All That Is Solid Melts into Air (24 page)

“I should go now, shouldn’t I? Maksim will be working soon.”

“Yes, you should.”

Artyom knew she was watching him as he walked softly to the door, stepping over limbs that spilled into the passageway.

At the gate, when he had given one of the pieces of gold to the guards, he asked them to point him in the direction of the city centre, but they just shrugged; they weren’t from here.

So Artyom walked through the industrial wasteland, his first time alone in the city. He saw some crows gathered around a stray rubbish bag and kicked out at them, announcing his presence on the streets, and they exploded upwards, the group splintering as it gained height. He saw the smear of streetlights ahead and made his way in their direction, passing a textile factory and a car scrapyard. When he reached the main road he followed the flow of traffic, reasoning that, at this time of the morning, people would be heading towards the city. He walked for an hour, the pavement narrowing, trees becoming more prominent, grass aisles in the middle of the road. He looked everywhere, drank it all in. There were old houses made of stone, with stone-roofed porches. The buildings here were solid, were made to last.

Artyom found himself touching everything. Now that he could see it in daylight, had time to reflect on it, the city was different in every sensory way. Even the space of the city was completely unlike the spaces he was used to, with the rectangles of sky between buildings. The sweeping streets. Statues and chiselled lintels. Gateposts. The lines in the road. The big, green lane where the officials drove. The kerbstones. The railings. All of this not alien but odd, unlike anything he was used to.

His father was safe. He had to be. He was somewhere else in the city, confined in a different area. Looking for them, just as they were looking for him.

Eventually, Artyom stopped at a crossroads and saw a street with full rubbish bins taking up half the pavement outside the houses. Artyom stopped a passerby, a man with a long, gray coat, the top button dangling from a thread. He asked if the rubbish would be collected this morning, and the man opened his eyes wide, held his arm out, and pivoted around, displaying the rubbish bins in answer, and walked on.

Artyom sat at a bus stop and waited. Every ten minutes or so a bus would pull up and the driver would open the door for him, then shake his head in irritation when Artyom waved him onwards. There were so many cars on the street: Moskviches, Volgas, Russo-Balts, Vazes, Zaporozhetses. He was in awe of the lines and colour of them, listening to the roar of their engines. All of these, having come alive from the pages of the manuals, there in actuality, speeding along the road in front of him. He approached some of the parked cars and ran his hand along their contours, but a woman in the row of houses opposite shouted at him, told him to mind his business.

If Iosif were here they’d probably find a way to pop the bonnet on some of them and slaver over the engines. Iosif was so much more adventurous than he was. Artyom thinks he remembers Iosif saying he had an aunt in the city, so he’s probably being well looked after. He’s probably watching television at night and eating tinned peaches straight from the can. Although, maybe not. Things don’t always work out the way you expect. After all, Artyom had an aunt in the city too, so Iosif could be saying the same about him.

He was hungry. In the shelter they’d be handing round breakfast by now. There were so many people there at this stage that there were no more queues; the militia came around delivering bags with packages of food for each meal, collecting the bags when everyone had eaten. Artyom hoped his mother would save something for him. But of course she would, she was his mother.

He waited for a while and then approached one of the bins and rummaged around. Nothing. He dug through a few more. Near the end of the street he found the carcass of a chicken, some tea leaves stuck to it, bits of newspaper, but nothing he couldn’t pick off. He ran his fingers in the spaces between the legs and the body, scooped up slivers of white meat from between its ribs. Real meat. Now that he had a taste for it, he wanted to stuff the entire thing into his mouth, wanted to crunch on the bones until there was nothing left. He raised the carcass to his mouth and licked it, taking in some tea leaves but mostly enjoying the grease on his tongue.

“Hey. Get away from there.”

The rubbish collectors had rounded the corner. They hung from the truck in their bright orange jackets, staring at him. One of them stepped down.

“What are you doing? Get away, you fucking rat.”

Artyom wiped the grease from his mouth with his sleeve.

“I’m sorry. I was waiting for you. I’m looking for Maksim Vissarionovich. He collects rubbish.”

“I think you’re looking for fucking dysentery. That’s what I think.”

Artyom didn’t know what dysentery was.

“I need to speak to Maksim Vissarionovich. Do you know him?”

“No. And I don’t care. Go and root through some other rubbish. Just do it in another area of town.”

The man was standing close to his face, all aggression. Artyom stepped out of his way, and the men emptied the bins into the back of the truck and clattered them on the pavement. Artyom was fascinated. He’d never seen a vehicle like this one. It had an internal arm that crushed the rubbish down and drew it inside. He stood and watched as they passed. But they didn’t go very far. The truck cut out and when they tried starting it again the engine just made a dull, straining sound. They popped the bonnet and rummaged around for five minutes with the same result. Artyom knew that sound. He approached the engine and grabbed the ignition coil with such assurance that the men let him carry on. He unbolted the coil, cleaned the contact points with his shirt, then replaced it in its slot and tightened the bolts. He gave a thumbs-up to the driver, who turned over the ignition, and they listened to it moan and gurn until it spluttered into life.

