Iosif stands from the table and walks outside, and Artyom follows him.
Iosif’s mother asks where they’re going and Iosif tells her that the sheeting on the roof needs to be fixed. He’ll nail it down in case the helicopters pass again and it’s ripped off. In the shelter, Iosif looks in the steel box under the workbench for a hammer and nails. There are only two walls to the shelter, facing north–south, made of thin lengths of wood, with the bark still on them. Logs are piled up against one of the walls, and there’s a small strip of earth where you can stand—the place where the boys kept their motorbike—which is spotted with blotches of oil from all their futile mechanical efforts.
“When did they leave?”
“Last night.”
“Last night? And they haven’t come back yet?”
“No. Of course not. Did you not notice your father gone?”
Artyom didn’t. His father often comes home when Artyom is asleep and leaves before he wakes. His father needs very little sleep. Sometimes Artyom wakes in the middle of the night and he can hear the wireless playing in the kitchen. There’s candlelight and he knows his father is just sitting and listening. His father can sit for hours without distraction. When he was small, Artyom used to walk into the kitchen and ask his father why he was still awake, or sometimes he would say he was thirsty and his father would take the bottle of milk they kept sitting in a bucket of water—before they had a fridge—and let Artyom drink a mouthful, but no more than that. And he would sit in his father’s lap and listen to the dancing violins and thudding drums of the music that would remind him of fairy stories, of little elves and big, stomping ogres. The volume turned down so low that it seemed at odds with the drama of the music, as if someone was telling him an epic tale in snatched whispers. Artyom would lie like a sick calf in his arms, drinking in any warmth that came his way.
Iosif finds the hammer and rattles an old tin can full of nails, looking for ones that are strong enough for the job.
“Do you know where they’ve gone?”
“Pripyat. But you didn’t hear it from me. If he comes home and Mother knows where he was, he’ll hit us both with this.”
Iosif wields the hammer as he speaks, lets its weight drag his wrist wherever it wants to go.
“No, he won’t.”
Artyom says this instinctively and they both look at the hammer that Iosif holds under his chin. Sometimes Artyom speaks with a definition that Iosif admires.
“Why did they go to Pripyat?”
“I don’t know. What, you think I know everything? I don’t know.”
Iosif finds the nails and puts them into his pocket and they climb onto the roof, pushing their legs off the side of the shelter to give them momentum. The structure wobbles when they put some force against it.
“I’m surprised the thing wasn’t flattened when the helicopters went over.”
“I know. Me too.”
If they knew any specifics about the helicopters, what model or make they were, they would have used those terms, but they don’t. They know every model of car ever produced in the Union. They know nothing about helicopters.
They walk along the roof, careful to stand only on the supporting beams, defined by the lines of nails; they don’t want to fall through. Iosif kneels at the place where the tin sheeting has come loose, takes a nail into his mouth, and holds it down. Artyom steps over him and weighs it down a little further along. This isn’t really necessary, but he needs to make himself useful. Iosif decides to put new holes in the tin. If he just uses the old ones, it will be easy for the nails to be wrenched out.
Iosif bangs on the first nail, and the sound of the nail scratching the sheet makes Artyom want to bite down on his knuckles. He won’t react though; he can’t lose face in front of Iosif. He thinks that Iosif’s mother must feel like she’s in the centre of a tin drum. He expects her to come out and wait until they’re finished, but she doesn’t. Every sound is magnified against a tin roof. In their own house he often hears rats scuttling above them, a sound he has never become used to. He loves when it rains, especially when evening is closing in and he’s doing his homework by the stove and the drops come down, with a beautiful regularity, falling evenly over the whole roof, just gravity and water.
Iosif makes quick work of the hammering. Iosif does everything in short, sharp bursts. He’s small but incredibly compact. His father has said he’ll make a good boxer someday, and Artyom doesn’t doubt this, the way Iosif darts about. Even in school, when they have writing exercises to do, Iosif can’t help but look about him, can’t help but jitter his legs and elbows.
When he’s finished, they sit and stare across the fields. Near the grain silo, there are two tractors tilling the soil. Both of them know how to drive a tractor, but the kolkhoz manager won’t let them do any of the machine work. They only get the dull jobs, like feeding the pigs and milking the cattle. They’ve pleaded with him enough times, but he always says, “And what if something happens, what then, you break a tractor, what then?”
“I wonder what this all looks like from a helicopter,” Artyom says.
“I don’t know.”
Iosif doesn’t like to wonder. He likes to deal only with things that are in front of him. Artyom can see him scanning already, looking for something else to do, now that their Sunday routine has been interrupted.
“We can probably go on the bike when they get back.”
Artyom lights up. Of course they can. How could he have forgotten?
“We can go places now.”
“I know.”
“We can ride to Pripyat, maybe even to Polesskoye.”
“We can ride to Minsk.”
They’ve never been to Minsk. But they’ve heard stories from their classmates.
“What about diesel?”
“We’ll get some from the tank near the tractor shed. We won’t need much. They won’t miss it.”
