by Josh Weil
Again, Dima drained his glass. He watched Yarik over the rim, and then through the empty bottom, and then he set the glass on the concrete beside his brother’s. Looking at the two glasses standing still and empty there, he said, as slowly as he’d drunk, “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying . . .” Yarik clenched his empty hand, let it fall open. “When you say the difference between us and animals, Dima, is that they get their joy from their work, that we get none, I’m saying maybe they get their purpose from it, bratets. Maybe their purpose gives them joy. Maybe, bratets, maybe it just turns out you and I . . .”
“You’re saying you’re not a bum.”
“Maybe we’re just different kinds of animals.” Yarik’s eyes stayed closed. He waited, as if for Dima to speak, and when he did—“You think your brother’s a bum”—Yarik reached for the vodka. Beneath his fingers, the glass rattled.
“But I’m not.” Dima sat there, staring at his brother. Then, slowly, body stiff with the effort, raised one leg, held his foot up off the footrest of the chair. “See?” he said, and his voice, shaking like Yarik’s cup, made of the word a command. “I even found some old shoes to fix up.” The boot stuck there, tape around its sole, motionless in the air between them. “And you know,” Dima said, “beggars don’t need shoes.”
Yarik stared at his brother’s foot the way Dima was staring at him. Then, emitting a small squeezed groan, he leaned forward off his chair. He put his hand on Dima’s foot and, for a moment, rested it there. He looked like he was going to say something to the boot. But he just pushed it, gently, back onto the footrest. And filled their glasses again. And when he was again sitting back beside Dima, he said,“Do you know what would have happened if I had helped you?”
“It’s OK,” Dima said.
“No,” Yarik said. “No, it’s not. Even while I was standing there, not helping you, even then I knew it wasn’t OK, and I hated myself, I fucking hate myself for standing there, and still, I know, I know that if I had, if you understood that—”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t care about—”
“I care,” Yarik said. “Dima, today I took the number six. I had to get it half an hour earlier because I had to transfer to the number three.” He looked like he would take a drink, but his hand simply rose and fell and never reached his mouth. He said, “I have to transfer to the three because you’re not on it.”
Dima reached over and touched his brother for the first time since they had come up on the roof. He put his hand on Yarik’s forearm. His thumb rubbed lightly at the softness of his brother’s arm hair. “I know,” he said, “like every day the past two weeks.” He smiled a small smile. “But it will be OK now. I’ve stopped going to the square. I’ve stopped reciting the poem. I won’t see any of those people anymore. Nobody. Just my bratets.” He let his fingers squeeze his brother’s wrist a little tighter. And when Yarik’s other hand pressed down on his, Dima shut his eyes. So it was a motion he felt more than saw—the weight of both their hands, Yarik’s fingers stilling Dima’s thumb, then the breath of air beneath his own palm—when his brother lifted Dima’s hand off. But he opened his eyes in time to see the small shaking of Yarik’s head.
Somewhere, a flock of geese was flying. Yarik turned away, as if to look for them.
“You’re right,” Dima said, “I don’t understand.”
“I know.” Still looking up at the sky, Yarik ran a hand through his short, wet hair. “That’s the problem.” He ran it back again towards his forehead, and in the light of the mirrors his hair sprayed a fine mist over his fingers and dampened his forehead and there were tiny drops glinting on the hairs of his eyebrows, on his lashes, when he closed his eyes. “You know who lived like an animal?” he said. “Papa.”
“He was happy,” Dima said.
Yarik breathed hard through his nose. “Mama was so miserable. We were so hungry. Selfish!” His whole brow jerked: a mist of fine drops shed. “How could he have been so selfish, Dima?” Then he opened his eyes and took a drink and swallowed, and when he was done, he said, “Today, I went to the Oranzheria to quit.”
Dima’s throat closed down to a whisper: “Because of me?”
Yarik finished his drink, set the glass down so carefully it made no noise at all on the roof. “I didn’t,” he said, and poured himself another glass. “Quit.” He said the word as if it was a joke of a word, and drank, and said, “Hired as foreman the day before you quit. And as manager the day I try to.”
