All That Is Solid Melts into Air (13 page)

November 1986

Chapter 11

S
ometimes Maria looks up and a day has passed, or longer, a month. Most evenings Alina, her sister, asks how her day was and she replies, “Unremarkable.” And they add up, those unremarkable days. Days that, when you look back on them, even two weeks later, retain not a single distinctive moment. And if she’s to admit the thing she fears most, it’s this: the stealthy accumulation of unremarkable months, the rows and stacks of nothing, the unfilled columns when she sits down to account for her life.

She turns from her lathe and looks up at the small, dust-caked clock that sits over the door to the locker room. It’s quarter past four, and Maria remembers her lunch—tea and herring and beetroot—remembers sitting with Anna and Nestor, but nothing else. How can the rest of it have escaped her? How can another day have almost ended?

In the past few years, life has become unrecognizable to her, existing somehow outside of her; in the passage of the seasons, in the momentum of a city.

“Maria Nikolaevna.”

Her line supervisor is standing behind her, clipboard, as ever, at the ready. He’s a small man with a string around his glasses that he never uses, preferring instead to perch them on the top of his forehead.

“Are you with us?”

“Yes. Sorry, Mr. Popov.”

“Mr. Shalamov wants to see you.”

“Yes, sir. Should I go straight to see him or get cleaned up first?”

“Mr. Shalamov doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Shalamov is their personnel officer. He oversees their initial training, and that’s the last most people see of him. Hearing his name puts Maria instantly on edge. She turns off her lathe and makes sure that the red emergency stop, the one at her knees, is also pressed. Two fragments of an unconscious routine, two more actions that add up to serious time when you calculate the repetition.

He may not like to be kept waiting, but she’ll step into the toilet nonetheless, put her hair back, wash her face. Because it’s a universal law that the prettier you look, the more things will go your way. Sometimes she thinks her entire education was based on this. If she learned nothing else in school, it was how to prime yourself for passing men.

She stands over the washbasin, takes a nail scrub to her hands, scoops some water up and over her face, and hears it shatter on the floor around her. Her hands are hard now, calloused, which is definitely an undesirable trait, but there’s no way of avoiding it. They don’t use gloves at the lathes, even though regulations require them to, because two years ago Polina Volkova, three workstations down, had the machine catch her glove, and her hand went with it. Half a second of gore, in which her hand went from being a hand to a shredded tangle of bone and ligament. So they wear gloves according to the regulations, but they don’t wear gloves according to reality. It does mean, though, that her face is usually clean and clear, because her calloused hands have just the right texture to keep her skin invigorated. So there are compensations.

This job was not of her choosing, and yet she’s not necessarily ungrateful for it, knowing the alternatives.

She runs her fingers along the bases of her eye sockets, massaging them. Hazel eyes, as dark as her hair, full and alert. She pulls her lips over her gums and rubs a wet finger across her teeth. Strong, symmetrical teeth, a point of envy amongst her friends. Her gums a little more prominent than she would like, so that in photographs she’s careful to contain the full breadth of her smile.

Grey hairs are multiplying across her head, with no discernible pattern. She thinks of Sunday mornings when Grigory would lie beside her and pick out the rogue strands like those gorillas on the nature programmes that forage through their mate for lice. When he couldn’t isolate the single hair and plucked two or three at once, she would let out an involuntary whimper, which he found amusing. These sessions would end with him coaxing her back from her irritation, smoothing his hands over her. Lazy Sundays.

She ties her hair back and adjusts her fringe.

On her return to Moscow, not long after she and Grigory were married, she secured a job as a staff journalist at a notable newspaper, where she worked her way up to features writer. A position she held for several years until some underground articles she’d written came to light. What followed was a dangerous time for her. She had to realign all aspects of her personality, was forced to erase her outspoken nature; every word she spoke from that moment would be sifted through and interpreted.

