by Josh Weil
Eat your fill, my dear brown cow!
Then all at once his eyes flew open, his neck swiveled, his face caught the light. He held a hand up to his eyes. “Who the fuck . . .”
“It’s me,” Dima said.
“Who the fuck is me?”
“Dima.”
The piss started up again. It was loud hitting the snow. And without warning the fat man tilted back his head and bellowed at the top of his lungs, “It’s Dima!” He grinned into the beam, and turned, and still zipping his fly lurched into a belly-swinging jog back towards the fire.
Dima followed at a walk, the whole way listening to Volodya shout his name. Soon the fat man was out of range of his headlamp. There was just the blackness and the fire and the singing and—Dima! Dima! Dima!—the slowly growing shapes of the others. Until another figure took shape in the faint far reaches of his beam. She grew brighter as she came. Then, halfway to him, stopped. Held out her arms. And fell backwards into the snow.
He was surprised to find his legs could hurry. And when he was standing over her, out of breath again, his headlamp carving a circle of light out of the dark around them, he was even more surprised to see her eyes stay squinted tightly closed. “Are you OK?” he asked. And she surprised him again with a snort, a rattling wheeze; she started to snore. He held his breath above her. She let hers out below. It clouded her face like smoke, and cleared, clouded and cleared.
Finally, she said, her eyes still squeezed shut, her voice tight with exasperation, “Oh, come on!”
He knew then what this was—her playacting the poem, Lyudmila out cold, the wizard’s sleeping spell denying Ruslan the consummation of their wedding night—knew it but still felt foolish saying it aloud. “Vika?” he said instead. And then, again, a little louder. And finally gave in and whispered down at her still face, “Lyudmila?”
There was her bad-toothed smile. “Listen,” she said. And, her eyes still closed, her lips the only thing moving in his beam, she showed him: “‘The youthful prince’s desire blazed on without fulfillment, tormenting him, a virgin ever—’”
“A martyr,” he corrected.
“‘But did he really just keep watch over his wife and find his satisfaction in thoughts of love?’” Her face mimed doubt. “‘Without the deed?’” The doubt turned to disbelief. “‘Subduing all his better instincts?’”
“His lower instincts,” Dima said. And picked up where she’d left off: “‘The monk who faithfully preserved the record of our famous knight and left it for posterity assures us firmly it is so.’”
“That sucks,” she said.
And as he knelt into the snow beside her he watched her eyelids flutter. “Good thing,” he said, “that it’s just a poem.”
Then they were open. Her eyes stared up at his face, straight into the light, her pupils growing smaller and smaller and staying on his. “Also”—she smiled—“that I’m no maiden.” Her words were a cloud blown over his face, and breaking apart, and showing her eyes again. Still on him.
“Where did you go?” he asked her.
She reached up through his breath. He shut his eyes. But when he felt her hand it was on his headlamp. Slowly she tilted it, tugging his head, sweeping the beam down the length of her body, back up to her face. Her eyes. “I’m here,” she said. And shut the lamp off. From the darkness, she asked him, “Are you?”
He nodded. Felt the motion move her hand. Then her fingers were gone from his forehead. Beneath him: the shadow of her shape slowly solidifying amid the moonlit snow. When she started to slip off his glove, he let her. His hand felt plunged into a hole cut in the frozen lake. Until she led his bare fingers into the unzipped collar of her coat, through the opening of her sweater, beneath the wool, onto her breast.
“And here,” she said.
He could hear in her voice how cold his hand was, feel it in the shiver that shook her body, the pebble of her nipple under his palm. But she only reached for his other hand, stripped off its glove, guided it down towards her waist, buried it beneath the coat and sweater that covered her belly. Her gasp. His fingers spread over the shudder of it. The swell of her breath.
“And here.”
He knelt, frozen, his arms out, hands motionless, his skin surrounded by her heat. Through her breast he could feel her heartbeat. Her navel: a warm well in the smooth stone of her belly. He tried to send his blood into his fingers, share his own warmth with her, but beneath him she was already unfastening the saftey pins from her fly, and he could feel his blood loosed all through him, racing.
