Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

He walks through the still streets, windows smashed and cracked; on the pavement a baby’s bottle and a bicycle tyre, broken glass and food containers encrusted with ice. A bread van passes him, the driver looking casually amused at the obstacles to his regular route, one hand out of the window pinching a cigarette, swerving gently every now and then to avoid the smouldering piles left over from improvised fires.

Snow sponges up the wash from the streetlights, which burn again, as though nothing had happened. Morning in Moscow: the city timid and languorous and his. In these hours he owns both the city and the day. He feels different, feels that he knows the character of things in a way that he didn’t before last night.

Yevgeni walks for a half hour, and the buildings become older, more solid, and he arrives at a great square and looks at the trees, their branches snapped, with twigs and large splinters bobbing in the fountains, and realizes where he is: the statue of Pushkin looking down on him, the Rossiya cinema to his right, the great plate-glass frontage smashed to such an extent that the place looks skeletal, half finished. Even the huge movie posters at the front have been taken. It becomes obvious to him now where he is headed. It’s probably no accident that he’s ended up in this district, his legs know the route well enough to carry him here unthinkingly.

He walks through alleyways, litter spreading from overturned bins. He passes a house with emaciated plants dangling over the porch and a sundial on the patch of lawn to the side that has been reappropriated as a bird table with a netful of nuts hanging from one corner. Another corner, another street, walking until he reaches the turquoise building. In the morning sun it looks as though someone has slugged it in the stomach. Its roof sags, concave but valiant, a patchwork of replacement tiles fixed at irregular angles so that streams of air filter through the house.

Yevgeni pushes the door open and walks up the steps that wake with a moan and greets a cat patrolling the corridor with a waggle of his finger under its chin. It lingers against his hand, shunting his arm with its head. He opens a door gingerly and steps into a wood-panelled room and sits at its dominant feature, a baby grand that takes over about a third of the floor space and is turned at an angle so that there is room for the door to open fully. Yevgeni looks at it in the sallow light and wonders for the first time—it had never occurred to him before—how the hell they managed to get it in here, the windows and stairwell so incredibly narrow.

He runs his hands over the curved lid, the particular shape of it fitting his hands like no other object he knows. He flips it in half, revealing the tips of the off-white keys, and then flips it again, and somehow the whole lid miraculously slides its way into the body of the instrument. He loves the weight, the balance of the keys, how when you push a white one it bounces again in readiness for reuse, whereas the black ones are plodding and awkward, objecting to being disturbed from their slumber, hammering out strange sharp and flat tones, grumpy and hulking.

There are piles of sheet music on the top and in the secret section under his seat and spilling along the floor and in front of the fireplace and beside the sofa and on the windowsill and radiators. Mr. Leibniz reads music like others read books. Often when Yevgeni comes for his lesson the old man will be stretched out on the couch, his wife in bed, a sheaf of Shostakovich on his chest, and he will hold his finger up in the air to prevent Yevgeni from speaking; Let me get through this one last section, the finger is saying, as if he can’t wait to find out how it will end.

Yevgeni doesn’t have to search for the particular sheet. He locates it instantly. A lime-green cover with a photo of a man who could only be a composer, who looks as if he were born a composer, a great white walrus moustache and a womanly shock of white hair brushed back from his forehead, a bow tie taming his thick neck. He places the sheet on the stand, adjusts his seat, places his right foot on the pedal below and his fingers in the starting position, and brings his ear to the level of his fingers and pushes downwards, letting the vibrations rise from the wooden box and stream through his ear and soak into his body, and he knows he is ready for this, finally, he is equal to the music now, he will no longer buckle under its weight.

He lets the previous night run free through the notes on the page, Grieg’s Nocturne in C Major, the keys containing any hue he wishes to paint, all the richness of the city: the window frames, the darkened signs, the fake leather on the seats of cars that sit abandoned, stunned, on the pavements. He plays the drips that splatter down from cracked drainpipes. He plays the contents of washing-powder packets streaming through the air in white and blue granules. He plays the cards of the poker game, the intensity of the eyes of the looters. He plays Iakov’s kindness and menace. Yevgeni looks beyond the notes and time signatures and tonal suggestions and he realizes that the notation is merely a framework upon which to place all this understanding. All things coming together, his knowledge of music and his knowledge of sound, his experience of life, brief as it is but full, bursting from him, searing out in the energy under his fingernails. He plays his Grieg as the room grows lighter, sunlight drawing itself across the pages, until he hears his name being spoken and turns around and sees Mr. Leibniz, his eyes soft and watery, leaning in the doorway.

“Have you been out all night?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother is looking for you.”

“I know.”

“You should go.”

“I know. I’m sorry I let myself in. I just, I don’t know, missed it. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you.”

Yevgeni stands up to leave. Mr. Leibniz’s wife comes into the room now, gliding past him, floating in her white nightdress, the ends of her hair catching the faint gusts of her movement, her face gleaming, alert. She sits on a chair and leans towards the piano, drawn to it, pointing at Yevgeni to return to his playing.

Mr. Leibniz sits too, takes her hand. “Perhaps once more,” he says.

And Yevgeni plays it again, differently than before, and then again, each time differently, so much to find within the patterns, his hands working separately and together, like the two figures seated near him, in their nightclothes, left and right, their easy compatibility, the freedom that it carries, the stretches of notes that weave themselves into an intricately complicated formation, fusing and separating, together and apart, timeless and in the moment. He could play this forever. He will play this forever. He knows it now. This is what he is meant to do.

Silence.

His fingers float upwards, vibrations still running through them, molecules quivering against each other, the sound dissolving somewhere over the orchestra, funnelling into the microphones that dangle above them.

A thousand people exhale.

Yevgeni opens his eyes.

The keys settle in their binary opposition, black and white, returning to stillness, released from his energy. He turns left, to the first and second violins, the violas, the woodwinds in the background, forward to the cellos and basses, black jackets, white shirts, black dresses, white skin, and nods to all in gratitude, and they raise their instruments in appreciation, and then he turns right to the audience, the glaring lights, the gale of applause, ranks of them holding up their phones to capture this moment.

It’s been several years since he’s played in his native city, but still he is not here with them, at least not immediately. He is on the other side of the Tverskaya, back in his old mentor’s apartment; Mr. Leibniz and his wife listening still.