by Josh Weil
Then the hail swept towards the bus and the bus met it and there was a thundering on the metal roof so loud that, even bent so his cheek was next to hers, he couldn’t hear what his mother said.
“What?” he shouted.
“Are we going there?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that where you work?”
“It’s where Yarik works.”
“Are we going to see Yarik?”
In the first quiet after they had gotten on the bus, after she had stopped struggling and he could sink back against the seat, he had let himself imagine maybe they would: Yarik would hear of them, or see them in the bus’s window, or would just know. But it wouldn’t matter; he wouldn’t come. “No,” Dima told his mother. She looked at him as if he had not answered anything, and he shouted, “Not Yarik.”
The last word cracked loud over the suddenly quiet inside of the bus, the banging of the hail gone abruptly as it had started. In its place there was the distant muffled remnants of its thunder. Through the bus window, he could see the hail bouncing off the panes of glass above.
When he pulled the bell cord the driver glanced in his rearview, then kept driving, as if he had misheard. Dima tugged the cord again. As the bus slowed, he could feel all the laborers on it looking at him. The whole ride he’d been worried one of them would say something, come over, make a scene that would get his mother shouting again. Maybe it was because of her that they hadn’t. Maybe it was the way his face in the last months had almost disappeared beneath his beard. But now one of the men in the seat behind them leaned forward.
“Where you trying to go, man?” he said, as if the one destination it couldn’t be was the place where Dima had asked to stop.
When the bus pulled away, they stood looking through its dust across the road to what remained of the sanitarium. He hadn’t expected much to be left—maybe the outlines of its foundation, maybe the two old lampposts that had stood sentry at the road, maybe nothing more than the feeling of the place hovering over a new-turned field. But there it was. Or at least the lower half of it. The entire cloister had been truncated five meters up. The top of the bell tower had been shaved off, the belly of the glass sky nearly brushing the old slate. At the corners of the garden wall, the turrets rose towards the sealed-off sky, their gray stone ending abruptly as the barrel of a gun. The building itself had been relieved of its entire roof, the whole second story gone. The old oaks that lined the drive had been de-canopied, flat-topped as a hedge.
And yet, they were still there. Ivy still crawled the walls. The tall windows had been freed of bars, but they still gazed out on the grounds as solemnly. There was a new coat of paint on the big double doors, but they were still black, still sat atop the wide stone steps, and Dima wondered how it would all affect his mother. After all, that was why he’d brought her. She who had not been back since her release two decades ago, who would not even pass by it to visit their father’s grave, not even to see Dyadya Avya before he died. If anything could pull her mind away from where it seemed determined to go, it must be this.
She stood in the glass-muffled drumming of the hail, staring at it. On her face there was a faint film of dust from the autobus. She touched her fingers to the hollow of her old neck, left a small muddy smear. He was about to reach out, to steady her, when she took a step forward and started across the road. There, where the wall broke to let the driveway through, he could see the new sign: SPACE REGATTA CONSORTIUM, PETROPLAVILSK HEADQUARTERS, MANAGERIAL OFFICES OF THE ORANZHERIA DIVISION.
“Ma’am?” the guard said, stepping out to meet her.
“I’m going, I’m going.” She brushed his hand off her shoulder, said, “I can find it myself,” and kept on.
“It’s OK?” Dima said, drawing up to the guard. He meant it as a statement but it came out a question.
“She can’t go in there,” the guard said.
“Look at her,” Dima told him. She was walking faster than he’d seen her move all year.
“What sector do you work in?” the guard asked him.
“She’s my mother.”
“Why is she here?”
“She has to use the restroom.”
“No, why did you get off here?”
“She’s going to have an accident.” Dima started after her. “We’ll be right out.”
He had to jog to reach her before she got to the steps. Helping her up them, he asked, “Are you going to be OK, Mama?”
“I know my way,” she told him. “I wouldn’t forget it in a million years.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine,” she said with the same irritation that the guard had stirred in her.
