Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

She’s waiting for Pavel—an old friend, or teacher, or lover: whichever traditionally comes first in the list of distinctions. Before her classes, she slid a note under his door, asking to meet, something she’s done every three or four months since their reacquaintance at a party last year. They rarely meet casually, even in the corridors of the faculty, but she finds it a relief to have a long-standing friend come back into her life, someone—independent of Alina—who knows her well enough to enable her to think things through. She wants to clear her mind before she meets Grigory, wants to dispel the possibility of unburdening herself to him. She’ll ask for a favour for the boy, nothing else.

She’s been waiting for Pavel for half an hour, watching the skaters on the river below her, lit up from the Central Lenin Stadium. Her gloves are thin and her fingertips feel dumb and immobile. She’s never become used to the snapping cold of the dark season. She’s never known any other kind, and yet the deep winter always finds ways to surprise her, wrapping itself around her skin, biting at her exposed extremities. She’s reminded here though, in this spot, with couples walking past, skates slung over their shoulders, that she loves the peacefulness that descends at this time. People speaking as they dress, in muffled, layered solitude. Condensed steam everywhere, moisture-laden breath. Winter always assumes a certain otherworldly gait. It has a texture and speech all of its own, a written language, snow nestling itself in lucid patterns, iced windowpanes pleading to be deciphered, skaters cutting swirls into the frozen river.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pavel has placed himself soundlessly beside her, an old habit which makes her jump out of her skin.

“You startled me.”

Pavel smiles. There’s a childish edge to his humour, always seeking an opportunity to irritate, to tease—an aspect so at odds with his status as a professor of literature. People revere him. He repeats his question.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And so quiet. I feel like I can hear every sound on the river.”

“Do you skate? I can’t remember.”

“I could skate in a straight line, I just could never turn.”

“That’s a problem.”

“I think it was something to do with relying on only one foot. I stopped trying just before I hit my teens. It was probably a wise decision, looking back.”

“I skate from time to time.”

“Of course you do. The man of five hundred talents.”

“Please, not you. If you start complimenting me, it might be the end of our friendship.”

She smiles and they embrace, warmly.

When Maria was a student, his lectures were eagerly awaited events not just within the department but throughout the university. The hall would be crowded with engineers, medical students, and marine biologists. They’d fill the steps, squeezing in three wide, the crowd clustering at the doorways and spilling out into the lobby, listening intently, laughing with their fellow students inside—those lucky enough to get a seat. Professor Levytsky drew effortlessly on the classics, embellishing his points with stories from the writers’ lives, their sexual proclivities, anecdotes of everyday embarrassments. He could hold a room with magnificent power, using silence as a way to taunt his audience, to stir them into their own internal opinions. From his mouth, poetry became a fine meal, each distinct word gaining its own flavour when issued from his lips.

“You got my note?”

“Of course, I read it with pleasure. You’ve always written a good note, Maria.”

“I’m sure I’ve had many successors.”

As an undergraduate in her first year, Maria had pursued him with zeal. In her first two months she wrote five love letters, slipping them under his office door in the late evenings. The letters themselves were a sexual awakening to her; she was surprised at her ability to write such sensual prose, surprised that she knew what she knew, experiencing the bodily tremors while she wrote, becoming heated as she lay her longings down in ink. And, in later weeks, when they lay in bed, him asleep, she would trace her finger along the lines on his fine-boned face, following the progress of those early words that were etched now into his crow’s-feet, chiselled into the grooves of his forehead.

“No. Notes like you wrote take real daring. There aren’t many out there with your courage. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m claiming it’s them and not me. I’m telling myself I still inspire the same yearnings.”

“Of course you do.”

“Please. Look at me. I’m an old man. I have tufts of hair growing from my ears. It’s a definite old-man symptom.”

Maria cranes her head back.

“I see no ear hair.”

“I clip it. They can take a lot, but I’m keeping my vanity.”

“It’s a good thing to keep.”

“It’s the best thing.”

Pavel ended it after six months, sitting over morning tea, while she was making out her list of errands for the day. He said he was preventing her from making her own discoveries. She remembered the words distinctly, remembered her confusion that an errand list and a lover’s rejection—her first great rejection—should occupy the same space. A breakup like this should be done in a romantic place, with tears and rain. This is what she thought then, a girl of nineteen. She needed to make her own decisions, he said, discover her own opinions, not sit under the weight of his experience. She had no idea what that meant at the time. She spat curses at him, came to his apartment in the middle of the night, attempting to catch him with a new lover, which she never did. In the end it mattered little; she was obliged to abandon her studies anyway, move to Kursk. When she returned to the city with Grigory, she was a few years older; married, wiser, carrying her own bank of experiences. Had they met on the street she would perhaps have thanked Pavel, told him she realized the unselfishness behind his statements, the accuracy of them.

A pause.

“You wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes. I don’t know why.” She hesitates. “I do know why, it’s just difficult to articulate.”

“I’m in no hurry. Talk to me.”

Maria notices that Pavel’s eyes are still the same shade of milky green. She wonders if our eyes change colour as we age.

“I’m worried that something is happening, something I should be aware of.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been hearing things. Odd things, from various sources.”

“What sources?”

“Neighbours, people at work, remarks in the class. They…”

She hesitates again.

“Yes?”

“Have you heard about the ‘Shining Solidarity’ phenomenon in Poland?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“When the Solidarity movement had to go underground, they developed techniques to keep up morale. They had help, of course. The Americans would send in aid shipments through Sweden, mostly communications equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Basic stuff. Books. Printing machines. Unregistered typewriters. Photocopiers. But the CIA gave them one impressive toy. A machine that transmitted a beam which overpowered the state-broadcast signals. Every few months on millions of TV sets the Solidarity logo would appear, with a recorded message announcing that the movement lived and the resistance would triumph.”

“It sounds like science fiction.”

“But it happened. It kept the movement going when people thought it had been extinguished. Viewers were asked to turn their lights on and off if they’d seen the logo. When this happened, a glittering light show would sweep through the suburbs. Such a show of strength. The whole city glinting like a piece of foil in the wind.”