All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  “How is your wife, Dmitri Sergeevich? I apologize, I can’t seem to remember her name.”

  He waves away her question.

  “Grigory isn’t just out for the evening. He’s been gone for months now, Maria.”

  “Oh. I see.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “I didn’t know. But his name is still on the letterbox.”

  “Yes. He still lives here officially, he just hasn’t been home in a long time.”

  “He never sent word to me, but then, I suppose, why would he?”

  “He left quickly. He didn’t have a chance to inform anybody. I myself got a call from his secretary.”

  “Did she say where he went?”

  Maria is aware that her voice is rising. It’s not like Grigory to act spontaneously.

  “She didn’t say exactly. She simply mentioned that there had been an accident in the Ukraine and his skills were needed.”

  “ ‘She didn’t say exactly.’ But you know where he is.”

  He takes a breath, twists a button on his cardigan.

  “The news reports of Chernobyl started appearing a couple of days later. I paid close attention. He left the same day they became aware of the accident.”

  “Chernobyl is in the Ukraine?”

  “Yes.”

  A moment of blankness. She stares at Grigory’s name on the letterbox.

  “I would have been in touch with you, but I had no idea how to reach you. Grigory Ivanovich hasn’t had any friends drop by looking for him. You’re the first one to visit.”

  She has no idea what to do. She finds herself saying this out loud. To Dmitri Sergeevich, of all people. She realizes she doesn’t even know his last name.

  “I have no idea what to do.”

  “Call the hospital—I’ve been sending his mail there. They’ll be able to help.”

  Maria doesn’t take in anything else he says. She knows she thanked the man but doesn’t become aware of leaving the building until she is walking down the slope to the steps by the bridge.

  How could they have sent him there? How could he still be there?

  She stops and looks around. She’s passed through the innards of the bridge and out onto the viewing platform that sweeps down to Leninsky Prospekt. The Academy of Sciences is to her right, glowing amber and grey. An intricate building that calls to mind the workings of an old watch, as if its outer panels have blown off to reveal the refined minds inside it, grappling with problems far beyond the realm of the humble citizen. To her left, Gorky Park stretches out, unlit, a reservoir of darkness in the vast expanse of the city.

  He has already been through so much. She has put him through so much. All of it beginning here, in this very spot.

  It was here that Mr. Kuznetsov had first approached her. Even after he had lain naked in her bed, inched his way inside her, she had continued calling him Mr. Kuznetsov, not wanting him to mistake their relations for intimacy. After the first few occasions, she knew that he had grown to find a sexual charge in her formal address, but it was too late then for her to relent.

  THAT NIGHT, the first night, she had received a call from one of the copy editors at the paper. A story was breaking which they needed her to cover. Could you come to the office? Looking back, his reluctance to outline what was happening should have raised her suspicions, but she felt such a surge of relief that it overpowered her sense of caution. The call meant she was being invited back into the fold, they were telling her they would forgive her indiscretions. The previous afternoon she had stood before the editor’s desk and watched him hold up her offending article, a short piece, no more than a hundred words, the headline legible from where she stood:

  200,000 ATTEND FUNERAL OF WARSAW PRIEST

  She was hardly surprised. She had known the article would stir up difficulties; in fact, she had done her best to slip it past the editor’s attention, handing it, casually, at the last minute, to the most junior copy editor, apologizing for overrunning her deadline.

  It wasn’t an ordinary funeral and it wasn’t an ordinary death. Five days beforehand, two police divers had pulled Father Popiełuszko’s body from a reservoir near the town of Włocławek, an hour’s drive west of Warsaw. The priest’s face was collapsed, beaten, his body bloated. Despite this, when the divers pulled him up, they recognized him immediately. Father Popiełuszko had been more popular even than the Solidarity leader, Lech Wałesa, because he had the extra authority that a collar and cassock bestow. His Sunday sermons had attendances of forty thousand and upwards. They came to hear him talk about the injustices imposed upon the workingman. He stood and reminded them through soaring rhetoric that the child Jesus was born into the family of a carpenter, not of an apparatchik. They came and listened and walked back to their homes, the surge of his speech patterns lengthening their stride.

