by Josh Weil
“It’s Dyadya Dima!” the boy would shout. And the phone would go dead.
After a few times, he called and simply said, “Hello.”
“Hello, Dyadya,” the boy had said.
Dima had paused. “Who?”
He could hear the boy’s breath come close to the phone. “I know it’s you, Dyadya,” Timofei whispered.
“Is your father at home?” Dima asked.
“Yes,” the boy whispered.
“Put him on the phone.”
“OK,” the boy whispered.
He sat there, feeling his rib cage jerk with the convulsions of his heart. Until the line went dead.
Still, the night he picked up the receiver and heard no tone he panicked. He tore out to the hallway, knocked at his neighbors’ doors. At each, he heard footsteps, saw dark spots where their shoes blocked the light, felt them peer at him through the small glassed hole, watched the light fill the crack of the door again, listened to their footsteps retreating. It was no different downstairs on the third floor at the Shopsins’.
Except that this time, when he saw the darkened patches beneath the door, he said, “Gennady!” The footsteps started away. “Do you still want the apartment?” They stopped. He heard them come back.
“Dmitry?” Gennady said, as if he hadn’t already known. “Are you . . . ? Is she . . . ?”
“Can I use your phone?” Dima said.
“Is your mother . . . ?”
“I need to use your phone.”
“To call the ambulance?” His voice sounded tight as Dima’s.
“Yes,” Dima said.
The clack of the bolt, the rattle of the chain.
Inside, the apartment seemed so full, the walls so covered, the rooms so cozy with furniture, the light of the lamps so warm, the whole place so much a home, that, following Gennady into the living room, Dima almost wished it was true, about his mother, if only so he could sit in the room and Gennady would bring him a glass of vodka and put on the tea, and he could lie down on the couch and lay his head on the cushion where Gennady’s wife was sitting and nobody would tell him he couldn’t. But she was already standing, smoothing her skirt, saying to Gennady, “Oh, now you’re letting in the building’s bum?”
“Masha!” Gennady tried to hush her.
“Why don’t you ask him to bring his fucking rooster?”
“It’s his mother.” Gennady handed Dima the phone as he whispered to his wife. “She’s dying.”
They watched him dial. Four long rings. Someone picked up and he started to speak and whoever it was put their receiver down.
“They aren’t there?” Dima heard Gennady say in one ear. In his other: the dial tone.
“What kind of a city do we live in?” Gennady was nearly shouting. “The ambulance—”
“Yes,” Dima said to the dial tone. “I need an ambulance. My mother.” He felt his eyes swell and knew he would cry if he didn’t stop.
Gennady stared at him.
Into the phone, Dima whispered, “What if she was, Yarik?”
“What?” Gennady said. And then, coming close to Dima: “Three-eight-one-seven Avtovskaya Street, apartment number—” Dima hung up the phone. “You didn’t tell them . . .”
“What are you worried about?” Dima said. “You don’t want them to save her.”
He was halfway to the door when he heard Gennady’s wife shout, “Who did you call?”
Then there were footsteps thudding and Dima’s arm was yanked backward and there was Gennady’s face, furious. “She’s not dying at all,” Gennady said.
“No,” Dima told him.
“Who did you call?” the man’s wife shouted.
“Listen, you bum,” Gennady said. “You fucking tramp. I should have climbed up to that fucking balcony months ago . . .”
“Who did you call?” his wife shouted.
“. . . and tore the head off that fucking rooster. If we didn’t have a deal . . .”
“Who—” his wife began again.
But Dima shouted back at her over the man’s head, “The same person I’m going to call from here when I come back tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Gennady said. He breathed the word like he was clearing his lungs for all the worse words coming. “Oh,” he breathed. “I’m going to fucking teach you a—”
“Or”—Dima jerked out of the man’s grip—“when my mother does die, you sonofabitch, I won’t sell you a single knob off a single door.”
Back upstairs, he shut that door behind him and stood with his fingers still on that knob, looking at what he had done to his mother’s place. The coatrack was gone, the bench beneath it gone. There were only the nails he’d banged into the hallway wall, the two coats hanging. In the kitchen: a greasy square on the wall where the stove had been before he’d sold it. The living room was carpetless but for the rugs hung over the windows. They were still rolled, mirror-light spreading over the emptiness: the bare sockets, their covers unscrewed and bartered; the broom leaning alone in the corner; the clothes his mother had stitched up piled on the floor. She was still working at the old foot-powered machine.
“Mama,” he said.
She glanced at him, then back at her work, as if she didn’t know he had been gone.
He watched her pick a skirt from the pile of ones he had reopened. Carefully, she squeezed its waist together, slid the two parts beneath the metal foot, lowered the needle, began to sew it closed again.
He rushed to her, then, yanked the skirt out of the machine, the thread stringing out with it and, grabbing his mother by her arms, dragged her up out of the chair and shouted into her close face, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?”
Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth. “Who are you?” she screamed.
“Mama—”
“Who are you?”
His fingers slid off her arms and she jerked as if she meant to flee him, but he wrapped himself around her, pulled her to his chest, said into her hair, “It’s Dima, Mama. It’s Dima, it’s OK.”
