by Josh Weil
“I want my family safe,” Yarik said, “and my job secure, and my roll as spokesman continued, and my promotions in the company guaranteed.”
“But you already had all that,” Bazarov said.
“And,” Yarik told him, “I want the rest of the money.”
Looking down at the man’s face turned up to him, Yarik thought he saw the flicker of a smile. “Cossack,” Bazarov said.
“The other ten million,” Yarik told him.
“Cowboy.”
“All of what the farm is worth.” And there was no question now: the man was grinning. “What,” Yarik said, “you were going to pay Kartashkin from the start.” The sound Bazarov made was like a snore cut short. “What you were going to pay to buy it from him.” Again, the sound, drawn out longer. “Except,” Yarik told him, “now you’re buying it from me.” And the man’s mouth gaped, his cheeks caved, his nose sucked the air: a long rattling snort. Yarik stared at him. The billionaire’s eyes were rolled up to look back at him, and his entire face was stretched with the effort of his snorting, and then it was gone, slipped out of sight below the table, and in the second it took Yarik to realize the man was coming for him, to put together the clattering of table and chairs with the body rushing beneath them, he raised the gun. But when Bazarov burst out and saw it—saw Yarik backing up, the gun leveled at his boss—the man didn’t stop, didn’t leap for the pistol, didn’t quit snorting. Instead he threw himself at a scrambling crawl across the carpet, lunging after Yarik’s legs.
“Am I the boar?” Bazarov shouted, and Yarik stepped back, nearly stumbling, away from him, and he shouted again, “Am I the boar?”
Then he was there, on Yarik’s legs, arms locked around them, and Yarik lifted the gun higher and told himself hit him, crack him over the skull with the iron barrel, hit him, knock him out, but Bazarov was down there snuffling, his long hair flying, his face burrowing into Yarik’s shins, and Yarik could feel the beard scraping back and forth on his pants, the wet mouth—Was he trying to bite him?—and he kicked, backed away, tried to shake the man off, but still couldn’t bring himself to club him. Then, with a slam of shoulders against his legs, arms yanking at his calves, Yarik’s feet were off the carpet, and he was falling, and it was too late.
By the time he hit the floor, Bazarov was over him. Bucking, trying to shove with his legs, wrench loose his wrists, Yarik knew he had never felt the man’s full strength. His legs were pinned. He couldn’t move his arms. Above him: Bazarov, breathing hard, his hair falling crazily around his face, his mouth wet and teeth glistening and goatee dark with spit. He expected to hear Bazarov’s laugh, to look up and see The She Bear grinning down. But what he saw instead made him stop struggling. The man’s eyes were sad. They were filled with something that might have been regret, or hurt, or even the pain of some great loss, but wasn’t; was something else—disappointment? a dead hope?—pressing down on Yarik with the sudden terrible fullness of all the man’s weight.
Dima was eating supper when the zerkala returned. He sat with his fork frozen in the pot, his breath caught, his body gone still in the sudden light blown through the windows, shocking and bright as a skyful of full moons risen all at once. Beneath the kovyor-curtains he’d left rolled up the new near-day spilled in, spread over his mother’s startled face. Out from its box, the unhooded rooster came, stood ruffling its feathers, began a slow stalk towards the balcony door. His mother struggled up, crept after it across the room. They both came to a stop silhouetted against the brightness outside, the bird all twitchy steps and head jerks, his mother motionless, her hands splayed out on the glass, her wild hair a fog around her head.
Out there, people had started cheering. From the apartment above: a thudding like someone jumping up and down. The hallway had begun to fill with whooping and laughter, the babble of TVs cranked up, all flooding in fast beneath the door to where Dima sat with his fork in his hand, listening. Then he set the fork down. It clinked against the pot. And he rose and went to the window and undid one clamp, undid the other, let the rug unfurl. He went to the next window and did the same. Over by the balcony door, the rooster began to crow.
Even after he had reblinkered it with the hood, convinced his mother to go to bed, crawled into bed himself, he couldn’t sleep. Downstairs, Gennady was throwing a party. Music throbbing, people shouting. The same in the streets, even on rooftops. There were explosions. Fireworks? Gunfire? Dima lay in the dark, beneath the blankets, eyes open, his whole body awake, as if waiting for a sign, as if the zerkala’s return might hold in it some hint of what was happening with his brother.
