The Great Glass Sea (45 page)

The teenagers were right: every few years a cold front sprang on some fall night, drove the thermometer down fast enough to freeze drunks stumbling home after dark. And once a decade it even happened during the day. But only every half-century or so did the mercury plummet like this, like a nail slammed down by a hammer blow, so low that drivers, getting out to check unwilling engines, froze their hands to the metal fast as hood ornaments; one had lost three fingers trying to tear free; others didn’t and died with faces frozen to the grille. Geese fell from the sky, so frozen by the time they hit the ground that their legs simply shattered, small black icicles tipped with frozen bulbs of red, skittering down the frost-white streets. The lake ice set so fast that fishing nets froze halfway hauled up, water captured midseethe, carved by the last churns of fish. Some hundred boats were stranded. Half their crews died before they could think what to do, the other half set their crafts on fire. They stood around them close as they dared, the backs of their heads, necks, calves, freezing anyway. Some of the boats burned hot enough they melted through and sank. Some just burned out. A wide flat plain of ice, and way out on it all those scattered fires burning, and sometimes a tiny dark figure running for the shore, running, running, until it went still.

Of course, those were just stories. That’s what the managers and foremen shouted at the old people as they climbed off the glass and down into the warmer air inside the Oranzheria. In there, the ground crews didn’t know how cold it was getting outside. They had begun to celebrate. The ones who had just joined up that night were first, followed by the ones who had been working for almost thirty hours, who took with them the rest. Men kissing women workers; women dragging them to dance; others just collapsing, flopping down, splayed, as if to make a thousand angel shapes out of the soft plowed dirt.

The ground-level managers tried to get them back to work, but even some of the foremen shouted that their crews deserved a few minutes’ rest. And that was before the workers from up on the glass started pouring down. The glass-level managers had passed out vodka to their foremen for keeping their teams’ bellies warm, and when the sleet had stopped and clouds had started breaking, some of the foremen had unscrewed the tops, handed their bottles around. Some of the crews had refused to give them back, and the foremen who had hung on to theirs were mobbed by men and women half-dead with exhaustion and fevered with relief. For a few moments the ground seemed a mirror of what was happening above—two festivals wild with the same roistering crowd—and then the word went around atop the glass, the stories the old people knew, and suddenly it seemed even colder, and they broke into a stampede for the ladders and stairs and any way down. And as they poured in off the glass, unzipping parkas, flinging off hats, diving in to join the thousands below, the two plains of people met with a sound louder than all the rumbles of all the machines, their voices filling the Oranzheria with a single roar.

That was what brought Dima to a stop. Through the quiet of the buffering woods—no traffic, still trees, Dima standing in the middle of the street—the noise from up ahead surged like floodwater down the funnel of the road. A riot? Some kind of mob? He wondered, again, whether he should have come at all.

That morning he had woken to a pounding on his apartment door: Gennady bringing him the news; he was going to try to drive out to the Oranzheria, did Dima want to come along?
Just for the night,
the man had said.
They’re desperate. They’ll take anyone.
Dima shook his head, told him thanks, meant to shut the door. But he couldn’t. When was the last time someone had visited him? When was the last time he had visited someone? Gennady stood peering at him, atwitch with urgency, shaking his car keys in his hand.
Do you want to come in?
Dima asked. The jangling stopped. The man stared. Then turned and was gone, his footsteps fading.

Back inside, Dima pulled an unrolled carpet open a crack. Outside the window, it was still strangely nightlike, dark as he had seen it since the mirrors had gone up. The sleet still hammered at the pane. His own voice said it then—
Just for the night—
and even as he shook his head, his mind was calculating the pay for one twelve-hour shift. He let the rug slap closed, went back to his room, got back in bed.
They’ll take anyone.
If he worked one night would they offer to keep him on? Would they let him work in his brother’s section? Eat his lunch in Yarik’s office? Would Yarik sometimes bring his tea out to sit in the grass with him? He tried to sleep.

