All That Is Solid Melts into Air (5 page)

“Thank you, Doctor. It’s good to be back to normal.”

“Good luck with the scarf.”

“You should wish the scarf luck instead, it has no idea what’s ahead of it.”

Grigory passes through the lobby, filled with people waiting to be admitted. Those without chairs sit against the walls, framing the perimeter of the room. There’s a chorus of coughing. A pool of tea lies in the middle of the aisle. He walks past it; it’s not his responsibility and, besides, he’s finished for the day. Three steps more and then he stops. He can’t bring himself to ignore it and walks back to the admissions desk, asking the receptionist to get some attendants to clean it up. When he sees her making the call he turns to go.

And she’s sitting there, in the front row.

Talking to a kid with floppy blond hair.

Pushing it away from his forehead.

Her hair is short, sharply cut; it still has its dark lustre, with the odd rogue strand of grey. Her face is slightly more defined, sinews in her neck beginning to show. She’s talking to the boy, and he realizes it’s Zhenya, her nephew, his nephew still, technically, an older version of the child he knew, beginning to take on the heft of a teenage boy, broader shoulders, a thicker face, and he can hear the inflections in her voice as she talks to the child and they reach him in waves, warm, subdued, utterly her.

Maria.

He says her name.

She turns and looks at him, and he realizes what an advantage it was to have noticed her first. She can’t control her reaction. The flicker of naked shock across her face, which softens into pleasure, familiarity.

“Grigory.”

He takes a step towards her.

“What are you doing here?”

She gestures to Yevgeni to hold up his hand, which he does, the fourth digit red and swollen, possibly fractured.

“He’s telling me he caught it in a door. Which is code, of course, meaning some kids attacked him.”

“You should have called me.”

“I didn’t want to bother you. We can wait.”

“Come through.”

“We can wait. We’ll be called soon.”

“Come on through. Please.” Grigory turns to Yevgeni. “Let’s get you looked after. I bet it hurts.”

“It’s not too bad,” Yevgeni says, attempting bravery.

“Do you know who this is, Zhenya? It’s Grigory. Do you remember him?”

Yevgeni looks at the doctor. He remembers the man carrying a present into their apartment. A large, wrapped box. But he doesn’t remember when this was or what was in it.

Grigory picks up an admissions form, indicates to the receptionist that he’ll take this case and leads them through the doors.

They walk in silence to Radiography. It feels too casual for them to speak while moving. And the boy is there—they need to get reacquainted on their own before they can talk in front of others.

Grigory steps aside for a short conversation with a radiographer then returns and speaks gently to Yevgeni.

“You’re going to get an X-ray of your hand. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes. It’s a photograph of my bones.”

“That’s right. Sergei here will look after you. It’ll only take a few minutes. When he’s finished, he’ll bring you back to us. Is that all right?”

Yevgeni nods. “Yes.”

“Come on then,” says Sergei. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

Sergei offers his hand to Yevgeni, but he doesn’t accept it, so instead Sergei begins to walk and Yevgeni follows.

Grigory hands Maria the admissions form to fill out. They both sit and she starts writing.

“He’s grown up. He’s not a child anymore. I barely recognized him.”

She takes a minute to reply, checking she’s filled in the form correctly, then places it on the small table beside her. She turns and looks at him, settling into the chair.

“Yes. He’ll be a teenager any day now. Mood swings and masturbation are imminent.”

Grigory laughs.

A pause.

“I knew I might run into you,” she says.

“Did you look forward to it?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Another pause.

“Yes. I wanted to see you. If I’m being honest.”

“I’m glad you came. You look well.”

“Thank you. I feel bad for keeping you working though, your days are long enough.”

“I’m sitting here, talking with you. This isn’t work.”

“Well, thank you anyway.”

Another pause.

“I thought about you on my way here this morning.”

“Really? Why?”

“I saw a pair of high-heeled shoes. The same as those black ones you used to wear all the time.”

He thinks about describing the sight to her, but stops himself. It would be too complicated to explain.

“Just one of those reminders that come from nowhere.”

