The Great Glass Sea (7 page)

It was a man who had never set foot in the fields who saw it first; a man from Moscow who moved so fast that by the time one farmer knew the oligarch had bought a neighbor’s share he had sold his share as well; a billionaire who spent so furiously he held 51 percent of nearly 100 percent of the farms that surrounded the city by the time the decade crumbled into collapse; a man who, when all the money nearly everyone else had saved lost nearly all its value overnight, had his in foreign markets, in Swiss banks, and most of all in land.

In Moscow they called him The She Bear. Businessmen said it out of envy, politicians out of respect, cartoonists with their pens: jaws gaping, claws raised, guarding cubs in bibs that read
Z
ERKALA
or
O
RANZHERIA
,
L
AND
or
L
AKE
or
L
IGHT.
In Petroplavilsk the people called him The Baron, spoke of how he had turned all the city, all the land around it, into his personal estate, how someday he would own the rest of Karelia, too: an entire vast region of vast Russia ruled over by him. By Borya, as his mother had called him. His friends still called him Baz. But his name was Boris Romanovich Bazarov, and, when they said it, the farmers from whom he’d taken the land let their spit fly.

Dyadya Avya hadn’t even bothered with the name at all: he just spat. His had been the last kooperativ still holding out—no money for pesticides or feed corn or food for families, just Bazarov, having already bought off a third of the old kolkhozniki, offering the only way for the rest to eat.
I don’t care if I have to make borscht out of my nephews
—their uncle had shoved a finger at Yarik and Dima for all to see—
I wouldn’t sell to that—
in place of the man’s name, he hawked up phlegm and gobbed it at the ground—
wouldn’t sell him the hole under my shithouse.
But one farmer mumbled,
Your nephews won’t feed all of us,
and another called out,
You’ll sell when you’ve got nothing to eat but the shit
and Avya, beating his fist on the side of the barn, shouted them all down.
Did I say we shouldn’t sell?
he bellowed.
Sell! We have to sell! But we don’t have to sell to that—
he hawked another, spat a smaller stream. The shouts went up:
Then to who?
Avya shouted back:
To one of us!
Laughter, snorts, jeers.
If you’ve got that kind of money,
one said,
you must be storing it up your ass.
Another heckled,
No wonder he won’t sell his shithouse.
And Avya roared over the laughing,
Not to me, you fools! And sure as hell not to any of you!
But men clamped under fear don’t have it in them to laugh long, and by the time his shout was done it rang out over an already quieting barn. The farmers shifted in their boots, their eyes serious.
To who?
they asked again. And the brothers’ uncle had to look away when he said the name:
Kartashkin.

Stepan Fyodorovich Kartashkin was hated almost as much as the billionaire. A district manager in the kolkhozy days, he had been one of the string pullers, the top-scrapers, a skimmer of profit and black market trader who had managed in those first lawless days of the early nineties to make for himself what in a small village had been a small fortune. Everyone knew he had gotten it at the expense of all the others and everyone resented him for it, but he was the son of the son of a villager; he gave more than anyone to the cripples at church gates; he came to the cultural house for every dance; he had been a farmer, was still a farmer; was, at least, one of them.

We all pool our shares,
Avery Leonidovich explained,
land and everything, and sell it to Kartashkin.

They shook their heads: even Stepan Fyodorovich didn’t have enough to match what the billionaire was offering.

So we sell for less,
Avya told them.

More head shaking, more grumbling, more questioning of why, why take a loss,
What would we get for it in return?

It stays in the village,
Avya said.
It stays out of the hands of that—
he hawked again, but couldn’t mouth more than a dribble.

And what,
one of the farmers asked,
is to keep Kartashkin from turning around and selling it all to The Baron for a profit?

That,
Avery Leonidovich told them,
is what we get for it
.
We put it in the contract. It has to stay a farm.

The billionaire—

And,
their uncle rode over the objections,
it can’t be sold to anyone but one of us. Or of our kin. We put it in the contract.

Which was how the old kolkhoz, Avya’s izba and outbuildings, and all the hectares around, had become the only swath of land within forty kilometers of Petroplavilsk to stay out of The She Bear’s paws. And still within the reach of the brothers’ dreams. Now, into the hollow of Yarik’s neck, Dima whispered what he’d been wanting to say all afternoon: “Bratan, I have it.”

Yarik’s fingers quit shaking his head, let go.

“My half,” Dima said. “I have it
now
.”

Somewhere down the street one of the parade stragglers dropped a bottle. Yarik looked towards the crash, watched the half-smashed bottle roll. Reaching in his jacket pocket, he drew out a pack of cigarettes, tapped it and shook one out, and reached in the same pocket and brought out a matchbook and lit it. “Half of what?” Yarik said, exhaling. “Of what we thought the land was worth four years ago?”

“Just this winter—” Dima started.

“Or even six months ago? Because, bratets”—with his free hand, Yarik picked a fleck of tobacco from his lip—“anything you’ve saved with this goddamn deflation has gone down in value and”—he spat—“everything out there”—he swept his hand at the skyline of the city—“has gained in it. Before we do anything, we have to have enough between us so we can go to Kartashkin while we’re still working, and find out his price, and meet it, and be able to keep up with . . .” He trailed off, drew on the cigarette, held it out to Dima.

If it hadn’t been for the small strip of white shivering at the tip of his fingers Dima wouldn’t have been able to tell that his brother’s hand was shaking. He left the cigarette there to show it, said, “How far are you?”

