All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  His mother points to the sacks that sit by the door, still no urgency in her voice.

  “We’re packed. We’re leaving. But not without my husband and daughter.”

  The soldier looks at the four sacks with clothes peeping out the top of them. He leaves. They wait. He comes back.

  “Okay. You can wait. But I am to stay with you. When the truck comes around again, you’ll have to get on it. We can use force.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  The soldier pulls a chair from the table, then decides he probably should stand. They wait. Artyom can’t tell for how long. After some time the soldier sits. His mother keeps sewing.

  Artyom walks to his room, and the soldier follows. He takes a tractor manual from under the bed and returns to his chair and sits. The soldier does the same.

  Eventually they hear an engine, a higher pitch than the trucks. The bike passes the doorframe; Sofya is behind his father, her arms across his chest. His mother stops her darning for the first time. They walk in, and his mother engulfs his sister. Sofya lets out an even stream of breath, like a ball being deflated.

  “They’re here,” his father says.

  His mother directs her eyes towards the kitchen table.

  His father follows his mother’s stare and turns to see the soldier. The soldier is embarrassed now, Artyom can tell. Time in the room has softened his resolve. He is occupying another man’s home, sitting in front of his family with a gun across his lap.

  His father approaches the soldier. “Come with me, please.”

  They walk outside, and Artyom can see his father gesturing, pointing back towards the house.

  “You think he’ll let us stay?” Artyom says.

  “That’s not what he’s asking,” his mother replies, seated again, still holding Sofya’s hand.

  His father walks back inside and takes some raw carrots from under the sink and hands them around. Then he takes some bread from the cupboard, breaks it into three chunks, and gives it to them. Artyom moves the bread toward his mouth, but his father stops him.

  “Save it until you have to eat it. It might be a while before you get a meal.”

  Artyom notices his father hasn’t saved anything for himself.

  The truck pulls up outside. and they take their sacks. Artyom carries two of them, because he can. He throws the sacks inside the truck and climbs up, using the lip of the hanging backboard to give himself a boost.

  He knows most of the people inside: the Gavrilenkos, the Litvins, the Volchoks. They live further out from the village. There are some that he doesn’t recognize. He turns around to help his mother up, then Sofya. His father is standing by the truck, holding their door. Is he bringing the door? His father lifts it up to him, and Artyom grabs it and places it facedown, and his father slides it to the back as people lift their feet, some complaining, and Artyom understands this. What is his father thinking, bringing their door?

  “No talking,” the soldier barks out, his authority renewed.

  His father climbs on board and sits beside his mother, not making eye contact with anyone. Artyom sees him grasp his mother’s hand. Artyom has seen them do this countless times, but he has the sense that something about the image is different, without quite locating what it is. The soldier closes the backboard, slides the pin into position, and climbs aboard. No one helps him. A gold ring on the soldier’s little finger clinks against the metal frame of the covering. Artyom realises it as the truck moves off: his mother’s wedding ring.

  Chapter 8

  In Party headquarters Grigory listens to the presentation from the evacuation committee. He feels a thousand years old, the lack of sleep catching up with him, his body still carrying the vibrations from the helicopter. They’ve brought supplies during the night, and so he sips tea from a polystyrene cup, the sugar and heat bringing some consolation.

  They have mobilized any available buses within a ten-hour drive. Two thousand four hundred and thirty buses will stop at a meeting point sixteen kilometres from the town and then arrive in four separate convoys to facilitate crowd supervision. The town has been divided into four sectors, with the specific evacuation routes highlighted.

  There will be dosimetric checkpoints in each sector to assess isotopic composition. People will be categorized according to risk and given medical papers to enable hospitals to process them efficiently. Five categories, stark in their naming: absolute risk, excessive relative risk, relative risk, additional risk, spontaneous risk. Anyone in the first two categories will be loaded into ambulances; the rest will be sent on buses. They anticipate that the dosimetric tests will take some time.

  “Should I bother to ask?” says Grigory. “Let me guess, we have fifty dosimeters.”

