by Josh Weil
“Because,” Dima compromised, “it wants to eat you.”
The boy’s face seemed to slowly squish, as if pressed by invisible palms. He squinted hard at the bird. “I will eat you,” he said.
Looking at Timofei, it seemed to Dima he just might try. With his free hand, Dima reached out and slowly swiveled the boy’s head back towards his grandmother.
“What’s she doing?” Timofei said.
“Sewing my underwear.”
The needle whirred, her foot pedaled.
“She’s good at it,” Timofei said.
Dima nodded. “She’s had a lot of practice.”
“Can I?” the boy asked.
“I don’t know,” Dima said. His mother was bent to her task as if the machine was a steering wheel and the couch a car, going fast, and without brakes, and she was driving it. “Why don’t you ask her?”
Which was how Dima ended up spending the next half-hour walking in circles, bouncing Polina on his shoulders, swinging her between his legs, while, seated behind the sewing machine, his mother pumped the treadle, her hands darting in to touch the fingers of his nephew, who stood beside her guiding Dima’s underwear into the needle’s flash. They had gone through the pile and started over, this time sewing up the leg holes, and the sky outside had finally passed into its long half-light when the bouncing and the swinging and crawling stopped working and Polina began to bawl.
Galina Yegorovna’s foot froze. The needle stopped. Beside her, Timofei stared at the wailing child.
“Oh, shit,” the boy said.
His grandmother raised her eyebrows.
“Watch your language,” Dima told him.
“Well,” the boy said, “she won’t stop crying, now. Not for a hour. She never does.”
“Oh, shit,” Dima said.
Timofei let the half-stitched underwear hang off the machine’s thread. “Now what are we going to do?” He grabbed another pair from the pile, punched his small fist through the remaining open hole.
Polina, pressed against Dima’s chest, redoubled her squalling, as if her brother had punched her, instead.
“Maybe,” Dima offered the boy, “you can hold the baby?”
Instead, his mother pushed herself up from the couch, came around the table with arms held out. Her face seemed to slip back two dozen years. “Lyubimaya,” she asked, eyes shining, “what happened?”
Handing Polina to her, Dima stood back, as if his presence might spoil the effect his mother would have, as if he expected the child’s malaise to dissipate like fog burned off by its grandmother’s warmth. Instead, the girl’s red-faced roaring only climbed another notch above endurable.
Over its screams he called to his nephew. “Maybe you can help me feed the rooster? Timofei, do you want—” The boy’s head shook vehemently back and forth. “I thought,” Dima said, “that you were going to eat him?”
But Timofei had gone utterly still. In his eyes there seemed true terror.
Dima glanced at the balcony door. The bird had calmed: its dim shape stood still. Shrugging, Dima crossed the room towards it, stepped out onto the balcony, shut the door behind him. The bird scuttled to a corner against the bars. For a moment Dima dropped his face into his hand. Why did you say that? he thought. He’s just a kid. Through his fingers he could see the rooster’s mirror-lit eyes. They glared at him over its beak. Bending down, Dima snatched the bowl, carried it back inside. Filling it with feed, he could feel the movement of his mother rocking the baby in the kitchen, the frozen stillness of his nephew watching. A memory: a hog, all chewed ears and sharp tusks and slabbering teeth and him, no older than Timofei, the animal four times his weight. He carried the bowl back out and, watching the Golden Phoenix attack its supper, remembered how terrified he’d been, the beast’s grunting, Dyadya Avya pouring out the slops. His own uncle. Dima felt like hiding. Inside, the baby’s wailing guttered out. Scrape, scrape, scrape went the rooster’s beak, digging for the last grains in the metal bowl. Dima unfolded the hood.
Stepping back through the door, he stopped so short he nearly let the blinkered rooster in. Timofei had shoved the sewing machine back against the sofa, the end tables against the walls. In the middle of the room, the boy had tipped both armchairs against each other, back to back, an inverted V. In their long shadow Dima’s nephew crouched, all but hands and knees hidden by one large sofa cushion. The other two had been set on their ends to make walls. Carefully, Timofei lowered the last cushion to rest on the edges of the others: a roof. The boy looked up and, seeing Dima, beamed.
