The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

  “You’re OK,” he said, scooping the boy in his arms. “Are you OK, Timosha?”

  As if the ice against his face had sealed all sound inside him, the moment Dima lifted the boy his wailing came. It blew over the frozen lake. Sitting, Dima pulled his nephew to his chest, wiped at his face, asked over and over, “Where does it hurt?” The boy shook his head and wailed, and Dima shucked his gloves, lifted Timofei’s lips, felt his teeth. He wasn’t missing any. All the blood was coming from his nose. Dima wrapped the boy in his arms then and let him wail. It was only when he realized that his nephew, held over his shoulder, was broadcasting his pain towards the shore, the city, that he turned him to face the darkening lake, set him on his lap.

  “Timosha,” Dima said, “it’s a bloody nose. Only a bloody nose.” He stole a glance over his shoulder at the shore—just the tsar’s brass back—and leaning his face close to the crying child’s, asked, “What do you want me to do?” The boy bawled on. “Do you want me to take you home?” The boy shook his head, flinging drops of blood. “Do you want to skate some more?” More droplets flung. “I know,” Dima said. “I know. Do you want me to read you a book?” The head shaking, twice as violent; the wailing turned up a notch. “It’s what I gave you to give to your father, Timosha.” The wailing kept on, but this time the head stayed still. “Don’t you want to know what it is?” Just a little, the head nodded. “Your father and I wrote it,” Dima told him. “When we were very young, barely older than you.” Timofei had gone quiet. He tilted his face up to look back at Dima.

  “Good,” Dima said. “Hold your face up just like that. And with your hand”—he took Timofei’s hand, the mitten still on, in his bare one—“squeeze the tip of your nose like this. Good, Timosha. Stay just like that, and the blood will stop, and I’ll get the story out of your rucksack, OK?”

  Face to the sky, blood half-hidden by the mitten at his nose, Timofei nodded.

  They sat facing the last of the sun, the nephew cradled in his uncle’s chest, the uncle holding the loose-bound papers before them both. Dima had put his gloves back on and his fingers were thick and cumbersome.

  Once upon a time . . . In the low light, the cold stinging his eyes, he could hardly read his childhood scrawl. But the words had lodged in him long ago and he read as if reading from the memory inside instead of from the page.

  “Once upon a time there were two brothers. They were twins. They lived on a farm. But not with their papa or their mama. With their uncle. His name was Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov. He was very funny and told good stories. Almost as good as this.”

  Timofei made a pinched noise through his nose that sounded like “No.”

  “What?” Dima asked.

  From beneath his mitten, the boy said, “Start at the beginning.”

  “That is the beginning. Once upon a time . . .”

  “No,” the boy said again, and with his free mitten pushed at the page opened over Dima’s left hand, the back of the cover. There, he had clipped the note to Yarik.

  “That’s for your father,” Dima told the boy. “Remember I asked you—”

  “But you said you were going to read what you gave me to give to Papa.”

  “I meant the book.”

  The boy pulled away from Dima’s chest, leaned over, sounded out the first word. “Dear,” he said, very slowly, and a drop of blood dripped off his face and spotted the first page. He didn’t seem to notice, only sounded out the next word: “Yarik.”

  Dima pulled him back so he would not bleed more.

  “That’s my papa’s name,” Timofei told him.

  “Yes.”

  “I can read it.” Timofei struggled against Dima’s hand, got free long enough to read aloud “I am” and start sounding the next word before Dima pulled him back again and told him, “OK, OK. We don’t have time, Timosha. I’ll read it, and then the book, and then we’ll go home, yes?”

  He could feel the back of the boy’s head nod against his chest.

  “Dear Yarik,” he read. “Mama wanted you to have this. Last night I didn’t know why, but now I do. Do you remember how you would start to say an idea and I would finish it? Or I would start and you would finish. ‘Into the lake,’ I said. ‘Where they drowned,’ you said.”

  Dima’s face felt too stiff with the cold to get any more words out. He cupped a glove to his mouth, blew into the leather. When the boy looked up at him, he nodded and took his hand away again.

  “I am worried about Mama,” he read on. “I try to help her, but I think I am failing. I think she needs your help. You know what I am saying. If I come back one night and she is not there I will know you understand. I will miss her. But I will be grateful to you, big brother. Yesterday, the building turned off the heat.”

