The Great Glass Sea (36 page)

“You mean Slava’s story,” Yarik said.

“OK.” Bazarov shrugged. “But
your
face.” Beneath them: the sound of all the work. Above: a breeze whistling through the cable. Then Bazarov reached out, slapped Yarik on the shoulder. “Holy shit,” he said. “I’ve got it. Yaroslav Lvovich, I have got it. And you gave it to me.”

“What?” Yarik said.

“Next,” Bazarov told him. Between their faces he swiped at the air with his hand and, as if the word had appeared in its wake, said it again: “Next.” Pushing his sunglasses down his nose, he stared at Yarik. “The slogan!”

“Next?”

“You were the one who said it,” Bazarov nearly shouted. “What’s next? Who’s next? How much next? What more next? All the questions are in that one word. And all the answers are in you. In the story of Slava. Because by the time we’re done with it, they”—he stabbed a finger over the edge at the workers below—“they will see you, but they will think to themselves,
Me.
”

“OK,” Yarik said.

“Good!”

“No,” Yarik told him, “what I mean is, OK, then let me ask you something: What’s in it for me?”

Slowly, the hairs of Bazarov’s goatee shifted around his mouth; they spread and rose and then his teeth were a thin strip of glint flashing in the sun. “Cossack,” he said.

“I mean,” Yarik told him, “that I don’t see how any of this . . .”

“Cowboy.”

“. . . changes any of the reasons that today I came in to quit my—”

And Bazarov punched him. He punched him in the upper arm, hard. “Fucking cowboy,” Bazarov said. His laugh burst out so loud, a roar so forceful Yarik could swear he felt the bucket shake. Then he was sure of it. Clamping a hand to the metal rim, he stared at Bazarov. The man gripped the sides, swinging his weight back and forth, back and forth, laughing, shaking his head, saying, “You fucking cowboy, you fucking cowboy,” until they were swinging, the wire jerking above them, Yarik’s stomach beginning to lurch.

Then just as suddenly, Bazarov stopped. His laugh petered out to a breathing through his bared teeth. “What’s in it for you, you fucking cowboy, is that you get to be the answer. And since we always have to have an answer, you always get to be next. Do you understand?” The bucket swayed back and forth, back and forth. “What I’m saying is you don’t just get promoted to manager today, but you get promoted tomorrow, and after that, and after that. You
have
to. We
must
. As long as we’re running the ads, as long as, in their minds, your face is what they see when they see the possibility of
next
, and in your face they see their own, you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to do your job, about what your crew will think of you, about what they think of your brother. They’ll want to
be
you.”

“But don’t you see . . .”

“Because you’ll have a lock on what they really want. Upward mobility. Going straight to the top. A lifetime guarantee on the American dream.”

The bucket swayed. Yarik stared at its iron floor between their boots. “Don’t you see,” he said again, “that’s what’s wrong with the history you told.”

“What?”

“My brother.”

This time it was Bazarov who, for a moment, was quiet. Finally, he said, “What about him?”

“You left him out of my history.”

“I left him out of Slava’s history.”

“But people know who he is. Dima is . . . Dima’s the reason I came here today to quit. People know he’s my—”

“I know all about your brother,” Bazarov said. “I knew all I needed to know the first day I met him—met you both. I’ve seen the video.” He grinned, stuck his hand up, made a pistol shape with finger and thumb, said, “
Puf
!
puf
!
puf
!” Dropping his hand again, he gave a shrug, let his eyes roll. “Ridiculous,” he said. But when he looked back at Yarik, he wasn’t grinning. “And maybe a little dangerous, too.”

“But he’s my brother,” Yarik told him. “I can’t—”

“He’s not the part of the story we would leave out,” Bazarov said. “He’s the part that makes it beautiful. Because, without him, Slava, your story is just one of hard work and luck. But that’s not how the world works. And no matter how good you make a lie, if it’s not how the world works people won’t believe it. Luckily for us, the way the world works
is
the way your story works. A lot of hard work and a little luck but, mostly, a moment of opportunity and the decision to take it.”

Yarik looked down at the iron floor again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Choice, Slava.”

“I think the swaying is getting to me.”

“It all comes down to choice. Who chooses to be next, and who chooses to be passed by.”

“I think we should go back down,” Yarik said.

“Sometimes,” Bazarov told him, “I think this whole country wants to go back down. Our nostalgic Russian soul. Sometimes I think it’s going to sink us all. I understand: it’s a hard thing, this choosing. We didn’t used to have to do it. In The Past Life our choices were made for us. But now we live in a different world. And in this world everything depends on the decisions we make. And what better story of
that
,” Bazarov told him, “than two brothers, twins, who choose so differently.”

He could see the tips of his boots and the tips of Bazarov’s pointing towards his, and he kept his eyes on the stretch of empty steel between them.

“What better way,” Bazarov said, “to show the consequences. One brother who chooses hard work and ambition. The other who chooses to slough off both. What better way to quash whatever effect your brother might have, those like him might have, those using him wish to have, on all the workers like you both. What better way than simply to show them
you
. You in the suit and tie of a section manager. In your manager’s car.”

“I’m not a prop,” Yarik said.

“Of course not,” Bazarov told him. “A prop doesn’t get to choose the direction his life will take.”

On the steel, a scattering of dirt and stones shifted back and forth, pebbles rolling, stopping, rolling back.

“Yarik.”

At the sound of his name, Yarik lifted his gaze. Bazarov’s was already on him.

