We Are Not in Pakistan

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Olena thinks of exemption certificates but erases the thought. In the market yesterday she met Laima wearing a scarf that couldn’t hide the red, swollen side of her face. And Viktor is as quick-tempered as Anatoli.

  “Maybe nuclear power is not good,” she says. “Couldn’t we harness the wind?”

  “Windmills? Yes, and maybe we can design them with hay storage right from the beginning.”

  “What about the sun?”

  “Olena, I’m not trained for the sun, the moon, the wind or the stars. The atom is all I know. After the accident, the Lenin station was supplying power again within five months — can protesters do that? After their protests, they go home to dinners made on stoves, to lights that run on electricity, to refrigerators that draw power from a grid.”

  “Don’t worry, Viktor,” says Olena in her most soothing voice. “Jobs in capitalist countries are not for life — they can hire you but also fire you. So why leave our country? If you don’t like this apartment, they are building new ones in Slavutich for all the workers.”

  “Slavutich is too close to Pripyat.”

  Viktor cannot trust official assurances that the food is safe, that the water is pure. And he cannot trust what is revealed now because revelation means it was concealed before, and where there was concealment, there may be more to reveal — how can he know?

  Lies breed more lies: doctors who sign death documents that do not mention radiation exposure, scientists who sign fraudulent dosimeter readings, directors who tear pages of radiation level readings out of the records. International energy conferences where plant operators are blamed for pushing the emergency A-Z button.

  Maybe it would be better if Viktor were like Anatoli, able to read only Russian and Ukrainian, because the scientific journals he reads in English confuse and upset him. International agencies are now saying exposures lower than thirty-five rems can be dangerous. One article said boiling the water does not eliminate radiation, another that the Soviet Union’s remaining fourteen RBMK reactors are flawed.

  He’d be really upset if she told him their new neighbours say vodka and cranberry juice are useless and may even be harmful. And Viktor is too angry for Olena to tell him, but two days ago Rivka called to say goodbye — she is taking a leave of absence to travel to some villages far outside the Forbidden Zone. Soldiers are taking more radiation readings and moving cows from collective farms and she wants to find out why.

  “No one tells our comrades any results,” she said. “I wrote an article asking who gave orders for a nursery school to be built beside a radioactive meadow, but my director will not publish it. In another article, I asked why contaminated meat is being shipped to other parts of the nation, and why clean milk and meat is not being brought into the Forbidden Zone. He will not publish it.”

  Olena wakes at three o’clock and finds Viktor writing to the Jewish Social Services: yes, we’ll go.

  Plans are secret, Viktor says. Besides Matushka, Anatoli and Laima are the only ones he trusts with the news. So Olena couldn’t bid Rivka do svidanya, even if Rivka were back in Kyiv. Goodbye to Matushka will only be temporary, Viktor promises.

  If Dedushka could be allotted an apartment in Kyiv, Olena would want to stay. But since he is now forbidden to leave the Zone of Exclusion, it doesn’t matter if she is in Kyiv or America. Maybe once she and Viktor are settled, they will let all the people like Dedushka go where they want. Maybe then Dedushka can come to America too.

  Anyway, no one has asked Olena. Where Viktor goes, she and Galina go, as if blown by the wind.

  Goodbyes to Dedushka are possible only by telephone and through Anatoli, who has an official pass to visit the zone. When he returns, Anatoli says Dedushka looks well, has only a touch of radiophobia. He spends all day writing to the regional authorities — “Send clean products, send Geiger counters, send clean milk, send sugar, send fish. Our wood is contaminated — please install gas.”

  In the spring he will be forced to evacuate to an apartment in Minsk and given fifteen rubles a month to buy uncontaminated meat and vegetables. Anatoli called Dedushka ungrateful because Dedushka called it coffin money.

  The only message Dedushka sent for Olena was, “Go soon. For Galina’s sake, go.”

  It’s December, and almost a new decade. A future has arrived when Olena thought there was no future.

