by Josh Weil
Back inside, Dima pulled an unrolled carpet open a crack. Outside the window, it was still strangely nightlike, dark as he had seen it since the mirrors had gone up. The sleet still hammered at the pane. His own voice said it then—Just for the night—and even as he shook his head, his mind was calculating the pay for one twelve-hour shift. He let the rug slap closed, went back to his room, got back in bed. They’ll take anyone. If he worked one night would they offer to keep him on? Would they let him work in his brother’s section? Eat his lunch in Yarik’s office? Would Yarik sometimes bring his tea out to sit in the grass with him? He tried to sleep.
Sometime later the battering at the windows stopped. Through the small holes in the kovyor, a faint gray light spiked across the room, landed on his blanket and seemed to go right through, to touch his skin like the tips of icicles. His face felt just as cold. Shucking the blanket, he rose into a wall of frigid air. He could not see through the window; it was opaque with ice. He thought of Gennady’s hand, shaking—they’re desperate—the man standing in the hallway in the middle of the night, about to drive out in the middle of a storm. Everyone who worked on the Oranzheria, Dima realized, must have gone out there, too. Everyone. Rattle, rattle, rattle, went the keys.
He dressed in every warm thing he had: two pairs of long underwear, two of wool socks, a pair of wool army pants, and then a second pair, a turtleneck shirt, a high-collared sweater, and a low collared one on top of that. His legs rubbed at each other when he shambled to his bed, yanked all the blankets off, and dragged them into his mother’s room. He lay them over the pile already on her sleeping lump. Then he went out to the foyer to get her a hat. On his way back, he heard the rattling again, louder, closer: there at his feet, Ivan’s box shook. He crouched down. Inside: a pile of gold feathers shivering. He put on his mother’s shapka, grabbed her heavy coat off its hook, and carried it and the box back to her room. She slept on, even as he nestled the fur hat over her head, as he opened her drawer and took out her sweaters, even as he wrestled them one after the other onto the bird, and stuffed the bird back in the box, and draped the coat over it, and went out and shut the door.
In the hallway, he struggled into his old Oranzheria rain-suit. The waterproof pants barely fit over his padded legs, the windproof jacket over his long wool coat. He wrapped a scarf around his neck and zipped the jacket up and wrapped another over his face and shoved a wool hat down on his head, added a second, lifted his hard hat off the hook it hung on, took the utility goggles out from under it, put those on, too. He had just sat down to pull on his boots when he thought he heard his mother. He stilled, listened. Nothing. Nor from outside: no bus rumble, no clatter of trams, not even the sound of a single car. He sat there thinking. Then he got up, grabbed his rucksack, threw his boots in, zipped it shut, and stepped to the hook beside the hard hat. There, his old ice skates dangled by their laces. He slid them off.
That dawn, he skated the streets of the city, their slush-stuccoed macadam frozen to a glaze, the avenues and boulevards become canals, their icy backs beginning to reflect the brightening of the sky. Through the thinning clouds the last of the mirrors glowed like ship lights in a fog. He passed parked cars hunkered under shells of ice; a square-nosed little Lada stranded in the street, its cab light on and door open and driver disappeared; a gas tanker jackknifed across the road. He swooped around it. In the middle of the avenues, trolleys sat their tracks, some with their windows still aglow, too opaque with ice to see anything but the stillness inside. The tracks were varnished with flash-frozen sleet, the wires above them glassy, sagging; some had snapped, and around the city their sparking lit up pieces of Petroplavilsk like signal flares. He skated north, the rough ice rattling his shins, his spine shaking, but the speed smoothing it out as he hurtled towards the edge of town, a dark bundled shape, scarf whipping behind him with his wind.