“You think,” Bazarov said, “that I don’t know how hard this is? You forget: I also had a sibling. Two.” In his eyes there was an openness so unexpected it made Yarik want to look away again, but the man said, “I told you that they died,” and he couldn’t. “A fire. I didn’t tell you it was my fault. Well”—Bazarov sighed—“at least I
felt
it was. I loved them.” He raised his eyebrows, as if there was no way to hide a thing like that. “When it happened,” he went on, “I was away. Like our father, who was never home, who was never
anything
. Except drunk. I was in Moscow, trying to make my business . . .” He winced. “If I had been there, I know I could have saved them. I
know
it. The way I know I failed them because I wasn’t. For a long time after, I thought
I
was a failure, felt it no matter how well my business did, maybe even
because
my business . . .” He shook his head. “But now I don’t. Now I think of my son, his secure future. His mother, who I support.
My
mother, who didn’t have to wreck her health with work, who doesn’t have to worry in her old age. I think of the mothers and children and loved ones of all the people who work here.” He opened his arms. “So many who I’ve done good by.
Because
of my business. Was it worth it? I can’t think of it like that. I can only know this: I chose to live up to
them.
To all those other lives. Sometimes, you have to choose to fail. To let one person down. Or even two. So you can live up to
everyone
else. Especially yourself.”

When Yarik dropped his gaze back to the bucket’s floor, the dirt was still, the pebbles stopped.

“I can’t tell you what to choose,” Bazarov said, “but I can tell you this: whoever you do let down, don’t make it someone who you know won’t let you down. Those people are rare. I know: I’ve spent my life looking for them. Yarik,” he said, and Yarik shut his eyes, “find the person who is already holding you back, who is already failing you. Because I know this, too: I wasn’t the only one who failed my sisters. There were so many others who might have saved them. Including, hard as it is, themselves.”

With his eyes shut, Yarik could still feel the bucket’s swaying inside him. And when he shook his head, it was worse. The scrape of Bazarov’s bootstep, the sense of a weight come closer. From far below, there rose the sound of the logging crews, the earth-shaking thunder of all the trees falling along the forest’s edge.

“I know it’s hard.”

Yarik felt the man’s hand on his shoulder. It was bruised from the punch and it hurt and Yarik didn’t pull away.

“And,” he heard Bazarov say, “it’s going to get harder.”

That evening, when Yarik pushed open the door to the stairwell of his home, he heard footsteps climbing somewhere on the flights above. It could have been any woman’s heels clacking, but it wasn’t; it was his wife’s; he knew it in his body. His boot-thuds banged up the stairs, reverberating like a whole flightful of men, so loud he couldn’t hear if she had stopped, or kept on towards the neighbor’s door, where, just home from work, she would retrieve their children from the old woman, which she could not do, which he could not let her do. By the time he reached her there on the landing, grabbed her around the waist just as she was about to knock, he was gusting so hard from running up that he could not get out any words.

“What is it?” she whispered.

He took the hand that she’d touched to his face and put his mouth to her fingers and breathed.

“What’s going on?” she said, and he told her, “Don’t get them” and “Leave them for a while” and “Downstairs.”

In their apartment, he pressed her against the wall, shoved up her work skirt, got her hose down. “What is it?” she asked him, again, breathy and quick. “What is it?”

“I got a new job.”

“A raise?”

“A new job,” he repeated, and then, “a better job. Bigger, more money, more . . .” And then he was in her and she was saying, “How? How?” the way she had said “What is it?” before, but he was staring above her head at the hole in the wall and he couldn’t speak. “How?” she said, “How?” and each time she said it he grew softer and softer until he had to push his pelvis all the way against her just to keep from slipping out and still he ground away, refusing to stop, trying long past when he knew he could not ever come, could only keep pushing, keep staring at the pieces of plaster broken inward, the chunks of it missing, the black place in the middle the size of his fist.

The day before, it had been Dima staring down at the holes his hands had made, the strange shape his splayed body had imprinted in the bank. Mud had clung to his neck hair, slicked down his back. In his underwear, he’d hunted the shallows for the rest of his clothes. By the time he’d given up, the mud had dried to a crust on his back, silt sifting down into the water with each step. Sliding his bare arms through his rucksack’s straps, he knew it would be a long time before he saw his brother again. Knew, splashing south in nothing but wet underwear, it would be a while before he’d want to.

He stayed close to the bank, screened by the reeds, until the river turned and, climbing out, he made his way along the drainage ditches, through the woods, up the embankment of the access line. At the tracks, he stepped onto a rail, hoping to relieve his root-and-rock-torn feet. Instead, the steel seared them. Scrambling off, he stood looking at the burning metal, the smear of blood from his gouged soles bright in the sun. But it was on his face that he felt the heat. His forehead. His eyelids. He shut them. Her fingertips.

He had intended to take the tracks back to Petroplavilsk, to hide between the walls of buffer woods until, beneath the less revealing mirror-light, along the city’s side streets, he could, unclothed, sneak home. Where these days his mother hardly seemed to know him, where his brother no longer came, where the only soul he ever spoke with was the bird.
Home
. He could hear Volodya’s voice, could feel again the sadness with which the word had filled him then.
Because,
the fat man had said,
we’re your friends
. And Fedya:
We’re your people.
And Vika, too:
You just don’t know it yet.
But how could they be after the way they’d used him? The memory made him want to sit down, stay there, stop thinking. Because how was what his brother had done, or stood by and let be done to him, any better? Dima took a step, as if to shake the thought, leave it behind. Because if that was true so was this: all his life he’d never felt the need for friends, could never comprehend how others created out of nothing anything close to what he and Yarik had always simply had.
Have,
he told himself. But when he took another step it was in the oppsite direction. Away from the city. Down the tracks towards a distant place where they seemed to disappear.