The Great Glass Sea Read online

  The Great Glass Sea

  Also by Josh Weil

  The New Valley: Novellas

  The Great Glass Sea

  a novel

  Josh Weil

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Josh Weil

  Drawings by Josh Weil

  Jacket design and artwork by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2215-5

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9286-8

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  for my brother

  Always the island had been out there, so far out over so much choppy water, far beyond the last gray wave, the groaning ice when there was ice, the fog when there was fog, so distant in the middle of such a huge lake that, for their first nine years, Nizhi—that church made of those tens of thousands of wooden pegs, each one as small as a little boy’s finger bones; those woodshingled domes like tops upended to spin their points on the floor of the sky; the priests’ black robes snapping in the wind, their beards blowing with the clouds, their droning ceaseless as the shore-slap waves—might have been just another fairy tale that Dyadya Avya told.

  And then one day when the lake ice had broken and geese had come again, two brothers, twins, stole a little boat and rowed together out towards Nizhi . . .

  “Into the lake,” Dima said.

  “To hunt the Chudo-Yudo,” Yarik said.

  “Until they found it.”

  “And killed it.”

  They were ten years old—Dmitry Lvovich Zhuvov and Yaroslav Lvovich Zhuvov—and they had never been this far out in the lake, this lost, this on their own. Around them the water was wide as a second sky, darkening beneath the one above, the rowboat a moonsliver winking on the waves. In it, they sat side by side, hands buried in the pockets of their coats, leaning slightly into each other with each sway of the skiff.

  “Or maybe it came up,” Dima said, “and crushed the boat.”

  “And they drowned,” Yarik said.

  “Or,” Dima said, “it ate them.”

  They grinned, the same grin at the same time, as if one’s cheeks tugged the other’s lips.

  “Or,” Yarik started.

  And Dima finished, “They died.”

  They went quiet.

  The low slap of lakewater knocking the metal hull. The small sharp calls of jaegers: black specs swirling against a frostbitten sky. But no wood blades clacking at the rowboat’s side. No worn handles creaking in the locks. Hours ago, they had lost the oars.

  Now they were losing last light. Their boat had drifted so far into Lake Otseva’s center that they could no longer make out the shore. But there was the island. All their lives it had been somewhere beyond the edge of sight, and now they watched it: far gray glimpse growing darker, as if the roots of its unknown woods were drawing night up from the earth. It humped blackly out of the distant water, unreachable as a whale’s back. And beyond it stretched the lake. And all around: the lake. And beneath them the rocking of its waves.

  At their feet the tools they’d taken scraped back and forth against the skiff floor: axe, hatchet, cleaver, pick. Each one freshly sharpened. In the bow, behind their backs, a brush hook’s moon-bright blade swayed against the sky. Beneath it, a cloud of netting. And, nestled there to keep from breaking, wrapped in wool blankets to warm the life in them: two dozen eggs, a gestating nestful of yolky souls. Out of the stern, the fishing rod jutted, its line lipped by the waves—tugged and slacked, tugged and slacked—going down down down into the black belly of the lake where its huge hook hung, gripping in its barb the red fist of a fresh goose heart.

  Way out over the water, far beyond the island, the edge of the lake met the end of the world and there the sky was a thin red line drawn by a bead of blood. Then it was just a line. Then the line was gone, and there was just the darkness of the earth meeting the darkness of the sky and the boys rose unsteadily on the unsteady boat and crouched atop the netting, unfolding the blankets from the eggs. Dima unscrewed the tops from the canning jars. Yarik cracked the shells against their rims. One by one he slid in each yolk on its slick of albumen. One by one Dima closed the tops again. When they had all the eggs in all the jars, they tied threads around the glass necks. Each thread they tied to an oarlock or a hole punched through the gunwale or a ring at the prow, the two brothers crawling around the boat, reaching over its edge, letting go the jars. At the ends of their strings they floated, the glass gleaming, the eggs like a lakeful of eyes.

  “How many heads do you think it has?” Dima said.

  It had become more night than dusk, and there was no moon, no way to see the fishing line. But they watched the rod.

  “At least six,” Yarik said.

  “Probably twelve,” Dima said.

  Yarik told him, “Twenty-four.”

  Dima said, “I want the axe.”

  Reaching down, he found it, and—arms thin as the handle, shoulders straining—lifted. Beside him, in Yarik’s small boy’s hands, their old uncle’s pistol seemed huge. They sat huddled together, cold and silent and knowing the other was scared: the line would snap tight; the boat would jerk; the weight would suck down the stern; the water would wolf their feet; the thing’s two dozen heads would roar up around the boat, one set of jaws mouthing blood and metal, the other twenty-three agape, their tongues, their teeth.

  “What if it doesn’t come?” Dima said.

  That was when the rod bent. They watched it arc, watched the arc deepen until the rod was almost doubled on itself, shaking.

  “It’s going to,” Dima whispered, and Yarik said, “break,” and Dima said, “come loose,” and then the stern dropped so fast that for a moment there was just the strain of all the air cupped within the boat against all the water trying to suck it down, the sound of something splitting, tearing . . . and then the boat jerked back up, its stern lifting off the surface, knocking the boys forward, noses to knees, and when they looked up the rod was gone.

