All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  She paused and looked, taking in the crackle and spit of the young fire.

  It was true. She had always been a stranger here. So much energy spent on staying as anonymous as possible.

  “You’re right, it never has. Half my life I’ve been talking about leaving it.”

  “You don’t owe it anything,” he told her. “Come to Paris. You always talk about how much you love it there.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m too old to move.”

  “You’re too old to stay. Haven’t they told you? Anyone under twenty-five isn’t welcome. Any time I come back, I feel obliged to get my tongue pierced, just to fit in.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll do that instead.” She laughed.

  What he said has stayed with her though, awakened her to new possibilities, to change.

  YEVGENI SHOWERS and takes his suit from the rail, puts on his underwear and trousers, and slides the plastic sleeve from the dry cleaner’s off his shirt, inspecting it for creases, still his mother’s child.

  He sees her so rarely now. She got married again, ten years ago, to Arkady, an engineer who runs a building-supplies company in Odessa, a cousin of one of the women in the laundry where she used to work. When Yevgeni visits they run out of conversation after the first ten minutes. There are no common aspects to their lives, and they have never been able to speak about the past. So they fill the pauses with trivialities, they argue about politics, pass on any news about old neighbours. Maybe if they were on new ground it would be different, but his mother doesn’t like to travel, she’s reluctant to shed her old suspicions of the West. She’s never visited his adopted home in the fifteen years he’s been there.

  At first he was resistant to accepting the State Prize. Standing in the Kremlin, in the seat of power, shaking the president’s hand in front of the assembled photographers, was, to Yevgeni, a tacit endorsement of the current regime. But then, he asked himself, what did it matter? No one ever voted according to the preferences of a pianist.

  He took the award for his mother’s sake. A repayment of sorts, a way to thank her for all she had done for him. When the ceremony was finished, he handed her the medal in its box and insisted she take it, and she did so, her eyes filling with gratitude, and he was glad he had come here, glad he hadn’t been too proud to let her have this day.

  Maria didn’t attend though, for which, no doubt, his mother would castigate her. But he was more than a little proud of her. Uncompromising to the end.

  He’d like to show his mother how he lives now, the things he sees. The beauty, the awe, of his adopted city. He’d like to take her to the Sunday bird market on the Île de la Cité. She would enjoy listening to the red-faced men bellowing out their enticements, cajoling people as if they were trying to off-load used cars, instead of budgies and finches. They could wander around the corner to Notre Dame, she could stand in that building of overwhelming scale, or wander around the museums. Perhaps being exposed to centuries of great art would stir something in her, let her understand him better. She’s proud of his success but doesn’t have any feel for the music. The music, as she likes to say, is not for her. He’s seen her asleep too often at recitals to offer her tickets anymore.

  He runs a comb through his damp hair and slips on his jacket, adjusting his collar—no tie—puts in his cuff links. Yevgeni sends his mother clothes, and she sends back little thank-you cards. He knows she still appreciates well-cut cloth, soft fabrics. It’s the one small thing that still connects them.

  He enters the members’ lounge to a rush of applause and upraised glasses, and he nods and places a flat hand on his breast in appreciation and walks to his mother, who makes a great show of her embrace, then shakes Arkady’s hand and catches Maria’s eye across the room. He approaches her when he has settled his mother and Arkady into conversation with a prominent architect.

  “You’re not meeting the great and the good?”

  “I didn’t realize they were here. Alina only introduced me to the mildly compromised and the unashamedly corrupt.”

  He laughs, embraces her. “Usually I’m the only one to notice.”

  “That was beautiful tonight, Yevgeni.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do. Thank you. It’s so good to have you here.”

  A pat on the shoulder from the executive director. Yevgeni nods in response.

  “I need to shake hands with some sponsors, do my bit for the scholarship fund. Give me a little while.”

  “Of course.”

  On their way to the restaurant, the four of them are silent in the taxi. It begins to rain. Umbrellas explode up and down the street, drops on the windowpane descend in streaks.

