by Josh Weil
“Why I need you,” Bazarov said, “is your history. Your story.”
The bucket dropped so close to the billionaire that Yarik could see his body shake with the quiver of the ground. Bazarov didn’t even shift his feet. He didn’t shift his gaze from Yarik, either. Then he turned, placed his hands on the bucket’s rim, pushed himself up, and, easy as stepping over a low fence, swung his legs in. From inside the bucket, he looked back at Yarik. “Come on,” he said. “Get in. I’m going to tell you the story of you.”
There was the unmistakable weight of the bucket beneath him, the solidity of the rim in his hands, and yet the tug of the line, when it lifted them off the earth, made even the heavy steel under his boots feel fragile. The winding drum moaned; the hoist rope sang; the bucket swayed a little. He watched its shadow slide on the ground, open up beneath them, spread wider as they rose.
“Yaroslav Lvovich Zhuvov.” Over the noise of the crane’s hydraulics, Bazarov had to half-shout. “Big blue eyes, black black hair. From good Karelian stock. Son of a good Russian fisherman, a lover of our great poet, our great drink. Son of a good Russian woman who worked hard all her life in our textile plants, on our local army base. Son of Petroplavilsk, of our city.”
Down below: their own shadows, side by side, jutting out of the patch of shade cast by the rising bucket. Their shapes rose with it. A strange sensation: even as Yarik’s shadow shrank from him, there it was among the men below, growing larger.
“But,” Bazarov continued, “a son of the countryside, too.” Bazarov waved his hands at the sinking trees, the fields they couldn’t yet see. “Out there”—he brought his hand back, made a fist of it—“in here”—gave his chest a gentle knock. “A boy of the woods and pastures. A farm boy. Pulling potatoes. Whistling as he works. Until . . .” Bazarov smacked his hands together. “Tragedy. Papa: dead. Mama: gone mad with grief. And yet, raised by his loving uncle—that stout kolkhoznik, red-chested man of the soil—he struggles on.”
Yarik watched the ground slip away, watched the shape of the bucket stretch with the changing slant of the sun.
“But what,” Bazarov said, “what, in the hard times that we all knew, the great collapse we still feel here”—again, he thumped his fist against his chest—“what, in those times, was a penniless boy, practically an orphan, an orphan raised by an uncle who was—let’s face it—afflicted by that devil all our Russian families know, an orphaned peasant boy alone in a drafty izba with his drunken uncle unable to make ends meet, what was he to do?”
And there was Yarik’s own shape stretching, too, already almost unrecognizable as something made by him.
“Persevere!” Bazarov raised his fist between them, shook it. “Survive! Make it through one day after the next until, finally, there comes a day that is different. Over the city”—Bazarov swept his hand like the whole world was drawn on a page and he was flipping it—“there appears a new star. His wife? And another. His child? And soon a whole sky full of them. The zerkala. The Oranzheria. Where our Yaroslav . . .” Bazarov paused. “Shall we call him Slava or Yarik?”
But Yarik was silent, looking down at the tops of the trees where his shadow had been broken up and swallowed by the woods.
“Where Slava,” Bazarov went on, “signs up to work. He works hard, our Slava, a new husband, a new father. He works well. Is he rewarded? Not right away. But”—Bazarov held up a finger, let his smile break out behind it—“eventually, after a few years—but not so many years; really, not very many at all—his hard work is, yes, at last, recognized. He is promoted to foreman. Then to manager. And next . . .”
Yarik could feel Bazarov looking at him as steadily as he was looking down, and when he lifted his eyes Bazarov let go of the bucket’s edge, raised his hands, palms up.
“Next?” Yarik said.
“I don’t know,” Bazarov said. “Is there a next? Or does he throw it all away?” Palms still raised, he leaned back against his side of the bucket.
Through the metal, Yarik could feel the slight shake, an almost imperceptible shift, and he leaned a little against his own side, as if, though his mind knew it wouldn’t tip, his body was telling him it might.
