All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  “No. Notes like you wrote take real daring. There aren’t many out there with your courage. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m claiming it’s them and not me. I’m telling myself I still inspire the same yearnings.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Please. Look at me. I’m an old man. I have tufts of hair growing from my ears. It’s a definite old-man symptom.”

  Maria cranes her head back.

  “I see no ear hair.”

  “I clip it. They can take a lot, but I’m keeping my vanity.”

  “It’s a good thing to keep.”

  “It’s the best thing.”

  Pavel ended it after six months, sitting over morning tea, while she was making out her list of errands for the day. He said he was preventing her from making her own discoveries. She remembered the words distinctly, remembered her confusion that an errand list and a lover’s rejection—her first great rejection—should occupy the same space. A breakup like this should be done in a romantic place, with tears and rain. This is what she thought then, a girl of nineteen. She needed to make her own decisions, he said, discover her own opinions, not sit under the weight of his experience. She had no idea what that meant at the time. She spat curses at him, came to his apartment in the middle of the night, attempting to catch him with a new lover, which she never did. In the end it mattered little; she was obliged to abandon her studies anyway, move to Kursk. When she returned to the city with Grigory, she was a few years older; married, wiser, carrying her own bank of experiences. Had they met on the street she would perhaps have thanked Pavel, told him she realized the unselfishness behind his statements, the accuracy of them.

  A pause.

  “You wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yes. I don’t know why.” She hesitates. “I do know why, it’s just difficult to articulate.”

  “I’m in no hurry. Talk to me.”

  Maria notices that Pavel’s eyes are still the same shade of milky green. She wonders if our eyes change colour as we age.

  “I’m worried that something is happening, something I should be aware of.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been hearing things. Odd things, from various sources.”

  “What sources?”

  “Neighbours, people at work, remarks in the class. They . . .”

  She hesitates again.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you heard about the ‘Shining Solidarity’ phenomenon in Poland?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “When the Solidarity movement had to go underground, they developed techniques to keep up morale. They had help, of course. The Americans would send in aid shipments through Sweden, mostly communications equipment.”

  “What kind of equipment?”

  “Basic stuff. Books. Printing machines. Unregistered typewriters. Photocopiers. But the CIA gave them one impressive toy. A machine that transmitted a beam which overpowered the state-broadcast signals. Every few months on millions of TV sets the Solidarity logo would appear, with a recorded message announcing that the movement lived and the resistance would triumph.”

  “It sounds like science fiction.”

  “But it happened. It kept the movement going when people thought it had been extinguished. Viewers were asked to turn their lights on and off if they’d seen the logo. When this happened, a glittering light show would sweep through the suburbs. Such a show of strength. The whole city glinting like a piece of foil in the wind.”

  The sound of skates cutting into ice.

  She continues. “Things are coming my way. I don’t know. Worrying things. A neighbour of mine has seen cats strung up from lampposts. They mean something. I know it. There are kids in the Tishinski markets on Sundays buying up old military uniforms, cutting them up, making fashion statements. Other things too. I hear of clubs where women dance with replicas of red star medals over their nipples.”

  “And you disapprove?”

  “Of course I don’t disapprove—let them jerk off over the whole army. But I need to know I’m not wrong. Something is happening. I can feel it.”

  “You’re worried?”

  “No. I don’t know what I am. Restless, maybe.”

  “You’re thinking maybe you want to get involved.”

  “That’s not it. I have responsibilities. I have people who rely on me. I’m just barely clawing my way back from the wilderness.”

  Pavel doesn’t speak for a while, simply blows on his gloved hands, rubs them together. The length of their friendship apparent in the silences.

  “There are so many nights when I’m in a reception room in the faculty, sharing a drink with former students, and I don’t know who I am. I’m droning on, making witty remarks, droll observations, to people who are no better than reptiles, men whose job it is to do obscene things.”

  He turns to her, and Maria notes that he’s more reticent than before, another way the years have taken hold. She couldn’t imagine hauling him through a blazing row any longer, a sombre weight to his words now.

  THEIR RELATIONSHIP was largely built upon ideological arguments. She was constantly questioning, reviewing, surmising, churning all her newly gained knowledge through the prism of her personality. She’d argue with him anywhere. So many times their lovemaking was abandoned because of a throwaway comment from him. Or she would storm into his office, not bothering to check if there was a colleague inside, and bombard him with her fusillade of newly researched facts, slinging in an occasional well-chosen quote to underline her point. On one occasion, she exploded into a barber’s while he was in the chair getting a shave, picking up an argument in which he had silenced her, one day before, with his experience of debate and with the tapestry of facts that were always within his reach. A narrow, smoke-filled room with two barber’s chairs, one empty, and a row of waiting men, strands of hair clinging to the glass mirrors. She pushed open the door and cleared the barber away as he held his blade aloft, astonished, looking to his customers for support, but they were as shocked as he. Pavel’s rebuttals came so rapidly, with such force, that the front of her coat was dotted with flecks of shaving cream. Pavel remembers that he wiped his face clean, put on his jacket, paid, and left, with a stubble-mottled face, all without breaking the flow of the argument, countering her well-prepared perspectives, loving every moment of it. Loving the intellectual stretch she provided. Loving how it was intertwined with her naïvety, so that often she would be unable to recognize the limits of her argument, blowing everything out of proportion. And in these moments he would pause, would cease his replies, and Maria would realize her error and he would spend the next couple of hours trying to coax her back from her disappointment in herself. Trying to make her see that it was her commitment to her subject, her righteous fury, that made her so attractive.