Now, stopped, his breath steaming from his wool-wrapped mouth, he stood watching the clouds clear over the Oranzheria. They were dark and thick as a forest floating above where one once stood, heavy as if filled with the souls of all the woods sawed down to make way for the glass, the barns razed, the bulldozed izbas, the dust risen up from all their falling, boiling away, blowing westward, as if in that direction their passage to heaven lay, and beneath them the glass reflected the boiling back, blanched with the brightening sky, the city’s second horizon thickened with ice so it seemed the two halves of the world had slipped a little farther apart. He unzipped his rucksack, switched his skates for boots. And maybe it was the slowness of his feet, their drag on his speed-accustomed bones, the coming down of his muscles from their flirtation with flight. It might have been the thunder of all the voices trapped inside the glass, the way it burst upon him when he entered the Oranzheria. The heat of them, the thousands of bodies, his face beading with sudden sweat. Maybe it was their milling, the whole crowd riled, the riling building towards a burst, the chants of No! No!, yelling he caught coming through it in shards: Go up? Shovel clear? In cold like this? In just our coats? Or maybe it was simply the bodies of the birds, that his first thought was of all the meat, that he should stuff his pockets full; or that his second was of Ivan swaddled in his mother’s sweaters, buried beneath her coat; or that his third was this: he wished one of those glass-smacking birds had managed to crash through, that others had followed, all along the half a hundred kilometers of the southward wall, first cracks and chips and a few shards falling and then the whole thing bursting, a thousand birds of every color exploding outward, their wings flashing in first sunlight, all around them flecks of glass flickering through the air.
Because the sun was up. All along the eastern horizon it had split the clouds. From inside the Oranzheria the ceiling was wavery beneath its coat of roseatted ice, and as the color filtered down it dissipated like blood in water, blushing the tops of the walls, the whites on the still-circling birds, barely a breath of pink on the rungs of the winding stairs, dissolved to nothing by the time it reached the throng in tumult below, reached Dima’s face tilted up and gazing. He climbed into it, out of the noise, out of the anger, the redness rising on him as he rose towards the glass.
At first the quieting was so slight that those who stood around the ones gone silent didn’t even notice. But gradually others went silent, too. The ones still shouting heard their own voices in their ears, and paused. A lull. Strange quietude. Here, a man with his neck craned back, easing a hard hat from his head, his Adam’s apple shifting. Here, a woman, her eyes rolled upward, lips drifting apart. A manager unbuttoning the collar at his throat. A cluster of foremen pointing. A thousand faces peering up.
Up there, on the ice-sheened surface of the glass, someone was skating. They could see the dark lines his blades made. Two pen tips inscribing long arcs in the ceiling, curves and curls and loops, as if some giant of the old fables—some Koshchei or Norka—had reached down to scrawl his sign into the man-made sky. It was a rippled sky now, warped as old window glass, and the ice on it obscured the clouds into just the idea of clouds, shifting and floating, more color than shape, and through them floated the dark shape of the skater. At times the sunlight hit his tracks and they flared brilliant behind him. At times it hit him and he lit up fulvous, his clothes turned tawny, the fuzz of his wool scarf and hat seeming for a moment to glow. There he swirls, catching the sun’s gold, the lines of his skates unfurling around him like the long sickle feathers of some fairy-tale bird.
What must it have been like to clamber up and join him? What must it have felt like to rush for the stairs, to pound up them with all the pounding feet of all the others, to push open the ceiling hatches and burst up into the cold and light in such a gusting of steam? And to watch the others bursting up all over the glass, a plain of geysers as far as you could see? To feel the ceiling shake with all their weight? To launch into a slide, boot soles slipping, arms flung out, face red with whooping? What must it have looked like to the managers below? Were they furious or scared? Did a shiver run through them a
s they stood in the darkling shade of the roiling shadows thrown down by all those madly cavorting souls?
One whole sector went. Simply caved in. There were the frolicking revelers, the jubilant crowd, the swirl in its center that all at once stopped. A first few gone still. And the stillness spreading to those around them, struck faces passing mute understanding, rippling fear, a wave of horror that in one panicked rush came crashing down on the surface of the great glass sea. There came a crack like bedrock splitting in a quake. Then the screams.
