by Josh Weil
Now, he asked her, quietly, which pile the book belonged in. Her eyes stayed on the page. He tried to ease it from her fingers, but they gripped tighter.
“Is there a pile for each of us?” he asked.
She held on, her hands shaking.
“Is there one for me?”
She nodded.
“Does this go there?”
“No,” she said.
“I’d like it,” he told her.
“No,” she said again. And when she turned her eyes on him, he could see the clarity was still there. He could see her trying to fight whatever was trying to take it from her, the way she had in the week after his father, her husband, had died, and he sat with his chest pressed to her shoulder, a nine-year-old boy looking at his mother with her gone-white hair, her determined eyes, her lips trembling when she spoke: “It’s for Yarik.”
“Why?”
“For Yarik.”
He nodded. “OK,” he said. “Do you want me to put it in his pile?”
It was one of the worst things that he had seen: his mother, so there just a second ago, beginning to leave. He almost put his hand over her eyes to keep from having to watch the confusion come back in.
“What pile?” she said.
Just as, all those years ago, in that week before the men from the sanitarium had come to take her from her sons, she had lost the battle, too.
The children were running around the old grade school, past the dun brick, the slatey window glass, circling the building in single file, tramping a ring in the snow. The path they beat was dark and gray as the sky above, and watching them from behind the wrought iron fence, the old pair of ice skates hung around his neck, Dima felt again the burning freeze: six years old, and he and Yarik doing the same—the screwed-down stare at the back of the boy in front, the mittened hands rubbing at ears turned to icicles, the shouts of the gymnastics coach, Take those hands down!—though thirty years ago the song had been a different one.
“Russia, our beloved country!” the children sang now.
“United and mighty, our Soviet land!” they had sung then.
And, too, they had run it—his and Yarik’s entire class—in their bare feet.
That first winter at school, each time the gymnastics coach made his whistle shriek, they had dropped to the ground, lain rocking on their backs, feet clamped in their hands, howls mixing with the white-breathed agony of all the other kids.
Look, Yarik had later showed their father, they’re bleeding.
What if our toes fall off? Dima had said.
And their father, knocking that past night’s tobacco from his pipe, had bent to peer at their feet, the flame from his match so close to their soles they could feel its heat.
Your toes won’t fall off, he told them.
How do you know? Dima said.
Because—he shook out the match—I’m going to teach you how to keep them on.
He told them to lie down on their backs, and, grunting exaggerated puffs, laughing through the smoke in his mouth, he hauled them by their arms and legs into the position he wanted. They lay there feet to feet. This is how your dyadya and I would do it, he said, every time the gym coach blew for the break and they had let him arrange them the rest of the way, his calloused fingers on Dima’s ankles as he dragged him into his brother, his big hands lifting Yarik’s small ones as he made room for the one’s feet to wedge into the other’s underarms. When he was done, they lay with their toes in each other’s pits, their arms pressed tight to the sides of each other’s legs.
The armpits, their father said, crouched at the middle of their single tangled shape, are the warmest part of the body. Except—he grinned—for the crotch. And with the bowl of his pipe he rapped each one a quick knock there. Over them, he stood, his face scrimmed by pipe smoke, watching them squirm with laughter and pain.
All that winter, every time the gymnastics coach blew his whistle, they would drop to the snow and scoot into the shape their father showed them, lying still, squeezing, amid the wild writhing of the other kids. And all that summer they worked at Dyadya Avya’s barefoot, building a layer of calluses opaque and hard as the trimmings carved off the milk cows’ hooves, so that by winter they could run all ten circles around the grade school without ever having to stop.
Until the winter they turned nine, when the boys from the grade below came running, shouting from too far away to be understood, their billows of breath like some signal the brothers couldn’t read. Dima and Yarik were halfway through their laps when the boys burst into them, blood in their cheeks, their eyes alight with news.
They ran barefoot all the way to the lake, their feet crunching snow, slapping the ice alongside trolley tracks, the frozen surface of Otseva. Out there: a huddle of men. Dark shapes against the brightness, more hurrying from the shore. The ever-gusting wind had blown the glassy surface clear and on it stood a hundred oystercatchers, red-beaked and black, and they rose in waves around the running boys. Wingbeats, caws. The men seemed to part as easily, the first not knowing who was pushing through, the next gone still at the sight of them, a last few hands grasping for their arms, their jacket collars, anything to grab them by and hold. They fought the grips, silent, struggling, until they saw him. So close they could almost have touched his face with their outstretched fingers, if it hadn’t been under so much ice. His black hair a floating blur beneath the surface, the black strip of his mustache—it had always smelled of pipe smoke, been warm with breath, tickled their cheeks—shifting with the current down there like something alive.
Coming through the crowd: a man in a hard hat, gloves gripping a long black pole, its iron tip wedge-shaped as a serpent’s head. Behind him: the open ice of the lake, and three more men crossing it at a strange and shuffling run. Between two a ladder rattled. The third carried a heavy maul.