“I hope not,” Bazarov said. “Because that story? That history? That’s a history almost everyone here can relate to. That’s a story people will take home with them. These people.” He leaned over the edge, looked down, and Yarik, feeling the bucket shift again, looked down over his edge, too. “These people will hold that story up before them. And in it, they’ll see themselves.”
Down there, the yellow hard hats of the logging crews floated amid the forest, the green pines and bright birch leaves, like bees in a field, the roar of their chain saws reduced by the height to a buzz broken only by the rumbling of the machines, the crack and crash of trees coming down. All along the edge of the woods they fell, and looking at the trunks laid out on the ground it was almost as if the ground itself had flipped ninety degrees and the line of fallen trees down there was the new forest’s edge, and for a moment Yarik felt he couldn’t tell if he was leaning over at all, or standing straight. . . . But there was the ground, the churned soil, the skidder machines dragging the logs across it, and the tub grinders chewing them to pulp and the graders rolling over the dirt to push it flat, and then the girders going up, the bright metal scaffolding reaching out from the south, and he had the feeling again of the earth being tilted, as if the scaffolding was rebar at the top of a skyscraper, erected upwards into a muddy sky and, far below, the finished exteriors gleaming with glass, towering too high, too far from the ground, to even see where it was rooted to the earth.
“You were right,” Bazarov said, “it is beautiful.”
Yarik looked up from the sight.
“The first time we met,” Bazarov reminded him. “You said it should be turned into an attraction. Not just someplace people worked, but a place people wanted to come to. You were right about that. Just not about which people.” He smiled at Yarik. “It’s OK. You haven’t seen the surveys. You don’t have a team devoted to figuring this stuff out. You haven’t studied the past fifty years in the part of the world we’re trying to outdo. Productivity, retention rates. Do you know the secret to their success?”
“Whose?”
“Tomorrow. The belief in tomorrow. That it will be a better day. Work hard, play fair, make something of yourself. The chance to get ahead, to climb a little higher. Or at least the fact that they believe the chance exists.” He turned and spread his arms and leaned farther out over the edge and flapped them—once, twice, big slow flaps—and when he turned back he was beaming. “Fly high!” he said. “You’re going straight to the top!” He squinted at Yarik. “Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. You are there.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yarik said.
And standing in that steel bucket in the sky, their clothes bright in the blasting noon, one’s head dark as a distant bird, the other’s a speck of sun against the blue, Bazarov laid it all out: how his managers had come to him, the warnings they had brought of the rumblings they had heard, the laborers growing dissatisfied, the workforce that had been so grateful in the first years now starting to raise complaints—hours, pay, safety, breaks—how beneath it all there was the same murmuring stream: What now? Where next? Is this it? No, he told Yarik. Not for them, not for the Oranzheria. They just had to make the workers see it. They had to make them believe it. They had to show them him, Yarik. Posters, flyers, billboards, TV. A publicity campaign built around his story.
“You mean Slava’s story,” Yarik said.
“OK.” Bazarov shrugged. “But your face.” Beneath them: the sound of all the work. Above: a breeze whistling through the cable. Then Bazarov reached out, slapped Yarik on the shoulder. “Holy shit,” he said. “I’ve got it. Yaroslav Lvovich, I have got it. And you gave it to me.”
“What?” Yarik said.
“Next,” Bazarov told him.
Between their faces he swiped at the air with his hand and, as if the word had appeared in its wake, said it again: “Next.” Pushing his sunglasses down his nose, he stared at Yarik. “The slogan!”
“Next?”
“You were the one who said it,” Bazarov nearly shouted. “What’s next? Who’s next? How much next? What more next? All the questions are in that one word. And all the answers are in you. In the story of Slava. Because by the time we’re done with it, they”—he stabbed a finger over the edge at the workers below—“they will see you, but they will think to themselves, Me.”
“OK,” Yarik said.
“Good!”
“No,” Yarik told him, “what I mean is, OK, then let me ask you something: What’s in it for me?”
Slowly, the hairs of Bazarov’s goatee shifted around his mouth; they spread and rose and then his teeth were a thin strip of glint flashing in the sun. “Cossack,” he said.