Sometime later the battering at the windows stopped. Through the small holes in the kovyor, a faint gray light spiked across the room, landed on his blanket and seemed to go right through, to touch his skin like the tips of icicles. His face felt just as cold. Shucking the blanket, he rose into a wall of frigid air. He could not see through the window; it was opaque with ice. He thought of Gennady’s hand, shaking—
they’re desperate—
the man standing in the hallway in the middle of the night, about to drive out in the middle of a storm. Everyone who worked on the Oranzheria, Dima realized, must have gone out there, too. Everyone.
Rattle, rattle, rattle
, went the keys.

He dressed in every warm thing he had: two pairs of long underwear, two of wool socks, a pair of wool army pants, and then a second pair, a turtleneck shirt, a high-collared sweater, and a low collared one on top of that. His legs rubbed at each other when he shambled to his bed, yanked all the blankets off, and dragged them into his mother’s room. He lay them over the pile already on her sleeping lump. Then he went out to the foyer to get her a hat. On his way back, he heard the rattling again, louder, closer: there at his feet, Ivan’s box shook. He crouched down. Inside: a pile of gold feathers shivering. He put on his mother’s
shapka,
grabbed her heavy coat off its hook, and carried it and the box back to her room. She slept on, even as he nestled the fur hat over her head, as he opened her drawer and took out her sweaters, even as he wrestled them one after the other onto the bird, and stuffed the bird back in the box, and draped the coat over it, and went out and shut the door.

In the hallway, he struggled into his old Oranzheria rain-suit. The waterproof pants barely fit over his padded legs, the windproof jacket over his long wool coat. He wrapped a scarf around his neck and zipped the jacket up and wrapped another over his face and shoved a wool hat down on his head, added a second, lifted his hard hat off the hook it hung on, took the utility goggles out from under it, put those on, too. He had just sat down to pull on his boots when he thought he heard his mother. He stilled, listened. Nothing. Nor from outside: no bus rumble, no clatter of trams, not even the sound of a single car. He sat there thinking. Then he got up, grabbed his rucksack, threw his boots in, zipped it shut, and stepped to the hook beside the hard hat. There, his old ice skates dangled by their laces. He slid them off.

That dawn, he skated the streets of the city, their slush-stuccoed macadam frozen to a glaze, the avenues and boulevards become canals, their icy backs beginning to reflect the brightening of the sky. Through the thinning clouds the last of the mirrors glowed like ship lights in a fog. He passed parked cars hunkered under shells of ice; a square-nosed little Lada stranded in the street, its cab light on and door open and driver disappeared; a gas tanker jackknifed across the road. He swooped around it. In the middle of the avenues, trolleys sat their tracks, some with their windows still aglow, too opaque with ice to see anything but the stillness inside. The tracks were varnished with flash-frozen sleet, the wires above them glassy, sagging; some had snapped, and around the city their sparking lit up pieces of Petroplavilsk like signal flares. He skated north, the rough ice rattling his shins, his spine shaking, but the speed smoothing it out as he hurtled towards the edge of town, a dark bundled shape, scarf whipping behind him with his wind.

Now, stopped, his breath steaming from his wool-wrapped mouth, he stood watching the clouds clear over the Oranzheria. They were dark and thick as a forest floating above where one once stood, heavy as if filled with the souls of all the woods sawed down to make way for the glass, the barns razed, the bulldozed izbas, the dust risen up from all their falling, boiling away, blowing westward, as if in that direction their passage to heaven lay, and beneath them the glass reflected the boiling back, blanched with the brightening sky, the city’s second horizon thickened with ice so it seemed the two halves of the world had slipped a little farther apart. He unzipped his rucksack, switched his skates for boots. And maybe it was the slowness of his feet, their drag on his speed-accustomed bones, the coming down of his muscles from their flirtation with flight. It might have been the thunder of all the voices trapped inside the glass, the way it burst upon him when he entered the Oranzheria. The heat of them, the thousands of bodies, his face beading with sudden sweat. Maybe it was their milling, the whole crowd riled, the riling building towards a burst, the chants of
No! No!,
yelling he caught coming through it in shards:
Go up? Shovel clear? In cold like this? In just our coats?
Or maybe it was simply the bodies of the birds, that his first thought was of all the meat, that he should stuff his pockets full; or that his second was of Ivan swaddled in his mother’s sweaters, buried beneath her coat; or that his third was this: he wished one of those glass-smacking birds had managed to crash through, that others had followed, all along the half a hundred kilometers of the southward wall, first cracks and chips and a few shards falling and then the whole thing bursting, a thousand birds of every color exploding outward, their wings flashing in first sunlight, all around them flecks of glass flickering through the air.

