All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2 page)

So, his mother bought him a map and gave him a little perfume bottle that he was to spray into the eyes of anyone who came near. Of course he threw it away as soon as he could. Bringing a perfume bottle to school was just inviting pain.

The things he’s seen since, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, when he comes home late. He’s seen men with matted hair stretched out over a row of seats. He’s seen couples bundled together under blankets that reflect the light with their dirty sheen. There are people who have loud conversations with God and people with no teeth, their faces sucked into the hollow of their mouths.

A man took out his penis once. In the end carriage this was. Took out his penis and pissed against the driver’s door. A weighty slub of flesh. Yevgeni kept looking at it, then looking away and then looking back. He couldn’t help it, such a secretive thing, out there in the air, in the light, alive. Steam coming off the stream of his raw piss. The liquid flowing down the train, fanning out into skinny tributaries. Yevgeni didn’t want to pull his legs up, didn’t want to draw the man’s attention, so he let the piss lap against his shoes, flicker over his toes. Nobody raising an objection in the carriage, everyone else wrapped up under blankets, closed off from sensation.

He changes trains at Okhotny Ryad, his steps reverberating into the broken bone. By the time he gets on the red line aches are flaring up in other places. His shoulders and ribs are held by a numbness, as if he had unhinged them and left them in ice for a few hours. They too are turning in on themselves, preventing the vibrations from the tracks reaching the spongy insides of the bone. The screeching metal claws at his ears, pitched to the same intensity as his pain. All of this going on inside him, inside this train, as it bullets along, deep under the Moscow streets.

They reach the Universitet stop, and he slumps onto the platform, makes his way to the escalator. He pauses before it, secretly afraid of escalators, afraid he might fall down backways if he doesn’t place his feet fully on the step. Once through the gates, he walks up a flight of wet steps, into the air. Rain is coming down in blustering sheets, thrashing onto the tarmac of Prospekt Vernadskogo. Water sweeps across the roofs of passing streetcars. It’s evening, which he hadn’t expected. Time has slinked along and now Yevgeni begins to worry that he might be too late, perhaps his aunt has finished with her class, maybe he’ll have to go home after all, face the full force of his mother’s questioning.

Through the trees of the campus, he can see the central tower of the Lomonosov, but it’s further away than he expected, a ten-minute walk. The rain keeps building momentum, and as he reaches the campus gate, he decides instead to dash for shelter on the opposite side of the road, underneath the concrete canopy of the State Circus.

Thick streams of water fall from the rounded folds of its roof, mooring the building. Sodden ticket holders bustle into the glass auditorium, shedding their coats as soon as they’re inside. In front of the steps below him, a man walks past pushing a bike with one wheel, half carrying, half coaxing it along, drops clinging to the strands of his thick beard. Yevgeni thinks at first that the man might be one of the performers, but then takes in his state of dishevelment and decides he can’t be. Besides, what kind of tricks can you do with a clapped-out road bike?

He tucks his damaged hand under his armpit. He wants to be at home, sitting beside the radiator, warming his hands with sweet tea. A wave of nausea rushes over him and Yevgeni realizes he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. His hand is consuming all his concentration and strength. It’s the only thing that matters right now. Café tables and chairs are abandoned all around him. With the sleeve of his free arm, Yevgeni wipes the rain off a nearby chair and plants himself on the metal seat. Even though he knows his location, he feels lost, he’s not where he needs to be and can’t think of how he’ll get himself to his aunt Maria’s classroom, or back home. And he can’t go to the hospital on his own; there would be three hundred questions. They might even start questioning his mother, which she could definitely do without.

He doesn’t know where his aunt’s classroom is or even which building it’s in. What was he thinking, coming here? He shouldn’t even have been standing on the concourse, doing nothing, shouldn’t have put himself in a situation where someone could harm his fingers. His rehearsal schedule will be thrown off, and then what’s to become of them? Will his mother have to do laundry forever? She works so hard. He’s the man of the house. What kind of man is he who comes to a place looking for his aunt and doesn’t even know where to start and ends up in a wet chair watching the rain?

In the apartment blocks across the road women are whipping clothes off washing lines strung over balconies. They pluck pegs off their lines, holding them in their teeth, then turning to call indoors for help, identical bursts of movement that happen on different levels of the building, independent of each other. Across the city, his mother is probably doing the same.