  “YOU’VE HEARD the joke about the chicken farmer?” he asks Maria.

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “A chicken farmer wakes one morning and goes into the yard to feed his brood. He finds ten of them dead. There is no reason for this. They were healthy, some of his best birds, so he is confused. He is worried the rest of the brood may be similarly affected, so he decides to ask comrade Gorbachev for help. ‘Give them aspirin,’ the premier says. The farmer does this, and ten more die that night. This time the premier suggests caster oil. The farmer does as suggested, and ten more are dead the next day. He goes back to Gorbachev and is told to give them penicillin. He does this and, the next morning, all the chickens have died. The farmer is distraught. ‘Comrade Gorbachev,’ the farmer says, ‘all my chickens are dead.’ ‘What a pity,’ Gorbachev replies. ‘I had so many more remedies to try.’ ”

  Maria smiles at him. He’s always had a beguiling mouth, shape-shifting, simultaneously knowing and innocent.

  “And this is funny?”

  “She comes to me for help and ridicules me. It’s fine. Funny isn’t the point. The joke is the point. The weakness is the point.
The fact that they are telling this joke on production lines, at football matches, in taxis, this is the point. Where we’ve come to. This is the point. I haven’t written a line of poetry in nearly twenty years. Not since the crackdown after the Prague Spring. I took my reputable job and taught the books they wanted me to teach, stayed away from saying anything controversial by telling little smutty stories about the writers’ lives.”

  Absently, he packs some snow between his gloves, forming a concave disc.

  “So many of my friends kept writing. Even in the camps they wrote. Even when they got to their lowest point.” He is very still, then continues. “They’re dead or hobbled now, and I’m still eating professorial lunches. You know how they got their writing out of the prisons?”

  “I’ve heard a few different ways.”

  “They swallowed it and shat it. Or rolled it on their tongue and exchanged it in a visitor’s kiss. Women secreted it inside themselves and let the guards pretend to attempt to pick it out. Can you imagine the humiliation? They did what they felt necessary.”

  “How many times did we talk about this, even back then? Go and ask one of your friends—the ones who are still alive—if you should have kept writing. See what they’ll say.”

  “They can absolve me precisely because they’ve been through it. I can’t absolve myself.”

  A ski jumper misjudges his flight, coming down in a flurry of light snow.

  “I can feel it too, a moment opening up. They see their flaws, they are aware of the need to modernize. Gorbachev looks at those leaders before him—Chernenko, a senile old cripple with emphysema; Andropov, a man who had to have dialysis twice a week, who was so sick that everyone suspected the general secretary was in fact dead—and he is pushing for change but doesn’t know how to modulate it. We are making jokes about the man’s indecision. He is no longer a figure of fear. People are hungry for more. I know you see this too. But there is only confusion now; no idea where to push, who to ask.”

  Maria nods. “Sometimes I hear these words, ‘glasnost,’ ‘perestroika,’ and they sound to me like the final breaths of an empire.”

  Pavel throws the disc of snow towards the trees, they watch it disassemble in the air.

  “There are some people I want you to meet.”

  “People?”

  “Yes, people. People I respect. Not windbags or idealists. Serious people. People who are talking of serious things, about access to markets, a maximization of resources.”

  “I’m not asking for a way in, Pavel. I just want to be ready.”

  “Have you thought about the possibilities of us going back to where we were? They may close ranks again soon.”

  “It can’t happen on its own, you know. In the fifties, I drank for three days straight when word trickled out about Khrushchev’s secret speech. The end of Stalinism, the end of fear. We were expecting an era of prosperity. We listened for a great chorus of contradictory opinions. But it didn’t come. So we went back to doing what we do so well: watching, deluding ourselves with fragile hopes, with an occasional moment of grace or luck; holding on to these things as omens. Hoping ourselves into inaction. Perhaps in a year we’ll be shot for daring to tell a stupid chicken-farmer joke.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You’ll think about what I said.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’ll let you know about our next gathering. If you decide to stay at home, I’ll understand.”

  She nods. “I know.”

  When they part she walks down through the pathways between the slalom run, skiers dipping and rising from the undulations of the trail, many of them hunkered down, elbows and head tucked in, trying to extract the maximum speed from such a short, shallow course.

  She reaches the pathway by the river and looks up. Pavel is still there, his face cupped in one hand, his gaze resting on the river, on the skaters swooping in the still night. She stays and watches him until he moves off. A man who is used to his own company. A couple stand and kiss right beside him, too close for comfort, but he doesn’t react, following the thread of his thoughts to completion before moving away.