Maria would like to ask if there were others, ask how often he thinks of her.

“Happy birthday,” she says instead, softly.

“Thanks.”

“No parties?”

“What do you think?”

“It’s possible. Maybe there have been changes I don’t know about.”

“No. No changes. And you?”

She leans back and rubs her neck, something she does when a conversation ventures into uncomfortable ground. They know all each other’s signals.

“Yes. There are changes.”

“A new apartment? A new job?”

“I’m doing some teaching now, a couple of days a week at the Lomonosov. I’m still living with Alina. That’s not what I meant, though.”

“I know.”

The texture of her skin. He can bring forth the sensation of touching it just by looking at her; it feels as if he were keeping perfect time to a long-forgotten dance.

The ceiling is made up of square foam tiles, one or two dislodged, revealing the darkness of the roof space above.

“I bought an allotment. I’ve been growing potatoes.”

“Good.” She smiles. “I’m glad. Where is it?”

“Out in Levshano. I go there on weekends and turn the soil and practice for when I’m deaf and half senile.”

She laughs her laugh.

“He’s become quite the talent.”

“Who?”

She nods in the direction of the radiography room.

“His piano playing. He’s now a fully blown prodigy. There’s talk of a scholarship to the Conservatory.”

“Really?” He looks to see if she’s joking; he can’t hear it in her voice.

“Really.”

“It happens that quickly? I remember he used to plonk away with gusto on my old upright, like any other kid in front of a keyboard. Three years and he’s a potential genius?”

“I know. It makes me wonder what the hell I’ve been doing with my time.”

“He looks so uncoordinated.”

“Well, they never look like athletes, do they, all that time spent tinkling away. He’s kind of a marvel, though. Alina’s got him a teacher in the Tverskoy. An old Jew. Tough as a boot. I’ve seen him at lessons. The teacher plays something, then Zhenya sits down and plays it back. Straight away. Without hesitating. No notation either.”

“Just like that? From nowhere?”

“From nowhere. I’m constantly having to fight away my jealousy. We’re saving to buy him a piano.”

“You’re saying the boy doesn’t even have a piano?”

“No. Nothing. When I said ‘prodigy,’ I wasn’t exaggerating.”

Grigory flattens his hair with his hand. She can tell he’s irritated.

“Why didn’t you ask for mine?”

“I couldn’t.”

“If he needs it. You know I can hardly play—it’s just gathering dust. You’re too afraid to pick up the phone?”

“Not afraid. Of course not. But maybe you’d moved on. Maybe there’s someone there now who plays. How can I ask anything of you?”

“There’s no one else.” An edge to his voice.

A pause.

“Okay. Thank you. I’m sorry. I’ve no right to be possessive. Don’t be annoyed.”

“I’m not.”

Another pause. Maria waits for his irritation to calm.

“I ask myself if you’re happy,” Maria says.

“I’m not unhappy.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No. It’s not.”

The door opens down the corridor and Sergei beckons them in.

He hands Grigory the acetate sheet.

“A clean fracture on the metacarpal.”

Grigory holds it to the light to confirm, then brings it over to Yevgeni.

“Have a look.”

Yevgeni looks up at the sheet.

“That’s my hand?”

“That’s your hand. See the black line, at the bottom of your fourth finger?”

“Yes. The bone is broken then?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be back to normal in a few weeks.”

Grigory sends Sergei off to get some painkillers, and they enter a treatment room. He takes a metal splint from one of the blue plastic boxes that sit on a rack in the corner. It looks like the tweezers Yevgeni sees in his mother’s purse, except thicker. Grigory sits him down and slides it carefully over the finger, strapping it in place.

“No piano for you for a while.”

“I know.”

“Are you sad about that?”

“No,” he says. Then turns to check if his aunt will repeat this to his mother, but she’s looking around the room pretending she hasn’t heard.

Grigory hands the X-ray to the boy.

“Keep it. Put it up on your bedroom wall. Not many other boys have a photograph of their bones.”

Yevgeni smiles up at him. “Thank you.”

Sergei returns with a small plastic container of pills, then leaves, winking at Yevgeni on his way out.

