All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  In the corridor on the third floor the attendant introduced them to the nurse. She took Artyom’s mother aside and spoke to her quietly. As their conversation continued, Artyom watched his mother edge away from her, palms raised, as if she had just walked into the cage of a wild animal.

  He heard the woman say, “His skull is compromised.”

  He heard the woman say, “His central nervous system is compromised.”

  Sofya heard it too.

  Artyom asked Sofya, “Compromised from what?”

  Sofya wouldn’t reply.

  Compromise. Isn’t that something you do when you can’t agree? How can a skull be compromised?

  They walked into the room, and everything was much better than Artyom expected it to be. His father was sitting on the bed, playing cards with men they knew: some of their neighbours—Yuri Polovinkin, Gennady Karbalevich, Eduard Demenev. It was surreal to see them all sitting here, as if they were at home, chatting after a meal, whiling away the hours before sleep.

  Artyom’s father looked up and saw them enter, and Artyom noticed his eyes flare, his pupils expand. He thought his father might drop the cards in his hand, his muscles going slack with surprise.

  He turned to the other men. “I’m in trouble now.”

  The men laughed.

  He embraced each of them, wrapping his arms around them, pressing their bodies into his. And even though the nurse advised against it, they didn’t hesitate to touch him. How could they? And Artyom’s mother didn’t scold. But when they turned around and faced the other men, there was an odd force in the air, a wariness. They didn’t volunteer to come forward, they just nodded. The men, for their part, stayed withdrawn.

  Artyom’s father was wearing pajamas that were too small for him; they rode up his arms and legs, clung to his chest. It made him look like a small boy who had grown magically overnight.

  IN THE STERILIZING ROOM, Grigory stands in front of the sink, surgical hat tied in a knot at the back of his head, goggles and thyroid collar on, and cleans under his nails with a plastic disposable pick. He has long, deft fingers, disproportionate to his short palm. When he’s satisfied, he takes the scrub to his hands, lather forming around his knuckles. Five, six operations a day and still he feels the absence of his wedding ring, nothing to place on the steel shelf in front of him; instead it lies abandoned in the upper drawer of his bedside locker, back there in his city. He works the tap with his elbows and rinses his hands, seeing the skin emerge sleek from under the foam and backs into the operating room, holding his hands up, palms facing him, the nurse helping him to slip on the gown and gloves.

  His team is already gathered around the bed. An infant, three weeks old, lies on the operating table, dwarfed under a surgical blanket.

  Grigory looks at the tiny girl, her eyes peacefully closed, her neck hardly bigger than his wrist. A human life in its most vulnerable state: a shallow-breathing infant resting on a narrow ledge between the twin precipices of birth and death. An urge rises in him to touch the child in reassurance, let her feel the warm hand under his glove, but he looks away from the peaceful face, from the flickering eyelids, turns his concentration to her beating chest.

  The child has a congenital heart disease, truncus arteriosus—rare everywhere but here—her aorta and coronary and pulmonary arteries all emerging from a single stalk. A complicated operation; one that will take hours. He’ll have to separate the pulmonary arteries from the aortic trunk and patch any defects that emerge, then close two ventricular septal defects, holes in the walls between the two lower chambers of the heart. Lastly he will place a connection between the right ventricle and the pulmonary arteries.

  They have a single cardiopulmonary bypass machine in the clinic—continuously in use due to the sheer numbers of surgeries they are required to perform—into which they will divert her blood.

  He takes the scalpel and rotates the handle in his fingers, readying himself. He presses into and pierces the small chest, feeling the skin give way. He holds back the fragile ribs with a clamp, then inserts a thin tube into the femoral vein to withdraw blood from the body, passing it through the machine to be filtered, cooled, oxygenated, and returned by way of the artery. Through the magnifying lenses that sit on top of his goggles, he can see her quivering heart, light purple, carrying on in its dutiful rhythm. So tiny, half the size of his fist.

  They work at a pace now, other hands contributing, entering and exiting his line of sight. Grigory hears no sound, not the bleep of the CBM machine nor the mutterings of his team, the suction of the vacuum pump that the junior registrar uses to keep the area clean. This is the stage when he functions only by vision and touch. These are the moments for which he is respected, for which all his silences, his distance, are forgiven him by his subordinates. They too understand the demands of the work, many of them running on false energy, anything to get them through. Grigory has noticed an attendant or a nurse move swiftly the few times he’s entered the storage room they use as a dispensary. He is beyond asking questions. Medical supplies are one of the few things they have in sufficient quantity, and his theatre runs flawlessly. Everything else is outside his concern.

  If the team need to communicate with him, they wave a finger in the periphery of his visual field and, on the few occasions they do this, he looks up, taking a brief moment to locate himself in his surroundings, sound streaming back in, a sensation that reminds him of emerging from the swimming pool. He stops only to drink from a straw that the nurse holds close, attuned to his signals, or to communicate with his staff, no more than a few fragmented sentences. He works steadily throughout, neither too confident nor overly tentative. He has to feel his way through, let his thoughts merely drift along the surface of his mind. Hours in this state of intensity.