  At their meal, they drink good wine and Alina displays her storytelling skills, recounting tales of her son’s childhood to Arkady, and they laugh and Maria is grateful once more for her sister’s abilities. There are some shared experiences that are impervious to time.

  After coffee, Alina pulls a package from a shopping bag beside her chair, wrapped in brown paper, rectangular. She hands it to Yevgeni, and he can feel a frame underneath the wrapping. A photograph, he thinks, perhaps some certificate he has long forgotten about. But it is neither, so much better than that, surprising him.

  An X-ray sheet, enclosed in glass, front and back.

  He smiles, remembering.

  A fracture on the fourth finger of the right hand. The hand of his childhood self.

  “I still have the bump.”

  He displays it, then places his hand over the sheet. All that remain unchanged are the spaces between the fingers.

  He holds the X-ray to the light, the inner pattern of the hand so unfamiliar in its negative form. The bones rounded at the knuckles, balanced precariously on top of each other, the fingertips tapering off into triangles.

  Maria points to the different parts, naming them.

  “Distal phalanx, proximal phalanx, metacarpal, interphalangeal joints.”

  “You learned them from Grigory?” Yevgeni asks.

  “Yes.”

  He lays the gift on the table beside his coffee.

  “I remember him that night. His kindness. I was scared, especially after the X-ray—it was a strange experience for a nine-year-old kid. But he talked to me like I was an equal, his voice was so reassuring.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  They are silent again. Spoons clink against china.

  Alina nods to her sister. Maria thinks she won’t say it. Yevgeni won’t push her on this subject, he never has—but she can hear her voice uttering the words. “It’s what killed him, you know. Radiation.”

  Yevgeni looks at his mother, then back to his aunt.

  “But that’s not possible. It was a heart attack. It happened so suddenly.”

  “You know so little.”

  WHEN GRIGORY TOOK his own life, she didn’t feel the anger, the confusion, which those close to her predicted would come. She was the one who had forced open the door to their bathroom, found him there, face pressed to the white-tiled floor, the jar of pills standing upright next to the sink. She knew he wasn’t doing it to punish either himself or her. He had seen where the illness would lead him. To take his life was a rejection of this end, not of their love. It was calculated, rational, but not cold. Only she could make the distinction. Only she had sat with him in those mornings after his return, when she would make breakfast and watch him eat, as meticulous as ever, and then sit and listen as he spoke of what he had been through, the lives that had passed under his fingers. Talk for an hour and no more, before washing the dishes, passing them to her to dry, releasing the pain in manageable increments.

  She knew he was ill from the very beginning, several weeks before he himself did. Something haunted in his look, a shade to his face. She saw it those first few mornings, a physical retreat from the man she knew before.

  He came back home determined. He had material: anecdotal, unofficial, but, he thought, valuable n
onetheless. Even if he couldn’t hold anyone directly accountable, he wanted people to know what had happened.

  In his absence, however, he had become invisible.

  None of his former colleagues would meet with him. They would barely speak to him beyond the basic courtesies. Grigory sat one morning at Vasily’s parking spot at the hospital, waiting until he stepped from his car, and yet, as Grigory approached, Vasily returned to his seat, turned the key in the ignition, and reversed. Even as Grigory jogged beside him, red-faced, banging a fist against his window, Vasily concentrated on his driving, refusing to acknowledge him. Even as his old friend was left pleading in the rearview mirror, arms outstretched, Vasily picked up speed.

  Maria tried to give him what help she could. Pavel and Danil and their connections were unwilling to get involved. They couldn’t afford to raise their heads again, not so soon after the attempted strike. Eventually she was able to link Grigory up with some journalistic contacts, but of course they wouldn’t run with what he was telling them, especially without substantiated evidence.

  He talked to prominent artists, writers, asked them to use their position to speak out, but why would they? They all remembered what had happened to Aleksei Filin, in Minsk. Jail was worth the risk only when they couldn’t work freely. Now they were able to do so with very little interference, and no one was willing to jeopardize that.

