by Josh Weil
Then her dye-black fingers were in his beard. They inched into the rusty tangles, tugged a little, tilted his face up.
It was the first time in his near-forty years that he’d been kissed. Not the brush of his mother’s or his sister-in-law’s lips, but kissed. He had no idea that lips could be so soft. He had no idea a tongue could be so alive. He had no idea the breath released from someone else’s lungs would be such a different substance when unmixed with any outside air. He took it in.
When she was done, she pulled away, smiled down into his face, said, “So that’s what it’s like while you still have this crazy beard.” Then, without moving from his lap, she reached to the sink. It was piled with toiletries that seemed dumped from an upturned purse, but the scissors were large enough she found them by feel, so rusted that as she snipped through his tangled beard they squeaked. She seemed to get a kick out of the noise. Soon she was making it, too. Squeak, squeak, with each snip, until the hedge of hair was gone. Then, with a thunk, she put the scissors back, picked up a bar of soap, dunked it in a bucket full of filthy-looking water, and, still sitting on his lap, scrubbed Dima’s face into a cloud of charcoal foam. Which she proceeded to shave off. She didn’t seem to notice when the razor nicked him. She didn’t seem to care that the grayed soap, the cold water, dripped onto her as much as him. She didn’t even wipe his face before she kissed him. “And that,” she said, “is what it’s like without it.”
“Which is better?” he asked.
She shrugged. Then scooped a wet clump of beard hair off their laps and, holding handfuls to her cheeks, said, “You tell me,” and kissed him again.
In the center of the Oranzheria, at the edge of the woods that ran along the access line, they stood listening to the whisper of the others’ rail-boards disappearing down the tracks. Dima in his newly stolen suit beneath his old overcoat, his throat squeezed by a tie, his shaved chin cold, his shorn head strangely light beneath the knit of his same old hat. Beside him: Vika in her wig. A severe jaw-length wedge, it was black to match her brows. Her lipstick was the brightest thing in the shadows of the trees. She was bundled in the same man’s coat she’d worn since autumn; once inside the Oranzheria, she’d shuck it, Dima would strip away his winter wear, they would cross the fields to the old sanitarium, enter it as Slava and his wife.
Under the drifting man-made moons the top of the Oranzheria gleamed like a frozen sheet of lightning laid flat. As far as Dima could see to either side, the wide glass wall facing the access line was fogged with steam. Through it, Dima could make out the silhouettes of the strike breakers, whispy and wraithlike farther out in the fields, the shapes of heavy equipment lumbering and indistinct as deep-sea beasts. Between the clouded wall and where he stood with Vika beneath the trees, the earth was made of all the things the clearing crews had shoved outside the glass, the remains of old izbas, residue of villages, all grown over, filled in, a rutty landscape of scattered mounds.
They made their way onto it, into the mirror-light, eyes squinting, hunting the wall of steam for the nearest portal through which they’d enter, arm in arm. The ground was all holes hidden by shadows or shadows shaped like holes, and unaccustomed to her heels, Vika stumbled, snagged Dima’s coat sleeve, slipped her hand a little early around his arm. Beneath her fingers his bicep seemed more part of him; he was aware of the way it hardened when she gripped, waited through the relaxing of her fingers for the moment when she might tighten again.
Part of him was just as eager to get inside the Oranzheria, dump the bulky coat that bunched between them, sense her through nothing but his jacket sleeve; to feel again the way she’d looked at him when he’d tried on the suit, her teasing whistle belied by the glimmer of her eyes; to see her shift again into the woman who, mince-stepping through the wave-and-smile of a politician’s wife, had made him laugh, who, in her slim-fitted dress, had made him swallow. But the rest of him was scared. In there, he would have to be the politician, the salesman, Slava. In a suit and tie amid the farm fields? He’d been sent out to bolster the strike breakers’ morale. And how to get from there to headquarters? On the bus beside workers from whose ranks he’d risen, or some manager’s sedan they would flag down, or maybe they’d even comandeer a dump truck; a photo shoot, he’d tell the driver, just like Volodya, back in the woods, had told him. Back in the woods it had all seemed a whole lot better. Now, with each step nearer to the vast glass wall, it seemed a little worse.
Still, catching sight of the portal, what could he do but tilt his cold chin towards it, touch her fingers on his arm, tell her, “There’s the door.”
Then it was gone. The Oranzheria was gone. So was she.
So were the zerkala.
Dima stood in the sudden darkness, utterly still, staring up.
“What the fuck,” he heard her say.
Up there, the blackness was so deep Dima could feel his pupils open for it, feel it flood his eyes, a pool of night. Strewn with stars. The Great Bear. The Hydra. The Milky Way. The whole universe of them that he hadn’t seen in years.
“What the fuck,” she said again.
In the dark, even the forest behind him sounded different, as if the wind in the trees was the woods’ own exhalation of breath. From within the Oranzheria, behind its blacked-out wall, came the thickening quiet of the machines shutting down. Each vanished engine left another hole until all the darkness in front of Dima seemed shot through with the same silent shock. And then the crescendo of voices swelling to fill it.