Artyom nods. “Of course.”
Iosif always knows where to get the things they need. He takes a handful of nails from his pocket and hands half the pile to Artyom and points to an empty paint tin near the gate and throws a nail at it. They’re always throwing things at other things. The bucket is too small and the angle of the opening too narrow for them to have any real hope, but they like the challenge anyway.
“First one to land it gets first ride.”
“Deal.”
They fall into a rhythm, unspeaking, Iosif biting his tongue as he throws, and Artyom thinks again about what they look like from above. Two boys sitting on a weathered, green tin roof. He thinks that from up there everything must be broken into flat shapes. Great, square fields. Narrow, thin roads. The circular top of their grain silo. He wonders what the soldiers think of them. They must think these boys have nothing to do, they must think it’s so far from any action. But Artyom and Iosif can throw nails at cans. They can make forts in trees. And now they can ride their motorbike through fields, hear it hum over muddy lanes.
Iosif nudges him and points to their right, another target for them. Artyom follows his finger and realizes he’s hearing the bike, he’s seeing their fathers trail along the road, stirring dust in their wake.
They fling the remaining nails into the bushes and lower themselves off the roof. They push open the door to the kitchen, and Iosif’s mother is still where they left her. The plates sit on the table.
“They’re coming back.”
“The helicopters?”
“No. Father.”
She rises, pushes her chair back, and paces towards the door in one concise motion.
They wait in the laneway. When the men approach, Iosif’s mother runs to meet them. The boys are tempted to run too, but they stay where they are. They don’t want to seem too eager. And they both think that the bike looks like a smooth ride.
Iosif’s father dismounts and talks animatedly with his mother. Artyom’s father turns the throttle and stops alongside the boys.
“Let’s go.”
<
br /> He says this as an order. At first Artyom doesn’t understand: surely his first time on their bike, the bike they’ve worked so hard on, should be a moment of pride, of celebration. Then he looks to his right and sees Iosif’s father dragging his mother back to the house.
“Let’s go.”
Artyom’s father revs the engine violently, and Artyom jumps on.
“Are you holding the side handles?”
“Yes.”
They move off so quickly that Artyom’s head snaps back.
When they reach the house Artyom’s father drives up to the porch and dismounts before the bike has fully stopped. Artyom gets off too, and his father, holding the handlebars, lets the bike drop onto the grass and walks to their steps. Artyom tries to pick up the machine and put it on its kickstand, but his father barks at him.
“Leave it. Inside now!”
His father rarely raises his voice. Artyom is old enough to resent his father giving him orders, but not old enough to disobey. He isn’t certain if there is such an age.
Inside the house his mother is repairing his father’s spare trousers. She works the needle with her sharp, precise hands, teasing the thread out at different angles. She has great skill as a dressmaker. Everything the family wears has in some way been reshaped and remodelled by her. Artyom wears his sister’s old clothes, but no one can tell—with the buttons swapped over and the shoulders recut—that they’ve ever been worn by a girl. In the evenings when he can’t concentrate on his homework, he watches his mother’s fingers. They function as indicators of her mood. He thinks of them as being like antennae, showing how much her senses are engaged.
“The military will be here anytime,” says Artyom’s father. “They’re putting people in trucks. Pack a bag, we’ll need to sleep in the forest tonight.”
“What, the forest? What? I can’t walk that far. The forest?”
“They’re evacuating the area. There’s been a fire in the power plant.”
“So they’re evacuating the whole area?”
“Where’s Sofya?”
He turns to Artyom.
“Where’s Sofya?”
“I don’t know.”
Artyom’s mother continues. “I don’t understand. Why don’t they just put out the fire? It’s not going to spread this far.”
“It’s a nuclear plant. It’s dangerous.”
“How is it dangerous? It’s not as though there were bombs in there.”
“It’s dangerous, that’s all. Where’s Sofya?”
“I don’t know,” Artyom says again.
Artyom’s mother doesn’t know how to react. She does what she always does when she’s nervous, she busies herself. Artyom has seen it when people come over for dinner and she doesn’t know how to talk to them. Or when his father compliments her figure in front of their friends. She carefully winds up her thread, and makes sure her needles are ordered in their pouch according to size. Then she pours herself a cup of water from the jug that’s always on the counter. The one he has brought to and from the well a hundred thousand times.
“Go and find her,” his father says to him. “And no fucking around with that bike. We need to leave right now.”
Artyom walks outside, glad to be away from the house. Sofya is a walker, so she could be anywhere. His father knows this. How the hell is he supposed to find her? She walks. She likes to look at birds. She hates that they go shooting grouse, but she knows better than to say anything about it. Their father doesn’t have much time for himself outside of work. She doesn’t want her disapproval to sully the pleasure of one of his rare pastimes. And, besides, she eats the meat, doesn’t she?
Sofya was always the one who brought nature inside the izba. She collected beetles and birds’ nests when she was young. She’d keep the beetles in jam jars under her bed. Artyom hated them but would look at them nonetheless, see them trying to clamber up the glass sides and fall on their backs and struggle to right themselves.