  Sweat trails down the ridge of his skewed spine. He hasn’t had a swim in six months, and this is taking its toll, his scoliosis asserting its grip on him in the hours before bed, so that most nights he can be found lying twisted on the floor of his room, contorting his body at various angles, breathing deeply, waiting for his muscles to relent. Quick spasms dart their way up his back, but he ignores them. The pain can come later.

  Nearing the end, he sews Gore-Tex patches into the septum holes, secreting them inside the lining of the heart, where they will expand as the organ grows, if it does grow.

  When he is finished, he can put down his instruments and look at her again. Perhaps she will live, he thinks. Perhaps there is no radiation stealthily making its way through the long grass of her metabolism. These infants, to him, are flickering flames in the midst of so much darkness, so much extinguished hope. He wants to cup his hands around them, protect them from the pervading winds.

  His junior closes up, and Grigory walks into the afternoon sunlight, discarding his surgical wear into the appointed basket as he goes. Outside, he bends over, hands on his knees, and takes in great gulps of fresh air, free now of responsibility, however temporarily.

  Day after day like this.

  He can feel himself becoming less distinct, over time, becoming like a photograph left out in the sun, curling at the edges.

  He lets out another breath.

  “You’re just out of surgery.” A woman’s voice. A nurse he can’t place.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll be ready again in a few minutes.”

  She puts a warm hand on his shoulder. Grigory wishes the heat would move down to his coccyx; it might provide some relief. He opens his eyes, unfolds with difficulty. She isn’t a nurse. It’s a woman, her face lean, cheekbones that direct his glance towards her eyes. A stranger. He would like to make an effort, but he turns away, too tired to affect politeness.

  “I wanted to thank you.”

  He moves to the door. “Don’t mention it.”

  “He loves that dog, it’s given him a new lease of life.”

  Grigory pauses.

  “I thought it was the operation that left him weak, but he needed a companion. You understood this.
I, his own mother, didn’t.”

  He turns back, his mind spooling through the previous weeks.

  “Your son . . .” He clicks his fingers, trying to spark his memory.

  “Artyom.”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “He’s doing well?”

  “Very well. He’s coming back to himself again. The dog, I don’t know what . . . it took away his anger.”

  Her pupils wide and dark, soaking in the daylight.

  “I’m glad.” Grigory hesitates. “More than glad. But I didn’t understand anything. The dog needed help. Artyom is a good helper.”

  She nods, smiling to herself, then looks up. The man before her has a kind of frantic weariness to him, as though he is skimming across the surface of his days. She can tell he will lose momentum soon, plunge into deep waters. He runs a hand across his face, and she senses that he too is aware of this.

  “We all need a good helper,” she says.

  Now a nurse arrives, stands at the doorway, looks at her watch without speaking, reluctant to draw him back to the theatre.

  “They need you again so soon?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The woman takes his hand. The sensation so foreign to Grigory. He is the one whose job is to touch; prodding, pinching. Her skin has the consistency of thick cream.

  “You understand more than you think, Doctor. You already know that medicine isn’t magic. Most of us still believe that everything can be healed with a swipe of your scalpel.”

  He pats her hand and withdraws.

  “It was good to meet you,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  The nurse holds the door for him, and he walks inside, passes the viewing window for the theatre, another young life laid there in readiness.

  AN ELK BOLTS into the depths of the wood, surging into the dark with a burst of rolling muscle. Artyom is shocked into stillness, then curious. He turns and follows, carrying the kindling which he has tied in a sling behind his back. The prints of the animal sit clear and fresh on the snow. If he’s lucky, he’ll catch sight of it again when it pauses, calms its fears. He treads as quietly as possible, spreading his weight from heel to toe. The snow shallower as the trees pack closer. He hears a scream and freezes. His first instinct: it’s a girl in trouble. Artyom drops the kindling to the ground and dips out from under the sling. He runs forward twenty steps and then sees the elk again, its head raised to the treetops, its vast antlers tilted downwards. A beautiful beast, pushing out this shrill noise, at odds with its bulk. A plaintive cry, a keening. Then it quietens, raises its head, and disappears once more.

  It took Artyom’s father fourteen days to die.

  HIS FACE WAS swollen and, when the shock of seeing him had faded and Artyom looked closer, he noticed that the glands under his father’s ears were sticking out like small, round pebbles. When they came back the next day, they were the size of eggs. The day after that, he was alone. Each man had been placed in a separate room. They were banned from going into the corridor, talking to each other. So they communicated by a series of knocks. Dash-dot, dot-dot. Remembering the code from their military training.

  Artyom, Sofya, and his mother stayed in the nurses’ quarters behind the hospital. On their first night in the hospital, the attendants tried to remove them from the common room where they were settling down to sleep. But they saw the steely determination in Artyom’s mother’s eyes. These people wouldn’t be moved.

  The nurses’ apartment was a small room with a double bed, a gas ring for cooking, a fridge in the corner, and a shower room. They were almost alone in this building too. Now all the nurses lived on the bottom floor, the rest had moved out.