“Is that your house?” Dima said.
The boy shook his head.
“Whose house is it?”
“It isn’t a house,” Timofei told him. “It’s a barn.”
At his calves, Dima could feel the rooster pushing. Its wings rustled. He shivered. Then, stepping in, slid the door shut behind him. “Whose?” he said.
“Ours.”
Crossing the room, Dima crouched next to his nephew, rested a hand on the boy’s small head. “You and me?” Dima said. The boy nodded. Dima worked his fingers through the softness of hair. “What about your papa?” he asked.
“Him, too,” Timofei said. “All of us.”
His nephew had never been to Dyadya Avya’s, probably never even seen a picture. And, still, Dima couldn’t swallow. “Where . . .” He squeezed a cough inside his throat, tried again. “Where do we sleep?”
Timofei turned and pointed behind him: the two armchairs tilted into the peak of a roof. “That’s the house.”
Of course: the boy would know farms from picture books. Not the two-room izbas—one for large livestock, the other for hens and humans—but little white houses, big red barns, silos like in America. Still, watching his nephew’s eyes, the small face close, Dima told him it was a very nice house. “We’ll all be very cozy.”
“Except the baby,” Timofei said.
“Polina?”
“The baby sleeps there.” The boy’s small finger jabbed downward at the roof of the barn.
“With the horses?”
“And the cows.”
“And the pigs?”
“Yeah,” Timofei said, “and all their shit!”
They laughed, a quiet, shared laughter kept inside the world the boy had made for them there on the rug.
It was not much later, but long enough that they had turned the samover into a silo, built fences from old schoolbooks stood spine-up, comandeered Dima’s mother’s two-wheeled shopping basket for a cart, filled it with hay-colored yarn; long enough that the winkered rooster they’d put in it had worked itself into a frenzy, that Polina, pulling the cart, had gone from giggling to a tired quiet crawling, her harness of yarn gone slack, her brother standing over her shouting Kha! Kha!, his small hand flailing as if he held a whip; late enough the baby had just begun to cry when Zinaida walked in.
A few minutes after Yarik had followed her, Dima stood with his brother in the middle of the wrecked room, their mother in the kitchen heating up the shchi, Zina in the bathroom with her children. The door was closed, but Dima could hear her vehement whispering to Timofei, the slosh of the washrag as she scrubbed Polina’s skin.
Dima said, “I didn’t know the marker was permanent.”
“Oh come on. After you’d covered her body with it? What were you doing?”
“Me?”
“Yes, Dima. While my son was blackening my daughter with splotches of permanent ink, what were you doing?”
Seeing it again—his niece on her back, his nephew crouched over her, the pen squeaking on her skin as she giggled and squealed—he struggled to suppress a smile. “I was holding her down.”
“This isn’t funny, Dima.”
“Bratets . . .”
“This is crazy.”
“Timofei was teaching her how to moo.” Dima watched his brother’s face mirror his own. They stood there, trying not to grin. From the bathroom came the rumble of Zinaida adding water to the tub. From the kitchen,
the clanks of their mother at the stove. The older brother reached out and stilled the younger’s fingers beneath his own.
“Dima . . .”
Dima tried to keep his hands as motionless as possible, to make them a good resting place for his brother’s. “She’ll be OK,” he told Yarik.
“I know,” Yarik said. “I’m not worried about her.” It didn’t matter: his brother lifted his hands off, anyway. “Why are you doing this?”
Dima lifted his gaze to Yarik’s; his brother’s eyes were more resolute than his hands. “I don’t know.”
“You must,” Yarik said. “Because you’re the one who quit your job. Who rides around on buses all day. Who refuses to work . . .” He reached to his throat, pulled at the knot in his tie. “They talk about you,” he said. “At work. On the bus. At Zinaida’s work. They talk about you, but you’re the one who makes them talk. You’re the one who threw away your job, who refuses to stop this, to just do the same thing we all know we have to do. You must know what this is doing to you and still . . .”