  Six weeks after his return there was finally a breakthrough. The European Atomic Institute was organizing a major conference in Austria on nuclear safety. They had invited him to make a presentation. All his frustrations of the previous weeks were cast aside. When the time came, Maria travelled with him. Months had passed by then and, although he refused to go for a checkup, they both knew he was ill: his breathing was laboured, he tired easily. The intervening months had passed so slowly, so painfully, that when they finally boarded the plane and Grigory sat in his seat, she could see the relief wash over him. Finally, she remembers remarking to herself, he could put his responsibilities to rest, he could carry out what he considered his duty and then concentrate on his health. Throughout the flight he held her hand, so animated, and pointed at the rivers and motorways that snaked underneath them.

  They took a taxi from the airport, the tall glass buildings of a Western city so unfamiliar to them. At the hotel reception there was no record of their names, but it didn’t matter, a small complication they explained away, one that would easily be remedied. When, at the conference centre the next day, the same thing happened, then they had no explanations.

  There was no listing of Grigory as a delegate. He showed them his letter of invitation and they replied they were sorry for the confusion, but he couldn’t be admitted if he wasn’t on the list. He showed them his passport, they said they were sorry; even his speech, they said they were sorry. They placed the list of presentation speakers in front of him: his name wasn’t on it.

  He had ceased to exist, melted into air.

  He asked to speak to the conference director by name, but it was a security guard who approached them instead. Again, sorry. Everyone was sorry. When Grigory got angry, started shouting, demanded to speak to someone more senior, they suggested he send a complaint in writing. When Grigory strode past them into the conference room, it was then that they escorted him outside.

  On the street, Maria stood beside him holding up his letter of invitation as he approached arriving delegates, told them in his broken English what had happened, took out his box of projector slides, asked people to look at them as evidence. But no one did. Instead, they held up their briefcases to barricade themselves from him as they passed.

  When the last of the delegates had entered, Grigory sat on the concrete steps in his best suit, now two sizes too big for him, looking into the glass lobby from which no one returned his gaze. A beaten man.

  Later that day, they spent what money they had left on a flight home. Maria found him dead less than two weeks later.

  IT’S JUST THE TWO of them now, aunt and nephew, sitting in her darkened living room. After the restaurant, Alina and Arkady said their good-byes and returned to their hotel. Alina held Yevgeni’s medal to her chest and promised her sister she’d call, make more of an effort to stay in touch. Perhaps she will.

  “And yet you stayed here,” Yevgeni says, “in this apartment. Surely you think of him every time you walk into that bathroom?”

  She takes a moment before replying.

  “The past demands fidelity,” she says. “I often think it’s the only thing that truly belongs to us.”

  She walks to the window. Tourist boats pass on the river. The dull throb of drum and bass pulses through their silence.

  “Is that why you never told me? Out of loyalty to him?”

  “Telling you is no disloyalty to Grigory. If it was, I’d have taken his story to the grave. Your generation was gifted with a sense of boundless promise. I suppose I didn’t want to burden you with the responsibility. I wanted you to be free to follow your talent.”

  She moves to a storage cupboard in the hall and returns carrying two large document boxes. Yevgeni rises to help her, but she gestures for him to sit and places them on the coffee table.

  “This is all I have left of him.”

  “You don’t need to show me,” he says.

  She bends and kisses Yevgeni on the forehead. “I know,” she replies, and then walks to her room.

  He turns on her reading lamp and opens the boxes, both of them filled with manila folders, dozens of them.

  He reads. He keeps reading, his curiosity gaining momentum. He pulls out the files and piles them in two unsteady stacks. Hours upon hours of ordered black print. Sometimes he pauses to stand and gaze out of the window. Things he half knew, rumours he once heard, are consolidated. A word on the street from his childhood, a muttered side-mouthed comment, becomes here, in their pages, an indelible part of history.

