by Josh Weil
Yes, he told himself, you can.
The sight of her had always seemed to strip his thoughts of everything else. The first time he found that out he’d been standing just as still, but alone, listening over the pulse in his ears, his too-loud breath, to the others moving through the woods at night. They carried candles, lanterns, a few flashlights. His own was dark. In the blackness beneath the trees, he’d felt the beam drawing eyes to him, told himself it was just superstition—foolish!—and felt the eyes—a festival to draw the spirits of the drowned!—and stopped—rusalki rising from the rivers—shut his flashlight off. Only in fables did wraiths claim companions for their suffocated souls: he knew that. What he hadn’t known, hiding there in the dark, listening to the others whispering through the underbrush, was how she’d found him.
They’d flirted across the bonfire earlier that evening and, as she took shape behind a candle, it occurred to him he had only ever seen her face in firelight. Holding her candle closer to his, she’d asked him what was wrong. It must have been his shame at the fear he knew she saw that made him tell her about his father. It must have been the heart in her that he would grow to love that made her take his hand.
But emerging from the woods, he had heard, beneath the sounds of women singing, the gurgle of the Kosha’s current flowing by beneath. He’d pulled his hand from hers, stepped back, asked, Where are you taking me?
And taking his hand again, she’d told him, To the river. So you can look in and see nothing there but us.
Now, he stood at the edge of the mattress, looking down at only her, his dark belly hair still wet from the bath, the sting of the aftershave all but gone from his face, his hands holding her feet, his fingers curled over her toes, concentrating on the feel of her with everything he had. It was their Sunday night ritual: once a week, after the seventh workday had come and gone, and the next seven were about to start, after supper and putting the children to bed, after the housework and the paperwork, even if Yarik’s neck ached just holding his head, even if Zina’s eyes itched with needing sleep, they made the time to make love to each other.
He would press each of her fingers to his lips, pinky to thumb, one by one, slipping them into his mouth, telling her with his tongue I know this crevice, I remember this crease. Each place on each foot he would match with some part of him: the heels of his palms fitting her arches, his tongue between her toes. Slowly, he would work his way along her arms, the soft insides of her elbows, her collarbone rising and falling with his own breath, so that by the time he kissed her pulse through the heat of her thigh, he could feel his own blood pumping at his neck. And she would push him onto his back and put him in and go at him with a fury like all his touches packed together, balled up, and burst.
But that night, beneath her, his brother at last shoved from his mind, he could not keep from confronting himself: his mouth mashed against his wife’s sweet-scented neck, he saw his own, raw and red, the aftershave slapped on to hide his smell; his face hidden between her breasts, he pictured his own chest, a mangy pelt, nipples pink as sores; trying to stay inside her warmth, he imagined his own blood-filled sex, his hanging sack, thought how grotesque. As she surely would have thought if she had seen her husband that day on the bank. As, surely, his brother would see him now. That made him pull out. She reached down, bent for him, but he lifted her face in his hands and shook his head.
Hours after she had gone to sleep, he was still in the kitchen, still sitting in his robe and slippers on the chair he had dragged to the window, his arms still crossed on the sill, another cigarette smoking in his hand. The teacup on top of the stove was stuffed with butts. Beside it, the percolator he’d brewed the coffee in was empty. The sweet-cheese pie he’d taken from the fridge was gone but for a few lumps stuck to the cardboard disk. On the windowsill, beneath his crossed arms, lay his uncle’s old snub-nosed revolver. His home was quiet. His daughter asleep in her crib, his son in his bed.
He was imagining a dog like Dyadya Avya’s stretched out beside his sleeping boy, Timosha’s face buried in the wolfhound’s side, thick fur fluttering with his breath. He imagined the dog following Polina as she toddled around the house, nudging her with its nose. He could almost hear the clacking of its nails, the thump of it lying down by the stove, the quiet keening it would make in its dreams.
