Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

How close it all came to never happening.

HE CLINKS THE RING repeatedly against his glass, a metronome to pace his thoughts.

Yevgeni has never asked his mother why she kept it for him, why she didn’t let his father take it to his grave. Such a question would be too revealing for both of them, would open up too much. Old habits still lingering.

Perhaps she felt guilt at not providing a male presence for him. Perhaps, at his graduation, she wanted to remind her son where he came from, that though he was about to flourish in a new, sophisticated world, he would always be a kid from the outskirts. His wearing of it surely indicates he does feel an obligation, a debt, to his father, but Yevgeni remembers the man so vaguely that he’s merely a shadowy presence, a ghost who climbs his walls on long winter evenings.

It’s the only possession he has that’s older than himself, and he wears it, in truth, out of fidelity to the past. To remind himself that, one generation before, an artist with his talent, with his profile, should expect to spend half a lifetime freezing in a gulag: chopping wood, laying roads. That the prospect of a life such as his has driven many better musicians, better men, to madness.

The heat of the Scotch licks over him. He takes pleasure in the charred aftertaste, a reward for his work; he can allow himself this. These minutes after a recital are the only time he truly feels at peace, feels equal to his ambition.

The chatter from the auditorium has quietened, the audience continuing their conversations in the lobby, only an occasional stray note from loosened strings as the orchestra packs up their instruments.

The ring has since proven a constant source of speculation for women over a certain age. Almost every day he gets questions about it, little jokes about him transferring it onto the other hand, making it a wedding band once again. Such comments never used to bother him, but now, in his midthirties, they carry a sting. He simply doesn’t have an answer when they ask if there’s a woman in his life. There have been missed opportunities he has seen only in retrospect, too unwilling to compromise his focus, the last of which was a historian who lived in a former hotel that had been through the most superficial of reconversions. The lift had a sliding iron gate, the brass plate outside still announced he was entering the Hôtel Jean Jaurès. He presumed it was no accident that a historian would choose to live in a building named after one of the founding pillars of French socialism. He presumed this but never thought to confirm it with her.

He would call to her late at night, and she would open her door naked, cradling a cat that covered her breasts, a habit she’d developed after searching the building for it one too many times. After their lovemaking Yevgeni would lie awake and watch the ceiling fan, listen to the endless repetition of it cutting the air. He felt at ease with her, felt a possibility stir within him, but they didn’t spend enough daytime hours together for either of them to confirm their instincts. At moments like this, she still makes him wonder.

“Find another musician,” Maria tells him. “A cellist maybe, even a dancer, someone who understands.” But he never has.

SUCH RISKS SHE TOOK. Maria can barely grasp the scale of them in retrospect. Gambling with the boy’s future, with his safety. Alina’s too. At the very least he would have been prevented from setting foot in the Conservatory. She would have denied him doing the very thing that defines him. And for what? The Wall came down less than three years later, the Union was officially dissolved two years after that. Everyone got their freedoms and used them to elbow each other out of the way for whatever slice of the country they could get. Screwing each other as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Even her colleagues in the factory had no interest in communal action, in collective autonomy—all those phrases that had seemed so potent to her then—they just wanted more than they already had.

Despite all her worries, Yevgeni’s presence turned out to be irrelevant. When the power went out, they guided Sidorenko and the ministerial consort to a guarded room while Zinaida Volkova stood on the stage, proposed a strike, and read out their demands by torchlight to cheers and stamping of feet. The euphoria lasted until word went around that there was a citywide blackout. By the time the emergency generators kicked in, the stripping of the factory was well under way. They took anything that could be ripped out without mechanical aid. Even the supplies of water Danil had secretly stocked disappeared. The strike organizers fled, opting to stay anonymous. Who could blame them? Sidorenko, the minister, and management went home, and a couple of weeks later many of Maria’s colleagues were back in the plant, carrying out essential maintenance work.

Production was back up and running within a couple of months. The only gains the workers had made were the piles of scrap metal sitting in their baths and galvanized sheds.

Gambling her family on people who never believed in anything.

What lingers from that night is shame. It still has such a grip on her that she’s never been able to tell either of them what they avoided. Who did she think she was, playing God with their lives?

She never went back to the place. While work was suspended, Pavel managed to make enough space in his department to place her in a full-time tutoring position, and she’s stayed there ever since. The Lomonosov became her refuge through the new regimes. After the Union disbanded, it was probably the only institution in the city unaffected by the frantic tussle for wealth. Students still carried books, fell in love, turned in late papers, clustered together in the library. Her role, since then, has been in service to them, provoking them, encouraging them. The place has been good to her, perhaps too good. She got comfortable there, while the country needed good journalists—still needs them, now as much as ever.

But something has changed in her in the past few months, a surge of promise. Lately, she finds herself waking in the morning, placing her feet on the bedroom carpet. Curious. Captivated. Ready to soak in the coming hours. All her responsibilities have been played out. She is ready, finally, to live for herself.

The feeling has surprised her, delighted her. The result, she suspects, of something Yevgeni said on his last visit. She was setting a fire in the grate, and he remarked how Moscow didn’t seem like home anymore. He listed his grievances: the coarseness of the town, the flaunting of wealth, the teenage girls taking photographs of each other draped over the bonnets of sports cars, the muscle-bloated men wearing T-shirts plastered with cheesy American slogans, the neon-fringed boutiques selling leather dominatrix wear.

“But then again,” he said, “this has never been our city. It has always belonged to other people.”

She put a match to the fire lighter, kneeling close until the kindling began to smoke, then dusted down her jeans, gazed into the hesitant flames.

She paused and looked, taking in the crackle and spit of the young fire.

It was true. She had always been a stranger here. So much energy spent on staying as anonymous as possible.

“You’re right, it never has. Half my life I’ve been talking about leaving it.”

“You don’t owe it anything,” he told her. “Come to Paris. You always talk about how much you love it there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m too old to move.”

“You’re too old to stay. Haven’t they told you? Anyone under twenty-five isn’t welcome. Any time I come back, I feel obliged to get my tongue pierced, just to fit in.”

“Well, maybe I’ll do that instead.” She laughed.