by Josh Weil
They passed the bridge. It was the bridge.
And up ahead a streak of sunlight sliced down over the fields. Another: sudden brightness cutting through the dusky blue beneath the ceiling of snow. Another, another. Somewhere here lay the souls of a hundred thousand birches. The bones of the old house, the old barns: all buried now. Somewhere beneath that flat and endless simultaneity of all the mass cultivated fields was a place where once a patch of color had glowed amidst dark woods, a mound of collapsed logs and earth and roots dense and tangled and impenetrable as the muscles of a heart.
And their uncle’s body? Their father’s?
The truck stopped. The engine died.
From above them they could hear the steady scrape of the shovelers. Through the windshield they could see the glass panes coming clear. The snow disappeared in strips behind the rubber-tipped shovels of the workers who pushed them, and in the clear strips there walked the black boot soles of the men, and there were thousands of them. Where they cleared the sky there was the deep blue of late afternoon. In the silence between the brothers there was the creaks and sloshing of the shoved snow emptied through the release chutes into the colliquation tanks. The light hit it as it fell: brief avalanches, mirages of waterfalls, coming one after the other all over the landscape in small moments of thunder, flashing over the cisterns and gone, and flashing over another and gone, and another.
Then Dima was out in it. He stood beside the truck, the door hanging open, the dirt road in front of him, and across it, where Dyadya Avya’s farm had been, the endless yellow of the wide rapeseed fields. The driver’s side door opened; he heard it smack shut.
“Dima,” Yarik said.
Dima’s fist shot out, slammed against the fender of the truck. “Why?”
“Bratishka.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You must have known.”
“How could you let them buy it?” He swung his glare on his brother. “When you knew, you knew, Yarik . . .”
“I didn’t let them buy it.”
“. . . you knew that I had enough to buy at least some. When you”—his fist shook between them—“you had enough to buy all of it. Why—”
“I did. I did buy all of it.”
Dima started to speak again, but the sound died in his throat and there was just his fist shaking against his brother’s chest, and his eyes with the question shaking in them.
“Where do you think,” Yarik said, “all that money came from?”
“Why did you give it to me?”
“It was yours. It was half. Half of what I got for us when I sold the land to him. He was going to get it anyway, Dima. I just got it first so we would get something, we would have something of what Dyadya Avya left, something of what was ours.”
“Ours?”
“Put your fist down.”
Instead, Dima’s other came up. He stood there with both fists against Yarik’s chest, the knuckles touching, the hands shaking. “Ours,” he said. “Not yours.”
“If you hit me, bratets, I swear I will hit you back.”
Slowly, Dima lifted his fists away. He brought them together to his face, and clenching them in front of his mouth, he looked at the fields, tried to remember where the old izba had been, to see any sign of the chimney or the foundation or the gate, and there was nothing, and he said, “Why did you even bring me here?”
“You asked to come here.”
“To bury Mama.”
“To show you,” Yarik shouted. “To show you what the real world is. Mama wanted me to have our book? You think she wanted it to wake me up?”
“Yarik, where did they bury—”
“I’m awake, Dima! I live awake.”
“Where can we bury her now?”
“You live in a fucking dream.”
“At least—”
“We’ll bury her in the cemetery.”
“At least, if I live in a dream . . .”
“Where people bury people.”
“. . . it’s my dream.”
“Your dream,” Yarik said, “is what killed her.”
It felt to Dima like his fist must have hit the truck again, but in the second afterward he watched his brother’s face whipping back to him, and then his own eyesight whipped around, a crack of pain ripping up his jaw into the socket of his eye.
“You had half the money,” Yarik shouted at him. “You had that much! And she was freezing! She was starving! And she blamed me! Me! She had to. Who else was going to take care of her? You? When did she ever expect anything of you? Why did I? Get up,” Yarik said. “Get up and get the fuck back in the truck.”
