All That Is Solid Melts into Air (23 page)

Maria was careful not to write about the background. She detailed the ceremony and included some pointed quotes from the eulogy. She indicated with skilfully selected words that the death was not from natural causes but, otherwise, she kept to the ritual itself and let the readers draw their own inferences.

The editor held up the piece. He accused her of expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, of encouraging dissent. She had her rebuttals prepared. How could this be anti-Soviet subject matter when the authorities themselves had made publicly known that the perpetrators were SB police? She was reporting on a funeral; it had nothing to do with politics. Maria had no doubt she was on steady ground. She could defend every sentence against accusations.

Her editor listened and nodded, and then produced several pages of pink carbon paper, covered in her familiar scrawl. Pages she’d written for a samizdat, which had been typed and copied and typed and copied until her words had been thumbed through by several hundred pairs of hands.

The editor displayed each set of pages and read the headlines:

GDANSK ACCORDS ENABLE POLISH WORKERS TO ELECT UNION REPRESENTATIVES

SOVIET FORCES ACCIDENTALLY SHOOT DOWN KOREAN AIRLINER

MASSIVE OVERPRODUCTION OF ARMAMENTS CLAIMS CHIEF KREMLIN ADVISER

Maria couldn’t believe it. The samizdat went to incredible lengths to make sure authors would be untraceable.

“I’ve never seen these before.”

“Fine. In that case, I can hand them to the KGB to conduct some handwriting analyses.”

She placed her face in her hands.

“Writing inflammatory articles for a ragged underground paper is one thing. But now you are trying to bring us into disrepute. I’m obliged by law to report you.”

There was nothing to do but wait for it all to unfold.

Maria spent the day pacing the apartment, waiting for the knock on her door, thinking about the interrogation room she would soon find herself in, the sleep deprivation and starvation, the days of endlessly repetitive questioning.

She couldn’t even bring herself to let Grigory know what had happened, telling herself there was no point in burdening him with the same sense of dread. So when she received the call to return to work that evening, she was swept away with relief. She grabbed her coat, made her way to the Metro stop, taking the same route she’s just walked. When she reached the viewing platform, Mr. Kuznetsov was standing there, looking at the traffic below.

Mr. Kuznetsov, her editor. A stale man, desiccated skin, flat, unresponsive eyes.

She stopped, recognizing him straight away; it was clear to her that his being here, intercepting her journey, was no coincidence. Immediately, all that would transpire unfolded in her mind. It was all set up to play out beautifully for him. He would remind her that, due to his discretion, she still had a job. He would remind her that the KGB would be very interested in her dissenting view. She even predicted that he would use the word “implications,” use it to promise the destruction of her husband’s career.

“And there are other implications,” he proceeded to say.

The words still ring out to her, even now, with a terrible clarity. Her life imploding with that single sentence.

If she had had more time, if the conversation had taken place in his office, perhaps she would have fled, found Grigory, told him everything. He would, of course, have confronted Kuznetsov, paying no attention to how well connected the man was. It would have meant the destruction of a fine career, another skilled doctor disregarded. Grigory would have been deprived of the very thing that defined him.

But of course, Kuznetsov knew that too. His standing there, so close to her apartment, meant that she couldn’t defer the decision. And once that determination was made, she couldn’t turn back. As she lay with Grigory later that night, afterwards, her deception expanded into the millimetres that separated their bodies. Lying there on the freshly changed sheets, another man’s body heat still contained in the core of their mattress.

The only influence she could bring to bear was her lack of willingness. When Kuznetsov prised her apart, her body proved itself resistant to his touch. The lips of her opening as stiff and dry as cardboard, causing them both to burn as he propelled himself into his rhythm.

She looks away from the spot where Kuznetsov once stood, his presence still palpable, and gazes down into the cold heart of the city. Leninsky Prospekt is straddled by neon-lit billboards, all of them proclaiming the superstitions of her leaders. Their weaknesses, the tensions, the conflicts, the secrets that give the Party a reason to exist, the fears that make their hearts flurry in the quiet of the night:

“THE COMMUNIST PARTY IS THE GLORY OF THE MOTHERLAND.”

“THE IDEAS OF LENIN LIVE AND CONQUER.”