“I mean,” Yarik told him, “that I don’t see how any of this . . .”
“Cowboy.”
“. . . changes any of the reasons that today I came in to quit my—”
And Bazarov punched him. He punched him in the upper arm, hard. “Fucking cowboy,” Bazarov said. His laugh burst out so loud, a roar so forceful Yarik could swear he felt the bucket shake. Then he was sure of it. Clamping a hand to the metal rim, he stared at Bazarov. The man gripped the sides, swinging his weight back and forth, back and forth, laughing, shaking his head, saying, “You fucking cowboy, you fucking cowboy,” until they were swinging, the wire jerking above them, Yarik’s stomach beginning to lurch.
Then just as suddenly, Bazarov stopped. His laugh petered out to a breathing through his bared teeth. “What’s in it for you, you fucking cowboy, is that you get to be the answer. And since we always have to have an answer, you always get to be next. Do you understand?” The bucket swayed back and forth, back and forth. “What I’m saying is you don’t just get promoted to manager today, but you get promoted tomorrow, and after that, and after that. You have to. We must. As long as we’re running the ads, as long as, in their minds, your face is what they see when they see the possibility of next, and in your face they see their own, you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to do your job, about what your crew will think of you, about what they think of your brother. They’ll want to be you.”
“But don’t you see . . .”
“Because you’ll have a lock on what they really want. Upward mobility. Going straight to the top. A lifetime guarantee on the American dream.”
The bucket swayed. Yarik stared at its iron floor between their boots. “Don’t you see,” he said again, “that’s what’s wrong with the history you told.”
“What?”
“My brother.”
This time it was Bazarov who, for a moment, was quiet. Finally, he said, “What about him?”
“You left him out of my history.”
“I left him out of Slava’s history.”
“But people know who he is. Dima is . . . Dima’s the reason I came here today to quit. People know he’s my—”
“I know all about your brother,” Bazarov said. “I knew all I needed to know the first day I met him—met you both. I’ve seen the video.” He grinned, stuck his hand up, made a pistol shape with finger and thumb, said, “Puf! puf! puf!” Dropping his hand again, he gave a shrug, let his eyes roll. “Ridiculous,” he said. But when he looked back at Yarik, he wasn’t grinning. “And maybe a little dangerous, too.”
“But he’s my brother,” Yarik told him. “I can’t—”
“He’s not the part of the story we would leave out,” Bazarov said. “He’s the part that makes it beautiful. Because, without him, Slava, your story is just one of hard work and luck. But that’s not how the world works. And no matter how good you make a lie, if it’s not how the world works people won’t believe it. Luckily for us, the way the world works is the way your story works. A lot of hard work and a little luck but, mostly, a moment of opportunity and the decision to take it.”
Yarik looked down at the iron floor again. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Choice, Slava.”
“I think the swaying is getting to me.”
“It all comes down to choice. Who chooses to be next, and who chooses to be passed by.”
“I think we should go back down,” Yarik said.
“Sometimes,” Bazarov told him, “I think this whole country wants to go back down. Our nostalgic Russian soul. Sometimes I think it’s going to sink us all. I understand: it’s a hard thing, this choosing. We didn’t used to have to do it. In The Past Life our choices were made for us. But now we live in a different world. And in this world everything depends on the decisions we make. And what better story of that,” Bazarov told him, “than two brothers, twins, who choose so differently.”
He could see the tips of his boots and the tips of Bazarov’s pointing towards his, and he kept his eyes on the stretch of empty steel between them.
“What better way,” Bazarov said, “to show the consequences. One brother who chooses hard work and ambition. The other who chooses to slough off both. What better way to quash whatever effect your brother might have, those like him might have, those using him wish to have, on all the workers like you both. What better way than simply to show them you. You in the suit and tie of a section manager. In your manager’s car.”
“I’m not a prop,” Yarik said.
“Of course not,” Bazarov told him. “A prop doesn’t get to choose the direction his life will take.”