Beside him, he could hear Vika rustling. Something heavy and soft dropped to the ground. The strange intimacy in listening blind, trying to read her sounds: a faint clicking, tiny metal tings, the whisper of cloth on skin—and then he knew it. As if struck clear, his eyes began to make her out. Paleness by paleness, her form emerged: she was standing next to him naked. Then she let out a whoop, and was off.
Beneath the moon’s bare sliver she gamboled across the overgrown junk mounds, reveling in the wash of darkness as if it were a cleansing rain, leaping and whirling, a ghostly dervish loosed upon the night. In the starlight he could see her breath. Beyond her, blips had begun to glow behind the blacked-out Oranzheria wall. The workers’ headlamps: a thousand fireflies floating in the fog of the glass. And atop it, as far as Dima could see, they blinked on, too, clear and bright as a distant city aglister with its lights, the way Petroplavilsk had once looked from out in the farmland at night.
Now he could hardly see it. Looking left down the chute of darkness that was the access line, towards where he knew Petroplavilsk must be, he caught a dim flush—the fog lights of the trams and cars, the few lamps people still kept in their homes. And from there a far-off murmur, less sound than a sense of emanating panic.
Then she was there. Close, shivering, pulling at his coat. “Let me in,” she said, her voice shuddering, pressing herself to him. He wrapped her in the wool flaps. She was so thin he could have rebuttoned his coat around them both, up the line of her back, but he simply held it shut, his arms around her. He could feel how cold her skin was through his suit, her legs clamped against his, her quivering ribs, the jut of her nipples just beneath his chest.
“What do you think happened?” he said.
They stared up, as if expecting any moment the mirrors to flash back on.
“Maybe the Consortium found out,” she said. “Decided to preempt our plan.”
“Why?”
“To deny us the moment.”
“And now?”He pulled the coat closer around her. “What do we do now?” He waited for her to look back at him. And when she didn’t, he said, “We weren’t really going to be able to, were we?” Her eyes found his. “Did you even really know,” he said, “where the control room was?”
“We could have found it.”
“And then?”
There was the glint of her smile. “What does it matter now?” she said. “What we do, what we might have . . .” A shiver shook her body and her hands rose from beneath his coat, foun
d his jaw, tilted his face back. “It is.” He could feel her voice on his throat. “Someone already did.” She leaned against his chest. “Dima”—he could feel his name in the movement of her cheek—“it’s done.”
He let his own cheek lower to a rest on the top of her head. A surprise to feel, instead of the fuzz of her shorn scalp, the long hair of the wig. And strange to sense their breathing slip into synch, her body swelling and ebbing alongside his. He imagined her mushroom tattoo riding the rise and fall of her belly. He could almost feel the touch of it. He watched all the lights moving in the Oranzheria’s mist.
“Come,” she said, and he thought, Where? but she was only pulling him down. They crouched together, a mound made of them, covered by his coat. “My calves were cold,” she told him.
Her shiver, his heat: maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed to him the wall of glass was already losing a little of its fog. In there the lights moved with an urgency that made the night around the two of them all the more still. “What do you think they’ll do?” he whispered.
She looked behind her at the workers, too. “That,” she said, “is what we do. Now that the deed—”
“The propaganda.”
She nodded. “That’s what we start tomorrow. Tonight. . .” His coat shifted with her turning back and he tried to catch her gaze, but it went past him, lost in the blackness of the woods behind. When her voice came again—“I wish we had firecrackers”—it sounded young as a girl’s. Or simply happy. He swore he could see the brightness in her eyes when they turned to him. “We should make a fire.”
He hated to shake his head: they’d be seen; someone would come.
But she was looking back at the woods. “In a month then,” she said. “On Korochun. If it’s still dark, we should go and . . .” She trailed off.
If it’s still dark.
Dima rested his cheek against the softness of her wig again. “When we were kids,” he told her, “we used to go with our uncle, out to the graveyard and light the fires to keep the dead warm. Dyadya Avya would kill a chicken. We’d roast it on a spit, and for each bite we took we’d toss some skin or bones or even meat down on the grave to keep him fed. When we were older, my brother and I used to bring whatever we could catch—a rabbit, a squirrel—and do the same.”
Her head shifted beneath his cheek, but she didn’t look away from the woods.
She said, “After my parents left, I made the fire with friends. We’d do it on the Kosha Road, just outside the city, at the crossroads with the old highway. When a car would come we’d hoot and howl and throw burning sticks at it. Sometimes, we’d line up between the fire and some truck’s headlights and dance the khorovod.”
He nodded. “We danced it, too. Did you used to tell the story? The old tired sun that shuts its eyes just for a second, lets night creep up and kill it?” He could see Dyadya Avya’s face bright with firelight, the sounds the old man made to dramatize night’s dark knife cutting out the flaming heart, the moaning of the dying sun shifting seamlessly into the crying of the newborn one: from winter’s womb it would come, return in spring aflame with vengeance, spend all summer hunting down the night.