Because the sun was up. All along the eastern horizon it had split the clouds. From inside the Oranzheria the ceiling was wavery beneath its coat of roseatted ice, and as the color filtered down it dissipated like blood in water, blushing the tops of the walls, the whites on the still-circling birds, barely a breath of pink on the rungs of the winding stairs, dissolved to nothing by the time it reached the throng in tumult below, reached Dima’s face tilted up and gazing. He climbed into it, out of the noise, out of the anger, the redness rising on him as he rose towards the glass.

At first the quieting was so slight that those who stood around the ones gone silent didn’t even notice. But gradually others went silent, too. The ones still shouting heard their own voices in their ears, and paused. A lull. Strange quietude. Here, a man with his neck craned back, easing a hard hat from his head, his Adam’s apple shifting. Here, a woman, her eyes rolled upward, lips drifting apart. A manager unbuttoning the collar at his throat. A cluster of foremen pointing. A thousand faces peering up.

Up there, on the ice-sheened surface of the glass, someone was skating. They could see the dark lines his blades made. Two pen tips inscribing long arcs in the ceiling, curves and curls and loops, as if some giant of the old fables—some Koshchei or Norka—had reached down to scrawl his sign into the man-made sky. It was a rippled sky now, warped as old window glass, and the ice on it obscured the clouds into just the idea of clouds, shifting and floating, more color than shape, and through them floated the dark shape of the skater. At times the sunlight hit his tracks and they flared brilliant behind him. At times it hit him and he lit up fulvous, his clothes turned tawny, the fuzz of his wool scarf and hat seeming for a moment to glow. There he swirls, catching the sun’s gold, the lines of his skates unfurling around him like the long sickle feathers of some fairy-tale bird.

What must it have been like to clamber up and join him? What must it have felt like to rush for the stairs, to pound up them with all the pounding feet of all the others, to push open the ceiling hatches and burst up into the cold and light in such a gusting of steam? And to watch the others bursting up all over the glass, a plain of geysers as far as you could see? To feel the ceiling shake with all their weight? To launch into a slide, boot soles slipping, arms flung out, face red with whooping? What must it have looked like to the managers below? Were they furious or scared? Did a shiver run through them as they stood in the darkling shade of the roiling shadows thrown down by all those madly cavorting souls?

One whole sector went. Simply caved in. There were the frolicking revelers, the jubilant crowd, the swirl in its center that all at once stopped. A first few gone still. And the stillness spreading to those around them, struck faces passing mute understanding, rippling fear, a wave of horror that in one panicked rush came crashing down on the surface of the great glass sea. There came a crack like bedrock splitting in a quake. Then the screams.

Watching at home on their televisions, or on the screens in the displays at the Universitetsky Rynok, standing frozen on the street, staring through first-floor windows at strangers’ TVs, the people of Petroplavilsk heard the reporter say
Oh no.
A news station had sent a helicopter over the scene just as the glass collapsed, and all that day they showed the video: the stampeding thousands, the darkness blooming in their midst, sudden as a sinkhole, guttling them in, and then the whole surface going down.
No,
the reporter said,
no!

Another station got footage from the ground—jags of glass jutting through bodies like monstrous teeth—and they played it over and over the next day and the next. But what most people watched had come earlier, captured in a shaking frame by one of the first who had climbed up: the fuming hatch, obscuring steam, a flash of metal, first glimpse of the skater on the glass, a gliding apparition so wrapped in layers and smothered in scarves and masked by goggles that it looked almost inhuman—except for its motion; there was something familiar in its ebulient glascading, in the near-weightlessness of its shape swooping by, that for those few minutes seemed to embody all that people felt they had lost.