by Josh Weil
How many times had Dyadya Avya pulled the trigger before the gun had finally gone off? Before Yarik, slipping down the muddy bank, splashing into the current, catching the hammer flash—The gun! Dima had shouted behind him—the flash again—Get the gun!—fought the weight of his boots, the shoving current, come so close to their uncle floating on his back—the hammer clacked—his eyes squeezed shut, his belly ballooned with the air in his lungs—clacked—so close Yarik had reached out, grabbed the barrel . . . The boom came so loud it stripped the sound from everything else. Ripped away even the feeling of Yarik’s bruised fingers, his burned palm, the coldness of the water, the warm blood. It sprayed from the lung pierced in their uncle’s chest, slicked Yarik’s face, his arms, as he tried to smother the spume from the hole Avery Zhuvov had blown in his fast-sinking self.
Lying on his back, his own chest swollen with his own breath held, Yarik could feel it now: the slipperiness on his fingers, the bruise of his grip, that river’s chill. He listened to the boom. Why did it seem so much louder than that one time, even longer ago, when he had fired the gun? In his own hands, it had gone off just as close, shot the same kind of bullet. Even the water beneath them, even his brother’s voice shouting behind the blasts: it should have sounded the same. But in his memory the ones he’d fired from the rowboat when they were kids were so much smaller, quiet pops, pop, pop, pop . . . He let the pistol barrel fall from his temple. It thunked against the floor. Not just the same kind of bullet: they had been the very bullets their uncle had loaded in. He had not been trying to play with fate: years ago, their dyadya had loaded all seven chambers. He’d never used the gun since then, hadn’t know the boys had taken it, wouldn’t have thought to see if any bullets had been spent. What a shock it must have been to work up the nerve to pull the trigger only to hear it click. And to do it again, and again, each time thinking this one must be the last: how horrible. How horrible that on the last try it was. Horrible, Yarik thought, because it was such a small thing that made the difference: that night on the rowboat he had shot six shots.
When he drew in his breath, it was shaky with anger. How close he had come to making another. If he was so bad at choices, what had made him think that that one would have been right? How would it have helped anything, anyone? He imagined Zina having to identify his body—his body, not his face: the explosive tips would have left her nothing of that. Not even a body she could bury: the church wouldn’t condone such a sin with a cemetery plot any more than it had for his uncle, his father. He imagined Dima hearing the news, then, and knew there would be no one to hear the news of what Dima would surely do to himself. And, seeing two new piles of stones beside the two ones overgrown, he thought of his mother, of her home, and Zina moved into it, Polina crawling the bare floor, his little boy the last man left, and his anger hit him so strong he didn’t even know what it was or why until he had squeezed the trigger and the boom had blasted around the cavernous room and the echo was filtering down on him like the wing-brushed dust.
Except there was no dust falling. He lay on his back with his arm outstretched above him, the pistol pointing straight up at the roof. No tinkle of glass. No clatter of plaster blown loose and tumbling down. Surely an explosive-tipped bullet would have done some damage he could see or hear. But there were just the crows, cawing now, wild with frantic circling. He watched their shapes flit by the shards of light, watched until he could make out their full circles and the nose of the pistol circled with them and he followed one until his gun moved as if strung to the bird.
The boom again. Again, the jolt jerking his wrist. There flew the bird, circling just the same. And no sign of the bullet hitting anywhere.
“Sonofabitch,” he said.
He pushed himself up, pointed the gun at the low wooden wall of the stage a few meters away and pulled the trigger again. There was the sound. And nothing else. The boards stared back at him, blank and unmarred as before.
“Sonofabitch,” he said again, and fired two more shots, in fast succession, not aiming at anything, just shooting to hear the booms and feel the handle slam into his palm and clench his jaw and make himself watch the absence of any sign of anything fired at all.
