All That Is Solid Melts into Air (18 page)

If this same photographer had wandered into their homeland, would there be anything left to photograph? Only two shades left in that place. The dark sky and the white land, white as the clouds that streamed over this landscape in America. Artyom thinks of the tyre hanging from the oak tree outside their house, swinging lonely. Every part of his home, everything he touched, saw, put his weight upon, is underground. But he can’t imagine this, his mind isn’t able to erase all that he has known. When he finally goes back he knows he’ll feel like a cosmonaut walking on the moon.

IN MINSK,
when they left his aunt Lilya’s building, they had no energy or desire to walk to the bus station, to wait in line and sign forms and be directed to a shelter which, they knew from the direction of the walking crowds, was at the other side of the city. Standing outside the apartment block, they could hear chaos still hanging in the air. Artyom’s mother walked as if carrying a weight—the way she clung to Sofya—and all three of them wanted, to their core, a place to lie down, somewhere they could close their eyes. They could face whatever would come tomorrow. They just couldn’t face it at that moment.

The weather was warm enough to sleep outdoors, but they would be exposed to whoever passed by. Artyom decided it would be too much of a risk and, besides, his mother needed some privacy, needed some time to take in her rejection.

Opposite them was a long row of metal shelters, low sheds made of the same tin sheeting as the roof of their izba. Each shelter was sealed with a padlock, and some had pieces of furniture outside them or other castoffs: a wing mirror from a truck, a bicycle seat with a bent shaft. Artyom looked around to see if anyone was watching and then walked the whole line of them, pulling at each lock, until finally, after covering fifty metres, finding one that wasn’t closed properly, he pulled open the door, hunched over, and walked inside, bumping into unknown objects. He stretched up until his fingers located the cable, which he traced to a switch at knee level just inside the door. He flicked it on.

There was a line of old paint pots sitting along the tin wall and, now that he could see them, he could also smell their biting chemicals. In the centre, there was a space large enough for them to lie down, and he could make out thick rolls of dense grey material, stiffer than cloth, which stood on end, dry to touch. It would be enough.

He stepped outside and beckoned his mother and sister, and when he saw Sofya wave back he ventured inside again and set about laying the material down on the metal floor.

When his mother arrived, she said the material was “undercarpet” and Artyom didn’t know what this was and when she explained Artyom found such a thing hard to comprehend, people who were rich enough to put carpet under more carpet.

He took the jacket from the door and put it on his mother. She tried to refuse, to give it back to him to wear instead, but Artyom and Sofya insisted and his mother didn’t have enough will to resist. They cleared their pockets of whatever food they had left—a few carrots and some ends of bread—and they ate quietly, a grim picnic, until Sofya said, “What is that smell?” and they scrunched their noses up and, it was true, there was a sickly sour smell. Like meat gone bad. Artyom’s mother lifted her armpits and smelled underneath them and folded her mouth in disgust and Artyom couldn’t help but laugh at this; his mother was always so insistent on cleanliness. There were so many nights after pig feeding that he came home and she sent him to the well and supervised from the window as he scrubbed himself. He laughed and Sofya laughed too and leaned into their mother and sniffed her armpits, like a runt looking for a nipple, exaggerating the action, and Artyom did the same and his mother laughed then too, and she wrapped her stinking arms around them, pressing their faces to her, and they giggled some more and then relaxed into her, disregarding the smell, feeling protected. Sleep came quickly.

When Artyom woke, the light was off and the door open, allowing in a vertical stripe of grey light from the morning sky. He saw a figure standing there and sat up suddenly and shook his mother, and the figure said, “Hello.”

His mother sat up too and the figure said, “I’m going to turn on the light. Don’t be shocked.”

Sofya woke with the light, pushing herself upwards unsteadily by her arms, the way Artyom had seen newborn calves assert themselves into the world.

It was a man older than his father, but not quite elderly. A comfortable, lined face, grey hair streaming from under a knitted black hat.

“You came on the buses last night?”

