All That Is Solid Melts into Air (11 page)

“Your father emptied them out.”

Artyom looks outside. The lid of their wooden storage crate lies on the grass and their stock of potatoes has been spilled out in piles.

He turns again to his mother. “We’re not coming back, are we?”

She flattens her lips and shakes her head.

They pack and they wait. Each minute is stretched out. They sit and long for the return of half of their family.

They hear engines, coming from the direction of the village. It’s not the bike, or helicopters. These sounds are mixed with dislocated speech. They walk outside. A mechanical voice carries through the air, words meshed into one another.

Military trucks with loudspeakers strapped to their frames can be seen over the hedgerows. As they near the village, the last ones in line stop and spread out into the various laneways.

“What do we do?”

“Let’s go back inside. We’re not leaving this house without them.”

A truck stops down the lane, probably outside the Scherbaks’. Footsteps walking towards them, voices getting louder.

Through the vacant doorframe, Artyom can see a soldier approach. He steps into the room.

“Into the truck. You are allowed one bag.”

He’s not so much older than Artyom. Tall and gangly. He has a hand on the gun that’s slung across his chest. Artyom could bundle him down the steps before he has time to point it anywhere. He looks over to his mother, anticipating a signal, but she has picked up her needle and is working on the trousers again, barely paying any attention to what’s going on, as if this happens all the time.

“Into the truck. Let’s go.”

The soldier is a little unsure. His order has now become a request.

Artyom’s mother looks up from her stitches.

“My husband is out, looking for my daughter. They’re coming back. But we’re not leaving without them.”

“You can wait for them in the truck.”

His mother puts down her work.

“I see.”

She says this deadpan, diluting the soldier’s order into merely one of a number of possibilities.

“We have orders to burn down the house of anyone who doesn’t cooperate.”

“Fine. But we’ll wait here while you do it.”

She provides no gestures or intonations that betray her fears. His mother has learned not to fear a pointed gun. This woman speaking is his mother. Yes, she has had a life before motherhood, before marriage, yet Artyom can’t reconcile his scant knowledge of her past with what is happening right now, in front of him.

Confused, the soldier turns to the boy. Artyom wishes he had something with which he could occupy himself. He half wonders if he should pick up a needle and thread.

His mother points to the sacks that sit by the door, still no urgency in her voice.

“We’re packed. We’re leaving. But not without my husband and daughter.”

The soldier looks at the four sacks with clothes peeping out the top of them. He leaves. They wait. He comes back.

“Okay. You can wait. But I am to stay with you. When the truck comes around again, you’ll have to get on it. We can use force.”

“I’m sure you can.”

The soldier pulls a chair from the table, then decides he probably should stand. They wait. Artyom can’t tell for how long. After some time the soldier sits. His mother keeps sewing.

Artyom walks to his room, and the soldier follows. He takes a tractor manual from under the bed and returns to his chair and sits. The soldier does the same.

Eventually they hear an engine, a higher pitch than the trucks. The bike passes the doorframe; Sofya is behind his father, her arms across his chest. His mother stops her darning for the first time. They walk in, and his mother engulfs his sister. Sofya lets out an even stream of breath, like a ball being deflated.

“They’re here,” his father says.

His mother directs her eyes towards the kitchen table.

His father follows his mother’s stare and turns to see the soldier. The soldier is embarrassed now, Artyom can tell. Time in the room has softened his resolve. He is occupying another man’s home, sitting in front of his family with a gun across his lap.

His father approaches the soldier. “Come with me, please.”

They walk outside, and Artyom can see his father gesturing, pointing back towards the house.

“You think he’ll let us stay?” Artyom says.

“That’s not what he’s asking,” his mother replies, seated again, still holding Sofya’s hand.

His father walks back inside and takes some raw carrots from under the sink and hands them around. Then he takes some bread from the cupboard, breaks it into three chunks, and gives it to them. Artyom moves the bread toward his mouth, but his father stops him.

“Save it until you have to eat it. It might be a while before you get a meal.”

Artyom notices his father hasn’t saved anything for himself.

The truck pulls up outside. and they take their sacks. Artyom carries two of them, because he can. He throws the sacks inside the truck and climbs up, using the lip of the hanging backboard to give himself a boost.

He knows most of the people inside: the Gavrilenkos, the Litvins, the Volchoks. They live further out from the village. There are some that he doesn’t recognize. He turns around to help his mother up, then Sofya. His father is standing by the truck, holding their door. Is he bringing the door? His father lifts it up to him, and Artyom grabs it and places it facedown, and his father slides it to the back as people lift their feet, some complaining, and Artyom understands this. What is his father thinking, bringing their door?

“No talking,” the soldier barks out, his authority renewed.