The man who had spoken to him smiled wryly, calmer now. “What’s this guy’s name again?”

“Maksim Vissarionovich. I don’t know his last name. He lives near the bus station.”

“Anyone know him?” he asked his workmates.

Shakes of the head.

“Okay. We’ll find you someone who does.”

He indicated for Artyom to sit in the cab, and the rest of the men returned to their platforms and grabbed their respective handles. They drove through the streets, low-hanging branches scraping the windshield. The driver had a knob on the steering wheel, which he used to drive the thing one-handed, grinding it around corners, driving so close to lampposts and walls that Artyom was sure they were going to crash, until he flicked the wheel in the right direction and the truck spun around miraculously on its own axis.

They left the city and, after a few minutes, turned off into a narrow side road arched with trees. They stopped at a barrier, where the driver flashed a card to a man in the booth, and they edged down a slope and onto a concrete platform.

Gulls dropped down from the sky and skimmed over a vast synthetic territory, a seascape that was entirely made up of things discarded. Bulbous plastic bags, strings of electrical cable, and soggy cardboard were congealed into a single, amorphous mass. Bulldozers surfed the waves of slosh, surging uncertainly against the semisolid waste. They looked as if they could tip over at any moment, but they climbed steadfastly before plunging back once more into the expanse.

The man from the back of the truck walked forward to a tin shed twenty metres away. Artyom sat in silence in the cab, the driver barely looking at him—not out of spite or revulsion, Artyom sensed, he was just a man who didn’t feel a need to make a connection, who was happy in his own thoughts. The man emerged from the shed and beckoned him with a wave, and Artyom opened the cab door and the air slithered into his nostrils, leaving a filmy residue against the back of his throat. He had never smelled anything like it. He clasped his hand to his nose and breathed only into the cupped space of his palm. As he stepped out onto the ground, a grey, cloacal muck encased his shoes. It was a struggle even to walk in this place.

“I asked around. He’s due back in a couple of minutes. You can wait here.”

“Thanks.”

“And you. Thanks for your help.”

They shook hands and the man climbed back on the truck. Artyom watched as it rounded one of the mounds and backed up against a low concrete wall, and spat out its chewed-up contents. The men stood around and shared a cigarette and talked amongst themselves, and when their truck was emptied they stood at their positions once more and drove up the laneway, back into the morning, into fresh air.

Artyom stood and watched, captivated, his hand still in front of his face, and took shallow breaths through his mouth. The graveyard of all that was once useful. It was all a kind of greyish brown, an anonymous sight. After a few minutes of looking, he was shocked to realize that there were some people moving through the rubbish, covered in this sludge, barely distinguishable from their surroundings. They walked with sacks slung over their shoulders and picked things up and examined them, turning them over in their hands. What a way of life. Rising every morning to scavenge around this hollow, barren terrain. This was not a place Artyom could ever have imagined, a place so man-made. He looked out at these people wading through filth, letting out a bleat of delight if they salvaged something they could sell, finding small traces of encouragement buried in all the desolation, their comrades running towards them to share in the excitement. And Artyom would return frequently to this moment in the following weeks, when he watched sickness engulf his father, when blood seeped out through the pores of his father’s skin, when he began to realize that he could never understand or predict the pathways that someone’s life could take; that the will of a desperate person was stronger than anything he knew and that fate unspools in its own stubborn way, beyond influence or rationale.

Maksim arrived and greeted him, full of consideration, and fed him and took him back to the shelter, returning three days later, having located his father in one of the hospitals. Maksim waited at the gate while they washed as well as they could and dressed in the best clothes they had brought with them. As they got in the car, she looked at her children and said, “Don’t we look well?” and smiled. It had been a month since Artyom had seen his mother smile. He found the sight so reassuring, as comforting as a fire on a winter’s afternoon.

At the front door of the hospital they used the last gold tooth to bribe their way into the building.

There was nobody else there. The place was wrapped in silence. The only sounds were the echoes of footsteps that rang through the corridors. It was disconcerting to see a public building so empty. A shrill silence. Their ears attuned to the constant turmoil of the shelter. Sofya said, “I think my ears are going to crack,” and Artyom knew what she meant.

Once the attendant had given assurances that he would take them to Artyom’s father, Maksim said his good-byes and wished them luck. He slipped some money into Artyom’s mother’s hand, but she refused to take it. They struggled for a few moments, grasping each other’s wrists, and Maksim kept saying, “Please,” even though he was the one leaving the money and, eventually, Artyom’s mother relented. He left them his phone number. “Please. You’ve no one to look after you. If you need help, I’ll help,” and walked out the door. Each one of them called out their thanks, but he batted it away, kept his head down.

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.