All That Is Solid Melts into Air (32 page)

“He won’t say anything.”

“A single fucking squeak, so help me.”

Anatoly looks at Yevgeni, winks, and points towards the barber’s chair. Yevgeni sits down to watch.

Silence sweeps through the room, and the men get down to the serious business of the game. One of them whips the cards around the table, and they don’t take them up and look at them, as Yevgeni has always done the few times they played at home; instead they keep them flat, taking only a brief peek at the corners. They don’t use roubles to bet but various mechanical materials, a combination of nails and bolts and screws and nuts. There’s a mound of these in the middle of the table and various-sized clumps in front of the men. Yevgeni knows he should go. His mother and aunt and Mr. Leibniz will be waiting. But twenty minutes more. He has twenty minutes before he really needs to leave. He can make up some time by running. He watches and keeps his mouth shut and the game expands into sequences, ranging from the tense and perfunctory—where everyone is concentrated on the other, throwing little sidelong looks, one of them massaging some small bolts in his hands as though he is rolling a cigarette—to a more expansive mode, where they drink and laugh and talk of obscure things, of women and former jobs. And occasionally there’s an eruption, when someone takes a hand unexpectedly, when they brandish their cards, laying them out like a fan, wrists up, and there follows an outburst from the others, an intestinal moaning, hands slung towards the ceiling in frustration at the vagaries of the game. Yevgeni has never actually seen grown men play a game up close before. How odd it seems that, even at their age, they are caught up in the same dilemmas as he sees in his school yard, the laws of luck and skill.

Yevgeni can’t make out who’s winning. Each pile of chips seems to be roughly the same shape and size, with the exception of Anatoly’s, whose resources are quickly depleting, forcing him to play more erratically, until finally a hand comes down to Anatoly and another man. Anatoly has no more nails or screws in front of him; everything has been pushed to the centre of the table. Iakov drums the table lightly to ratchet up the tension, and Anatoly looks at him as if he might reach forward and pull Iakov’s fingers from their sockets, and so he stops, looking sheepish.

Anatoly lays his cards forward. Yevgeni can tell it’s an impressive hand by their expressions, the downturned mouths and tucked chins and faint nods. The man opposite takes a moment to display his own cards, enjoying the moment of strike, looking at Anatoly with a predatory eye. Yevgeni can tell by this look, even before the man shows his hand, that Anatoly has been defeated. Anatoly knows it too, a small death occurring throughout his features, the faint glaze of hope and expectation extinguished, and his face becomes even more shrunken, looking as though it might be swallowed by his shoulders at any moment.

He shakes hands reluctantly with the other man and walks from the table in disgust, sitting on the arm of the barber’s chair, suffering the ultimate cardplayer’s indignity, unable to participate in a game in his own home.

He sits beside Yevgeni, and Yevgeni folds his arms, an action that seems to age the boy by fifty years, drawing him into the bitter circumference of the luckless gambler. They watch a few hands, and then Anatoly leans in closer.

“You hungry? You want something to eat?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you.”

“I’m hungry. I have some ham blinchiki in the fridge. You want some?”

“Okay then. Thank you.”

“Okay then.”

Anatoly puts a hand on Yevgeni’s head to punctuate the end of their exchange. He leaves the room, and a couple of minutes later the lights go out. The men at the table curse and someone flicks a cigarette lighter and they are caught in tiny intimacy, the flame dancing shadows around the room. They call to Anatoly for some candles, and he calls back that he’s looking already and emerges a few minutes later holding a plate of steaming blinchiki in one hand and a candle in the other. He offers the plate to Yevgeni, who takes one of the blinchiki, and then Anatoly places the plate on the table and rummages in his pockets, drawing out some extra candles, and the men murmur their gratitude and continue their game as if nothing has happened. Anatoly, still holding his own candle, tilts his head to Yevgeni, gesturing towards the corridor.

“Come with me.”

