During these nights, he gazes at them in their cots. Nothing is so unimaginable that it cannot be true, this is what he thinks, beauty and ugliness resting within the single body of a diseased infant, the two faces of nature brought into stark relief.
No officials have made their way here, despite his daily entreaties. He wants them to walk into this room, a place where ideology, political systems, hierarchy, dogma, are relegated to mere words, belonging to files, banished to some dusty office. There is no system of belief that can account for this. The medical staff know that, in comparison, nothing that has gone before in their lives has any significance. There are only these months, these rooms, these people.
When they bury the dead, the corpses are wrapped in cellophane and placed inside wooden coffins, which in turn are wrapped and placed inside zinc caskets and lowered into concrete chambers. The families are never allowed to accompany their loved ones on this final journey. Instead they stand gravely by the door of the mortuary as the sealed van holding their dead disappears into the distance.
GRIGORY REACHES his quarters, still carrying the injured dog, and lays him on the floor beside his single armchair, dark horsehair drooping from its seams, in the narrow space between his bed and the wall. His room has a single bed that dips heavily in the middle, a locker overrun with medical books and some detective novels that have long since outlived their purpose of staving off the penetrative boredom. On the wall opposite the door are a small wardrobe and a washbasin. Grigory leaves the room and returns with a bowl, which he fills with water and places beside the animal’s head. The dog is in too much pain to right itself in order to drink, and so Grigory cradles its neck in his arms and brings it gently to a position where it can lap the water freely, its tongue folding around the liquid, gathering it. Grigory is coated in sweat from the journey, and this is now turning cold, clinging to him, and as he peels the shirt from his body his own odour rises up strong and sour.
He wipes off the sweat with his bedsheet and puts the shirt back on—he hasn’t any clean clothes at the moment, he finds he’s never in the mood to do laundry—and he walks across the yard, which is silent now, an occasional TV set in the surrounding windows throwing patches of throbbing blue light onto the ground. A boy stands at the gable end of one of the buildings, bouncing a tennis ball between wall and ground, the bounce creating a pleasing double rhythm before the ball comes to rest in the boy’s hand. Grigory walks to the supply room of the clinic, gathering all he needs to treat the animal, and on his return, he pauses to watch.
The boy changes hands as he throws and catches. A quick snap from either wrist before he releases the ball, alternating the surfaces, so the ball hits the pavement first and on the next throw strikes the wall first, the flight switching between languorous arches and rapid straight lines.
A solid boy who is almost a man, wide-shouldered, drifting his hips from one side to the other, as if caught by a gentle breeze. This boy too has a scar across his neck. So they have met before, Grigory observes, although he doesn’t recall the boy’s face.
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes. You were the doctor who worked on my neck.”
“That’s right. How are you feeling?”
“A little better, stronger. It doesn’t scratch as much when I eat.”
“Good, that’s a good sign.”
Their voices linger in the air, so few other sounds present.
“What’s your name?”
“Artyom Andreyevich.”
“Artyom. That’s a man’s name.”
The boy smiles.
“I’m glad to see you up and about. It’s a pleasant ending to my day.”
Grigory lifts an open hand in good-bye and then pauses, leaving the hand in the air momentarily, as though he is stopping traffic.
“Are you afraid of dogs?”
“No.”
“Okay. Follow me then.”
Grigory turns and can hear the boy’s footsteps in pursuit, bouncing the ball by his side as he goes, never breaking stride. In the room, the boy kneels over the dog, stroking the side of its head. He hasn’t had an exchange with an animal since he left Gomel, and he feels this lack intensely, a farmboy surrounded only by people, forced to live in a warren of indistinct, prefabricated huts.
Grigory unwraps a fresh needle and twists it onto an old syringe, then slips it into the rubber cap at the top of the benzodiazepine vial and pulls back the plunger, so the liquid runs fast and pure into the body of the instrument. The boy watches with interest, seeing a man with skill and knowledge perform his routine up close. Grigory pushes the plunger upwards and a straight jet of liquid catches in the bulb light, breaking into droplets as it descends in a perfect parabola. He tells the boy to hold the dog’s head and to be careful in case it reacts badly. He slides the needle into its hindquarters, and the boy can hear the palpatory suck of punctured skin and watches the liquid drain from the syringe. He can feel the dog’s head vibrate in reaction to the pain, and keeps his hands soft yet firm. The animal moans but accepts his treatment.
They wait for the anaesthetic to take effect, and the boy looks around the room. His eyes settle on a page, torn from a magazine, which Grigory has pinned on the wall to the side of his bed. A small, imperfect moon hanging over a low mountain range, barns and shacks in the foreground, barely perceptible in the scale of the image.
“The place in this photograph. Is it near here?”
“No. It’s in America.”
“You have been there?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have it?”
Grigory looks at the image again. It has become so fused with the features of the room that he has almost forgotten it, a last remnant of a previous passion, the moon hanging serenely in a clear sky, all features of the landscape below placed in relation to its delicate curve.