  Father Popiełuszko had had the eyes of the regime firmly fixed upon him. It was well known that he stored funds and passed them on to the Solidarity groups in Warsaw. When his body was identified, such a public rage swept through the city that the authorities immediately identified and arrested the three agents of the secret police who were responsible for his death. It was an unprecedented act for a ruling authority to give up its own agents, but it calmed the situation enough for the funeral to pass off peacefully.

  Maria was careful not to write about the background. She detailed the ceremony and included some pointed quotes from the eulogy. She indicated with skilfully selected words that the death was not from natural causes but, otherwise, she kept to the ritual itself and let the readers draw their own inferences.

  The editor held up the piece. He accused her of expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, of encouraging dissent. She had her rebuttals prepared. How could this be anti-Soviet subject matter when the authorities themselves had made publicly known that the perpetrators were SB police? She was reporting on a funeral; it had nothing to do with politics. Maria had no doubt she was on steady ground. She could defend every sentence against accusations.

  Her editor listened and nodded, and then produced several pages of pink carbon paper, covered in her familiar scrawl. Pages she’d written for a samizdat, which had been typed and copied and typed and copied until her words had been thumbed through by several hundred pairs of hands.

  The editor displayed each set of pages and read the headlines:

  GDANSK ACCORDS ENABLE POLISH WORKERS TO ELECT UNION REPRESENTATIVES

  SOVIET FORCES ACCIDENTALLY SHOOT DOWN KOREAN AIRLINER

  MASSIVE OVERPRODUCTION OF ARMAMENTS CLAIMS CHIEF KREMLIN ADVISER

  Maria couldn’t believe it. The samizdat went to incredible lengths to make sure authors would be untraceable.

  “I’ve never seen these before.”

  “Fine. In that case, I can hand them to the KGB to conduct some handwriting analyses.”

  She placed her face in her hands.

  “Writing inflammatory articles for a ragged underground paper is one thing. But now you are trying to bring us into disrepute. I’m obliged by law to report you.”

  There was nothing to do but wait for it all to unfold.

  Maria spent the day pacing the apartment, waiting for the knock on her door, thinking about the interrogation room she would soon find herself in, the sleep deprivation and starvation, the days of endlessly repetitive questioning.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to let Grigory know what had happened, telling herself there was no point in burdening him with the same sense of dread. So when she received the call to return to work that evening, she was swept away with relief. She grabbed her coat, made her way to the Metro stop, taking the same route she’s just walked. When she reached the viewing platform, Mr. Kuznetsov was standing there, looking at the traffic below.

  Mr. Kuznetsov, her editor. A stale man, desiccated skin, flat, unresponsive eyes.

  She stopped, recognizing him straight away; it was clear to her that his being here, intercepting her journey, was no coincidence. Immediately, all that would transpire unf
olded in her mind. It was all set up to play out beautifully for him. He would remind her that, due to his discretion, she still had a job. He would remind her that the KGB would be very interested in her dissenting view. She even predicted that he would use the word “implications,” use it to promise the destruction of her husband’s career.

  “And there are other implications,” he proceeded to say.

  The words still ring out to her, even now, with a terrible clarity. Her life imploding with that single sentence.

  If she had had more time, if the conversation had taken place in his office, perhaps she would have fled, found Grigory, told him everything. He would, of course, have confronted Kuznetsov, paying no attention to how well connected the man was. It would have meant the destruction of a fine career, another skilled doctor disregarded. Grigory would have been deprived of the very thing that defined him.