He runs. He can understand his mother’s reaction. It’s only a fire, after all. But all of it is tied. He thinks of yesterday morning, what they saw. He thinks of the helicopters overhead. Something huge is happening.
Sofya’s not at their babushka’s grave. Artyom pauses for a few minutes in front of it. He can’t help looking around in case his father is watching, even though he’s far from sight. The rushnik that’s draped over the wooden cross is almost threadbare. The mound of earth is covered in green shoots. Soon it will be indistinguishable from the grass around it. One day the wooden cross will rot and crumble and people won’t know there’s a body underground, in a wooden box, his babushka. Already Artyom can’t remember what she sounds like, what kind of things she’d say. He remembers what she looked like. But the rest of it, the sensations are as frayed as the material on the cross.
He runs to Sofya’s tree: there’s a tree with a wide horizontal branch that she lies on sometimes with a view to the shop in the village where she watches the comings and goings. She watches the village and Artyom watches her. She’s only two years older than he is, but she knows so much more than him. Sometimes he says things and she just nods and smiles. The way his mother does.
He’s sweating from the running. He’s been running for half an hour. He calls into the Polovinkins’ to ask Nastya if she’s seen Sofya, but the place is empty. He runs to the back of their house and sees them, two fields away, driving their cattle towards the forest. Everyone is heading for the forest.
He returns home, panting, and walks through the front door, motions to put his hand on the handle, but realizes the door is lying on the table.
“I can’t find her.”
Why is the door on the table? Instinctively he puts his hand on the frame to make sure it’s empty.
His father is bundling their blankets into a sack.
“What?”
His father stops.
“Shit. Where can she be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You looked at the grave?”
“Yes.”
“You asked Nastya?”
“They’ve headed for the forest, they’re driving their cattle there. She isn’t with them. Maybe she’s already heard, maybe she’s gone ahead.”
“No.” His mother is shouting from their room. “She’d come back.”
His mother emerges from their bedroom. She runs her fingers through her hair, teasing the tangled strands out by jerking her fingers. An action that makes Artyom anxious just by looking at it.
“Andrei. You’ll have to find her.”
“I know.”
His father strides out, calling back as he leaves. “Do whatever your mother tells you. Make sure you don’t leave her alone.”
The bike roars off, and a great quiet descends. His mother walks towards him and holds him in her arms. Artyom can feel her hesitancy; she doesn’t want to impose anything on him, she’s aware that he needs to create his distance from her, the way he’s stepping into manhood. But he accepts her embrace. Because she asks so rarely. He knows she needs a touch, a reassurance.
She steps away and picks up a potato sack from the corner.
“Pack your things. Bring something warm. And if there’s anything really important to you, bring that too.”
“Okay. Where did we get these sacks?”
She inclines her head towards the window.
“Your father emptied them out.”
Artyom looks outside. The lid of their wooden storage crate lies on the grass and their stock of potatoes has been spilled out in piles.
He turns again to his mother. “We’re not coming back, are we?”
She flattens her lips and shakes her head.
They pack and they wait. Each minute is stretched out. They sit and long for the return of half of their family.
They hear engines, coming from the direction of the village. It’s not the bike, or helicopters. These sounds are mixed with dislocated speech. They walk outside. A mechanical voice carries through t
he air, words meshed into one another.
Military trucks with loudspeakers strapped to their frames can be seen over the hedgerows. As they near the village, the last ones in line stop and spread out into the various laneways.
“What do we do?”
“Let’s go back inside. We’re not leaving this house without them.”
A truck stops down the lane, probably outside the Scherbaks’. Footsteps walking towards them, voices getting louder.
Through the vacant doorframe, Artyom can see a soldier approach. He steps into the room.
“Into the truck. You are allowed one bag.”
He’s not so much older than Artyom. Tall and gangly. He has a hand on the gun that’s slung across his chest. Artyom could bundle him down the steps before he has time to point it anywhere. He looks over to his mother, anticipating a signal, but she has picked up her needle and is working on the trousers again, barely paying any attention to what’s going on, as if this happens all the time.
“Into the truck. Let’s go.”
The soldier is a little unsure. His order has now become a request.
Artyom’s mother looks up from her stitches.
“My husband is out, looking for my daughter. They’re coming back. But we’re not leaving without them.”
“You can wait for them in the truck.”
His mother puts down her work.
“I see.”
She says this deadpan, diluting the soldier’s order into merely one of a number of possibilities.
“We have orders to burn down the house of anyone who doesn’t cooperate.”
“Fine. But we’ll wait here while you do it.”
She provides no gestures or intonations that betray her fears. His mother has learned not to fear a pointed gun. This woman speaking is his mother. Yes, she has had a life before motherhood, before marriage, yet Artyom can’t reconcile his scant knowledge of her past with what is happening right now, in front of him.
Confused, the soldier turns to the boy. Artyom wishes he had something with which he could occupy himself. He half wonders if he should pick up a needle and thread.
All That Is Solid Melts into Air Page 10