“Explosive tips,” he spat, smacked the lock off the chamber, jerked it open, was about to shake the casings into his palm, the last unfired blank. . . . But the gun had gone still in his hand. He held his hand still beneath it. He looked at the saddlebags on the floor. Next to the one full of the money meant for him, the stack he’d pulled out lay wrapped in its bands. Crouching down, he picked it up with his free hand, thumbed slowly through it. It all looked good. But there were a lot of other stacks. He flipped the pouch open again, and pulled out another one, and had flipped through it, and another, and a fourth, when it hit him. It was all there, and if it was all there, it was enough. It would be enough. He would make it enough. At the thought, he stood, took a few steps, sat down on the edge of the stage. As if they had been waiting for him to leave the center of the room, the crows came down in the corner farthest away, landing, their wings flapping noisily, their talons clacking at the floor. He watched them gather, dark shapes clustering, the flock growing as if out of the darkness of that corner. He still had the gun in his hand, the shells still in it, and as he watched the crows amass, he slapped the chamber shut. Maybe it was useless, he thought, maybe it was a dud, maybe it wouldn’t do anything at all, but at least it was a bullet, the last one he had left.
At first, he thought Kartashkin’s farm had been abandoned, too. The fields were stubbled with spindly knapweed spikes, cagongrass gone brittle and gray, tamarack bushes lifting hummocks of snow on their backs. In the pastures, the snow was unbroken and smooth as the fields should have been. Where were the cows? Not in the milking parlor; it was silent, doors shut, feed paddocks empty. Between it and Kartashkin’s house stood the giant equipment shed where once the combine harvesters had been kept, the harrows and hay rakes with their curved metal teeth, the new Belarus tractors hosed down and gleaming. Now the inside gaped cavernous and empty.
At the turnoff to the house, Yarik stopped. The car idled. The driveway wasn’t plowed. A slight depression in the snow, it led to the garage, a glassed-in porch, two stories of wide windows below a bright blue roof: it looked like one of the houses he’d seen in the new-built subdivisions outside of Moscow. Except there was no door on the garage, no car in it, the windows plywooded over, the porch wrapped in plastic, no smoke rising from the chimney. Instead, way in the distance a faint wisp unfurled above a smudge so far off no one but him, or Dima, or perhaps their mother if she could still remember, would have known what it was.
He parked in front of an old Ural dump truck turned snowplow, pulled his even older Mercedes up till its nose nearly touched the big metal blade. Behind the truck, a door split away from the farmhouse and a woman shoved her head out into the cold. She looked old as his mother, and she wore a sweater over a nightgown and track pants under it, and it took him a second to place her as Kartashkin’s wife. It was the curls of her uncovered hair, the way she dangled her cigarette when she looked at him and said something. He couldn’t hear over the engine any more than that it was a shout, and by the time he’d shut the engine off she had ducked back inside and closed the door behind her. But she hadn’t been shouting to him: farther back in the yard, beside the privy, the door to the big shed where Dyadya Avya once kept his geese swung open as if knocked loose by the house door slapped shut. In it: Kartashkin, bundled in a coat, one hand pushing the door, the other holding a burst of colors blooming upward from his fist, riotous and shimmering in the light. Feathers. As the man stepped out, Yarik glimpsed inside: dim shapes moving, thin glints of cage bars. From in there, a rooster shrieked, another shot its call in answer, the whole shed exploded with the racket of the birds. Kartashkin closed the door on it and started for the house, the feathers shaking in his fist, walking carefully on the beaten path of snow and ice, looking at Yarik’s car the whole time. When he got to the ste
ps that led to the izba door, he took hold of the rail and stopped. His stare kept on. No raised palm, no call hello, just the impatience of his coat-wrapped body waiting there in the cold.
Inside, Yarik bent to shuck his boots, watched Kartashkin lower himself to a stool, ease out one creaky leg, call to his wife to tug off his own. She pulled out a chair at the table, motioned for Yarik to sit, said, “Dobro pozhalovat, Yaroslav Lvovich. It’s been a long time.”
