The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  Though these days he came with nothing, climbed the stone steps, pushed through the groaning doors. Inside, sales goods had usurped the classrooms, electric stoves gathered in place of scholars, sound systems rattling the remains of blackboard chalk. In the lecture halls where students once studied Akhmadulina, Yevtushenko, TVs shouted each other down. Dima would walk past it all to a stairwell at the far end of the first floor, where, behind the door, all the cacophony faded away. His footsteps tamped the noise further into quiet. In the basement, the building’s heating and cooling machines murmured, the clacks of his shoes muffled by a floor so thick with coats of paint it felt soft beneath his soles.

  As far as he could tell, the door he’d found down there was the only unlocked way in. But if anyone else used it, there was no sign. He would shut it behind him and savor for a second the utter dark. Then he would reach to the wall, slide his fingers until they hit the switch. The fluorescent tubes hummed, flashed on. A few more flickered. Until a long row of bookshelves showed. At the dim edges of the light, more dark stacks stretched out. He walked down them, flicking the switches, each row shuddering into light, as if they were the night tracks of some great railway station and, as he passed, engines rolled in, flooding each platform with their beams—Karamzin, Leskov, Pushkin, Merezhkovsky—until he stopped at whichever one he chose to board.

  Hours later Dima would emerge, mind still buried in some book, hurrying back through the market to catch the next tram to the lake. With the windows open, he could smell Otseva as the tram drew close: a scent like rain hitting soil, wet feathers in silt. No one else got off there. Down at the lakeshore he would lean alone against the railing, the iron warm from the sun, and watch the small shapes of the massive ships drifting in the distance among their invisible nets. Farther down the shore, at the harbor, the cranes clanged, swung their bony arms around the sky. But here, where he stood, the water was empty of all but birds: a flock of black jaegers afloat on a breeze, below them seagulls bobbing white on the waves.

  When he and Yarik were boys the calls of children would have chorused with the caws of birds, swimmers bobbing between the smacks and sailboats, the small skiffs moored near the shore where, each early light, fishermen would gather to row out.

  In summer, Dima and Yarik would go down there with their father. Dawn would have already cracked the dark, the distant edge of the lake rimmed with a swelling strip of red as if the night sky was a lid lifted by some unseen hand. The low-flung light would find them all there on the littoral—the men and their boats, the spools of nets and the upslanted oars—all casting long shadows onto the gravelly beach behind them, where the boys would help their father haul the heavy bait boxes, the coolers of ice, his clanking wood-carver’s case. And on mornings when Dyadya Avya had spent the night, stayed up drinking vodka and smoking pipes, slept over on the couch, he would come down with his only family, sit in the sand sharpening filleting knives, the two boys crouched near, fingering a net for tears, and tell them his tales of Nizhi. He had been there, once. Their father, too. When I was not much older than you. Your papa was not much younger. We were both in the Young Pioneers.

  They had gone out as a troop, the boys and girls crowding the deck, their blue pants fluttering, blue skirts held down against the spray, around each neck a Pioneer scarf, blood-red and snapping in the wind. The schoolmarms and Komsomol minders who led them out had arranged with the monks for a tour of the churches enclosed by the wood walls of the pogost, but their uncle and father had hidden on the ferry, slipped out after the rest, escaped to see the world beyond the gates instead: the wind-whipped pines and vast stands of reeds and the life the monks lived on that island so far out in the middle of that sea-sized lake.

  Out there, Avya said, they still make fishing nets from rope rolled out of bark. They use a drawknife to skin green aspen trees, soak sheaves of the long strips in the bog water beneath boards weighted down by stones. And when it’s dry it’s soft and golden as a young girl’s hair and they roll it between their hands. He would set down his knife and sharpening stone, place his palms on his knees, and show them. He told of looms that looked medieval, of the intricate cloths the weavers turned out, the crosses and icons the monks carved into everything from soup ladles to cowbells. There were plows fashioned of ropes and planks, blades made in the island’s forge. They curved downward, he said, long as your arm, like teeth pulled from a Chudo-Yudo’s mouth. And do you know what pulled them through the earth?

  Working at the tangles of the nets, their fingers red in the red of the sun, the boys guessed mules, oxen, even goats.

