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.
Acknowledgments
A number 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.
For their encouragement and support, my thanks to my family, especially my father.
And for Flora, for all of this and so much more.
P.S.
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About the author
DARRAGH MCKEON was born in 1979 and grew up in the midlands of Ireland. Since graduating from University College Dublin he has worked as a theater director throughout Europe and the United States with companies such as Steppenwolf (Chicago), The Royal Court (London), the Young Vic (London), and Rough Magic Theatre (Ireland). He now lives in New York. All That Is Solid Melts into Air is his first novel.
About the book
The Empty City
An Original Essay by Darragh McKeon
We drive in through the main street, a two-lane road, the margin engulfed by weeds, the flanking tower blocks shrouded by fir trees. Craning my neck and looking up, I can see balconies that are overrun with creepers, their adjacent windows matte black with shadow, vacuums of habitation. Brown stains of carbonation run down from one floor to the next. It brings to mind an old man trailing gravy or tobacco juice down his chin.