The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  “This”—Bazarov cut the man off, not looking at him, not talking to him—“must be the manager . . .”

  “Nikitin,” the manager said.

  “. . . who called the branch director . . .”

  “Eduard Nikitin.”

  “. . . who called the personnel director, who called my secretary, who was supposed to tell me—who told me—that you,” he said to Yarik, “were going DOMO. That you were a flight risk.”

  “Yes, sir,” the manager said.

  “He did the right thing,” Bazarov told Yarik.

  “Thank you, sir,” the manager said.

  “But,” Bazarov said, “he’s still going to lose his job.”

  From behind the manager, somewhere in his office, came the drone of the air conditioner, the rattle of it shutting off.

  “Why?” Yarik said.

  “Because,” Bazarov told him, “you’re going to take it.”

  While the manager stood in the doorway and tried to argue why it wasn’t right and then to explain the complexities of the position and finally to plead, Bazarov laid it out—how soon Yarik would start, what his duties would be, how many foremen he would have under him, how many laborers in his section, how much more money he would make—until the manager came out of the doorway into the anteroom and tried to shove himself between his former boss and his former employee, to make Bazarov look at him, hear him, and Yarik said, “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  Bazarov turned, walked away from the frantic manager. He opened the exit door and stood in it, squinting into the brightness outside. The manager followed him. Yarik stayed where he was. From behind the two men, he could see the billionaire pointing to something. The manager went quiet.

  “Well?” Bazarov asked the man. “Can you bring it down?”

  Yarik tried to make out, through their figures, what they were looking at.

  “I didn’t ask will you,” Bazarov said, and the manager said something that Yarik couldn’t hear, and Bazarov didn’t answer, just stepped back into the room and put his hand on the door edge, as if to swing it shut and waited, and the man slowly made his way out and down the wrecked steps to the ground.

  Watching him, watching the laborers beyond, the landscape of his worklife framed by the open door, Yarik could not understand how he’d so quickly become separated from it all. Something about it all felt wrong. Not just what he had witnessed with the fired man, not just the unfairness of how it had been done, but the fact that Bazarov had come here to do it. That his boss seemed to have put in place some standing order to report on all that Yarik did, to relay news of his actions up a chain of command. Maybe it was his dream, maybe his decision, maybe simply that Yarik was looking out at fields soon to be plowed and planted, but as he wondered what was in him, what he might have, that could have brought all this about, the only thing that came to him was the farm. Which wasn’t even his. Which was nothing more than a possibility planted far in his past, a half-hopeless dream of what might be. Surely, with all his information, all the effort he’d already spent selecting Yarik for something, surely the billionaire knew that.

  “What’s a setback,” Bazarov said now, “but a new beginning?” He still stood in the door, his back to Yarik, and Yarik wasn’t sure if his boss was talking to him or to the man he’d fired. “A chance to go even further in a new direction. Any successful man knows that. Any failed man knows it, too, just learns it too late. If he’s smart, he’ll turn this into an opportunity. No”—he patted the door—“he’ll recognize the opportunity I’ve given him. If he doesn’t, then I didn’t want him working for me, anyway.”

  Yarik could see, past Bazarov in the still-open door, the manager making his way across the lot, his suit pressed against him by the wind, his tie fluttering from his neck.

  “He’s lost his job”—Bazarov turned back to Yarik—“whether or not you choose to take it.” He let go the door, left it open. “So why are you still looking at him?”

  But when Yarik refocused, Bazarov was gone from the doorway. He had stooped to the carpet, and he came up holding a clear glass shard in his hand. A jagged shape half the size of his face.

  Through it, he looked at Yarik. “It’s about seeing the opportunity,” he said. “It’s always about seeing the opportunity.” He lowered the shard till his eye looked over it. “Khodorkovsky.” His breath blew against it when he spoke. “You’ve heard of Khodorkovsky. What would Mikhail Khodorkovsky have become if he hadn’t been denied a defense job because he was a Jew? Would he have become one of the richest men in Russia if he hadn’t looked around him and seen what he could do instead? Would he ever have started his Center for the Scientific-Technical Creativity of Young People?” Bazarov laughed, shook his head. “What we did back then to avoid saying the word ‘business,’ right? And Friedman? The head of Alfa Group? You know how he started? Hawking theater tickets. Organizing the hawkers. A theater mafia. By the time he graduated university he was director of a hundred and fifty students all over Moscow, buying up tickets, bartering them on the black market. What is that?” Holding the glass between his thumb and forefinger, he touched one sharp corner to the flesh below his eye. He asked again, “What is that?”

