"I don't suppose you are a drunk," he told her gravely.
Although nurses are used to hearing all sorts of things from their patients, she gave him a quick, puzzled look. "Me a drunk? What an idea!"
"But it is strange, isn't it, that our Soviet women drink very little, while the men pour it down. Why is that, do you think?"
"Drunkenness is a great social evil," she told him severely. "The decisions of the Twenty-seventh Party Congress—"
"Yes, yes, the decisions," Smin said. "But why do our men drink? Because they have jobs they don't like, for which they are not paid enough, and the money they are paid can't buy them the things they want. Isn't that true? But if it is true for men, how much more true it must be for women! Wouldn't you like to have an electric dishwasher? A blow dryer for your hair?"
"I will have those things soon enough," she said properly. "The production in consumer goods is increasing all the time."
Smin smiled up at her with real fondness. He said, "You are a very good girl."
When she had gone away, looking puzzled, he lay back and closed his eyes. The interview with the GehBehs had tired him more than he had expected. He really should go out to speak to the head nurse about Sheranchuk, he thought. He was determined to do that, very soon… but first he allowed himself to close his eyes for just a moment.
When he opened them, one of the doctors was standing over him, a smile on her cool face. "And how are you feeling now, Deputy Director Smin?"
"I will feel better," he said at once, "if you put Leonid Sheranchuk in that other bed. It's lonesome here."
The doctor nodded thoughtfully. "I believe Comrade Sheranchuk has requested the same thing. Perhaps it can be arranged. You should properly have a room of your own—"
"I don't want a room of my own! I want Sheranchuk here."
She said, "What you want, Comrade Smin, is to get better, and that's what we want too. It is up to the hospital director to decide if having him as a roommate will be good for you. Now, I asked how you are feeling."
"Very tired of being in hospital," he said. "Otherwise not bad."
"But that is only a temporary remission, you know." She hesitated, then asked him in an accusing tone: "Did you do something to your dosimeter?"
"I? To my dosimeter? Why would I do that?" Smin asked, determined not to tell her of the switch.
"Because you wished to be a hero? I don't know, I only know that your physical condition does not match the dose record. According to the state of your white blood corpuscles, you must have received well over two hundred rads. It may have been as many as five hundred rads."
"That sounds like a great many rads," said Smin.
"If you remained untreated it is enough to kill you, without question, in approximately thirty days after exposure." She counted on her fingers. "Without treatment you would not be likely to die before the twenty-first of May, perhaps you might survive even until the beginning of June, but no longer. However," she went on, smiling her icy smile, "in this hospital we have the best treatment for radiation disease. Even perhaps when the patient is not cooperating as he should. Also, we now have a wonderful American doctor who has just arrived yesterday, a gift from our American friend Dr. Armand Hammer."
"Who is Dr. Hammer?"
"He is one of the good Americans, Deputy Director Smin. He has always been a friend to the Soviet Union, since the days of Lenin, and now he has brought us help in this unpleasant business. This Dr. Gale from America has developed special methods of treating people like yourself. We will get rid of the dying marrow in your bones and replace it with healthy new marrow — as soon as we can find a satisfactory donor."
"All right," Smin said. "Now just leave me alone until it's time for the operation."
The doctor said triumphandy, "Unfortunately, it is not that easy. First we will have to make you ready for the transplant. And that, I'm afraid, is not a very enjoyable process."
When the doctor had finished telling him how unenjoy-able the process was going to be, Smin lay with his eyes closed, thinking the matter out. He was not in pain. From time to time he found himself nauseated, or sweltering even under the light sheet. But there was no real pain now, and his head was clear.
He might have preferred a little less clarity, he thought.
It had all been explained to him and, yes, he agreed, there was nothing that one would enjoy in his immediate future. The real question was how much of a future he had.