Yevgeni follows him, touching the walls to guide himself, until Anatoly opens the door onto the street, where the city is shrouded in black, hiding from itself, betraying nothing. There’s a rich, syrupy darkness. A car turns a corner, and its lights reveal corners of buildings, stalks of lampposts, as though the street is being rediscovered, someone stumbling upon it after many years, blowing away the dust, smelling the musty air. The darkness turns all sound to a whisper. And then a floop and crackle. Yevgeni thinks for a fleeting second that the city is cracking, breaking into fragments, but there is colour now, a flash of blue coming from his left, and he turns to see blue bursts of fireworks light up the dark velvet air. He’s seen fireworks before, of course, but not without any surrounding light. Not when they’re the only colour to be seen in the whole city. There’s a line of people leaning against the opposing walls, and the blue wash clings to their features, a look of delight flaring across their faces. As his eyes adjust, Yevgeni can see others walking now, coming from the cusp of the hill, heads bobbing in the slope of their walk, edging slowly along the pavement, all points of orientation obliterated. Others in doorways become defined, old men on canes and women with mufflers and buckled boots watch the night. They gaze up and down the street and sometimes bend over to take it in from other angles. A large bird beats its wings above them, and Yevgeni looks up to see it gliding over, its span almost connecting the rooftops.

He feels a shove from behind. The men from the poker game pour onto the street, full of hurried purpose. Iakov grabs Yevgeni’s neck and steers him in their direction.

“Come on.”

“Where are you going?”

“We have some things to do.”

“I need to go home. I said I’d be home soon. My mother will be worried.”

Iakov stops, looks at him. Slaps him on the back.

“Of course. We’ll give you a ride. Besides, it’s too dangerous to walk.”

A swell of blue light propels them forwards.

MARIA BOLTS DOWN
the stairs, two at a time, feeding the banister rail through her right hand. She’ll find a phone box, maybe down near the Metro stop. She doesn’t want to call from too near her building in case they trace it back. She may trust Danil by now, but she doesn’t know how prominent he is, how much attention he attracts.

She’s careful where she steps. Can’t take a tumble now. Watch out for needles, broken glass. There’s a wad of toilet paper here and there, and she doesn’t want to know.

Mr. Leibniz was right, they’ve mollycoddled the boy. Apart from everything else, this is his moment. Where is his ambition? Does he want to be like all the other kids? Does he see the lives around him and think he wants one of those, wants to dull his imagination, spend all his evenings watching TV, or drinking and talking about inanities with no end in sight? All these weeks she’d been thinking that he didn’t like the pressure, but maybe it was the possibility of success that scared him, that he may have to stand apart in this world. Be something other than average. She knows that if she sees him outside she’ll grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Tell him there are only so many opportunities in life, even fewer if you come from where he comes from.

She bounds down the last flight and comes to a stop beside the lifts. She needs to hurry but not look as if she’s hurried. She doesn’t want people asking why she’s running to a phone box. Word will get back to Alina, or others. She’ll be asked why she didn’t make the call from home.

She hands around some cigarettes, asks the men drinking meths if they’ve seen a boy wandering around. They look at her, trying to figure out what she wants to hear before answering. She doesn’t wait to listen to their replies: she should know better than to ask.

The faces of dead soldiers leer down at her, the pages almost transparent with the lights on behind them, phantoms all of them.

She finds herself scanning cars, trying to make out if there are figures in the front seats waiting for her to pass, whispering into radios while heaters on the dashboard trickle out streams of warm air. She heads towards the phone box near the school. She waits at the traffic lights, and ranks of cars pass slowly by, ploughing through black sludge, causing it to fan out from their tyres.

They’d be leaving now, Anna and Nestor and the rest of her colleagues, no doubt resenting her, having to give up their evening to hear some spoiled brat. The lights turn red but she doesn’t cross. She wonders what happens if tonight doesn’t go ahead. Will she need to flee? Word will surely get out. You can’t have a plan as extensive as theirs and keep it a secret for too long. The supplies alone will give them away. Danil may have been able to get them into the building without any fuss, but try getting them out again. Her fate is being played out without her. She has no control over the next few hours. Why did she not pick Zhenya up herself? Too much faith, that’s why. All of this turning on the fulcrum of a nine-year-old boy. Of course it was bound to go wrong. She crosses the road at the next opportunity and passes the school, graffiti tainting the lower part of its façade, crawling up past the window ledges, coming to an abrupt end at the height of an outstretched arm. People pass, returning late from their shifts, many with dust or dirt on their shoes and jackets, determined to get home, their bellies cavernous. A twist of her shoulders to avoid a collision. It’s not just manual workers though, unskilled production drudges like herself; men walk by in suits as rumpled and baggy as their skin, looking downwards, too weary to face the horizon, their only wish to be alone.

