nine, she’d found that place: his schoolboy fascination with Gagarin, Tsiolkovsky, Korolyov’s dream of men on Mars, the Mir space station orbiting above. He would be an engineer. And all her years as a secretary on the Petroplavilsk base, what favors she could nurse from her boss, what little she could save for bribes, had gone to opening a slot for him. One slot for one boy. All the pull she could put together would have never been enough for two. It was the way The Past Life worked, and all his earliest years he had worked towards it: memorized the multiplication charts their mother made him, learned his constellations— Ursa Major, Hydra— off a plastic place mat she gave him for his birthday, accompanied her to speeches by men who she said mattered. While their father, who had never understood ambition, took his other son to the park to hear the poets read; while their father, who was proof of what happened when a man had no will to rise, lay on his boat beside Dima beneath the stars, telling tales of the great bear, the sea serpent that swallowed the sun; their father, who suddenly, one day, was gone.
And then their mother, too. So subsumed by grief she had been taken away to a place where others could help her overcome her helplessness. And alone with Dima out at Dyadya Avya’s, month after month in only their old uncle’s care, what track had there been for Yarik to run on but whatever rail would keep him alongside his brother? What future was there to work towards but the end of the next day? And when, after that parentless year, the state gave them their mother back, when the three of them returned to the apartment on Avtovskaya Street, where was the woman who’d once wished for a bigger flat, a better life, who’d been so driven to drive her firstborn? Gone as her good secretary’s job, as her once-black hair, as her faith in him. Back then, he could feel the hollowness inside him where his mother’s hope had been scooped out: every connection she’d made, broken; every path she’d pushed him towards, closed; her hand too weak to pull him anywhere, let alone up. At night, back in their old room, he would leave his cot, crawl in with Dima, the two of them too used to sleeping together in the hay of their uncle’s izba to fall asleep apart. Curled into the curve of his brother, he’d stare across the room at the wall: behind there, he knew, their mother slept in a bed still sagged with the weight of her dead husband, knew she’d returned from the sanitarium stripped of the thing that had stirred her dreams of a bigger life for him, just as he’d known he had to let go of those dreams, too.
A slapping sound—the rubber strips that curtained the exit to keep the warm air in—and they were out of the Oranzheria: glass roof giving way to girders that became open sky, the earth preparation crews, and then the clearing crews, and then the logging crews, until the car was past everything but the receding din. Then that was gone, too. In the quiet, the car felt even bigger, the seat beside him emptier. Outside, the road was lined with tall pines, their needles new to the mirror-light, stands of birches still unaware of the pandemic winter would bring. He watched them flash by, nothing on either side but walls of woods. Until, up ahead, he saw the sign: T HE D ACHAS .
They weren’t really dachas, of course—no one had time to putter in cottage gardens on the weekend anymore; no one had weekends—but once the sign had pointed to a hundred summer cabins, each with its own flowering lilacs and vegetable plots, a village like dozens of others that used to surround the city, this last one still called by what it had once been, as if the people of Petroplavilsk wished to deny what it had become. A ghetto. Yarik had never seen it, but he’d heard about it from his wife: the flophouses, the fleas, the homemade vodka stills, the dogs she’d seen roasting over fire pits, the giant billboards mounted on the
And then their mother, too. So subsumed by grief she had been taken away to a place where others could help her overcome her helplessness. And alone with Dima out at Dyadya Avya’s, month after month in only their old uncle’s care, what track had there been for Yarik to run on but whatever rail would keep him alongside his brother? What future was there to work towards but the end of the next day? And when, after that parentless year, the state gave them their mother back, when the three of them returned to the apartment on Avtovskaya Street, where was the woman who’d once wished for a bigger flat, a better life, who’d been so driven to drive her firstborn? Gone as her good secretary’s job, as her once-black hair, as her faith in him. Back then, he could feel the hollowness inside him where his mother’s hope had been scooped out: every connection she’d made, broken; every path she’d pushed him towards, closed; her hand too weak to pull him anywhere, let alone up. At night, back in their old room, he would leave his cot, crawl in with Dima, the two of them too used to sleeping together in the hay of their uncle’s izba to fall asleep apart. Curled into the curve of his brother, he’d stare across the room at the wall: behind there, he knew, their mother slept in a bed still sagged with the weight of her dead husband, knew she’d returned from the sanitarium stripped of the thing that had stirred her dreams of a bigger life for him, just as he’d known he had to let go of those dreams, too.
A slapping sound—the rubber strips that curtained the exit to keep the warm air in—and they were out of the Oranzheria: glass roof giving way to girders that became open sky, the earth preparation crews, and then the clearing crews, and then the logging crews, until the car was past everything but the receding din. Then that was gone, too. In the quiet, the car felt even bigger, the seat beside him emptier. Outside, the road was lined with tall pines, their needles new to the mirror-light, stands of birches still unaware of the pandemic winter would bring. He watched them flash by, nothing on either side but walls of woods. Until, up ahead, he saw the sign: T HE D ACHAS .
They weren’t really dachas, of course—no one had time to putter in cottage gardens on the weekend anymore; no one had weekends—but once the sign had pointed to a hundred summer cabins, each with its own flowering lilacs and vegetable plots, a village like dozens of others that used to surround the city, this last one still called by what it had once been, as if the people of Petroplavilsk wished to deny what it had become. A ghetto. Yarik had never seen it, but he’d heard about it from his wife: the flophouses, the fleas, the homemade vodka stills, the dogs she’d seen roasting over fire pits, the giant billboards mounted on the
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