  Stumbling to his feet, Dima stood scanning the water for a hint of the rod streaking away. Or hurtling back at them.

  The boatwall boomed.

  He jerked, ripped a hand off the axe, flailed for the gunwale. Behind Dima: his brother laughing. Even in the dark, he could see the panic on Yarik’s face, the unnerved giddiness in his eyes as he banged the metal barrel on the boat-side again.

  “Trusishka,” Yarik called him. He tried to make clucking noises as he bobbed his head, but he was laughing too hard; only sputtering came out.

  The laughter passed from Yarik to Dima as these things always passed, as if the placentas that had once fed them were still conjoined, and Dima climbed onto the rowboat seat, shakily stood, threw
back his face, and crowed a laughter-rippled rooster’s call: “Kukareku!”

  Yarik climbed beside him, crowed out his own: “Kukareku!”

  On the thin metal bench, they stood side by side, beating their chests, calling into the night.

  From the night, a call came back to them: some rooster of Nizhi crowing its reply. Such a long sound! So drawn out and furious! They counted it—raz, dva, tri . . . fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—longer even than Dyadya Avya’s old crower, longer than they could push their own breath when they emptied their lungs in a wild burst of crowing back. How the rooster bellowed his challenge again at them! How they threw their crowing, boys and bird, across the black surface of the lake!

  Until their crows turned to shouts, their shouts back to laughter, the laughter to breathing, the breathing quieting. They stood there, rocking. Above them, the stars filled the sky like sand filling a bucket of water until it seemed wholly comprised of grains of light. Below, Otseva’s surface filled with their reflection. All around the boat, the floating jars gleamed: a drifting constellation, waterborne.

  “What if it comes back?” Yarik said.

  And they passed between them the knowledge that that was why they had come out. For it to come back. So they could kill it. They stood thinking of their father, and how he must have tried, and they passed between them the truth that he had failed, and that they would fail, too, and they wondered again, silently, the thoughts they had wondered aloud in the night in their beds at Dyadya Avya’s—where in them lived their souls? And had they grown side by side, same to same, in their mother’s womb as well? And if one was swallowed up, or died, or simply left, would the other go, too?—and then they climbed down off the seat and went around the boat again, Dima with his axe, Yarik with the cleaver, cutting all the strings.

  One by one, the jars floated away. The gleams separated from each other. The darkness between the boys and the boat widened and widened and then swallowed any sign of the jars at all.

  “Out to see Nizhi,” Dima tried. And after a moment: “Into the lake.” And then: “Where they sank, and the water swallowed them up, and they drowned.” Dima grinned, waited to feel his brother grin.

  But his brother was clambering for one side of the boat, and Dima was scrambling to the other to keep from tipping, and into the darkness that somewhere hid the island Yarik was shouting, “Help! Help!”

  Dima reached for him and drew him down again, beside him on the bench, whispered it would be OK, they were together. On the island, Yarik’s shouting had stirred some dog of Nizhi. It barked, so far out its sound was quiet as a creaking in the dark, and the sky drifted above the drifting boat, and the cold came on, slow and steady, as if the creaking was its footsteps creeping across the night towards the boys, and they leaned into each other, shivering.

  When Dima climbed off the bench, Yarik followed. They slid together along the bottom of the boat until they lay stretched out, boots to bow, out of the wind, side by side, rocking. In the sky, the stars flickered, flickered, as if each distant dog bark caused the night to blink.

  In unison, the brothers unzipped their jackets. They slipped their arms out of the sleeves. They paired each strip of zipper with its mate on the other’s jacket, worked at the pulls along the teeth until they were zipped in, facing each other, their jackets become one jacket that encased them both. Inside, they slid their fingers into each other’s pits. Against his hands, Dima could feel his brother’s heartbeat. Or was it his brother’s hands beating beneath Dima’s arms? Or was it his own heart pulsing? The wind rushed by above.

  He might not have woken if it wasn’t for Yarik’s struggling. Over them, the searchlight washed across the boat, sparked off the empty oarlocks, was gone again.

  Yarik tore the zipper open, shoved loose, sat up. Dima stayed lying where he was. He watched the light find his brother.

  “Look!” Yarik called down at him.

  Instead he shut his eyes.

  “Allo!” Yarik shouted. “Allo!”

  Dima listened to the night swallow the shout, to the water shushing beneath Yarik’s banging scramble for the bow, his brother’s frantic passed by, unseen, missed—until the gunshot silenced everything. Its blast filled the boat fast as if the bottom had been blown out, water rushing around Dima’s ears. Through it, he heard another boom, another. Eyes squeezed tight, he counted the shots—four, five, six—waiting for the seventh that would mean the gun was empty. It never came. Instead, there was his brother saying his name, asking him to sit up, telling him to look.

  But when Dima rose, he kept his eyes shut. He would have stayed in the hull if, without his brother, it hadn’t been so cold. He climbed by feel onto the bench, leaned against Yarik. When the light hit his brother’s face, Dima opened his eyes. Bright as a full moon, the searchlight came, sweeping the lake, them, the lake. Until it held, blasting. Dima shut his eyes again. Through the water, he could feel the ship coming, the shuddering of its engine, the small boat beginning to shake.