In the morning it was there: an envelope slid beneath the hallway door. It looked just like the ones that had appeared once a month in the mailbox stamped with his mother’s name, except this one was hand scrawled with his.
Bratishka, forgive me. This isn’t forever. But please listen to me now. You must be careful. You must not go where there aren’t people around. Stay home as much as you can. Do not go back to the Oranzheria, Dima. Or the farm. For me, please, OK? I’m sorry I can’t say why. I’m sorry for everything.
—Yarik
Years from now, when people talked of The Revisitation, they would recall almost everything about the weeks in which it began, and almost nothing of the days in which it ended. The dark left, the long-dusk returned, the wild animals fled for the wilds again, the refugees went back with them. The strike was forgotten. Workers were rehired. New ones, too. The Oranzheria needed repair—the crater in its roof rebuilt, its vast fields replowed and planted—and the great glass sea needed new shores, its edges expanded, its surface spreading faster and farther than ever before. The Consortium needed as many people as Petroplavilsk could give it. And in the months and years that would come after, what the people would remember, more than anything else, was how much they needed all that the Consortium had brought.
A few days after the Oranzheria reopened, all those who’d clamored for it to close were rounded up, packed into The Dachas, guarded by new hires who would ensure the gates stayed shut. Why he wasn’t dragged off, too, Dima didn’t know. At first, he thought that that was what his brother’s message meant. He waited at home for the thuds of police boots coming up the stairs, for another knock at the apartment door. And when the raids that swept the city seemed over, he opened the door himself, went down the stairs. A glaring white mid-January morning. He took the reinstated tram out to the train station and walked between the long rows of abandoned railcars out back until he reached the beginning of the access line. For most of the day he searched the snowy woods for any sign of rail-boards stashed, kicked and dug at any clump of drift-smothered brush that seemed to strike his memory, until by the time the late sunlight sliced through the boughs, the forest floor around him looked like a scene of battle, the snow cratered and churned as if a band of others had struggled there. But there was only him, standing thigh-deep in the wrecked whiteness, knowing that, in the end, the main thing she had proved was that, in the beginning, he had been right: there was a finite amount of room in life; to let her in, he’d let a little of his brother out. He’d looked away. He’d let night sneak upon him, and he could feel the edge of the knife against his heart. He pulled it out and held his flesh closed again, pressing together the meat of his chest in the hope it might knit shut.
And in the nights he slept as he had slept before, the artificial light outside his window threaded through the holes in the kovyor, fine strings spun faint and colorless out of the mirrors’ caromming, drifting lucent through the darkness of his room, sewn to the feather-filled duvet, to his bare shoulder, to the Adam’s apple in his arched neck, to the eyelashes of his closed lids. Until, in the mornings, the sun plucked the pale strands away, and strung its fire in their place, and, as if his eyelid skin had grown to know the two kinds of light, his eyes blinked open. In the summer, he had awoken after a few hours; now, in winter’s depth, he slept half the day.
Below on the street, the traffic mumbled as cea
selessly as every hour. The dogs, once more unmoored from the turning of the earth, barked their same sleepless barks. The steam pipes hissed with heat. Dima would draw on his robe and shuffle through the near blackness of the near empty living room, until he reached the balcony doors and, groaning as he bent, lifted the bottom edge of the kovyor and rolled it up. The blast of sunlight built him as it built the room: his thick socks, red as if knit of blood; his bird leg shins; grease slicks in the nap of his wine-colored robe; behind him, the box his mother had made for Ivan catching fire, the only piece of furniture left.
Inside, on its pillow bed, the hooded rooster always hunched, still as if sleeping. But, at his footsteps, it would jerk its head, flap a wing, wamble out to the end of the rope tied to its knotty gray leg, and stand there, facing him through the felt. On its back, its golden feathers shone smooth as water washing over a sunlit rock, its long black tail shimmering with a hidden green discovered by the sun. He would reach out and trace the length of one almost endless plume, let his hand float over the feathers, bury his fingers in its chest until he felt its heat, and hold them there, and talk to it.
“Poor Ivan,” he would say, “what do you have to show for it all?”
