Rivka laughs, and a spark flies between her and the director like a little of the current that flows between Viktor and Olena at night. In her own office, Rivka shows Olena a poem she wrote to commemorate International Women’s Day. Olena has never met anyone who writes poetry. Rivka asks what Olena thinks of her poem.
“It is beautiful,” says Olena immediately. “Believe me, beautiful!”
Without checking with her director, Rivka tells Olena she can start working with her the day after May Day.
Olena feels she has been given a great gift. But then she is not sure … how will she tell Viktor?
Back in the square, Olena adds carrots from the babushka to her shopping bag. Then the joke strikes her and she laughs. Rivka asked what Olena thought of her poem — as if what Olena thinks mattered!
Viktor is picking at his food, though Olena has served one of his favourites, fish kotlety. She wants to tell him about Rivka, about Rivka’s poem, about her new job. She will tell him that Laima is working too, and Anatoli doesn’t object. She is waiting for the right moment.
“Our power station has been ordered to produce consumer goods,” says Viktor, washing his breaded fish down with vodka. “Because of Gorbachev and his glasnost.” His eyebrows knot and rise. “What can a reactor make but electricity? Personal nuclear bombs and batteries, maybe?”
This is not the right moment.
Viktor tosses and turns all night, worrying, worrying, till Olena rises, fetches oil and massages him. “You’ll think of something,” she assures him as he falls asleep.
And the next day, over breakfast, he does think of a good suggestion: meat-mincing machines. He leaves for a meeting with his director and Plant Director Burkhanov. But that evening, he tells her they rejected his suggestion. They decided to propose hay storage facilities to Party leaders in Moscow.
“Imagine how that will look: horse-drawn carts delivering hay to the Lenin reactor,” he says with a hurt laugh.
Olena will tell Viktor about her job when he is more calm. Maybe on the weekend before May Day, when they are going to Sochi on the Black Sea.
Olena packs a picnic basket with three matzoh in a napkin, a bottle of Georgian wine, and horseradish. She adds a few sweet prune-stuffed pampushky and a lokshyna noodle ring filled with creamed vegetables. No salo, no sausage.
With Galina, she rides an accordion bus that stops at a village with no name. Her grandfather is lean and bright-eyed, and these days he’s more hopeful, he says because of the new man Gorbachev and his glasnost, but Olena knows it’s because she is closer. Who else will remember to bring him Passover foods he cannot find in old Chernobyl, the nearest town?
Outside Dedushka’s wooden farmhouse, the scent of black earth surrounds Olena as if she were a child again. Dedushka has a Passover present for Galina — a mink purse that belonged to her great-grandmother. He brings out photo albums and gives her a black and white snapshot of Olena’s mother. The little girl balances her plate on her knees and chews solemnly as she listens to a story about the night Olena was born. Later, Dedushka goes inside and returns triumphant, the tarnished rattle that once cheered baby Olena clutched in his hand. “I remember things your mother cannot,” he says, laughing as he gives it to Galina.
Friends stop to greet him, linger to exclaim over Olena and Galina and ask his advice. A farmer gives Galina a ride in his cart; Olena will bathe the manure smell away when she gets home.
Olena tells Dedushka they will leave on Saturday morning, tomorrow, after Viktor finishes the safety test at the station. She cannot hide the pride in her voice: they will be guests of Viktor’s director at his dacha. And now, since Viktor’s director is travelling with Director Burkhanov to Moscow to report their progress on hay storage, it will be just Viktor, Galina and Olena.
Six days — just the three of them in Sochi! Olena has made pampushky and berry-filled nalysnyky. Viktor has stocked up on vodka because Anatoli told him Gorbachev will ban it after May 1. Olena has packed cans of dried milk in a suitcase.
They’ll be home on Thursday to watch the May Day parades. Galina is excited about May Day, and so are all her friends. Olena too loves the parade, the streamers, the flags, the placards with the familiar slogans.
“Enjoy this week, Olena,” says Dedushka, as she kisses his forehead and brings Galina forward to say goodbye. “There’ll never be another like it.”