GRIGORY’S FIRST CAMERA, at fourteen, marked the end of his childhood. He divided his youth by this distinction: pre-camera/post-camera. At fifteen, an elderly man in their building donated some darkroom chemicals to further Grigory’s passion and, in retrospect, this marked another stage in his maturity. He acquired some black foil at a market and set up his darkroom in the communal bathroom. A tiny room, seven feet by four feet, and traced a line of foam sealant around its perimeter, keeping out the slivers of light that would otherwise stream upwards from the irregular meeting points of the ancient wall and floor.
The room became a womb to him. Grigory would work in the middle of the night, when no one would be knocking on the door, the perfect darkness more enveloping than the sleep from which he had emerged. He knows the contours of that space more intimately than those of a lover, the positioning of the bathtub and sink, the small medicine cabinet with its mirror, the equipment tray he would carry from his room, rattling gently with bottles and beakers, placing it in exactly the same position each evening, so he could find the necessary materials in the darkness.
At the end of their street was a park with a copse of beech trees, which taught him about colour. So many images of the beech trees piled high under his bed, separated by thin sheets of cardboard. The depth and range and personality of colour. Day after day, throughout the summer and winter, he would take his camera to the trees and observe, over the passing weeks and months, how their colour adjusted according to time and light and weather, how purples would transform themselves to scarlet and orange, yellow and off-white, and the thousands of gradients between each shade.
GRIGORY LOOKS at this American landscape now, frayed around the edges, a crease line from the magazine’s spine bisecting the mountains, and turns to the boy and feels envious, despite the tragedy of his life, of the boy’s ability to view the world through inexperienced eyes.
“I brought it from home. I don’t know why I have it. Perhaps it reminds me that I have a small life. Does that make sense to you?”
The boy nods. “Yes.”
“I used to take photographs. When I lived back in Moscow. T
hey were all of buildings and people. Full streets. At night the sky was orange. I like the deep, black sky in this photograph. In my apartment, I would look at it and feel like making a campfire in the middle of my living room.”
Artyom looks at the picture again and wonders what a photograph of their home would look like now. He knows all the stories. His father, while he could still speak, told him that everything around their home had turned white. Not as in winter with snow covering all things, but as in summer, with the grass high, leaves quivering in the breeze, flowers blooming in their fullness, but everything drained of colour.
If this same photographer had wandered into their homeland, would there be anything left to photograph? Only two shades left in that place. The dark sky and the white land, white as the clouds that streamed over this landscape in America. Artyom thinks of the tyre hanging from the oak tree outside their house, swinging lonely. Every part of his home, everything he touched, saw, put his weight upon, is underground. But he can’t imagine this, his mind isn’t able to erase all that he has known. When he finally goes back he knows he’ll feel like a cosmonaut walking on the moon.
IN MINSK, when they left his aunt Lilya’s building, they had no energy or desire to walk to the bus station, to wait in line and sign forms and be directed to a shelter which, they knew from the direction of the walking crowds, was at the other side of the city. Standing outside the apartment block, they could hear chaos still hanging in the air. Artyom’s mother walked as if carrying a weight—the way she clung to Sofya—and all three of them wanted, to their core, a place to lie down, somewhere they could close their eyes. They could face whatever would come tomorrow. They just couldn’t face it at that moment.
The weather was warm enough to sleep outdoors, but they would be exposed to whoever passed by. Artyom decided it would be too much of a risk and, besides, his mother needed some privacy, needed some time to take in her rejection.
Opposite them was a long row of metal shelters, low sheds made of the same tin sheeting as the roof of their izba. Each shelter was sealed with a padlock, and some had pieces of furniture outside them or other castoffs: a wing mirror from a truck, a bicycle seat with a bent shaft. Artyom looked around to see if anyone was watching and then walked the whole line of them, pulling at each lock, until finally, after covering fifty metres, finding one that wasn’t closed properly, he pulled open the door, hunched over, and walked inside, bumping into unknown objects. He stretched up until his fingers located the cable, which he traced to a switch at knee level just inside the door. He flicked it on.
There was a line of old paint pots sitting along the tin wall and, now that he could see them, he could also smell their biting chemicals. In the centre, there was a space large enough for them to lie down, and he could make out thick rolls of dense grey material, stiffer than cloth, which stood on end, dry to touch. It would be enough.
He stepped outside and beckoned his mother and sister, and when he saw Sofya wave back he ventured inside again and set about laying the material down on the metal floor.
When his mother arrived, she said the material was “undercarpet” and Artyom didn’t know what this was and when she explained Artyom found such a thing hard to comprehend, people who were rich enough to put carpet under more carpet.