Above him, Dima could see the men gathered, looking down at where he lay, shovels in their hands, pools melting in the sunshine around their boots. The sun came down on his face and warmed it and he felt like he could lie there forever, like the men would stay forever leaned over, still, looking at him, and if they would just stop and stay there, and the sun would stay as it was, and he could stay in it . . . But there was the sound of his brother’s boots on the dirt road. The driver’s side door opened and smacked shut. The truck engine shook awake. He heard the passenger side door open.
“Bratets,” Yarik said, and in his voice there was a pain as if each word was stitched to his throat and each utterance yanked them out one by one. “You think this is about Mama. You think it’s about us. It’s not. It never has been. It has always, always, always been about you. Your selfishness. Your jealousy. Because I married? Because I had a child? Because I refuse to cling to some fairy-tale time of our lives? Because when I go swimming in the lake it’s Timosha’s feet on my shoulders, my son’s fingers that I feel tap the top of my head, not my brother’s, not yours. Jealous of a child. Of a six-year-old. That’s what this is about, Dima. The fact that every morning I wake up beside my wife and you wish it was still you.”
“No,” Dima started to say, “all I wanted . . .”
“. . . is for me,” Yarik finished for him, “to wish it, too. But I don’t. I don’t even wish it. Can’t you see that? If I wished it I would have kept the land. But I didn’t want that. I don’t. I don’t want my dream to be my own, Dima. What I want is for it to be real.” There was the chiming of the open passenger door. “Come on,” Yarik said through it. “Get in.”
Slowly, Dima rose. The men above him seemed to back away straight up, as if they thought he would rise through the glass and into them. His brother was saying, “I didn’t make the deal just for the money, Dima. I made it for that. To keep it safe, all of it, work and life and my family and you. But now you know—we both know—that it’s not. You’re not. Dima . . .”
But Dima was walking past the open door. He went around the truck to the tailgate, opened it, let it bang down. Through the rear windshield, he could see his brother, neck twisted, staring at him, saying something. Reaching in, Dima found the handle of the shovel. He dragged the metal head out along the plastic bed.
“Where are you going to dig?” his brother said from inside the cab. “Where would you bury her?”
And then Dima pulled the shovel back like a logger about to swing an axe, and his brother stopped talking, and a second later there was the crash. He slammed the shovel head into the rear taillight. He brought it back and slammed it again.
When his brother’s shouting came at him—“You think I wouldn’t have had them move Dyadya Avya?”—it was louder—“Papa?”—nothing between it and him but the air, and he spun and saw his brother stop at the sight of the shovel raised and, without taking his eyes off Yarik, he pulled back and slammed the metal into the side of the tuck. It buckled in. He slammed it again. And, his brother a still shape standing, watching, the men above standing as still, watching, the sun flinging off the shovel blade and up at the glass and over his brother and down to dissipate into the fields, he made his way around the truck, smashing the fenders and the side-view mirror and the grille and the glass, until he was back where he had started. Everything w
as silent. Above the truck the crowd on the cleared patch of glass had grown, and all except off in the distance the scraping had stopped, the snowfalls in the ditches had ceased, the fields were quiet.
The whole time, Yarik had stood in the shovel’s gusts, the flashes off its blade, stood still, watching. But when Dima began climbing into the bed of the truck, he moved. Stepping close, he shot out an arm, tried to grab whatever he could of Dima, saw the shovel head glint, the glint rushing at him. Then he was ducking, low, half-fallen into a crouch, one hand on the ground, the other on the tailgate, the blade ripping by above his head with an air-slicing whoosh that filled his ears, until another sound smashed down and knocked it away: metal slamming wood, wood cracking, the shovel crashing, the pine lid shattering. It was as if, instead of the shovel, the sound had hit him. For a second, his hearing left, his sight bleached, the world slipped his hold. And when it came back he was standing behind the tailgate pointing a pistol at his brother.