He could feel the wetness of her mouth coming through his shirt. He held her tighter. Against his chest, she said something and he pulled away, looked down at her.
“Yarik?” she asked him.
“No,” he told her. “I’m Dima.”
“Where’s Yarik?”
“He’s at work.”
“He should be home by now.”
“Yes,” he said.
“He comes home and I make him cabbage soup and we listen to ‘Ochi chyornye.’”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m home now, Mama. OK?” He held her face in his palm and kissed her forehead and said, “I’m home, Mama.”
Around her eyes the skin was still red from her fright, but her eyes were calm. He watched them fill with something like happiness.
“Good evening, lyubimy,” she said to him.
“Good evening, Mama,” he said.
She sat back down at her machine, shook her head at the mess of the thread. She found her scissors and cut it and threaded the needle again and put the skirt back under the foot and began to sew. All the time he watched her. When the chattering of the needle had settled into its rhythm, he sank beside her, sat on the floor next to her chair, put his head in her lap, and could almost hear her ask, the way she used to when he was a boy, What happened? Beneath his head, her thigh rose and fell. Then stopped. He looked up at her. She was looking down at him. Her fingers stroked his hair.
“How was work?” she said.
She never left the flat. Had not for nearly six months now.
“Mama,” he would ask her, “why don’t you come with me to work today?”
They would be out on the balcony, Dima brushing away last night’s ashes with his boot, his mother cocooned in the blanket he’d wrapped around her against the cold. “I have too much to do,” she would tell him, or, “I’d just be in your way,” or her hand would simply shove free of the blanket and grip the railing as if she thought he’d try to ta
ke her outside by force.
Once, he had. Carrying her down the stairs—back cramping, thighs shaking—and out onto the sidewalk. His arm around her shoulders, her arms hitched stiffly at her sides, they had watched the people pass.
“Why is everyone in such a rush?” she’d said.
He’d shrugged, asked her if she wanted to ride the trolley with them. She looked at him like he’d gone mad.
Sometimes he worried that she was. That the affliction from their father’s death so many years ago, the derangement that had taken her from them for that long year when he and Yarik turned ten, was coming back.
The day her husband died, she had been at work. A secretary at the army base on the outskirts of the city—typing letters, scheduling meetings, making the country stronger in a thousand tiny ways: each envelope she sealed, each call she made, each movement part of the Party machine. How she had loved it. And how hard it must have been to know her husband couldn’t, to understand the man she’d married had become a fisherman who brought home no fish, who spent his days alone on the ice, doing nothing, that the fact that she still loved him could bring her such shame. Such resentment. She had stopped asking her husband to come with her to community cinema nights at the base, went to dinners with officers alone, worked late solely so he would get home from his day doing nothing and find her still gone. The way she did the night she returned to his drowned body instead.
Climbing the last stairs, hearing the voices behind her apartment door, opening it onto a crowd of turning faces, she must have known some tragedy lay in wait, must have wondered, for a moment, worse than any other, Who?
They had lain the body out, wrapped it in towels soaked through and clinging to the shape of her husband’s corpse. Beneath, the kitchen table buckled with lakewater weight. The floor gleamed from a mopping. She would have seen her husband’s brother standing with the mop head in his hands. He was wringing it. In the light from the overhead bulb, the water was a sheen on his forearms. She would have seen her small sons, sitting on chairs, their eyes at the height of the crowd’s hanging hands, their bandaged feet before them. She would have seen the place where the towel had slipped and fallen away: a small spot, no bigger than the palm of her hand, a hole so black it would have seemed as if the towels encased nothing more than an emptiness inside, until, slowly, she made out the pitch-black strands of his wet hair.
Dima could still remember the look on her face. Because, for the next weeks, it had refused to leave—lived on in her eyes, endured in the set of her mouth, abided even in the way she breathed—while all around it the rest of her face changed.
She went to bed that night and did not get out of it on her own again. Not to go to the funeral. Not to march from the old country church to the hole in the earth of the kolkhoz. She did not hear the goat-skin volynka play the funeral march, see the coffin carried past the neighboring farms. She did not hold her children while the casket was closed. She did not go to them that night when their uncle brought them home. In the morning, she did not go to work. She did not cook them breakfast, or pack them lunch, or make them supper after school. She did not ask them how their day had been. She did not speak. By the time the sanitarium sent its grim-eyed men, her hair had gone white, her skin shrunken on the bones of her face, her lips shriveled as if she’d aged a decade.
And Dima, not yet ten years old, nearly two dozen years ago, long before he ever imagined losing his brother, hadn’t been able to understand. Now, watching a different kind of hole opening in her, Dima knew something he couldn’t understand was happening again. More and more she was becoming like she’d been then: her refusal to ever leave the house, the times she seemed unable to even acknowledge him, even the manic sewing. One day, he took her machine away. The ceaseless chatter of the needle, the steady pumping of her foot; the way she went to it first thing in the morning, tying her robe around her; the way she was still there when he got back at night: it was all too close to how he remembered her, to the sanitarium from so many years ago, to the faint shaking he could still feel in the air amid the ceaseless stabbings of the workroom machines when he and Yarik would walk hand in hand down the hall to visit her in that small gray room with its drab padded walls, the black-barred windows, their mother motionless on the hard bed.