“They’re going to make you a manager?”
“Maybe,” Yarik said. Then he said, “Yes.” He stared up at the sky, as if still searching for the geese among the mirror gleam. “Unless I say no.”
“Why would you say no?”
The breath he let out seemed to take half the weight of his body with it. And the way his body sank into the chair it seemed what was left was still too much. “Listen to them,” he said. “Do you think they navigate by the stars? What if they navigate by the stars?” Then he dropped his chin and cleared his throat and took a drink again and looked at his brother and said, “It’s just temporary.”
“What is?”
“Just a precaution. A condition. That’s what he told me: it’s a condition.”
“Who told you?”
Yarik shut his eyes and put his hand over them and held it there.
“Who told you?” Dima asked again.
Beneath his hand, Yarik shook his head. He took his hand away. His eyes were open. “He told me it was the only way. He said, ‘What if the men in your section see him lounging about? What if they see you together? What would that do to our story?’” He breathed out a small breath through his nose. Dima could hear it hit the drink close to his brother’s mouth. “They won’t, I told him. ‘What if he comes to visit you?’ he said. He won’t, I told him. He said, ‘What if you’re seen with him riding the buses?’”
The geese were right above them now, their sounds so loud that when Dima said, “For how long?” he could not tell if his brother had heard him or not.
“What the hell do you think they steer by?” Yarik said. He was still looking up at the birds. “It can’t be by land. Because every year the land is different. What the hell must they think of the Oranzheria? A huge lake with no water? Ice in the summer? They must hate it. One year it was just there. And they looked for the fields, and they were farther than they should have been. And when they came back, on the way south, the lake was even farther. And the next year, the distance from the lake to the fields was farther again, and it must have kept on like that, for years, the glass growing, them coming back. Until one year it will be too big and they’ll have no place to land at all.”
Dima reached over and touched his brother on the shoulder. “For how long?”
“Or anywhere,” Yarik said. “That’s what he told me today. That was his condition: or anywhere.”
“How long is temporary, Yarik?”
“Not just the buses. Not just in the Oranzheria, he said. He said, ‘What if you’re seen with him anywhere?’” Yarik looked at Dima. “‘I won’t be,’ I told him.”
There was the sound of the geese, and of the traffic below, and of someone shouting in an apartment, muffled, as if through a closed window, and loud, as if the shouting was out of a fury or a sorrow that could not be contained by windows or walls or that could ever go quiet. And then it stopped, and there was just the sound of the traffic and over it the geese. Yarik reached for the bottle, poured another glass, and, shaking his head, sucked the edge of his hand where the vodka had spilled. Through his fingers he said, “Why did you have to make that video? That poster?”
“I didn’t know—”
“How could you be so stupid?” he shouted, and the echo came back like the shouting from the apartment a moment ago, and after it the geese seemed to have gone quiet, or simply gone, and Yarik bunched the sleeve of his robe in his free fist and squeezed, hard. “I’m sorry,” he
said. The spilled liquor dripped. “I don’t know how long.”
“When will you know?”
“When I tell him to go fuck himself. When I’ve made enough, when my job is safe enough, I’ll tell them all to go fuck themselves.” He drank the rest of his glass and smacked it down on the roof beside him and lifted the lever on the deck chair so that the back slapped flat beneath his weight and he lay there looking up at the sky. “Then fuck the bus,” he said. “They’ll pay me enough I can get a car. I’ll have to get a car. They’ll expect a manager to have a car. They already expect a fucking foreman to look like he could have a car.” He rubbed at the skin below his jaw. “I shave both ways, now,” he said, his voice tight with the stretch of his neck. “First up, then down. I never fucking did that in my life. Zina likes it. She likes the way clothes smell coming back from the dry cleaner. When she goes to the station she likes having to look like she could be a foreman’s wife. She holds Polya between us in bed and brushes the baby’s cheek against my cheek and whispers things to her about the kind of life she’s going to lead. She lets Timofei use my aftershave. Aftershave! Since when did I ever use fucking aftershave? She dabs it on his chin. She tells him once we send him away to school, to a private school, he’ll have to do his part, too. Why? he says. Because it’s for you, she tells him. And she puts the aftershave on his chin.” Yarik slowly lowered his glass to the concrete next to him. “Don’t ever have children,” he told Dima. “Don’t ever have a wife. You love them too fucking much.”