“Sure,” she said. And he could feel her smile. “But mostly we just went off into the woods and fucked.”
Then her head was out from beneath his cheek. A strange sensation, her breath on his chin, as if his skin, covered so long by his beard, was learning again how to feel.
“But look!” she said.
The words were a puff of warm breath, and he jerked a little, peered at her.
“But look!” she said again.
Her face was turned to him, waiting for something, and he whispered, “At what?” In the faint moonlight, he couldn’t quite tell if her eyes rolled.
“The door,” she said. “It’s open?” She paused, waited. And then: “A footstep?”
He smiled. “A nimble footstep!” he said. “You’ve memorized it?”
Her laugh was the first nervousness from her he’d ever heard. “Are you kidding?” Her hands lay flat against his chest. She pressed them there a little more firmly. “But you have.”
The Khazar khan, Ratmir. Ruslan’s rival. Asleep inside a castle, lured there by a keep-full of maidens. “‘And through a silvery ray of moonlight,’” Dima said, “‘a girl darts. Now’s the time for dreams to spread their wings and fly!’”
“Really?” Vika said, all mock surprise, and, inside his coat, leaned into him.
“‘Wake up,’” he went on. “‘This is your night of nights!’”
“‘Uh-huh,’” she said.
“‘Yes, wake up—don’t waste precious moments!’” He couldn’t make out the sound she made through the sound of his own swallowing. But he felt her shake her head. She had placed her ear in the space between his neck and chest, as if trying to hear the vibrations of his throat: “‘The covers slid from off the bed; damp forelocks fringed his flaming temples.’” Her lips were on his throat. “‘The girl stood over him in silence . . .’”
Vika opened her mouth and closed her lips around his Adam’s apple. When she spoke he could feel the flutter of her tongue against it. “Go on,” she said.
“‘And on the bed where the khan lay . . .’”
“You skipped ahead,” she told his skin.
“I know,” he said.
“Good,” her tongue told him.
“‘She leant one knee . . .’”
“Like this?” Vika said, and she was on her knees between his bent ones.
“‘She breathed a sigh . . .’” He could feel her breath on the soft skin beneath his jaw. “‘. . . then bent her head down to him . . .’” Her hands slid up his chest, cupped his face, drew his own head down. “‘. . . trembling and unsteady . . .’”
“And?” her lips said.
“‘And with . . .’” He paused.
“With?” she said.
“‘. . . with a mute and hungry kiss . . .’” Her lips were almost touching, tracing the movement of his own. “‘. . . she cut his dream short—’” And he couldn’t keep from smiling at the stanza’s last two words: “‘Lucky man!’”
He felt her smile with him. “I’ll say,” she said.
But did she? She was kissing him so hard he was sure no sound could have escaped.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, her tongue writing the words on his, “but I can’t remember the last time I fucked someone beneath the stars.”
And he would have reached down, stopped her hands, but they were inside his coat, and his were outside, holding her, and when she slid her fingers between his legs, feeling him, he didn’t know what to do. Half his body tried to hunch away, and the other half of him turned it into an arc down to her, and he told himself it was to press her still, but her lips were pressing back on his and it was as if the pressure was released in the stroking of her hand, and for a moment he let her. Then he pulled his face away. He tried to focus on the stars.
“‘The valley around here was lonely,’” he said. “‘Secluded and engulfed in shade. Stillness . . .’” He reached down and held her arm. “‘Stillness.’” And she was, her hand, the whole of her, watching him. “‘Stillness had seemingly held sway there since the inception of the world.’” Still looking up at the stars, he asked her if she remembered that part of the poem.
“No,” she said.
“It’s the part where Ruslan finds the Khazar khan again. Finds Ratmir has given up the warrior life to live in that little cottage, by the river, fishing, happy.”
He didn’t know where her hands were, except that they were no longer touching him. “And?” she said.
He met her eyes. Crouching there, watching the faint hint of her face in the darkness of his coat, he told her how that part of the poem was what he thought of when he thought of the old miri. Of the dream of an age of new ones. “When we were young,” he told her. “In our twenties. My brother and me. We lived like that. We had . . . we have a dream. A farm. Our uncl
e’s old—”
“And me?” she said. “What do I have to do with any of this?”
“It’s just—”
“I don’t. What does this have to do with—”
“Vika.”
“It doesn’t.” Her hands reached up out of the coat’s collar between their necks. “Ivanushka,” she said, and grabbed the lobes of his ears. She shook them, just hard enough to jerk his head. “Ivanushka the Fool. This isn’t like that. This isn’t anything like that.”
“I know,” he said.
And she flattened her hands against his temples, squeezed. “There’s room in here,” she said, “to want more than one thing.”
Between her palms he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t you see? That’s what’s happened to everything. Everyone wants too much, everything becomes nothing.” It was as if the word knocked loose her hands. “What you want to have, what you want to get, you lose your focus and you lose everything. That’s why the miri worked. They were small. They were focused. They—”