The first time he came home and found her with the box, he thought she was going to be all right. Thought it might even be useful, almost as if she were making a gift for him. Of course, it was really for the rooster. He leaned against the doorjamb and watched the two of them.
It was autumn, the coldest day yet, and his mother had brought Ivan in from the balcony, tied him to the hissing heater. On the floor, beside where she knelt, she had placed a box of soggy crackers, and while she worked she would pinch some of the meal, roll it into a ball, toss it to the Golden Phoenix. It would peck it off the rug, cluck at her. She would cluck back. She did remarkable imitations of its sounds. She did it, he could tell, almost without knowing. All her attention was on the box.
A big cardboard box, overturned and empty of all but what she had put in it: a thin brown blanket folded to make a floor, a pillow from the long-gone couch become a bed. With her heron scissors she had cut a doorway in one side and a window in the other. Beside the entrance, she had written the word ZHUVOV, as if the rooster deserved their surname now that it would sleep inside their home. Which, that night, it did.
But when Dima came home the next day, she was working on the box again, lining its inside walls with gray-green wool cut from her old army secretary’s coat. He had tried to pretend it could have been any color, tried to pretend the skin beneath his beard, around his jaw, over his throat, wasn’t tightening.
That night Ivan ripped the lining apart and all the next day she had to reinstall it, and he had been able to go on pretending. But the next morning he saw what she’d drawn with marker on the pillow: black outlines of a turned-down sheet, of two small pillows at the head. And that night he came home to her constructing bars. They were black bobby pins that she had shoved into the cardboard windowsill. He watched her put the last ones in place. Then he knelt down and slowly, silently, pulled each back out.
It was the end of October when their mother began refusing to get out of bed. The first morning Dima let her be, brought her eggs boiled over the balcony fire, sat at the foot of the mattress, eating from his own plate while she picked at hers. But when he came back at the end of the day, she was still there, sitting on the pillows the way he’d propped her up ten hours before, everything about her seeming asleep except her open eyes. All the next day he stayed home, trying to coax her onto her feet. He moved the kitchen table to the living room, in view of her doorway, poured glasses of steaming tea, set out plates of blini straight from the pan, each pancake filled with the last of the cheese. He sat there oohing and ahing over the smell, urging her to come try the way the wood smoke made the dumplings taste even better than the ones she used to make. “You don’t believe me?” he said. She leaned over the bedside and spat.
He brought the rooster to the edge of her room, stood there stroking the soft feathers of its chest.
“Bring him to me,” his mother said, scooping the air with her arm.
Instead, Dima turned and took the Golden Phoenix out of sight, stood just to the side of her door talking loud enough she couldn’t help but hear. “I don’t know why, Ivan,” he said. “Maybe she just doesn’t like you anymore.”
By that night he had begun to worry something was wrong with her legs. When he pulled the covers off, her whole body—so small! so shrunken!—tightened at the cold, her hands flapping for her nightgown’s hem. He wrapped his fingers around her feet, began to feel her bones.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Does this hurt?” He moved up to her ankles.
But she only repeated it—“What are you doing?”—more and more anxiously as, searching for something knotted or bruised, he probed the sagging muscles of her calves.
“Do
you want to go to the hospital?” He said it as a threat. “Do you want to be locked in a room?” His hands working up the brittle bar of her shin. “Do you remember what that’s like? Hm? Mama?”
All the while, her saying, over and over, “Chto ti delaesh?” until his fingers found the hollows around her knees and her hands flew from her nightgown, grabbed at his, and she cried out, “What are you doing, Dima?”
“Trying to see if you can stand!” he cried back.
And, just like that, the panic left her eyes. Her body relaxed. Her hands left his. He let go of her knees and watched as she slid out of bed and put her bare feet on the floor and stood. She smiled, as if she expected him to be pleased. Then she climbed back in the bed and reached down, drew up the cover, lay there again.
And again, the next morning, she refused to get out of bed.
“All right,” he told her. “OK.”
When he came back into her room he had thrown his winter coat over blue coveralls. He wore the yellow hard hat for the first time in half a year.
By the time the autobus came she had quit struggling, gone limp in his arms where he sat at the stop with her held on his lap, and by the time he was carrying her up the steps towards the driver, she had quit shouting at him, too. The sky was a heavy stillness of clouds dark and full as insects too gorged to move, and they rode beneath it, through the cacophony of shouts and horns, along streets kaleidoscoped with the colors of all the new cars roiling among the furious currents of the crowds, his mother’s eyes growing wider and wider, her face more and more slack. Until, nearing the outskirts of Petroplavilsk, her face started to contract. He watched her brow bunch, followed her stare. And realized this was the first time that she’d seen it.
Out over the Oranzheria it had started to hail. As far as he could see, the pebbles of ice hit the glass, bounced, leapt. From that distance it looked like there was a line in the air a couple stories up from the ground where the hail decided to stop and dance.
He leaned towards his mother. “It’s a greenhouse,” he told her, close to her ear. “The largest in the world.”