The Great Glass Sea (19 page)

Even in weather like this they used to gather. Not many, but always some, always a few hunched into their raincoats, sharing umbrellas, listening to whichever poet had managed to scramble up the slippery plinth, to stand at its top getting soaked, an arm around the tsar’s waist, and shout his verse through the racket of the rain. Always his father was there to hear.

Now, the square was almost empty. Under the aspen trees, among the dandelion puffs heavy with sog, two old people sat in their hats and raincoats atop two upturned plastic drums, manning the receptacle collection site—one ruble per plastic bottle, two for cans of tin—a makeshift recycling center run by what was left of the Communist Party in Petroplavilsk. On the opposite side, around the bus stop, a few small shapes huddled. Nearer, beneath a tree at the edge of the square, a trashman in his orange poncho, his broom over his shoulders, waited out the rain.

It had quit, and there was just the dripping from the leaves, from the tsar’s stiff arm above, by the time it came to Dima: of course no listeners were there; for a long time now there had been no speaker atop the statue for them to hear. He craned his neck. Up there: the toe of Peter’s boot, the bottom of his coat, the underside of his outstretched hand, the gray and rolling clouds. From the cobblestones there came a shrushing sound, slosh of water. Silence. The shrushing again.

It wasn’t easy climbing up. He got his shoe tips on the stone ledge, but from there bronze swooped out in a grip-denying slope, and he had to stretch to reach the hold above it, haul himself with shaking arms and scrabbling legs until he could grab the great tsar’s toe.

Standing foot to foot with the statue, one arm clamped around its wet cold waist, Dima looked down at a square unexpectedly far below. The rustling of the leaves seemed louder now that his own clothes were flapping in the same gusts. The shrushing on the cobblestones had stopped. Instead, there was the silence of the trashman looking up at him. In his hand the man held the push broom straight up, its bristles dark and sopping, its wide head facing Dima like the pan of a photographer’s flash. Over at the bus stop, the commuters had turned to watch him, too. Looking at their faces beneath their black umbrellas, Dima could feel the hairs prickling all down his neck. He tried to think of how he would begin a poem if he were a poet. He coughed. The trees rustled. He tried to think of what he might have inside him to say. His face felt feverish. At the bus stop a man began to shake his umbrella out. Dima watched another turn away, look down the street.

A flame is in my blood
, he thought. The statue’s waist felt like it was trying to slip loose from his fingers. He imagined saying
A flame is in my blood
, and thought his throat was so dry the words would stick, and when he finally said them—“A flame is in my blood!”—he was trying so hard to get the words past his teeth they came out twice as loud as he’d intended.

The old Party members’ wet hats swiveled towards him, white beards in the brim-shadows. They shifted on their red plastic buckets.

A flame is in my blood,
he thought, and thought blood, bone, burning, throat, dry, life,
burning the bones dry
. . . “Burning the bones dry of life!”

The noise of the bus covered his voice, and he shouted the last word—
that’s not too bad,
he thought—and then was glad for the bus’s interruption so he could stop and think. He watched the people get on, one person get off—a young, thin woman with black hair all buzzed but for her bangs, dressed in the yellow vest of a bus-fare collector—and when it pulled away again there were just the ones who’d been there before, two waiting for a different number tram—they’d turned their backs to him—and the fare collector woman already shifting her glance away. He looked down at the trash sweeper. The man swung the broom-head back to the ground.

“I sing . . .” Dima tried.

The shrushing of the broom, the slosh of the water it pushed over the stones, the shrushing again.

“I sing . . .”

The man flicked his eyes up at Dima and Dima tried to catch his glance, but the man yanked it away again.

“I am singing of . . .”

As the man moved off, his orange back hid the broom, his poncho swishing to the sound, so that it seemed the shrushing came from the man himself. Beneath the sound, Dima could hear his own words lingering; he wished the man would walk faster, or shove harder, or do whatever he had to do to cover them up.