  She is not ready.

  March 1990

  Going to America means going to Italy. Soon after they arrive in the apartment building run by the Jewish Social Services, Viktor says he feels better. His burns have faded, he looks stronger. Galina’s hair has recovered its curly sheen, and she hasn’t had a dizzy spell in weeks. At first her little mushroom wept for Matushka, but now she runs errands and gives the other refugees in the building haircuts. When they pay her in chocolates, she brings it all “home” to Olena in her satchel, her eyes shining.

  “No chocolates, you don’t need chocolates,” Olena says. “You tell them they must tutor you in English and mathematics. Tell them you will pay by haircuts. Or I will pay by haircuts.”

  Galina is learning Italian and English so fast she even translates for Olena. But Olena worries about Galina going on buses with Italian men — they admire her black curls. They look and look at her, as if she is a prostitute. And Galina just laughs at them. Italian men don’t like it when a little girl laughs at them … one followed her home and stood below her window all night, waiting. Then Galina didn’t laugh.

  Olena tells Viktor they should go to Austria, Germany, anywhere. “We must leave now — I don’t like this!”

  “Germany!” he says. “They have enough refugees and now no wall to keep them out. And I don’t speak German. That man will go away.”

  But then a week passes and the man is still there every night, looking up at Galina’s window.

  Viktor becomes sure that man is KGB — who else would watch an apartment night after night, maybe in the daytime as well?

  “He is dark and short,” says Olena. “To me, he looks Italian.”

  “No,” says Viktor, “he’s KGB.”

  “But why would he follow us? Gorbachev and the KGB have enough to worry about — Azerbaijan, Czechoslovakia, now Lithuania.”

  “Because I resigned from the Party before leaving. Otherwise, how can I enter America?”

  “You could have just said you had resigned.”

  “I don’t want to begin my life there with a lie.”

  So again they leave for America, this time by way of Austria, again thanks to Jewish Social Services. On a cool, breezy night, in a rented Fiat.

  This is a good feeling, that we are together, just the three of us. And that everything we own can move with us in this car, away from Unit 4.

  October 1991

  Olena is sitting at the kitchen table of a two-bedroom apartment above the Teri-Oat convenience store in Shorewood, a town on the lakeshore north of Chicago. She is trying to write her November rent check.

  She would like to plug her ears against Bette Midler’s voice wafting from Galina’s room. And Galina’s ears too. Her daughter has begun to believe what the song says, “God is watching us,” as if the mythical spirit is KGB. And if God is watching, why must he do it “from a distance”? Galina is not the only one who plays the song till it is inescapable; all this year it was the favourite of American soldiers sitting in dusty tents in Kuwait fighting what Viktor called the First Oil War.

  A hundred and twenty dollars. How much is that in rubles?

  Do not calculate it — just write.

  Such a rich country, with no propiska — anyone can just live where they want. But they make their comrades pay so much for housing. And education! Only school is free — how can the state be so irresponsible that it will not pay for college? And so many schools, none of them teaching the same thing to children the same age, no one in Washington telling them what to teach so they can compete with children in other countries. Some people in Olena’s ESL class graduated from those schoo
ls, born right here in America and can’t read their own language. The volunteers who teach her English can’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. They teach English as a Second Language, as if Olena grew up like them, speaking only one language.

  A hundred and twenty dollars is also the amount she has paid thirteen times now, every month, to Jewish Social Services for the air fares, for their three months in Italy, for the three months in Austria. And she will pay it twenty-three times more.

  And Jewish Social Services volunteers are teaching her that Passover, Yom Kippur, Purim and Hanukkah are not just days for cooking special foods. They say real Jews don’t eat sausage, or any pork for that matter. They say God is everywhere. Like radiation.

  Already Olena has a job; after three months of training last year she works at the Windy City Day Spa giving massages. She doesn’t have to speak English for that. She gives “great” massages, say her clients. Olena thought the word “great” should only be used for Party officials or tsars and tsarinas, but here everything and everyone is “great.” Her old country, the Soviet Union, is like Great Britain — no longer great. The newspapers and TV all rejoice that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have declared their independence.