It had. Sitting at the table, feeling the floorboards with his toes through the holes in the slippers she’d slid towards him with her own slippered foot, he took in the room. When he had lived there with Dima, it had all been one open space, but the Kartashkins had put up partitions that ran from the log walls to the whitewashed masonry stove in the center, each room warmed by a section of its heat-holding brick. The partitions had been wallpapered, and the log walls plastered over, and, at first, it must have hardly felt like an izba at all. But that must have been a while ago, back when they had begun to build the big new house they’d never finished; he remembered hearing that they had sold their place in town, were going to make do with Avyeri Zhuvov’s old izba until their new home was done. When had that been? He couldn’t remember, but he knew it must have been before the Oranzheria.
Through one open doorway he could see into what looked like a bedroom: a mattress big as the one he and Zinaida had just bought, smothered in a pampering of pillows, their cases worn, the edges split. Through another doorway: a mammoth television, its dead screen skewbald with mottled splotches. On top of it someone had placed an ironing board. From beyond, there came the chirrups of hatchlings: cages covered with once-bright towels faded almost free of the depictions dyed in their cloth: a dolphin, a starfish, two trunks of palm trees silhouetted by a sun.
When Mrs. Kartashkin brought Yarik his tea, the cup was monogrammed in silver: LMK, same as was stitched above the fraying edge of her robe. He pulled his glance from both: on her age-pilled sweater, he recognized the logo of some designer brand Zinaida had only recently been able to buy. But when the old kulak joined him at the table, he could not stop staring at Stepan Fyodorovich’s face. They had called him that—old kulak—since long before he was old. Now he had grown into it. It wasn’t the way his mouth had pinched, his skin sagged off his neck, not even anything contained in his eyes—his eyes were pit-hard and calculating as ever—but something inside the man, the life in him: it hung off his frame like the flesh left after a sudden loss of weight. Now that Kartashkin had taken off his coat, Yarik could see the old man was still in his pajamas. SFK over the heart. Half the buttons gone. Through the gaps, patches of gray hair curled.
He was glad he had worn his suit. The night before, he’d asked Zina to trim his hair. That morning, he had shaved, ironed his slacks, put on the new tie. The saddlebags had wrinkled his jacket—he had slid them off his shoulder when he’d come in, let them slump beside his boots—but they had left their leathery scent on him, and he was glad of that, too. The room stank of chicken feathers and bird scat and the smoke of the woodstove and of cigarettes. The old kulak drew on the one in his mouth, took out the stub, stuck it in a cake pan full of sand. The pan was already littered with a pack’s worth of butts, and in between them the sand was stabbed with deep small holes, too small for cigarettes, as if someone had poked it with a knitting needle, over and over again. Next to it, on the table, a cigar box sat: gold-foil seal, some coat of arms stamped on top. Kartashkin lifted the lid. Inside: a pack of the same cheap Troikas that Yarik smoked. The old man dug a cigarette out, offered it. Yarik shook his head. While the man lit up, his wife bent before the masonry stove, pot holders in her hands, opened the iron door, drew out another cake pan, and taking off the table the one full of butts, slid the new one in front of her husband. It was full of sand, too. Yarik could feel the heat come off it. The woman watched Kartashkin as if she expected him to do something with what she’d brought, but he hadn’t even seemed to notice. Smoke leaking out his nostrils, he stared past Yarik, at the floor, the leather bags.
“You want to know what’s in the bags?” Yarik asked him.
Kartashkin tugged his gaze away. He had dumped his handful of feathers on the table when he’d sat down; now he reached to the pile. “I thought,” he said, “you would come with your brother.”
“He’s at home.”
The old man nodded, drew a feather out. It was viridescent, speckled with flecks of blue and brown, long as his forearm. “You live together?”
“Money,” Yarik said.
“He told me . . .”
“In the bags.”
“. . . that when you had the money”—Kartashkin raised the feather over the cake pan—“you would come each with your half to buy it.”
“That was almost a year ago,” Yarik said, and watched the kulak stab the feather into the hot sand. “What are you doing?”
“Tempering,” Kartashkin told him. He left the feather standing straight up in the pan and, searching through the pile for another, said, “Does he know you’re here?”