  Men, their uncle said. A monk behind pushing at the handles, another in front, hauling a rope around his waist, and both of them chanting while they worked.

  He spoke of men singing as they threshed the flaxseed; of others rolling themselves across cut fields, frocked bodies smashing stalks back into soil, a dozen monks turning over and over among the shadows of the clouds. One’s sole work was to ring the bells. He’d climb the bell tower, wrap himself in the ropes: around his forehead, looped over his chest, attached to each elbow, ten strings tied to his ten fingers. When he played them the sound was like a dozen men each ringing a dozen bells. But it was the sight of him you never forgot: strung up in ropes, his whole body flailing, his mouth hanging open, his face twisted by bliss.

  Like this, their father said, and, gathering his fists full of the net, threw his head back, dropped his jaw, and spasmed so wildly his boys leapt back, laughing against their laughing uncle’s lap.

  On those long summer days they spent every hour of light out on their father’s boat. He had named it Once upon a Time, the words—ZHILI-BYLI—carved in its stern like the name of any other fishing smack, but in its gunwales, in the door to the catch well, in all the places their father had carved, it was unlike anything else on the lake. Sunrise to sunset they worked surrounded by scenes he’d chiseled. The gurdy’s thick shadow slipping away from fur-hatted Ivan Popolyov lifting the lid off a pot: inside, the snowball half-turned into a maiden, blushing pink with early sun. Midmorning blasting the transom bright where, on either side of the motor, a water pail danced on legs. Around the corner of the wheelhouse, another Ivan gaped at them, his face gone golden in late light. And, lit by the moon, he was on top of the structure, too, in kaftan and boots, straddling a carved branch beside a carved nest while a carved owl taught him the language of birds.

  Once school started up again, their father went out alone, returned while the other fishermen were still at work, sunlight still full, his hold still half-empty, in time to meet one son waiting on the strand for him. Their mother kept Yarik home to study, but Dima was always there: together, they would walk up the shore to stand, father and son, in the last hour before sunset, listening to the poets atop the statue of the tsar.

  Now, an hour before the mirrors rose, Dima would leave the lakeshore and walk back through the park, and pass beneath the giant pointing arm of Peter the Great and to the bus that would take him out to the Oranzheria to meet his brother.

  One day he stopped at the statue, instead. It was raining and the wind blew in off the lake, streaking at a slant against the tsar’s bronze back. In the lee of the plinth the low step leading up to it was the one dry place. He had left the railing early, his face raw from rain, his shirt wet, and so he let himself sit for a while, leaned his back against the base, watched the trees shake.

  Even in weather like this they used to gather. Not many, but always some, always a few hunched into their raincoats, sharing umbrellas, listening to whichever poet had managed to scramble up the slippery plinth, to stand at its top getting soaked, an arm around the tsar’s waist, and shout his verse through the racket of the rain. Always his father was there to hear.

  Now, the square was almost empty. Under the aspen trees, among the dandelion puffs heavy with sog, two old people sat in their hats and raincoats atop two upturned plastic drums, manning the receptacle collection site—one ruble per plastic bottle, two
for cans of tin—a makeshift recycling center run by what was left of the Communist Party in Petroplavilsk. On the opposite side, around the bus stop, a few small shapes huddled. Nearer, beneath a tree at the edge of the square, a trashman in his orange poncho, his broom over his shoulders, waited out the rain.

  It had quit, and there was just the dripping from the leaves, from the tsar’s stiff arm above, by the time it came to Dima: of course no listeners were there; for a long time now there had been no speaker atop the statue for them to hear. He craned his neck. Up there: the toe of Peter’s boot, the bottom of his coat, the underside of his outstretched hand, the gray and rolling clouds. From the cobblestones there came a shrushing sound, slosh of water. Silence. The shrushing again.

  It wasn’t easy climbing up. He got his shoe tips on the stone ledge, but from there bronze swooped out in a grip-denying slope, and he had to stretch to reach the hold above it, haul himself with shaking arms and scrabbling legs until he could grab the great tsar’s toe.

