The Great Glass Sea (66 page)

From the end of the 6:00
P.M.
news to the beginning of the eleven o’clock edition playing now on the waiting room TV, Yarik had sat in a hard plastic chair or paced the wide linoleum squares and fought the urge to leave. When he had first left Dima with the doctors and gone back down the hall, he’d thought the glances the nurses gave him were merely the usual thing—
Isn’t that the guy from the Oranzheria ads?
—had expected one to approach—
Mr. Next?
—the way people did on the street. But in the waiting room the whispers had been unfriendly, something unsettling about the stares, and then he’d seen the report he’d missed on the earlier hour’s news and known he’d had it wrong: the only reason they were talking about him was what was being said about his brother.

And now, there was Dima, on the arm of an orderly, being walked into the room. All eyes turned. Yarik’s, too. And the thought that he was joining them, another spectator taking in the sight of his brother’s face, made him look away.

He’d spent the past hours thinking of what he would say, but when he stepped forward to ease his brother from the orderly’s arm, it was Dima who spoke, mouthed a word so garbled only Yarik could have understood. “Bratan.” And, through the Novocain that numbed his jaw, working with his swollen lips: “You look good.”

The starch in his collar, the tie loosened around his neck, the new winter jacket with the Consortium logo on its chest: right then he would have ripped it all away. But watching Dima’s smile—a little saliva slipped from the corner of his mouth, his eyes trying not to show the pain the analgesic was already letting through—how could he not smile back? “You don’t,” Yarik said. As much for himself as to steady his brother, he put his arm around Dima’s back. A murmur rippled through the gawkers.
Good,
Yarik thought,
let them doubt what they’d been told.
He gave his brother’s shoulder a gentle pat. “Come on,” he said. He’d been holding Dima’s rucksack by a strap, and he saw Dima watching it, made out his brother’s slurred, “Where’s Timofei?”

“Home,” Yarik told him.

“We were only—”

“It’s late.” Yarik heaved the bag to his shoulder, felt his neck muscles tense. “Let’s get you there, too.”

But, helping his brother down the corridor, feeling Dima’s unsteadiness beneath his arm, he knew it was too late. He’d waited too long.

A day after he’d confronted Bazarov, after the man had called his guards back in and given Yarik back his gun—
One last lesson
:
load it yourself
—and had him escorted outside again, on the first full evening reillumined by the zerkala, Yarik had returned from work, stepped into the stairwell, shut the building’s door behind him, and heard a voice say
Slava.
When he turned, a thin figure waited there, half-hidden by shadows, half by a hood, barely discernible but for her hands, her face.
You even answer to it,
she said. And he could just make out a smirk. He’d thought she was a stalker, someone after a snapshot or an autograph, but when he’d asked her what she wanted she’d spoken his brother’s name. She’d come, she told him, because she knew it might be the last day she could. Because, with her last hours of freedom, she wanted to do something good. For Dima.
Who are you?
Yarik had asked.
I’m the one,
she’d said,
who he might love if he didn’t already love you.
While she’d talked he had gradually been able to make her out. Her fingers working over a sliver of something metal, snapping it open and shut while she spoke of how close she feared his brother was to coming undone, how she’d seen others so troubled they needed The Dachas’ walls around them to keep the rest of the world at bay, the way, she said, that Dima needed him.
You,
she said,
shoving her hood back.
Not Slava.
The anger showing in her face.
Someone who could be the twin your brother talks so much about. Because this
—she stepped close, snagged his tie, slapped it back against his chest—
isn’t him.
Watching her face soften, the fury fade from her black eyes, he’d listened to her try to paint a picture of the life she seemed to believe that he and Dima could still lead. But beneath the smoke of her cigarette breath he’d sensed her desperate need to believe in it herself, and it had been that—the knowledge that he no longer did, the hole he could feel where once he’d needed to believe in it, too—that, when she’d said the words
good brother,
had made them hurt so much.

Now, outside the hospital, in the perpetual sidewalk crush, all he could do was try to help his stitched-up brother make it through the harried crowd. “Excuse me,” Yarik said, over and over, “I’m sorry,” and, pushing aside those who paused to peer at their faces, “please.”

When they got to his car, Dima stopped. In the light from the zerkala the sky blue of the Mercedes looked almost gray. “When did you get it?” his brother asked.

But Yarik was already walking around the other side, opening the door, sliding, for a second, out of sight. Stuffing the rucksack in the passenger footwell, he glanced up at the window: Dima’s bloodstained coat, the face hidden by the car’s roof, the stab of shame that Yarik felt at being glad for that. He leaned the rest of the way across the seat, lifted the lock.

When the engine rumbled alive on the first crank of the key his brother raised his eyebrows, as if impressed. But Yarik caught his wince; even that small movement must have hurt. And when Dima reached to his forehead, as if unsure what his fingers would find, Yarik reached over, too, flipped the visor down. The small dim mirror shook. Watching Dima see his own face in it, Yarik made himself look, too: a split in one eyebrow taped together, the forehead purpled close to the skin, blood crusted at his temple, in his beard, a patch, mustache to jaw, shorn clear for the gauze. Which was what the doctor had told him: eleven stitches in the chin, a few more in his torn lip, five above the left eye. His brother’s nose would just from now on be a flattened nose.

“I didn’t mean for them to hurt you,” Yarik said and began backing out. “When Timosha’s principal called Zina, and Zina didn’t know where he was, she called the police. Told them Timosha was missing. I knew it was you.”

“You knew?”

