Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

In the morning Maria walks across the courtyard and watches the watchers. Curtains flick overhead, figures stepping away from the glass. Nothing that happens in this stretch of land goes unseen. She steps over the kerbstones that are half painted, a job which the maintenance men occupied themselves with for a few days, before finding some other distraction.

She hasn’t slept well, her mind ticking over after her conversation with Alina and then one thing leading to another, thoughts whirring uncontrollably in the dark. When this happens, which isn’t often, she thinks of it as her mind unspooling, all those blank working hours being cast out, reclaiming their freedom.

She passes a car with brown tape in place of a back window. There are great mounds of uncollected rubbish on the sides of the pomoyka. Plastic bags stacked upon plastic bags. The children use them as combat shelters for their snowball fights, and she can conjure up the sour stench that will rise again when the snow melts and the air heats. The smell of a new spring.

Children adapt.

They take an untreated football pitch and use it as an obstacle course. They play volleyball with taped-up wads of newspaper. They don’t have basketball hoops here, so they kick the seats out of old kitchen chairs and lash them to drainpipes. They spend their young lives inventing games with stratified, nuanced, ingenious rules and spend their adult lives resenting the constraints around them.

The bus steams up and bobbles to a stop.

Maria looks at bare branches set against the sky, lines running into one another, sturdy boughs tapering off into a fine filigree.

She wants to make love on a warm night with moonlight shimmering down rain-slicked streets.

When Mr. Shalamov arrives Maria’s waiting in the armchair outside his office. The secretary refuses to look at her, resenting her intrusion. A different species from the people that inhabit these rooms, with their well-cut suits. Even the secretary in a matching jacket and skirt. Maria wonders if the secretary changes into her work clothes, just like everyone else. Surely she can’t wear a skirt like that outside in such cold, even with thick tights on. She can’t have a locker room, and Maria thinks of her changing in the management toilets, rising in status as soon as she slips on the soft material, and in the evening shedding that skin again, becoming just another nameless face, sneaking onto the bus home, averting her eyes, hoping that she won’t see a worker she recognizes. Or more likely she feeds off the high-powered lives that surround her, massaging their bodies as well as their egos, sharing their beds.

Maria stands and speaks before the secretary has a chance to interject.

“Mr. Shalamov.”

He stops and looks at her and then looks at the secretary.

“I’m sorry to intrude. I just wanted to continue our conversation from yesterday evening.”

A glaze in his eyes. She can tell he doesn’t recognize her.

“We talked about the Lomonosov.”

He turns when recollection strikes him.

“Yes. We’ll pick the matter up another time. Anya will set up an appointment. You’ll be notified.”

His back is to her and he’s moving towards his office door. She rattles off her prepared lines.

“I would like to make amends for my lack of participation in some of our previous cultural activities, I have a suggestion for an event that would be good for morale.”

He stops and turns.

“Is there a problem with morale?”

His voice is icy. He’s focusing intently on her. A cool, dispassionate glare.

Maria’s nervousness melts away, instinct kicks in. She’s faced a look like this dozens of times, someone uncertain about her intentions. She slows her pace, lifts her shoulders, talks to him clearly and warmly, like an equal.

“Let me begin again. My nephew is a talented pianist, a candidate for the Conservatory. I’d like to arrange a concert, in recognition of the abilities that are nurtured here. So many of our workers are gifted. Of course, you’re in a better position than anybody to recognize this. I would like to arrange an evening in celebration of such great talents, an evening that honours the efforts of the simple worker, our ability to work in harmony. Perhaps some Prokofiev sonatas.”

He nods, taking in her words.

“A fine suggestion Mrs.…”

“Brovkina.”

“Mrs. Brovkina, but perhaps now is not the right time.”

“I should mention that my nephew is nine years old. The evening could function as a symbol of our potential.”

“Nine years old. The child can play Prokofiev?”

“Yes, sir. He’ll be auditioning for the Conservatory in the spring.”

He looks at the floor and looks up again.

“I’ll think about it. As you say, such an event may contain a powerful symbolism. And we do our best to support talents, in whatever form they appear. I’ll discuss it with our director of culture.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He turns in to his office. The secretary looks at her. Maria smiles.

“Thank you for your patience.”

She walks down the metal steps and makes her way to her bench, and her working day begins. She tells herself that this is a good morning. She’ll keep telling herself this, even if she doesn’t believe it.

Once again Grigory walks this flat landscape with the pale evening light drawing down, his only respite from the plain, hastily constructed buildings that are now his home. He came to this resettlement camp three months ago, when swathes of corn covered the fields and combine harvesters traced the land, supported by locals who tied the straw in bundles, standing it on end to dry and be taken home later for their horses. Rows and rows of them inching forwards, like a local mob whose intent was to beat the land into submission. A year before, this would have been a sight to take pleasure in, to watch a community reap their harvest, but Grigory has developed a suspicion of all types of agriculture, all signs of growth. He knows the dangers that lurk in the most innocuous things.

When he left Chernobyl they were harvesting too. Men from the clean villages on the outer rim of the exclusion zone would enter their neighbours’ evacuated farms and pluck beets or potatoes from the earth. Often they’d take their children out of school, bring them along; their wives also. These were men who had always trusted the soil; it had never failed to provide for them. How could they believe the earth had betrayed them when vegetables were growing in front of their eyes? They would ask why they were allowed to work their own farms and yet their neighbours were forced to move because of some imaginary boundary. If their cattle needed feed, their neighbours wouldn’t begrudge them. The feed sits in sacks—how can it be contaminated? Even the kolkhoz offices endorsed this view. They posted signs saying it was permissible to eat salad vegetables: lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers. There were instructions for dealing with contaminated chickens. They advised people to wear protective gear and boil the chicken in salt water, to use the meat for pâté or salami and pour the water down the toilet.

In his final weeks there, when all of his authority had been stripped away, Grigory drove from farm to farm at the perimeter of the zone, showing his credentials, advising people of the dangers they were in. None of them believed him, until he took out the dosimeter and the machine beeped shrilly: 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 micro-roentgen per hour—hundreds of times the level of natural exposure. It was a method he’d adapted when it became apparent that all Vygovskiy’s grand statements about a new beginning, about a thorough, methodical cleanup, had been quashed by one phone call from the Kremlin.