All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  But all has not been so smooth recently. His tempo is beginning to drift. It’s a slight quirk that seems to be growing exponentially. The auditions for the central school of the Conservatory are next April, and Yevgeni’s training has come unstuck. There’s a tautness in the household. Mr. Leibniz has asserted that the boy would either grow out of his musical difficulties or fall deeply into the disordered void; there’s no way to train it out of him. “Music is a sensual medium,” he says, “his style cannot be counted back to purity.” Maria passed the bathroom the other night and saw Alina gripping the taps, leaning back on her heels, head on the sink rim. Of course, if he doesn’t get in the first time he can always reapply the next year, but the boy doesn’t deal well with failure. Maria thinks that if he doesn’t succeed initially, he won’t get in. He has a fiery will. He blazes in his pursuit of the music. He’s not one of those vapid automatons she sees when they go to a recital there, when they sit in that pale-green room and watch stooped men with silver-tipped canes greet each other and assess the performer’s pedigree as if they were a racehorse. Afterwards each musician receives their applause utterly devoid of appreciation, bending as though their body has finally refused to carry itself upright.

  They look at their audience and see only judgement. They proclaim in silence to the room that they’re talentless, worthless. If only you knew the paltry depths of my ability. How painful it is even to stand here and receive such graciousness, how utterly unworthy I am. So excruciating that they can barely keep their eyes open. It’s all such bullshit. Every one of them has an ego the size of that barge of an instrument they play. Maria always feels the urge to walk up to the podium, grab them by the shoulders, and shake them till their teeth rattle. Precious little orchids.

  Her favourite thing about the Conservatory is to stand outside it, especially on weekdays—though she hasn’t done this since she moved to the outskirts of the city—when the students are practising and the windows over the courtyard are all thrown open and a great clatter emerges. All these styles and tempos and tones competing with each other. All that sweat being expended. You feel as if you’re standing in front of a great cauldron of creativity. All that discordance so full of life, so utterly at odds with the translucent figures that sit up on the rostrum at the recitals.

  No, Yevgeni is definitely not of that mold, and it’s another thing she loves about him. There are tantrums. Sometimes after lessons he locks himself into the bathroom and refuses to come out. He throws things at walls. He bites his keyboard, bites his knuckles, pulls at his hair, kicks doorframes and lampposts, a tumult of rage inside the kid.

  And yet there’s a joy to his playing; she delights in his fingers. Yevgeni has the lightest fingers. They skip along his knee while he watches TV. He often eats dinner with one hand, drumming into the tablecloth with the other. Sometimes they brush their teeth in the bathroom together and he hums scales as he does so. He jumps from foot to foot, singing each note in an almost perfect pitch, at least to Maria’s untrained ears. Occasionally he even sits at her old typewriter, working the keys to a hammered frenzy, and she likes the sound of this too, the rhythm of who she used to be, given voice to the wider world once more.

  Symphonies are running on the record player every waking moment. Debussy accompanies her as she clips her toenails, Mendelssohn guides the spoon as she heats beans.

  There’s a small tuxedo in Alina’s closet and a bow tie with a tiny circumference. They attend competitions in regional halls in the sleet and hail, Mr. Leibniz in the back row swaying his stick from side to side in a disciplined rhythm. The child at a piano bringing them there. A child in a mini-tuxedo.

  Maria keeps him on her knee and guides his path through long division, adjusting his deviant numerals, reminding him how to fit the figures into their blue-ruled boxes. She lays out the numbers in neat columns and double-rules the answer line at the bottom. She double-rules it because this is what she’s always done. An unthinking practice passed down through the generations.

  Yevgeni has a jar of pencils on the table, which she finds immensely comforting. Bunched pencils bring reassurance. The rubber at the top is often bitten off. She can see where he has made indentations in the metal bracket with his teeth. He sits on her knee and finishes his homework, and then Maria flicks his hair back from his forehead, kisses the peak of his skull, sends him to wash his teeth, and looks at him as he goes out the door.

