bound it with a leather shoelace stitched though its binding like the suture of a wound; how they had brought her this story of what they’d done—Once upon a time and out to see Nizhi and lost their oars and almost drowned—how she had pulled them to her, worry crowding out everything else in her eyes; how the next visit she had spoken first, asked over and over if they were all right; how she had made them promise to never do something like that again; how that had been the beginning of the months that brought her home; how he wished there was something he could bring her now to do the same; how he knew there was not. He could still feel the pressure of her hand on his cheek, his other cheek pressed to her breast, his own hand holding his brother’s, his gaze locked on the part of the window he could see—those thin birches gathered just outside the garden wall, all those still white trunks beneath the shimmering leaves.
When he woke, he did not know what time it was. Somewhere near: his mother’s slow breathing. He stirred and felt her with his feet. She had curled into a ball at that far part of the couch. Lifting his legs off her, he shuffled, arms before his face, towards what he thought was the balcony door. His fingers brushed the hanging rug. He raised it. Out there, the sun was an orange bulge of fire breaking over the city in the distance. Then it rose and he realized he had slept all day, and all night, and it was dawn again. He looked at the rooster outside in the red light. The rooster stared back. Through the glass he thought he heard it cluck.
When he turned back to the room, the light was streaming around his shape. His mother, in it, blinking.
“Good morning, Lyubimy,” she said.
“Good morning, Mama,” he replied.
That day he rolled the rugs up and held them rolled with screwed C-clamps. He went to meet his brother on the bus, and passed the day on the trams, and that evening, home, he took a pair of socks out of his mother’s hands and threw them at the pile of all the others on which she’d sewn shut the tops. From a closet bin he scooped a handful of chicken feed, dumped it into an old dog bowl, brought it out to the rooster. When he was small, he’d ruined his uncle’s straight razor scratching the word Ivan into the tin side of the same bowl that swallowed the bird’s head now. Watching it eat, he pointed at the eastward glow of the mirrors coming. “That’s not the sun,” he said. And when the first blinked on over the city, he said it again, “That’s not the sun.” He said it for each one that showed itself, until half a dozen filled the lower edge of the sky. Then he reached down and yanked the rooster’s head out of its bowl and made it look. “What’s the matter with you, Ivan?” he said. The rooster kicked out its talons. He lifted it by the neck. “Why don’t you crow for each of them?” he demanded of it. “Why don’t you crow all the time?” When he and Yarik were kids out in the country the cocks had kept them up all night. Was it simply because this one was alone, no others around to goad him with their calls? Or did it think it was some fable
bird, its feathers too bright for ordinary life? The rooster’s eye swiveled at him. “Why you?” It tried to gouge his knuckle with its beak. “Who says you get to need the sun?” Its legs lashed out. Now that he had gotten it mad, he realized, he could not put it down.
Pushing the glass doors open, he headed for his mother’s room, the bird held out at arm’s length, its long black tail dragging on the floor. In the old carved chest he found his uncle’s felt farmer’s hat, dropped it over the rooster’s head, clamped it with a fist around the feathered neck. With his other hand he unstrung the leather laces from his boot.
Back out on the balcony, he set the hooded rooster on the concrete floor, scrambled inside, shut the doors. Through the panes, he watched its fury. It got in three quick steps before it hit the wall. Stumbling, it turned and ran full speed into the railing. It stood, kicked out its talons as viciously as a dazed and blinkered rooster could, turned again and ran smack into the glass. Dima knelt down, eye to hood. Behind the bird, the sky was full of mirrors, growing bright.
One day, he got off the bus at the used electronics market in the University Square, wended his way from booth to booth until he found a merchant of old CDs who had the one he wanted. That night, he put it on: peeper frogs chirping at first dark. He set it to repeat and let it play.
Another day, he got off the bus at the Oranzheria, hiked to its edge where the loggers were felling trees, spent an hour searching through the wreckage that they’d left. Home, he knelt beside his mattress, distributing the fresh-cut branches, a forest floor spread beneath his bed frame.
Each evening he ate supper across from his mother, helped her to bed. He fed the rooster, tied on its hood of felt. Stepping inside, he shut the glass doors, unclamped the rug, let it unroll, breathed in the green pine scent, fell asleep to the memory of a world long gone.
And each morning he loosened the laces around Ivan’s neck, took off the hood, and listened to the Golden Phoenix crow.
For a while, then, the passengers on the trolleybuses he rode couldn’t help but stare at him. Not in the way he was used to—the tight-faced glances of disgust at his indolence, the red-eyed glowers of men coming off eighteen-hour shifts that he’d once worked—but with a new keenness, a wondering, as if recognizing in him something their bodies remembered but their minds had lost, their faces growing easeful with the watching—sometimes a wistfulness in their eyes, sometimes a yearning, a smile, the creep of jealousy—until they turned away, embarrassed that any of the other passengers should see. And he? He sat and watched the city pass, the white footbridges arcing over the Solovinka, their thin wood guardrails woven like lace, the grass on the riverbank green as something grown for a children’s storybook. At noon the huge dome of the Alexandro-Nevsky Church shone golden in the midday heat, the market around it filling the air with sun-loosed scents of onions, carrots, cabbage. If he caught the number twelve at Griboyedova Boulevard at 11:55 it would pass by the belltowers just as they began to ring. The tulips around the statue of Peter the Great had bloomed and gone and been replaced by rusty marigolds. In the quiet of the late day before it turned to evening, when the heat had passed its zenith and was slipping slowly towards the cool of night, he would make his way around the statue, cutting blooms. Nobody was ever there to notice. Though on the bus they gazed at him as he brought the orange flowers to the Oranzheria, a gift for his brother’s wife. Even the other workers could not look away when he rose, his face lit with the sight of Yarik climbing on.
