The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil Page B

face look almost affronted. Hurt, even. He sat back a little on his ball. The rubber squeaked. “I was born on the Volga, in a small town to the east of Nizhni Novgorod. I remember watching the sunsets with my father, the light on the river, the silhouettes of the domes. He was a soldier. I rarely saw him. My mother? She was”—he acknowledged the coincidence with a pursing of his mouth—“also a seamstress. We lived on Gryiboedova Street, in a home that we shared with three other families. My first kiss was with one of the daughters of one of the families, an event brought about by our arguing over a cigarette we had found.” He rocked a little on the ball, smiled. “I had two sisters,” he went on. “They died in a fire.” He made his smile into not-a-smile. “Unrelated,” he said, “to the incident with the cigarette. I went to school at Lobachevsky University. I did my service in Afghanistan, the last year that we were there. I got a wife, got a kid, got divorced—they’re all in Moscow—got rich, wound up here.” He leaned forward again, the ball sighing under him. “There,” he said. “Now we’re having a heart-to-heart.”
    Yarik held his hand over the top of his tea, felt the steam wet and warm on his palm. “Our father died,” he said.
    “I’m sorry,” Bazarov said.
    Yarik shrugged. “We were nine.”
    “And your mother?”
    “We stayed with our uncle while she was recovering.”
    “Your uncle must have been a real Russian muzhik,” Bazarov said, “right in the line of the good peasants of old. All the strength and future of Russia lies in the hands of the muzhik.” His smile widened, his voice deepened. “It is they,” he said, as if reciting, “who will start the new epoch, show us our real Russian language, our true laws.” He gave a little bounce, sat there beaming. “Turgenev?” he prompted. “ Ottsy i deti ? No?”
    Yes, Yarik thought, his uncle had been a real muzhik: he had loved his land. And lasted less than a year after the half-hectare he’d lived on all his life had been sold. Yarik could see him out in the river, floating on his back, his bare white belly huge with held breath, the gun glinting as he pressed it to his chest. Yarik could feel his reaching arm, the sting in his palm, the bruise in his fingers, the heat. He put his tea down. “Mr. Bazarov . . .” he said.
    “Baz.”
    “. . . why did you bring me here?”
    The man’s smile spread itself into a grin. “Yaroslav Lvovich,” he said, “why did you come here?”
    “Because you asked me.”
    “But what did I ask you?”
    Yarik wanted to shove the grin away. He kept his hands flattened to the curve of the hard hat in his lap. He said, “What do you want?”
    Bazarov laughed. A short happy yip of a laugh that made Yarik grip the hard hat tighter. “Yes!” Bazarov said. “Yes, exactly. What do you want? ” Reaching out with one hand, he pushed the tea cart away, rolled the ball beneath him a little closer, sat with his knees almost brushing Yarik’s. When he spoke again the mirth was gone from his voice. “Yaroslav Lvovich,” he said, “what do you want?”
    The longer Yarik looked at the man’s eyes, the more their color seemed to change, the closer it seemed to come to the color of his own. He leaned back a little. “From you?” His back pressing into the couch. “You mean what do I want from you?”
    Bazarov’s face stayed where it was. “I mean”—his eyes held—“from life.”
    There was nowhere farther for Yarik to lean. So he sat with his shoulders pressed against the couch’s back, looking down at his hands on the hard hat in his lap, and, for a moment, he could almost smell the scent of Dima’s hair when he would set his brother’s hat over his face, his wife’s sweat when they made love, his son’s morning breath when the boy kissed him good-bye before work, the life shared between his daughter and her mother and himself that almost overcame him when he bent to blow