  There is no order to Yevgeni’s process. He reads something, puts it down, picks up something else. He reads a recounting of dietary routines, cleaning methods, sexual activity. He reads doctors’ testimonies, liquidators’ activity reports.

  It strikes him, amid all of it, that the endless variations of a single life could probably fill an entire library: each action, every statistic, all record of being; birth cert, marriage cert, death cert, the words you had said, the bodies you had loved, all lay somewhere, in boxes or filing cabinets, waiting to be picked upon, collated, notated.

  He reads into history, into the conjecture and the lies, into all that spent energy.

  He views photographs of firemen and technicians, a plague of black globules spread over their red-raw bodies. He stares at images of infants with mushroom-shaped growths in place of eyes, with heads that have taken on the form of a crescent moon. He reads to gain understanding. He looks and reads and doesn’t know how to respond to such things. There is no response. He gazes at the images in awe and curiosity, guilt and ignorance. All of this is his past. All of this is his country.

  And when he can look no longer, Yevgeni closes his eyes. And the world comes in.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of books were important in my research, but none more so than The Russian Century by Brian Moynahan, Among the Russians by Colin Thubron, Chernobyl Record by R. F. Mould, and Voices from Chernobyl, compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and translated by Keith Gessen.

  The images contained in Zones of Exclusion by Robert Polidori, The Edge by Alexander Gronsky, The Sunken Time by Mikhail Dashevsky, and Moscow by Robert Lebeck gave me license to set my imagination free.

  The documentaries Chernobyl Heart and Black Wind White Land marked the beginning of my writing. The ongoing and endless work of Adi Roche and Chernobyl Children International continues to astound me.

  There are many I am indebted to for helping me along the way. Jocelyn Clarke, Orla Flanagan, Jenny Langley, Brad Smith, Isobel Harbison, Conor Greely, Tanya Ronder, Rufus Norris, Thomas Prattki, Diarmuid Smyth, John Browne, Neill Quint
on, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, The Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, Anna Webber, Will Hammond, Claire Wachtel, Iris Tupholme, Ignatius McGovern, Natasha Zhuravkina, Emily Irwin.

  For their encouragement and support, my thanks to my family, especially my father.

  And for Flora, for all of this and so much more.

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Meet Darragh McKeon

  DARRAGH MCKEON was born in 1979 and grew up in the midlands of Ireland. Since graduating from University College Dublin he has worked as a theater director throughout Europe and the United States with companies such as Steppenwolf (Chicago), The Royal Court (London), the Young Vic (London), and Rough Magic Theatre (Ireland). He now lives in New York. All That Is Solid Melts into Air is his first novel.

  About the book

  The Empty City

  An Original Essay by Darragh McKeon

  All we have left is the place the

  attachment to the place

  we still rule over the ruins of temples

  spectres of gardens and houses

  if we lose the ruins nothing will be left

  —Zbigniew Herbert

  1.

  We drive in through the main street, a two-lane road, the margin engulfed by weeds, the flanking tower blocks shrouded by fir trees. Craning my neck and looking up, I can see balconies that are overrun with creepers, their adjacent windows matte black with shadow, vacuums of habitation. Brown stains of carbonation run down from one floor to the next. It brings to mind an old man trailing gravy or tobacco juice down his chin.

  As we near the town centre, I feel a strong sense of dislocation, as if perhaps we shouldn’t be here. I assume this is because of the potential dangers of the place, the speculative health implications of our visit, or maybe it could be to do with the gravitas of its history; that coming to this town is an act of desecration or disrespect, as though we’re putting our dollar down for the freak show, about to enter the tent to gaze and point at the bearded lady or the three-legged man. But that’s not it, I realise. We don’t belong here because nobody belongs here. Drive through a city, any city, even in the middle of the night, and there’s a bulb glowing over a lonely porch, a dog eyeing you suspiciously, or a closed-up petrol station, its owner sleeping upstairs. Here there is nobody. No admissions booth. No map demarcating the areas of interest. Not even a passing farmer taking a shortcut.