  Dima coughed to free the air from his throat. The sun was almost down. He dipped his head until his face was against the top of his nephew’s head, and said with his lips in the wool of the boy’s hat, “That’s it.”

  “What’s that.” Timofei pointed again with his mittened hand.

  “That’s just my name.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Dima nodded his face against the wool. “It says, ‘Your little brother.’”

  “OK,” the boy said. “Now let’s read the book.”

  By the time he was halfway through, the sun had gone and the zerkala had come up. They were barely bright enough to read by. He had just reached the point where the brothers lost their oars, when he heard shouting from the shore. He turned. Back there, three men were climbing over the guardrail between the statue park and the rocks that edged the lake.

  “How?” Timofei, in his lap, said. “How did they loose the oars?”

  Behind the men, behind the rail: a car. It was the shape of the cars the city’s policemen drove, it was a police car—on its hood he could see the flashers—and he almost let go of the book.

  “How—” Timofei started.

  But Dima had looked down at the boy and seen the blood dried dark on his face and said, “Oh no.”

  Then he was scrambling up, saying, “Stand, stand,” trying to steady Timfoei on his skates with one hand while, with the other, he shoved the storybook in the rucksack.

  The men were close enough now that he could hear their words slapped across the ice at him, hitting like pucks—don’t and boy and move and drop—and he let go of Timofei and felt the air waver behind him where he knew the boy was and reached out again and pulled his nephew tight. The men were in uniform. Two ran with a hand on their sides, like men with cramps, or men who had hurt a hip, or men who carried guns. The third carried a long stick in his fist. He was the faster one. There were the boy’s words mixed in now, too—who and who and who—and Dima’s words back—OK, OK—and Dima tightened his arm around Timofei’s shoulders and stooped to grasp the bag and all the while shouted at the men things that came out—uncle and nephew and skating and my brother—and when he straightened up, the rucksack hanging from his free hand, he rose right into what felt like a hammer smashing the side of his head.

  The second blow felt like the stick it was. It hit his stomach and his eyes saw it leave his body, saw the policeman’s boots stepping back on the ice, and his mind shot the thought through his head thank god it’s just a stick and then it hammered down against his skull again. There was a sudden wind on his face. There was the sound of Timofei screaming. There was a slab of rock, large as the lake, dropping from the sky, falling so fast all he could do was clench his teeth against it before it smashed full on into his chin.

  Once upon a time there were two brothers. They were twins.

  A double-headed axe.

  They lived on a farm.

  A single-bladed hatchet.

  But not with their papa or their mama.

  The cleaver Dyadya Avya used to crack the backs of the chickens and cut them into quarters.

  With their uncle. His name was Avery Leonidovich Zhuvov. He was very funny and told good stories.

  That long-han
dled brush hook with its wide blade shining flat and straight before the sudden vicious curve at the end.

  Stories almost as good as this.

  That night, the night that their uncle had told them how their father died, that night while Dyadya Avya slept on the floor by the big woodstove, the empty bottle clutched like a kitten to his chest, that night they had lain on the straw, each boy pressed to one side of the dog, the dog breathing, its breath smelling of its organs, of the blood that their brushing had drawn from its gums, the crack beneath the stove door flickering with just enough firelight to find the boys in the blackness of the hut, that night they had decided to gather the tools they would need for killing.

  One by one, week after week, they snuck them from the house or from the barns, brought them across the fields into the forest. They did it at night—carrying them through the birch woods, the white trunks long stripes of moonlight, the blades in their hands like chips of stars—while Dyadya Avya slept. And when he found his cleaver missing, his sickle gone, after a fit of furious searching, their uncle would stop, his belly heaving, and curse at the ceiling, as if to shame the heavens into giving back his tools. But they were no more above the roof than beyond the clouds. If God had had a hand in it, it was only in the perfect place that He’d afforded the brothers to hide them.

  They would crawl inside the buried banya, nestle a jar of sinkers in the leaves that lined the earthen floor, or add a blacksmith’s mallet to the pile of weapons they had stored, and sit, knees drawn up against the cold, shoulders hunched beneath the carved-out ceiling, hair catching in the roots, and talk of what they might use for a lure.

  It could not be just a piece of meat, they knew. It had to be a soul.

  Eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, chests to air thick with the ancient scent of mushrooms grown and died and decomposed above their heads, they debated where in a body the soul could be found. The lungs that allowed an animal to breathe? But then it would escape on every exhale. The brain? But then how could a headless hen still scramble feverish with life? They thought for a while that it might reside in the eyes. But they had seen their father’s blue, blue irises, his black, black pupils, staring back at them up through the ice. The heart: no one had reached down his throat, no one had cut into his chest, no one had sawn through his breastbone, wrenched it open, no one had seen whether or not their father had still had his heart.

  In the threshing barn, hanging on ropes from the rafters, were all the parts of the hog their uncle had slaughtered and smoked that fall: hams, ribs, shoulders, hocks, all wrapped in muslin and frozen hard. The liver their uncle always cooked up fresh. The head he boiled into cakes of gelatin and brain. But there was a bag that hung by itself that held the ears, the snout, the cheek meat, and, somewhere among all the smaller parts, a rock hard heart.

  But it’s frozen, Dima said.

  They debated whether or not the soul could be killed by cold. Or if it would slip out before the temperature got too low. Dyadya Avya had told them it was the part that God chose to bring up to Him, so they were sure it would not be stupid enough to let the heart’s walls freeze it in. Besides, even if the cold was of no concern to it, it would have surely left for heaven by now.

  It leaves right after something dies, Yarik said.

  It leaves before, Dima said.

  It can’t, Yarik said, you can’t live without it.

  See? Dima said, as if that proved his point.

  That was when they decided the soul was smart enough to know when the body was wounded too gravely to go on, smart enough to flee before it got trapped inside. Unless something snuck up and killed the body while the soul was unawares, caged it in there until it could be devoured still alive. And when did it come down from heaven? When did it enter the heart? At birth? No: they had seen the belly of a pregnant rabbit cut open to show the lingering life of her brood inside. They had seen in their breakfast the spots of blood in the yolk, even, once, the beginnings of a beak.

  They left while Dyadya Avya was in his deafness of midday drunk, napping on the pallet upon the stove. They hitched the mule to his cart. They loaded the cart with their arsenal of blades and bludgeons. They took the jars and the eggs. They took the live goose, a hood on its head. Dima had it tight beneath an arm, one hand squeezing shut its beak, his other hauling him up onto the cart, when Yarik suddenly jumped down, ran back to the house, disappeared, and a minute later came back out holding something that gleamed: Dyadya Avya’s ancient revolver, gripped in his two small hands. Climbing up beside Dima, Yarik’s eyes had shown how scared he was by what he’d done. His mouth had shown how set he was on doing it. Towards the mule’s ears he made a click. They drove down to Otseva’s shore. They loaded up a little rowboat they found tied to the dock. They slipped the knot. And rowed together out towards Nizhi, into the lake, to hunt for the Chudo-Yudo.

  “Until it came up,” one of them said,“and crushed the boat.”

  “And they drowned,” the other said.

  “Or it ate them.”

  “Or anyway—”

  “Dima.”

  His face was numb. All but his ear.

  Or anyway.

  His ear was burning with cold.

  “Dima!”

  Swooping away from his eye, carved in the ice: a long thin cut, smooth line arcing on the lake, the lake blurry with snow. The moonlight—no the sunlight—shone through the splinters of ice that the blade of the skate had lifted. Then something steamed between the groove and his eye and when he blinked the bottom of his eye had filled with red. No: the ice, filled with red. He watched the skate’s track turn color, the blood running along it, away from him, so fast, as if it meant to draw its line all the way across Otseva to the opposite shore. And then it stopped. Pooled against a thick black wall. The sole of a boot. The light of the mirrors: gone. His brother’s voice: “Dima.”

  Even without it, he would have known the grip of his hands, known him by the way he hauled Dima up to a sit and crouched beside him on the ice and cradled Dima’s head against his chest, his hand patting harder and harder at his brother’s cheek.

  “Yarik,” Dima said.

  “Oh God,” his brother said. “What those fuckers did to your face.”

  “Your face,” Dima said and, through the numbness, tried to smile.

  He didn’t know whether the smile made it, but the pain came through like a nail. When he shouted, the nail drove the rest of the way in. Through the pain, he knew his brother was saying something, knew he could have even understood it if he could have thought about anything but the pain.