Reaching down, she undid his pants. Her hands must have been as cold as his, but they felt burning. Her knuckles in the hair above his pelvis, her fingers finding him, the freezing air and—“Still?” she asked; “Here,” he answered—he was in her.
So fast, such warmth. He stared at her beneath him—that she could be so deep, he so far in someone, her the one to take him there—tried to make out her eyes. “Here,” he said again. And listened for her voice giving him the same word in return—Zdyes, she would say, and he would tell her, Zdyes—but her mouth stayed open in the moonlight, her eyes shut, her face full of such concentration she seemed already gone to another place.
On the road out to the Oranzheria the plow had cleared a path no wider than itself, and as Yarik drove—an old diesel-breathed Mercedes he’d bought secondhand—the car parted the crowd like a blade through snow, the jobless stepping up onto the piled banks, down again as he passed by, rising and falling in waves. Until, up ahead at the crossroads, he saw a few former workers motioning for him to stop, beyond them, a barrier. He braked. Another time, he would have gotten out to help them move whatever was in the way. But not with a saddlebag of cash on the seat beside him, all those laid-off people massed around the windows. The ones in front were dragging apart a dead fire’s remains. Long, blackened logs. Last night must have been Korochun. He wouldn’t have thought anyone would light the crossroad bonfires anymore, feel the need to frighten spirits from claiming others’ lives too early: it seemed so far removed from the real dangers of this world. He cleared the quiet with a gunning of his engine, waved thanks at the men, looked away as they called out for money, and, pushing forward, put the fire and its ghosts from his mind.
Ever since Moscow they had been haunting him: memories of his father, his uncle, the kolkhozniki he’d known as a boy, the old kulak he was going to have to see again. His brother, who, afterwards, he would have to face. The choice he would have to make. Though in the end it seemed to him the billionaire had left him none. Just a letter for Kartashkin, a contract, the cash.
Beneath the Oranzheria, the day went dim. Above, no one had cleared the snow. It smothered the glass, and under it the fields seemed to draw in, as if sliding back to the years before the mirrors, and Yarik slipped back even further: winter wakings, Dyadya Avya sleeping off a drunk, nothing but sunlight to rouse the boys; they pulled blankets over their heads, the morning seeping in as if through the canopy of a deep forest from one of their uncle’s fairy tales. Here, harvesters slumped like giants slain; feller bunchers had suffered some warlock’s curse, died off in herds, their steels jaws open wide with last breaths; everywhere the boom-arms of excavators were bent like broken dragons’ necks, their shovels hanging loose as half-severed heads; the mage had found the trenchers, too: there they sat frozen still as all the rest.
Then he was through to the other side. He squinted into the brightness, the sun on the snow, the snow falling in sparkler bursts from spruce boughs, the Kosha River gleaming, frozen. But not solid, the way it had been on the city side of the glass. Here, the ice showed the wink of water, a rippling gap snaking down the middle of the river. Here was where the zerkala sent their light now.
He drove through a village, between the wooden houses with windows blocked by blankets newly nailed to sills, mattresses propped on their ends against the light, past the sense of people sleeping who had never slept through daylight before, bare winter trees that seemed somehow mo
re alert, as if their sap had shot through them like adrenaline and they were stiffened, waiting, as he sped by.
Then he wasn’t. He sat in the stopped car. All around spread winter fields the way fields had been before the Oranzheria—snow smothered, barren, white to make his eyes water—and before him there was only the curve of road disappearing into dark pines, and there was no reason for him to have stopped. He stared through the windshield, as if waiting for a reason to appear. Nothing but the squat, boxy bell tower rising over the distant pines, nothing but the distance and the road taking him towards it, and then he could hear it: the heavy, low clanging of the bells. Ten kilometers ahead lay the farm. Ten minutes more and he would reach it: the barns and paddocks, their uncle’s soot-dark izba, that old kulak Kartashkin waiting in it for him.
The bell wasn’t ringing—he could see the dark inside the tower, the lack of any movement, any glint—but he could hear it. He could hear the music, too: the gusli and balalaika, the fiddle slinging its tune above the trees, onto the road, at him. He could hear the people roar and clap. He could feel the rumbling: all the farm trucks coming from the villages around to pull up in the muddy lot beside the dom kultura.
