Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“So funny that you won’t say what it is?”

“Well. It’s nothing. I found him a couple of weeks ago, that’s all. He was clenching and unclenching a pair of rose clippers.”

Maria does the action.

“Where did he get them?”

“Evgenia Ivanovich downstairs—you know how she likes her flowers. It’s not important. Anyway, he’s clenching and unclenching and I ask him what he’s doing and of course he says, ‘Nothing.’ So I keep pushing and he says he’s strengthening his hand. And I say, ‘Why are you strengthening your hand, surely it’s strong enough?’ And he says, ‘When I’m in the audition, and the other kids are there and we shake hands. I want to crush them. I want them to be scared of me.’”

Maria tails off as soon as she’s said this. When it comes out of the mouth of a nine-year-old, one as bedraggled as Zhenya, there’s a ridiculousness in the schoolboy bravado. But the words coming cold, straight out of her own mouth, carry a supreme sadness. Even music, beautiful melodies become an instrument of power here. The kid is constantly surrounded by forces that want to crush him to dust.

“I think he’s still being bullied.”

“Don’t worry. He’s a stubborn kid, he’s smarter than any of them. He’ll do okay.”

“The other day, I get him to slice some carrots. I tell him to roll up his sleeves—why add to the laundry basket?—he refuses. I get suspicious. I walk over and pull up his sleeves and there’s a red mark on his arm. He says they call it a Chinese burn. He says it’s nothing, some game. Says it’s just a thing they’re doing.”

“It’s a Chinese burn. This is what kids do.”

“Since when? It never happened when we were young.”

“It happened, it just never happened to us.”

“Meaning?”

Maria didn’t mean to bring it up. The age-old argument leaking out again, slipping its way between sentences.

She sighs. “Meaning what it means.”

Alina shakes her head in disbelief.

“And so it begins. Cling to it, dear sister, cling to your bitterness. What else do you have?”

Maria shrugs her shoulders.

“It’s not bitterness. I’m just willing to recognize him for what he was.”

“How do I spend my hours? In a hairnet pulling sheets from a line, feeding them through a mechanical roller. Ironing like a madwoman in the evenings. I have a mouth to feed; he had four. It was some extra money. A side job. People, the few who knew what he did, understand that. There are such things as shoes and bread and soup. I never saw you refuse them; our bones never jutted like some other children. Necessity. People understand, even now. Those who know.”

The tension rises, a particular tension for this particular subject.

“It was not laundry work. It was not even work. And people don’t understand. And everybody knew, everyone knows. Name his friends—go ahead, count them. Who came to console us when he disappeared?”

“They were frightened. They didn’t wish to be connected. They were all involved to some extent. He took no pleasure in it. How can you make this be anything else? We had dolls, we had books. Do you think you would have led the life you did if we had no books?”

“It was not just a side job.”

“Did he beat us? Did he make her life a misery? Not him. Be ashamed of those men instead. Set your life against those men. I say it again: you had dolls.”

“It was not a side job. The day that you realize it, that day will arrive.”

“Well, I’m not young and it has no marking on the calendar. I’m still waiting.”

Neither of them speaks. Maria goes back inside and places the pressed clothes into a delivery bag, one hand on top, one on the bottom. She puts a saucepan of water on to boil and spoons tea into the pot.

Their father went to the races on a Saturday afternoon and never returned. There were no explanations or justifications for his work, how he betrayed others, led them to a life of imaginable misery. They couldn’t sit with him, understand him, listen to an old man’s regrets. Only a void remains, and it continues to wrap around their lives, tying them together in ignorance.

Maria sits listening to the water boil, currents of the past lapping inside her. The clank of a card hitting the metal bucket occasionally makes its way into the apartment. It’s always like this. The recurring subject that dominates their lives. Every lengthy conversation comes around to it eventually, teasing out the intangibles, the unknowables. Because who really can have a clue as to why Nikolai Kovalev did what he did, pushing his little wood pieces, aligning all his forces. Maybe it was valour or self-sacrifice or vanity or greed. Maybe it was something he never thought about, just numbers on a sheet, little codes. Maybe he was more worried about his opponent’s opening gambit or the exposed position of his rook.

Alina shuts the balcony door and places the near-empty bottle on the kitchen counter. She wets the tea with the boiling water and waits for the leaves to settle into zavarka. Maria watches her by the reflection in the glass door.

Alina fills the pot and takes down two cups and puts them on the table, letting the tea stew again, then, after a few minutes, pouring. It smells strong, relaxing. Maria thinks that she’d like to take a bath, but she’d have to clean off everyone else’s scum first, not something she’s prepared to do right now. Instead she tells Alina about the meeting.

“I know all the arguments. Of course you’ll say it’s a good opportunity, and it is. But I can’t think about coming home, after my day, and opening that book and taking notes for hours on end. Three, four, five years of this. Already I can’t face that thought.”

“But you said you never get to use your brain. You’d be pushing yourself, thinking in a new way. That’s good, surely?”

“I don’t have a natural aptitude for it. I could do it, but I’d have to grind it out. I’d have to study harder than most other people.”

“And there’d be classes. You enjoy classes. Other engineers with opinions, curiosity.”

“But I already have classes. They respect me in the Lomonosov. There’s talk of giving me more hours—even a junior position. I was hoping that by next year they’d offer me some lectures, give me a research brief. You want to know about longer term, the Lomonosov is longer term. It holds more possibilities than being another clipboard holder in a factory. And it wouldn’t take years of drudgery.”

“And now this.”

“And now this.”

“We can’t do without your teaching money for a few years. There’s only so much ironing that will fit in this place.”

They both look around. There are stacks of finely pressed sheets everywhere. They have to tiptoe around them. Shirts hang from a specially constructed rail, dozens of them. They sit in a sea of cotton and polyester.

“They’re saying, ‘We own you, you can’t do something else.’”

“Well, maybe show them your fidelity, prove your love to them, they might move on to some other person.”

“So I make a gesture?”

“Yes. Show how it benefits them to have you do other things. Show them you bring them something of benefit. You’re cultured. They respect culture. Bring that to them in some way.”

“What about a recital? If they come and they like it, they donate. Use it to get Zhenya a rehearsal room. It might even brighten everyone up a bit.”

“So then. Zhenya will play.”

“You know how he is, though. Maybe he can’t handle it.”

“It’s for his aunt. If I asked, maybe not; but you, he’d learn to walk on his hands for you.”

They finish their tea and unfold Maria’s bed and Alina helps her to change her sheets and pillowcase and they turn off the lights and settle down in their separate rooms and think about how they’ve survived together. No husbands or parents to rely on. If they disagree on their past, then they disagree on their past. It can’t separate them. And each of them thinks how good it is to have a sister.