Artyom made to reply but held himself back, left space for his mother.

“Yes,” she said.

The man picked up two shovels near the door, put on a pair of gloves that hung by the hook.

“You’ll need to get food. There’s a truck coming to pick me up. I know where the shelter is.”

They stood and dusted themselves off. Sofya slapped her face to wake herself.

“I’m Maksim Vissarionovich.”

“Tatiana Aleksandrovna. These are my children, Artyom and Sofya.”

“Were you cold?”

“No. Yes. We used some things. I’m sorry.”

Artyom’s mother realized she was wearing the man’s coat. She began to take it off.

“Please. It stinks, I’m sorry. The sun hasn’t come up yet. Wear it until you get there.”

“Thank you, Maksim Vissarionovich.”

“Just Maksim. You slept in my coat, you know me well enough.”

The man had great, sweeping eyebrows as unruly as his hair.

“Then please call me Tanya.”

“Of course.”

Artyom rolled up the undercarpet, and Maksim pointed to their sacks of belongings.

“These are yours?”

“Yes,” Artyom replied, and Maksim grabbed all three in one hand and dipped and hefted them over his shoulder with a neat turn, and Artyom noticed the man’s wrists, the impressive width of them.

Artyom placed the undercarpet back with the other rolls.

“No, bring it.”

Artyom pointed to the roll, questioning, and Maksim repeated himself.

“Bring it. You might need it.”

A truck pulled up outside, a shrill whistle beckoning them out. A flatbed truck carrying five men, a shallow metal tub in their centre in which a fire burned, with logs sticking out and sparks crackling.

“We’ve a stop to make first,” Maksim said to the men, and then climbed in front with the driver, an anonymous figure hunched over the wheel.

Another vehicle. Another journey to somewhere. Artyom spread his hands in front of the fire and warmed them. The morning wasn’t so cold, and he suspected the men kept the fire out of habit, a luxury they afforded themselves to compensate for the early rise.

“You’re from the buses,” one of the men said.

“Yes,” Artyom’s mother replied.

“Have you come far?”

“From Gomel.”

“Far enough then.”

“Yes. I suppose.”

As the wood burned, lit splinters and sparks caught the trailing air and tailed behind them, darting and crackling in their wake.

Artyom could see his mother was running questions through her head. She looked upwards and chewed the inside of her lip, then addressed the men.

“People were wary of us last night. Can you tell us what you’ve heard?”

The one who replied had a face of dark stubble with a dusting of white tracing the line of his chin.

“I hear there’s militia guarding the hospitals.”

“Why would they do that?”

“They say that people are coming to the hospitals poisoned. They’re worried about it spreading.”

“Like a plague?”

“It’s just loose talk.”

“Are you not worried to have us share your truck with you?”

He looked around to his comrades. They were men of understatement. They pressed their bottom lips upwards, shaking their heads. One of the men spat into the fire, but the gob didn’t reach, hitting the side of the tub, where it sizzled and collapsed into a drip of brown sap. The man with the white chin had a bunch of keys, which he turned on his finger, the metal ringing as they flopped forwards and back.

“If you’re poisonous, why do they bring you to the city? To all of us? If you’re poisonous, they’d keep you out there, where there’s no people. You don’t look poisonous to me. You just look lost.”

“We feel lost.”

He directed his look to Artyom. “You know what we do?”

Artyom couldn’t answer. He had just accepted the fact that they were on their way to work.

“You collect rubbish,” Sofya piped in.

“That’s right.”

He turned and directed his conversation to her.

“You’d be surprised the things we pick up. Last week Pyotr here found a radio. You can’t tune it in but it crackles. So he brought it home and played it for the mice. They haven’t come back yet. That right, Pyotr?”

Pyotr smiled a mangled grin at Sofya. “I’ll keep it till someone throws out a cat.”

Sofya smiled back, equal to the man’s warmth.

“People get rid of things they don’t need. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have value, though. You just need to adapt them to a different use.”

