All That Is Solid Melts into Air Read Free Page B

them this morning because it’s his birthday today, he’s thirty-six years old. Skilled. Respected. Alone. A chief of surgery with a failed marriage behind him.
    He chose a set of cufflinks from the drawer of the bedside locker and stared at the empty bed, the discarded blankets funnelled along one side, as though there were a body underneath them, as though she were still there, that they had emerged from the raging arguments, their love made stronger through the heat of their marriage; refined into something purer, more enduring. But the shape in the bed was merely a reminder of her absence, one which he feels most acutely in the mornings; from when he wakes in the same position as he did in the years she was there—cradling nothing now—to when he turns the key in his door, facing the day without Maria’s tender words of encouragement.
    He walked to the hospital. Forty minutes from his apartment. He likes to take in some air, even though his path is mostly along the third ring road, with traffic spitting out its fumes. Snarling. Even at such an early hour. He stopped in the centre of an overpass and looked down on the motorway, holding on to the metal rail. A truck bellowed as it passed underneath him, and he felt the urge to spit on it, a habit from childhood which he thought had been extinguished, but it turns out it was lying dormant all the time, only to rise up in him now, on the first day of his thirty-seventh year.
    A man stood at the far end of the overpass taking photographs of a gravelled section that overlooked some scrubland beyond the boundary wall. He’d never seen anyone in this spot before, as it has no practical use, an unnecessary extension alongside the stairway that drops to the footpath. Grigory walked towards him. He was curious to see what the man was photographing, but there was also the fact that the stroll provided a slight aberration from his usual routine, an acknowledgement of this particular day.
    Before Grigory reached him, the man with the camera turned and nodded in greeting and descended the stairs. Grigory continued to the boundary wall and leaned on it. The sky had almost fully lightened, the sun cresting the horizon. Grigory knew he was running later than usual. He liked to get a couple of hours of office work done before the committee meetings and the rounds and the demands for his signature and the funding applications and the consultations and the operating theatres. All of it racing along. His days streaming by. He crossed his fingers and thumbs to form a rectangular frame, a viewfinder, something he hadn’t done in years, but the idea of someone taking a camera to such an indistinct place intrigued him.
    A nothing place of scorched grass. A pylon planted in its centre. A crumbled wall.
    Then Grigory looked down, almost directly underneath, and dropped his hands from his face to take in the whole sight, trying to see it in its entirety, framed by the field, the perimeter walls beyond which traffic streamed along, oblivious to the image.
    A grid of shoes, a whole cityscape of shoes, it seemed, was decked out before him, evoking a sensation that he couldn’t quite articulate. How many shoes were here? Perhaps a thousand? All neatly lined and spaced.
    He was no longer in a hurry. These shoes were placed there, carefully, to be looked at. And so he looked at them. The leather stitching or plastic moulding, the laces and flaps and the contours of the openings, the finely curved lines. There were slippers and ballet shoes, work boots with exposed steel toecaps, children’s sandals. The shoes not filling the landscape but emphasizing absence, such personal items, as if a whole battalion of people had been ghosted away. There was, he was sure, a rational explanation for such a sight. Maybe it was a memorial of sorts, or perhaps the work of some radical artist. He was sure he’d hear about it at some point. But for now he could stand and marvel at what you could stumble across, just