“I’m OK,” Dima said. “You don’t have to worry so—”
“This fucking thing.” Yarik yanked the tie loose, dragged it through his collar. “Do you even see yourself, Dima? Do you see anything around you?” Slowly, he wrapped the tie around all four fingers of his other hand. “Forget the looks they give me when I get off the bus. Forget the way Zina looks at me when I bring you home. Can you imagine the things the other kids say to Timofei at school? His uncle a tramp? A throwback? Their parents: ‘You don’t want to wind up like that.’” He came to the end of the tie. “You must know. You must, and still you choose . . .” And he stood there, holding it tight, a bright bandage around his fingers. “I do worry. Bratishka, I worry about you.”
“Bratan,” Dima told him, “nothing’s going to happen. I haven’t done anything. We were just playing.” He took a step towards the tilted-together armchairs. “Look, this is a barn.” He crouched down. In there, a row of four empty glass jars glinted. “We even put in milk cans.” Still squatting, he turned to the couch cushion house. “This is where we sleep.” Patting the rug in time to each name, he said, “You, Zinaida, Timofei, his Dyadya Dima. He wanted to sleep between his mama and his uncle. You, he wanted over here”— he patted the rug—“on the other side of me. But I told him you’d want to sleep beside your wife.”
“Is that what this is about?”
“This”— Dima rose, stepped across the rug—“is the cart. This is the hay.”
“This is about Dyadya Avya’s?”
“Here is the rooster.” Dima bent down and untied the bird, and when he stood again he was holding it to his chest. “If you take off his hood he even crows.”
Yarik looked away. His eyes seemed to land on everything in the room except his brother. In the opening to the kitchen, their mother stood staring into a pot, gone still but for a few white wisps of hair fluttering in the steam.
“And Mama?” Yarik said. “Where is she supposed to sleep?” He turned back to Dima. “Or did you forget her? Did you think she’d just stay here? Go on living like this? Or not? Because, like this, how long can it be before she . . .” He shook his head. Around his fist the tie was so tight it cut the color from his fingers.
All his life, Dima had seen it: the way their mother weighed on Yarik, her expectations, his shame at failing them, resentment at the fact that he still had to love her, at the ease with which Dima did.
“You were supposed to take care of her,” Yarik said.
Long ago Dima had learned to let it alone, stay silent. He buried his own fingers in the soft belly of the bird.
Yarik sighed. Slowly, he began to unwrap the silk. “Zina and me,” he said, “while we were at dinner, we decided . . . we want . . .” Before his hand was free, he was already reaching for his pocket. “I only have a few hundred on me, but—”
“No,” Dima told him.
“We can afford, each month—”
“No. I am taking care of her, Yarik. Look at her.” She was tasting the broth, a spoon to her lips, her eyes shut. “You think she needs something other than soup, her sewing, her son—her sons—to be happy?”
Yarik stood with the unwrapped tie hanging in a low sag between his hands. “You think she is?”
“I think,” Dima said, “she’ll sleep on top of the stove like Dyadya Avya did.” He smiled. “Keep your money, bratets. Take whatever you were going to give us and save it for your son. The barn, the izba . . .” He motioned with the rooster towards each, the long tailfeathers swaying. “When we go out there, Timofei won’t have to make believe. We’ll play the games Dyadya Avya used to play with us. Dump a bucket of potatoes onto the table. Tell him and Polya whoever peels the most gets a sip of vodka. Do you remember him lying there drinking while we peeled? How he’d tell us a story? The way we used to get slower and slower as we got closer and closer to the last potato, how we’d wait, with that last peel hanging, not wanting his fable to end?”
“You make a fable of it,” Yarik said.
“You remember it.”
“You tell it how Dyadya Avya would have told it.”
“But you remember it.”
“Yeah. Because it’s a memory. And memories of that long ago are fables, Dima. It was before the zerkala, the Oranzheria. Before I married Zina. Before Timosha and Polya. Before I was a foreman. Look at this.” He held his hands forward, the red silk shining between them. “Zina picked it out. Not one of Papa’s from thirty years ago, but one she—one we—picked out together. Maybe all Mama needs is soup, Dima, but I like that I can take my wife out on our anniversary. For barbecue. Have you ever eaten American barbecue? Do you remember when there was no meat in the stores? Do you remember how even when we were working at the factory, the only meat we got was gray and sour and all gristle? Do you remember, in this fairy-tale childhood of ours, what we would eat every night at Dyadya Avya’s?”