Below them, at ground level, a woman walks past, sheltering under a navy-blue umbrella. Yevgeni’s eye is drawn downward from the intermittent chaos that unfolds above her. She wears a gray coat and black shoes. Yevgeni recognizes the swivel of the body, the pace of her stride. It has to be her. Finally some luck. He stands up and shouts over to her, “Auntie!” She doesn’t hear and keeps moving. He shouts again, “Auntie Maria!” Still nothing. Yevgeni doesn’t think he has the strength to run after her. He needs rescuing from his little island of gloom. He waves his good hand in the air with broad strokes. Still nothing. She’s moving past now, the moment quickly becoming lost.

The pavement becomes washed in a yellow glaze. Carnival music blares from the overhead speakers.

Yevgeni, momentarily disorientated, looks up to see the perimeter of the concrete canopy lit up with hundreds of individual bulbs. The steel tables around him glisten, stagnant puddles turn into blobs of molten gold. Across the street, his aunt Maria stops and looks over at the circus building, charmed by the electric surge that radiates out into the damp evening air, and pays particular attention to a sodden boy sweeping an arm above his head, as though waving out to sea.

Chapter 2

G
rigory Ivanovich Brovkin stands at the edge of the cold pool in the Tulskaya baths, gazing at the flat sheen of the undisturbed water. The slap of flesh surrounds him: feet sticking to the wet marble floors, the large hands of the old masseurs pounding and kneading thick wads of skin in the adjoining treatment rooms. All men, mostly older than he is, walking with a certain gait, paunches swaying, shoulders bent back, chests out, bodies freed from restrictions, uniform white bath towels cosseting their waists, corners flipping around their knees from their languorous stroll. To his left, two men play chess, partially obscured in the steam, half the pieces ivory white, the same colour as their skin. The pieces gathering condensation, looking as though they too were sweating out their impurities.

The pool water inert and translucent, so clear he can see the tiled bottom, six feet below, so solid-looking that the idea of it opening itself to him, parting to his weight, seems absurd.

The day has been a long one and it’s not finished yet. He climbed out of bed at 5:25. He stood at the window in the cobalt light and watched as the day unfurled, the morning growing paler, routine activities billowing out: bakers checking on bread rising dutifully in ovens, janitors pulling on their overalls, mechanics in depots tinkering with delivery trucks, testing the engines patiently until they greet the day with spluttered complaints.

He leaned his forearms against the glass and watched as a pigeon lifted above some beech trees, its outstretched wings gathering invisible currents, carrying a heart disproportionate to its body size. Such contradictions that nature can hold in its effortless order.

He has always appreciated order. It was this aspect of his nature that probably, on reflection, drew him to surgery. In the operating theatre, he takes great comfort in the physical rituals. The tools being handed to him in a specific way, held at a particular height. Placed into his hand with just the same amount of force. Everything scrubbed and disinfected. Everything shining clean. A room that is beyond, if not error, then carelessness, everything in it the result of careful deliberation.

He showered and ate a breakfast of black bread and two boiled eggs and drank some tea. He put on his suit and tied his tie, ran a comb through his gradually receding hairline; the years moving ominously forward.

His thoughts had a bitter taint to them this morning because it’s his birthday today, he’s thirty-six years old. Skilled. Respected. Alone. A chief of surgery with a failed marriage behind him.

He chose a set of cufflinks from the drawer of the bedside locker and stared at the empty bed, the discarded blankets funnelled along one side, as though there were a body underneath them, as though she were still there, that they had emerged from the raging arguments, their love made stronger through the heat of their marriage; refined into something purer, more enduring. But the shape in the bed was merely a reminder of her absence, one which he feels most acutely in the mornings; from when he wakes in the same position as he did in the years she was there—cradling nothing now—to when he turns the key in his door, facing the day without Maria’s tender words of encouragement.

He walked to the hospital. Forty minutes from his apartment. He likes to take in some air, even though his path is mostly along the third ring road, with traffic spitting out its fumes. Snarling. Even at such an early hour. He stopped in the centre of an overpass and looked down on the motorway, holding on to the metal rail. A truck bellowed as it passed underneath him, and he felt the urge to spit on it, a habit from childhood which he thought had been extinguished, but it turns out it was lying dormant all the time, only to rise up in him now, on the first day of his thirty-seventh year.

A man stood at the far end of the overpass taking photographs of a gravelled section that overlooked some scrubland beyond the boundary wall. He’d never seen anyone in this spot before, as it has no practical use, an unnecessary extension alongside the stairway that drops to the footpath. Grigory walked towards him. He was curious to see what the man was photographing, but there was also the fact that the stroll provided a slight aberration from his usual routine, an acknowledgement of this particular day.