Maybe that was why he had taken out the gun: to help him remember what it was like inside their uncle’s izba. Or maybe to bring him back to the first time he had held it, that night when he and Dima had snuck it down to the lake, back when they were boys, when it seemed possible to take care of anything—even the Chudo-Yudo, even their father’s soul—together. Whatever it was, once he had brought it out, he hadn’t wanted to hold it. He had set it on the sill, covered it with his arms. He had not looked at it since. But he could feel it there, pressing its cold shape into his skin.
Outside, the traffic rumbled. Voices from the bus stop floated up. A vacuum in the apartment upstairs droned. There came the clatter of a trolleybus. He wondered if his wife and kids could ever get used to wind in the trees. If they could sleep through the sounds of the peepers, crickets, rain on the roof. Dogs, and their distant yipping, mice in the walls, night birds, the clamor of morning. Why not? Zina hadn’t lived in the city until she met him. She knew the joys that could come from a childhood spent in the fields.
Lighting another cigarette, he went through all the new things in his home—the washing machine, the computer, the color TV, their electric toothbrushes, Timosha’s little rucksack with wheels, plastic flowers for the vase in the vestibule, the vase, matching slippers for Zina and him—and as he thought of them, he made them disappear. Pictured them simply gone from the rooms. It seemed easy. Until he pictured Zina finding out. Because, of course, she also knew the misery that could come from a childhood in the fields. It wasn’t just him that had brought her to the city. And who was he kidding: he’d wanted all those things, too.
“Well,” he said, aloud, “sometimes you don’t get what you want.” He watched the tip of the cigarette burn. Sometimes, you have to choose between what you want and what you need. He ashed over the window ledge, took a draw, held it in his lungs. The problem was sometimes it wasn’t so easy to tell which was which.
From far out over the city, the bells of the Alexandro-Nevsky Church rang. Faint, low gongs. He wished he could walk through the heavy doors into the cool dark nave, crowd with the worshippers against the walls, and in the undulating drones of the priests feel just a little of Zina’s belief. He wished he could light a candle and whisper a prayer and know that it was heard, out of his hands. Every Sunday evening, when he got off work, he went to Alexandro-Nevsky with his wife and, standing there, bowing, murmuring in time with all the others, prayed to feel God’s hands on his shoulders, for them to gentle him along a path he didn’t have to create for himself, to lift his family in their palms, to fold protecting fingers around his brother. But, outside again, he only felt the surety in his wife’s hand holding his, the strength of her grip.
And if he were to go in there this morning, he knew he would only stand beneath the icons’ stares and feel the hard floor, the empty cavern, that in the bearded visage of each priest, he would see his brother’s face. He would feel the chill dawn air on his own smooth cheeks, the shaking of the road beneath him, the soil under his hands, the body between them, and the word bratishka on his lips, I’ll take care of you in his mind. It will be OK. It wasn’t. He hadn’t.
It was then he realized that he was staring at the gun. The old Nagant revolver lying there. A small pistol, its barrel sawed off short, the dull metal scratched, its wood handle worn. It looked almost as old as the cowboy guns on the billionaire’s desk, like something from before the Great War, maybe even before The Revolution, and, wondering where their uncle had gotten it, he reached down and unlocked the gate and let it fall open. He rolled the cylinder one click. It was loaded. Click. And loaded. Click. All seven chambers full. It had been empty that day that
they had fished it out of the water; Dyadya Avya had emptied it. But who had loaded it again? He couldn’t remember if he and Dima had done it afterwards. Why would they have? Or had their mother? Sometime in the years after her husband died, after Avya died, after the farm was gone, her pension gone, the system she had lived her life by, the world she knew how to live in, gone, had she done it then, some night, loading it alone? Left alone by her son who had gone, too. Who no longer visited, never called. Sometimes he thought he’d take the tram over, visit for an hour. Sometimes he sat by the phone, imagining his brother’s hello. Put Mama on, he’d say. Then set down the receiver, get up, walk away. Ever since he’d been a boy she had seen through him, known she had to push and push or he would fail. It’s Yarik! Dima would say, his voice shot through with joy just at the fact his brother hadn’t failed him, too. But she would see, would know.
