All That Is Solid Melts into Air (33 page)

“What do you want?”

She can hear a shuffling, the crimson tip rises, he is standing; the flare of a match, a jawline, is revealed for a fleeting moment. The light compresses and the flame is drawn nearer a face, a nose, an eye. His eye.

“Grigory?”

His upper lip stretches into a smile, a row of teeth.

“Maria? Is it you?”

She replies breathlessly, “Yes. Is it you?”

“Yes.”

The cigarette is discarded, the match goes out. He lights another one, closer to his face this time, leaner than she has known, shadow-sculpted, hollowed-out eyes. An aged face. He steps closer, brings the match to her. She can feel the lick of its heat. He reaches out in the dark, finding her, both of them trembling from the cold of the night, from the warmth of their touch.

THEY’VE BEEN WALKING
for five minutes. The fireworks still flare, but there are longer pauses between them now. Rubbish bins are being set alight. Yevgeni sees bursts of fire whenever they emerge from the alleyways to cross a main street. He’s stopped believing there’s a car, but what is he to do? He can’t just run off, wander alone through the streets. He has no idea where he is, for one. His toes are cold though, his shoes too flimsy. He should have bought boots instead of running shoes. A pair of boots and his mother wouldn’t have asked questions, just accepted whatever he said, so relieved that he had a new pair.

He tells Iakov his feet are cold, careful to keep his tone steady; he doesn’t want to moan. Iakov keeps walking but looks at him, punches him on the shoulder, and hands over a small bottle that he takes from his jacket pocket, telling him to drink.

Yevgeni has never dared to taste vodka till now, but Iakov is looking at him, measuring him up, and there is no choice involved in this: he is here with these men, under their protection. He can’t risk being abandoned.

The bottle isn’t much bigger than his hand and has a curved body that fits snugly in the palm, and Yevgeni takes a deep breath and downs a mouthful, and coughs as the liquid sears the inside of his throat. Iakov laughs, and the three men in front look back and laugh too. Yevgeni can feel a surge of vomit reach the back of his tongue, but he manages to quell it. He takes another breath and lets the sensation subside. The men don’t wait for him, and he has to run to catch up, their strides are so long, eating up the ground in front of them.

A figure walks down the alleyway in the opposite direction, a rectangular shape crossing his chest and, as they near, Yevgeni can make out that the shape is a TV. The group of four, Iakov included, stop in front, blocking the man’s way. Yevgeni hangs back a few paces, wary.

“You moving house?”

The man looks from side to side and considers turning around, but there are four of them and one of him and, besides, he’s carrying a TV. Really, how far can he run?

“Something like that.”

“It’s a good idea. No traffic at this time. No one to bother you.”

“Except of course you ran into us. Are we bothering you?”

The man stays admirably nonchalant in the circumstances. “No. No bother.”

Yevgeni can make out that the rabbit ears for the TV are slung around the man’s neck and rest on his chest, the two metal prongs sticking out, making it look as if his chest has been pierced from behind by an archer.

The oldest of the men, the one who was winning at cards, is the one who leads the exchange. Iakov and the others take their cues from him.

“It’s better at night, you know, because if people see you, they can get the wrong idea.”

The guy with the TV grins dumbly, no idea how to stack the odds in his favour.

The oldest guy looks to Iakov, who is standing to his right, then back to their temporary prisoner.

“Drop the TV,” says Iakov.

“What?”

Iakov takes a step forward and punches him on the head, a hard, short hit on the temple as the man tries to duck. The TV bounces to the ground, its screen imploding with the impact.

The older guy takes the cord for the rabbit ears and wraps it around the man’s neck, and they plant punches on his face, his head bobbling from side to side, at the mercy of their blows.

The sound of effort, heavy breathing, pleasure mixed in, delight, thrill. The men are enjoying their work. Yevgeni can hear a strangled noise coming from the man’s mouth and can see blood and saliva dripping, and he takes another swing of vodka to numb the shock, and Iakov approaches him and grabs him and pushes him in front of the man, who is kneeling on the ground by now, beside the shattered TV, arms covering his head.

This is what men do too, Yevgeni thinks. Even as they get older, this is what they do. He didn’t know such a thing. How could he? What men does he know apart from Mr. Leibniz and a couple of male teachers; the gym instructor? He has no recollections of being in the company of grown men. He has never been taken anywhere by his father: no films or poolrooms, no games of football in the park. No one has ever shown him that this is what it is to be grown up, hanging around poker tables and burning barrels, fighting and drinking. There are things his aunt and mother couldn’t provide. Maybe he has been raised as a little girl all along. He needs to accept this opportunity.

He stands there looking at the man, cowering. They shove him forward. He can hear Iakov say, “Kick him in the head.” It sounds to Yevgeni like he’s calling it out from a hundred metres away.

The other men snicker.

“
Do
it.”

This is what men do. This is what it means to be one of them. Yevgeni lets fly a kick into the man’s neck and there follows a rumbling cheer from the others, and he swings out again and again, the man’s neck soft and doughy at his foot, and the man looks up at him, eyes burning in indignity, and Yevgeni draws back and makes contact with the man’s chin, which sends him sprawling backwards. The contact feels as solid as kicking a wall, something dense, not muscle and fat, hard bone. His foot is ringing with the impact. One more into the body of the man. Another one. He’s not the helpless one anymore, the one with dainty fingers. It’s his fists and his feet that will carry him through.

He stops, panting, satiated.

The others walk on, and Yevgeni stays and looks at what he’s done.