“I called them. Told the dispatcher I thought Timofei was with you. But when I called again she said someone else had called in a sighting. At least she told me you were on the lake.” And, yes, he knew. He knew that when he’d told her it must be Dima she hadn’t just called the police. Or the ones in the squad car had made a call of their own. How could he have believed that anything with which he’d threatened Bazarov would keep his brother safe? They would simply bring Slava down in the same way, tie him to some disgrace, drop him from their campaign. And once he had been replaced? “Dima . . .” he said, and told himself he’d tell his brother all of it now, everything, he had to, and the car hit a stretch of potholes and he peered out the windshield as if he could see them before they were already under the wheels, and told himself
tell him
, but when the road smoothed out again, he only said, “I got there as fast as I could.”

“How did you know?” Dima asked. “When you first heard Timofei was missing. How did you know it was me?”

Yarik pulled close behind the car in front of them, pushed the heel of his hand against the horn. When he let go, let the blare blow away again, Dima’s question only seemed to sit louder in the quiet. He looked at his brother. “The way we always do,” he said. Then he shifted, gunned the engine, pulled around the car into the oncoming lane. The rucksack slid against Dima’s shins, and Yarik glanced at it, at his brother, back at the road. “Timofei gave me your letter,” he said. He could feel Dima watching him. He kept his eyes ahead. “I’ll take Mama.” There was the whir of the tires on the frozen asphalt. “How is she?”

“OK,” Dima said. “Confused.”

“Is she eating enough?”

“No.”

“Are you?”

But Dima was staring ahead, as if at the blinking yellow signal of a trolley coming towards them on the tracks between the lanes. “Yarik,” he said, “what’s going on?” On the avenue a stoplight turned: a spot of red, the brake lights of cars. “Where did you go that night Zinaida was so worried?”

Yarik brought the car to a stop. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“She came to the apartment. Bought me coffee. She said you’d left early that morning.”

“What morning don’t I—”

“She said you’d taken Dyadya Avya’s gun.” Across the intersection, the tram was waiting, too, its signal flashing. “That was the night you left me that note,” Dima said. “Why? What was going on?”

The light changed; Yarik pulled right, caught his brother looking at the turn signal ticking in the dash, then back at the road they’d left behind, heard Dima blow a small laugh from his nose. “When you said get me home, too, I thought you meant . . .” The rest was lost in his brother’s throat.

“Dima”—Yarik’s own voice softened—“who would take care of Mama tonight?”

“We could take her together to your home.”

“No.” The word came out harder than he’d meant it. “We couldn’t.”

“I thought you said once you had the job, once things were settled—”

“What’s settled?”

“You said you’d get a car.”

“I got it three months ago, Dima.”

“You said you’d tell them to fuck off.”

“Don’t you think,” Yarik said, “that if it changed anything, any fucking thing, it would have changed it three months ago? Do you have any idea what I risked when I stopped those cops? What a risk I’m taking now? Waiting for you in the hospital? Driving you to your apartment? Dropping you off?”

“You took the risk all the time,” Dima said. “In the mornings, when you threw rocks at my window.”

“Gravel.”

“When you sat down there in this car.”

“A few pebbles.”

“Why?”

“You were sleeping late.”

“So?”

“I had to get to work.”

“Then—”

“I had to get to work and I didn’t want to go without hearing the rooster, all right?”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand! I wanted to hear your rooster. You’re my brother and I wanted to hear your fucking rooster, one fucking rooster, crow in the fucking morning again.”

They sat in the sound of the snow and ice beneath the wheels, the rattling of the car over the cracked road, the ceaseless shush of the heat breathing out of the dash.

“He crows every morning,” Dima finally said. “You could just come and hear him. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. Why does it have to be—”

They braked, jerked forward, sat in the middle of the road. In the rearview mirror: the fog lights of cars coming close fast.

“You want to know why?” Yarik said. “I’ll show you.”

And he turned, sharp, onto a side street, and sharp again onto another avenue, driving too fast, out towards the city’s edge, until they were rushing past the shops cropping up before the bigger outlying stores, and he didn’t slow until he hit the strip where they sold electronics, the wide windows displaying sound systems and washing machines and computers and TVs, and they stopped.

A wall of televisions turned to the street, stacked tight as tiles. The Mercedes idled before them. Peering past his brother, Yarik stared through the the plate glass, scanning the bank of TVs, searching all those boxes of color and light.

“I don’t know why I thought it would still be playing,” he said. And, when Dima asked him what, “You. On the news. The old clips, you on the roof, the stuff of you skating on the Oranzheria.”

“Again?”

“And what someone shot tonight. You, all bloody.”

“Why—”

“Timosha, with his bloody face. Me dragging you off the ice. ‘Bringing you to justice,’ the reporter said. The police . . . You don’t want to know what the police said.” Behind Dima, the jittery images shook the screens.

“Why would they have said anything?”

“Because they were told to,” Yarik said. “They were
paid
to. You’re right, Dima, it’s not that complicated. But it is hard.”

With all the garish TV screens backlighting his head, his brother’s face seemed almost too dim to see. But Yarik knew his own was lit, that Dima must be watching all the changing colors on his face. He tried to keep his jaw still, his mouth steady. But he knew that Dima felt it. Knew it from the softness in Dima’s voice when he said, “It didn’t used to be. It doesn’t have to be.”

Behind his brother the televisions seemed to shake. “But it is,” Yarik said, and in the wavering of his own voice knew that the shaking wasn’t the TVs.

“Who says so?” Dima asked, barely whispering. “Who paid them? Bratan? Who’s doing this to you?” Reaching across the shift, he touched Yarik’s leg so lightly his fingers hardly released their weight.