Or, he would ask, “What will you make today? Some shit? A new feather? Will you add another millimeter to your tail?”
Or simply, “What use are you?” He would smile, poke a finger at its puffed chest. Its bullish neck would twitch. It would try to peck him through the felt.
“Oh,” he would say, and, trapping its legs in a fist, pull it to him, press it to his chest. He would rock it a little. He would sing, low and quiet:
The night has gone
And with her taken the darkness
Papa has come
And rolled up all the rugs
Wake, wake.
Sometimes he would stop before the verse was done, sure someone was listening. But when he looked around, the living room was empty. The windows above his balcony showed no shape leaning out. He was sure, then, that the rooster in his arms was watching. Somehow, through its hood, it was peering at him while he sang.
Opening the glass doors, he would set it on a rail, the bird’s tail feathers unspooling to the balcony floor. He would untie the cinch around its neck, draw off Dyadya Avya’s old felt hat. In the instant after, he would try to catch Ivan’s eye. But it would have locked onto the sun. The flesh around its socket lit bright red, nubby as pig leather, each tiny bulge stubbled with a tiny barb, as if the quills of feathers grew backwards out through its skin. In the golden light the curved membrane twitched, glistening. The pupil, a dark tunnel shrinking so quickly that soon it would be gone.
And then the rooster would lift its neck and crow out its morning-cracking call. Dima would shut his eyes and listen. He would feel the woodstove heat on the side of his face, hear the crackling of new logs thrown on. The air smelled of eggs still warm from the hen, the sour breeze of his brother’s yawn. How good the first hot sip of tea felt on his throat.
He would swallow, open his eyes. On each balcony each flower pot displayed the same bright bloom. The Landscape Replacement Crew had come again, exchanged the potted plants that had failed to blossom for plastic ones that came prepetaled. Sunflowers. Single stalks whose small yellow heads now sat beneath caps of crusted snow. He would watch the cold breeze shake them, the only movement on all the floors of all the balconies. But for him. Making the trash fire, settling the kettle on the grill, he would go in to wake his mother.
One morning he woke to a clattering on his bedroom window glass instead. The room was still dim, the threads of light untinted by the sun. He lifted his watchface into one of them: a quarter past ten, almost an hour after he had awoke the morning before. When the clattering—it sounded, he realized, with a jerk, like pebbles thrown—struck the glass again, he rose and went to the window and rolled the kovyor up. New snow. The first since the mirrors had returned. It was still falling, the sky still thick with it, the daylight dimmed. Below his window: footprints. A man’s boots? A woman’s shoes? He followed them to the street, where they were lost in the crowd of others.
When it happened again, a few weeks later, he checked the time—half till eleven—and, throwing the duvet off, stumbled to the window, got the kovyor up enough to duck his head beneath. No figure running, no eyes peering up. And in the emptiness below it occurred to him that whoever it was wouldn’t have been able to run off that fast. They were somewhere close. He scanned the sidewalks. It was not snowing yet—no way to tell fresh footprints from the mess of ones already made that week—but the sky was just as dark with all it would soon throw down.
The third time—awoken from late sleep again—he scanned the parked cars instead, their wet roofs, winter-grimed glass, searching for one with its tailpipe smoking. There were two: a small rust-stained Lada and an old sky blue Mercedes Benz.
The fourth time, he leapt from his bed at the first knocking of the stones, flapped the kovyor open, saw the blue door smacking shut. Out on the balcony, he rushed to the railing, peered down: the Mercedes’s window was open, a dark jacketed elbow resting on the sill. He watched it for a while—the elbow never moving, no face peering out—and then went to the rooster and took its felt hood off. It crowed. Before he went inside, he checked the street again. The window was up. When he came back with the kettle, the car was gone.
After that, he woke each morning thinking that he’d heard the pebbles, but the sun was in the strings of light and his watch read the normal time for him to rise, and he knew he hadn’t. Until, almost a week later, he woke with the clattering still in the air. Before his eyes were fully open, he was out of bed and at the window, looking down at a figure in a fur hat, a fluttering coat, skidding and slipping away. Even before the man yanked open the door to the sky blue car, Dima knew he had thrown the rocks. And even before then, he was sure it was his brother. But by the time he got downstairs and out to the street, there was just the empty space between two parked cars, the tire tracks broken through the roadside drift, the faint shadow of the Mercedes already disappearing beneath the falling snow.