  And Yarik answered, “Seeing the opportunity.”

  “Taking the opportunity. More than just the vision to see it.” Bazarov jutted the shard towards Yarik. “The balls to take it.” Bringing it back until it was an inch from his mouth, he breathed on the glass, fogged it, and when it had cleared again, said, “You know how long it took me to make my first two million?” He tapped a jagged corner against his front tooth. It made Yarik wince. “Seventy-two hours. Two million American dollars. I was given a chance to arrange a transfer. Roubles to dollars, Russia to the West. Just making a trade. But this was the first month of the new economy, and between the official exchange rate and what the market would pay there was a little difference. Ten percent. Which I pocketed. Sure, I’d done it before—a thousand here, a few thousand there—but never on a twenty-million-dollar exchange. You know how much I would have made if I had hesitated? Nothing. Everyone who means anything has a story like that. That was how it was. Now, it’s not so easy to get that kind of shot. But there still are opportunities. There are chances. This here, now, is one for you.”

  “I know,” Yarik said. “What I don’t understand . . . I don’t understand why now, why—”

  “Yaroslav Lvovich,” Bazarov said, “you don’t decide when the opportunity comes. You decide only if you will take it. I decide when it comes. Because I’m the one offering it. All I can do is give you what you need to take the next step. You have to take it. I can give you the cornerstone, my friend, but you have to decide where to lay it. What kind of life you’re going to make with it. Maybe your life is destined to be little. Maybe great. But you can’t know until you start building. And you can’t start building until you lay the first stone.”

  Yarik could feel his smile betraying him, and he tried to tamp it down, flatten his face back out.

  “What?” Bazarov said.

  “Nothing,” Yarik told him, and saw the man’s eyebrows rise and knew that was the wrong thing to say and followed it fast with, “It’s just the thing about the stone. You got that from the poster.”

  For a moment, there was only the sound of the work going on outside, the air conditioner whirring. Then Bazarov’s lips split, and his teeth showed and he tapped at them again with the corner of the glass. His smile spread. “That is the kind of thing,” he said, “I would have said back in the nineties.” He barked a laugh. “Look at you! Going from laborer to foreman to manager to this in just a few months. You’re having your own 1992 right here in my Oranzheria.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” Yarik said.

  “What’s there to understand?”

  “Why me. Why you seem to like me—”

  “Seem? I’m offering you your opportunity. Take it. Unless you think it’s going to bite you when you grab on.” He gr
inned again. “You think I’m going to bite you?”

  “No,” Yarik said.

  “You sure?” And in one quick move he lifted the piece of glass to his mouth and, peeling back his lips like a dog, chomped his teeth down on a corner. For a second, there was just the man clenching his jaw, and Yarik staring at him, and then Bazarov’s laughter burbled out around the glass and his lips shook and he dropped the glass and his laugh exploded in the room as if the shard he’d yanked from his teeth had been a grenade pin. “What makes you think that I like you? Because I ask you on a hunting trip? Because I tell you I want to see you stand in front of a two-hundred-kilogram boar with nothing but an old revolver? That I’ve loaded?”

  “I only meant—”

  “With how many bullets? Maybe”—he shrugged—“just one?” He held up a single finger. Then tapped it lightly against Yarik’s chest. “I like your history, cowboy. I like the story behind you, of you.” He smiled. “Oh, don’t look so glum. I like you all right, too.” And his smile spread to his eyes. “Come on, lyubimy,” he said, “let’s take a little lovers’ walk.”

