Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

The soldiers carry megaphones and guns and arrange long, snaking lines according to the corresponding tower blocks, at the end of which are a doctor with a dosimeter and a trestle table with a lieutenant checking identity cards and stamping new medical papers. Those in the critical categories are hauled to the side, dragged behind a wall of soldiers, and shunted into ambulances. They protest in a whole-bodied way, limbs churning, clothes falling loose around them, tearing in the struggle. Their families rush forward but are butted away, soldiers expertly dispatching blows to the lower neck, causing the injured people, children included, to crumple in slow motion from the knees. The space the crowd inhabits expands with their indignant rage, but they are kept at bay by the unyielding troops. These soldiers have seen battle and carry with them the resolute steeliness of experience.

When the buses arrive, the crowd surges forth, swarming round the vehicles, prising open windows, climbing on mudguards, bellying onto roofs. Tear gas is released and the swarm retreats and the soldiers board the buses and drag out those inside, dispensing blows in full view of the crowd. Megaphones keep blaring instructions. Simple, clear sentences:

Return to your lines.

Do not attempt to board the vehicles without a medical certificate.

Anyone who attempts to do so will be severely punished.

Three lines repeated as a mantra, eventually restoring order. The crowd fatalistic and ultimately submissive.

The operation reports detail that animals are likely to be highly contaminative—radioactive matter would be soaked up through their coats—and so the troops shoot any animals on sight. Pets are wrenched from protective arms and shot in full view of their owners. Docile dogs looking innocently into gun barrels. The soldiers clench cats by the ridge of skin behind the neck and place pistols under their squirming chins, blood exploding in all directions.

An elderly woman passes a large jar of milk around to her neighbours, hearing it aids with radiation poisoning. An official slaps the jar from her hand, yelling to her that it’s probably contaminated, and the creamy liquid slopes in a single trail down the pavement, eventually combining with animal blood into a lurid, pink puddle. The woman remains still, helpless.

Grigory stands outside the operations centre—a hastily constructed tent on a slightly elevated point in the eastern sector of the town—and takes it all in. It’s a military operation; there is nothing he can do to interfere. He watches the spreading chaos and feels impotent and alone.

To his right, slightly down the slope, Grigory sees a man attempting to carry a door onto the bus. The soldiers encircle him, all with their guns pointed, as if they’re about to skewer the man. Grigory moves within earshot. The man stands with one arm around the vertical door, as if it’s an old friend that he’s introducing to a group of neighbours. He has a strong sweep of a chin, with short, grey stubble, and a salesman’s charisma. He’s pointing to the intimate details of its surface. Grigory follows the man’s fingers and sees some neat lines scored into the side of the panel at various heights, fractions beside them: 3¼, 5½, 7½. The man points upwards to a boy and girl, early to midteens, with the same definition to their faces, deep-set, clear eyes. Grigory realizes the man is pointing out the measurements of their height as children, the markings of their growth. The man talks about the history of this object. The soldiers are intrigued by such ludicrous ambition, bringing such an unlikely object with him while everyone else is trying to smuggle on an extra bag or jacket.

Grigory hears the man had laid out his father on this door, ten years ago, then his mother last winter. He explains all this to the soldiers; he shows them the notches, the names, the tribal markings denoting the history of the thing, the only object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead body will rest, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man’s nose.

Blood leaks down his face, glistening in his stubble, dripping from his chin. The door falls onto the concrete with a crash, and the crowd panics, so tightly wound up they mistake it for a gunshot.

Some words still emerge from his lips; the momentum of the man’s speech hasn’t let him dry up completely. Then he stops talking and some other soldiers grab him, pull him forward, and drag him away, pushing his family backwards. The door is consumed in the heave of the crowd. Grigory can see the family being pushed back in the surge, trying to swim against the tide of bodies, and the man is bundled into a troop carrier, where he covers his chin and mouth with his hand, and Grigory can’t tell if this gesture is to staunch the flow of blood or to indicate his regret for his outlandish ambition.

Other soldiers are boarding trucks, and Grigory finds out that they’re ancillary squads, sent to search the town for anyone in hiding. He decides to join them, judging that a smaller group holds more opportunity to bring his calming influence to bear.

They drive to the western part of the town and walk through apartment blocks. Washing hangs on lines that stretch the width of each balcony. Fridges contain bottles of orange juice and lengths of butter on dishes. They find people behind shower curtains and wedged into airing cupboards. They find a pregnant girl lying in a hollowed-out sofa. Grigory stands on a balcony, glancing over the empty streets for signs of movement, and looks down and sees a pair of hands clutching the railings at his feet. He leans over the guard rail and finds a man hanging straight as an exclamation point, his gaze directed downwards, as if avoiding eye contact would keep him obscured from sight. A man hanging ten storeys up, his lean muscles taut with effort and desperation. In another apartment an old woman sits in her kitchen listening to the radio. When they enter in a clatter of heavy boots, she turns down the volume and looks peacefully at them, in total control of the situation. Before they have a chance to give the order, she refuses to leave. She invites them to beat her or shoot her if that is necessary, but she states that this is her home and she will die here. None of the soldiers has the appetite for this kind of violence, not here, not with this woman. They walk out and Grigory shakes his head and smiles in admiration, and she raises her open palms to the ceiling, a silent gesture that says everything there is to say at this moment, in this room, in this town.

Many of the doors have notes pinned to them, to friends or relatives, stating a point of contact in the city. People have painted their family name on the door, an attempt to assert ownership. In dozens of apartments, they find tables fully laid for dinner.

They find a young couple sleeping in bed. They had been drinking for most of the night and lay there together under the sheets, oblivious to the commotion all around them. When the soldiers burst in, the man leaps from the bed in shock and then, realizing his nakedness, leaps back in again. The soldiers laugh, and Grigory asks them to leave and then sits on the bed and explains the situation to the couple, staring into the dark eyes of the young woman, gaining her trust with the gentleness of his tone. They wait in the kitchen, and when the couple emerge, dressed, carrying a few belongings, the soldiers clap and cheer and they smile shyly, and Grigory envies them their burgeoning love.

They put people in the truck and drive them to the relevant zones and then return and put more people in trucks. They pass a small graveyard and find a woman fisting soil from a grave—her parents’ grave—into a jam jar. She pleads to keep the jar, but they take it from her and empty the soil back onto the ground. The woman has no energy to protest.