He thought then that he understood his father better than he ever had before. The hours he had spent hidden in his ice fishing hut; the way he would head for the balcony to smoke his pipe, shut the door behind him, close his eyes; how much he must have needed the release of the dancing, relief of the drinking, those nights out at the dom kultura. There were times Yarik had hated him for being gone. Hated him even then, as a child, before he had been gone for good. And afterwards. And now. There were times when he hated his mother, too, for giving in to her grief, his uncle for giving up, his brother simply for being there on that pile of dirt in the back of that truck needing him to say bratishka. Needing him to be a bratan. I’ll take care of you. He had been ten.
Looking down at the bus stop, the crowd pushing onto the tram, watching how fast the ones who disembarked walked away, crossed the street, the cars refusing to so much as slow, it seemed to Yarik his forebears had passed on to him a flaw in their hearts that with each beat of his own he had to struggle to suppress: what had permitted his father to fail at even finding a way out of the ice; what had let his mother succumb to her collapse, leave her sons to take that on their shoulders, as well; whatever weakness in Dyadya Avya had allowed him to abandon his almost-sons, led him to the riverbank, given its assent to the gun, the trigger, his finger.
A bang. Yarik jerked, eyes snapping shut. It was only hearing the skitter across the floor, opening his eyes to see the pistol slide beneath the couch, that he realized it had not gone off, had just been shoved off of the sill, that his arm had done the shoving. From beneath the couch, against the wall: a muffled thud. He felt it as if the gun smacked to a stop against the inside of his skull. Turning back to the window, he lowered his head to the sill, smothered it under his crossed arms. The last thought he had before falling asleep was that maybe he should not have taken the gun from the chest in his mother’s home; maybe it was no safer here with him than with his brother.
But when he woke it was into a feeling of peace. Some noise from outside must have brought him back. He couldn’t have slept long; the mirrors were still sinking below the earth’s edge. Inside the apartment it was as quiet as before. He listened to the silence of his family sleeping. He felt hungry, and emptied out, and light, and at ease. He tried to remember what he had dreamed, but all he could bring back was that it had been about his brother and him. Maybe they had been crouched together, in the dirt, in a row, in a field; yes: using their fingers to push holes in the soil. And he had woken up with this unexpected calm. He rose and opened the refrigerator and stood in its chill, its yellow light, and all he could see clearly was that he had no choice at all.
Later that morning, when he told his manager that he was quitting, the man looked at him with relief. Still, he gave Yarik the obligatory sorry to see you go, didn’t bring up the way he must have seen Yarik’s crew ignoring their foreman’s orders, heard the jokes they cracked at Yarik’s expense, didn’t tell him that ever since his brother had become a problem he’d been wanting to fire Yarik anyway. He just pushed back from his desk and opened the door to the anteroom, asked Yarik to step out there, said he had to check on something. “It’ll take me less than five.” But half an hour later, when the manager finally emerged from his office, the look of relief was gone. “Wait here,” he said and, “Welcome back,” and shut the door again.
“Here” was inside a mobile trailer rolled to the edge of the Oranzheria: toilets and a cafeteria and the sector manager’s office and the tiny anteroom Yarik had been put in, all of which in a few weeks would be rolled forward again as the glass spread north. The anteroom was carpeted, air-conditioned, smelled faintly like boiled potatoes. Yarik sat on the faux leather love seat below a framed photograph of the Chinese Great Wall. Across the narrow room the Pyramids hung. Behind his head, he could hear the sounds of a crew—his?—getting tea in the next compartment over. Outside the trailer there were the rumbles of a backhoe, a compactor, all the work going on without him. Inside the office, the manager was on the phone, his voice coming through the door loud enough for Yarik to make out that he wasn’t happy, but not why.
Across from him, beneath the Pyramids at sunset, a flowing script read Nothing bold was ever built without someone deciding where to lay the first stone.
His brother, him, a field, a row. What were they poking into the earth? Seeds? Fertilizer? Just making holes?