“THE SOVIET UNION IS THE SOURCE OF PEACE.”

Sentences swathed in vanity. This rhetoric surging through their institutions and overflowing into the minds and actions of individuals. Surging through Kuznetsov as he surged into her: creating, eventually, her unwanted child, her unwanted life.

And when she rid herself of the child, it compounded her guilt. All she wanted then was to turn away from the world, from Grigory. Not revealing it all to him then—now that she can reflect upon that time—was a wilful act of self-destruction. When it was all over with Kuznetsov and he reported her anyway, she was glad. She welcomed the punishment, she told herself she deserved to toil away at a job she hated. To lose herself in menial tasks, to shut down her mind, close off her personality.

She makes a pact with herself, a promise, as she walks down the broad avenue, traffic whipping past as she disappears into the pavement underneath Gagarin’s steel monument, as she descends on the narrow escalator: she will no longer be just another shadowed form in this city built on whispers.

Chapter 18

T
he snow is coming in force now, these past two weeks, dropping its full weight from the sky. Huge, feathery flakes clump on Artyom’s lashes, small drifts gather in the nape of his hood. All around, the resettlement camp is silent, not much moving other than the trucks that come and go.

The snow sits evenly both on the ground and on the flat roofs of all the prefabricated huts, so they look as if they’ve been driven upwards from the earth, their yellow walls the only color for kilometres around, a colour that was probably intended to elicit cheer but instead serves only to emphasize the cheap, inhospitable nature of the constructions. They would look cartoonish but for their dilapidated state. Already, in many, windows have fallen from their frames and the residents have taped up cardboard or nailed up the doors ripped from their kitchen presses to keep the wind out.

In every hut there’s a fuel-burning stove. So much of the day spent poking and prodding. They get their fuel allowance from the supply store: a wheelbarrow of logs for each home, delivered by a young soldier with red-raw features and a permanently runny nose.

Batyr is improving. After three weeks, Artyom can see how his coat is beginning to regain its lustre; he’s starting to put on weight. Artyom visits him at mealtimes and, more recently, takes him for walks. He’s built a small cart for the dog, big enough to rest his haunches on but small enough so that he can put his front legs on the ground. There’s a handle on the back of the cart that Artyom uses to push the dog forward, and Artyom is aware that it must look strange, but there are many stranger sights here.

He gives Batyr food which he scavenges from the sacks of waste piled up at the back of the storehouse. There are always soldiers guarding the building, but Artyom made a point of introducing them to his two-legged friend. They knelt and rubbed Batyr behind the ears, patted him, ran their hands vigorously up and down his flanks, and when they did this Artyom saw a brightness in their eyes, the animal taking them away from routine, and he saw them then as brothers and sons, laughing at the dinner table, feeding scraps to their own dog as it looked at them pitifully with its head on their knee, imploring. Now they let Artyom poke away at the rubbish, as long as he promises he’ll tie the bags up afterwards, they need to keep the rats away.

At first Artyom was feeding Batyr from the clinic’s leftovers—the doctor arranged it that way—but after about a week the kitchen staff told him to look somewhere else. He could have gone back to the doctor, but the man is busy, he has more on his mind than where to get scraps for a dog.

Because Sofya is sick, she has a room to herself. Artyom sleeps in the same bed as his mother. His mother changes in this room, so he sees her naked from behind. Neither of them cares. What was important before is no longer important here. They sleep side by side, and his mother rises three or four times in the night to check on Sofya.

There are some mornings he wakes to find his mother has curled into him in her sleep. Such a thing doesn’t feel unnatural to him. He understands how the body seeks reassurance; he doesn’t resist because he needs it too.

Their hut doesn’t leak like a lot of the others. The adults hardly talk about anything else, a constant exchange and comparison of the physical status of their homes. Artyom thinks that this is maybe because they can do something about it, do some repairs; the huts can be fixed, the sickness can’t. Artyom’s thankful that their place doesn’t leak, at least not yet. If Sofya had to lie there in the cold, it would be worse.

Every hut has a kitchen-cum–living room and two bedrooms. There is no toilet or running water of any kind. They have an electric hob and the stove and an electric radiator in each bedroom. Some people have TVs or radio sets; their relatives have dropped them off at the reception hut, leaving nothing else but their names. No note. No one enters further than the reception hut. Artyom understands why.