  There was a child of her own once, or the early configuration of a child or a potential child. But she couldn’t bring herself to have it. She didn’t want it in this world. And its departure was followed a few months later by the departure of her husband. After the procedure, Maria believed that if they had taken an X-ray of her, there would be a single line denoting her outer shell, and nothing else. The doctors would see her as she was, just a thin film of skin, no organs or intestines or blood flow. A single, contoured line. She often still thinks these thoughts, feels these feelings: her child’s absence, her husband’s absence. So many empty spaces in her life. And perhaps, she thinks, that’s why she feels such delight when she watches Yevgeni sway along a soundless keyboard. It dignifies that which is not there. It reminds her that life can be experienced in ways that she has never contemplated.

  Maria and Alina grew up in Togliatti, an industrial town in the Samara region, in an apartment similar to the one in which they live now. Her father worked the ticket booth in the train station, playing chess round the clock with a small cadre of friends who would drop by at appointed times. As she got older, she realized that when her father was referred to by people outside the family it was in a hushed, strained, maybe sour, way. Stray comments leaked through the cracks of winter-planed doors. People cast glances over downturned shoulders. She was exposed to it from the earliest age, and it took some time to realize—by watching how the same adults treated her few childhood friends—that this was not the norm.

  He disappeared one day, a few months short of her twentieth birthday. It was Alina who finally told her that the notebook their father kept in his small booth didn’t contain records of chess matches but a detailed account of the movements of the city. Who went where and when. Who bought what, talked to whom. What someone wore on a particular day, who they welcomed off the platform. Their father was the gatekeeper for the town, the all-seeing eye, passing the information along a chain of connections, resulting in actions which Maria couldn’t help imagining.

  Then he too disappeared, and this was something they couldn’t account for. There were no answers to this development. A Saturday afternoon when he went to the hippodrome to lay a little money on the horses and never returned. They questioned everyone. Everyone they asked gave no reply. She accompanied her mother to the buildings of the men he played chess with, and they stood at their doors while a mother and wife broke down under the gaze of her daughters, physically knelt before these men, wrapping her arms around their legs in an action of abject desperation, and they looked into the middistance, viewing the ordinary motions of their street, her wretched family oblivious to them.

  Alina is ironing shirts. Alina is always ironing.

  “Now he’s having trouble with his maths.”

  “I know, I gave him some help.”

  “First his timing goes. Now the little genius can’t even count.”

  “You can’t worry it away. It’s not like one of your creases.”

  “Oh, and he’s your child. You’re right, of course. The past nine years I’ve been thinking he’s mine.”

  “Be sarcastic. I’m trying to be supportive.”

  “The kid doesn’t even listen to me, he listens to you. Since when did I become the enemy?”

  “He doesn’t want to disappoint you. Just give him some time.”

  Maria folds some shirts. Alina sprays water from a plastic bottle and runs the iron over the damp patches, and steam expands into the room.

  It’s time for a drink.

  It’s a thing that has sneaked into her life:
a drink or two and the evening counts its own way to its conclusion. And she’s not ashamed. It’s a fringe benefit of manual labour, no one questions your need to unwind. She stands on the balcony, glass in hand, with a clear bottle, its white label inscribed with one word in large black type: VODKA. There is a pleasure, she finds, in its unadorned seriousness. The stark quality of the label eliminates the trivial drinker.

  This is Maria’s moment of quiet reflection.

  What are my ambitions?

  Sometimes she thinks into the middle of her unborn child’s life. It’s not a ghost that follows her around, she doesn’t look at other kids and wonder what colour its eyes would be or if it would have difficulty tying its laces. But she sees imagined scenes. A daughter being fitted for a dress. Sitting for dinner in the apartment of a bright young couple, proud and radiant, though she doesn’t know if her child is the man or the woman. Odd, imagined moments. Snatches of an alternative life.

