All That Is Solid Melts into Air (15 page)

Maria folds some shirts. Alina sprays water from a plastic bottle and runs the iron over the damp patches, and steam expands into the room.

It’s time for a drink.

It’s a thing that has sneaked into her life: a drink or two and the evening counts its own way to its conclusion. And she’s not ashamed. It’s a fringe benefit of manual labour, no one questions your need to unwind. She stands on the balcony, glass in hand, with a clear bottle, its white label inscribed with one word in large black type:
VODKA.
There is a pleasure, she finds, in its unadorned seriousness. The stark quality of the label eliminates the trivial drinker.

This is Maria’s moment of quiet reflection.

What are my ambitions?

Sometimes she thinks into the middle of her unborn child’s life. It’s not a ghost that follows her around, she doesn’t look at other kids and wonder what colour its eyes would be or if it would have difficulty tying its laces. But she sees imagined scenes. A daughter being fitted for a dress. Sitting for dinner in the apartment of a bright young couple, proud and radiant, though she doesn’t know if her child is the man or the woman. Odd, imagined moments. Snatches of an alternative life.

When she had the procedure—as they kept referring to it—she didn’t tell him beforehand. He is a doctor, he spends his life healing, repairing—there was no way he would allow her to go through with it. Instead she left a note in his jacket pocket. Just the facts, the decision, no pleading for understanding, no fleshing out of her thoughts.

Afterwards, when she had had a few hours’ rest, she took a taxi home, bleeding and weak, and when she opened the door she saw him sitting on a wicker stool beside the stove. He held the note towards her, the scrawled lines she’d left to explain herself. Even in her weakened state she knew it was now a piece of evidence, and he held it up, not needing to voice the question, his eyes asking it for him:
Who are you?

Of course, their marriage couldn’t survive such a thing. That too was a calculation on her part. It was not only her actions that would hurt him, it was the independent nature of them, demolishing the closeness that had grown between them. Grigory is a man who listens, who speaks directly to the centre of things. This is why she fell in love with him. At parties he would stand in the corner and, inevitably, people would divulge their lives to him. Teary-eyed women returning from their conversations with him would clasp her forearm as they passed, making eye contact, thanking her, acknowledging her luck in finding such a partner, and her impulse would be to smash her glass into their teeth.

Sometimes, after work, she would visit him in the hospital, and he would be mid-surgery and she could look through the viewing window and watch the refined world in which he functioned, the ghostly lights and bodywear, the goggles and instruments, the small, highly skilled gathering focused upon a single point. She would stand beside the family of the patient as they held hands and wept, mumbling prayers under their breath, watching what she was watching, their loved one at the mercy of her loved one, and sometimes, from a distance, she would observe him—unaware of her presence—speaking to the families in his white coat, and they would kiss his hand or fold into despair depending on his words, and how could she come home, after witnessing all this, and ask him to take on her worries? How could she do this when she wouldn’t even allow herself to be irritated when he left empty containers in the fridge or stubble in the bathroom sink?

In their final weeks, they spoke to each other only through functions: “Can you pick up some milk?”; “The lightbulb in the bedroom needs changing”; “Are there any clean towels?” There were times she felt close to him, reminded of what she once had, when a tremor of their intimacy would stir her into recognition. The scent of him. Or when he reached past her or stood near her, the disparity in their size, the natural protection he offered. In these times she wanted to reach out, place a hand on him, say a vulnerable word, knowing this was an impulse he shared. But they couldn’t bridge that void, articulate what they needed to articulate. Their language had been unlearned, and it had become too painful now to recall.

Now Maria has a folding bed that they keep behind the couch. Maria has two pairs of shoes, one of these so worn that water seeps through, and so they are only halfway practical for six months of the year. Maria has one pair of earrings and underwear so greyed it looks, and feels, as if it has been fashioned out of concrete. She has a faltering nephew and a long-suffering sister. She has a duty to them.

She doesn’t have ambitions anymore, she has responsibilities.