Artyom is one of the oldest boys in the settlement. He’s seen a couple of others his age, but they were weaker than he is and who knows what kind of state they’re in now. He feels strong. His mother keeps asking if he’s getting enough rest, but he likes the air, he needs to be outside. It gives him a purpose.

He walks to the forest almost every day collecting wood, handing it around to their new neighbours. He never expects anything for it—it didn’t cost him anything—and from time to time his mother receives a kindness in recognition for his help. Last week a woman in sector 3A gave her a pair of her son’s boots for Artyom’s walks. The boy had died a few months before. And so now Artyom finds himself trudging along between the trees in a dead boy’s boots. But it doesn’t concern him in any way.

“I’m lucky to have a son like you, Artyom.”

“You’re not lucky, Mama.”

“There are people worse off.”

“That may be true, but not much. We’re not lucky.”

“No. You’re right. We’re not.”

GRIGORY SITS OUTSIDE,
leaning on a metal table, dabbing his fingers in a pool of condensation at its lip. A spider dangles below, twirling languorously. He will soon begin surgical prep, inside for the rest of the day, so he takes in cool breaths while he can; watching water twist along the tendrils of ice that hang from the roof of the clinic, the one solid building in the whole settlement. Brick walls half a metre thick that mercifully retain heat. They speculated as to its use before they came here, an old barracks perhaps. A stubborn musty scent in the operating theatre despite the plastering, the painting, and the daily scrubbing.

People here are waiting, solemnly waiting. He watches them walk laps around the recreational area in the middle of the settlement. Walking and waiting.

An elderly man sits on a nearby bench, hands clamped under his armpits. Grigory feels no impulse to speak to him, nor to his own colleagues when he twists open the handle of the common room, puts his shoulder to the expanded door. Even in his break times he is unaccompanied, slow to welcome any intrusion into his guarded world. Four tables in the room and still he manages to stake out a private territory. He tells himself, has hinted to others, that his mind needs to recuperate, so many hours spent in total concentration—and this is true; sometimes it’s beyond him to make the few simple choices demanded of him in their small canteen. When they ask—tea or coffee? rice or potatoes?—he shifts listlessly, unable to mouth the correct words.

He can also recognize, when he has a will to, that these are the strategies of an only child: to create a world impervious to others, your passions sealed off, as contained as the canisters of oxygen the anaesthetist carts into the building. This is his ease.

How different would it be, he wonders as he pushes wearily off the chair, with Vasily here?

Out in the fields the snow is so deep that Artyom has to wade through it. He keeps his pelvis lower to the ground and leans into his steps. It takes so much effort that he doesn’t feel the cold. He reaches the first trees of the forest and trudges inside. These trees mark a border; time slows as you pass through the line of branchless trunks. The light that comes down has air inside, as if it’s been passed through a tea strainer, and the rays split into strands of drops as they fall onto the forest floor, landing silently like dancers, turning as they descend.

The sound of his own breath. Trickles from hidden streams. A branch struggling under its load. The air, too, somehow distilled. Smoky air. Strong air.

Tall trunks with no branches. A stoat slithers up one, twenty metres away, a white blur ascending.

Artyom walks and sits and walks again, looking for fallen branches. When he is thirsty he scoops snow into his mouth and looks up at the canopy far above him.

It was a forest, back there, that claimed his father, and in the silence Artyom can feel a connection amongst these tall trees, as if they are drawing him here. They sway nervously, confessing their remorse, creaking like a door forced open in the wind.

BACK IN MINSK,
they had been in the emergency shelter for a month before they found his father. New people kept arriving. At the end of the first week, their floor space was cut in half, so they no longer had room to lie down flat. They were forced to sleep in shifts, there were so many of them bunched in under that roof. The whole place stank of sweat. People complained continuously of the smell. Babies were getting rashes from not being cleaned. Eventually, the militia set up a line of hoses at the back of the warehouse to deal with the problem. Everyone was given a plastic bag, and you queued up at the back door, and once you stepped outside you had to strip naked and put your clothes into the bag. You had to tie a knot in the bag and then, still holding your clothes, you’d stand in front of the wall, near a drain, and the militia would hose you down. Afterwards, you used your own clothes to dry yourself off, then put them back on and reentered the warehouse, with small puddles between your toes, your shirt and underwear sticking to you. For the first few days the militia guys would rate the women. The women would stand in a line, naked, holding their plastic bags in front of their genitals, and the guards would shout out a score between one and ten. If any woman complained, her bag would be sprayed until it was torn and her clothes soaked through, so she would have to walk back inside naked or sodden, the material sticking to her skin, under the watchful eyes of a thousand people.