He must have said something. Or Dima simply felt it. The last crack of the wood hung in the air, dwindled away, was lost in the sounds of distant snow swept down. Dima stood above the caved coffin, shards scattered around the truckbed, the shovel still in his hands, his hands still. Above them: the slight shifting of the workers’ boots, all their soles on the glass, a smothered thunder. From the truck’s cab the door chime tolled, over and over, like some paltry imitation of church bells. And on his brother’s face, Yarik saw a thing that drained the life out of his own: Dima looking back at him as if he didn’t know who his brother was.
Yarik’s throat wouldn’t work. The muscles of his hand were failing, too, the gun too heavy; it would have dropped if Dima hadn’t reached out and taken it. It was as if the weight came off his throat. “It’s not loaded,” Yarik said. “They’re blanks.” And then his words were rushing out: “Dima, there’s one left, but it’s a blank, believe me, I wouldn’t . . .”
But Dima’s eyes were fixed on their uncle’s old revolver in his hand. “Try it,” Yarik was saying, “you’ll see,” and Dima let the shovel drop out of his other. He held the gun in both. “Believe me,” Yarik was saying, and the handle fit Dima’s palm just as it had his brother’s, as it had Dyadya Avya’s, their hands shaped by tools, by blood . . .
The blast tore between them, smothered Yarik’s voice, filled his ears, loud as two shots, as three, and as the sound scattered and fell away he could hear breaking through it, slowly finding his ears, the tinkling. It came distant and accruing as bird chatter at dawn, and then he was seeing it: the glittering air, the tiny shards sparkling through the light, the chips of glass hitting the truck cab, the bed, the coffin, ricocheting and rattling like hail. All over the road, in the ditches at its edge, pieces of the exploded pane lay scattered. He could feel them in his hair, stinging his face, could see them on his brother’s, and he saw again Bazarov’s eyes as the man had watched him from across the table—the glimmer of fear, the sneaking smile—and when Dima turned away, when he set down the gun, when he picked up the shovel, when he broke the coffin open and hauled their mother out, Yarik let him.
She was still wrapped in the blanket Dima had bound her in, and as he heaved her up, her cut strands of long white hair fell out over the black liner of the truck. She had lost her stiffness, begun to smell. The blanket was soaked heavy. Dima tried to get her over his shoulder without letting go of the shovel, felt his brother watch him fail at it, take a step as if to stop him, and, holding to the shovel with his other hand, Dima simply dragged her out. The chips of glass fallen onto her through the broken pine lid fell off, clattering, as he pulled. At the edge of the truckbed he climbed down and lay the shovel on top of her body and, gripping just above where her ankles would be, backed up until she hovered between him and the truck end, her shoulders and head on the bed, and then, as her shoulders dropped and her neck bent and her head was about to smack into the ground, his brother was there, holding her. Slowly, Yarik lowered her until her top half was resting on the dirt, the shovel still resting on her, her blanket-wrapped legs still under Dima’s arm. For a moment, the blanket was touched by them both, their mother’s body stretched out between their hands. Then Yarik let go and, walking backwards, dragging her, Dima made his way across the road.
The workers followed him above, flowing around the hole in the glass, moving in their fur-hooded parkas like a slowly blown cloud. And the black shapes of their boot soles were like flocks of geese flying beneath it, and their steps were like wing flaps. Occasionally, in the sun, one of their shovels gleamed.
Down there, Dima hauled his mother’s body in its heavy wrappings of wool. It left a wet dark trail in the dirt of the road. Then he was crossing the overflow ditch, and the water was splashing around him in the light, and the blanket came out dripping. The flowers of the rapeseed plants shook as he entered them, bright yellow in the sun and deep yellow in the shadows of the men who stood above. The field was mottled with all their shade, and Dima moved in and out of it, a row of bent plants shaking in his wake. When he stopped, the men above him stopped. The shadows held. He lay the bundle down in the yellow rapeseed flowers, and with the blade of the shovel began to cut at their roots.
