Jimfish was very confused: ‘Then Africa is to be left with no defence against this sickness?’
‘But, yes!’ The philosopher reached beneath the bedclothes and pulled out the dried beetroot he had been cradling when they met. ‘If what I have is an African illness, then we must find traditional African remedies. The Central Committee of our movement has decreed that lemon juice, the African potato and beetroot will do the job far better than the poison of our enemies. Unfortunately, I had run out of money for food, I had sold even my old Lenin cap, sucked the lemon dry and polished off the potato and I was very close to finishing off the beetroot when you rescued me.’
Jimfish pointed out gently that although this treatment for his illness might have won Central Committee approval it had not helped him much.
‘It may look that way to a non-Party member,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘But the beetroot-and-potato treatment is Party policy. And anyway, the new experimental drugs for treating the virus can be bought only from the United States and cost thousands of dollars and I am a poor man.’
That was enough for Jimfish, who went immediately to Jagdish and explained the matter to him. The good man picked up the phone and placed the order. ‘What is the point of money if I don’t help others?’
And so it was that the new drugs were flown at great expense from the United States, although Jimfish and Jagdish agreed that they would not mention this to Soviet Malala. Once on the treatment, his viral load stabilized, he began to gain weight and he was in the happy position of claiming that he had been saved by the cocktail of beetroot, lemon juice and the native sweet potato. Now that he was well again his ambition to travel to the Soviet Union was keener than ever.
But Jagdish, who had travelled in Eastern Europe, was puzzled by this and quizzed Soviet Malala about his loyalty to Soviet Communism.
‘I suppose you know that the USSR has some strange customs: there are separate schools for Party apparatchiks, separate lanes for their cars and separate privileges for the ruling caste. That sounds to me very like South Africa. Moreover, Soviet citizens are not well fed. The USSR and all its satellites never have enough bread to go around, nor shoes, socks, bathplugs or even toilet paper. And if its citizens are so fortunate, why do so many of them dream of running away?’
The philosopher was not to be budged. ‘If there is a small degree of discomfort, it’s so that citizens are always alert, pricked into the anger that fuels lumpenproletarian progress. If it were not so they might become so happy and peace-loving that their enemies would sweep over them.’
Jagdish agreed to buy air tickets and this turned out to be surprisingly easy because the new strong man of Uganda, who had just replaced Milton Obote, had decided that, after years of indigenous despotism, it was time to give the Soviet system free rein, and there were Russians all over Kampala selling arms and handing out the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Air tickets were soon bought and the three friends found themselves on a Soviet Aeroflot flight, bound for Moscow.
After the plane had left African airspace and begun its passage over Europe, Jagdish mused on the odd fact that, for a peace-loving people, the Soviets owned very many rockets capable of destroying the world.
Soviet Malala was quick to set him right: ‘The missiles of the USSR are strictly for defence, unlike the arms of western imperialistic powers, which are intended to obliterate peace-loving people.’
As their plane crossed the Ukraine and they were nearing Kiev the sky darkened and far below they saw what looked like a sickly sun, pulsing among thick grey clouds. This was odd because it was long past midnight and the sun seemed very far below them. What could there be on the ground that might shine as brightly as the sun? Then the pilots of the plane announced to the passengers that they had been ordered to land. When Jagdish protested that they had paid to be flown to Moscow, the pilots retorted that it was from Moscow itself that the order had come.
CHAPTER 5
Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986
The plane touched down at an airport called Zhulyany, which they were told was not far from Kiev. The good Jagdish, feeling sorry for Soviet Malala, so cruelly denied his first glimpse of Moscow, offered to buy him a ticket on another airline so that he might continue his journey.
The philosopher smiled at his ignorance, well-intentioned though it was.
‘In the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics there is only one airline, Aeroflot, just as there is only one political system, one party, one leader, one politburo and one right side of history.’
This gave Jimfish his chance to ask a question that had been worrying him since he had left Port Pallid: ‘How will I know when I am on the right side of history? Who will I ask?’
Soviet Malala was happy to explain: ‘There is no need to ask, no room for doubt, no chance of error. Just remember the central rule of Soviet socialism: everything not expressly permitted is always forbidden.’
Once on the ground, an elderly yellow coach drew up beside the aircraft and Soviet Malala said it was almost certainly a customary courtesy, this being doubtless the way in which the USSR welcomed all peace-loving visitors. The coach was packed with sleepy soldiers who would not give up their seats and the new arrivals had to stand in the aisle. Luckily, Soviet Malala, the son of a mother very much taken with the Bolshevik Revolution, had learnt Russian as a young child and he was ready to act as interpreter to his travelling companions. He asked the soldiers if they were on their way to a holiday camp, for in the Soviet Union workers enjoyed free vacations courtesy of the Communist Party.
This drew a surly response from a huge man with a great red beard, whose name was Ivan.