He stopped twirling the keys and poked one of the logs further into the fire, causing a brief blaze of sparks that disappeared into their clothing.

“You’ll be fine. You’ll go home or you’ll adapt.”

“Thank you,” Artyom’s mother said.

“I’m just saying what I know.”

A pause.

“Where do you take it all?” Artyom asked. They didn’t have anyone to collect their rubbish at home. If they didn’t need something they burned it. There must be a big fire somewhere.

“To the dump.”

“You don’t burn it?”

The man looked surprised. “No. We don’t burn it. We pile it up.”

“And then what do you do?”

The rest of the men laughed at the question, but the man with the milky chin took it in and thought about it.

“We put more on top of it.”

“So it’s where things end up?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

Another man said, “It’s where we’ve ended up,” and they laughed again.

They arrived at a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, a long, squat building surrounded by other long, squat buildings. The men helped them disembark, carrying the sacks and the roll of undercarpet. Artyom’s mother took off Maksim’s jacket and handed it to him, and he refused it but she was insistent, an immovable stubbornness in her voice, so he took it and she shook his hand and they called out their thanks to the men on the truck, each of whom responded with an open hand, covered by a ragged glove, and the truck disappeared into the morning, the suspension wheezing in the distance.

On the ground were the imprints of thousands of feet, leading from everywhere, merging into a muddy route to the entrance.

Artyom’s mother announced their arrival to the guards and they asked where she was from and heard their names, but they were just obeying routine, they had no lists to cross off and just nodded towards the door.

There were no queues in the warehouse; everyone had been registered during the night. All they could see were people laid out in their minute homes. Every family had a couple of square metres of carpet, cordoned off by drooping pieces of cardboard that had been taped to the floor. Thousands of small lives compacted together. Artyom recalled lifting a large stone and seeing a swarm of insects crawling underneath. This was what a city would look like if you took away all the walls and furniture.

Nearly everyone was sleeping. There were only a few people moving about, so few that it seemed odd to look at a vertical figure, someone standing or walking: seeing this many people stretched out gave the illusion that humans were built to exist on a horizontal plane. Odd, too, to see so many people exist in silence after the chaotic noise of the previous day.

Pigeons flapped overhead, darting their heads to take in every aspect of the place.

A woman wearing a yellow sash approached them. They could tell from her face that the smell from Maksim’s jacket still lingered. The woman spoke to them with distaste.

“Your cards.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The cards.”

Artyom’s mother stalled, not understanding; surely they wouldn’t refuse them entry.

Artyom leaned in towards his mother. “She’s asking for the cards they gave us before we boarded the buses. When they scanned us with their metres.”

“Of course.” She directed her reply to the woman, and patted her body and pulled out a small purse from under her sweater with some roubles and three categorization cards.

The woman looked at them and asked Artyom’s mother to confirm their full names and dates of birth, which she did. The woman nodded towards Artyom and Sofya.

“You can’t hold their cards for them. They’ll need to show them any time they’re asked.”

“Of course.”

“Come with me.”

She led them to a door with a series of locks and took out a set of keys and turned the bolts one by one and told them to wait there. Artyom peeked inside, saw piles of green blankets set on top of desks, and he guessed that this room was originally the office area of whatever it was this warehouse stored. The woman returned holding a small stack.

She handed the blankets to Sofya, gave Artyom’s mother an improvised map, hand-drawn, showed them how the area had been divided into sections, and told them that they would collect their food once a day from the provisions area in the far corner of the building. Their section would be called over the loudspeakers and they would present their cards and get their food and bring it back to their living quarters. She said “living quarters” without a trace of irony, as if they should be grateful to inhabit a strip of carpet.

She pointed out their section and turned the map to the back, which revealed the number of their area. Artyom’s mother asked where the toilets were and the woman pointed to a sign with an arrow halfway down the left-hand wall.

Artyom’s mother asked if there were showers.

“There are no showers.”

“What about washing?”

“Let’s hope it rains every few days.”

Artyom’s mother took in this information without surprise.