The marigold in his brother’s lapel had lost its luster, its petals curled brown at the tips, but seeing the bloom in the dim entrance to the apartment they’d once shared lit Dima’s face full as if from a fresh-picked bunch. Still, he would have crushed it in a hug if his nephew, clinging to Yarik’s leg, hadn’t been in the way, if his brother hadn’t been already hugging a silver samovar big as the boy—a gift, Dima knew, from Zinaida’s parents five years ago today.
“It’s for Mama,” Yarik told him.
Zinaida undid the baby from her sling. “Who has time anymore to sit around a samovar?”
How long had it been since Yarik had invited him up to his home? These days his brother spoke instead of scarce seconds alone with Zinaida, the precise number of pork chops she’d bought, the baby being sick, said tomorrow and next time, looked away.
Now, Yarik set the samovar down, scooped up his son instead. “Hi, Mama,” he said.
Their mother, hunched over her sewing machine, looked up and beamed. “How was work?” she asked him.
“Mama”— Yarik’s smile only brought out the sadness in his eyes—“where do you think I work?”
Freshly shaven, he was in a suit—their father’s? uncle’s?—its shoulders sagging, sleeves too short; he’d cut the pants’ cuffs, turned them down so they reached his shoes.
Zinaida’s dress fit her like she’d had it tailored to every part of her shape. Dima rarely thought of her as an attractive woman, and it surprised him each time he realized she was. She had on heels so high they changed the muscles of her legs, an eel skin purse, earrings dangling.
“It’s our anniversary,” she told their mother.
“Oh?” The old woman’s hand fluttered up to her kerchief, smoothed it over her hair. “Which factory?”
“No,” Zinaida started.
But their mother was already holding her hands out to Yarik. “This one,” she said, “I’ve always known would one day be a nomenklaturshchik!”
Stepping in front of Yarik, Zinaida took his mother’s hands for him. She glanced back at her husband, her wink failing to cover her concern. “Me, too,” she said. “To me, he’s always been a big man.”
Yarik’s half-laugh came out barely a hum. “Yeah,” he said. “Direktor of the Zinaida Industries.”
But their mother had already retrieved her hands, was hunched over her machine again, the needle hammering. Dima watched her shaky fingers feed it the waistband on a pair of his underwear. When he glanced back at Zinaida, her tweezed brows were raised at him.
“OK,” his sister-in-law said, “you don’t want me to find you a girl from work. You’ve made that clear. But Dima . . .” She flicked an amused glance at the pile of underwear.
“It’s Mama,” Yarik said. “She’s afraid of being left out of all the fun we’d have on double dates.”
And, feeling his brother’s grin take hold on his own face, Dima almost stepped to their mother, swept her up, waltzed her to Yarik who, he knew, would do the same to his laughing wife, but when he turned his own grin towards Zinaida he saw only concern creeping into her face. She had begun to lower the baby to the ground, to let Polina wander; now she paused, the girl’s legs dangling. Dima watched her eyes sweep the room. She lifted the baby back up.
It was true: he had bartered away the vacuum. It had been one of the first things to go. True: on the wallpaper the ghosts of pictures hung, nails through dark rectangles where the light hadn’t reached before. He hadn’t noticed till then how overpowering the smell of cabbage soup was, how cobwebs covered the furniture legs, how dusty the moldings. But she wasn’t looking at the moldings. He watched her take in the piles of clothes his mother had stitched shut, the other piles of ones he’d snipped back open, the windows browed with rolled rugs, the broken one he’d covered over with a trash bag and tape. The plastic rattled and breathed. Behind the balcony door, the rooster paced, huffed-up and staring back at them. It stopped. Then leapt at the glass, whacked with its beak, beat its wings, scrabbled with its taloned feet, and Zinaida jerked so violently she nearly dropped the baby.
“It’s just for two hours,” Yarik told her.
“Oh, Dmitry Lvovich . . .” Around her eyes, the skin bunched with concern.
“It’ll be fine,” Yarik said.
“We forgot the toys,” she told Dima, as if apologizing to him for something else.
“It’ll be fine,” Dima said.
“No,” she told him. “I wouldn’t leave you with them for two hours with no—�
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“Zinusha,” Yarik said, “what do you want me to do? Take Dima to dinner instead?”
How embarrassing to stand there feeling his heart leap like that, feeling hope balloon in his chest like one of the toys they had left behind, something that would squeal when pressed and collapse. He was sure they could see it on his face. Just as, before, at Yarik’s mention of a double date, they must have seen how much he hated the thought of some woman squeezed beside him at one of the few suppers he and his brother still shared. He knew he should be happy for Yarik on his anniversary, for Zinaida, and he told himself he was, he was—but he had never understood it, the chase everyone else seemed compelled to make, the way everyone seemed to need to dilute their love. Lust, he could imagine—Yarik’s trips to the dockyard women, his nights with the dance club girls, the way something in the urge seemed stirred by newness—but love? Why the drive to spread it ever thinner? To go from a mother, a father, a brother, to a wife. To a child, another, a mistress. No, he could not understand how in the end it could make anyone more happy than they’d been when they began.
After his brother and sister-in-law had left, Dima stood with the baby squirming against his chest. Behind him, Timofei stood swiveling his head between the couch with his grandmother and the balcony door, the chatter of the sewing machine and the wing-thwapping, claw-scratching of the bird.
“What’s it doing?” the boy asked.
Outside, the rooster’s feathers whipped about, its comb flapping, its beak and talons sparks on the glass.
“Trying to get in,” Dima said.
“Why?”
He considered. On the one hand, he knew it was time for its supper —simple as that. On the other, he had a sudden urge to tell the boy it was because the bird hated children, hated that it was Timofei who’d stayed while his father had gone, hated even that he was here at all.