But when he pulled into a swath shoved clear by a plow there was no one else there. Getting out into the cold, the air stinging his face, he could see that for a long time, now, no one had been in the dom kultura. The bell in the tower wasn’t just still; it was gone. Zerkala light and gusts of wind had thinned the snow on the roof, and Yarik could see patches missing from its rusted tin. The sallow plaster was scrawled with graffiti, or crumbled off the brick walls. Most of the windowpanes were broken. The front door gaped.
The slam of his car door shutting startled something in the building. For a moment there was the lingering smack, the sounds of something banging inside; then it came flapping out of the dom kultura, gray and black feathers shining in the sun, and he wondered as it cawed off what there was left here for a crow to eat. Opening the car door again, he leaned in, lifted out the leather bag of roubles, grabbed Dyadya Avya’s gun, shoved it with the money into the pouch. This time he closed the door quietly, used his hip to press it shut. His footsteps crunched through the snow. He was wearing heavy boots with his suit pants tucked in the tops, and a parka over his suit jacket, the fur-lined hood hanging down his back, the shouldered saddlebags tilting him with their weight. In the sunlight, his breath made puffs of steam.
Then he was inside, the creak of the boards beneath him. Something scrabbled on the wood, a brushing like swipes of a broom, a flurry of exhalations. Or wing flaps? As his eyes adjusted, he made them out: a few big shapes, their black heads and wings and legs disappeared into the dark, only their gray visible, less like crows than the headless bodies of birds floating, rustling, feeding on something. It was too dark to tell what. But he could smell it.
Once, it had smelled like life in there, the whole huge room full of people’s breath, sweat, mud, spilled kvass, vodka, wafting through the windows with the scents of roasting meat, the piss stink of drunkards propping themselves against the buildingside, of the women crouched at the edge of the field. He could remember the smell of Zina the first time he had slept with her, the scent of him spread on her skin, her scent still sticky on his, when they had come back from the woods into the crowd, her astride his shoulders, wet and warm on the back of his neck, and him breathing her in. How light she had seemed when he had started to dance!
Now, the saddlebag of roubles was growing heavy. Beneath its weight he made his way towards the stage. Whoever played last had left their music stands: a few metal glints, a couple empty chairs. Deeper in the darkness of the room, the crows fluttered at his approach. He stopped. He let the saddlebags slide from his shoulder. Two heavy thuds to the ground and, before the leather strap could slap quietly after them, the birds were up. They clattered into the air, wings smacking wings. And Yarik dropped to a crouch. He flung out a leg. Slowly, kicking first one then the other, he began to dance. His winter boots banged at the floor, his suit jacket flapped inside his parka, the hood slapped over and over at his back. He crossed his arms in front of him and shut his eyes and thumped his heels against the boards, and the music stands behind him rattled with the shaking, his cheeks shaking, the skin below his jaw shaking, and the heat starting to cloud inside his coat, until his sweat was coming—he could feel it seep into his clothes, prickle his neck, his belly, his chest, and his lungs already sucking for breath, and his heart thudding loud as his boots—thump, thump, thump—so he could feel it beneath his crossed arms, and he uncrossed them, and held them out, and opened his hands and, shaking with his kicks, shut his fingers as if grabbing on to hands holding his. So simple, he thought. And then his leg cramped and gave out and his other crumpled with it and he toppled onto his back.
Lying there, arms spread, legs spread, head cushioned by the crushed fur of his hood, he stared up at the shapes of the circling crows and thought, You danced until you were tired and when you were tired you stopped and when you stopped you slept. He shut his eyes. He was still breathing hard. The sweat on his face was already beginning to chill. Up above, the ceiling was dark, and the wingbeats of the crows went round and round and it seemed strange to him that they wouldn’t caw, that there was just the sound of their panicked flight, their moving, moving, going nowhere. Had any of the choices he had made been right? To sell their father’s boat. To marry. To have a kid, another. To work on the Oranzheria. To let his brother lead the kind of life he did. To leave his mother in Dima’s care. To take the promotion. To take the money. All of it, from the first steps that started to separate him from his brother, to the last ones that had led him now to here: when he thought of it like that, the answer seemed clear. What right did he have to think the choices Dima had made were wrong? What right did he have to choose anything for Zina, for their kids? To make a choice now for them all? It seemed then that whatever he did it would be wrong. And yet here he was, ten kilometers away, ten minutes from what might be the biggest decision he would ever make. He opened his eyes, looked for the crows. Nothing. They must have found a hole, squeezed through one of the gaps in the roof, flown off. But then he saw something dark flit through the light, and another shape flapping and gone, and knew they were still up there, still circling.