Before Grigory reached him, the man with the camera turned and nodded in greeting and descended the stairs. Grigory continued to the boundary wall and leaned on it. The sky had almost fully lightened, the sun cresting the horizon. Grigory knew he was running later than usual. He liked to get a couple of hours of office work done before the committee meetings and the rounds and the demands for his signature and the funding applications and the consultations and the operating theatres. All of it racing along. His days streaming by. He crossed his fingers and thumbs to form a rectangular frame, a viewfinder, something he hadn’t done in years, but the idea of someone taking a camera to such an indistinct place intrigued him.

A nothing place of scorched grass. A pylon planted in its centre. A crumbled wall.

Then Grigory looked down, almost directly underneath, and dropped his hands from his face to take in the whole sight, trying to see it in its entirety, framed by the field, the perimeter walls beyond which traffic streamed along, oblivious to the image.

A grid of shoes, a whole cityscape of shoes, it seemed, was decked out before him, evoking a sensation that he couldn’t quite articulate. How many shoes were here? Perhaps a thousand? All neatly lined and spaced.

He was no longer in a hurry. These shoes were placed there, carefully, to be looked at. And so he looked at them. The leather stitching or plastic moulding, the laces and flaps and the contours of the openings, the finely curved lines. There were slippers and ballet shoes, work boots with exposed steel toecaps, children’s sandals. The shoes not filling the landscape but emphasizing absence, such personal items, as if a whole battalion of people had been ghosted away. There was, he was sure, a rational explanation for such a sight. Maybe it was a memorial of sorts, or perhaps the work of some radical artist. He was sure he’d hear about it at some point. But for now he could stand and marvel at what you could stumble across, just off an anonymous motorway, on a routine morning. Aware all the while that he himself formed part of the scene, a forlorn figure in a worn suit, staring at this wonderful absurdity.

He rarely thought of how he looked to others. It was a side effect of having the responsibility of delivering grave news. Walking into a room to meet fraught parents, or a wife who hasn’t slept for a week, requires only an outward gaze. You lose all authority, all assurance, if you worry about how you’ll be perceived. He thought how the life that had silently formed around him seemed such a solid thing now, how rarely he ever brushed against the element of surprise anymore.

Down, to the right, almost outside his range of vision, his attention was drawn to the sheen of a pair of glossy black stilettos. A regular staple of her wardrobe. The sight of it transported him to the night at the river. The night of their first real encounter. Grigory’s younger self, hunched alone on the frozen surface, only a paraffin lamp for guidance. A small wicker stool, the same one on which he sat many years later in the eye of their unhappiness. A rod. A hole in the ice.

THE PLACE IS KURSK
. The river named after the city. He’s a junior registrar in the hospital and a new arrival. He comes to the river to rid his brain of Latin terms, of the smell of the wards, antiseptic still clinging to his skin. Nothing to concentrate on other than the dark circle before him, half a metre in diameter, his line plunged into the ambiguous depths. He holds the rod loosely in his hand, engrossed in his waiting. A glass bottle rests between his thighs and he puts it to his lips but receives nothing, his supply exhausted. He shakes his head in annoyance and places it under the stool, resuming his position.

A cry from the bank. “Hey!”

He turns to see buildings foregrounded against the streaked indigo sky, passing cars sweeping their halogen light over the streets. The cry again, coming from a walkway along the bank. A figure emerges from the darting shadows, shrouded by trees, a woman with long dark hair, moonlight skimming over it, woven into the night.

He reels up the line and balances the rod on the stool and approaches her. As he nears he can hear a flurry of giggles as her hand rotates a small rectangular object. Closer now, he sees it to be a silver hipflask. The light separates her face into planes, each angle revealing its own beauty.

“Dr. Brovkin, you looked lonely and thirsty,” she says. “I thought I could help.”

She says this with a slight lilt in her voice, a subtle challenge. She’s wondering if he’ll recognize her, which he does. She’s a cleaner in the hospital, they’ve made eye contact in the lobby, excused themselves as they manoeuvred past each other in the canteen, both carrying laden trays. Of course he knows who she is. He imparts warm familiarity with his eyes, looking straight at her.

“With which part?” he asks, and she pauses, not understanding. “Are you offering to help with the loneliness or the thirst?”

“Oh.” She laughs, a flush to her cheeks, a softness around the eyes. “Maybe both.”