By the time they dragged the body out, Dima could feel the ice like spikes through the soles of his feet. They stabbed up through his ankles and split his shins and pierced his knees. Still he stood, barefoot, watching his brother tear free of his jacket, run to their father, grab a frozen hand, shove the stiff fingers beneath his armpit, call for Dima to take the other. And fighting their father’s cold wet coat, pushing his own fingers into the crevice between arm and chest, he’d felt the hardness of the skin in that hollow where his father’s limb joined his father’s body, the utter absence of heat.
Plenty of room for dreams and for life
The coming years promise to us.
Allegiance to our Motherland gives us strength.
So it was, so it is, and so it will always be.
The last words submerged beneath gasping breath, the slowing shrush of boots in snow, and then the children stopped, and there was Timofei standing bent over his knees, coughing. A few kids around him collapsed into the drifts. The gymnastics coach kicked snow onto their faces, started to herd them all inside.
Dima looked for something to throw at the child. He was standing behind a wrought iron fence, far enough away he would have to shout to be heard. Between the fence and the street, around his boots, food wrappers were strewn among cups and straws. A single red glove, wet to the color of old blood, spread like a hand emerging from the sooty bank. Around it: brown glass bottles barely visible beneath the snow. Around them a bright scattering of metal caps. Quickly, he pried four out.
The first one didn’t come close enough to even make Timofei look. The second hit him in the cheek. The boy jerked, slapped a mitten to his face. Dima gave a quick wave, the skates clanking. The boy said something he couldn’t hear. Gloved fingers flapping at his palm, Dima urged him closer. The boy shook his head. Dima put his whole arm into beckoning. But Timofei just shook his head again, turned, started for the steps that led to the building’s door.
“Timosha!” Dima unlooped the laces from around his neck, dangled the skates from his glove extended over the fence towards his brother’s son. Timofei paused. He was the only child still outside and while he stood
there the school door shut. Through it came the muffled bellows of the gymnastics coach. “Timosha!” Dima called again.
Slowly, head bent, eyes down, as if approaching an unsafe dog, the boy came. Behind Dima, a trolley clattered by. The snow in that far edge of the schoolyard was deep; it piled at the boy’s knees and sloughed away and Timofei neared slowly, as if pushing through sand.
He stopped close enough that Dima could see the weight on his nephew, the small boy bent over his chest like an old man. It made the skates feel heavy, too. He drew them back, hung them again around his neck.
“Timosha,” he said, “it’s me. Your dyadya.”
The boy’s eyes stayed on the snow where his legs were buried. “I’m not supposed to see you.”
Behind Dima, in the street, cars passed in steady shushing waves. “You mean you can’t even look at me?”
“Mama said if I see you, just act like I didn’t.”
Dima leaned his chest against the fence, his arms over it, the blade of a skate knocking at a bar with a quiet clank. “Well,” he said, “I bet you’re allowed to see this.” He held his arm out towards the boy. Between his gloved thumb and forefinger was a third bottle cap. When the boy looked up, Dima waggled it so it winked in the gray light. Then, with a flick of his thumb, he sent the cap arcing into the air. It spun, high above his head, and he opened his jaw wide as he could and leaned over the fence and caught the falling bottle cap in his mouth. With a chomping sound, he shut his lips around it. He made them big while he pretended to chew. Then he squatted down to the boy’s height, bent his neck back so the ribbing of his throat showed through his beard. Beneath the skin, he knew the bulge of his Adam’s apple would be huge.
“Come here,” he croaked.
From the other side of the fence: silence.
“Touch it,” he croaked.
With his face to the sky, he listened to the boy’s first hesitant step. When he could feel Timofei was close enough, Dima put his own finger on his Adam’s apple and croaked, again, “Touch it. Take off your mitten and touch it.” A faint spot of pressure joined the one from his own finger. He took his finger away. The boy’s stayed.
“Should I swallow it?” he croaked. He could feel, easily as if it had been Yarik, when his nephew nodded. “I can’t see you,” he croaked. “You have to tell me.”
“Swallow it,” Timofei said.
And with a gulp, he jerked his head back upright, his Adam’s apple disappearing. The boy’s finger stayed on his throat. He felt the other tiny fingers join it, until Timofei’s whole hand was searching his neck through the tangle of his beard.
“I ate it.” Dima watched the boy’s eyes go from big to huge. He opened his mouth, showed the gaping emptiness.
“It will kill you,” the boy whispered.
“No,” Dima said.
“Yes, you’ll die.” He sounded more in awe of the idea than scared by it.
Dima laughed. “You think?”
The boy nodded, very seriously. His eyes had not yet left Dima’s throat.
“Then I better get it out again,” Dima said and, standing up, made with his lips a bubbling imitation of a fart.
The boy jerked back. And in the second before his nephew’s shock shifted to laughter, Dima shook his left leg, shook it harder, shook out of his pants a bottle cap that plunked into the snow.
It seemed such a long time since he had heard a child laugh. Covering his own smile, he slipped the bottle cap out from under his tongue, told the boy, “I have something I want to give you.”