But, inside, Dima wasn’t. At first he thought it was the stares: the foyer boomed with the footsteps of all the men and women crossing, heels clacking, doors whacking open, smacking shut. They threw glances at the big-bearded laborer, the old lady sweating beside him in her coat, at others rushing by as if to see if they would say something. Nobody did. Where there had been the nurses’ desk vending machines now stood, the old green walls repainted yellow, hung with huge pictures—blowups of the zerkala line, Banner 1 to 1.5 all the way up to the 8 series satellites they were launching now—but it was the light in the place that felt most strange. Dima’s neck craned back. Panes of pellucid glass. The frenzied battering of hail. There was no ceiling but the same that roofed the open fields outside.
When he looked down again, his mother was shuffling away through the rush around her. The hallway she entered was less crowded; he could feel the space opening around him as he followed her, as if he were growing smaller with each step. The wood floor was the same worn wood. The shoe racks outside the rooms the same brass racks. In the vast workspace the long tables of sewing machines were gone as the inmates who had worked at them all day, a maze of cubicles in their place, and as he went on behind her down the hall, he could hear the ceaseless chattering of keyboards, the paper whispering like cloth.
She stopped, turned, tried the handle of a door. Through the gap it opened, she disappeared. In the moment before he followed her inside, he reached for his brother’s hand. His fingers floated in the empty air. Then he closed them and buried them inside his coat pocket and, with his other hand, shut the door behind him.
At the sound, she looked at him. “Where is everything?” she said. “Where has it all gone?”
In his pocket, his hand squeezed on itself.
It was an office, now. Cabinets where there had been a dresser. Desk where there had been a bed. Glass teacup on the blotter, emptied of all but the wet leaves clinging to its bottom.
“They would have changed things,” he told her. “After you left.”
She stood with her hand on the back of the desk chair, her wrist bent with her weight, her eyes showing the despair he’d feared.
Inside his coat pocket, his fingernails dug at his palm.
“Did you think you could come back?” he asked her. “Mama, is that what you want? To come back here?”
Her eyes told him.
“You can’t,” he said. “Even if you want to. Even if you want to so badly that all your hair turns black again. Even if you lie in bed for a year. You can’t.”
Slowly, carefully, walking both hands down to the arm of the chair, she lowered herself into it. “Why did I ever leave?”
“You got better,” he told her.
But she only said, again, “Why did I leave?” and he could see in her face that she meant not what had allowed her to, but what had forced her to, what had pulled her back out of the safety of this place where she had once lived.
He took his fist out of his pocket, held it in his other. “Us,” he told her. “Mama, you left for us.”
Behind her was the desk, and behind the desk, the window. Its blinds were drawn. The only light in the room came from above, down through the ceiling, down through the pane of glass, faintly shaking to the rhythm of the hail.
And the hail spi
lled down, a ceaseless clattering of pearls stripped off a broken string wrapped round and round the welkin neck, each one a whisper through the clouds, a multitude of last prayers mouthed, until the final stone slipped off the necklace end and down the breast of heaven and left the clouds all hushed. Such a heavy bank of them up there, thick, dark, unblown by any breeze. It covered all the city, the lake, the sea of glass. Above it, the sky grew dim, the stars swarmed, the mirrors rose.
