Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Grigory finished his smoke and started up again, walking through the trees, zigzagging his way uphill. It took longer than he expected, almost three quarters of an hour. At the top he heard a movement to his left, and saw a swooping form, flowing close to the ground. Instinctively he raised his gun.

A whispered shout. “Don’t shoot, you bastard.”

“Vasily?”

“Yes.”

Vasily drew closer, the white sheet sweeping behind him like a cape. He held his hands up, mocking his friend.

“Where do you think we are, in a war?”

“You took me by surprise.”

Vasily laughed, a different kind of alertness about him, playful, overcoming his fatigue.

“I found something,” he said.

Grigory stood up, interested now.

“Really? What?”

“Come on, it’s worth it.”

They descended the other side of the slope and passed through a valley, taking turns to lead the way through the trees, bending branches for the other, Vasily stopping occasionally to take out his map and torch and find their bearings.

Grigory wondered if they would be reprimanded when they returned, for taking too long on their watch, but they could make some excuse, say they were following some figures in the trees but they turned out to be a couple of wandering wolves. And, besides, there was the thrill of doing something forbidden. Both friends could feel this. It was nice to claim back a little autonomy after their months of blind obedience.

At the bottom of a short ridge Vasily told Grigory to drop his pack and rifle, slung the torch over his shoulder, tucked the map into his pocket, and began the scramble upwards. It was not a difficult climb, but the ice and dark didn’t help, so they were careful. Grigory wondered why they had chosen such a direct route and not wound their way up another hillside, until he got to the top. At the summit Vasily offered his hand and hauled up his friend and they sat on the snow and looked up at the great rock formations in front of them, the Manpupuner rocks: gigantic natural stone pillars, over thirty metres tall, standing wistfully on this windswept plateau, their outlines attracting the moonlight, instantly recognizable to the two men from their schoolbooks. Six geological wonders gathered in close formation as if in conversation and a seventh, the leader, looking out across the plains below.

“I had no idea,” said Grigory.

“Neither did I. As a kid, when we learned about the rocks, our teacher made us draw a map of the area. When I was waiting for you, I turned the map at an angle and recognized it. I could see it all in crayon again.”

All schoolchildren know the legend behind the forms. The Samoyeds, the Siberian tribe, had sent giants to destroy the people of Vogulsky. But when the behemoth travellers crossed this plain and took in the glorious beauty of the Vogulsky mountains, the shaman of the group dropped his drum in astonishment and the group froze into stone pillars, held there in awe. The story, which carried little interest for Grigory as a child, made sense now, here, now that he could see their configuration, all of them leaning into the wind, pushing forward with purposeful intent, and they bent and stooped as figures would, the axis of waist and shoulder line clearly discernible. Grigory looked out over the milk-white plains, out towards the mountains that were responsible for the giants’ eternal torment, and he walked to the immense, unlikely rocks, the imprisoned figures, and placed a hand on the leader, reaching no higher than the top of the sole of his imaginary sandal, and thought what luck it was to come across such a thing, to have a childhood story made real and immediate, and he knew that this phase of his life would soon be at an end, that in a couple of months they would be stationed in a military hospital, then university again, and his life in medicine would fully begin, and his thoughts turned to his former comrades, strung up on beams and boughs back in their camp, what glories they had missed, cutting short their young lives through desperation, and Grigory dissolved then into a river of tears, his body hunched against the stone figures, his head bent towards his waist, his arms crossed over his crown, and it was such a relief, finally, to feel the onrush of compassion, to confirm that his indifference to a hanging corpse was merely a method of self-protection he had to cultivate, and this realization caused him to break down even further, to flounder in a sea of emotion, understanding that the internal thrust of who he was would survive any conditioning, that as much as he might try to dull himself to the harshness, the indifference of the world, he would never be truly absolved.

Vasily hunkered beside him, a comforting hand on his back, not speaking, respecting equally the privacy of his friend and the sanctity of the setting.

Later, when the manoeuvres had ended and they drank by the fireside and celebrated their symbolic victory with their comrades, and Bykov walked around his men, congratulating them, praising their strength, Vasily and Grigory marked themselves with ravens, both of them heating a needle, burning through the skin, and running ink into the crevices, remembering those who couldn’t endure what they’d been through.

The intensity of military life eased for them then.

They bribed an administrator, who sent them together to a military hospital in eastern Siberia. They worked as nurses and porters and cooks, observing whatever medical procedures passed their way, and on summer weekends they lived out their fishing fantasies, hiring a small boat and heading out into the Velikaya estuary, where they spent whole days casting out into the crisp waters for pollack, caring but not caring if they caught anything, doing it for the pleasure of the task, languishing in the rhythmic lap of the water, casting their lines towards the horizon. There they caught snailfish sometimes, a strange gelatinous fish that had the texture and shape of a large roasted red pepper. The thing looked prehistoric, as if no one had told it about the requirements of natural selection, and they speculated intermittently as to the origin of its name, so that it became a running gag between them, to drop the question in at random moments, so that the very wording of the question became funny, then boring, then funny again, going through its own comedic evolution.

Sometimes beluga whales swept near their boat. Calm white presences, skimming through the water. From a distance, they would see the vertical spout of water from a blowhole and they would place their rods aside and watch. Occasionally an anchor-shaped tail would flip up and crash back onto the surface announcing a whale’s presence. One simple action that never failed to be breathtaking.

IN THE SHADOW of the reactor Grigory looks over to Vasily. The helicopter is being readied, loaded for the drop.

“I’m thinking about the Manpupuner rocks. About that night.”

“Yes,” Vasily replies. “I’ve thought about that too. There’s something about the scale of this place.”

They turn their attention again to the column of smoke.

“And the whales at Anadyr.”

“Yes. We’ve seen some things.”

“Yes, we have.”

They’re dressed in rubber suits, rubber boots, rubber gloves, gas masks, all in white. They’re guided to the machine and strapped facedown on the floor. They would view the reactor below from small holes in the lead sheeting. This has been decided on as the safest option. There’s no readily available way of releasing themselves from the strapping and they wear no parachutes, the flight being too low for them to have any effect. They turn their faces to each other, fear drawing a taut line between the whites of their eyes, connecting them.

Two boys from Kostroma, how their lives had ushered them to this moment.