All That Is Solid Melts into Air (21 page)

More silence. “Well, I don’t know how to put it. The strangest thing. I was in the Lefortovo—you know how sometimes it’s good for meat, the lines that sometimes spring up.”

“Yes.”

“It was Varlam’s birthday and I wanted to cook him something special, some pork maybe, and I hung around, went to the places where I had queued before, and eventually I came across a line and I got a shoulder of pork, a beautiful slab, let me tell you.”

Valentina is slightly bug-eyed, with hair chopped under her ears, which further emphasizes the oval shape of her face. Maria could see her standing at the door of the memory, wondering if she should step inside it, wondering if this was doing any good.

“Then I walked back to Kurskaya station. I was really pleased with myself. He works so hard, Varlam. You know how it is, Alina works hard too. I wanted to make him a meal to celebrate him. I know Varlam hasn’t done amazing things in his life. He’s feeling, at the moment . . . what’s the word? . . . unaccomplished. So I wanted to cook him a meal that recognizes what he means to me. A meal fit for a good man.”

She swats the air again, scattering away irrelevant information.

“Anyway, with this package of meat in my bag, I’m proud of myself. I’m a good wife. And I’m walking those backstreets—you know where I’m talking about, there’s a steelworks building and it’s near all those railway lines.”

Maria nods. “Yes.”

“The evening is coming down and I feel like the only person in the city—there’s no one else around, not even any footsteps to be heard—and I turn a corner and see something hanging from a lamppost.”

She pauses, looking up, and her voice turns lighter.

“And right away I feel like it’s going to be something strange. I don’t know why. The weight of it maybe, the way it swung on its own weight. And I look up and it’s a dead cat, hanging from a short piece of rope, its eyes gleaming from the streetlight. And I feel it’s looking right at me.”

“My God.”

“I know. Its mouth is open, fangs bared, snarling, spitting, the way cats do. I tell myself I need to get out of there, so I start to walk faster—I’m nearly running, in fact. My shoes have a thick heel, so I’m staggering and I slip but regain my footing and look up, and there’s another one. I kept my head down all the way back to the station, but I could still tell, from the corner of my eye, that there were more—maybe twenty. I don’t know. I was so worried someone would come around the corner, some militia guys, and I’d be the only one around with these fucking animals strung up, and they’d start asking me questions.”

“Of course.”

“I couldn’t even cook that dinner later. I just couldn’t bear the sight of raw meat. I had to dump the package near the station. The blood was leaking through the paper and getting onto my hands. I wanted to puke.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well since.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’ve been forgetting things.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m glad you came today. I would have called over anyway. I wanted to ask if you’d heard anything like this before. When you wrote for the newspaper, maybe people talked about such things.”

“No. I’m sorry. They didn’t.”

“I’m sitting here wondering why cats are hanging from lampposts.”

“I don’t know. It seems like a statement of some kind.”

“Who would make a statement there? In Lefortovo?”

“I know. But what else could it be?”

“You don’t know. I don’t know. Such an odd fucking thing.”

Yevgeni pushes open the door again. It’s a little too neatly timed for comfort. Maria hopes he’s just bored with the fish.

“Did you see them?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“Their colours are beautiful.”

“Varlam loves them. He wakes sometimes in the middle of the night and he says that if he just watches the fish, he falls asleep again.”

“He can see them in the dark?”

“The bottom of the tank lights up.”

Yevgeni definitely wants one now.

They say their good-byes and Maria hugs Valentina, offering reassurance, and Valentina mimes that she doesn’t want what she’s said to fall on other ears, and Maria nods and Valentina knows she can trust Maria. This is a woman who’s never in her life passed on a secret.

They carry the empty laundry bags and feel the release of the weight.

“Thanks for helping me.”

“It’s fine, Zhenya. You’re good to do it all on your own.”

They walk, listening to the sound of their own footsteps.

“I suppose you want some fish now.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “No, not really.”

“Did you hear what we were talking about?”