She wears a thick shawl over a long, grey dress, cut to her figure. She is returning from a party, which has left her not drained nor drunk but effervescent, radiating life and curiosity.

He takes a mouthful from the hipflask and feels a hot flash spread through his chest. His head judders with surprise.

“Whiskey? I was expecting vodka.”

“Well, it’s good to be surprised. Has it warmed your insides?”

“Yes. Yes it has.”

“So it has done its job.”

He nods, looks at her again.

“I have never fished,” she says. “It looks peaceful.”

He raises his palm gently to his waist, cupped, as if he is offering something. “Show me your shoes.”

Warily, she lays her foot into his hand and he cradles it for a moment, running his flattened fingers along the curve of her instep, then over the long stiletto heel, and lingering on her ankle, gripping it as though in greeting before replacing it gently on the ground, a blacksmith’s motion. He looks into her lean face, so twitchingly alive, a thoroughbred, and shakes his head with disappointment.

“Your heels are too sharp. How can you wear these shoes in weather like this?” he says.

“Women are well-balanced creatures. Didn’t you know this?”

She stands on one leg, then the other, and removes them, hanging them on her fingers. He laughs. A light chuckle, boyish, which surprises both of them.

“You can’t come out, you’ll freeze with no shoes.”

“I’ll be fine, there’s a doctor present.”

She stands expectantly. And so he scoops an arm underneath her legs and carries her onto the ice. He takes wide steps, bending his knees, keeping a stable base underneath them. If they fall in, there is no one around to help.

When they reach the stool she half kneels on it, tucking her legs beneath her. She places the shoes on the ice and then unfurls her shawl. For an instant it hangs horizontally in the air, swelling in the middle, just as when the nurses change beds in the wards, a suspended sheet gathering together everything in proximity.

She twirls the shawl as it descends, and its thickness falls across her entire body, no part of her distinguishable beneath shoulder level. When she is wrapped and seated, he stands behind her and places the rod in her hands, then unclasps the spinner and they listen to the mechanism rotate until he thinks the depth is adequate, then flips over the metal spur, causing the line to brake, and he encourages her to loosen her grip on the handle by gently pinching her fingers.

“Now what do we do?” she asks.

“Now we wait,” he says, and she feels his breath streaming over her neck and he sees the black stilettos lying askew on the white ice, giving off an air of bewilderment.

THE MEMORY CARRIED
Grigory all the way into the hospital lobby. He glanced at the clock above the reception desk. There was work to be done and he was late. It was almost 9:00 a.m., a full hour and a half past the time he usually arrived. The place was already moving in the ways it always did. People were sitting, clutching their numbered tickets, waiting to be registered. The administrators were walking behind the counter pressing bundles of paper to their chests. Somewhere in the room a radio broadcast a combination of static and muffled conversation. He brushed through the double swing doors of the ward corridors and passed rooms with nurses handing out medication and saw patients sitting up expectantly, their arms linked to intravenous drips beside their beds. Usually he would turn inside one of the wards and have a word with a few of them, a reminder that the surgical staff didn’t just see them as skin and bone. He’d ask where they were from, read their medical charts and reassure them, tell them they’d be out of here before the weather changed or the hospital food became too much for them.

People looked up as he passed but he avoided all eye contact. He caught himself midpause gazing blankly at an empty wheelchair, still carrying this morning’s vision, the very unlikeliness of it turning inside him. He’d have to shake himself out of it.

An attendant crossed in front of him pushing an empty gurney. It shimmered noiselessly across the lime-green linoleum, a twig drifting on a river.

The smell. The place always had the same smell. It usually hit him as soon as he walked through the doors. Disinfectant and boiled vegetables. Earthy and sickly clean. He couldn’t smell it without thinking of his aunt, his father’s eldest sister. Walking into her house as a child. The stink of her old, unbathed body covered over with the perfumed powder she put on her face.

Family in everything. History bundled into the basic materials of who we are. His was a job where he could trace the origins of things. He often stood and looked at X-rays and saw lesions in a patient’s lung, opaque spots dotted around the chest, as if someone had spilled water onto the film. Or coronary arteries that had been whited out, the clotting looking like unthreatening, blank space. He saw the origins of illness. And in many cases he saw family here too, the hereditary nature of these conditions bearing a whisper of those who had gone before. History and family carrying on into the present, into the future, and he never failed to be fascinated, to reflect that our upbringing is apparent not just in our manners or mannerisms or our speech, it is there too on a cellular level, proving its presence on an acetate sheet, laid against a lightbox, fifty years after our birth.