Watching at home on their televisions, or on the screens in the displays at the Universitetsky Rynok, standing frozen on the street, staring through first-floor windows at strangers’ TVs, the people of Petroplavilsk heard the reporter say Oh no. A news station had sent a helicopter over the scene just as the glass collapsed, and all that day they showed the video: the stampeding thousands, the darkness blooming in their midst, sudden as a sinkhole, guttling them in, and then the whole surface going down. No, the reporter said, no!
Another station got footage from the ground—jags of glass jutting through bodies like monstrous teeth—and they played it over and over the next day and the next. But what most people watched had come earlier, captured in a shaking frame by one of the first who had climbed up: the fuming hatch, obscuring steam, a flash of metal, first glimpse of the skater on the glass, a gliding apparition so wrapped in layers and smothered in scarves and masked by goggles that it looked almost inhuman—except for its motion; there was something familiar in its ebulient glascading, in the near-weightlessness of its shape swooping by, that for those few minutes seemed to embody all that people felt they had lost.
That was what most people watched—leaning together over tables at supper, or alone in apartments silent but for the scrape of skates—and that was what everyone else blamed for what happened next.
The cold spike stabbed short and fast, left Petroplavilsk laid out under ice, palsied by downed power lines, but by the following day the weather had withdrawn, fast as it came, the city waking to a frigidity no worse than the common rawness of early winter. The sun returned, the streets were cleared, the buses began to run. And yet the laborers on the Oranzheria did not go back to work. The strike started with barely a hundred, a small crowd lining the road up to the greenhouse entrance, all stirred by something they couldn’t fully explain, didn’t understand any more than this: they didn’t want to go back in.
Some were still wearing bandages, others knew ones who had died, all had witnessed the crawling injured, helped drag out the too badly crushed, been given, on the day of the collapse, the rest of the day off. Buried in bed for more straight sleep than they had had in weeks, or curled beneath blankets with their wives, nothing more pressing than how to keep their children entertained, something had seeped into their bones: memories of a time when there had been two days off in a row, two again a week later; a time when there were only a bare few things to eat but their families had spent hours, whole evenings, cooking together, eating together late into the night; a time when apartments were crowded and cramped but all the doors were open to all the other apartments’ open doors; when there was always someone visiting or inviting a visitor in; when there were no ready-made cakes in the corner stores, but if you smelled a baking kulich, you knew that each family in every apartment on that floor would come together that night, sharing small slices, drinking tea from the samovar until one in the morning, or two, or three. . . .
And all along the southern wall of glass, the laborers inside paused, their shovels stuck in the heaps of dead birds. The workers on top of the Oranzheria quit the repairs they had begun, came to the edge instead, looked down. Some raised their hands in solidarity, some shouted calls of support; one reached up and—Did he know what he was doing? Was he only preparing to go back to work?—slipped his safety goggles on and pressed them to his face. Outside the Oranzheria, one of the strikers did the same. For a moment, the two looked at each other through their goggles and the looks on their faces said that if they hadn’t known what they were doing, they knew it now. One by one, the others up on the glass began lowering goggles over their eyes while, on the ground, as if in a reflection, worker after worker did the same. Outside, all in the crowd who had brought goggles put them on, the gathering thickening with those fresh off the buses, growing with others leaving the Oranzheria, workers leaking out like heat drawn to cold, until, by evening, the throng outside was over a thousand strong.
By the next day, it had tripled. They gathered down by the lake, overflowing the statue’s square, flooding out onto the esplanade, filling Kuibysheva Prospect, a legion of laborers bundled in winter parkas and knit hats, long wool coats and huge fur shapkas. The few who still owned ice skates hung them around their necks, blades flashing at their chests. Nearly everyone was wrapped in a scarf. And all who had a pair of safety goggles wore them; some brought a second pair for wives or children or strangers: thousands of be-goggled faces moving en masse up Onezhskoi Flotili Street towards the erstwhile parade grounds of Space Regata Square.