  Sometimes, climbing up the steps of the autobus on his way to work, Dima would pass Yarik climbing down and feel, for a moment, his brother’s palm on the back of his neck, still warm from Yarik’s coat pocket. Or punching in at the entrance to the Oranzheria he would spot his brother in the crowd shuffling out: Yarik would nod to him, too tired to speak; he would nod back. Sometimes, twelve hours later, Dima would hear his brother, returned for his next shift, calling to him: Good morning, little brother! And he would call back: Good night, big brother! Born a mere eight minutes apart, it was how they’d called each other since they were kids, and the whole tram ride home he would play it over and over in his head—good morning, bratishka; good night, bratan; good morning, bratishka; good night . . . —trying to keep the voice just right, to hold the image of Yarik’s eyes.

  And, though weekends were an idea discarded long ago, sometimes on Unity Day, or Defender of the Fatherland Day, or any of the half-handful that he got off, Dmitry Lvovich Zhuvov would go to his brother’s home. He would take a tram across town, shortcut through the playground, skirt the small lake puddled at the building’s entrance, climb the concrete steps inside the dimlit stairwell, knock on the apartment door, and step into his brother’s hug and kiss the cheek of his brother’s wife and eat with the children some sweet thing she had made, and they would gather—his little nephew leaping up and down on the couch, his infant niece nursing at his sister-in-law’s breast—while the two brothers, lying hidden behind the coffee table, raised hands: a mitten bear, a glove of a rooster, simple socks making a pair of horses to pull the sleighs in the tales the brothers told. Then Dima would turn his cheek on the rug and, watching so close he could feel the breath behind his brother’s whinny or roar, try to catch a glimpse of Yarik as he used to be.

  Sometimes Dima would almost feel that Yarik still was as he’d once been. Helping hang an icon for his brother’s wife, Dima would stradle Yarik’s shoulders, whoop and flail as his brother, roaring, tried to stand beneath the weight, bellowing until they both collapsed into a laughing heap. Clearing away the dead lilacs that lined Yarik’s street, they’d taken turns with the bow saw, one brother urging the other on with hollered bursts of folk songs, each banging out the beat with the flat of his hands on the sawer’s back. It was the way they’d always worked together, and, later, pouring a drink, Dima would stare across the table—Yarik’s hands full with his daughter’s diapers, ears with his son’s babble, face flush from shouting over it to his wife—and tell himself, I am seeing him, here, right now, and know it wasn’t true. Always, then, Dima would think of the lake and the rowboat and the blanket of stars. His eyes would ache. His lips would shiver. He would cover them with his fist.

  They had the same big fists, were the same high height, had grown the same thick bones. Heads round as ball-peen hammers, hair black as raven wings, eyes like the gray of that bird’s breast feathers stirred with the blue of its sky. Their father used to call them his two tsareviches, claim they had flown to him as
crows, morphed into infants before his eyes, would one day turn back into birds and fly away again. Instead, with each year, they only turned a little more into themselves: Yarik’s shoulders a little wider, his forehead a little higher, the skin around his eyes a little more cragged; Dima’s eyes seemed to grow more blue, his face to lengthen, a mole marking his cheek. Still, until a couple years ago, strangers had struggled to tell them apart. Now it was easy: one was brown as their farmer uncle after a summer in the fields, the other pale as his wraith-white skin in winter.

  The first year Dima worked at the Oranzheria, it had scared him—watching his face turn wan and wrinkled—each shift beneath the mirrors’ thin light leaching his color a little more until he was as pallid as any other night worker high on the surface of that great glass sea. Vast hectares of panels stretching across an endless scaffolding of steel, it spread northward from the lakeshore, creeping over the land like a glacier in reverse: the largest greenhouse in the world. On the news they talked of its unceasing expansion, of the whole country’s future in ever brighter bloom, of a Russia risen again on the wings of her space mirrors.

  Kosmicheskie zerkala. An idea born during Brezhnev (Oh for a satellite to reflect the sun into our Siberian night! Oh to snatch day from the earth’s bright side, expel our long darkness from this northcold land!) and designed under Andropov (These giant dragonflies! Their steely abdomens the size of submarines! Their solar module wings!), built in Gorbachev’s last years, scrapped by Ivashko, reborn with the oligarchs and launched in the last decade of the past century, rocketed through the exosphere on the arching backs of freshly molted entrepreneurs. It was a man from Moscow who built the first (the people of the city shook their heads, took it for just what this new breed of billionaire did when it got drunk), and it was his corporation that quieted their laughter to whispers (he was going to launch it for science, for Russia, for Petroplavilsk, for free), and finally to awestruck silence the day the Space Regatta Consortium put the first one up: belly to belly with the world, it slid the planetary curve, in its wake a gleaming disk of Kevlar, big as Red Square, reflecting the sunlight down. But it was the Ministry of Energy that paid for the Consortium to send up another, and another, and the next, and the one after that.