  But of course, Kuznetsov knew that too. His standing there, so close to her apartment, meant that she couldn’t defer the decision. And once that determination was made, she couldn’t turn back. As she lay with Grigory later that night, afterwards, her deception expanded into the millimetres that separated their bodies. Lying there on the freshly changed sheets, another man’s body heat still contained in the core of their mattress.

  The only influence she could bring to bear was her lack of willingness. When Kuznetsov prised her apart, her body proved itself resistant to his touch. The lips of her opening as stiff and dry as cardboard, causing them both to burn as he propelled himself into his rhythm.

  She looks away from the spot where Kuznetsov once stood, his presence still palpable, and gazes down into the cold heart of the city. Leninsky Prospekt is straddled by neon-lit billboards, all of them proclaiming the superstitions of her leaders. Their weaknesses, the tensions, the conflicts, the secrets that give the Party a reason to exist, the fears that make their hearts flurry in the quiet of the night:

  “THE COMMUNIST PARTY IS THE GLORY OF THE MOTHERLAND.”

  “THE IDEAS OF LENIN LIVE AND CONQUER.”

  “THE SOVIET UNION IS THE SOURCE OF PEACE.”

  Sentences swathed in vanity. This rhetoric surging through their institutions and overflowing into the minds and actions of individuals. Surging through Kuznetsov as he surged into her: creating, eventually, her unwanted child, her unwanted life.

  And when she rid herself of the child, it compounded her guilt. All she wanted then was to turn away from the world, from Grigory. Not revealing it all to him then—now that she can reflect upon that time—was a wilful act of self-destruction. When it was all over with Kuznetsov and he reported her anyway, she was glad. She welcomed the punishment, she told herself she deserved to toil away at a job she hated. To lose herself in menial tasks, to shut down her mind, close off her personality.

  She makes a pact with herself, a promise, as she walks down the broad avenue, traffic whipping past as she disappears into the pavement underneath Gagarin’s steel monument, as she descends on the narrow escalator: she will no longer be just another shadowed form in this city built on whispers.

  Chapter 18

  The snow is coming in force now, these past two weeks, dropping its full weight from the sky. Huge, feathery flakes clump on Artyom’s lashes, small drifts gather in the nape of his hood. All around, the resettlement camp is silent, not much moving other than the trucks that come and go.

  The snow sits evenly both on the ground and on the flat roofs of all the prefabricated huts, so they look as if they’ve been driven upwards from the earth, their yellow walls the only color for kilometres around, a colour that was probably intended to elicit cheer but instead serves only to emphasize the cheap, inhospitable nature of the constructions. They would look cartoonish but for their dilapidated state. Already, in many, windows have fallen from their frames and the residents have taped up cardboard or nailed up the doors ripped from their kitchen presses to keep the wind out.

  In every hut there’s a fuel-burning stove. So much of the day spent poking and prodding. They get their fuel allowance from the supply store: a wheelbarrow of logs for each home, delivered by a young soldier with red-raw features and a permanently runny nose.

  Batyr is improving. After three weeks, Artyom can see how his coat is beginning to regain its lustre; he’s starting to put on weight. Artyom visits him at mealtimes and, more recently, takes him for walks. He’s built a small cart for the dog, big enough to rest his haunches on but small enough so that he can put his front legs on the ground. There’s a handle on the back of the cart that Artyom uses to push the dog forward, and Artyom is aware that it must look strange, but there are many stranger sights here.

  He gives Batyr food which he scavenges from the sacks of waste piled up at the back of the storehouse. There are always soldiers guarding the building, but Artyom made a point of introducing them to his two-legged friend. They knelt and rubbed Batyr behind the ears, patted him, ran their hands vigorously up and down his flanks, and when they did this Artyom saw a brightness in their eyes, the animal taking them away from routine, and he saw them then as brothers and sons, laughing at the dinner table, feeding scraps to their own dog as it looked at them pitifully with its head on their knee, imploring. Now they let Artyom poke away at the rubbish, as long as he promises he’ll tie the bags up afterwards, they need to keep the rats away.

