Artyom looks to his left and sees that they’re parked outside the train station. An abandoned car sits squat on its axle, people swarming around it, and Artyom walks over and stands on the bonnet to get a better view.
The main bulk of people are walking in a thick line away from the building, following hazard lights that have been laid like a trail.
Again he looks for men, fathers, but sees very few.
His mother has decided they’ll go to her sister Lilya’s apartment. She’s not sure where it is, but she’d recognize it on a map. So they need to get out of the crowd and find their bearings. Artyom turns back to the station. There are still a few lights on, and a station guard leans against a column of the portico. Artyom signals to his mother and sister to meet him by the main entrance and, when he sees them making progress against the tide, he pushes forward himself and eventually emerges into empty space and approaches the guard.
“Is there anywhere to get a map?”
The guard busies himself and walks away, answering as he does so, reluctant to make eye contact.
“Try the concourse, there might be some on the information stand.”
Sofya and his mother walk towards him, looking around for possibilities.
His mother puts her hand in her pocket, brings out some roubles, and puts them in his hand.
“See if you can find something hot.”
“To eat or to drink?”
“Either. I don’t care.”
Artyom pushes open the main door of the station, steps onto the concourse. The place is deserted. Artyom is surprised that some of the crowd haven’t filtered inside to get some respite from the chaos. He hears his footsteps reverberate around the empty space. It’s an otherworldly sensation, to be alone in this grand expanse, a single figure under the great, arching roof of the Minsk train station. The information booth is closed, but there’s a map of the city on the wall, behind a plastic pane. He digs his fingers beneath the frame and slides out the map, rolls it up.
He steps inside an empty waiting room, which houses a boy, asleep, alone, head on a table. The boy is almost embracing the tabletop, an empty packet of cigarettes beside his ear, a jar with some ash and old butts beside the empty packet. The boy’s head resting on his hand, a grubby finger laid on his eyelid. Light filters through the discoloured plastic sheeting of the roof in a cool aqua-green. Artyom touches the tabletop and rubs some ash between his fingers.
Someone has a radio on in the distance. Folk music finds its way into his ears.
He finds an arcade where small stalls sell trinkets, all closed up. More people in this section, also searching for food. Station guards are silhouetted against the light, their caps flattening their profiles, giving them the grandeur of chess figures. There are old men hunched in corners, lying on plastic bags containing books and old coats.
In the station shop there are empty, square glass cabinets. A crowd is pressed against the counter. An old woman on the fringes eats a blini from wax paper. There is no anger in the queuing, no aggression in the gathering. People slope and drift. There is no more food to be had here, but they wait anyway, in hope.
He returns to the portico and shows his mother the map.
“Did you steal it?”
“Of course I stole it. You think there’re shops selling maps for tourists?”
“I don’t like you stealing.”
“Fine.” He walks towards the door. “I’ll leave it back.”
He has his own mind now. She can’t scold him anymore.
“No. You’re right. It’s fine.”
They’ve been fighting more in the past year. She can tell from his eyes that he’s chalking up another victory. She’ll win very few arguments from now on—not that she wants a competition, just a recognition that she still has some authority, that she knows things.
He lays the map on the ground in front of her.
“Her place is near the bus station. Get us to the bus station and I’ll find it from there.”
Artyom runs his finger over the districts and finds it.
“Okay. It’s not far.”
“Did you get any food?” Sofya asks.
“No. All the shops have been cleared out. There were probably hundreds of buses before us. I’m sure people have stocked up.”
Artyom takes his mother’s sack. Sofya can carry her own.
“How do we know when Father gets in?” Sofya asks.
“He’ll find us at Lilya’s.”
They head out into the road in single file, Artyom leading. He stays close to the walls. A man passes by with his head down, looking at his shoes. There are women and children sitting in the middle of the tarmac, quaking through tears. Artyom’s mother approaches them and coaxes them into doorways, sheltering them from the pressing crowd. A woman in her forties walks backwards, screaming obscenities at the arrivals. She uses a term they don’t understand: “glowworms.”
They cross through the park, still keeping close. His arms are aching from the sacks, but he doesn’t want this to be known, otherwise his mother will insist on carrying her own. Eventually, though, he stops, places them on the pathway, and shakes out his shoulders.
His mother looks at him, concern weighing on her. Artyom sees her differently here, away from home, under the iron lamps of the pavement. She looks older than her age. The land, the work, has hardened her. Hardened her skin and face, but maybe also made her more determined. He thinks about how she works at harvest time, bent low over the straw, tying it together, gathering it into ricks. All day bent over, stopping only for the occasional drink of water. She’s determined to get them where they need to go. A different strength to his father’s.
“You’re tired.”
“Yes.”
“Let me take them.”
He leaves the sacks on the ground, and she heaves them over her shoulder and begins walking again. He’ll take them back in a few minutes, when his shoulders have had a rest.
At the bus station there are more people, more chaos. The confusion is relentless, but they are becoming accustomed to it. They move through the crowd more quickly now, spotting the gaps, less tentative in their steps. Artyom’s mother doesn’t hesitate in her direction, and he and Sofya know that she recognizes where she is.
