All That Is Solid Melts into Air (17 page)

He hears sounds from the road: a squeal of brakes and then glass shattering. Grigory looks in the direction of the noise and sees a sulphurous light, stalled. He runs towards it, the cold air inflaming his lungs.

As he nears he sees a man standing over a dog, waving his arms in the air, admonishing the felled animal.

The driver directs his invective at Grigory, but Grigory ignores it and kneels over the dog. It’s a German shepherd, young, less than a year old, Grigory estimates. The animal faces the front of the car with thick ribbons of blood around its hindquarters and a web of drool laced around its mouth, its eyes turned upwards, their lids flickering in pain. Grigory rests a calming hand on its neck and the animal raises its head a few centimetres from the road and lunges forward, snapping its jaws. Grigory leans backwards, unafraid, and speaks softly to it, his tones reaching under those of the driver, who is still spitting out his complaints.

“Good boy. You still have some fight in you. Let’s see what we can do.”

He reaches his hand towards the neck again, asking the animal’s permission through the slow deliberation of his movement. He slides his fingers into its thick coat and moves downwards, feeling the strong pulsing of its heart, never taking his eyes from those of the dog, which are searching now, darting to various points in their circumference, showing tentative trust; placing its hopes in this stranger. Grigory moves his hands nearer the wound and the dog releases a moan, a sound as stark and elemental as its surroundings.

He looks up to the driver.

“Its pelvis is broken.”

“This is your dog? It’s smashed my headlight, it’s damaged my bumper. This fucking dog, coming out of nowhere. This is your dog? Someone will be paying, I assure you.”

“It’s not my dog.”

“Of course you say that. ‘Not my dog.’ But you come and look after it. Why do you care? Coming out of nowhere. Of course it’s your dog.”

“Please. It’s in a lot of pain.”

“Who are you? A hero? A vet looking for animals to save?”

“I’m a surgeon.”

“Good. Then you can afford to pay for my headlight.”

Grigory stands and takes in the car, a black Riva. He walks nearer the man and looks him in the eye, a bullfrog wobble of skin under the man’s chin.

“I don’t know who owns the dog. I do know that it’s in a lot of pain. I live in those buildings back there. If you take me home we can look after the animal and then ask around.”

The driver steps back, his gaze spiralling downwards in short, sharp bursts. His voice is now so muted that Grigory has to strain to hear him.

“I tell you what, you keep your dog. I’ll pay for the damage myself.”

He steps into the car and drives off. There’s a rattle from the front bumper as it drags along the ground.

Alone on the road with a shattered dog.

Grigory looks back to the settlement, the buildings taking on a deeper light by now, incandescent; then turns to the animal.

“You’re a brave one, aren’t you?”

He kneels once more and scoops the dog into his arms. The animal wails softly, but doesn’t resist, recognizing the authority of its new master. Grigory walks back over the puffed snow, struggling under the dog’s weight, its heart beating close to his.

EACH NIGHT
after his walk he enters once again the few low rooms of the clinic. Returning to hear the breath of sleeping children, all of them waiting to pass under his knife. Grigory knows he has a weaker will than any of them, and there are nights when he lies amongst them, hoping that their courage, their thirst for life, might pass into him, replenishing him.

Children who have already undergone thyroid operations and are regaining their strength sleep on thin mattresses laid out in rows along the floor. In the morning they rise and roll them into a wheel, tie them up with string, and place them in the corner. There is a playground outside with a high net strung across it. They’ve received a batch of tennis balls as part of an aid consignment, and the children invent complicated rhythmical games with them. In the breaks between surgery Grigory watches them and tries to decipher their rules, but they change daily, hourly, and so he pays attention only to the fluid motion of these children, identical scars running horizontally across the base of their necks. These are the healthier ones. The weaker ones lose consciousness while standing. They buckle to the ground, marionettes whose strings have been cut. Nosebleeds break out all the time. At any moment he can look across the yard and see half a dozen children pinching their noses, looking up to the sky, unperturbed by the spontaneous flow from their nostrils.

There are those for whom the sickness has spread to the lungs or pancreas or liver. They lie sweating in the few beds available. Many are placed back with their families in their accommodation, where they are guaranteed somewhere to rest and a visit by a nurse. In the past few months, infants have emerged from the womb with fused limbs, or weighed down with oversize tumours. There are children whose bodies have no sense of proportion, football-size growths on the back of their skull or legs as thick as small tree trunks, or one hand minuscule and the other swollen to grotesque dimensions. Others have hollowed-out eye sockets, lined with flat patches of skin: it looks as though the human eye is an organ that has yet to evolve. For many, there are tiny holes where the ears should sit. A child, a girl, was born two weeks ago with aplasia of the vagina. Grigory couldn’t find any references to such a thing in his textbooks. He had to improvise by creating artificial holes in her urethra through which the nurses would squeeze out her urine.

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. They 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.