She takes in the image in the glass. A certain slackening to her features now, a looseness, subtle but undeniable. Wrinkles like sketch marks smattered around her eyes. Fine details that perhaps she alone can see, but she can’t stave off the thought that middle age is on its way. Three years of working here are beginning to take their toll. She wonders what she’ll look like in another three.

And yes, it’s true she’s reconfigured herself to become what they’ve asked of her. She dresses anonymously, she nods her head in agreement with almost any statement floated in her direction. She has made it a point to avoid eye contact with everyone other than a few trusted friends, so she walks with her head bowed, a kind of self-containment, moving like a vessel, constant, never deviating from her course. But she’s still here, surviving.

Maria takes off her package-brown work coat, bangs the dust off it, and then puts it on again. It drops shapelessly around her. She’s lost weight in the past year. Her cheekbones protrude, her arms feel slightly insubstantial. There is only so much food that she and Alina can queue for, only so many hours in the day, although she’s started to have decent meals in the canteen of the university—another reason to love the building.

She slaps her cheeks to give them some colour. She knows Mr. Shalamov likes his employees to look vibrant, full of the joys, despite requiring them to spend all these dogged hours in this spartan shed. Should she leave the coat off or keep it on? She keeps it on. Mr. Shalamov will surely mention its absence, and it’s not as if she has a tantalizing figure.

Okay.

She glides out the door and moves hurriedly to the metal steps that lead to the management offices. Rough squares of brown carpet tiles. A secretary at the desk with a typewriter in front of her, a telephone, and nothing else. The secretary looks at her with deadened eyes. Maria thinks that this is a woman whose days pass in staggered increments of time, her hours comprised of finely sliced segments. Answer a phone, five minutes pass. Type up dictation, fifteen minutes pass. No other workers to talk to. Managers who see her as barely human. Things could be worse. She could be this woman.

“I’m here to see Mr. Shalamov.”

“Yes. He’s been waiting.”

She says this with distaste. As if Maria should feel guilt at keeping the man from the reports he has to flick through, from the nap he has to take.

She makes a call and replaces the receiver. Maria stands in front of the desk. The woman types while Maria waits. A few minutes pass. The phone rings, she answers it.

“He’ll see you now.”

“Thank you.”

Maria walks into his office with its large plate-glass windows that look out over the factory floor, so self-contained that Maria can hear her feet pad along the carpet. The silence makes what’s happening out there seem like an intricate mime. Mr. Shalamov is standing with his back to her, looking out over the waves of industry. He doesn’t turn to acknowledge her. She doesn’t speak. While she waits she looks down to her empty stool. Her comrades at her workstation going through the same motions, moving as fluidly as any of the larger machinery in the midground, where aluminium panels and steel parts grind forward in endless sequences. A series of interlocking arcs and twirls. Nothing out of sync in this moving tableau.

ON HER FIRST MORNING,
having resigned herself to a future of repetition, she was surprised at the comfort that she was deriving from the crowd, the sense of common purpose, each individual working their way through a collective life.

The scale of it was astonishing, ten thousand employees. And there are other complexes nearby: an ammonia plant, a chemical-processing factory; a vast migratory movement makes its way from the city on buses and trolley cars and marshrutkas and she is one of them, stepping in tandem with hordes of scarfed women and hooded men.

She wonders sometimes if perhaps she was born for this, that this life of hers was inevitable. Isn’t this how people truly live: clocking in for work; whispered, surreptitious parties on a Friday night; duck feeding on a Sunday?

The first sight of the factory made her pause in shock, made her realign her sense of scale. When she passed through the enormous, hulking doors, six times taller than a person, her superintendent met her and recited the facts: the assembly line a kilometre long, a new car produced every twenty-two seconds of every minute of every hour of every day. A sea of calibrated metal, waves of industry pushing onward with meticulously timed precision, a constellation of spinning parts.

The factory floor.