As soon as Olena gets home, the phone rings. Matushka, from Kyiv. A message for Viktor: “Ask what have I done that he is not coming to visit his Matushka on Passover weekend.”
The column of Olena’s neck feels as hollow as if she had scoured it, removed her larynx and other organs. Her anger sours the sauerkraut soup she makes for dinner.
And she doesn’t tell Viktor before he takes the bus to work at ten that evening.
She will tell him when he gets back.
There was an accident. At the plant. Viktor’s voice is telling Olena this. He says it again. It’s five o’clock on Saturday morning, and he is saying to keep Galina home and stay inside. “Not serious,” he says. “Don’t worry. Not serious at all.”
“Are you telling the truth?”
“I’m so tired,” says his Party voice. “Stop your chatter. Close all the windows.”
Outside the balcony window, past the laundry, Olena sees it — a red column rising over the power station into the dark sky. She closes her eyes and the afterglow pulses against her eyelids. Viktor said she shouldn’t worry. Fire engines will be there already. But her inside voice is saying oh no, oh no.
Seven o’clock comes and Olena is still waiting. Instead of dawn, a lesser darkness is spreading behind a column of smoke. Red flames glow and grow. What is Viktor doing? Where is he? What is his exposure? Thirty-five rems an hour is the limit. Then evacuation. But a safety engineer must continue working as long as he can. What does she know but the basics? Radiation sickness — nausea, diarrhea, changes in the blood.
But only if a person is exposed to more than one hundred rems in an hour.
Olena opens the balcony door a crack and sniffs.
Trees. The last fragrance of April. A faint scent like rain falling on a dusty road.
Olena can’t see the radiation, she can’t sense it in her body. But it’s there. Is it going into and through her Viktor right now?
Her knees turn liquid. She has a sudden need to pray. She, an atheist. Dedushka would laugh at her. And she doesn’t know a single prayer. A Schevchenko poem is all that comes to mind: “No, let us not depart, nor go. It is early still …”
She will wait till eight, and if Viktor isn’t home by then, she will even pray to Lenin.
Seven-thirty. Another call. Viktor has been taken to Pripyat hospital. “It’s only gas,” says the nurse on the phone.
Olena leaves Galina with a neighbour. She runs to the bus stop.
Is it the air or fear burning her eyes, her throat?
Ten minutes. She has wasted ten minutes.
She walks and runs all the way to the hospital. Military vehicles pass, soldiers block some roads — she takes detours. Other women, young and old, are running like her. They join her in the crowd outside the hospital. Olena begins to jostle and yell at the soldiers.
Just past them, at the entrance, stands a woman with a cloud of brown hair, a notebook in her hand. Olena screams Rivka’s name.
Rivka says something to someone. Olena is allowed in.
So many patients, so many beds in plastic cubicles. A nurse points to Viktor’s. Olena rushes.
Then stops.
Viktor is attached to a drip. She approaches slowly.
“I felt faint,” he says, taking Olena’s hand. “Then I started vomiting. The nurse made me wash and lie down.”
The nurse’s face is blank. If only she would tell Olena not to worry or say, Your husband will be home soon. But she just takes Viktor’s blood sample and leaves without saying anything.
“Do you have diarrhea?”
“Not yet.” He clo
ses swollen eyes.
Her inside voice repeats one hundred rems, one hundred rems.
She doesn’t know what to say.
His grip on her hand tightens. “Bring milk and vodka,” he whispers. “And BTs.”
“Couldn’t … couldn’t that be dangerous?”
“Just bring those cigarettes!”
“Da, da!”
“Give Galina iodine tablets immediately. Buy all the iodine tablets you can. There are a few extra packets in the saddlebag of the motorcycle.”
After a moment he says, “We detached from the power grid, lowered enough control rods into the core to reduce power to seven hundred megawatts. But the reactor became unstable. So the shift foreman pushed the emergency A-Z button to lower all the rods and shut down.”
“Where were you?”