Yarik finally looked at him.

“How far,” Dima said, “from your half?”

The bottle had stopped rolling. “We said we’d try.” Yarik brought his hand back. “We didn’t say we’d have it by
now.
We didn’t set a date that you—”

“I saw Kartashkin.”

Yarik held the cigarette a centimeter from his mouth.

“When I was out at Dyadya Avya’s,” Dima told him. “Guess what he charged me for the rooster?”

Yarik moved his hand to his lips, drew in.

“Nothing,” Dima said.

Through the smoke, Yarik looked at him.

“He gave the bird to me for free. He’s buttering everybody up. I talked to some of the others. He’s offering to give them a cut of whatever he makes from the sale of the farm. He’s going to sell, Yarik. He’s going to find a way to get out of the contract, and he’s going to sell.”

Yarik shook his head. “Not yet.” He tossed the cigarette down at his feet. “Not until the old kulak knows exactly how high he can go.”

“What if one of the others—”

“He’ll wait, Dima. So long as the Oranzheria is still being built, he’ll wait. He’ll wait to see how much the Consortium is willing to bid.”

In Dima’s arms, one of the rooster’s legs worked free, jutted out, scrambling at the air. “But the contract—”

“You said it yourself. He’ll find a way. Or more likely their lawyers will. Some clause, some bribe. One of the old kolkhozniki who used to farm with Dyadya Avya, one of their kids . . .”

“That’s why,” Dima said, “we have to go to him
now
.”

Again, the pack of cigarettes; again, the two quick smacks against Yarik’s palm. “You don’t think someone else already has?” One of the rooster’s talons snagged in his brother’s shirt, yanked the fabric. Yarik clenched the fresh cigarette in his mouth and with his free hands reached to work the bird’s claw loose. “But he won’t sell to them. Just like he won’t sell to us.” He freed the rooster’s foot and held it for Dima to take. “Not till the Oranzheria is at his goddamn door. Then he’ll sell. And that, bratets, is when we’ll know how much is half of what we need.”

Dima squeezed the knotty foot in his hand. “But the Oranzheria won’t go that far.” The day was as dim as it would get, the mirrorglow not yet enough to lift his brother’s face out of the almost-dusk. “It can’t just keep going,” Dima said.

Yarik drew in, a red flare at the end of his cigarette. “Of course not.”

“It’s too far.”

“I know that.”

“It—”

“
You
know that. Because we work there.” Yarik smiled just enough to let the smoke leak out. “But the old kulak doesn’t. He won’t know it till the work on the Oranzheria stops. Till it stops growing. Till it’s done.”

“And then . . .”

“Then we’ll go to him.” Yarik drew again on the cigarette. “And that is why it can’t be now, bratets, why we have to keep at it until the minute the last pane of glass is laid on the last hectare of the Oranzheria. So that we have enough, so that our halves—
your
half—keeps growing with the value of the land, so that we can go that day, that
exact
day, and bring it to him, bring him more than the others in the village have, before the others in the village know.”

Pressed against the skin of his arm, Dima could feel the Golden Phoenix’s warmth, the softness of its feathers, its small heart working. “How long do you think it will be?”

Yarik shrugged. He took the cigarette from his mouth, looked at the half-spent stub. “Longer than it takes me to go through one of these.”

“Bratan . . .”

“I don’t know, maybe in five hundred packs? Maybe a thousand?” Yarik tried to make his mouth smile.

“Bratan,” Dima said again, and his brother looked away, up the street, as if he already knew what Dima was going to say. “How much have you been—”

“There’s the tram.”

“Yarik, how much have you been able to save?” Dima watched the back of his brother’s turned head. “When it comes time . . .”

“You don’t have a wife,” Yarik said. “You don’t have kids.”

Above the tram, the contactors stuck up like two antennae, feelers that worked their way along the web of wires woven over the street. They hit a switch, clattered, came on.

With his free hand, Dima reached over, into his brother’s shirt pocket, drew out the pack. He nudged its top open with his thumb and, beneath the rooster’s ruffled neck, worked his fingers after a cigarette.

Yarik leaned close to light it. “What was it like? Out in the village?”

“Out there,” Dima told him, “the mirrors’ beams still haven’t reached.”

“You were there at night?”

“Out there”—Dima drew in, let the smoke out—“the roosters crow.”

Over his last word, the tram’s brakes began their long slow squeal. The Golden Phoenix struggled. Dima pressed the bird against his chest.

“I’ll have it,” Yarik said. “By the time we need it, I’ll have it.” Then he turned and shouted back towards the playground,”Mama! Mama, the trolleybus!”

And Dima turned, too, and joined him in calling for her.

She was on her knees in a patch of new growing grass, the tiny bright green blades thin as hairs, a few last golden feathers scattered around her, shining more dully now in the semblance of sunlight the zerkala threw down. Above the trolley stop the wires had begun to hum.

From all the way across the water he can hear the chattering of the birds. Their wind-prick calls coming through the slap of the waves, the smack of the oars, borne on the wind that gusts over Nizhi, across the lake, to them. What wind! What blast of it! He can see the whipping grasses, the stands of bent-necked spruces shaking like the manes of huddled horses, the churches alive with a flock of storm petrels gathered in the leeward, clinging to lintels carved centuries ago, to wooden shingles set in place by long-dead monks, small birds taking shelter behind the dozens of delicate onion domes, half a thousand dark whifflings waiting out the wind.