  “No, sir, we have one hundred and fifty,” a junior assessor says, with a trace of pride.

  Grigory pauses for a moment and takes a sip.

  “That’s approximately one per five hundred citizens.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grigory has the man removed from the room.

  More military equipment arrives at the plant: Mi-2 fighter planes, Mi-24 fighter helicopters, instruments of battle. They send several robots designed by the Academy of Sciences for exploration on Mars. The lieutenant in charge of logistics has no idea where to park them.

  At the evacuation site Grigory is astounded by the power of a crowd. The sheer weight and expanse of a gathered horde. The static hum of trepidation. Crying children: a small battalion of crying children. Mothers with worry streaking their faces; agitated men who find it impossible to still their hands rubbing their stubble, tousling their hair, clutching and unclutching their biceps. Thousands of hurriedly packed suitcases with sections of clothing peeking from their joins. Voluminous suitcases stuffed to an almost spherical state. Families caught caseless, using thick plastic bags with handles to transport the most necessary of their belongings, the bags leaking books and ceramic trinkets and suit jackets. Women with their meagre pieces of jewellery stuffed into their bras, which cause odd irregularities in their breast lines. Children wearing three layers of clothes, streaming sweat in the afternoon sunshine. Physical contact cascades throughout. Neighbours embracing. Couples holding hands, wives burrowing their heads into their husbands’ chests, children on shoulders, in arms, hugging waistlines. Babies in slings. Teenage lovers kissing frantically, as they are wrenched apart, scrabbling for a final contact, clawing the space between them.

  The soldiers carry megaphones and guns and arrange long, snaking lines according to the corresponding tower blocks, at the end of which are a doctor with a dosimeter and a trestle table with a lieutenant checking identity cards and stamping new medical papers. Those in the critical categories are hauled to the side, dragged behind a wall of soldiers, and shunted into ambulances. They protest in a whole-bodied way, limbs churning, clothes falling loose around them, tearing in the struggle. Their families rush forward but are butted away, soldiers expertly dispatching blows to the lower neck, causing the injured people, children included, to crumple in slow motion from the knees. The space the crowd inhabits expands with their indignant rage, but they are kept at bay by the unyielding troops. These soldiers have seen battle and carry with them the resolute steeliness of experience.

  When the buses arrive, the crowd surges forth, swarming round the vehicles, prising open windows, climbing on mudguards, bellying onto roofs. Tear gas is released and the swarm retreats and the soldiers board the buses and drag out those inside, dispensing blows in full view of the crowd. Megaphones keep blaring instructions. Simple, clear sentences:

  Return to your lines.

  Do not attempt to board the vehicles without a medical certificate.

  Anyone who attempts to do so will be severely punished.

  Three lines repeated as a mantra, eventually restoring order. The crowd fatalistic and ultimately submissive.

  The operation reports detail that animals are likely to be highly contaminative—radioactive matter would be
soaked up through their coats—and so the troops shoot any animals on sight. Pets are wrenched from protective arms and shot in full view of their owners. Docile dogs looking innocently into gun barrels. The soldiers clench cats by the ridge of skin behind the neck and place pistols under their squirming chins, blood exploding in all directions.

  An elderly woman passes a large jar of milk around to her neighbours, hearing it aids with radiation poisoning. An official slaps the jar from her hand, yelling to her that it’s probably contaminated, and the creamy liquid slopes in a single trail down the pavement, eventually combining with animal blood into a lurid, pink puddle. The woman remains still, helpless.

  Grigory stands outside the operations centre—a hastily constructed tent on a slightly elevated point in the eastern sector of the town—and takes it all in. It’s a military operation; there is nothing he can do to interfere. He watches the spreading chaos and feels impotent and alone.

