Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Maria tried to give him what help she could. Pavel and Danil and their connections were unwilling to get involved. They couldn’t afford to raise their heads again, not so soon after the attempted strike. Eventually she was able to link Grigory up with some journalistic contacts, but of course they wouldn’t run with what he was telling them, especially without substantiated evidence.

He talked to prominent artists, writers, asked them to use their position to speak out, but why would they? They all remembered what had happened to Aleksei Filin, in Minsk. Jail was worth the risk only when they couldn’t work freely. Now they were able to do so with very little interference, and no one was willing to jeopardize that.

Six weeks after his return there was finally a breakthrough. The European Atomic Institute was organizing a major conference in Austria on nuclear safety. They had invited him to make a presentation. All his frustrations of the previous weeks were cast aside. When the time came, Maria travelled with him. Months had passed by then and, although he refused to go for a checkup, they both knew he was ill: his breathing was laboured, he tired easily. The intervening months had passed so slowly, so painfully, that when they finally boarded the plane and Grigory sat in his seat, she could see the relief wash over him. Finally, she remembers remarking to herself, he could put his responsibilities to rest, he could carry out what he considered his duty and then concentrate on his health. Throughout the flight he held her hand, so animated, and pointed at the rivers and motorways that snaked underneath them.

They took a taxi from the airport, the tall glass buildings of a Western city so unfamiliar to them. At the hotel reception there was no record of their names, but it didn’t matter, a small complication they explained away, one that would easily be remedied. When, at the conference centre the next day, the same thing happened, then they had no explanations.

There was no listing of Grigory as a delegate. He showed them his letter of invitation and they replied they were sorry for the confusion, but he couldn’t be admitted if he wasn’t on the list. He showed them his passport, they said they were sorry; even his speech, they said they were sorry. They placed the list of presentation speakers in front of him: his name wasn’t on it.

He had ceased to exist, melted into air.

He asked to speak to the conference director by name, but it was a security guard who approached them instead. Again, sorry. Everyone was sorry. When Grigory got angry, started shouting, demanded to speak to someone more senior, they suggested he send a complaint in writing. When Grigory strode past them into the conference room, it was then that they escorted him outside.

On the street, Maria stood beside him holding up his letter of invitation as he approached arriving delegates, told them in his broken English what had happened, took out his box of projector slides, asked people to look at them as evidence. But no one did. Instead, they held up their briefcases to barricade themselves from him as they passed.

When the last of the delegates had entered, Grigory sat on the concrete steps in his best suit, now two sizes too big for him, looking into the glass lobby from which no one returned his gaze. A beaten man.

Later that day, they spent what money they had left on a flight home. Maria found him dead less than two weeks later.

IT’S JUST THE TWO of them now, aunt and nephew, sitting in her darkened living room. After the restaurant, Alina and Arkady said their good-byes and returned to their hotel. Alina held Yevgeni’s medal to her chest and promised her sister she’d call, make more of an effort to stay in touch. Perhaps she will.

“And yet you stayed here,” Yevgeni says, “in this apartment. Surely you think of him every time you walk into that bathroom?”

She takes a moment before replying.

“The past demands fidelity,” she says. “I often think it’s the only thing that truly belongs to us.”

She walks to the window. Tourist boats pass on the river. The dull throb of drum and bass pulses through their silence.

“Is that why you never told me? Out of loyalty to him?”

“Telling you is no disloyalty to Grigory. If it was, I’d have taken his story to the grave. Your generation was gifted with a sense of boundless promise. I suppose I didn’t want to burden you with the responsibility. I wanted you to be free to follow your talent.”

She moves to a storage cupboard in the hall and returns carrying two large document boxes. Yevgeni rises to help her, but she gestures for him to sit and places them on the coffee table.

“This is all I have left of him.”

“You don’t need to show me,” he says.

She bends and kisses Yevgeni on the forehead. “I know,” she replies, and then walks to her room.

He turns on her reading lamp and opens the boxes, both of them filled with manila folders, dozens of them.

He reads. He keeps reading, his curiosity gaining momentum. He pulls out the files and piles them in two unsteady stacks. Hours upon hours of ordered black print. Sometimes he pauses to stand and gaze out of the window. Things he half knew, rumours he once heard, are consolidated. A word on the street from his childhood, a muttered side-mouthed comment, becomes here, in their pages, an indelible part of history.

There is no order to Yevgeni’s process. He reads something, puts it down, picks up something else. He reads a recounting of dietary routines, cleaning methods, sexual activity. He reads doctors’ testimonies, liquidators’ activity reports.

It strikes him, amid all of it, that the endless variations of a single life could probably fill an entire library: each action, every statistic, all record of being; birth cert, marriage cert, death cert, the words you had said, the bodies you had loved, all lay somewhere, in boxes or filing cabinets, waiting to be picked upon, collated, notated.

He reads into history, into the conjecture and the lies, into all that spent energy.

He views photographs of firemen and technicians, a plague of black globules spread over their red-raw bodies. He stares at images of infants with mushroom-shaped growths in place of eyes, with heads that have taken on the form of a crescent moon. He reads to gain understanding. He looks and reads and doesn’t know how to respond to such things. There is no response. He gazes at the images in awe and curiosity, guilt and ignorance. All of this is his past. All of this is his country.

And when he can look no longer, Yevgeni closes his eyes. And the world comes in.

Anumber of books were important in my research, but none more so than The Russian Century by Brian Moynahan, Among the Russians by Colin Thubron, Chernobyl Record by R. F. Mould, and Voices from Chernobyl , compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and translated by Keith Gessen.

The images contained in Zones of Exclusion by Robert Polidori, The Edge by Alexander Gronsky, The Sunken Time by Mikhail Dashevsky, and Moscow by Robert Lebeck gave me license to set my imagination free.

The documentaries Chernobyl Heart and Black Wind White Land marked the beginning of my writing. The ongoing and endless work of Adi Roche and Chernobyl Children International continues to astound me.

There are many I am indebted to for helping me along the way. Jocelyn Clarke, Orla Flanagan, Jenny Langley, Brad Smith, Isobel Harbison, Conor Greely, Tanya Ronder, Rufus Norris, Thomas Prattki, Diarmuid Smyth, John Browne, Neill Quinton, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, The Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, Anna Webber, Will Hammond, Claire Wachtel, Iris Tupholme, Ignatius McGovern, Natasha Zhuravkina, Emily Irwin.