She flicks matches over the railing. They spit hot flame and twirl calmly to the ground, end over end, disappearing from sight after four floors. She’ll run out of matches and look up, turn around, walk into the kitchen, and ten years will have elapsed. Already she’s surrounded by the past. It seeps into every moment. Like the smallest things that remind her of her father. Someone cracking an egg. Someone sweeping snow from the bottom of their trousers. In the subsequent years there were no letters or postcards, no word sent back about him, and this leads her to believe that whatever happened had happened quickly. If he was locked away somewhere, they would eventually have heard about it. So there was no prison. They didn’t even know if it was the KGB or someone whom her father had informed upon, some family whose lives he had ruined.

After the disappearance, their mother came to Moscow and joined the Lubyanka queue for information. The final refuge of the most desperate. Maria was already studying in the Lomonosov by then, and Alina was married in the city, living south of the river. They took the queuing in shifts, Maria and Alina joining her when they could. They brought each other soup and warm blankets. A ten-day queue. The line snaking from Chistoprudny Prospekt all the way down to Nikolskaya Ulitsa, coming to an end at that small brown door where they had a three-minute audience with a KGB officer who told them, “No information, come back next week”; and people would walk from that door and return to the back of the line, beginning it all again.

Eventually, after a month of this, their mother crumbled. She lay in bed for weeks, wailing and sleeping. They fed her with whatever they could find, stewing old vegetables, leftovers from the market. Often her bed was soiled, and one sister would wash her down while the other scrubbed the mattress.

They placed her in a residential home and, to pay for it, Maria took work in Kursk as a cleaner in a hospital, moving from Moscow because any job that doesn’t need a qualification is filled years in advance. So she went to Kursk and cleaned and saved and Alina stayed in the capital and did the same and they’d visit their mother on alternate months and look into her eyes and search for a gleam of life, hoping she would show some signs of progress.

Alina joins her.

“He’s in bed?” Maria asks.

“Yes. He’s tired. Have you some left?”

The bottle is passed. Alina takes a shot, then smacks her lips, letting out a rasp.

“Look at us. Disappointed women firing down cheap vodka on a concrete balcony. My diagnosis is that we need men,” Maria says.

Alina smiles. “Yes. Men. Remember what they were like.”

“I’m not fussy, you know, not now, I’ll take any old thing: fat, missing teeth, hairy back. One who never remembers how to use a knife and fork. Even one who spits out his tobacco on the streets.”

“Ah. A man who spits. Is there anything sexier?”

“Nothing. Nothing that God has created in his blessed name can be sexier than my fat, hairy-backed, gap-toothed, tobacco-spitting man.”

“Don’t forget the bad table manners.”

“Oh yes, a man who spits on the street and eats with his fingers.”

They shoot out a brief giggle and pass the bottle between them.

They once had men, both of them. They are attractive; Maria can view this objectively, or can at least try to. Perhaps it will happen again.

She phoned Grigory three times after their meeting this spring. Two calls to his apartment. Another to the hospital. His secretary said he was away on business but she’d give him the message when he returned. Maria is half glad she didn’t get through, though. Yes, it would be good to see him, to have him in her life once more. But what then? They couldn’t go over old ground. She couldn’t take him through all her reasons, all that happened around that time. It’s not something she can burden him with.

And yet. Those few minutes in the hospital, when they waited for Zhenya’s X-ray, were such a comfort. Simply to be in his presence was a recognition of the connection they had, a reminder that only the end of their marriage was fatally flawed.

Alina’s husband was killed in Afghanistan. Serving the cause. Maria wasn’t sorry and neither was Alina. He was violent and bigoted; brooded in the apartment; drank with his friends; drove military jeeps into walls just to see how sturdy they were. He cleaned his nails with his army knife, thought it gave him an edge, but it only served to intensify his pettiness, his military vanity. They never spoke of him but both frequently wondered how he had managed to produce Zhenya, the Mendelssohn-obsessed, little, lovable freak.

“He wants a pet.”

“Zhenya?”

“Of course Zhenya, who else do we talk about? He wants a parrot.”

“And? I would have thought it wasn’t particularly strange for a nine-year-old boy.”