“Go,” he shouted into the darkness. “Get out of here!”
But the echo of his voice only brought with it the sound of their wingbeats falling back down on him again.
He spread his own arms and slid them, winglike, slowly up and down on the floor, up once and down once and his right hand hit the leather of the saddlebags. For one more flap his left arm worked on its own, and he thought, One more bad choice: why had he not emptied the pouch full of the cash Bazarov had given him to keep? Why had he been too afraid to leave it in the apartment, thought they wouldn’t trust him at the bank if he walked in with stacks and stacks of bills? Now, he would have to lock it in the car—five million roubles spilled out, shoved beneath the seat—while he carried into the meeting the other pouch full, the money meant for Kartashkin. Something about the thought stopped his left hand flapping, sent his right searching for the buckle. He found it, flipped the pouch open, dug inside, grabbed a stack of roubles, drew it out. The revolver came, too, fell out with a clank. He lay with his neck swiveled, his cheekbone against the floor, staring down the length of his arm to the roubles in his fist, to his knuckles nearly brushing the old revolver. The last person to pull the trigger had been his uncle. He saw it again: Avya’s face as he’d heard his nephews calling from the riverbank, the brothers splashing after him, their uncle turned, water swallowing his cheek, one eye above the surface, staring back. Yarik had thought the raw fear in that eye had been a pleading for them to save him, but he knew now that it was anger, anger that the old man had made his choice in life—three hammer clicks, four, five—and now, as the two of them rushed towards him, life was making him choose all over again. Yarik wondered, then, if their father had reall
y fallen through the ice. No. Life gave you choices, and you made them. Chance, fate: they were no more real than the Chudo-Yudo. He wondered if that was why Dyadya Avya had told them the story of the devil snake, of their father’s soul, wondered if their uncle had thought them too young to understand. Well, he wasn’t young anymore. He thought how he was almost as old now as his father had been. And then he dropped the stack of roubles and his fingers closed around the grip of the gun.
His hand shook. The barrel rattled against the floor. He told himself it was just the awkwardness of the position, his arm stretched out, his wrist bent, his hand reaching, and then he laughed. He laughed at himself, at the idea that he would even think of doing it, laughed out loud, and the sound went up into the ceiling and brought down with its echo the panic it gave the crows, their wings whapping at the walls, the walls shedding dust, and in the sound of the dust tinkling to the floor he realized he wasn’t laughing anymore. He thought how nice it would be not to have to make the decision ten kilometers away. He thought how nice it would be not to have to make any more decisions at all. In the end, Zina always told him, that was how it would be. Everything clear, nothing left in the dark. The eternal light. She said it would be everlasting as the flame that hung above the tabernacle to remind them of the unceasing presence of the Savior, the Light of the World. He thought he understood why his wife had such faith. Why she believed in heaven. He wished he did, too.
Maybe then he would have been able to lift the gun. Instead, he had to slide it on the floor until his arm was bent, his elbow stuck out from his side, the gun upside down, its barrel touching the side of his head. If there’s no such thing as chance, he thought, then what of Bazarov and his revolvers? Maybe that day in Moscow the man had loaded one blank among the bullets; it would be just like him, the thrill he’d get knowing there was that little extra risk. He wondered if the game could be played with one chamber empty instead of one full. And, his finger touching the trigger, tentative as the nose of a dog brushing some stranger’s knuckles, he knew, with a sense as deep as any animal’s deepest sense, that all the chambers were full. He wondered if it would count as a game of chance simply due to the shakiness of his hand. Then he remembered the explosive tips.