  Would the women she massages think Olena was no longer “great” if she told them she comes from Chernobyl? Maybe they wouldn’t want her hands on their skin. She’d become like her poor Dedushka. His letter says no one talks to him in his new apartment in Minsk, no one visits, so afraid are they.

  Olena writes the check, puts it in an envelope and seals it. She licks a stamp before she realizes it is self-sticking, unlike Soviet stamps. She presses it to the envelope anyway, not wanting to waste it.

  Viktor’s English was always much better than Olena’s, but he has to learn American English in place of the British kind. He works in a microbiology laboratory, testing and labelling. He tells Olena what food to buy: only brands he has tested in the lab himself. This year she gathers rituals as well as religion: replace foods used, no changes in brand or size. Write checks carefully, add them up each month.

  Olena writes the address. Her handwriting looks unfamiliar in English.

  She puts the check on the table in the hall and returns to her seat.

  Her memory — it’s no good any more. Places and faces at home erase themselves slowly, decaying from the core outwards till they are swallowed into black.

  She draws a canary yellow notepad toward her and writes to herself in Ukrainian:

  Take clothes to laundromat

  Write letter to Dedushka

  Make lokshyna for Galina

  Make potato varenyky for Viktor

  • • •

  April 1992

  Again Olena is sitting at her kitchen table, writing checks. But now Matushka is also here, sitting before the TV in the living room, a notebook and an English-Russian dictionary beside her. Her arrival was a Passover surprise from Jewish Social Services.

  Four Los Angeles policemen have been acquitted of beating a black man, Rodney King, and Matushka is trying to understand why people are shocked and enraged by the verdict. If there were a God, Olena would thank it for American TV, which fascinates and persecutes Matushka by withholding what she is expected to believe.

  American TV and newspapers all told Olena that the Soviet Union had dissolved, that the Soviet parliament had gone out of existence, but did Olena believe them? She could not believe two republics simply declared their independence and the Kremlin didn’t send in troops to teach everyone a lesson. They told her Yeltsin was installed and the Communist Party was powerless, but did she believe them? Not until Matushka resigned from the Party.

  Maybe she didn’t believe the news on TV because Viktor said Americans give credit to the actor who was in the White House six years ago instead of to Unit 4 at Chernobyl.

  On May 1, 1992, one hundred and twenty dollars will come out of her account for the landlord. And another one hundred and twenty for Jewish Social Services. Now Olena has to write another. Fifty dollars, for Matushka. Fifty dollars Olena cannot save for Galina — how much is that in rubles?

  If Olena doesn’t write this check, will they send Matushka back?

  Oh, she will pay, she will pay. Of course.

  Olena doesn’t talk to Matushka unless she has to. Let her live in her room, Olena in hers. Olena cooks and clean for her, that’s enough.

  Olena puts the check on the hall table and returns to her seat in the kitchen. She draws her notepad toward her.

  Take clothes to laundromat

  Write letter to Dedushka

  Make lokshyna for Galina

  Get vodka for Viktor

  Make potato varenyky for Matushka.

  October 1992

  Viktor is spending hours at the Constant Reader, a used bookstore several blocks away. Every weekend. Perhaps he has found a pretty bookseller there. Olena will surprise him.

  The wind is beginning to whip leaves from flaming maples. As she walks, Olena admires the carved pumpkins with which people decorate their doorsteps. A volunteer said none of those pumpkins will be eaten, they will all go to waste. Competing election signs ask her to vote for Clinton, Perot or Bush, but she is not a citizen here. Is she now a citizen of Ukraine or the Soviet Union? American immigration authorities will decide.

  Olena tells the bookseller she is looking for language tapes because she can’t find the words to say anything else.