Through the smoke the old man breathed out, Yarik could see his wife standing over the stove, picking the old butts out of the other pan.
Her husband’s fingers picked through the feathers, drew another out. It was a rich purple deepening to black, a gleaming plume that swooped down in an arc so long it swished against the table. “I gave him one of these,” Kartashkin said.
“A feather?”
The old man laughed. It was a phlegmy sound cut short by a cough. “The whole bird. He said he was going to give it to you as a gift.”
“For my daughter.”
“A daughter!” He turned his wrinkled neck till his cough-wet eyes caught his wife’s. “Little Yarik has a daughter.”
“How old?” she asked.
“For her first birthday,” Yarik told them.
“That bird?” the woman said.
The old man was shaking his head. “He told me it was for you. A Golden Phoenix is not a gift for a little girl.”
“I know,” Yarik said. “I made him take it back.”
“Back?” Kartashkin had stuck the feather in the sand, and he said the word with such force the black plume shivered from his breath. “He didn’t bring it back.”
“He kept it,” Yarik said.
“I wouldn’t have taken it back.” Kartashkin sucked at his cigarette, fished out a third feather, jammed it in, too. “It was a gift.”
Watching the old man hunt out a fourth, Yarik tried to glean from the word what it was that was really making him so mad.
“It was a gift,” Kartashkin said again, “from me.”
“My daughter—”
“Not to your daughter. To your brother.”
“I’m sure—”
“Do you know how much a full-tailed Golden Phoenix is worth?”
“No,” Yarik said.
“I could sell a bird like that—”
“But you didn’t.” This time Yarik cut the old man off. “You gave it to my brother as a bribe because you were hoping to get out of the contract you signed, because you were hoping to stab in the back the kolkhozniki . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“My uncle . . .”
“I have a right—”
“You have a right to sell the land only to one of their sons. Or—because my uncle had no sons—to me.”
There was the squeal of another stove door opening, and a flickering orange light flashed around the room. Kartashkin’s wife tossed her handful of butts into the fire and shut the door again. At the table, the old man stuck one feather after another into the baking pan, stab, stab, stab, in quick succession, until the entire handful he’d brought in stood straight up in the hot sand, brilliant reds and golds and green-tinged blacks shivering between the men. When he was done, he pointed through the feathers, his finger jutting palely between the colors. “Where did you get them?”
“The bags? They’re from America.”
“We’re not talking about my brother,” Yarik said.
“He said he had half.”
Yarik reached out and, with the backs of his knuckles, pushed the cake pan aside. The metal burned, but he didn’t take his hand away until the space between the two of them was clear again. “In those bags,” he said, “is much more money than my brother could ever come up with. More than you could ever get from both of us combined.”
Kartashkin finished his cigarette, stubbed it into an empty corner of sand. But instead of opening the cigar box for another, he reached past it and dragged across the table a knife. A pen knife, the blade folded away into the handle. “That’s the problem,” he said. “What you two could ever get could never be enough.”
Yarik watched the old man open the blade, test it along the hairs of his forearm. “I said,” Yarik told him, “that it was more than we could get.”
The kulak pulled out of the cake pan the first feather he’d stuck in the sand. Its stalk had gone from the clearness of fingernails to clouded as bone. “But you also say that you have it.” With the edge of the knife, Kartashkin began to scrape upwards along the opaque tube, millimeter by careful millimeter, stripping away the plume. “And,” he said, “although I am impressed with your suit and your tie, although I can see that you cleaned yourself up meticulously to come and see me, I once was clean and meticulous and had money, too, and I can also see that your tie is too short, and that you don’t know how to make a knot, and that your suit is old and worn-out, either by you or, more likely, by someone else before you even bought it, and I know that however much you’ve managed to get, it can’t be enough.” He had cleaned the quill smooth for a length as long as his long fingers, and he leaned forward now and blew the scrapings from the table. “Because,” he said, “you might be one of the few who have the right to buy it, but I’m the only one who has the right to sell it.” He held the feather as if it were a pen, moved it in the air a little, testing how it felt in his fingers. “I set the price.”