  To his right, slightly down the slope, Grigory sees a man attempting to carry a door onto the bus. The soldiers encircle him, all with their guns pointed, as if they’re about to skewer the man. Grigory moves within earshot. The man stands with one arm around the vertical door, as if it’s an old friend that he’s introducing to a group of neighbours. He has a strong sweep of a chin, with short, grey stubble, and a salesman’s charisma. He’s pointing to the intimate details of its surface. Grigory follows the man’s fingers and sees some neat lines scored into the side of the panel at various heights, fractions beside them: 3¼, 5½, 7½. The man points upwards to a boy and girl, early to midteens, with the same definition to their faces, deep-set, clear eyes. Grigory realizes the man is pointing out the measurements of their height as children, the markings of their growth. The man talks about the history of this object. The soldiers are intrigued by such ludicrous ambition, bringing such an unlikely object with him while everyone else is trying to smuggle on an extra bag or jacket.

  Grigory hears the man had laid out his father on this door, ten years ago, then his mother last winter. He explains all this to the soldiers; he shows them the notches, the names, the tribal markings denoting the history of the thing, the only object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead body will rest, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man’s nose.

  Blood leaks down his face, glistening in his stubble, dripping from his chin. The door falls onto the concrete with a crash, and the crowd panics, so tightly wound up they mistake it for a gunshot.

  Some words still emerge from his lips; the momentum of the man’s speech hasn’t let him dry up completely. Then he stops talking and some other soldiers grab him, pull him forward, and drag him away, pushing his family backwards. The door is consumed in the heave of the crowd. Grigory can see the family being pushed back in the surge, trying to swim against the tide of bodies, and the man is bundled into a troop carrier, where he covers his chin and mouth with his hand, and Grigory can’t tell if this gesture is to staunch the flow of blood or to indicate his regret for his outlandish ambition.

  Other soldiers are boarding trucks, and Grigory finds out that they’re ancillary squads, sent to search the town for anyone in hiding. He decides to join them, judging that a smaller group holds more opportunity to bring his calming influence to bear.

  They drive to the western part of the town and walk through apartment blocks. Washing hangs on lines that stretch the width of each balcony. Fridges contain bottles of orange juice and lengths of butter on dishes. They find people behind shower curtains and wedged into airing cupboards. They find a pregnant girl lying in a hollowed-out sofa. Grigory stands on a balcony, glancing over the empty streets for signs of movement, and looks down and sees a pair of hands clutching the railings at his feet. He leans over the guard rail and finds a man hanging straight as an exclamation point, his gaze directed downwards, as if avoiding eye contact would keep him obscured from sight. A man hanging ten storeys up, his lean muscles taut with effort and desperation. In another apartment an old woman sits in her kitchen listening to the radio. When they enter in a clatter of heavy boots, she turns down the volume and looks peacefully at them, in total control of the situation. Before they have a chance to give the order, she refuses to leave. She invites them to beat her or shoot her if that is necessary, but she states that this is her home and she will die here. None of the soldiers has the appetite for this kind of violence, not here, not with this woman. They walk out and Grigory shakes his head and smiles in admiration, and she raises her open palms to the ceiling, a silent gesture that says everything there is to say at this moment, in this room, in this town.

  Many of the doors have notes pinned to them, to friends or relatives, stating a point of contact in the city. People have painted their family name on the door, an attempt to assert ownership. In dozens of apartments, they find tables fully laid for dinner.

  They find a young couple sleeping in bed. They had been drinking for most of the night and lay there together under the sheets, oblivious to the commotion all around them. When the soldiers burst in, the man leaps from the bed in shock and then, realizing his nakedness, leaps back in again. The soldiers laugh, and Grigory asks them to leave and then sits on the bed and explains the situation to the couple, staring into the dark eyes of the young woman, gaining her trust with the gentleness of his tone. They wait in the kitchen, and when the couple emerge, dressed, carrying a few belongings, the soldiers clap and cheer and they smile shyly, and Grigory envies them their burgeoning love.

  They put people in the truck and drive them to the relevant zones and then return and put more people in trucks. They pass a small graveyard and find a woman fisting soil from a grave—her parents’ grave—into a jam jar. She pleads to keep the jar, but they take it from her and empty the soil back onto the ground. The woman has no energy to protest.