The man groans in a basso rumble and takes on the same form as the TV: shattered, slumped.

Yevgeni runs to catch up.

Chaos is building. Crowds are tearing through the streets now, cars parked at any angle, dumped in the middle of the road. People are running in all directions. A line of militia vans snakes its way towards them, their roof lights pulsing colour into the air. They cross the road and wait for the militia to pass, and the oldest of the men approaches a car. He shatters the driver’s window with his elbow and unlocks all the doors, and they pile inside. Yevgeni squeezes into the middle of the backseat, his shoulders almost around his ears. The man in front takes a screwdriver from his pocket and jams it into the ignition, and the car stammers into life and the back wheels screech, and they pull out into the road, the back end fishtailing from side to side, and Yevgeni can feel the heat of the two men pressed beside him, Iakov in the front seat whooping with excitement, and where the hell are they going, taking up the middle of the road, fireworks in front of them, still blossoming blue.

They gather speed, careening through the streets. Yevgeni has to lean forward and clutch the headrests of the seats in front in order to avoid being shaken around. The men beside him list from side to side as though caught in the midst of a powerful sea storm. If they crash head-on into something, Yevgeni knows he would be flung through the windscreen. Air whips through the car from the broken window, fragments of glass shuffle across the dashboard.

They brake suddenly, and a woman sprawls over the hood but rolls off sideways and continues into the street. Yevgeni can’t believe that the driver can anticipate anything, considering the speed at which they’re travelling.

The driver constantly combines the hand brake and accelerator, so that the car bolts and buckles with a stubborn will and Yevgeni’s shoulders keep connecting with the seats in front. He has to concentrate intently to avoid ramming his head into the hard frames underneath the upholstery.

They drive for ten minutes maybe, the driver relaxing—less to contend with as they move to the outskirts of the city. Yevgeni is glad, after all, that they’re not bringing him home; he’s not ready to face his mother and aunt, not after what just happened. And he doesn’t even want to think about playing the fucking kiddie tune.

They screech sideways and come to a halt. He hears doors click open one after another, and the men jump out. He stays where he is for a moment, disoriented, nauseous.

He hears Iakov shouting after him and gathers himself and steps out of the car. They are far away from anywhere, some industrial area. The place is lit only by car headlights; they aren’t the only ones who have decided to come here, wherever
here
is. Gigantic light poles, like tree trunks in the gloom. People running, carrying large boxes with their lids torn off, dumping them inside the cars and then running back for more. Some people, his mother’s age, older, are pushing and dragging caged carts, the kind you see being hauled out of delivery vans, stacked with boxes upon boxes. The boxes spill out their contents as they’re being bumped along. A packet of biscuits rolls end over end towards a drain, scuttling away from the madness. A can of sardines comes to a stop against a lamppost.

Kids a few years younger than Yevgeni are smashing windscreens with wheel wrenches. The glass sounds like crashing waves and the panes fold in a way he wouldn’t have predicted, a tapestry of cracked glass that curls up like burnt paper. Near the steel roll-up door at the entrance to the nearest warehouse a young woman is pouring honey into her mouth, and it spills along her neck and slowly makes its way down her T-shirt, though not spilling exactly, he thinks, rolling, turning over upon itself.

Inside, people have paraffin lamps and candles and torches for guidance, and they crash their carts into one another’s and scream and yell.

Boxes stacked upon boxes, wide aisles of thick steel shelving. People crawling up them, ripping and tearing with glee, feeding on their contents, dropping them from a height to their partners on the floor down below. People throwing jars against the concrete floor just to watch them explode. Yevgeni stays near the walls, crouching out of sight, retreating into the darkness. At the end of a centre aisle, four boys stand and tear the tops off cardboard packets of washing powder and shake them out, and the white particles drift down in a foggy haze, settling in piles, sticking to the thin metal filaments of the shelving units so, at a glance, they seem like small, snow-laden trees in what looks like a minute winter garden, a place of quietude amid all the chaos. Yevgeni hunkers down in an empty space under the shelves and tucks his legs up, wrapping his arms around them, and watches the soap dust linger on its way down and smells the soft chemical smell, and thinks of his aunt and his mother standing on their balcony at home, wearing the borrowed dresses, their hair pinned up, staring at the fireworks, wondering where he could be, their hands knitted in worry, starch under his mother’s nails.

BUT HIS MOTHER
stands alone, watching, wearing her housecoat, a scarf wrapped around her pinned-up hair, looking out for her boy, trying to make out his form in the moving shadows. Maria is inside, at the table, clasping Grigory’s hand, two steaming glasses of tea in front of them. They don’t speak. Now is not the time. Now is only the time to sit and be free from explanations. Grigory removes his hand from hers and clasps her shoulder, her upper arm, her wrist, examining each part of her by touch, turning them over in his skilled hands, naming her bones once more, claiming them, whispering, “Manubrium. Ulna. Radius. Scapula.”

Alina turns towards the door and watches. She can’t go inside to break their reunion. She can’t go to bed alone, imagining her boy out there. She can only stand here, on this balcony, waiting dutifully.

Chapter 27

S
unlight has persuaded the city to return to itself once more. Yevgeni steps into the morning. It’s time to go home. He passes a construction site and stops and walks in, wary of guard dogs, and opens the cab of a digger and finds what he had hoped, a workman’s jacket, heavy and black with a luminous strip around the waist. He takes it, resolving to bring it back in a couple of days. Someone will arrive at work and have to make do with a thin coat, and there are many things in life that aren’t fair but this is one he can do something about.

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.