His father climbs on board and sits beside his mother, not making eye contact with anyone. Artyom sees him grasp his mother’s hand. Artyom has seen them do this countless times, but he has the sense that something about the image is different, without quite locating what it is. The soldier closes the backboard, slides the pin into position, and climbs aboard. No one helps him. A gold ring on the soldier’s little finger clinks against the metal frame of the covering. Artyom realises it as the truck moves off: his mother’s wedding ring.

Chapter 8

I
n Party headquarters Grigory listens to the presentation from the evacuation committee. He feels a thousand years old, the lack of sleep catching up with him, his body still carrying the vibrations from the helicopter. They’ve brought supplies during the night, and so he sips tea from a polystyrene cup, the sugar and heat bringing some consolation.

They have mobilized any available buses within a ten-hour drive. Two thousand four hundred and thirty buses will stop at a meeting point sixteen kilometres from the town and then arrive in four separate convoys to facilitate crowd supervision. The town has been divided into four sectors, with the specific evacuation routes highlighted.

There will be dosimetric checkpoints in each sector to assess isotopic composition. People will be categorized according to risk and given medical papers to enable hospitals to process them efficiently. Five categories, stark in their naming: absolute risk, excessive relative risk, relative risk, additional risk, spontaneous risk. Anyone in the first two categories will be loaded into ambulances; the rest will be sent on buses. They anticipate that the dosimetric tests will take some time.

“Should I bother to ask?” says Grigory. “Let me guess, we have fifty dosimeters.”

“No, sir, we have one hundred and fifty,” a junior assessor says, with a trace of pride.

Grigory pauses for a moment and takes a sip.

“That’s approximately one per five hundred citizens.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grigory has the man removed from the room.

More military equipment arrives at the plant: Mi-2 fighter planes, Mi-24 fighter helicopters, instruments of battle. They send several robots designed by the Academy of Sciences for exploration on Mars. The lieutenant in charge of logistics has no idea where to park them.

At the evacuation site Grigory is astounded by the power of a crowd. The sheer weight and expanse of a gathered horde. The static hum of trepidation. Crying children: a small battalion of crying children. Mothers with worry streaking their faces; agitated men who find it impossible to still their hands rubbing their stubble, tousling their hair, clutching and unclutching their biceps. Thousands of hurriedly packed suitcases with sections of clothing peeking from their joins. Voluminous suitcases stuffed to an almost spherical state. Families caught caseless, using thick plastic bags with handles to transport the most necessary of their belongings, the bags leaking books and ceramic trinkets and suit jackets. Women with their meagre pieces of jewellery stuffed into their bras, which cause odd irregularities in their breast lines. Children wearing three layers of clothes, streaming sweat in the afternoon sunshine. Physical contact cascades throughout. Neighbours embracing. Couples holding hands, wives burrowing their heads into their husbands’ chests, children on shoulders, in arms, hugging waistlines. Babies in slings. Teenage lovers kissing frantically, as they are wrenched apart, scrabbling for a final contact, clawing the space between them.

The soldiers carry megaphones and guns and arrange long, snaking lines according to the corresponding tower blocks, at the end of which are a doctor with a dosimeter and a trestle table with a lieutenant checking identity cards and stamping new medical papers. Those in the critical categories are hauled to the side, dragged behind a wall of soldiers, and shunted into ambulances. They protest in a whole-bodied way, limbs churning, clothes falling loose around them, tearing in the struggle. Their families rush forward but are butted away, soldiers expertly dispatching blows to the lower neck, causing the injured people, children included, to crumple in slow motion from the knees. The space the crowd inhabits expands with their indignant rage, but they are kept at bay by the unyielding troops. These soldiers have seen battle and carry with them the resolute steeliness of experience.

When the buses arrive, the crowd surges forth, swarming round the vehicles, prising open windows, climbing on mudguards, bellying onto roofs. Tear gas is released and the swarm retreats and the soldiers board the buses and drag out those inside, dispensing blows in full view of the crowd. Megaphones keep blaring instructions. Simple, clear sentences:

Return to your lines.

Do not attempt to board the vehicles without a medical certificate.

Anyone who attempts to do so will be severely punished.

Three lines repeated as a mantra, eventually restoring order. The crowd fatalistic and ultimately submissive.

The operation reports detail that animals are likely to be highly contaminative—radioactive matter would be soaked up through their coats—and so the troops shoot any animals on sight. Pets are wrenched from protective arms and shot in full view of their owners. Docile dogs looking innocently into gun barrels. The soldiers clench cats by the ridge of skin behind the neck and place pistols under their squirming chins, blood exploding in all directions.

An elderly woman passes a large jar of milk around to her neighbours, hearing it aids with radiation poisoning. An official slaps the jar from her hand, yelling to her that it’s probably contaminated, and the creamy liquid slopes in a single trail down the pavement, eventually combining with animal blood into a lurid, pink puddle. The woman remains still, helpless.