  She wanders up and down the stacks until she finds Viktor. He’s sitting on a stepstool, old copies of Moscow News spread on the floor beside him. He shows her a 1989 article, “The Big Lie.” It says Soviet leaders covered up Chernobyl. It is news for the world, he says, and he’s glad it was printed. And he shows her another in English about a place called Three Mile Island.

  “For the health of so few, the company paid five million dollars in compensation,” he says. “And in the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl allowance is negligible. Oh, it’s not only the money — we could have learned much from the mistakes of others.”

  Olena rests her hand on the slope of his shoulders. How thin he is! Perhaps they should take the bus home.

  She leads him from the bookstore. At the bus stop, she stifles her habit of staring at dark-skinned people.

  Riding home, Viktor says, “So many big lies. Even in America. Nothing is free here — not health, not good education, not housing. Only they say you are free. I think they mean you can buy blue jeans, black jeans, white jeans, so long as they’re jeans — this is what they call freedom. You can rent an apartment and it looks same as your neighbour’s — just like in Kyiv. You can buy a desk, a chair, a sofa, and there are ten thousand others like it in the homes of other people. And thousands sit before a TV that looks like ours. This is individualism?”

  He is decaying as if a half-life had expired. A doctor told him his white cell count is low. But Olena thinks grief for so many lost comrades, sorrow and self-disgust kill slowly.

  Viktor shows her a book he bought. “For you,” he says. “Taras Schevchenko, in English.”

  A showcase in Olena’s mind displays every gift from Viktor, from the large box with the thousand kisses inside to her iron, a Swiss knife, a blanket from their early days in Moscow. All left far away in Pripyat. Never before has he given her poetry.

  Olena looks out of the bus window and back; everything has blurred.

  The book falls open and she reads slowly, “In foreign lands live foreign folks; their ways are not your way. There will be none to share your woes or pass the time of day.”

  She shows Viktor.

  He has bought himself a book in English, too. The Gulag Archipelago. It looks very difficult.

  A few blocks later she says, “You know that Zone of Exclusion they made at Pripyat? I’m living in one here. I can’t speak to anyone, they don’t understand me.”

  Viktor takes out his wallet, opens it and holds out a small square of paper. A photo of Galina. Olena gazes at it with him.

  “Did you know, sh
e wants to study public health?” he says. Pride, surprise and admiration are mixed in his voice.

  Olena envies Galina.

  December 1993

  After giving three massages, Olena leaves the spa at two o’clock. Sunshine reflects off store windows and snow-furred lintels. It’s ten below zero with the wind chill factor. It’s good she found a sheepskin jacket and a hat, scarf and boots at the thrift shop. Good that she doesn’t have to wait long at the bus stop.

  She walks home on plowed and salted sidewalks. Snow trenches come almost to her waist. The wind would freeze her cheeks the same way in Moscow or Ukraine right now.

  What’s happening there? She has to read Russian newspapers to know — American TV showed only a few seconds of the panic after the ruble recall. Even when Yeltsin stopped the old Communists with a day-long battle that left Moscow’s parliament building blackened and smoking, it was news for just a few minutes. But American intentions, they are good. They have even opened a Holocaust museum in Washington.

  What is Rivka doing now? And Laima? And the teachers she worked with in Moscow? They are not so lucky. If there’s a story about Russian women on TV, it’s about trafficking and prostitution.

  Olena doesn’t look for Rivka among those faces but listens carefully to the names of the reporters. One day she will hear Rivka’s.

  Does the old country stay the same, frozen, immobile as we wander and wonder? Do we fade as people forget us? Why do so many memories come now, when we are safe? Here, where few seem to have heard of Chernobyl and few seem to care that it happened? Are my memories real or contaminated?

  In the mailbox is a letter unevenly plastered with new Ukrainian stamps. Smiling inside, Olena climbs the back stairway to the apartment, puts her handbag on the hall table.

  Viktor and Matushka are sitting on the futon in the living room, watching the CBS news. Paula Zahn says many Russian women want rich men to marry them and take them to America. “Prostitutes!” says Matushka.