The doctor had been quite clear about what was ahead. There were classically four stages in cases of radiation sickness— first, the "prodromal syndrome" — the onset of the illness— when there was vomiting and faintness. That, the doctor told him, was not serious; it was probably only the impact of the radiation on the nervous system that produced the symptoms, and they passed.
As they had, in only an hour or so.
Now he was in the "latent period." The patient felt better at this point — as Smin indeed did, not counting the badness of the feelings resulting from the things they were doing to him to try to save his life. Not counting that his hair seemed to be falling out. Not counting, especially, that the latent period would not last more than a couple of weeks, and then it would be time for the "febrile period."
It was in the febrile period that he would probably die, because the stage after that held only two possibilities: either he would slowly begin to recover. Or he would be dead.
He opened his eyes as he heard a sound at the door. His son Vassili came in, looking scared and very young in his cap and white robe and bootees. "They took a sample of my bone marrow," he said proudly. "Do you know what they did? They pushed a kind of a knife right into my chest! Right into the bone!" He gently touched his clavicle to show where the knife had gone.
"That must have been very painful," Smin said, wishing he could put his arms around the boy — if it were not so painful to move — if he did not know that Vassili was afraid, as everyone who came into the hospital seemed to be afraid, that somehow some of the radioactive materials would leap from his skin to theirs if they got too close.
Vassili bit his lips, pondering a response to make to that which would not be either teenage bragging or inadmissible sentimentality. "I was glad to do it," he said awkwardly, and changed the subject. "What will they do now?"
"Well," Smin said, changing position on the bed uncomfortably, "you see, because I am sick it is necessary to make me much sicker. Because the marrow of my bones has been damaged, they must now finish the job and destroy it completely, so that when they put your good marrow into me, it will find an empty place waiting for it."
Vassili swallowed, his eyes large. "Ah, but there is a bright side," Smin said quickly. "I've received so much radiation already that that, at least, they don't need to give me again. Only chemicals. All the medicines do is make me vomit, but I was doing that anyway."
But the boy was frowning. It was apparent that he had already been told what lay in store for his father. He said, "They took bone marrow from you too?"
"What little there was to take, yes," his father smiled, touching his breastbone. "Help me into the wheelchair — no, wait," he corrected himself, remembering that visitors should not touch the patients. "I'll get the nurse to do it later. I want to find out about my friend, the hydrologist-engineer, Sheranchuk."
"Yes," said the boy absently. "He is here, also with too much exposure to radiation." Then Vassili came back to the main subject on his mind. "Father? If my bone marrow isn't good for you, what will happen?"
"Then we will ask someone else to give me a bit," Smin said cheerfully. "It does not have to come from a relative. Simply that is usually the best place to find a match, but it could be taken from some total stranger who simply happens to match my type."
"And if there isn't such a stranger?"
"Then they will do a fetal liver injection, of course. Do you know what that is? Before they are born, children manufacture their white blood corpuscles in the liver; and when a supply
of fetal liver is obtained, it is injected into people like me. Just like the bone marrow. Three people in this hospital have already received such injections." He did not add that all three had died. He changed the subject: "And have you been assigned to a school while you are here in Moscow?"
"Oh, yes," the boy said, his eyes gleaming. "Such a school, Father! There is a computer in the math class, and my teacher of English herself studied in America!" That reminded him: "And there are American doctors here, did you know? Two of them now, and more, they say, coming — with all sorts of medicines and machines and things; they will have you well in no time, I am sure!"
"Of course they will." The effort of reassuring his son was beginning to tell on Smin. He could feel himself sweating, and it was obvious that the boy still had something on his mind. Smin sighed and took the plunge. "What else is worrying you, Vassili?" he asked.
The boy bit his lip, and then forced out: "What did those men want?"
Smin sank back. Of course! "Ah, I see," he said. "The organs. They had simply questions to ask, of course. Naturally something like this must be investigated with complete thoroughness."
Vassili nodded doubtfully. "But you did nothing wrong," he protested, unable to keep it from sounding like a question.