Grigory stands outside the operations centre—a hastily constructed tent on a slightly elevated point in the eastern sector of the town—and takes it all in. It’s a military operation; there is nothing he can do to interfere. He watches the spreading chaos and feels impotent and alone.

To his right, slightly down the slope, Grigory sees a man attempting to carry a door onto the bus. The soldiers encircle him, all with their guns pointed, as if they’re about to skewer the man. Grigory moves within earshot. The man stands with one arm around the vertical door, as if it’s an old friend that he’s introducing to a group of neighbours. He has a strong sweep of a chin, with short, grey stubble, and a salesman’s charisma. He’s pointing to the intimate details of its surface. Grigory follows the man’s fingers and sees some neat lines scored into the side of the panel at various heights, fractions beside them: 3¼, 5½, 7½. The man points upwards to a boy and girl, early to midteens, with the same definition to their faces, deep-set, clear eyes. Grigory realizes the man is pointing out the measurements of their height as children, the markings of their growth. The man talks about the history of this object. The soldiers are intrigued by such ludicrous ambition, bringing such an unlikely object with him while everyone else is trying to smuggle on an extra bag or jacket.

Grigory hears the man had laid out his father on this door, ten years ago, then his mother last winter. He explains all this to the soldiers; he shows them the notches, the names, the tribal markings denoting the history of the thing, the only object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead body will rest, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man’s nose.

Blood leaks down his face, glistening in his stubble, dripping from his chin. The door falls onto the concrete with a crash, and the crowd panics, so tightly wound up they mistake it for a gunshot.

Some words still emerge from his lips; the momentum of the man’s speech hasn’t let him dry up completely. Then he stops talking and some other soldiers grab him, pull him forward, and drag him away, pushing his family backwards. The door is consumed in the heave of the crowd. Grigory can see the family being pushed back in the surge, trying to swim against the tide of bodies, and the man is bundled into a troop carrier, where he covers his chin and mouth with his hand, and Grigory can’t tell if this gesture is to staunch the flow of blood or to indicate his regret for his outlandish ambition.

Other soldiers are boarding trucks, and Grigory finds out that they’re ancillary squads, sent to search the town for anyone in hiding. He decides to join them, judging that a smaller group holds more opportunity to bring his calming influence to bear.

They drive to the western part of the town and walk through apartment blocks. Washing hangs on lines that stretch the width of each balcony. Fridges contain bottles of orange juice and lengths of butter on dishes. They find people behind shower curtains and wedged into airing cupboards. They find a pregnant girl lying in a hollowed-out sofa. Grigory stands on a balcony, glancing over the empty streets for signs of movement, and looks down and sees a pair of hands clutching the railings at his feet. He leans over the guard rail and finds a man hanging straight as an exclamation point, his gaze directed downwards, as if avoiding eye contact would keep him obscured from sight. A man hanging ten storeys up, his lean muscles taut with effort and desperation. In another apartment an old woman sits in her kitchen listening to the radio. When they enter in a clatter of heavy boots, she turns down the volume and looks peacefully at them, in total control of the situation. Before they have a chance to give the order, she refuses to leave. She invites them to beat her or shoot her if that is necessary, but she states that this is her home and she will die here. None of the soldiers has the appetite for this kind of violence, not here, not with this woman. They walk out and Grigory shakes his head and smiles in admiration, and she raises her open palms to the ceiling, a silent gesture that says everything there is to say at this moment, in this room, in this town.

Many of the doors have notes pinned to them, to friends or relatives, stating a point of contact in the city. People have painted their family name on the door, an attempt to assert ownership. In dozens of apartments, they find tables fully laid for dinner.

They find a young couple sleeping in bed. They had been drinking for most of the night and lay there together under the sheets, oblivious to the commotion all around them. When the soldiers burst in, the man leaps from the bed in shock and then, realizing his nakedness, leaps back in again. The soldiers laugh, and Grigory asks them to leave and then sits on the bed and explains the situation to the couple, staring into the dark eyes of the young woman, gaining her trust with the gentleness of his tone. They wait in the kitchen, and when the couple emerge, dressed, carrying a few belongings, the soldiers clap and cheer and they smile shyly, and Grigory envies them their burgeoning love.

They put people in the truck and drive them to the relevant zones and then return and put more people in trucks. They pass a small graveyard and find a woman fisting soil from a grave—her parents’ grave—into a jam jar. She pleads to keep the jar, but they take it from her and empty the soil back onto the ground. The woman has no energy to protest.

They hear a noise from a lift shaft and break through an iron grille and find a young boy, perhaps five years old, sitting on top of the lift, clasping his hands to his ears. One of the men climbs into the shaft and emerges a few minutes later with the boy bouncing on his shoulders, making horsey noises and steering the soldier by the ears.

They continue to shoot pets, despite Grigory’s objections. Pets run from apartments, and the soldiers fire their pistols at will and argue over kill numbers as if they were war heroes.