  They went straight through the work zone, Bazarov cutting across it casually as if it were a meadow in the woods. Not long ago it might have been. It had definitely been forest. Up ahead, out from under the glass and girders, in the open air at the edge of the Oranzheria, the loggers were taking the next trees down. A long line of quivering firs and spruce, each shaking as a saw bit through. All along the forest edge they dropped in booms, the wall of green calving like the cliff-front of a glacier. Between the loggers and the two of them roamed the machines, scaly-plated and shovel-toothed, backhoes clawing logs into piles, cranes dipping hydraulic heads into the stacks, lifting felled trunks one by one. In their wake the chippers came on wheels tall as the men beside them, and before them the ground was cleared of all but churned earth the stump-pullers tore apart into massive holes.

  Bazarov made his way through, leaving room for Yarik to walk beside if he could keep up. When he came even, Bazarov said, without slowing his stride or turning to look, “I’m the one who should be glum. All these stories about everyone else and you never even ask me how I got rich.”

  “I thought,” Yarik said, “you made your first two million—”

  “That’s an anecdote,” Bazarov told him. “That’s not my history, my story. How I got from then to now, there to here. Who I am.”

  But before Yarik could ask, the billionaire had spotted a hard hat coming their way, veered into his path, stepped in front of him so fast the kid—barely older than a boy, carrying a tray crammed with enough tea glasses for his entire crew: a new hire’s chore—nearly smacked straight into his boss’s chest. For a second, the two of them stood there, each gripping a side of the tray, the tea spilled into a pool around the cups, the cups rattling, the kid’s face shifting from about–to-slug-the-sonofabitch to shock to worry to a half-swallowed, “I’m sorry.”

  Bazarov’s shrug made the tray jerk. “Friend,” he said, “what’s your name?”

  “Sergei.”

  “Seryozha, my friend, it looks like we better turn around and fill these back up. Here”—he tugged the tray free—“let me help you,” and they were all three walking back the way the kid had come, Bazarov carrying the clattering glasses, the kid glancing at the spilling tea, Yarik watching them both, trying to keep up.

  “How old are you?” Bazarov asked.

  “Eighteen,” the kid said.

  “Eighteen.” Bazarov said the age as if it made him happy. “When I was eighteen, I was . . .” He nudged the kid with an elbow. “I was carrying coffee back and forth just like you. But”—he shot the boy a reproving look—“I wasn’t doing it for free. This was in Leningrad at the Institute of Engineering and Economics. I wasn’t a student. I couldn’t get in.” He winked at the kid, flashed a mock-shocked face at Yarik. “But I knew students. And these students were always complaining about tea: having to leave their studies to buy it from the corner teahouse, out and in, in and out, every hour. So for a few roubles, for a while, I was a one-man mob in the tea-delivery black market. Until word spread to other study groups. Soon, I had to hire my roommate to make the tea. Other friends to deliver it. To other universities. The Polytechnical. The Institute of Technology. A little illegal spekulyatsia of my own.” There was the noise of the work all around them, the clanking of the glasses on the tray. He shook his head. “I know,” he said, “you’re thinking, This guy is full of it.”

  “No, sir,” the kid said, “I don’t think you’re—”

  “But he does.” Baz slid his look to Yarik. “He’s thinking, He carried coffee, not tea.” They had reached the cafeteria trailer, and Bazarov stopped. “But, Seryozha, these students, they were, in secret, fans of the West. In secret they liked to smoke Marlboros. They liked to read Ricardo, Mill, Adam Smith. They liked to drink coffee.”

  The kid glanced at the cafeteria trailer.

  Bazarov rattled the glasses. “OK,” he said, “I’ll give you the quick and dirty, as the Americans say. By the time those students were scrambling to put what they’d been reading to practice, I was importing green coffee beans by the sackful. Also, inside the sacks, I hid diamonds.” He raised his eyebrows at Yarik, at the kid. “Not for myself,” he assured them, “but for the men who paid off the customs agents for the lying documents that let me bring in my shiploads of beans, untaxed.” Bazarov handed the tray back to the kid, plucked off a half-full glass, handed another to Yarik. “You know the place called Kofe Khauz on Lyzhnaya Street in town? Or the one on Chernishevskogo Avenue? Or maybe the Kirov Square branch?” He winked, held up his cup, and, in one shot, drank the cooled tea down. Replacing his cup, he asked the kid, “Want to know why I told you this?” He took Yarik’s glass and put it on the tray, too. “So that, when you bring the full cups back to your buddies, you’ll tell them you want ten roubles each for doing it. And tomorrow you’ll tell them twenty.”