Dima set his glass down, too. “I already have a brother,” he said. And, when Yarik looked at him: “It’s OK. You can go back to taking the number four.”
Maybe high up at the edge of space one of the mirror wings was shaking. Or maybe down on the roof, in the pallid light, it was his brother’s face instead. “I won’t see you in public,” Dima told him. “Until your job is safe. Until you say. I’ll only come by here.” It was his brother’s face. “It’s OK, Yarik. I’ll come by at night and help with the children. I can cook. I know how to make a hell of a cabbage soup.”
When his brother spoke, the sound made the shaking of his face seem worse. “I don’t think . . .”
It was as if the thing that was working in his brother’s face had slipped into Dima’s, too. “What?”
“Zina came back from church,” Yarik said. “The priest. She said he talked to her about you. About the children. What people will say. The lessons they’ll learn.”
“What lessons?”
“She said . . .”
For a moment Yarik’s face seemed about to break, and Dima could see his mouth working to keep it from shaking completely apart and when Dima spoke his voice came out louder than he expected: “You’ll come to Mama’s then.”
Yarik shook his head.
“You’ll come.”
“No,” Yarik whispered.
“Yarik—”
“I think for a while . . .”
“Don’t say it.”
“For a while we should not see each other, bratishka.”
And Dima had to look up at the sky. He tipped his head back as he would to keep the blood from dripping out of a broken nose, and stared through the ache in his eyes. He could hear the geese again, faintly, and there they were, already so far he could barely make them out, moving eastward, into the distance, and against the movement of the zerkala drifting to the west they seemed to be going so fast.
“Then,” his brother’s voice said from beside him, “we’ll see each other all the fucking time. I swear. Dima, I’ll be making enough that I can save, really save. I made him a condition, too. He pays to keep you out of The Dachas. Six thousand roubles a month. And that’s nothing! Nothing compared to what I’ll be able to put aside! I’ll be saving sixty thousand a month, maybe more. In a year—just a year—I can have enough to buy Dyadya Avya’s. Dima, it’s the only way. Can’t you see that? Without it we’ll never do it. Zina’s never going to be a farmwife. She’s never going to let her children grow up hoeing weeds. I won’t let them. I don’t want it. But I want to be with you. Dimochka. Bratishka, I’ll make enough to build a second house out there. A real dacha, like the rich men have. A country home. Next to you and Mama in Dyadya Avya’s old place. In a year, Dima, I’ll be able to buy it for you myself.”
Dima rose then, and steadied himself on his feet. He didn’t even realize he had made fists with his hands until Yarik rose, too, and put his own big palms over each of Dima’s knotted ones. For a moment, Dima just let them stay there, feeling them on the back of his, and then they lifted, barely the beginning of a lift, the faintest cool air coming between their skin, and Dima’s hands unclenched and grabbed his bother’s and clenched again.
They stood like that for a long time, long enough that the last sounds of the geese were covered back up by the sounds of the traffic. When they could no longer hear them at all, Yarik said, “Is it a long crower, Dima? Like Dyadya Avya’s? Do you remember how long his rooster would call? Does Ivan call as long as that? As long as the one out in the lake? On Nizhi? Dima? Bratets? Bratishka?”
In the apartment nearby where the shouting had been, or another one below, or one across the alley in another building, someone had turned the television on. It sounded like the news, or an interview, or, anyway, some man talking numbers. Slowly, Yarik forced his own hands open, loosening his brother’s grip around his fists, straining against Dima straining to hold them still, both, for too short a moment, failing.
That night, crossing Ostrovskogo Avenue, Dima stood on the concrete island between the trolley tracks, waiting for the eastbound four to pass. It came on through the mirror dusk, wheels clacking, contactors zipping on the wires with a sound like the air being slit. And when the westbound four slid around the corner, too, he could feel the sound blasting at him, pressing at his front and back, solid as a pair of palms trying to hold him still. He watched the riders in the windows: weary faces, shadowed eyes, sleepers and gazers and all of them passing on without any sign they had seen him. Then the roar was gone and the dragged walls of wind fought his coat, whipped his hair, blew the track trash so it leapt and shook as if strung along behind. Slowly, so slowly it took him hours, letting each foot shuffle forward at the pace it wished to go, he walked home.