Sliding down, he sat at the tsar’s feet, his own feet dangling against the plinth, still far from the ground, the metal folds of Pyotr’s coat crowding his head so he had to hunch. He sat there, imagining what his father would have thought; he would have walked away, too. Or tried to climb up and get him down. And, thinking of his father, it came to him:
A flame is in my blood, burning dry life to the bone
. The first time he’d heard it, he had been sitting on his father’s shoulders.
I do not sing of stone, now, I sing of wood.
Was it Akhmatova? Pasternak? He tried to hear the rest—
It is light and
. . . something . . .
made of
. . . Something about a fisherman, an oak . . .
hammer them . . . hammer them . . . hammer them in
. . . —he couldn’t do it.

When the sun came out again he was still sitting there. He shut his eyes, watched the redness it made of his inner lids, felt its faint warmth on his face. Surely he could remember something he had read in the old library. . . . But there was only the sudden booming of his father’s voice, the bellowed tune to Glinka’s opera, the dom kultura fires flickering, the steam of all the villagers packed inside to see their fellow farmers perform that year’s rendition of Pushkin’s epic poem, as they did each year, and everywhere, in cultural houses across the land, in rural schoolyards and city auditoriums and the theaters of the capital, places where once, in a time long past, the entire country would seem to pause from life, different days, at different hours, but all gone still, grown men and women mouthing the few stanzas they’d learned as children, children learning them anew, all brought to silence as they listened to the beloved verse . . .

By a distant sea a green oak stands;

to the oak a chain of gold is tied;

and at the chain’s end night and day

a learned cat walks round and round.

Rightwards he goes, and sings a song;

leftwards, he tells a fairy tale.

“. . . What magic here! What magic . . . magic here . . .” But that was all he could remember. He sat listening to the whispering of the trees, the clang and boom of the faraway docks. A bus came, went. It wasn’t until its rumble had faded again that he realized it had taken with it the shrushing sound.

He opened his eyes. The sweeper was still down there, his broom motionless now, his eyes already on Dima’s. The man took one hand from his broom. With it, he made a scooping gesture, palm to his chest, fingers curling, a motion that might have meant
come down, come down
or might have meant
more, more
or whatever it meant that the two old Communists now stood up from their bucket stools and hobbled closer, that the fare collector who had taken off her rain boots to stand barefoot in a puddle, cigarette between her lips, only now broke her stillness to light it.

That Switch, Dima rode the tram out to meet his brother, but when they got off at Yarik’s apartment complex, instead of waiting in the hope he’d be invited up Dima hugged his brother there on the street. Then he got back on another tram and took it to the Universitetski Rynok. That night, in the old stacks of the abandoned library, he found what he was looking for. And the next day, at the same time, he climbed the statue of the tsar with a copy of
Ruslan and Lyudmila
in the rucksack on his back.

There, below him: the park sweeper, leaning on his broom handle, looking up. To either side other trashmen stood, one with a huge plastic bag, another with a poker, scraping quietly at the cobblestones with its sharp tip. With them, gathered on the cobblestones around the statue: a woman in a business suit wolfing pirozhki with greasy hands, a man beside her holding an empty dolly at an angle, as if about to drag it away. The last time Dima had seen even such a small scattering of people standing around the square so still was so long ago the three old folks who’d turned over their red plastic buckets in the grass wouldn’t have yet been old. They had brought bags of bottles with them, were sorting the plastic from the glass, the small sharp sounds skipping like rocks across the surface of the wind in the leaves. Over on the street, a trolleybus pulled up. Dima glanced to see the same thin woman stepping out of the doors again—black hair catching the breeze, fare collector’s bag swinging as she hit the sidewalk and saw him and quickened her pace, as if she thought he’d already begun.

He had forgotten, before, that Pushkin had opened his epic with a dedication. Now he started it over again, from the true beginning. “For you,” his voice broke through the breeze, “tsaritsas of my soul, my beauties, for your sake have I these golden leisure hours . . .”