  Then his brother was standing behind Dima, his hands beneath Dima’s arms, gripping the sides of his chest, dragging him slowly backwards, and it was almost worth it. The lake slid away: the clearing he and Timofei had made growing, the vast white plain of all the rest shrinking, the island of Nizhi too far to make out in the reflected light. His brother’s gusty breathing came from somewhere above his head. His brother’s hands slipped and gripped again. He tightened the insides of his arms around them, trying to keep them warm.

  From the end of the 6:00 P.M. news to the beginning of the eleven o’clock edition playing now on the waiting room TV, Yarik had sat in a hard plastic chair or paced the wide linoleum squares and fought the urge to leave. When he had first left Dima with the doctors and gone back down the hall, he’d thought the glances the nurses gave him were merely the usual thing—Isn’t that the guy from the Oranzheria ads?—had expected one to approach—Mr. Next?—the way people did on the street. But in the waiting room the whispers had been unfriendly, something unsettling about the stares, and then he’d seen the report he’d missed on the earlier hour’s news and known he’d had it wrong: the only reason they were talking about him was what was being said about his brother.

  And now, there was Dima, on the arm of an orderly, being walked into the room. All eyes turned. Yarik’s, too. And the thought that he was joining them, another spectator taking in the sight of his brother’s fa
ce, made him look away.

  He’d spent the past hours thinking of what he would say, but when he stepped forward to ease his brother from the orderly’s arm, it was Dima who spoke, mouthed a word so garbled only Yarik could have understood. “Bratan.” And, through the Novocain that numbed his jaw, working with his swollen lips: “You look good.”

  The starch in his collar, the tie loosened around his neck, the new winter jacket with the Consortium logo on its chest: right then he would have ripped it all away. But watching Dima’s smile—a little saliva slipped from the corner of his mouth, his eyes trying not to show the pain the analgesic was already letting through—how could he not smile back? “You don’t,” Yarik said. As much for himself as to steady his brother, he put his arm around Dima’s back. A murmur rippled through the gawkers. Good, Yarik thought, let them doubt what they’d been told. He gave his brother’s shoulder a gentle pat. “Come on,” he said. He’d been holding Dima’s rucksack by a strap, and he saw Dima watching it, made out his brother’s slurred, “Where’s Timofei?”

  “Home,” Yarik told him.

  “We were only—”

  “It’s late.” Yarik heaved the bag to his shoulder, felt his neck muscles tense. “Let’s get you there, too.”

  But, helping his brother down the corridor, feeling Dima’s unsteadiness beneath his arm, he knew it was too late. He’d waited too long.

  A day after he’d confronted Bazarov, after the man had called his guards back in and given Yarik back his gun—One last lesson: load it yourself—and had him escorted outside again, on the first full evening reillumined by the zerkala, Yarik had returned from work, stepped into the stairwell, shut the building’s door behind him, and heard a voice say Slava. When he turned, a thin figure waited there, half-hidden by shadows, half by a hood, barely discernible but for her hands, her face. You even answer to it, she said. And he could just make out a smirk. He’d thought she was a stalker, someone after a snapshot or an autograph, but when he’d asked her what she wanted she’d spoken his brother’s name. She’d come, she told him, because she knew it might be the last day she could. Because, with her last hours of freedom, she wanted to do something good. For Dima. Who are you? Yarik had asked. I’m the one, she’d said, who he might love if he didn’t already love you. While she’d talked he had gradually been able to make her out. Her fingers working over a sliver of something metal, snapping it open and shut while she spoke of how close she feared his brother was to coming undone, how she’d seen others so troubled they needed The Dachas’ walls around them to keep the rest of the world at bay, the way, she said, that Dima needed him. You, she said, shoving her hood back. Not Slava. The anger showing in her face. Someone who could be the twin your brother talks so much about. Because this—she stepped close, snagged his tie, slapped it back against his chest—isn’t him. Watching her face soften, the fury fade from her black eyes, he’d listened to her try to paint a picture of the life she seemed to believe that he and Dima could still lead. But beneath the smoke of her cigarette breath he’d sensed her desperate need to believe in it herself, and it had been that—the knowledge that he no longer did, the hole he could feel where once he’d needed to believe in it, too—that, when she’d said the words good brother, had made them hurt so much.