And from that day, he ceased to hide from the city’s sight. No longer did he keep to quiet laneways, dark alleys, the hidden corners at the back of buses. Of what consequence, his concealment? In fear of what result? So long as he stayed away from his brother. There was who he and Yarik had been before, and who they one day would be again, restored to themselves on their old land, and in between, he knew, his own self had become their greatest danger, his presence in his brother’s world the only thing to dread.
Now he haunted all of Petroplavilsk on foot. How many saw him from the windows as they passed? His beard blowing, his hair a tattered flag, his cheekbones hard and thin as the edges of a soup bowl, his eyes in the sun so blue. How many watched him where he stooped in Pervomayisky Park, beneath the heavy greenness of the late summer leaves, the grass around him scattered with sticks small and white as broken birch twigs, a hundred half-smoked cigarettes thrown out. He plucks them, gathers them in his palm like berries, fills his coat pocket, slips one between his lips and lights it and draws. The smoke drifts through his beard like forest fog. How many saw him slip into the rain-dark alleys between apartment blocks, his soaked coat and hair disappear into a dumpster’s mouth, emerge again to sling his rucksack on, swing a leg over a metal side, slosh back onto the street. What passerby noticed the flick of the rod, the singing line, the shape squatting on rocks beyond the guard wall of the pier, the silver flash of a fish slapped down and brained? Who heard the singsong chortling voice blown in off the lake on the breeze?
It seems to him most days that the answer is no one at all.
Certainly there is no one in the echoing National Theater, where he sits in the velvet-shedding seats, beneath dead chandeliers, prying the shells off fora
ged walnuts. The thin autumn sunlight streaks in through the gap left by the pried-open exit door, touches the bare stage, makes its way slowly across the rippling folds of the endlessly still curtain. The sound of the husks dropping to the floor is thunderous.
Certainly no one else stands on the cold tiles of the cavernous gymnasium, the wall cracks lumped with lichens, its vast pool murky as a lagoon. No one else strips down beside him, drops their clothes, leaps boylike into a splash so huge it spatters the wall. No one hears his whoop, his shriek, the chattering of his teeth after.
Now the only places from which he stays away are the ones where he used to go before, where the only people from whom he hides would expect to find him. For a while they wait down by the lake. Businessmen watching from their windows. Trash collectors sweeping past the square. A few thugs still brave the threat of cops, give out feeble shouts, old slogans, light sad, smoky fires in the garbage cans. For a while, the Communists drape the statue with their banners, paste it with flyers of him, play bright tunes on old brass horns, their even older lips unable to keep the notes from sliding into sorrow. Some hangers-on post torn-out pages on the plinth. Some climb up, read Pushkin from their books. Some try reciting words of their own. None last. Nobody listens. A few people boo. A few days later there are only a couple stragglers camped out. A few after that the cops take them away. To The Dachas? Is that why the three figures who all this time have sat beneath the trees, waiting, watching, finally leave?
And then the great tsar has the plinth to himself. Nobody clings to his bronze body but the jaegers and crows, alighting spread-winged, ruffling, looking over the ever emptier square. The old men and women in their Soviet scarves and pins have retreated again into the aspens’ shade, the sometime cannonade of empty bottles dumped into their plastic drums. In the old library there is not even that much sound. It has sunk back into silence, darkness, the weary patience of books deprived of hands to pull them, pages waiting to be turned. Behind the rail station, the access line is two long threads of mirror-light strung out, unbroken by even a sliver of his shadow. If the railcars wake from their rusty slumber, it is not from his footsteps on the gravel. Even the trams, the buses, the trolleys are empty of him now; he shuns them the way on sidewalks others shy from him. And if he sees a ticket-taking woman peering out an opening door, he turns his face away, turns down the next side street, disappears.