He watched Timofei’s eyes flick to the ice skates around his neck. “Do you have your rucksack inside?” Dima said. The boy nodded. “It’s very important that you put this in it.” And, reaching into his coat, he drew from the inside pocket a sheaf of papers rolled around its leather-stitched spine. “It’s for your father.” He held it through the fence. He could see the disappointment in the boy’s eyes. “And for you, too,” he said. “But the note in it”—Dima tapped a paper clip with his thumb—“is for him. Timosha, will you give it to him for me?”
The boy didn’t take it. Instead, Timofei said, “Are those your skates?”
Dima nodded.
“No they’re not,” the boy said.
“Timofei,” Dima said, “please take this for me. Please put it in your rucksack and give it to your father.”
“They’re too small,” the boy said.
Dima lowered himself again to a squat. “Of course they are.” Through the fence, he smiled at his nephew. “That’s why I’m giving them to you.”
The boy beamed so broadly Dima could hear his teeth chattering.
“Now take this,” Dima told him, “and put it in your rucksack.” He watched to make sure the boy slipped the book safely inside his jacket. But starting to lift the skates off of his neck, Dima stopped. He could see how it would be: Timofei running back to the school, him watching until his nephew disappeared inside, and by the time Dima might see him again—maybe before the winter’s end, maybe not for another year—his brother’s son would already be a different boy. He left the laces where they were. Instead of handing them through the fence, he reached out with his empty glove and ruffled Timofei’s head. “Go inside,” he said. “Get warm. And when school is over, don’t follow your friends to the gym, OK? Run here right away, without anyone else, straight back to this fence, and I’ll take you to the lake. I’ll tie these on your feet. I’ll show you how to use them.”
That afternoon, he reached across the fence, gripped Timofei under his arms, and, struggling with what should have been an easy weight, lifted him over the wrought iron spikes. Setting the boy down on the sidewalk, the ache leaking out of his atrophied shoulders, Dima bent his legs, put his hands on his knees. “Climb on,” he said.
They went like that, the boy riding the man’s back, down Antonova Street towards Lake Otseva. The sky was still as dark, as gray, but the slab of it had slid a little off the horizon, and there a bright strip attested to the nearness of the sun. Every now and then, Dima would shrug his shoulders, hefting the weight of the boy’s thighs on his forearms, leaning into the press of the arms around his neck.
“You’re bony,” Timofei said.
“You’re chubby,” Dima told him.
“You’re smelly,” Timofei said.
“Oh yeah? What do I smell like?”
“My papa,” the boy said.
At Dima’s chest, the small skates clacked.
“You smell like Papa after he comes home from work.”
Dima nodded. “Well,” he said, “you know your father and I—”
“Like Papa,” the boy cut him off, “but a whole lot worse.”
Down by the lake they passed beneath the statue and Timofei reached up, as if to grab the brass tsar’s finger, but he could not, and they went on out, over the guardrail, onto rocks half-covered in snow, and, Dima carefully shuffling forward, made their way onto the ice. All along the shore, old pleasure boats were sealed in, forgotten speedboats marooned in frozen water, abandoned sailboats with their hulls holding high banks of windblown snow. They looked like the gargantuan bodies of some ancient beasts cut down by giants, their bare masts jutting into the sky like great spears that had slain them. Way out, over the vast expanse of white, the island hovered, faint as a cloud, almost invisible in the middle of the lake, a place where the spear-throwers might have dwelled.
Holding Timofei’s hand in his, Dima led the boy out to the spot on the ice where he used to skate when he’d been his nephew’s age. Together, they brushed at the snow with their boots, clearing away a small circle, the two of them the only things moving on the lake. Above, jaegers rode the breeze, the most distant mere sharp-winged shapes cutting across the low strip of last light. As they widened their circle of ice, the man and boy passed before it, too, silhouetted by that crack between the horizon and the clouds, coming into the sun and circling back to cutout shapes again and circling again into the light.
When they h
ad cleared enough, Dima took the rucksack off Timofei’s back. He loosened the straps, was about to slide his own arms through, when Timofei said, “Wait.” The boy opened it, dug inside, took out a small package of sukhariki crackers sealed in cellophane. “They’ll make you strong,” his nephew told him. Dima could feel his throat swallow his smile. “Let’s save them for after,” Dima said, and they sat on the ice while he removed the boy’s boots and laced the skates onto his feet. Then he helped Timofei stand. His hands around the boy’s waist, he walked with him, each small slide of his boot soles matching each small slide of the blades.
After a while, Dima was only holding his hand, standing in the middle of the circle, like a trainer with a horse, their arms the tether, and a while after that the boy was skating one length and then the other, unsteadily and slowly with Dima shuffling along beside. By the time the sun’s color had deepened towards orange, Timofei was skating on his own. By the time it had gone red, he was going so fast he could have broken something when he fell.
Before the boy even hit the ice, Dima was running after him. Timofei landed all sprawled out, but by the time Dima got to him he had curled up on himself, a dark still lump. At first, he hoped that the red on his nephew’s face was just tears and snow caught by the setting sun, but as soon as he was bent low he knew it was blood.