But below, no one could see them. That night the city was bedimmed nearly to darkness again, the zerkala mere inklings, more felt than visible, as if—like the frogs who used their over-melatonined glow of belly skin as an insect lure; like the evergreens that, burned by unsensed winter, resprouted side-buds—the denizens of Petroplavilsk had grown another sense innate as knowing when someone’s eyes were turned on them. And that morning the sun stayed just as hid. The sky’s blanket smothered it. All day the world seemed unable to climb out of the grayness preceding dawn. Out in the Oranzheria, the workers mumbled gratitude for the respite, rolled down their sleeves, splashed faces in irrigation water that already felt a little cooler. Even the crops sensed the shift, their leaves a little stiffer, their stalks enlivened with a freshness plants used to feel at the end of night. But by afternoon, their rustling seemed restive. The workers felt the cooling prickle their necks. Through its glass skin the Oranzheria slowly leaked its heat, the hail from the day before melting into a pool one centimeter deep and five thousand hectares wide, floating up in the sky, and beneath it the world was murky as the underwater world it had become, and no sun evaporated the pool, and that evening the sleet began to fall. It sheeted down in one incessant torrent, switching all night between a storm of ice and a flood of rain, and by the morning the collection tanks were creaking at capacity, the water ducts were overspilling, the gutters between the panels of glass mucked motionless with slush. Through it all, the glass clearers moved with plastic-edged shovels and rubber-tipped scrapers and wide push brooms, thousands of them side by side in lines like the peasant harvesters who, sickles synchronized, once filled fields centuries ago. But as fast as they cleared it, the sleet filled in their tracks.
And that was how it was till night. The shift changed, the weather kept on. The clouds remained. Above them, the mirrors ran their tracks through the stars, and the stars shone as they ever showed, and the new moon looked down with its dark face on the impenetrable blanket of clouds, and the next day it was the same. That switch, the zerkala shift didn’t go home. Some went down from the glass to do the jobs they had been hired for, and some of the incoming workers went up to help those who had labored twelve hours trying to keep the ceiling clear, who stayed up there now to work a thirteenth, a fourteenth, on into the day. Up on the glass it was cold and wet, slippery work. Some of the laborers twisted ankles, slammed down on elbows, sprained wrists. With sleeves soaked, chests splashed, they worked on, even as their heads grew foggy, their eyes began to ache, their joints whispered through their marrow warnings of coming colds. Down below the glass, in the dimness that had persisted now for days, in the chill slowly seeping in to replace the leached-out warmth, the laborers heard harbingers of a different sort. They came in a language only the plants and animals seemed to understand: the long leaves of the mammoth corn began to curl; the wheat to slump, whole fields synchronized in the slow-motion act of falling over; seedlings in the midst of sprouting stopped, stayed half-hidden in soil cracks, paused like small animals trying to sense if it was safe to come out. The actual animals seemed to say no. The laborers could hear it in the sound of summer suddenly dwindling off: the crickets that sawed beneath the glass all year ceased. What the grown fields lost in sound, the new-plowed soil made up in movement: it writhed with all the worms that usually stayed buried beneath the sun-heated crust, that only came up after irrigation, but now rose out of the earth all at once. The birds that should have fallen upon them were too frenzied to notice, or at least to land: in the last hours they had decided—warblers, wagtails, whaups, all the ones that used to migrate and no longer did—that the time had come to start again, and from all across the thousands of hectares they came, flying south, a second cloud even more roiling than the sleet-shedding bank above, seething southward into the southern edge of the glass. There, the translucent wall shook with their thudding, the din of their panicked calls, the bodies piling up. All day the laborers worked in a frenzy near that of the birds, piling all the added jobs onto the ones they were meant to do, doing all their crack-voiced foremen told them to, and all the while struggling, even more than with the work, to keep an unfamiliar foreboding at bay.
Another shift switch, but there was no one to switch out. The Consortium sent word into the city. All those who could came: anyone who had worked on the glass before, who had been injured, who had been let go, some who had never even glimpsed the Oranzheria until that evening, teenagers cutting out early from school, dockworkers in the middle of sleep between their shifts, shop owners shutting their doors, people too old to go out in such weather. They flooded in under the glass or scrambled on top, joined the workers who had already been there a day and a night and a day and more, trying to outlast the clouds.
Towards dawn the sleet finally stopped. The laborers on the roof were too tired to cheer. They stood still, shovels and scrapers in their hands, looking up at the sky. Now they could hear the sounds going on in the world beneath their feet: the shouts of the foremen, the roar of the added machines; some felt the glass shiver at the thudding of the birds.