They reach a tree-lined street of apartment blocks. It’s quieter here. They pass a group of men gathered around the opened bonnet of a car, drinking, one underneath with a torch, tinkering away. The men stare as they pass, carrying their belongings. The group don’t say anything, but Artyom can feel their eyes trailing him, aggression in their look. So this is what Minsk is like, he thinks.
“They don’t like us here, do they, Mama?” Sofya says.
“No. I suppose they don’t,” Artyom’s mother replies.
They find the building and, pushing open the door to the entrance, they see the lift doors are wide open with the lights off and wires hanging out where the buttons should be. Artyom’s mother lays the sacks on the ground and looks dolefully up the steps, and arches her back, stretches her neck from side to side.
“What floor is she on?” Artyom asks.
“The eighth.”
“I’ll take the bags from here.”
“Thank you, Artyom.”
The steps are crumbled at the edges, stones peeping through. So Artyom steps sideways, keeping the sacks at an even height to balance himself. There’s a smell of piss in the enclosed space, and it joins together with the scent of potatoes ingrained in the cloth, which rises up as he swings the sacks. The walls are covered in writing. Names in huge, black letters, connected in a fluid scrawl, a series of interlocked curls. On the fourth-floor landing there’s a kid’s disembowelled bear, its cotton insides greyed and trampled upon.
He pushes into the corridor and looks at his mother as she knocks on the fifth door down.
No answer. She waits and knocks again. No answer. She calls: “Lilya. It’s Tanya. We need your help.”
They wait. She looks at So
fya, who is staring at the ceiling, her fists curling around the opening of her sack. Sofya always looks upwards when she’s angry. Artyom’s mother leans against the wall and puts her ear to the door.
“You’re in there. Your light was on. I can hear you. I have Artyom and Sofya. We need to come in. Please, Lilya.”
Artyom stays at the end of the corridor. He understands there’s something private about the moment. He needs to let his mother go through this on her own.
His mother steps away from the door. Movement, a voice from inside.
“I can’t help. It’s too dangerous. You need to go to the shelter.”
His mother bangs on the door.
Some neighbours appear. Stripes of light cross the green tiled floor. A shirtless man stands in the corridor, his chest hair curled into dots. He fills the gap between the walls, hands on his hips, like a goalkeeper waiting for a penalty.
“Lilya. I’m your sister. Let us in.”
“You’re poison, don’t you know this? You can’t stay around other people.”
Artyom’s mother starts to cry. He hasn’t seen his mother cry since he was a child. Sofya kicks the door, but his mother brushes her aside. They both lean against the wall, hiding their faces.
The man with no shirt speaks.
“You heard. You’re fucking poison. Get out of here.”
This half-naked bastard shouting at them. Artyom drops the bags and runs towards him, arms wide, a slur of dense breath in his throat, but the man sidesteps him easily, and Artyom skids along the ground, tearing the knee of his trousers, skinning his flesh. The man steps into his doorway.
“If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’ll come out with my knife.”
He spits in Artyom’s direction, the blob landing near Artyom’s shoes.
“Five minutes.”
The man closes his door, and the three of them bunch on the floor in individual piles, beaten. After a few moments, Artyom’s mother walks over to him, cradles his neck in her hand, and kisses the top of his head.
“Let’s find a bed.”
They walk back towards the stairwell, their feet echoing in the corridor.
Chapter 10
In Pripyat, night has drawn in and Grigory walks through the town alone. He passes a small carnival with a Ferris wheel creaking in the breeze. The apartment blocks are dark, uninhabited now, looming.
Coloured paper still lies scattered around the town, mocking the tone of the day. Dead dogs littered everywhere, stagnant blood glistening through the darkness. Grigory occasionally catches the darting gait of wolves, drifted in from the forest, attracted by the scent of blood, courageous in the emptied streets.
He makes his way back to the operations centre in the main square, approaching from a side street, and as he enters the square he pauses in realization at the statue in the middle, the iron figure half kneeling, raising his open arms to the heavens, full of fury. He has passed it a dozen times in the last day, unaware of its subject: Prometheus, the Greek god who gave fire to the people.
This statue in this place.
Grigory slumps under the figure, spent. A young lieutenant approaches and sits beside him. He also is too tired to attend to his duties. He pulls out a cigarette and offers one to Grigory, who readily accepts, his first cigarette in ten years. And Grigory remembers how Prometheus was punished for his betrayal of godly secrets: Zeus had him chained to a rock and each day would begin with an eagle ripping his liver from his body, which grew back by evening, so that the suffering would be repeated to eternity.
They stay there, unspeaking, until Grigory says, “I’m a surgeon. I never expected to live through a day like this.”
The soldier dabs a loose strand of tobacco off his tongue and spits.
“You remember, my friend, what comrade Lenin told us: ‘Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.’ ”
They finish their cigarettes in silence.
