Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

They stand and talk. The talk is that the air defence command were afraid to take him out of the sky: three years ago they shot down a Korean civilian airliner that had drifted into Soviet airspace. They thought it was a spy plane. An international embarrassment of incredible magnitude.

So, the talk is that no one was prepared to give the order.

A few in the room are saying he’s a genuine emissary, sent from the West, a modern-day Messiah. Already they are being mocked.

The official line was that the Moscow radar was down due to routine maintenance work.

Maria wonders where the hell Pavel is. She talks to a tall, slim guy in a black sweater with holes where the shoulders should be. He’s a botanist, midtwenties with deep-set eyes, and he talks without expecting a response, and she sips her vodka, half interested, and tries not to look at the door.

“We took him to be a weather balloon.”

Some people in a circle in the corner are doing impressions of the generals readying their excuses for Gorbachev.

“There was impenetrable, low-hanging cloud.”

Each one elicits a round of laughter, and Maria smiles wryly. Their intonation is pitch perfect: they slur their words, speaking like Neanderthals, and a couple of them take on the persona of gorillas, chewing their knuckles, wrists bent, scratching themselves, elbows at unlikely angles.

“His flight pattern replicated low-flying geese.”

The laughter builds with each enactment.

There’s a box in the basement of their apartment block, stacked together with Alina’s husband’s belongings. Letters, photographs, a restaurant bill, cinema stubs: all the detritus of her marriage that she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. It’s too difficult, too obscure, to think of Grigory out there; Maria has no reference points, no landscape to imagine. And she hasn’t told Alina what she knows. Her sister would respond with practicalities, tell her glibly that she’s loading herself with unnecessary worries, try to reassure her with all those bullshit news reports. So, instead of dwelling on the possibilities, she thinks of the box instead, fills it with all the unspoken words which they’ve yet to exchange.

A man wearing a dark cap arrives to ironic cheers, and he carries with him a large bag. Some of the group huddle around him and help him unpack, and they join metal pieces together until Maria realizes it’s a movie projector that he’s been carrying, and he displays the tin can containing the reel to everyone as if it were a bottle of fine wine, and there’s a hushed murmur of approval and Maria is annoyed that Pavel never mentioned that a film would be the focal point of the evening, and where the hell is he? An hour late is too much, even for him.

The movie is Solaris by Tarkovsky. They sit on whatever is available and lean against the far wall, and the botanist has managed to manoeuvre himself beside her, but he’s timid enough to keep his hands to himself and Maria isn’t anticipating any problems. They have to aim the image over the ovens, and because of this the picture is elongated as if the figures in the film are in a hall of distorting mirrors. Maria kind of likes this element, the way the mouths and noses stretch out in close-ups, which makes her consider what an odd thing the human face is in its configuration, how strange in its regularity, all the billions resembling each other.

They stop the reel, and there is some mumbling and fiddling with the projector and the man in the dark cap announces that his speakers are blown so there won’t be any accompanying sound, and there are boos and hisses amongst the crowd, who are getting into the crowd spirit, but Maria can tell nobody really cares, they’ve all probably seen it anyway and know the plot, and the lack of sound somehow enhances the stretched-out picture, makes it all the more curious, and the heat is still blasting from the oven and the industrial taint of the noise it makes is oddly appropriate to the images. They watch people speaking with no sound, and Maria finds herself considering the tongue action and lip movements, and it can’t be denied that it provides a faintly erotic twist.

Scenes pass and nobody moves, everyone as entranced by the spectacle as she is. Maria looks around at the group, bundled together under the blue light that flares and deepens as the camera changes its viewpoint. There doesn’t seem to be that many of them, now that she can see everyone gathered together, a small crew of drifting souls, all reaching to gain purchase on something solid and worthwhile, and the thought strikes her that if a fire consumed the building and they were all trapped inside, would anyone actually notice? Everyone here claiming they were in fact somewhere else.

The film as she remembered it is an intense psychological drama set in a space station, but viewing it here elicits ripples of laughter throughout its small audience. The flimsy and narrow spaceship tunnels, the claustrophobia and intense desire for privacy, the reassuring fantasies the characters cling to, the great, looming, all-controlling planet outside, all so close to their own experience that they have no option but to titter in recognition. Take the sound away and political allegory becomes satire.

Maria allows herself to be swept along by the motion and rhythm of the camera. She’s never done this before, too distracted by the narrative, but now she pays attention to the cutting pattern, the length of a shot, and she looks at the outside of the frame, rejecting where the director wants you to look, seeing instead a blurry stair rail or desk lamp; the smudged, unfocused items on the periphery that hold their own quiet captivations. Watching it is like reading a child’s picture book: no words to pay attention to, just the language of images.

They take a break at the end of the first reel and people spill into the corridor, smoking and talking, and there’s a queue for the toilet and Maria sees Pavel hovering around the door.

“You look lovely.”

“Thanks. You look late.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Pavel holds up a bottle he’s brought and pours a swig into Maria’s glass, locates one for himself, and blows the dust out of it. He pours and puts the cap back on and lays the bottle on the floor, clamping it between his feet, and they clink glasses and sip and Pavel looks around the room and Maria looks into her glass, swirling the liquid.

“How long is it since we’ve done this?” he asks.

“Done what?”

“Shared a drink.”

Maria pauses, thrown slightly off kilter.

“I don’t know. Maybe five years?”

She could have come to him. When the trouble started with the newspaper. Pavel would have given advice. She could trust him. Why didn’t she lay more faith in others? Pride maybe, she thinks. She doesn’t like to show her weaknesses. Pavel has always been loyal to her, even if they let a long time pass without seeing each other. She didn’t ask him to dig out a teaching role for her; he was aware of her situation and just called her up one day. At first she wondered if his kindness had a motive to it, if he was perhaps trying to rekindle things, but no, there’s never been an underlying edge to their conversations.

She draws him into a corner.

“What do you know about Chernobyl?”

“Why?”

“It’s begun to interest me. What have you heard?”

“Probably the same as you. Of course, I don’t directly know anyone who has been there. It’s all hearsay. But, yes, there’s been talk.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Wild tales, odd tales. The animals have been affected, rabid wolves are populating the forests, two-headed calves being born in the local farms. Fairy-tale stuff.”

“So you don’t think there’s any truth in them?”