That night, the Shopsins either weren’t home or wouldn’t come to their door. He went out to the sidewalk, pleaded, tugged on sleeves, finally found someone who let him use their mobile phone. Standing in the cold, beneath their impatient stare, he waited for someone to pick up. When his brother’s voice answered, he spoke right over the hello: “I know it’s you, Yarik!” But his brother only carried on. For a moment, Dima stared, perplexed, into the face of the phone’s owner staring back, and then the answering message was done and Dima said his brother’s name to the machine, asked it, “Why are you throwing rocks at my window? Why?”
“That’s enough,” the phone’s owner told him.
But Dima only raised his voice. “Come up,” he said over the other man. “Come up.”
It was into the second half of winter, more than a month since the last time he had seen the car, and there was a meter of new snow on the ground, his underclothes damp with sweat from pushing through it, his pants dark with slush, his jacket wet, and all of him cold, the day Dima came home to the apartment and found the heat turned off. He didn’t even realize how cold it was inside until he hung his jacket above the heater, stripped off his pants and shirt and lay them over it, and the back of his hand touched the metal and wasn’t burned. Then, standing in the hallway in his underwear and bare feet, it hit him. His jaw started shaking, as if the bone had realized it, too.
“Mama?” he said through shivering lips.
She wasn’t on her mattress where he’d left her that morning. It had become hard for her to move around—she needed a doorknob or chair arm to cling to—and he had moved her bed to the living room, set it near the bathroom door, brought her a piece of plastic piping for a cane. It was missing, too. He called louder.
“Good evening, lyubimy!” she called back.
Her voice came from inside her bedroom, and grabbing his bathrobe and socks
off the floor, he crossed the living room and went in.
She was sitting on the dark patch of old carpeting where her bed frame had been. Her back was to him, and, standing on one foot, putting on a sock, he said, “Good evening, Mama.” Her head swiveled. “Aren’t you going to ask me how work was?”
“You don’t work,” she said.
His fingers froze. And, before she turned back to whatever was in her hands, he saw it: the lucidity in her eyes, the sudden presence of the mother he remembered.
All around her was mounded everything he hadn’t sold: her meager jewelry, the dresses and shoes and hats she’d never wear again, the boxes that stored the artifacts of her life, all left untouched by him, now strewn across the floor. She had separated it into piles, islands of clothes, trinkets, toiletries, each item tagged with a torn piece of paper. Her sewing box lay on its side, drawers spilling a hundred colors of thread, a cloud of pinheads shimmering above their cushion set beside her.
“Are you OK?” he said to her back. She was wearing what he’d dressed her in that morning—her threadbare nightgown, wool socks and slippers, the kosinka that always bound her hair—nothing more. “Mama, aren’t you cold?”
She stayed bent over whatever was in her lap. Going to her, he crouched before a pile, picked up a low-heeled shoe. A pin had been pushed through the black leather where the bridge of the foot would be. The scrap of paper it held in place proclaimed, in her unsteady letters, ZINAIDA. He set it down, picked up a knit hat. YARIK, the pinned tag said. There was a half-used jar of face cream. SELL, she’d written on it. He picked through half the things in the pile—TIMYA on a Young Pioneer scarf; POLYA on a tangle of hair ties; DIMA on a leather wallet, the pin bent as she had shoved it through—and, in another pile, he sifted among old reading glasses; a chewed tobacco pipe; the first tiny pair of ice skates that he and Yarik had shared. He crouched behind his mother, put his chin on her shoulder, looked down at what she was holding. A sheaf of papers, holes punched along one edge, bound together by a brittle strip of leather. The ink had browned, but the drawing was exactly as Dima remembered: the rowboat with its prow leaping over a curl of wave, the oar a tiny stick floating away, almost into the stars that his own fingers had scattered across the top of the page. Below them, two boys huddled in the boat, wrapped in each other’s arms. A child’s unsteady script: Now that they had stopped rowing they were starting to get very cold. He could not remember whether he or Yarik had written the words, but he remembered the two of them reading it aloud together to their mother that long-ago day in the sanitarium.