November 1986
Chapter 11
Sometimes Maria looks up and a day has passed, or longer, a month. Most evenings Alina, her sister, asks how her day was and she replies, “Unremarkable.” And they add up, those unremarkable days. Days that, when you look back on them, even two weeks later, retain not a single distinctive moment. And if she’s to admit the thing she fears most, it’s this: the stealthy accumulation of unremarkable months, the rows and stacks of nothing, the unfilled columns when she sits down to account for her life.
She turns from her lathe and looks up at the small, dust-caked clock that sits over the door to the locker room. It’s quarter past four, and Maria remembers her lunch—tea and herring and beetroot—remembers sitting with Anna and Nestor, but nothing else. How can the rest of it have escaped her? How can another day have almost ended?
In the past few years, life has become unrecognizable to her, existing somehow outside of her; in the passage of the seasons, in the momentum of a city.
“Maria Nikolaevna.”
Her line supervisor is standing behind her, clipboard, as ever, at the ready. He’s a small man with a string around his glasses that he never uses, preferring instead to perch them on the top of his forehead.
“Are you with us?”
“Yes. Sorry, Mr. Popov.”
“Mr. Shalamov wants to see you.”
“Yes, sir. Should I go straight to see him or get cleaned up first?”
“Mr. Shalamov doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Shalamov is their personnel officer. He oversees their initial training, and that’s the last most people see of him. Hearing his name puts Maria instantly on edge. She turns off her lathe and makes sure that the red emergency stop, the one at her knees, is also pressed. Two fragments of an unconscious routine, two more actions that add up to serious time when you calculate the repetition.
He may not like to be kept waiting, but she’ll step into the toilet nonetheless, put her hair back, wash her face. Because it’s a universal law that the prettier you look, the more things will go your way. Sometimes she thinks her entire education was based on this. If she learned nothing else in school, it was how to prime yourself for passing men.
She stands over the washbasin, takes a nail scrub to her hands, scoops some water up and over her face, and hears it shatter on the floor around her. Her hands are hard now, calloused, which is definitely an undesirable trait, but there’s no way of avoiding it. They don’t use gloves at the lathes, even though regulations require them to, because two years ago Polina Volkova, three workstations down, had the machine catch her glove, and her hand went with it. Half a second of gore, in which her hand went from being a hand to a shredded tangle of bone and ligament. So they wear gloves according to the regulations, but they don’t wear gloves according to reality. It does mean, though, that her face is usually clean and clear, because her calloused hands have just the right texture to keep her skin invigorated. So there are compensations.
This job was not of her choosing, and yet she’s not necessarily ungrateful for it, knowing the alternatives.
She runs her fingers along the bases of her eye sockets, massaging them. Hazel eyes, as dark as her hair, full and alert. She pulls her lips over her gums and rubs a wet finger across her teeth. Strong, symmetrical teeth, a point of envy amongst her friends. Her gums a little more prominent than she would like, so that in photographs she’s careful to contain the full breadth of her smile.
Grey hairs are multiplying across her head, with no discernible pattern. She thinks of Sunday mornings when Grigory would lie beside her and pick out the rogue strands like those gorillas on the nature programmes that forage through their mate for lice. When he couldn’t isolate the single hair and plucked two or three at once, she would let out an involuntary whimper, which he found amusing. These sessions would end with him coaxing her back from her irritation, smoothing his hands over her. Lazy Sundays.
She ties her hair back and adjusts her fringe.
On her return to M
oscow, not long after she and Grigory were married, she secured a job as a staff journalist at a notable newspaper, where she worked her way up to features writer. A position she held for several years until some underground articles she’d written came to light. What followed was a dangerous time for her. She had to realign all aspects of her personality, was forced to erase her outspoken nature; every word she spoke from that moment would be sifted through and interpreted.
She takes in the image in the glass. A certain slackening to her features now, a looseness, subtle but undeniable. Wrinkles like sketch marks smattered around her eyes. Fine details that perhaps she alone can see, but she can’t stave off the thought that middle age is on its way. Three years of working here are beginning to take their toll. She wonders what she’ll look like in another three.
And yes, it’s true she’s reconfigured herself to become what they’ve asked of her. She dresses anonymously, she nods her head in agreement with almost any statement floated in her direction. She has made it a point to avoid eye contact with everyone other than a few trusted friends, so she walks with her head bowed, a kind of self-containment, moving like a vessel, constant, never deviating from her course. But she’s still here, surviving.
Maria takes off her package-brown work coat, bangs the dust off it, and then puts it on again. It drops shapelessly around her. She’s lost weight in the past year. Her cheekbones protrude, her arms feel slightly insubstantial. There is only so much food that she and Alina can queue for, only so many hours in the day, although she’s started to have decent meals in the canteen of the university—another reason to love the building.
She slaps her cheeks to give them some colour. She knows Mr. Shalamov likes his employees to look vibrant, full of the joys, despite requiring them to spend all these dogged hours in this spartan shed. Should she leave the coat off or keep it on? She keeps it on. Mr. Shalamov will surely mention its absence, and it’s not as if she has a tantalizing figure.
All That Is Solid Melts into Air Page 12