“Well, it’s not, except for the fact that he is who he is and lives where he lives. But that’s not why I brought it up. It’s what he wants it for, that’s the killer.”

“Well?”

Alina pauses. It’s the privilege of the older sibling to tell a story with impeccable timing and poise. Her ability to hold Maria in thrall has never wavered since the two of them shared a bed as children and Alina told rambling, fantastical tales. Stories featuring villains with several limbs and princesses with secret, unattainable powers and lines that could cut you bare, faultless scalpel lines that described entire universes in an instant. She honed this gift to early teenhood, Alina the master storyteller, and they can both feel it rise up again, that authority she holds when she wants to titillate her little sister.

“He wants me to teach it to talk.”

She pauses. An exquisite pause.

“So he can still hear my voice if I die.”

And they look at each other, the pathos of the simple request working its way into the backs of their eyes, and then they buckle into laughter at precisely the same moment, tears streaming down, their lungs heaving with the gale of unfettered, unrelenting mirth, because they both know this child, both have an understanding of his kooky ways, the kid who spends entire days humming Mendelssohn but can’t get his timing right, who can recite multiplication tables up to obscene numbers but can’t handle long division, and they let all that has been pent up flow through their ribs and find its expression in full-mouthed hysterics.

After it breathes itself out they find themselves hunched against the wall. Maria lights a cigarette, and they compose themselves under the bare bulb’s light. And now they have two items to pass, the vodka and a cigarette.

Maria is the first to break the silence.

“Another city, where would you go?”

“East or west?”

“Whichever.”

“The big ones. The ones with good TV and plenty of hair spray. Paris, London, New York. Maybe Tokyo.”

“Tokyo?”

“Yes, the lights. I imagine they have a neon skyline. And the cramming of people in the underground train. And to be a foot taller than everyone else. To look down on everyone from a height. To be the queen of the rush hour.”

“Tokyo. But you’d have to bow fifty times a day.”

“Well, that would be another reason. The bowing, all these little people paying homage to me. And you?”

“A city with a white beach and women who drink from fancy glasses. A city with palm trees. I’ll do what foreigners always do, open a bar on the beach. You can come and sit, wear large sunglasses, be mysterious, and Zhenya can play for tips, take requests from drunk honeymooners. Maybe even get a little action for himself.”

Alina palms her on the side of the head. More a sweep of the hair than an actual strike.

“What, the boy will never have sex?”

Alina scrunches her face and flails around Maria’s head, both laughing again. With who else could they let their guard down like this, become schoolgirls again, enjoying surreptitious cigarettes and speculating about boys?

The moment passes and they take another drink.

“The hand exercises. You know about these?” Maria asks.

“Of course I know. The kid’s obsessed. I come to wake him in the morning and he’s lying there with his arms up towards the ceiling, bending those skinny wrists.”

“You know about the rose clippers?”

Alina stops laughing, alert now. She doesn’t like it when Maria notices something about her boy before she does.

“What about them?”

“Nothing. A funny thing, that’s all.”

An edge to her listening.

“So funny that you won’t say what it is?”

“Well. It’s nothing. I found him a couple of weeks ago, that’s all. He was clenching and unclenching a pair of rose clippers.”

Maria does the action.

“Where did he get them?”

“Evgenia Ivanovich downstairs—you know how she likes her flowers. It’s not important. Anyway, he’s clenching and unclenching and I ask him what he’s doing and of course he says, ‘Nothing.’ So I keep pushing and he says he’s strengthening his hand. And I say, ‘Why are you strengthening your hand, surely it’s strong enough?’ And he says, ‘When I’m in the audition, and the other kids are there and we shake hands. I want to crush them. I want them to be scared of me.’ ”

Maria tails off as soon as she’s said this. When it comes out of the mouth of a nine-year-old, one as bedraggled as Zhenya, there’s a ridiculousness in the schoolboy bravado. But the words coming cold, straight out of her own mouth, carry a supreme sadness. Even music, beautiful melodies become an instrument of power here. The kid is constantly surrounded by forces that want to crush him to dust.