The goateed, stone-browed statue had long since been torn down. But even had it been there, there was no leader to scramble up the revolutionary’s back, cling to his pate, cry out above the crowd. Instead, the square reverberated with cacophonous voices in disarray. Over by the locked post office doors some stood atop the mail collection boxes, others clinging to the flagpole, a mob below shouting for better safety procedures, more time off. Amassed across the Kosha Bridge, another cluster bellowed about overtime pay. In the center of the crowd, around the bronze model of a space mirror that had replaced the disgraced Vladimir, the Communists gathered, chests stiff with medals, Red Army hats on their heads, a knot of old pensioners half-smothered in the moth-eaten, water-stained banner they unfurled. Power to the proletariat! they shouted, and shook the crimson cloth. Strength in our collective struggle! They raised it above their heads. Until a rabble of shaved-skulled goons waded in with boots and bottles and roars for a return of the tsar. Above it all the loudspeakers mounted on onetime lampposts blared out a voice boomed from some cavernous chest: The day has come! The day we’ve chosen! The day we choose to take back time! Each phrase followed by another voice howling affirmation: Fuck yes! Or Fucking right! Or Fucking zerkala! The big voice bellowed: What we must do! What we will do! And between the shouted slogans there thundered down long disquisitions on the senselessness of work, and between the disquisitions the lamppost speakers played a crackly recording:
I was once there: I drank of mead;
I saw the green oak by the sea;
I sat beneath it, while the cat,
that learned cat, told me his tales . . .
Someone had hacked the advertising screens that flickered from rooftops around the square, and in the place of glossy lips and silvery sedans there now loomed the image of a bearded man: perched on the plinth of Peter the Great, or flat on a rooftop pointing a pistol at the sky, or dancing across the Oranzheria on skates.
Among the multitudes below, the wondering ran like a thread through all the strike’s disparate swatches—the slight reciter’s frame, the skater’s thick-bundled body, the black beard that might be hidden beneath the scarf, the eyes behind the shooter’s goggles, whether the goggles were even the same—all waiting to see if someone would step forward, pick up the needle, draw tight the stitches, knot the thread.
But no one watched for him here, in the lobby of the old train station, standing in the ticket line, no goggles or scarf of padding beneath his coat, just his fingers worrying his knuckles, his teeth chewing at the beard hairs below his lip, his blue eyes trying to catch the cashier’s glance. On her window, a posting declared her break times, and as the clock ticked towards the next, the line began to thin—the customers behind him breaking away first, and then the ones in front—and remake itself before another window where another sheet signaled a new cashier would soon sit down. He stood in the ghost of the line, still the same half-dozen steps back, nobody befor
e him but the last customer complaining at the window, nobody behind him but the people giving him stares as they passed by. From outside, down Space Regata Prospect, the scending din of the demonstrations pressed through the lobby’s walls, pulsed in the air.
And then the customer was done and there was nothing but the ticket window glass between Dima and his sister-in-law. For a moment, Zinaida’s stare contained the shock of all that had happened since she’d last seen him. Then he stepped forward, and her face recovered the blank bored annoyance that was the mien of her profession. She looked away, pointed to the work-break sign, scribbled at some last bit of business, gathered up her papers, and left. He stared at the empty window. Around him people had begun to whisper. The roar of the distant protests washed up against their sound. In the slot where money and tickets were exchanged she’d left a scrap of paper. He turned it over. Track 1, go right, last door.
Near the end of the platform, Zinaida was waiting, her blond hair and her uniform and a cigarette’s smoke lit up in the half-open door. He’d never seen her smoke and thought the cigarette was to make her look like any cashier on break, but once she’d waved him inside and shut the door to the dim hallway she brought it to her lips and took a draw.
“Is he OK?” Dima said.
The smoke she exhaled shook.
“Was he hurt?”
And she reached out and pressed her palm against his cheek. “We didn’t know what to think,” she said.
“Was he there?” he asked her. “The collapse? Zina, was Yarik—”
“I came by the apartment,” she told him. “After I saw the news. We didn’t know, we didn’t have any way of knowing, we couldn’t tell if you were still up there when . . .”
“He came, too?”
She took her hand away.
“To Mama’s apartment?”