They say their good-byes in the car park. Grigory has offered to walk them to the Metro, but Maria refuses. He can tell by her voice that he shouldn’t argue. Grigory shakes Yevgeni’s good hand, tells him to be careful and to keep the dressing clean. He embraces Maria, her body so warm, slipping easily under his hands. They break, hesitantly, and Grigory reaches into his pocket for the plastic bottle and hands it over.

“Give him one if he can’t sleep. The pain should pass in the next few days.”

“Thank you.”

“The piano. You know where to find me.”

“Yes.”

“Come and find me.”

Maria takes in his words and turns and walks into the evening, Yevgeni beside her, holding his hand up, inspecting the dressing.

Chapter 3

A
small alarm clock sits on a locker beside the boy’s bed, but its bells will be silent, a silence that has carried through the past week. The boy wakes and stares at the longer hand, tracking its slow circle until the hour reaches five and grants him permission to peel off his blankets and enter the predawn light.

The light is different this morning. A blend of mauves and yellows, ruby-rich colours that, upon the moment of his awakening, make him wonder if he has overslept: surely the dawn has already arrived. He feels an instant tightening, the sensation particular to this crime, familiar to him from those rare days when he has emerged late for school or for milking, the surge of panic that sweeps over the muscles when time has stolen precious minutes or hours from their hold. He sits up and looks at the small clock and his brain assures him back to a relaxed state. The clock is never wrong and, even if it were, surely his father would have come to place a hand on his ankle, waking him gently.

Artyom is thirteen; the age has finally come when he can rise with his father, when he can hold a gun and listen to how men talk when they are alone. He is not of the age when he can add to the conversation—he knows this—but someday, this too will come.

This hour is new to him, the prerising hour, the hour when nothing is required but thought. Before this spring, his life was comprised only of activity, eating or preparing food, walking the cows down the rutted lane, lining them up for milking, then walking them back once more. Endless days defined by school and work and sleep. Occasionally there would be a party, on V-Day or Labour Day, when they would walk to the Polovinkins’ izba and join all the other families in the village. Where Anastasiya Ivanovna would play the balalaika and the men would sing army songs, solemn and low, until someone would turn the dial on the radio and they would spread into the lane and dance together, or if rain was falling, bump around on the porch and laugh. But this was a rare occasion, maybe three times a year, the whole village coming together, a village of twenty-five families.

On the first morning, on Monday, when he woke at four, the anticipation turning something inside him, he could think of nothing, but decided not to rise: his older sister, Sofya, slept six feet away and it would be wrong to wake her any earlier than necessary. Besides, his parents slept in the next room and his father would wake and dress and then be angry with him for adding another hour to his already long day. There was a possibility he would be denied the trip and would have to wait another year to shoot grouse with the men. One more year. He had pleaded with his father for so long now that another year would drain away the joy of anticipation, leave him murky and resentful.

And so, on that first morning, he simply lay in stillness and watched the rise and dip of the blankets that covered Sofya and the slow wash of light from a wakening sky, light that climbed the wooden walls and spilled across their neatly folded clothes resting on the two shelves of the opposite wall.

So curious, the colours he sees now, much different from the other mornings, seeping through the glass, making each aspect of the room seem precious, as though while sleeping they had been doused in wealth. His threadbare shirts seem gilded, the walls fashioned from a deep, exotic wood. He tries to think of a word with which to describe the sight to his mother when they sit over dinner this evening, but he doesn’t know the word yet. When she says it to him later, he forms it on his lips, repeating it silently, “luminous,” the shape of the word causing his lips to move like those of a feeding fish.

He thinks of his babushka who died during the winter. His father took the door off its hinges and laid it out on their table and laid her on top of it. A simple ritual that lifted the weight Artyom had felt during those days. Seeing her presented like that, the moment wasn’t as final as he’d expected it to be. Even though her skin had gained a greenish tinge, and her forehead was as cold as the stones they picked from the bare earth before ploughing. That night, when he took his turn to watch over the body, he spent his time staring at the candlelight dancing its way around the flaked paintwork on the boards, the gnarled iron of the latch. The light glowing then as it did now, softly vibrating around its edges.