“No.”

A pause.

“What were you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

Chapter 17

M
aria is leaning against the perimeter wall at the viewing point for Lenin Hills: the Moscow River below; a ski jump and slalom course to her right; the star of the main Lomonosov tower rises high into the night sky behind her.

This location was a favoured meeting place in her student days, with its beautiful view of the city. Men would wait here for her and take her ski jumping, a tactic, she now suspects, to get her adrenaline running, her blood pumping, desires racing. She hasn’t stood here in years. It’s the opposite side of the university from the Metro stop, and there’s always somewhere else she needs to be, even tonight. She’s resolved to make her way to Grigory’s later, a relatively short walk by the river. She needs to ask about a rehearsal place for Yevgeni. Although his offer of a piano had been several months ago, Grigory is not the type to go back on his word. He might well be agreeable to letting the boy come over a few days a week, even if he has ignored her phone calls.

She’s waiting for Pavel—an old friend, or teacher, or lover: whichever traditionally comes first in the list of distinctions. Before her classes, she slid a note under his door, asking to meet, something she’s done every three or four months since their reacquaintance at a party last year. They rarely meet casually, even in the corridors of the faculty, but she finds it a relief to have a long-standing friend come back into her life, someone—independent of Alina—who knows her well enough to enable her to think things through. She wants to clear her mind before she meets Grigory, wants to dispel the possibility of unburdening herself to him. She’ll ask for a favour for the boy, nothing else.

She’s been waiting for Pavel for half an hour, watching the skaters on the river below her, lit up from the Central Lenin Stadium. Her gloves are thin and her fingertips feel dumb and immobile. She’s never become used to the snapping cold of the dark season. She’s never known any other kind, and yet the deep winter always finds ways to surprise her, wrapping itself around her skin, biting at her exposed extremities. She’s reminded here though, in this spot, with couples walking past, skates slung over their shoulders, that she loves the peacefulness that descends at this time. People speaking as they dress, in muffled, layered solitude. Condensed steam everywhere, moisture-laden breath. Winter always assumes a certain otherworldly gait. It has a texture and speech all of its own, a written language, snow nestling itself in lucid patterns, iced windowpanes pleading to be deciphered, skaters cutting swirls into the frozen river.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pavel has placed himself soundlessly beside her, an old habit which makes her jump out of her skin.

“You startled me.”

Pavel smiles. There’s a childish edge to his humour, always seeking an opportunity to irritate, to tease—an aspect so at odds with his status as a professor of literature. People revere him. He repeats his question.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And so quiet. I feel like I can hear every sound on the river.”

“Do you skate? I can’t remember.”

“I could skate in a straight line, I just could never turn.”

“That’s a problem.”

“I think it was something to do with relying on only one foot. I stopped trying just before I hit my teens. It was probably a wise decision, looking back.”

“I skate from time to time.”

“Of course you do. The man of five hundred talents.”

“Please, not you. If you start complimenting me, it might be the end of our friendship.”

She smiles and they embrace, warmly.

When Maria was a student, his lectures were eagerly awaited events not just within the department but throughout the university. The hall would be crowded with engineers, medical students, and marine biologists. They’d fill the steps, squeezing in three wide, the crowd clustering at the doorways and spilling out into the lobby, listening intently, laughing with their fellow students inside—those lucky enough to get a seat. Professor Levytsky drew effortlessly on the classics, embellishing his points with stories from the writers’ lives, their sexual proclivities, anecdotes of everyday embarrassments. He could hold a room with magnificent power, using silence as a way to taunt his audience, to stir them into their own internal opinions. From his mouth, poetry became a fine meal, each distinct word gaining its own flavour when issued from his lips.

“You got my note?”

“Of course, I read it with pleasure. You’ve always written a good note, Maria.”

“I’m sure I’ve had many successors.”