  A few days later there were no nurses at all; it was the militia that cleaned the bedpans, changed sheets, administered medicines. Artyom asked one of them where the nurses had gone and was told that they had refused to do the work. It was too dangerous.

  How sick do you have to be to frighten a nurse?

  Small black lesions developed on his father’s tongue. A day later, black spots appeared all over his body, each the size of a five-kopeck coin.

  After that, Artyom and Sofya weren’t allowed into the hospital.

  Artyom pieced together what had happened. His father told him some things. Yuri talked to him too. Sofya sometimes answered his questions. And, after his father died, his mother opened up a little. There was no longer any reason to protect him.

  In Pripyat, when everyone was being evacuated, some officers gathered the men together, told them it was their duty to make their homes safe again. It was up to them to clear the damage. No one objected, glad of the opportunity to help.

  Artyom’s father was assigned to work on clearing the forests. The other men asked to join him. They drew attention to their experience of working together in the kolkhoz and managed to get official approval.

  They lived in tents in the forest; Yuri said they felt like partisans during the war. Soon the forest turned red, all the leaves a bright shade of crimson. Yuri remembered Artyom’s father picking up the red leaves on the forest floor, saying: “Mother Nature is bleeding.” There were tiny holes in them, as though caterpillars had run amok. They were given dosimeters but threw them away.

  “Either we do the work, or we don’t do the work, and we’ve decided to do the work.”

  This is what they said.

  They chopped the trees. Cut them down with chainsaws. They sliced them into metre-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and buried them in the earth. At night they drank; they had been told vodka helped with the radiation. “Vodka,” they laughed, “helps with everything.”

  The troops flew a flag over the reactor: two days after the accident they put it there as a symbol of pride, endurance. Five days later it hung ragged, eaten by the air. A day after that, a new flag, turning in the breeze. A week after that one, another new flag. Everyone tried to avoid looking at the flag. The flag was disconcerting.

  They worked on.

  One by one the chainsaws died. Nobody could understand why; they were in pristine condition, their mechanisms just wouldn’t respond. They were all replaced. Each man worked with a new chainsaw. These died too. Eventually, they took axes to the tree trunks, and at night they needed to drink even more to dull the pain of their raw shoulders. “Backbreaking work chopping down tree after tree by hand.” This is what Yuri said, and Artyom didn’t doubt it.

  They shot animals they came across in the forest and roasted them over a spit and ate them. Supplies were readily available, but they grew tired of tinned food after the first week. Roasting an animal on a spit lends itself to conversation. After a few weeks someone noticed that he couldn’t smell the meat as it roasted, and the other men realized that they couldn’t smell it either. Nobody slept well that night.

  The forest turned orange, and they said to each other, “Maybe Mother Nature’s blood is crusting over?”

  One day they realized that the straw in their tents came from stacks near the reactor. They decided to clear out their tents, but after three nights sleeping on the bare ground, they brought it back in. Yuri said he made a joke, “Better to die of radiation than pneumonia,” but nobody laughed. They stopped laughing after the first few weeks, after the chainsaws broke down again.

  One night it rained, and in the morning the water in the puddles was green and yellow, like mercury.

  All around them, soldiers and men like themselves were burying everything. Gennady Polovinkin came up with a slogan: Fight the atom with a shovel. They said this to each other sometimes as encouragement. They said it ironically, bitterly, but also with defiance: let nature come and fight them, they each had an axe.

  Artyom’s father told him he thought about him all the time. There were sparrows everywhere, littered dead on the ground. You couldn’t help standing on them, he said. They were covered in autumn leaves, even though it was still May. When he felt them underfoot he thought about that morning, out shooting. He prayed that Arty
om was somewhere safe, somewhere clean, untouched by all this perversion of nature.

  Artyom didn’t get to see his father when the tumours metastasized, not within his body but instead crawling to its surface, till they clasped his face, trailing his features like poison ivy. He didn’t get to see him when he was producing a stool thirty times a day, composed mainly of blood and mucus. When his skin started cracking on his arms and legs. When every evening his sheet would be covered in blood and Artyom’s mother would give the militiamen directions as to how to move him, and make sure her husband had fresh bedding for the night.

  Artyom stayed with Sofya in the nurses’ quarters and roamed the city for fresh food, which they paid for with Maksim’s roubles and which they would bring back and make into soup, which their mother would take down when she came back to sleep for a few hours. She came back to sleep and to lie to her children, to pretend that their father wasn’t in any pain, just resting.

  At the end she couldn’t lie anymore, not when his tongue fell out. Not when she’d hold a bedpan at the side of his bed to catch the blood which ran in rivulets from no particular place in his body. Not when he would cough and spit up pieces of his lungs, his liver, choking on his internal organs. She would never tell them that she’d look at him and see him crying out to her as though from the end of a long corridor. His eyes wailing their pain, like an infant when it can’t express its need, can’t make itself be understood. She couldn’t lie and couldn’t face her children, so she stayed there beside him, slept on the chair next to him, unable to touch him because it would bring too much pain. Her children brought the soup to the attendant at the reception desk, who would deliver it to a table at the entrance to the ward. They never asked to see their father. He belonged to their mother now.