When the hour hand finally nudges into position, Artyom rises and gathers his clothes and creeps into the kitchen. He pulls his pants over his underwear, laces his boots, drops some small logs into the stove, poking it back to life, and walks to the well outside.

Springtime. A freshness in the air. Everything growing, all around, everything feeling alive, blossoms and birdsong, all things paled in their coat of morning dew. He drops the bucket down and hauls it back up and cups the cold water under his armpits and over his chest, with its newly acquired trails of hair, and, leaning over the well, pours the rest of it around the back of his neck, so that it parts over his head then joins upon itself once more, falling back to its origin in one sinuous length.

He stands and wipes the water from his eyes, smearing it down his cheeks, and shakes out his head, the cold of the water charging through his skin.

He opens his eyes and the sky floods his retinas, a sky of the deepest crimson. It looks as if the earth’s crust has been turned inside out, as if molten lava hangs weightless over the land. The boy looks into the depth of the sky, looking further than he ever has before, seeing through to the contours of the universe.

Artyom can hear muffled conversation from the pathway and sees steam rising over the hedgerows. He moves back inside to the kitchen, where his father laces his boots. The boy covers himself with a shirt and rubs it against his body, so it soaks up the remaining drops of water clinging to his skin. He slides into a woolen sweater and wraps himself in a coat and hat and folds his hands into a pair of fingerless gloves.

“Wait until you see the sky,” he says to his father. “What a sky.”

“It’s the same sky we’ve always lived under. It’s just in a different mood.”

Artyom takes the large jug of milk from the fridge and pours it into two bottles, then seals and wraps them in wet rags before placing them in his satchel. His father hands him a box of cartridges and the shotgun, which he has already cracked open for safety, so that its two ends droop over his father’s arm as if winded. His father gives him a nod, which is a silent reminder of the safety practices they have discussed: keep the gun open unless loaded; keep the cartridges dry and in their box; never point a loaded gun anywhere but at the sky or the target.

They join the men in silence, footsteps crunching across the packed earth. He has known these men all his life, known them at times to be loud and funny and full of song, but on these mornings they pay respect to the repose of the land, smoking in unison, opening their mouths only for a quiet greeting or a suggested change of direction or when a bird is spotted.

The boy walks a little further back from the men, trailing the huddled bulk of the group. He likes to open and close the gun, enjoying the reassuring
twock
that comes from the closure of finely engineered metal. He pushes aside the clasp and opens the shaft and closes it again, the sound of something fitting as it should. He’s sure his father would look disapprovingly at such a habit and so he keeps his distance, keeps the pleasure his own.

They take the same route as other mornings, turning left past the Scherbak home, crossing a small stile over the drain, and heading into the fields towards the pond where the grouse will have returned once more, having forgotten the deadly lesson of the previous morning.

His father had taught him to shoot only two weeks beforehand. It was a Tuesday evening when he brought the extra gun home. The boy knew he had received it from one of the other men in the kolkhoz—the collective farm—in exchange for covering some extra shifts; which in turn compelled Artyom to treat the gun with a reverence; the fact that his father was willing to work for it, for him. His father brought it home but gave no indication of his efforts. To an outsider, it might have seemed that his father merely found the object sticking out from a hedgerow at the end of the lane, that it was simply an advantageous quirk which interrupted an otherwise unremarkable day.

Artyom knew differently, though.

His father showed him how to line up the sights of the gun, demonstrated for him the different stances required when kneeling or standing, and when the boy was finally allowed to take his first shot at a depressed football they had hung from a branch, he was astonished at the power of the kickback from the weapon, causing him almost to lose his balance; despite the fact that he had anticipated it, been warned of it, had lodged the butt of the gun firmly into the notch between his shoulder and his collarbone. The compressed power of a weapon. This was what it was to hold power in your arms.