As an undergraduate in her first year, Maria had pursued him with zeal. In her first two months she wrote five love letters, slipping them under his office door in the late evenings. The letters themselves were a sexual awakening to her; she was surprised at her ability to write such sensual prose, surprised that she knew what she knew, experiencing the bodily tremors while she wrote, becoming heated as she lay her longings down in ink. And, in later weeks, when they lay in bed, him asleep, she would trace her finger along the lines on his fine-boned face, following the progress of those early words that were etched now into his crow’s-feet, chiselled into the grooves of his forehead.

“No. Notes like you wrote take real daring. There aren’t many out there with your courage. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m claiming it’s them and not me. I’m telling myself I still inspire the same yearnings.”

“Of course you do.”

“Please. Look at me. I’m an old man. I have tufts of hair growing from my ears. It’s a definite old-man symptom.”

Maria cranes her head back.

“I see no ear hair.”

“I clip it. They can take a lot, but I’m keeping my vanity.”

“It’s a good thing to keep.”

“It’s the best thing.”

Pavel ended it after six months, sitting over morning tea, while she was making out her list of errands for the day. He said he was preventing her from making her own discoveries. She remembered the words distinctly, remembered her confusion that an errand list and a lover’s rejection—her first great rejection—should occupy the same space. A breakup like this should be done in a romantic place, with tears and rain. This is what she thought then, a girl of nineteen. She needed to make her own decisions, he said, discover her own opinions, not sit under the weight of his experience. She had no idea what that meant at the time. She spat curses at him, came to his apartment in the middle of the night, attempting to catch him with a new lover, which she never did. In the end it mattered little; she was obliged to abandon her studies anyway, move to Kursk. When she returned to the city with Grigory, she was a few years older; married, wiser, carrying her own bank of experiences. Had they met on the street she would perhaps have thanked Pavel, told him she realized the unselfishness behind his statements, the accuracy of them.

A pause.

“You wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes. I don’t know why.” She hesitates. “I do know why, it’s just difficult to articulate.”

“I’m in no hurry. Talk to me.”

Maria notices that Pavel’s eyes are still the same shade of milky green. She wonders if our eyes change colour as we age.

“I’m worried that something is happening, something I should be aware of.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been hearing things. Odd things, from various sources.”

“What sources?”

“Neighbours, people at work, remarks in the class. They . . .”

She hesitates again.

“Yes?”

“Have you heard about the ‘Shining Solidarity’ phenomenon in Poland?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“When the Solidarity movement had to go underground, they developed techniques to keep up morale. They had help, of course. The Americans would send in aid shipments through Sweden, mostly communications equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Basic stuff. Books. Printing machines. Unregistered typewriters. Photocopiers. But the CIA gave them one impressive toy. A machine that transmitted a beam which overpowered the state-broadcast signals. Every few months on millions of TV sets the Solidarity logo would appear, with a recorded message announcing that the movement lived and the resistance would triumph.”

“It sounds like science fiction.”

“But it happened. It kept the movement going when people thought it had been extinguished. Viewers were asked to turn their lights on and off if they’d seen the logo. When this happened, a glittering light show would sweep through the suburbs. Such a show of strength. The whole city glinting like a piece of foil in the wind.”

The sound of skates cutting into ice.

She continues. “Things are coming my way. I don’t know. Worrying things. A neighbour of mine has seen cats strung up from lampposts. They mean something. I know it. There are kids in the Tishinski markets on Sundays buying up old military uniforms, cutting them up, making fashion statements. Other things too. I hear of clubs where women dance with replicas of red star medals over their nipples.”

“And you disapprove?”

“Of course I don’t disapprove—let them jerk off over the whole army. But I need to know I’m not wrong. Something is happening. I can feel it.”

“You’re worried?”

“No. I don’t know what I am. Restless, maybe.”

“You’re thinking maybe you want to get involved.”

“That’s not it. I have responsibilities. I have people who rely on me. I’m just barely clawing my way back from the wilderness.”

Pavel doesn’t speak for a while, simply blows on his gloved hands, rubs them together. The length of their friendship apparent in the silences.