He took the jacket from the door and put it on his mother. She tried to refuse, to give it back to him to wear instead, but Artyom and Sofya insisted and his mother didn’t have enough will to resist. They cleared their pockets of whatever food they had left—a few carrots and some ends of bread—and they ate quietly, a grim picnic, until Sofya said, “What is that smell?” and they scrunched their noses up and, it was true, there was a sickly sour smell. Like meat gone bad. Artyom’s mother lifted her armpits and smelled underneath them and folded her mouth in disgust and Artyom couldn’t help but laugh at this; his mother was always so insistent on cleanliness. There were so many nights after pig feeding that he came home and she sent him to the well and supervised from the window as he scrubbed himself. He laughed and Sofya laughed too and leaned into their mother and sniffed her armpits, like a runt looking for a nipple, exaggerating the action, and Artyom did the same and his mother laughed then too, and she wrapped her stinking arms around them, pressing their faces to her, and they giggled some more and then relaxed into her, disregarding the smell, feeling protected. Sleep came quickly.
When Artyom woke, the light was off and the door open, allowing in a vertical stripe of grey light from the morning sky. He saw a figure standing there and sat up suddenly and shook his mother, and the figure said, “Hello.”
His mother sat up too and the figure said, “I’m going to turn on the light. Don’t be shocked.”
Sofya woke with the light, pushing herself upwards unsteadily by her arms, the way Artyom had seen newborn calves assert themselves into the world.
It was a man older than his father, but not quite elderly. A comfortable, lined face, grey hair streaming from under a knitted black hat.
“You came on the buses last night?”
Artyom made to reply but held himself back, left space for his mother.
“Yes,” she said.
The man picked up two shovels near the door, put on a pair of gloves that hung by the hook.
“You’ll need to get food. There’s a truck coming to pick me up. I know where the shelter is.”
They stood and dusted themselves off. Sofya slapped her face to wake herself.
“I’m Maksim Vissarionovich.”
“Tatiana Aleksandrovna. These are my children, Artyom and Sofya.”
“Were you cold?”
“No. Yes. We used some things. I’m sorry.”
Artyom’s mother realized she was wearing the man’s coat. She began to take it off.
“Please. It stinks, I’m sorry. The sun hasn’t come up yet. Wear it until you get there.”
“Thank you, Maksim Vissarionovich.”
“Just Maksim. You slept in my coat, you know me well enough.”
The man had great, sweeping eyebrows as unruly as his hair.
“Then please call me Tanya.”
“Of course.”
Artyom rolled up the undercarpet, and Maksim pointed to their sacks of belongings.
“These are yours?”
“Yes,” Artyom replied, and Maksim grabbed all three in one hand and dipped and hefted them over his shoulder with a neat turn, and Artyom noticed the man’s wrists, the impressive width of them.
Artyom placed the undercarpet back with the other rolls.
“No, bring it.”
Artyom pointed to the roll, questioning, and Maksim repeated himself.
“Bring it. You might need it.”
A truck pulled up outside, a shrill whistle beckoning them out. A flatbed truck carrying five men, a shallow metal tub in their centre in which a fire burned, with logs sticking out and sparks crackling.
“We’ve a stop to make first,” Maksim said to the men, and then climbed in front with the driver, an anonymous figure hunched over the wheel.
Another vehicle. Another journey to somewhere. Artyom spread his hands in front of the fire and warmed them. The morning wasn’t so cold, and he suspected the men kept the fire out of habit, a luxury they afforded themselves to compensate for the early rise.
“You’re from the buses,” one of the men said.
“Yes,” Artyom’s mother replied.
“Have you come far?”
“From Gomel.”
“Far enough then.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
As the wood burned, lit splinters and sparks caught the trailing air and tailed behind them, darting and crackling in their wake.
Artyom could see his mother was running questions through her head. She looked upwards and chewed the inside of her lip, then addressed the men.
“People were wary of us last night. Can you tell us what you’ve heard?”
The one who replied had a face of dark stubble with a dusti
ng of white tracing the line of his chin.
“I hear there’s militia guarding the hospitals.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They say that people are coming to the hospitals poisoned. They’re worried about it spreading.”
“Like a plague?”
“It’s just loose talk.”
“Are you not worried to have us share your truck with you?”
He looked around to his comrades. They were men of understatement. They pressed their bottom lips upwards, shaking their heads. One of the men spat into the fire, but the gob didn’t reach, hitting the side of the tub, where it sizzled and collapsed into a drip of brown sap. The man with the white chin had a bunch of keys, which he turned on his finger, the metal ringing as they flopped forwards and back.
“If you’re poisonous, why do they bring you to the city? To all of us? If you’re poisonous, they’d keep you out there, where there’s no people. You don’t look poisonous to me. You just look lost.”
“We feel lost.”
He directed his look to Artyom. “You know what we do?”
Artyom couldn’t answer. He had just accepted the fact that they were on their way to work.
“You collect rubbish,” Sofya piped in.
“That’s right.”
He turned and directed his conversation to her.
“You’d be surprised the things we pick up. Last week Pyotr here found a radio. You can’t tune it in but it crackles. So he brought it home and played it for the mice. They haven’t come back yet. That right, Pyotr?”
All That Is Solid Melts into Air Page 17