“I wasn’t in the control room. When I felt the thud, such a thud, I thought it was an earthquake. But it could be — we don’t know, but it must be — that actor in the White House pressed some button at the same time. Star Wars.”
“Like Hiroshima?” says Olena. “Why not all of Pripyat, then?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that the reactor did not explode.” But his Party voice is speaking, so Olena knows: the reactor did explode. But now what is to be done? Can it be repaired?
“It will be all right,” says Viktor. “I saw the smoke moving north, away from Pripyat.”
“Get well, Viktor, and we’ll go to the dacha some other time soon.” Olena kisses his forehead.
• • •
Three days after the accident that was not an explosion, the Moscow Symphony is playing Tchaikovsky on the record player and Olena is ironing with the iron Viktor bought as her first anniversary present. She’s waiting for Vremya on TV.
The announcer will say that those firemen who so bravely fought the blaze have been evacuated to Hospital 6 in Moscow. They probably won’t mention that their wives didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. Olena is so lucky Viktor is not a fireman.
The nurse took a blood sample from Viktor — what was the result?
It must be all right because Viktor was discharged from the hospital.
He was called back to work, and Olena is very glad he is not at Unit 4 right now. Instead he’s escorting a KGB general and Party leaders from Moscow who have come to assess the damage. His director told him that, as he flies with the leaders in helicopters and rides with them in Zils, he must remind them that Soviet reactors do not need contingency plans and that there are not enough gas masks for the entire population. And he must reassure them that the reactor will be functional again very soon.
Was it right to send Galina to school? She took her iodine pills with breakfast, but …
It must be all right because the May Day parade has not been cancelled.
Olena stands her iron up and goes out on the balcony. She pushes the wash aside and peers across the city.
The red glow at the base of the spray of fire seems diminished. Smoke still billows up and descends. But now it’s leaning toward her, toward Pripyat.
Oh no, oh no. The wind is changing.
Was the sun so bright at this time last year? Did the cherry blossoms shine as pink? Was the scent of pine trees as strong?
She hasn’t been in Pripyat long enough to know.
Oh, let it not rain. Viktor said if it rains, radioactivity can enter the reservoir of the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers and poison Pripyat’s water supply.
The neighbour who looked after Galina the morning of the accident said boiling water will purify it.
Olena returns inside and shuts the door tightly.
Almost at the end of the news, the announcer reads, “One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident.”
It went by so fast. He said it so fast — was she mistaken?
Olena keeps her gaze on the TV while she answers the phone. It’s Rivka. She wants Olena to ask Viktor, now he is better, what really happened.
But of course Viktor won’t tell Olena, and if he did how could she tell Rivka? Because what if Rivka is working for a foreign government? The most charming people usually do.
Rivka says she heard on Voice of America that there was a massive steam explosion followed by a rapid reaction. Then the thousand-ton roof flew off as a second explosion blew the core. Glasnost or no glasnost, Olena knows better than to listen to Voice of America. And if Rivka did listen, she shouldn’t admit it — a counter-revolutionary act like that could cost Rivka her Writer’s Union card. But Rivka seems to have thrown caution to the wind, the changing wind.
Rivka’s angry — she’s good at being angry. She doesn’t mention that trucks, trains and buses have been commandeered by the army, or that reservists who expected to be summoned to duty in Afghanistan are being trucked into Pripyat. Or that a commission of inquiry was appointed by eleven o’clock on the morning of the accident. Rivka is angry that Director Burkhanov has wasted thirty-six hours before coming to the decision he should have made immediately: Evacuate!
Olena tries to explain that Director Burkhanov could not have made that decision. A decision affecting half a million people and possible panic must come all the way from the Politburo, from leaders in Moscow. And as for the delay, Shcho zrobysh! What can you do? Rivka must understand that people like Viktor and Olena are their comrades, not their wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Just comrades.
May 1986
Four days later, the balls of Olena’s feet treadle a Podolsk sewing machine in Matushka’s tiny spare room. She and Galena — and Viktor on weekends — will share the bed and a floor mattress. Only for a while, until they can return or retrieve their belongings from Pripyat. Refugees are pouring into Kyiv and housing has become impossible, but Viktor has been assured he will be allotted one of the first available apartments.