Half an hour ago he had been so sure of what he had to do. Now, he could feel doubt creeping in again. What would his wife think? How would he explain it to his son?
He was still staring at the photograph on the wall when a roar turned his head. It sounded way too close, as if someone was trying to park an earthmover outside the trailer’s door. Then it didn’t sound like they were trying to park. Outside: shouts. Yarik was up just in time to be knocked back onto the juddering couch, the whole trailer lurching with the manager’s shout, the Pyramid picture crashing to the floor. Right on the other side of the thin wall the engine rumbled. Around the entrance, part of the trailer’s metal had caved in, the door cracked along a bottom corner, half off a hinge. Yarik got up, yanked it open.
There was the dozer’s shovel, its maw so close he could have grabbed the top of the blade in his hands, its cutting edge buried beneath the trailer, its lower jaw crushed through the stairs, and the stack blowing smoke and the heat gusting off the grill and the bars of the open cab shaking at the idle, and behind them, in the operator’s seat, looking back at him, Boris Bazarov. His sunglasses were crooked on his nose. A few long shocks of hair had fallen in front of his face. He swept them behind his ears, straightened his shades. “My God!” the billionaire shouted over the diesel noise. “Who the hell let me drive one of these things?”
Then he was climbing out of it, the engine still rumbling, hopping down onto the treads and into the throng. He took the hands held out to help him as if they were offered for a shake, clapped necks, punched shoulders, said something that drew from the men a few wary smiles and from the billionaire his own laugh. Bazarov slapped the side of the machine—“Any of you guys know how to back this thing up?”—then turned to Yarik. “I bet you do,” he said, “but you stay put. You I want to talk to.”
While one of the workers climbed into the dozer’s cab, Bazarov stepped up on its push-frame, grabbed a cylinder, lifted a brown boot over the shovel blade, and clambered through the doorway, matching string tie swinging. His shiny suit was dust dulled, smudged with grease. He stilled his tie, held out his hand. Yarik took it.
“Hold on,” the billionaire said.
Behind them, the dozer revved, backed up. The tilted trailer slammed flat again.
Letting loose his grip, Bazarov cranked his neck to watch the bulldozer backing away. “I was at the head office,” he said. “Came quick as I could.” Then, turning back to Yarik, “Are you trying to go DOMO on me?”
Yarik shook his head.
“Do you know what DOMO means?”
“No,” Yarik said.
“Downwardly mobile,” Bazarov told him. He said it in English, and he reached by Yarik for the door handle and said it in Russian—“Nizhnyie dvizheniya”�
��and shut the door behind him.
The room was so small that the two of them filled it. In the office door, the manager stood, making it smaller.
Bazarov took off his sunglasses, his stare on Yarik. “I give you a good job,” he said. “I give you a good salary.”
“It’s not the money,” Yarik told him.
“I give you my friendship. I have you over to my home, take you out on the lake, show you my secrets, I set you up.”
“It’s not something I want to do.”
“Bullshit,” Bazarov said. “You’re making the decision.”
“I—”
“You’re deciding to do it.” He looked past Yarik’s shoulder, and the manager said “Excuse me, please,” and Bazarov stepped to the wall, looked at the broken glass fallen out of the Pyramids’ picture frame, told Yarik, “Or not to do it. Because nobody chooses to do anything they don’t want to do. At least not here, not now.” He picked the frame up. “Not men like us.” He set the picture back on its hook. “Men like us sometimes have to do something we don’t want in order to get something we do want. But that means we want to do it. Because it gets us to what we want. But”—he turned, looked at Yarik again— “we already know what you want. Remember?” Behind his back, another piece of glass fell to the carpet. “And this, Yaroslav Lvovich, is not the way to get it.”
“I’m not doing it for myself,” Yarik said.
“Bullshit again.”
“If I may, Mr. Bazarov.” It was the manager. “This doesn’t concern only him. You may have heard about the trouble his brother is causing, a video . . . this kind of . . . well, there was an incident here yesterday. A disruption. Caused by his brother. It’s become, I’m afraid, untenable, actually. It’s actually only the responsible—”