There was a grating whirr that vibrated into her feet, and Maria knew she would become wedded to this sound. She knew instantly that she would carry this noise home, sleep with it for maybe years, perhaps until death. There was a timeline here that was permanent and previously alien. There was a time clock, a punch machine. Punch in and out. The superintendent gave her a card and let her know it was an imprisonable offence to cheat the clock. He had personally sent employees to prison. The machine punched perfectly symmetrical holes, exactly in the centre of the boxes.

There were time slots and days, printed in embossed type.

Her name in embossed type. Maria Nikolaevna Brovkina.

And she took this card five days a week, for the past three years. Punching in and out, marking her time.

Maria worked into the work, eventually finding comfort in camshafts. It had taken months for this to manifest itself—it was endless and repetitive and crushingly dull—but after a time the religious beauty of the task emerged. The detail, the exactitude required in working the lathe. How deep can an action go? How perfect can a human act be? Maria worked to a precision of thousandths of a millimetre. A micron, they call it. A micron.

And the repetition.

And the repetition.

And the repetition.

Guiding the mechanical arm as fluently as if it were her own.

Over time, Maria found her body easing into and around the action. Her body incorporated and enveloped it. Drinking water in the kitchen, a mid-night, mid-sleep drink, and her arm would reach for the tap in the same flowing arc as the motion at her workbench. Her hand clutching the glass with a regularity only she knew.

Sometimes she works with her eyes closed. A dangerous act, dangerous machinery, but she can feel the precision of the task with a clarity that she still finds astounding.

MR. SHALAMOV TURNS
and points to the chair in front.

“Please.”

She sits, resisting an urge to take out a handkerchief and place it down on the seat to gather any dust she’s brought in.

“Mrs. Brovkina. Thank you for coming to see me.”

Mrs. Brovkina. It’s still her name, of course, and she’s seen it written down often enough. But no one uses her last name. It sounds odd still to be linked to Grigory, and it saddens her to hear it, carrying as it does a residue of failure.

“Of course.”

“I’ve been looking at your file.”

She can’t think of any recent discrepancies in her work, but of course that doesn’t mean someone hasn’t perceived, or even invented, any number of offences.

“Comrade Popov has been very complimentary. He says you’re a very consistent worker. In fact, your production rates are in the higher percentiles.”

She feels no relief. The statement is a prelude. He’s been through this process far more often than she.

“I try hard to contribute to the collective effort.”

“Of course. Just as we all do.”

She has spoken too early, singled herself out, made it sound like there are others who don’t contribute. She could qualify her statement, but it’s better to let it rest. Let him say what he has to say.

He lists off the major entries in her records. Dates of training. The promotion she was given last year. She can’t help but think of Zhenya and Alina, can’t help thinking about the size of their apartment. She doesn’t think she could go home if she is dismissed from this job. She couldn’t be any more of a burden than she is already.

He puts down the file.

“Tell me, what did you think of the lecture last month on the history of our automotive industry?”

So that’s it.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Shalamov, I was unable to attend.”

“Of course, yes. I see it now in our attendance records. Well then, what about the presentation on ‘Major Contributors to the Engineering Effort’?”

“I was also unable to attend that presentation.”

“I see. Of course. As a matter of personal interest, would you be able to name a major contributor to our cause in the field of engineering?”

The choice is to be arrogant or ignorant. It’s not arrogance, though. It’s knowledge. Why should she be afraid of such a thing?

“I know that Konstantin Khrenov was a pioneer of underwater welding.”

He sits back and nods, impressed. They both know that not many of his employees could pull a name like that just out of the air.

“He didn’t feature in our lecture, Mrs. Brovkina. That’s very specific knowledge to have at your fingertips. I learned about Mr. Khrenov’s work in my second year of specialist study. Where was it that you heard about the man?”

They drag it out. This is what they do. Just ask a straight question. Just get to the point. It irritates her to have to dance through this minefield. She remembers to take a breath. There can’t be any traces of frustration in her voice.

“In my previous work, I had some contact with underwater welders. They spoke to me at length about their processes and history.”