“Potatoes.”
“A potato.”
“And cucumbers.”
“I still eat potatoes, Dima, but now I have them with meat. Beefshteks, cherbureki. And I take them out of the freezer and put them in the toaster. In a toaster, Dima. Potatoes. Shredded into patties and precooked and crispy. And I love them.” He leaned towards Dima, low as if he would rest his forehead against Dima’s own. But he stopped, his face so close Dima could see the lines creased around his eyes. “Almost as much,” Yarik said, “as I love you. Even your fairy-tale ideas.”
Dima shifted the rooster in his arms, spoke with his lips moving against the hood, his eyes on his brother: “You didn’t think it was a fairy tale when you said we should sell the boat, sign up for jobs on the Oranzheria.”
Yarik straightened, began to gather his tie. “That was a long time ago.”
Dima lifted his cheek off the felt. “Don’t you still want it?”
“Of course.” Yarik stood there bunching his tie into the palm of a hand. “We were talking about what we had. Back then. Not what we will have. Someday.” He was staring at the silk, the red seeming to grow more red as it filled his hand. “Bratishka,” he said, “when I shut my eyes at night, when I finally go to sleep, do you think it’s about toasted potatoes that I dream?”
There was the mewl of a knob turning, the rasp of the bathroom door against the floorboards. Zinaida came out holding the baby. Polina was wrapped in a towel, her forehead smeared gray.
“Bring me a cushion,” she said to Timofei and the boy passed behind Dima and lifted the roof off the home and carried it to his mother who, laying the baby on it, ordered him to clean up the rest. Wending around the brothers, the child broke down the house, replaced the cushions, pushed apart the barn, gathered up the straw. And despite the ruination around him; despite the fact that Zinaida, zipping a jumper shut over the baby’s body, refused to look at him once; despite the way Yarik restrung the red silk over his neck as he prepared to leave; despite all that, when their mother came out of the kitchen with her oven mitt on
and a look on her face that Dima knew meant she thought they had all just come in, that in a moment she would ask How was work?, he could not help but imagine that the words out of her mouth would be How was school? instead, that the soap-and-iron-scented steam was pipe smoke wisping from the bathroom, that their father was in there shaving, that their mother was not old, that her hair had never been struck white, that it was only he and Yarik left alone before supper in the home that was theirs again.
That night, and the next morning, and in the days that followed, his brother’s Why? refused to leave his mind. Why are you doing this? There was a time when they would not have had to ask that of each other about anything. Now, on the tram, shouldering some exhausted worker’s lolling head, Dima could not quit thinking of Yarik’s twelve-hour shifts. Reaching out to help up a woman his mother’s age too work-weary to climb the few bus steps, he could not keep from seeing how old his brother’s eyes had grown in a mere month. Could not help but ask it back: Why? Was it possible they had changed so much? That one day they would come to understand each other as little as their parents had? He remembered his father on the couch with his books in his lap and his pipe wagging while he spoke—I am working, I’m working on myself—remembered his mother standing there, shaking her head, as if she’d lost the ability to communicate with him through speech. Was it possible that they had started out like he and Yarik, that the tracks they had run on side by side had somewhere down the line simply hit a switch that sent them slowly separating?
More and more now, he got off the tram at a tall column topped with a small bronze model of the great tsar’s ship, its prow pointing west towards the lands young Pyotr had explored, a symbol of the spirit that had once filled the law school and the science labs and the steps that rose beneath the stern steel letters—UNIVERSITET—that overlooked the square. University Market, where now electronics and appliances were bought and sold. Each time Dima pushed his way through the throngs, into the Universitetski Rynok, he was surprised to find some hawker hadn’t scrambled up the plinth, wrenched off the ship, shouted down a price. But the brass sails remained unfurled above the maze of kiosks, the used goods stalls where Dima sometimes sold small things—a kitchen scale, a curling iron—brought from home.