Crossing the second field, Artyom changes his path slightly, walking in an arched trajectory so he can approach some of the scattered bullocks chewing lazily in the morning air. He likes to rub his hand along them, the quivering life they hold underneath their hairy exteriors passing itself into his fingers. He likes the packed concentration of muscle beneath the beasts. When he was younger, he and his friends would punch the cattle hard, hoping for a response, but they never managed to provoke anything more than a disinterested look.

Artyom runs his hand over the head of the nearest one and feels the morning dew slicking his fingers, the heat emanating from its neck. The dew feels different than on previous occasions, as though it has the texture of fine material, and the boy looks at his fingers and finds them tipped with liquid. He scans the body and sees a channel of blood slowly pouring from the animal’s ear, dripping to the grass below. He checks the next bullock, ten feet away, and finds precisely the same.

He deliberates whether to call his father, by now almost out of earshot, but the decision isn’t a difficult one: cattle are important here, the difference between livelihood and starvation; he had known this even as a small child. His father hears the shout and stops, irritated, but then makes his way back to the boy. Andrei’s son always displays good judgement. If he considers something worth stopping for, it is worth at least some consideration. The other men are as unhurried as the beasts; they rummage in their pockets and light another cigarette and watch and wait.

These cattle belong to Vitaly Scherbak. Though all the men work for the kolkhoz, each of them has an acre or two of their own upon which they keep a few thin animals. These cattle will spend next winter wrapped in old newspaper, sitting in stacked lumps in old fridges or packed underneath hard clay. For now, though, they stand, bemused, chewing their cud, looking at Andrei Yaroslavovych and his son walk amongst them, tilting their heads to the morning sun.

When Andrei returns he consults the group and they decide to let Vitaly sleep an extra hour. The beasts will need attention but they seem in no great distress and their neighbour could do with his rest. But the news brings some conversation to the remainder of their walk, murmurs of speculation as to what could possibly cause a whole herd to bleed in such a way. And Artyom is proud of this; he has gained further degrees of respect, a boy who could notice such things would soon no longer be a boy, could soon make jokes and observations and judgements of his own.

They nestle into the ditch and Artyom takes in the sky once more. The great, roiling sky, looming over the earth, drawing all things together in their relative insignificance.

The men load their guns and stabilize themselves with their legs. Each one focuses on a particular bird and readies himself to shoot. A single shot would scatter the flock and leave the rest of the men cursing their lost opportunities. They would shoot as a group, just as they worked as a group, drank as a group, lived as a group. This is Artyom’s favourite part, the moment before the moment, when he can feel the concentration spread evenly amongst the men, the tufts of air from their morning breath spreading outwards simultaneously. Breathing together, being together. A hushed voice speaks out—“ready”—not as a question but a statement, a confirmation of their collective state, and the shots are released, two rounds each, noise obliterating the silence like a fist launched through a glass pane.

They are skilled shots, all having been through military service. All hit their prey, with the exception of the boy, who has yet to become as attuned to the sensitivities of the gun, the barrel bobbling slightly in front of him, tracing out a small, uneven circle. All is as it should be.

It’s the following moments that mark the beginning of something distinctive, a tilt in the balance of the natural order, a moment they would relate in a thousand conversations that stalked their future lives.

Immediately after the first shot, the grouse flurry into the air, but when normally they would then glide in a smooth and rapid flight, low over the earth, today they rise and wobble back to ground, or skim along for a few feet before crashing to the grass, rolling in a drunken, graceless sprawl of floundering wings and buckling legs.

The men reload and shoot, but quickly stop, all of them feeling a strengthening unease at the absurd sight before them. They rise from the ditch and walk out into the field and flip the carcasses over with their toes, the remaining live birds still twisting in the grass, disorientated. Artyom pulls a sack from his satchel, collecting the game as he had done on other mornings, but his father tells him to put it away, these birds should not be eaten.

They have lived most of their lives on this small patch of earth. They know the tides of growth and season, the disposition of nature, its wonts and moods. They recognize a disharmony here, in the strange events of the morning. As they return to their homes, to sleeping families, they consider this strange morning, wondering if the strangeness would extend itself to them, to the humans who live in this place. And they know that this, as with all other things, would reveal itself with time.