And as the clouds cleared the cold came. The youngest workers felt their smooth faces tauten, a chill on the surface of their eyes that they had never felt before, and remembered back to a winter when they were fourteen or thirteen or twelve and thought every few years it must happen like this. Most of the men and women with parents old enough to tell them stories of a cold snap come half a century before—Kosygin in the Kremlin, the Americans on the moon—felt their nostrils sting and their mustaches sharpen to pins and the small crackling whenever they blinked, and started to get scared. Those old enough to remember that day in 1969 themselves, when in a few short hours the tail end of fall pitched straight into a chasm of midwinter cold, dropped their tools, found the nearest hatch, got the hell off the glass.
The teenagers were right: every few years a cold front sprang on some fall night, drove the thermometer down fast enough to freeze drunks stumbling home after dark. And once a decade it even happened during the day. But only every half-century or so did the mercury plummet like this, like a nail slammed down by a hammer blow, so low that drivers, getting out to check unwilling engines, froze their hands to the metal fast as hood ornaments; one had lost three fingers trying to tear free; others didn’t and died with faces frozen to the grille. Geese fell from the sky, so frozen by the time they hit the ground that their legs simply shattered, small black icicles tipped with frozen bulbs of red, skittering down the frost-white streets. The lake ice set so fast that fishing nets froze halfway hauled up, water captured midseethe, carved by the last churns of fish. Some hundred boats were stranded. Half their crews died before they could think what to do, the other half set their crafts on fire. They stood around them close as they dared, the backs of their heads, necks, calves, freezing anyway. Some of the boats burned hot enough they melted through and sank. Some just burned out. A wide flat plain of ice, and way out on it all those scattered fires burning, and sometimes a tiny dark figure running for the shore, running, running, until it went still.
Of course, those were just stories. That’s what the managers and foremen shouted at the old people as they climbed off the glass and down into the warmer air inside the Oranzheria. In there, the ground crews didn’t know how cold it was getting outside. They had begun to celebrate. The ones who had just joined up that night were first, followed by the ones who had been working for almost thirty hours, who took with them the rest. Men kissing women workers; women dragging them to dance; others just collapsing, flopping down, sp
layed, as if to make a thousand angel shapes out of the soft plowed dirt.
The ground-level managers tried to get them back to work, but even some of the foremen shouted that their crews deserved a few minutes’ rest. And that was before the workers from up on the glass started pouring down. The glass-level managers had passed out vodka to their foremen for keeping their teams’ bellies warm, and when the sleet had stopped and clouds had started breaking, some of the foremen had unscrewed the tops, handed their bottles around. Some of the crews had refused to give them back, and the foremen who had hung on to theirs were mobbed by men and women half-dead with exhaustion and fevered with relief. For a few moments the ground seemed a mirror of what was happening above—two festivals wild with the same roistering crowd—and then the word went around atop the glass, the stories the old people knew, and suddenly it seemed even colder, and they broke into a stampede for the ladders and stairs and any way down. And as they poured in off the glass, unzipping parkas, flinging off hats, diving in to join the thousands below, the two plains of people met with a sound louder than all the rumbles of all the machines, their voices filling the Oranzheria with a single roar.
That was what brought Dima to a stop. Through the quiet of the buffering woods—no traffic, still trees, Dima standing in the middle of the street—the noise from up ahead surged like floodwater down the funnel of the road. A riot? Some kind of mob? He wondered, again, whether he should have come at all.
That morning he had woken to a pounding on his apartment door: Gennady bringing him the news; he was going to try to drive out to the Oranzheria, did Dima want to come along? Just for the night, the man had said. They’re desperate. They’ll take anyone. Dima shook his head, told him thanks, meant to shut the door. But he couldn’t. When was the last time someone had visited him? When was the last time he had visited someone? Gennady stood peering at him, atwitch with urgency, shaking his car keys in his hand. Do you want to come in? Dima asked. The jangling stopped. The man stared. Then turned and was gone, his footsteps fading.