Smin said gently, "The accident did not happen by itself, Vass. When everything has been studied, we will know who is at fault, that's all." He threw the sheet back, revealing himself in his red and white striped pajama bottoms, with no top. Even in front of his children Smin had always been shy about exposing the vast shiny burn scars on his torso, but right now, he thought, he would have welcomed Vassili's questions on the subject. What could be better for the boy to hear at this time than the tale of his father's ancient heroism in the tank battle before Kursk?
Almost as good, there was an interruption. Smin looked up gratefully as the doctor came in, but under the white head scarf her face was grave.
"I am sorry," she began, looking at Vassili rather than at Smin, and Smin knew at once who she was apologizing to.
"Ah, Vass," he said, smiling even though it hurt the corners of his mouth terribly, "it is your good fortune that you took after your mother, but this time, I'm afraid, it isn't mine. The doctor is trying to tell us that your bone marrow doesn't match."
Chapter 24
Tuesday, May 6
The village of Yuzhevin has an unfortunate label that was affixed to it by the ministry in Moscow. The label is "unpromising." The easiest way for a village to become unpromising is for it to lose most of its young people to better jobs in the cities, the factory complexes, or (in the case of Yuzhevin) the mines of the Don basin. There is no development capital for an unpromising village. As it dwindles, it is likely to lose its electricity and (if it ever had them) its telephones. The village is lucky if it keeps its store, its clinic, its school. Yuzhevin has not been that lucky, but, like many unpromising villages, it does have a surplus of one useful commodity that is very scarce indeed in most of the USSR. There is plenty of unused housing in Yuzhevin. To be sure, the available housing is not in any sense luxurious. Hardly any of the houses in Yuzhevin have more than one room. They have no indoor plumbing, and no one in the village has seen any reason to do any repairs or cleaning on the houses that have been abandoned. Yuzhevin, however, is definitely not radioactive, and in that way, at least, it is far better to be there in Yuzhevin than to remain in Pripyat.
Since Yuzhevin was not even on the highway, Bohdan Kalychenko had to walk a kilometer and a half, picking his way around the muddiest parts of the road, to meet Raia's bus.
Then he had to wait an hour for it, because the bus was late, and then Raia was not even on the bus. By the time he was back in the village he was not only hot and thirsty, he was beginning to be very hungry.
Although Kalychenko was a nuclear-power engineer — well, an operator, at least, which in his view was almost the same thing — he was defeated by the kerosene stove in the cottage he shared with another male evacuee. After a good deal of swearing he managed to get one of the burners alight to make tea, hacked off a few chunks of bread from what the truck had brought the day before, and, chewing slowly, sat on his doorsill to look out at the village street. In the village square thirty meters away a group of his fellow evacuees were playing cards around a table in the hot sunshine. They waved invitingly, but Kalychenko was not in a mood to join them.
At least his roommate, the postman Petya Barisov, was not there to bother him. When the villagers had offered farm labor to any of the evacuees willing to work the fields, Barisov had been quick to accept — not so much for the money as to get away from the ancient mother who had been evacuated to the same village and never stopped complaining about the treasures she had been forced to abandon in Pripyat. Now Barisov was off in the cattle pastures, repairing fences. So Kalychenko had a moment of privacy.
Unfortunately, Raia was not on hand to make some use of it. Not that there was ever any real privacy in Yuzhevin anyway, with the villagers always obsessively curious about their new neighbors, and the walls of the cottages made of cracked boards. He was certain that he had heard the sounds of people breathing just outside his window at night. The people of Yuzhevin were certainly friendly to the rich city people. It was not only that the evacuees were so much more sophisticated than the kolkhozists. The city people were a great boon to Yuzhevin, because they had brought with them the every-other-day trucks with food and even, sometimes, such things as toilet paper and occasional articles of clothing. It was not like having the village's own store again, but it was more than they had had for half a dozen years.