She reaches the phone box, saying a silent prayer that the thing still works. She doesn’t grab the handset, she clutches the cord instead, pulls on it, and it doesn’t come away in her hand. Miracle of miracles. She pushes some kopecks into the slot, takes the number from her pocket, and dials. Even in this, a phone call, she’s taking an enormous risk, the possibility of a recorder automatically spooling in some dark room, her voice transferred to tape. The call connects and she hears a single beep, a machine; it could be Danil’s, it could be someone else’s. There should be a code, she thinks, some prearranged, ambiguous phrase, but there isn’t one. She thinks quickly and says enough to get the message across: “He isn’t back. We can’t go ahead,” and then hangs up.

She puts the handset down and walks hurriedly away. The pace is probably unnecessary; they can easily find her if they are in fact looking. She should go home and pack a bag, get a train somewhere, try to mitigate the risks for Alina and Zhenya. She can be out of the city in an hour or two.

Everything goes dark.

Maria stops in terror. Her long-held fear has come to pass: blindness has come upon her. She used to wake in the middle of the night and wonder if she had lost her sight. The fear is still so present that she insists on keeping the hall light on, so when she wakes in this state she can look at the glowing seam under the door and reassure herself. She never thought it would happen while she was still awake.

But no, there are shapes, a moon, cars cresting the hill. Her panic releases. The power is out. She starts to run. Alina will be in a state. If she had managed to stave off fearing the worst, she will no longer be able to do so. Her child is out there, in the black. Her worst fears will be unleashed.

Maria runs for a few minutes, then stops; she has no idea where to turn off for home. She crosses the road and then crosses back. All the shadows the same, all the buildings indistinguishable without their surface features visible She needs to find the school, a different building from the rest. She can navigate her way from there.

She slows and passes two men and sees their attention fixed on a point behind her, hands held in the air bearing witness, and so she turns, looks where they are looking. Fireworks blossom over the city, umbrellas of bright blue sparks burst open, distributing delight, a gasp of wonder from unseen figures nearby.

She walks steadily now, her heart rate returning to normal, and she finds the school and turns and traces her way home by instinct. She moves in the opposite direction to everyone else, people emerging from the buildings to stand in the road and stare, people coming together to stand and gaze and murmur speculation with strangers and friends alike. They yearn for surprise, a moment of wonder, which they’ll chew over and savour and return to in the months ahead.

Maria finds the multilayered voices calming. Her childhood fear has abated now. Lights will return—already she feels certain of this—bringing Zhenya with them. She’ll pack a bag and be gone from their lives before morning. The unknown holds no fear for her; she’s spent enough years swaddled in ignorance. At this very moment, on the other side of her country, the sun is rising. So much out there for her. She sees the horizon pushing out like an old carpet being unrolled.

She cups her hands to her cheeks to warm them and realizes she is sweating, despite the cold. She turns in to the courtyard. Flat, grey shapes all around. Anyone who has felt the urge to do so has left home already, so she is alone down here, figures bobbing on balconies above her. Alina is one of them, no doubt.

She finds her building and traces her hand across the number on the porch just to make sure. She yanks open the door and can feel the concrete under her feet, markedly different from the snow and gravel. The crimson tip of a cigarette whirls in the air at waist level. Someone is sitting there.

“Hello?” A man’s voice, vulnerable, unsure.

She pauses.

“Hello. Is there someone there, please?”

She should walk on. This is not a place to speak to an unknown man, unprotected. But there’s something in the voice. She stops.