  When she had the procedure—as they kept referring to it—she didn’t tell him beforehand. He is a doctor, he spends his life healing, repairing—there was no way he would allow her to go through with it. Instead she left a note in his jacket pocket. Just the facts, the decision, no pleading for understanding, no fleshing out of her thoughts.

  Afterwards, when she had had a few hours’ rest, she took a taxi home, bleeding and weak, and when she opened the door she saw him sitting on a wicker stool beside the stove. He held the note towards her, the scrawled lines she’d left to explain herself. Even in her weakened state she knew it was now a piece of evidence, and he held it up, not needing to voice the question, his eyes asking it for him: Who are you?

  Of course, their marriage couldn’t survive such a thing. That too was a calculation on her part. It was not only her actions that would hurt him, it was the independent nature of them, demolishing the closeness that had grown between them. Grigory is a man who listens, who speaks directly to the centre of things. This is why she fell in love with him. At parties he would stand in the corner and, inevitably, people would divulge their lives to him. Teary-eyed women returning from their conversations with him would clasp her forearm as they passed, making eye contact, thanking her, acknowledging her luck in finding such a partner, and her impulse would be to smash her glass into their teeth.

  Sometimes, after work, she would visit him in the hospital, and he would be mid-surgery and she could look through the viewing window and watch the refined world in which he functioned, the ghostly lights and bodywear, the goggles and instruments, the small, highly skilled gathering focused upon a single point. She would stand beside the family of the patient as they held hands and wept, mumbling prayers under their breath, watching what she was watching, their loved one at the mercy of her loved one, and sometimes, from a distance, she would observe him—unaware of her presence—speaking to the families in his white coat, and they would kiss his hand or fold into despair depending on his words, and how could she come home, after witnessing all this, and ask him to take on her worries? How could she do this when she wouldn’t even allow herself to be irritated when he left empty containers in the fridge or stubble in the bathroom sink?

  In their final weeks, they spoke to each other only through functions: “Can you pick up some milk?”; “The lightbulb in the bedroom needs changing”; “Are there any clean towels?” There were times she felt close to him, reminded of what she once had, when a tremor of their intimacy would stir her into recognition. The scent of him. Or when he reached past her or stood near her, the disparity in their size, the natural protection he offered. In these times she wanted to reach out, place a hand on him, say a vulnerable word, knowing this was an impulse he shared. But they couldn’t bridge that void, articulate what they needed to articulate. Their language had been unlearned, and it had become too painful now to recall.

  Now Maria has a folding bed that they keep behind the couch. Maria has two pairs of shoes, one of these so worn that water seeps through, and so they are only halfway practical for six months of the year. Maria has one pair of earrings and underwear so greyed it looks, and feels, as if it has been fashioned out of concrete. She has a faltering nephew and a long-suffering sister. She has a duty to them.

  She doesn’t have ambitions anymore, she has responsibilities.

  She flicks matches over the railing. They spit hot flame and twirl calmly to the ground, end over end, disappearing from sight after four floors. She’ll run out of matches and look up, turn around, walk into the kitchen, and ten years will have elapsed. Already she’s surrounded by the past. It seeps into every moment. Like the smallest things that remind her of her father. Someone cracking an egg. Someone sweeping snow from the bottom of their trousers. In the subsequent years there were no letters or postcards, no word sent back about him, and this leads her to believe that whatever happened had happened quickly. If he was locked away somewhere, they would eventually have heard about it. So there was no prison. They didn’t even know if it was the KGB or someone whom her father had informed upon, some family whose lives he had ruined.

  After the disappearance, their mother came to Moscow and joined the Lubyanka queue for information. The final refuge of the most desperate. Maria was already studying in the Lomonosov by then, and Alina was married in the city, living south of the river. They took the queuing in shifts, Maria and Alina joining her when they could. They brought each other soup and warm blankets. A ten-day queue. The line snaking from Chistoprudny Prospekt all the way down to Nikolskaya Ulitsa, coming to an end at that small brown door where they had a three-minute audience with a KGB officer who told them, “No information, come back next week”; and people would walk from that door and return to the back of the line, beginning it all again.