  They hear a noise from a lift shaft and break through an iron grille and find a young boy, perhaps five years old, sitting on top of the lift, clasping his hands to his ears. One of the men climbs into the shaft and emerges a few minutes later with the boy bouncing on his shoulders, making horsey noises and steering the soldier by the ears.

  They continue to shoot pets, despite Grigory’s objections. Pets run from apartments, and the soldiers fire their pistols at will and argue over kill numbers as if they were war heroes.

  Chapter 9

  In the buses they don’t talk. They are too shocked for words. Artyom sits with his mother and sister in a double seat, five rows from the back, each of them replaying the incident in their minds.

  Artyom’s mother watches the backs of heads bounce and nod and shake.

  She didn’t know the door mattered to him. He had never placed great importance on it, and part of her wondered if he had tried to bring it with them as an absurd act of protest: “How dare you try to take my home, watch me take a part of it with me.” Of course, the children were astonished. Of course, the listeners were intrigued. There were many angles to the man that were only revealed at intimate moments, in the smallest of ways. Oddly stubborn. Wildly stubborn. No one knew. The kids perhaps had a certain insight, but no one really knew the unfathomable depths of his stubbornness.

  Andrei could slow everything down, all around her. He could bend time for her. When they made love in their bed, with his mother sleeping in the next room, a tough woman, full of harsh judgement, the slightest noise would bring tension—the old woman had sharp ears. So Andrei would be so careful, yet still so generous. They would make love while hardly moving. They would rock with mere whispers of motion, and she would bring him to release simply by the warmth of her hands on his waist.

  “When we go I want to go first.” She had always told him this, when they were alone, and he would nod, agreeing, because they both knew that he was the one who would endure, that she was the one who would collapse, helpless, overwhelmed.

  And now he is alone somewhere, in a truck or a cell, and she has two child adu
lts to look after, to reassure and lead as best she can, though they’re smarter, more aware than she is.

  He will be sent along tomorrow. There can be no other possibility.

  He will be sent along tomorrow.

  Kids are moaning and shuffling. Artyom is sitting by the aisle, hanging off the side of the seat. There are families sitting on each other’s laps, but Artyom doesn’t want to suggest this to Sofya; the intimacy would be too strange.

  The lights are on in the bus. They give substance to the cigarette smoke, a cloud of stained light hovering resolutely over them. Some children are sleeping, tired limbs slumped over the armrests, dangling into the aisle, heads lolling. A stream of whimpering trickles along the seats. There are intermittent rustling sounds, when people check which belongings they’ve forgotten, or dig into a plastic bag for an extra sweater. People are saying they’re on their way to Minsk, but there has been no announcement. He’s assuming there are some on the bus who recognize the route. Artyom looks around and realizes there aren’t many men. Some old men, yes, but very few his father’s age or younger. He didn’t notice this while they were being shoved into the vehicles.

  His limbs want to strike out, to destroy something, anything. There are enough nervous people around, though, so instead he clamps his teeth into his inner cheek and bites down hard, feeling warm blood nestle around his teeth. He’s never seen his father look bewildered, this man so durable, so assured, crushed by violence.

  He’d like to look out of the windows, be distracted by the unfamiliar sights, but he can’t get a proper view past his mother and sister, through the smoke. Sofya takes a carrot from her pocket and eats it, and Artyom does the same. They crunch on the tasteless lumps. Their jaws sore from a day of unwittingly grinding their teeth.

  Artyom wakes. The bus has stopped, and Sofya is punching his shoulder.

  “We’re getting off.”

  It’s nighttime. The windows are matted with dull streaks of condensation. Artyom’s brain feels the same way. He rubs his eyes with his fists, a gesture that reminds his mother of her boy at five years old, a naïve gesture that he will now surely carry through to adulthood. They gather their sacks, hug them to their chests, and wait until it’s their turn to step into the aisle and out of the bus, spilling into the great pool of dislocated people.