Sofya would always come back crying. His mother always came back quiet and stayed quiet for most of the day.

There was a place to wash babies. Gas rings were laid out on the ground with metal buckets of water resting on top of them. Another bucket of cold water would be placed on the ground beside each one, so the mothers could balance the temperature of the water and then scoop and pour it over the babies. Artyom saw one mother accidentally touch her child’s foot on the metal rim of a hot bucket, burning it. The infant wailed, bellowing with such desperation that a crowd of people came outside to see what was wrong.

There was no information about his father. Not the first week. Not the first month.

People talked in the beginning about how they got here, what they were doing before the call to evacuation. They went through their whole routines: who said what, who did what. People speculated. Many thought it was the capitalists that had sabotaged the plant, infiltrated it somehow over a long period of time and caused this chaos. The capitalists were intimidated by the progress of Soviet energy, they were becoming desperate in their scheming. People didn’t stray into wider subjects, though, they didn’t talk about where they came from, what paths their lives had taken and—as Artyom came to notice—after the first week, they almost stopped talking altogether.

Nobody knew anything about what had happened to their loved ones. A great blanket of longing descended upon the building. There were guards stationed along the perimeter fence; no one could pass without bribing one of them. Some gave away all they had in the first few days and walked to the hospitals or the other shelters, but they couldn’t find any information there either and were forced to return for the food and shelter offered to them, poorer than before, no chance of release until they were told they could go—if they would ever be told they could go.

Arguments broke out over floor space. Every centimetre was a precious commodity. Some people would try to adjust the makeshift walls of their allocation, and those who had been cheated would return and scream and tussle, and Artyom saw how petty people could become when desperate.

They had been there almost a month when Artyom’s mother woke him in the middle of the night.

“Artyom,” she whispered.

He woke easily. He couldn’t sleep soundly in this place, his body so confined, the constant shuffling noise, snores, sleepy mumbles, infants taking it in turns to wail their complaints.

“Yes?”

“There’s something I need you to do.”

She pulled out a small package from the folds of her clothes, a piece of soft cloth, wrapped very tightly with some elastic cord. She unwound the cord and displayed three gold nuggets. Artyom couldn’t see them very well in such weak light, so it was only when he touched them that he realized they were teeth.

He pulled his hand back, startled.

“Where did you get them?”

“It’s not important.”

“It is important. Where did you get them?”

“I didn’t steal them.”

“Well, they’re not yours. You don’t have any gold teeth.”

She was quiet; she let him realize it himself.

“They’re Grandmama’s.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Plenty of people do it. Before she died, your grandmother made us promise we wouldn’t bury her with them.”

Artyom was quiet for a few moments.

“Are you angry?” she asked.

“No. I just didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Artyom.”

She didn’t speak until she could see he was ready to continue.

“I need to find your father. Things are getting desperate. We can’t stay here forever.”

“Okay.”

“These are the only things of value that we own. You’ll need one to bribe the guard. After that, only use them if you have to. I want you to find Maksim Vissarionovich, the man who brought us here. He’ll be kind to us. See if he knows someone—a nurse, a Party official. Anyone.”

“Where will I find him?”

“Look for rubbish bins on the street. Ask any rubbish collectors you come across. If you still can’t find him, go back to Lilya’s building and wait for him at his lock-up.”

“Okay. Do we know his last name?”

“No. I never asked.”

Artyom’s mother shook her head as she said this, regretting her stupidity. She was close to him; Artyom could smell her sour breath. She took his face in her hands.

“You know not to use any of the gold unless you have to.”

“Yes.”

She kissed him on the forehead.

“Thank you, Artyushka. And remember to come back. If you went missing too, I couldn’t bear it.”