  Eventually, after a month of this, their mother crumbled. She lay in bed for weeks, wailing and sleeping. They fed her with whatever they could find, stewing old vegetables, leftovers from the market. Often her bed was soiled, and one sister would wash her down while the other scrubbed the mattress.

  They placed her in a residential home and, to pay for it, Maria took work in Kursk as a cleaner in a hospital, moving from Moscow because any job that doesn’t need a qualification is filled years in advance. So she went to Kursk and cleaned and saved and Alina stayed in the capital and did the same and they’d visit their mother on alternate months and look into her eyes and search for a gleam of life, hoping she would show some signs of progress.

  Alina joins her.

  “He’s in bed?” Maria asks.

  “Yes. He’s tired. Have you some left?”

  The bottle is passed. Alina takes a shot, then smacks her lips, letting out a rasp.

  “Look at us. Disappointed women firing down cheap vodka on a concrete balcony. My diagnosis is that we need men,” Maria says.

  Alina smiles. “Yes. Men. Remember what they were like.”

  “I’m not fussy, you know, not now, I’ll take any old thing: fat, missing teeth, hairy back. One who never remembers how to use a knife and fork. Even one who spits out his tobacco on the streets.”

  “Ah. A man who spits. Is there anything sexier?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that God has created in his blessed name can be sexier than my fat, hairy-backed, gap-toothed, tobacco-spitting man.”

  “Don’t forget the bad table manners.”

  “Oh yes, a man who spits on the street and eats with his fingers.”

  They shoot out a brief giggle and pass the bottle between them.

  They once had men, both of them. They are attractive; Maria can view this objectively, or can at least try to. Perhaps it will happen again.

  She phoned Grigory three times after their meeting this spring. Two calls to his apartment. Another to the hospital. His secretary said he was away on business but she’d give him the message when he returned. Maria is half glad she didn’t get through, though. Yes, it would be good to see him, to have him in her life once more. But what then? They couldn’t go over old ground. She couldn’t tak
e him through all her reasons, all that happened around that time. It’s not something she can burden him with.

  And yet. Those few minutes in the hospital, when they waited for Zhenya’s X-ray, were such a comfort. Simply to be in his presence was a recognition of the connection they had, a reminder that only the end of their marriage was fatally flawed.

  Alina’s husband was killed in Afghanistan. Serving the cause. Maria wasn’t sorry and neither was Alina. He was violent and bigoted; brooded in the apartment; drank with his friends; drove military jeeps into walls just to see how sturdy they were. He cleaned his nails with his army knife, thought it gave him an edge, but it only served to intensify his pettiness, his military vanity. They never spoke of him but both frequently wondered how he had managed to produce Zhenya, the Mendelssohn-obsessed, little, lovable freak.

  “He wants a pet.”

  “Zhenya?”

  “Of course Zhenya, who else do we talk about? He wants a parrot.”

  “And? I would have thought it wasn’t particularly strange for a nine-year-old boy.”

  “Well, it’s not, except for the fact that he is who he is and lives where he lives. But that’s not why I brought it up. It’s what he wants it for, that’s the killer.”

  “Well?”

  Alina pauses. It’s the privilege of the older sibling to tell a story with impeccable timing and poise. Her ability to hold Maria in thrall has never wavered since the two of them shared a bed as children and Alina told rambling, fantastical tales. Stories featuring villains with several limbs and princesses with secret, unattainable powers and lines that could cut you bare, faultless scalpel lines that described entire universes in an instant. She honed this gift to early teenhood, Alina the master storyteller, and they can both feel it rise up again, that authority she holds when she wants to titillate her little sister.