  Standing foot to foot with the statue, one arm clamped around its wet cold waist, Dima looked down at a square unexpectedly far below. The rustling of the leaves seemed louder now that his own clothes were flapping in the same gusts. The shrushing on the cobblestones had stopped. Instead, there was the silence of the trashman looking up at him. In his hand the man held the push broom straight up, its bristles dark and sopping, its wide head facing Dima like the pan of a photographer’s flash. Over at the bus stop, the commuters had turned to watch him, too. Looking at their faces beneath their black umbrellas, Dima could feel the hairs prickling all down his neck. He tried to think of how he would begin a poem if he were a poet. He coughed. The trees rustled. He tried to think of what he might have inside him to say. His face felt feverish. At the bus stop a man began to shake his umbrella out. Dima watched another turn away, look down the street.

  A flame is in my blood, he thought. The statue’s waist felt like it was trying to slip loose from his fingers. He imagined saying A flame is in my blood, and thought his throat was so dry the words would stick, and when he finally said them—“A flame is in my blood!”—he was trying so hard to get the words past his teeth they came out twice as loud as he’d intended.

  The old Party members’ wet hats swiveled towards him, white beards in the brim-shadows. They shifted on their red plastic buckets.

  A flame is in my blood, he thought, and thought blood, bone, burning, throat, dry, life, burning the bones dry . . . “Burning the bones dry of life!”

  The noise of the bus covered his voice, and he shouted the last word—that’s not too bad, he thought—and then was glad for the bus’s interruption so he could stop and think. He watched the people get on, one person get off—a young, thin woman with black hair all buzzed but for her bangs, dressed in the yellow vest of a bus-fare collector—and when it pulled away again there were just the ones who’d been there before, two waiting for a different number tram—they’d turned their backs to him—and the fare collector woman already shifting her glance away. He looked down at the trash sweeper. The man swung the broom-head back to the ground.

  “I sing . . .” Dima tried.

  The shrushing of the broom, the slosh of the water it pushed over the stones, the shrushing again.

  “I sing . . .”

  The man flicked his eyes up at Dima and Dima tried to catch his glance, but the man yanked it away again.

  “I am singing of . . .”

  As the man moved off, his orange back hid the broom, his poncho swishing to the sound, so that it seemed the shrushing came from the man himself. Beneath the sound, Dima could hear his own words lingering; he wished the man would walk faster, or shove harder, or do whatever he had to do to cover them up.

  Sliding down, he sat at the tsar’s feet, his own feet dangling against the plinth, still far from the ground, the metal folds of Pyotr’s coat crowding his head so he had to hunch. He sat there, imagining what his father would have thought; he would have walked away, too. Or tried to climb up and get him down. And, thinking of his father, it came to him: A flame is in my blood, burning dry life to the bone. The first time he’d heard it, he had been sitting on his father’s shoulders. I do not sing of stone, now, I sing of wood. Was it Akhmatova? Pasternak? He tried to hear the rest—It is light and . . . something . . . made of . . . Something about a fisherman, an oak . . . hammer them . . . hammer them . . . hammer them in . . . —he couldn’t do it.

  When the sun came out again he was still sitting there. He shut his eyes, watched the redness it made of his inner lids, felt its faint warmth on his face. Surely he could remember something he had read in the old library. . . . But there was only the sudden booming of his father’s voice, the bellowed tune to Glinka’s opera, the dom kultura fires flickering, the steam of all the villagers packed inside to see their fellow farmers perform that year’s rendition of Pushkin’s epic poem, as they did each year, and everywhere, in cultural houses across the land, in rural schoolyards and city auditoriums and the theaters of the capital, places where once, in a time long past, the entire country would seem to pause from life, different days, at different hours, but all gone still, grown men and women mouthing the few stanzas they’d learned as children, children learning them anew, all brought to silence as they listened to the beloved verse . . .

  By a distant sea a green oak stands;

  to the oak a chain of gold is tied;

  and at the chain’s end night and day

  a learned cat walks round and round.

  Rightwards he goes, and sings a song;

  leftwards, he tells a fairy tale.

  “. . . What magic here! What magic . . . magic here . . .” But that was all he could remember. He sat listening to the whispering of the trees, the clang and boom of the faraway docks. A bus came, went. It wasn’t until its rumble had faded again that he realized it had taken with it the shrushing sound.