On the steel, a scattering of dirt and stones shifted back and forth, pebbles rolling, stopping, rolling back.
“Yarik.”
At the sound of his name, Yarik lifted his gaze. Bazarov’s was already on him.
“You think,” Bazarov said, “that I don’t know how hard this is? You forget: I also had a sibling. Two.” In his eyes there was an openness so unexpected it made Yarik want to look away again, but the man said, “I told you that they died,” and he couldn’t. “A fire. I didn’t tell you it was my fault. Well”—Bazarov sighed—“at least I felt it was. I loved them.” He raised his eyebrows, as if there was no way to hide a thing like that. “When it happened,” he went on, “I was away. Like our father, who was never home, who was never anything. Except drunk. I was in Moscow, trying to make my business . . .” He winced. “If I had been there, I know I could have saved them. I know it. The way I know I failed them because I wasn’t. For a long time after, I thought I was a failure, felt it no matter how well my business did, maybe even because my business . . .” He shook his head. “But now I don’t. Now I think of my son, his secure future. His mother, who I support. My mother, who didn’t have to wreck her health with work, who doesn’t have to worry in her old age. I think of the mothers and children and loved ones of all the people who work here.” He opened his arms. “So many who I’ve done good by. Because of my business. Was it worth it? I can’t think of it like that. I can only know this: I chose to live up to them. To all those other lives. Sometimes, you have to choose to fail. To let one person down. Or even two. So you can live up to everyone else. Especially yourself.”
When Yarik dropped his gaze back to the bucket’s floor, the dirt was still, the pebbles stopped.
“I can’t tell you what to choose,” Bazarov said, “but I can tell you this: whoever you do let down, don’t make it someone who you know won’t let you down. Those people are rare. I know: I’ve spent my life looking for them. Yarik,” he said, and Yarik shut his eyes, “find the person who is already holding you back, who is already failing you. Because I know this, too: I wasn’t the only one who failed my sisters. There were so many others who might have saved them. Including, hard as it is, themselves.”
With his eyes shut, Yarik could still feel the bucket’s swaying inside him. And when he shook his head, it was worse. The scrape of Bazarov’s bootstep, the sense of a weight come closer. From far below, there rose the sound of
the logging crews, the earth-shaking thunder of all the trees falling along the forest’s edge.
“I know it’s hard.”
Yarik felt the man’s hand on his shoulder. It was bruised from the punch and it hurt and Yarik didn’t pull away.
“And,” he heard Bazarov say, “it’s going to get harder.”
That evening, when Yarik pushed open the door to the stairwell of his home, he heard footsteps climbing somewhere on the flights above. It could have been any woman’s heels clacking, but it wasn’t; it was his wife’s; he knew it in his body. His boot-thuds banged up the stairs, reverberating like a whole flightful of men, so loud he couldn’t hear if she had stopped, or kept on towards the neighbor’s door, where, just home from work, she would retrieve their children from the old woman, which she could not do, which he could not let her do. By the time he reached her there on the landing, grabbed her around the waist just as she was about to knock, he was gusting so hard from running up that he could not get out any words.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He took the hand that she’d touched to his face and put his mouth to her fingers and breathed.
“What’s going on?” she said, and he told her, “Don’t get them” and “Leave them for a while” and “Downstairs.”
In their apartment, he pressed her against the wall, shoved up her work skirt, got her hose down. “What is it?” she asked him, again, breathy and quick. “What is it?”
“I got a new job.”
“A raise?”
“A new job,” he repeated, and then, “a better job. Bigger, more money, more . . .” And then he was in her and she was saying, “How? How?” the way she had said “What is it?” before, but he was staring above her head at the hole in the wall and he couldn’t speak. “How?” she said, “How?” and each time she said it he grew softer and softer until he had to push his pelvis all the way against her just to keep from slipping out and still he ground away, refusing to stop, trying long past when he knew he could not ever come, could only keep pushing, keep staring at the pieces of plaster broken inward, the chunks of it missing, the black place in the middle the size of his fist.