Kalychenko contemplated the options available to him. At home he would have had no problem. He would have turned to his East German radio, or his well-loved stereo from Czechoslovakia, but, of course, those were still in Pripyat, along with his television and all the other treasures, and even if he had had them, there was no electricity to make them work.
He could, he thought, write a letter to the plant at Chernobyl, asking to be returned so he could go back to work now that his arm was healed. Surely one day soon at least Reactors No. 1 or 2 would be back in service, now that (one heard) the fire was out in No. 4. But that would entail explaining the not very explicable reasons why he had never been treated for injury or evacuated with other wounded.
Well, then. There were other alternatives. He could have done some of the things he had promised Raia he would do. Sweep the floor of the cottage. Wash again some of the windows that Raia had already washed once — but the coal dust in the air dirtied them in no time. He could have tried, as he had promised, to repair the door to the privy in the back yard, which had warped so that it would not close properly and a decent person had to hold it closed with one hand while going about his business inside, in the dark.
Those were all useful and productive things Kalychenko could have done, but none of them appealed. Besides, he remembered that he had a more interesting project.
He had managed to buy half a kilo of early raspberries from one of the villagers that morning — at a shocking price, almost half of what he would have had to pay in the private markets at Pripyat. He took the raspberries out of the cupboard, along with the two bottles of vodka, which had cost him four hours of standing on line to get. He unscrewed the tops of the botdes and set them on the table. Patiently he plucked the stems from the raspberries and, one by one, dropped them in to flavor the vodka. As the bottles began to fill, he soon had to stop. He was equal to that challenge. He wiped out a cup and poured off enough of the liquor to get the remaining berries in.
As there was no sense leaving the vodka in an open cup, he sipped at it as he added the berries. By the time he replaced the caps on the bottles and put them away, he had swallowed the warm surplus. He was therefore in an agreeable mood when one of the villagers appeared in the doorway. "You Kalychenko?" he asked.
"That's my name," Kalychenko agreed, polite to this shitkicker in the dirty shirt. "Would you like a drink?"
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The man grinned. He was a big old fellow, nearly bald, and although he wore rough clothes and shitkicker boots, there was an impressively expensive-looking watch on his thick wrist. "Never say no to gorulka," he said. "What, it's not gorulka? The Russian stuff? Well, by all means, anyway."
His name, he said, sitting down, was Yakovlev—"Call me Kolka" — and he had heard that Kalychenko was some kind of engineer. When they had each tossed down a glass of the vodka, barely flavored yet with the berries, Yakovlev asked, "Does that mean you know anything about machines?"
"I know everything about machines," Kalychenko boasted.
"Yes, well, no offense," Yakovlev persisted, "but what I mean is, do you know how to drive a tractor?"
"Dear Kolka," said Kalychenko, refilling their glasses, "I. did not come to this metropolis of Yuzhevin in order to help you out with your agricultural pursuits. I shouldn't even be here, do you understand? Our bus was the only one sent to a place like this."
"I only asked if you could handle a tractor," the man persisted.
"A tractor? I am a nuclear engineer, do you understand what that means? It means that I am an expert who has trained for many years with the highest of high-tech machinery. I will be recalled to duty very soon, because there are not very many of us in the Soviet Union, and we are not only scarce, we are very well paid."
"Uh-huh," said Yakovlev agreeably. "More than nine hundred rubles a month, I suppose."
Kalychenko's eyes bulged as he Was swallowing the new shot. He almost exploded, but managed to gasp, "How many rubles?"
"It is what I would be paying my son to help me drive the tractors, only the boy has decided he would rather be poor in Odessa than rich in Yuzhevin. Does that sort of salary interest you? Yes? Then, dear Bohdan, I think we've had enough of this duck piss. Come to my place and we will drink some good French brandy while I find out if you know enough to take an eighteen-year-old's place."
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