Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

The steps have an endearing groan. Maria imagines they’ve been consistent in their complaints throughout the years, never failing to let out a bleat of misery when pressed upon. An impulse with which she can empathize. She walks the steps with trepidation, the weight of all these developments resting upon her. She’s put so much on the boy. This is no situation for him to become involved in. She’s tried to put aside the thought that she’s endangering his future prospects, but such a thing is impossible.

She stands on the mat at the door and kicks the skirting board to dislodge the snow in her soles, cursing herself for not doing this on the way into the building. A small stack of snow is deposited on the mat, its surface sculpted with the pattern of her soles. She knocks on his door and hears him respond, and she turns the handle and walks inside, saying, “Hello,” softly as her head rounds the door.

Mr. Leibniz stands behind his wife, cutting and shaping her hair, a sheet draped around her body. They’re framed in the large window, almost two-dimensional, his wife sitting benignly in profile, wet hair sticking to the sides of her face, and Mr. Leibniz behind her, trapping hair between his fingers and chopping with the scissors. Mr. Leibniz waves a hand in greeting and smiles but stays at his post.

“Sorry. She was getting restless, so I’ve decided to give her a trim. It calms her down. Please, come in.”

Maria had picked some snowdrops from the gardens nearby, and she holds them forward uncertainly, feeling like a schoolgirl.

“Thank you. They’re beautiful. You’ll find something in the kitchen. Would you mind?”

“Of course not.”

She emerges a couple of minutes later with the flowers standing in a jug half filled with water. She walks towards the table and places the flowers down beside Mr. Leibniz’s wife, just out of her reach, and she smiles at them, a beautiful, clear smile, then looks at Maria, and confusion sweeps its way across her eyes, needing a cue, aware that she knows the face.

“This is Zhenya’s aunt. Maria Nikolaevna. You remember Zhenya?”

The smile unrelenting. Maria can tell she holds the smile as a way of staving off the confusion. Her look contains something else now, a shadow of distress, on some level an awareness that she should know this name, this woman, and a panic there too, unsure how to gauge the seriousness of her crime.

Mr. Leibniz leans over and takes his wife’s hand, running his thumb over the topography of soft veins. He introduces her again.

“It’s Zhenya’s aunt, Maria Nikolaevna. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize her. She’s only been here a few times.”

“Ah, good. Maria Nikolaevna. Come and sit. The bus will be along at any moment.”

Maria smiles and nods. “Of course. I’ll wait with you.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes. Maria finds this unnerving at first, but then realizes that Mr. Leibniz wants his wife to become used to her presence, to relax with a stranger in the room, and once she understands this, Maria too relaxes and just watches him at work, watches him combing and cutting, her own thoughts falling in tandem with the fine, white hair that laces together on the floor around the chair. He clips methodically. He combs the hair, then pinches it, then clips. Maria is impressed at the fluency with which he transfers the comb and scissors, the comb almost sidestepping them, slotting automatically between his fingers. Every few minutes he steps back and brings his eye line level with his wife’s shoulders and pulls the strands of her hair downwards on both sides simultaneously, ensuring symmetry. His wife sits with the sheet tied up around her neck, hands underneath, formless, just the bright, calm face, looking out the window. After a few minutes of this he begins to talk.

“She’s always been proud of her hair. There are so many evenings I would come home to her hunched over the bath wearing one of my vests, pouring beer over her head or cracking an egg on it. Always these strange-smelling potions over the sink, oddly shaped bottles. She used to have such lovely, dark, healthy hair. She’d love it when I would run my fingers through it. It would lighten her mood instantly.”

Mr. Leibniz takes a step back and bounces her hair in his hands and looks critically at his work, then to Maria.

“What do you think?”

“I think I should get you to cut my hair.”

“I’m a butcher. But I try my best. Wait till it dries out—you won’t be inviting me anywhere near your head then.”

“You’re being modest, you’re not just cutting and slashing. I can see you have experience.”

“I had four younger sisters. I learned to cut hair quickly. And also the war. When I was in recovery in the military hospital I became an unofficial hairdresser to the nurses. They were all preoccupied with looking good. They see all that blood, they want a haircut. It was their way of escape.”

“I’m sure you capitalized on your vital role.”

He points the scissors at her in delight.

“I was ruthless.”

Mr. Leibniz brushes the hair from his wife’s shoulders, then unties the cloth around her neck. He goes to the kitchen to fetch a sweeping brush, and Maria looks at the woman and feels an impulse to wave a finger in front of her face, to see if her eyes will follow, a small test of how responsive she is, but of course she suppresses this, keeps her hands folded together on her lap.

When he’s finished sweeping he asks Maria if she’d like anything, a drink maybe, and she declines and he brings the dustpan and brush back into the kitchen. Maria can hear a rustling at the bin and a trickle from the sink as he washes his hands, and when he comes back he takes a towel from a cupboard and dries his wife, dropping the towel over her head and mussing her hair, and she doesn’t object, remains totally still, and he drapes the towel over her shoulders to catch any remaining drops and runs a brush through the strands, smoothing the hair back with his free hand, and after that’s done he sits on the divan beside Maria, and they both look at her sitting there, glowing like a spring morning, and Maria shares his sense of satisfaction, even though she’s done nothing to earn it.

“How long has she been like this?”

“It’s hard to say really. It’s been two or three years since we’ve had a completely rational conversation. It sneaked up gradually.”

He pauses to see if she is just asking the question to be polite, but he can tell by her attentiveness that she’s interested, and so he continues.

“Katya was always busy—needlework or visits to elderly neighbours—she was always interested in things going on in the outside world. She was the one who kept us informed. I’ve only ever really cared about music, some literature maybe. She clipped things out of newspapers, old photographs and suchlike, and kept them in a scrapbook. Every few months she’d take out an old scrapbook from a previous year and look through it. I think it was her way of marking time.”

Maria nods.

“Anyway, one day I looked in one of her most recent books, and the first few pages had neatly clipped articles, carefully spaced out, and then as the pages went on it was a paragraph or two, chopped off with ragged edges, and as the pages moved on they had less and less coherence, until at the end there were only blocks of colour or text, plastered on top of one another, like a collage.”

He looks out of the window.

“All her forgetfulness and unfinished sentences were probably what led me to take down the book in the first place, but it wasn’t till I looked at the pages that I put it all together.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“Yes. She was as shocked as I. She couldn’t remember sticking them in. That was almost four years ago.”