A few last clanks of the old Communists sorting their bottles. Scrape of metal on stone: the man with the truck dolly lowering its lip. The trashman with his poker stilled. For a moment the stillness of them down there, of their eyes on him, stoppered his memory. He could recall the next words—
devoted to writing down this fable whispered
—but not what came after, and he was about to give up, to slide his rucksack around his shoulder, unzip it, draw out the book he had been studying on the buses all day, when the fare collector drew the cigarette from her mouth and stepped to the statue. She was not long out of her teens, too young to remember the poets before. But she held out the cigarette for him to take. Her fingernails were painted black, and keeping his eyes on them, he took the smoke, sucked in, started to straighten up. Her fingers snapped. She beckoned with them. Thinking she meant him to lean close, he glanced at her eyes. No, she just wanted the cigarette back. Something about that made him smile, and when he’d given it to her he pulled himself straight, waist-to-waist with the statue again, and spoke on—of the feline raconteur, the ancient oak, a world of fables redolent of long ago Russia, the Rus of old. . . .

I was once there; I drank of mead

I saw the green oak by the sea;

I sat beneath it, while the cat,

that learned cat, told me his tales . . .

He went as far as he had memorized—the wedding feast; the gusli’s wavering announcement of the bard; the newlywed knight Ruslan, eyes only for his Lyudmila, too full of lust even to swallow; his sullen rivals, onetime suitors of the bride—went all the way into the bedchamber, until (
But lo!
) thunder rips the air (
a flash!
), the lamp goes out: the eerie voice, the black figure, the bride disappeared (
groping, trembling, Ruslan’s hand seizes on emptiness . . .
). By the time he stopped, a handful of others waiting for the tram had wandered over, let their trams pass by; a shopkeeper across the street stood just outside his door, as if fighting the pull to abandon his job; a vendor in stained apron and steam-wet mustache had done just that, left his
pelmyeni
cart untended to come close enough to hear. In the quiet after Dima’s words, they all looked up. And panicked: in these ever longer days of early summer, the zerkala could rise nearly unnoticed, bleach dots speckling a sheet of still-bright sky. The business-suit woman clacked off in her heels, madly wiping fingers needed for her phone. The fare-collection girl put her shoes back on—she’d been sitting on the stones, black toenails in the sun—and got up. There came the clatter of the old Communists returned to their bottles and cans. The trash sweepers went back to work.

But the next day most of them were there again. And the shopkeeper, too, his shop door shut. Above it, in the second-story windows, the third-story, the fourth, men in ties and women in skirts stood, fingers parting blinds, foreheads pressed to glass, peering out at the gathered crowd. The Communist Party members had moved their whole collection center—buckets and folding table and stacks of crates—close enough the old people could hear. There were a gaggle of them now. The trash sweepers and litter pickers, sidewalk washers and railing painters—their orange vests bright as buoys floating among all the rest—made way for a long line of little children brought by their schoolteacher to hear the revered old epic told, mingled with the men on the repaving crew who shut down their steamrollers and silenced their jackhammers and stood, hard hats pressed to hips by arms still sheened with sweat, listening.

To the old tsar’s plea to the gathered knights: find his stolen daughter, earn the hand in marriage Ruslan had forfeited by failing to safeguard his wife. To the descriptions of dust boiling up behind the racing chargers ridden by the reinvigorated suitors, to the names—Farlaf, Rogdai, the Khazar khan Ratmir—that all but the schoolchildren had heard so many times so long ago. To the shame of disgraced Ruslan stumbling half-dead with hopelessness upon a light, a cave, a hermetic mage waiting inside. When Dima voiced the old recluse’s revelation—that it was the necromancer Chernomor who’d stolen the bride away—it seemed the crowd leaned in as if to touch the fable as much as hear it. And when he reached the end of what he knew, and his last words settled over the people gathered in the square, he felt it, too: the calls for more, the scattered clapping, a shouted guess at the next line, a sense that this, this thing he’d started, was not his to stop.