  Her walk takes her past the Vorobyovy Gory station, set inside a great glass bridge that funnels the Metro trains from the south to the centre of the city, its struts and girders slicing the ice of the river below into a latticework of shadow.

  It’s her favourite part of the city, this walkway. Tree-laden hills curve down into the river. There are no grand statements here, no monolithic towers, no gesticulating statues. The Central Lenin complex is spread out on the opposite side of the river, but the buildings maintain a degree of modesty, their design quietened by the sweep of nature around them.

  Nearing Grigory’s apartment, she sees his window on the top floor of a staggered block, in line with the upper reaches of the Andreevsky bridge. The light is off. It’s ten o’clock, too early for him to be in bed. Such a thing would be contrary to his sense of order. He’s out. Maria knows she can’t let the moment go by without some sort of contact: if she passes without leaving a note, she may not have the courage to return.

  She stands on the slope in front of the gatepost, looking at the uninhabited apartment, and this is an experience that is not unfamiliar to her: looking at her home and feeling like a stranger. The same anxieties descend. She dreads the possibility of meeting anyone. She smoothes her way into the shadows.

  At the door she presses his bell to confirm he’s not there. No answer. She punches in the code on the lock and finds the combination is still the same; the door pops open instantly for her. It’s a short hallway, but wide and well lit. She hasn’t been here since the day she took the last of her belongings, closed the door of the apartment, stumbled down these steps. She can still see the way he stood in their small vestibule, between the large mirror on the wall and the small oval one on the coat stand. Both mirrors bounced his reflection between them, so that before closing the door for the last time, Maria found herself leaving not just him but an endless multitude of him. Standing there, his shoulders wrapped in heartbreak.

  The memory overwhelms Maria and she leans against the rows of brass letterboxes and stares down at the chessboard tiles. She runs her hand along the nameplates under each slot and finally comes to his: Grigory Ivanovich Brovkin. She’d hoped that maybe both their names would still be there, but of course hers had been removed. wouldn’t she do the same in his position? Why keep a daily reminder of your loss, your great disappointment, your great failure?

  It wasn’t his failure, though, it was hers. She hopes that time has allowed him to relinquish all self-recrimination, releasing him from the wreckage she brought upon him.

  Maria takes a notebook and pen from her bag. She leans the pages on her thigh and begins to write. After the first few sentences she hears footsteps on the stairs and looks up to see the caretaker descend towards her.

  She nods in greeting. “Good evening, Dmitri Sergeevich.”

  He pauses, surprised.

  “Maria.”

  He doesn’t say her patronymic name. She presumes it would imply too much respect. He has passed her on these stairs before; on a few occasions, walking with a man who was not her husband, making her way to their darkened apartment. Each time, Dmitri Sergeevich had not attempted to hide his distaste at her betrayals. Maria remembers how, on passing him on those occasions, she had wanted to melt into liquid, to trickle down the steps, to flow down the hill and join with the river, where she would become indistinguishable and irrelevant, shapeless and free.

  On those two or three occasions he had seen her eyes hollowed with dread and mistaken it for guilt. He had seen her grapple for her keys, attempt to slide one of them into the lock while enduring the full glow of his judgement. He had seen her do this while battling through tears of anger and fear and mistaken them for tears of shame.

  She had hated him then, not for his spite but for his inaction. A moment of discretion, a few words to Grigory in a darkened corner under the stairs
, was all it would have taken for her to be released from her torment. Instead, he despised her silently and kept his distance from her husband. He watched her life crumble before him and didn’t have the wit to join together the events. He couldn’t read what she was saying to him with her trembling hands, with her smudged eye shadow, with her faltering steps.

  He stands at the bottom of the stairs now, unshaven, his clothes rumpled, a radically different figure from the neat, well-groomed man she remembers. She looks at him with the stains on his cardigan, his greasy hair, and is surprised to feel no anger. The man was simply going about his business. He wasn’t responsible for the cruelties of her situation. And, for her part, she is relieved no longer to experience the humiliation that a glance from him would evoke.

  In the past few years she has replayed her actions countless times while sitting at her workbench, her limbs functioning independently, her mind back here, and has long since reassured herself of her fidelity, if not in body then in everything else; everything that remained her own, at least, remained his.

  “Why are you here, Maria?”

  A softness in his voice.

  “I’m looking to leave a note for Grigory.” She lifts up her notebook. “I’ll finish and slip it into his letterbox. Can you tell him I called?”

  He approaches her, and she flattens the notebook against her chest, instinctively protective. Her humiliation, his hold over her, hasn’t, it seems, entirely passed. He doesn’t reach for the notebook, though; he gently takes her hand. She is too surprised to resist.

  “Please, Maria, come and sit.”

  “I’d rather not. I was just passing. I hadn’t intended to stay. It’s late and I need to get home.”

  “Please, Maria.”

  She sits, unnerved.

  “Would you like some water?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Perhaps Dmitri Sergeevich’s opportunities for company have become rare. Perhaps his isolation is causing him to look upon her as an old friend.