  When they had left the kid and the trailer and were walking fast again towards wherever Bazarov was taking them, Yarik told the billionaire he hadn’t realized the chain of American-style cafés that had cropped up in Moscow, St. Petersburg, even, in the last few years, Petroplavilsk, was owned by him.

  “It isn’t,” Bazarov said.

  “Or that you started it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  They walked in silence, passing workers passing them the other way, until another—a sack of concrete on one shoulder, a shovel on the other—seemed to grab Bazarov’s eye. The man’s face was slit from ear to lip by a raw scar, forearms blue with amateur tattoos.

  “Now to him,” the billionaire turned to Yarik, “I wouldn’t have told that lie.” He flipped Yarik a smile. “To him I would have told a different one. Maybe I would have asked where he got his scar. Then I would have told him a secret of my own. A secret that showed the real me, something that he would take home with him and hold up against himself and recognize.” He peered ahead into the distance. At what, Yarik couldn’t see. “I would have told him I was there: Moscow, the putsch of ’93. That I was in the squadron they sent across the Moskva to seize the mayor’s office. I would have been twenty-seven then. Penniless. In the parliamentary police. We hadn’t seen wages for months. I would have told him about storming the old Comecon building, being sent into the basement to see if anyone was hiding, about what I found, instead. You know what was down there? Vouchers. Privatization vouchers. Eleven million of them. Worth fifty-five million American dollars. Tied in bundles wrapped with condoms. Honest to God: condoms. And all of it behind a flimsy wooden door, a cheap little padlock. The fact that none of my fellow countrymen storming into that basement thought to bust down that door still makes me ashamed to be a Russian. That was a lack of seeing the opportunity. That was a failure to seize it. If I had been there”—he turned his hands palm up—“that would have been the way I got my start.” He shrugged. “Or at least that’s what I would have told a man like that.”

  S
till staring ahead, Bazarov raised a hand, as if signaling to someone. Someone standing beside a distant crawler-crane, the iron boom rising high over the scaffolding of the Oranzheria’s unfinished edge, the outrigger big as a dump truck on treads, its cabin window open beside the small dark dot of a man. A man wearing a suit. A suit the blue of the one Yarik’s manager had worn. Bazarov dropped his hand. In the distance, the man turned from the crane, started walking away. Even from afar, Yarik could hear the whir of the winding drum starting to lower the line.

  Listening to it, walking towards it, Yarik asked the man beside him, “What would you have told me? That you made your first two million dollars in seventy-two hours? That your mother was a seamstress and your sisters died in a fire? That you would show me things you’d never even shown your son?” He kept his eyes on the crane, the figure in the suit leaving. “That there was some way I could keep this job, and keep my brother, and I should trust you?”

  “You see,” Bazarov said, “I told you I knew I liked you. I wasn’t lying to you then, not about the millions, or my mother, or my sisters, or Pavel, and I’m not lying to you now. Half of success is knowing how to lie, Yarik. The other half is knowing when not to. And the key to that is who. Ask yourself: Why, if I wanted to deceive you, would I have just given you a demonstration of my methods of deceit?”

  They were nearing the crane now. Yarik glanced up at the end of the girders, the beginning of open sky, the boom way up there, and, coming down on the line, swaying a little in the grip of its lower sheave, a square-sided metal bucket, huge and dark against the brightness of noon.

  “I don’t know why,” Yarik told him.

  “Because,” Bazarov said, “it was never in doubt that I liked you, that I trusted you. What you were asking is why I need you.”

  They were a dozen meters from the crane, and the bucket was less than that above and dropping fast, and Bazarov walked to its shadow, stopped, turned to see if Yarik was coming. Yarik stood a few meters back, listening to the whine of the line lowering the bucket, watching the shadow shrink fast around the man.