“There are so many nights when I’m in a reception room in the faculty, sharing a drink with former students, and I don’t know who I am. I’m droning on, making witty remarks, droll observations, to people who are no better than reptiles, men whose job it is to do obscene things.”

He turns to her, and Maria notes that he’s more reticent than before, another way the years have taken hold. She couldn’t imagine hauling him through a blazing row any longer, a sombre weight to his words now.

THEIR RELATIONSHIP
was largely built upon ideological arguments. She was constantly questioning, reviewing, surmising, churning all her newly gained knowledge through the prism of her personality. She’d argue with him anywhere. So many times their lovemaking was abandoned because of a throwaway comment from him. Or she would storm into his office, not bothering to check if there was a colleague inside, and bombard him with her fusillade of newly researched facts, slinging in an occasional well-chosen quote to underline her point. On one occasion, she exploded into a barber’s while he was in the chair getting a shave, picking up an argument in which he had silenced her, one day before, with his experience of debate and with the tapestry of facts that were always within his reach. A narrow, smoke-filled room with two barber’s chairs, one empty, and a row of waiting men, strands of hair clinging to the glass mirrors. She pushed open the door and cleared the barber away as he held his blade aloft, astonished, looking to his customers for support, but they were as shocked as he. Pavel’s rebuttals came so rapidly, with such force, that the front of her coat was dotted with flecks of shaving cream. Pavel remembers that he wiped his face clean, put on his jacket, paid, and left, with a stubble-mottled face, all without breaking the flow of the argument, countering her well-prepared perspectives, loving every moment of it. Loving the intellectual stretch she provided. Loving how it was intertwined with her naïvety, so that often she would be unable to recognize the limits of her argument, blowing everything out of proportion. And in these moments he would pause, would cease his replies, and Maria would realize her error and he would spend the next couple of hours trying to coax her back from her disappointment in herself. Trying to make her see that it was her commitment to her subject, her righteous fury, that made her so attractive.

“YOU’VE HEARD
the joke about the chicken farmer?” he asks Maria.

“I don’t think I have.”

“A chicken farmer wakes one morning and goes into the yard to feed his brood. He finds ten of them dead. There is no reason for this. They were healthy, some of his best birds, so he is confused. He is worried the rest of the brood may be similarly affected, so he decides to ask comrade Gorbachev for help. ‘Give them aspirin,’ the premier says. The farmer does this, and ten more die that night. This time the premier suggests caster oil. The farmer does as suggested, and ten more are dead the next day. He goes back to Gorbachev and is told to give them penicillin. He does this and, the next morning, all the chickens have died. The farmer is distraught. ‘Comrade Gorbachev,’ the farmer says, ‘all my chickens are dead.’ ‘What a pity,’ Gorbachev replies. ‘I had so many more remedies to try.’ ”

Maria smiles at him. He’s always had a beguiling mouth, shape-shifting, simultaneously knowing and innocent.

“And this is funny?”

“She comes to me for help and ridicules me. It’s fine. Funny isn’t the point. The joke is the point. The weakness is the point. The fact that they are telling this joke on production lines, at football matches, in taxis, this is the point. Where we’ve come to. This is the point. I haven’t written a line of poetry in nearly twenty years. Not since the crackdown after the Prague Spring. I took my reputable job and taught the books they wanted me to teach, stayed away from saying anything controversial by telling little smutty stories about the writers’ lives.”

Absently, he packs some snow between his gloves, forming a concave disc.

“So many of my friends kept writing. Even in the camps they wrote. Even when they got to their lowest point.” He is very still, then continues. “They’re dead or hobbled now, and I’m still eating professorial lunches. You know how they got their writing out of the prisons?”

“I’ve heard a few different ways.”

“They swallowed it and shat it. Or rolled it on their tongue and exchanged it in a visitor’s kiss. Women secreted it inside themselves and let the guards pretend to attempt to pick it out. Can you imagine the humiliation? They did what they felt necessary.”