  At first Artyom was feeding Batyr from the clinic’s leftovers—the doctor arranged it that way—but after about a week the kitchen staff told him to look somewhere else. He could have gone back to the doctor, but the man is busy, he has more on his mind than where to get scraps for a dog.

  Because Sofya is sick, she has a room to herself. Artyom sleeps in the same bed as his mother. His mother changes in this room, so he sees her naked from behind. Neither of them cares. What was important before is no longer important here. They sleep side by side, and his mother rises three or four times in the night to check on Sofya.

  There are some mornings he wakes to find his mother has curled into him in her sleep. Such a thing doesn’t feel unnatural to him. He understands how the body seeks reassurance; he doesn’t resist because he needs it too.

  Their hut doesn’t leak like a lot of the others. The adults hardly talk about anything else, a constant exchange and comparison of the physical status of their homes. Artyom thinks that this is maybe because they can do something about it, do some repairs; the huts can be fixed, the sickness can’t. Artyom’s thankful that their place doesn’t leak, at least not yet. If Sofya had to lie there in the cold, it would be worse.

  Every hut has a kitchen-cum–living room and two bedrooms. There is no toilet or running water of any kind. They have an electric hob and the stove and an electric radiator in each bedroom. Some people have TVs or radio sets; their relatives have dropped them off at the reception hut, leaving nothing else but their names. No note. No one enters further than the reception hut. Artyom understands why.

  Artyom is one of the oldest boys in the settlement. He’s seen a couple of others his age, but they were weaker than he is and who knows what kind of state they’re in now. He feels strong. His mother keeps asking if he’s getting enough rest, but he likes the air, he needs to be outside. It gives him a purpose.

  He walks to the forest almost every day collecting wood, handing it around to their new neighbours. He never expects anything for it—it didn’t cost him anything—and from time to time his mother receives a kindness in recognition for his help. Last week a woman in sector 3A gave her a pair of her son’s boots for Artyom’s walks. The boy had died a few months before. And so now Artyom finds himself trudging along between the trees in a dead boy’s boots. But it doesn’t concern him in any way.

  “I’m lucky to have a son like you, Artyom.”

  “You’re not lucky, Mama.”

  “There are people worse off.”

  “That may be true, but not much. We’re not lucky.”

  “No. You’re right. We’re not.”

  GRIGORY SI
TS OUTSIDE, leaning on a metal table, dabbing his fingers in a pool of condensation at its lip. A spider dangles below, twirling languorously. He will soon begin surgical prep, inside for the rest of the day, so he takes in cool breaths while he can; watching water twist along the tendrils of ice that hang from the roof of the clinic, the one solid building in the whole settlement. Brick walls half a metre thick that mercifully retain heat. They speculated as to its use before they came here, an old barracks perhaps. A stubborn musty scent in the operating theatre despite the plastering, the painting, and the daily scrubbing.

  People here are waiting, solemnly waiting. He watches them walk laps around the recreational area in the middle of the settlement. Walking and waiting.

  An elderly man sits on a nearby bench, hands clamped under his armpits. Grigory feels no impulse to speak to him, nor to his own colleagues when he twists open the handle of the common room, puts his shoulder to the expanded door. Even in his break times he is unaccompanied, slow to welcome any intrusion into his guarded world. Four tables in the room and still he manages to stake out a private territory. He tells himself, has hinted to others, that his mind needs to recuperate, so many hours spent in total concentration—and this is true; sometimes it’s beyond him to make the few simple choices demanded of him in their small canteen. When they ask—tea or coffee? rice or potatoes?—he shifts listlessly, unable to mouth the correct words.

  He can also recognize, when he has a will to, that these are the strategies of an only child: to create a world impervious to others, your passions sealed off, as contained as the canisters of oxygen the anaesthetist carts into the building. This is his ease.

  How different would it be, he wonders as he pushes wearily off the chair, with Vasily here?