Seams of a night-blue fabric with a sun and moon print join as they pass smoothly beneath the presser foot. Of Matushka’s whole cupboard full of sewing machines with the new Energia motors, this pre-Soviet monster is the only one that works. When Matushka saw Olena using it, she pressed her lips as if sewing with an imported machine confirmed her low opinion of Olena.
Olena can hardly believe she is in Kyiv. Instead of watching May Day parades, she found herself snatching up the suitcase and repacking in minutes as two blank-faced soldiers stood waiting at the door. Because they could live in Matushka’s apartment, west of the muscular vein of the Dnieper, Viktor could arrange for her and Galina to be in the first wave of evacuees. Laima, who could only find a bed in an army barrack with other refugees, says looters will probably take anything left behind.
The suitcase Olena had packed for the weekend at the dacha lies open on the bed, half unpacked. No clothes, because Viktor said their clothes could be contaminated. But it’s good for Galina that Olena had packed dried milk — real milk now comes from irradiated cows. And Viktor said she could bring the cranberry liqueur and vodka; it cleanses the body, he says.
But what can she give Galina once the dried milk is finished?
Dark clothing, Anatoli said, might be impenetrable to radiation. The infinite space of night sky, the pattern of suns and reflector moons on Galina’s summer dress should fill Olena’s mind, separate her from earth and its troubles. But thoughts filter through.
She can’t stop seeing Matushka counting out just enough rubles for this fabric for Galina’s dress and for the bolt of white cotton beside her, then writing the amounts for each purchase in her black ledger book. Again she hears that wordless sniff: the money was a loan to Olena — not Viktor, not Galina.
Olena needs some bright yellow floss to embroider the collar and yoke for Galina. She will not embroider a single button.
If there is enough fabric left, Olena may even make a dress for herself. But first — she glances at the bolt of white cotton — she will make a new shirt for Viktor, maybe even one for Dedushka.
Dedushka
refused to leave his house. The soldiers burned his neighbour’s house and buried it, but he could not be persuaded — he said he doesn’t have much time to live anyway.
We’ll see him again soon. Yes, we will.
But he is alone.
She stops treadling for a moment, dashes her fingertips over her cheeks.
Matushka has taken Galina to the park. She will let the little girl play there for hours, letting everyone think she’s Galina’s mother rather than her grandmother. She will give her chocolate smuggled from Switzerland. Yes, Matushka, whom Olena thought a dried husk of a woman, incapable of love. At this moment she’s probably filling the little girl’s head with stories about Olena’s stupidity. Or with Khrushchev-era slogans which everyone must now forget.
It’s very difficult not to remember the many things you need to forget. On the outskirts of Kyiv is the ravine called Babi Yar — Olena tries not to walk in its direction, but that only makes her think of it more. She is an atheist, but she is also a zhid. Viktor too.
Trust no one.
But it’s also very difficult to remember what you’re supposed to remember. There’s a legend that in the 1940s, Russian deportees in a camp here in Kyiv were challenged to a game of football and won against the Nazis 3-0. Dedushka would have told her that story many times if it were true.
Matushka believes it; it’s a Party lie.
The sewing machine whirrs faster.
More and more refugees are coming in trucks from Pripyat. But on the telephone last night, Viktor was not worried. It’s a precaution, he said. He said this happened before. With the first reactor at Mayak in ’57. Ten thousand were evacuated then and many thousands of acres of farms laid waste.
“How do you know?” said Olena.
“A safety engineer is sometimes told what cannot be written down.”
Olena could have asked what else he was told that no one else was told. But she didn’t want to know. Did she know or dream of boron rods?
It feels so long ago.
Top academicians and other experts are arriving from all over the Soviet Union, Viktor said. He is not in danger, he said. He and Anatoli are working together, phoning Moscow to arrange shipments of nitrogen, boron and lead. But, he said, his life — everyone’s life — has been divided into before and after the accident.
We Are Not in Pakistan Page 2