He had dug away the first black layer of topsoil, a rough rectangle of dirt, when, across the field, back on the road, the company truck began to move. Even from above, the workmen could see how bashed in it was, how smashed the windshield, the missing side-view mirrors, the way it made a slow turn, forward and back and forward and back, between the edges of the road, until it was facing the way from which it had come. They watched it go. The dust hung in the air where it had been, and thinned, and was gone, too. Then, as if they had been waiting for a sign, the men themselves began to disperse, some scraping with their shovels at the last of the snow, some following with the wide brooms. Only a few lingered on, their heads bent over the glass, watching the figure down below: the sway and flap of the coat around his legs, the sparks of sweat and shards of glass flung from his tangled hair and beard, his thin arms driving the shovel blade over and over—flash and gone, flash and gone—into the dark hole slowly opening before him.
Tonight he will go down to the lake. The sky will be dark and murky as a river, the zerkala glinting in it like the Chudo-Yudo’s eyes on its two dozen heads. How huge the arm of the great bronze tsar beneath them. How small the shape that passes beneath its outstretched finger. How still the masts of the leisure boats. There, caught in the ice, a rowboat lies, its old wood white as some calcified fossil, extinct amphibian, gunwales for bones, hull for its shell, the two oars jutting out like frozen limbs. He wanders past it through the snow. In the place where he had cleared it the day before, the new snow is a slight depression. In the mirror-light it lifts before his boots: puffs of glow. Over on the industrial docks, the winter crews are repairing the summer ships, their headlamps small pinpricks of brightness, warm-seeming the way lamps used to seem on the streets in the hour between daylight and dark. But they are only headlamps. The rest of the light will stay like it is for the rest of the night.
Soon he will be far enough from them that they will seem part of the world of the shore, and he will seem part of the world of the lake. He trudges through the snow, over the ice, his long wool coat dragging at the drifts where the wind has lifted them like waves. His back is bulged with his rucksack. His rucksack is bulged with something tied to it. The rope dangles down—long, thin, black—into the snow. And when he reaches the wide open windswept plain where the gusts have cleared it of all but ice, and the ice is all a reflection of the sky, and he is a dark shape amid the countless gleams of the mirrors above and below, the rope seems to move. The rucksack shivers. For a moment, small black wings sprout from his back, flap at the air, and fold away again.
The ice had broken on the lake, and there remained only a thin cracking ring of it breaking up along the shore, and it was spring, when Yarik went out to Nizhi to see his brother. He caught a ride on one of the smaller fishing boats, paid the captain
to take him out. The big trawlers were at work, and above them the flocks of jaegers and oystercatchers and gulls followed in dark swirls, as if caught in nets cast into the sky. Standing at the gunwale, out of the way of the milling crew, he could almost feel on his palms the rough wet rope two dockside crewmen were drawing out of the water; there was the strain in his shoulders, pulling the heavy net; Dima’s grunts beside him. . . . A tug at his mouth; he pressed his lips together, stilled it. Staring out at the waves, he tried to press the rest still, too: the rocking under him, the heartbeat pulsing in his fingertips. How long had it been since he’d been this far out in the lake? Never on his own. Around him the water was wide as a second sky. He looked away from it, up: his own boat’s own small cloud of birds. Where, once, there had been stars. Flickering with the barks of a distant dog. On that long gone night when his brother, lying beside him in the rowboat bottom, had let out one quiet bark of his own. Gav! Through his smile, Yarik had sent up a yip to join the sound. Together, quietly, they’d said Gav! Gav! Gav! up at the stars. He could still feel it. He could still hear his brother’s whisper, a while later: I’m glad that there were two of them together. They had been studying the pre-Sputnik days in school—Cosmonaut Dezik, Cosmonaut Tsygan, first dogs to reach suborbital space, first living breath heard back on earth by mission control—and that night they had wondered: when the panting had paused was it the companions catching their breath at the sight of the moon rolling around the earth? When the world outside the capsule went up in flames, was the whimpering from fear, or pain, or were they simply trying to tell each other I’m here?