  He opened his eyes. The sweeper was still down there, his broom motionless now, his eyes already on Dima’s. The man took one hand from his broom. With it, he made a scooping gesture, palm to his chest, fingers curling, a motion that might have meant come down, come down or might have meant more, more or whatever it meant that the two old Communists now stood up from their bucket stools and hobbled closer, that the fare collector who had taken off her rain boots to stand barefoot in a puddle, cigarette between her lips, only now broke her stillness to light it.

  That Switch, Dima rode the tram out to meet his brother, but when they got off at Yarik’s apartment complex, instead of waiting in the hope he’d be invited up Dima hugged his brother there on the street. Then he got back on another tram and took it to the Universitetski Rynok. That night, in the old stacks of the abandoned library, he found what he was looking for. And the next day, at the same time, he climbed the statue of the tsar with a copy of Ruslan and Lyudmila in the rucksack on his back.

  There, below him: the park sweeper, leaning on his broom handle, looking up. To either side other trashmen stood, one with a huge plastic bag, another with a poker, scraping quietly at the cobblestones with its sharp tip. With them, gathered on the cobblestones around the statue: a woman in a business suit wolfing pirozhki with greasy hands, a man beside her holding an empty dolly at an angle, as if about to drag it away. The last time Dima had seen even such a small scattering of people standing around the square so still was so long ago the three old folks who’d turned over their red plastic buckets in the grass wouldn’t have yet been old. They had brought bags of bottles with them, were sorting the plastic from the glass, the small sharp sounds skipping like rocks across the surface of the wind in the leaves. Over on the street, a trolleybus pulled up. Dima glanced to see the same thin woman stepping out of the doors again—black hair catching the breeze, fare collector’s bag swinging as she hit the sidewalk and saw him and quickened her pace, as if she thought he’d already begun.

  He had forgotten, before, that Pushkin had opened his epic with a dedication. Now he started it o
ver again, from the true beginning. “For you,” his voice broke through the breeze, “tsaritsas of my soul, my beauties, for your sake have I these golden leisure hours . . .”

  A few last clanks of the old Communists sorting their bottles. Scrape of metal on stone: the man with the truck dolly lowering its lip. The trashman with his poker stilled. For a moment the stillness of them down there, of their eyes on him, stoppered his memory. He could recall the next words—devoted to writing down this fable whispered—but not what came after, and he was about to give up, to slide his rucksack around his shoulder, unzip it, draw out the book he had been studying on the buses all day, when the fare collector drew the cigarette from her mouth and stepped to the statue. She was not long out of her teens, too young to remember the poets before. But she held out the cigarette for him to take. Her fingernails were painted black, and keeping his eyes on them, he took the smoke, sucked in, started to straighten up. Her fingers snapped. She beckoned with them. Thinking she meant him to lean close, he glanced at her eyes. No, she just wanted the cigarette back. Something about that made him smile, and when he’d given it to her he pulled himself straight, waist-to-waist with the statue again, and spoke on—of the feline raconteur, the ancient oak, a world of fables redolent of long ago Russia, the Rus of old. . . .

  I was once there; I drank of mead

  I saw the green oak by the sea;

  I sat beneath it, while the cat,

  that learned cat, told me his tales . . .

  He went as far as he had memorized—the wedding feast; the gusli’s wavering announcement of the bard; the newlywed knight Ruslan, eyes only for his Lyudmila, too full of lust even to swallow; his sullen rivals, onetime suitors of the bride—went all the way into the bedchamber, until (But lo!) thunder rips the air (a flash!), the lamp goes out: the eerie voice, the black figure, the bride disappeared (groping, trembling, Ruslan’s hand seizes on emptiness . . . ). By the time he stopped, a handful of others waiting for the tram had wandered over, let their trams pass by; a shopkeeper across the street stood just outside his door, as if fighting the pull to abandon his job; a vendor in stained apron and steam-wet mustache had done just that, left his pelmyeni cart untended to come close enough to hear. In the quiet after Dima’s words, they all looked up. And panicked: in these ever longer days of early summer, the zerkala could rise nearly unnoticed, bleach dots speckling a sheet of still-bright sky. The business-suit woman clacked off in her heels, madly wiping fingers needed for her phone. The fare-collection girl put her shoes back on—she’d been sitting on the stones, black toenails in the sun—and got up. There came the clatter of the old Communists returned to their bottles and cans. The trash sweepers went back to work.