‘Holiday? We are on our way to put out what the authorities tell us is a very minor fire. So small we will be back by nightfall, safe and sound. From this we surmise the blaze is so terrible nothing like it has been seen on earth before, a gigantic blaze burning out of control, and that few of us will return alive. We know this from the newspapers.’
Soviet Malala turned to his friends, delighted to say how open and informative were the newspapers in the Soviet Union. But the bearded giant told him he was talking nonsense.
‘Our news services speak of disaster taking place somewhere else in the world. In the US or Canada or England. That’s always a sure sign.’
‘A sign of what?’ Jimfish enquired.
‘Of trouble at home. A dam has burst, an earthquake has killed thousands, a submarine has sunk with all hands. When we are told this, we contact friends abroad to ask if they have news of a disaster in the USSR.’
Jimfish shook his head at this: ‘If the Soviet Union is such an open, honest land why do its rulers lie to its citizens?’
‘Because that’s how it is,’ said Ivan. ‘They tell us next to nothing and we believe as little as possible.’
‘How can a proud citizen of the socialist Motherland give way to such bitter cynicism?’ Soviet Malala demanded. ‘Aren’t you proud of Marx, Lenin and Stalin?’
Ivan spat in the aisle where the travellers stood. ‘Proud! If I were to visit the grave of Karl Marx in faraway London I would spit on it. If I bumped into Lenin I would stab him to death and dance on his corpse. As for Stalin, he murdered every member of my family and razed my village, and so I pray each night for his eternal damnation. From your stupid questions I know you are a fellow traveller, a foreigner and a fool.’
With that he pushed Soviet Malala to the floor and began to stamp on him as if he were Lenin himself. Luckily, his fellow soldiers pulled him off, pointing out that Soviet and his friends were volunteers and they needed all the volunteers they could find.
‘But what on earth have we volunteered for?’ Jimfish asked them.
The answer from the other passengers was a strange one.
‘We are to be known as liquidators. All over the country thousands of liquidators are being mobilized to rectify what is said to be a minor technical mishap in a power station.’
‘What is to be liquidated?
’ Jagdish wondered.
‘Probably ourselves,’ came the reply.
When, after a couple of hours, the bus came to a halt, they had arrived at a huge industrial plant or refinery topped by four large towers. From the mangled and blasted fourth tower flames were shooting hundreds of metres into the air. Now they understood that this must have been the glaring sickly sun they had seen from the sky. Helicopters hung above the flames constantly showering what looked like dust into the fires below, a scene which reminded Jimfish of children flinging handfuls of beach sand into the ocean.
‘It’s like hellfire,’ said Jimfish.
‘Not at all,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘It’s a minor technical mishap. The Party will explain everything.’
Party apparatchiks took the volunteers into a briefing room, swore them to secrecy and told them about the minor mishap. There had occurred at Chernobyl nuclear power station an explosion that gave off many hundreds of times more radiation than the bomb the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima. The blast had blown the massive roof off Reactor Number 4, sending radioactive steam and dust high into the sky, and this cloud was, even now, floating over the USSR, heading west into Scandinavia, fanning out across most countries of Western Europe. Except, it seemed, for France, where the authorities insisted the radioactive cloud had either stopped at the country’s borders or gone around the sides. Certainly, it had reached Great Britain, and Ireland and Canada were next in line. The toxic fallout from the blast had already tainted the lives of thousands, but the fear now was that a second explosion, much more powerful than the first, might occur at any time and trigger nuclear nightfall for millions. The Party line was to say little, admit nothing, and call for volunteers from all over the USSR to put out the flames. This would be their job as liquidators.
The soldiers whose bus Jimfish, Jagdish and Soviet Malala had joined were assigned to clearing the burning graphite debris from the roof of the stricken Reactor Number 4. Mechanical robots had been tried at first, but had broken down in the intense radiation pouring from the jagged hole. It was time to employ human technicians or ‘bio-robots’. Each bio-robot was handed a gas mask, a hood, rubber boots and an apron thinly lined with lead. They were ordered to clamber up the iron staircases of the reactor, throw pieces of graphite off the roof, then run downstairs again as fast as possible. At no point should they remain on the roof for more than a few minutes.
‘But why spend such a short time?’ Jagdish asked.
The answer from the briefing officials was unusually detailed.
‘While you are on the burning roof, you are directly exposed to high doses of radiation from caesium-137, strontium-90 and iodine-131. To stay there for more than a few minutes may somewhat damage your health. But great rewards await your patriotic heroism – all of you are in line for cash rewards, medals for bravery and the undying gratitude of the Motherland. Now put on your gear and report on the roof.’
The bio-robots in hoods and gas masks, wearing goggles that gave them the bug-eyed look of giant, white-eyed wasps, went clambering across the devastated roof, grabbing lumps of hot graphite and pitching them to the ground. The steam was so thick they could see very little. The huge soldier, Ivan, exhausted by heat and radiation, came very close to falling into one of the gaping fissures where the roof had split open and plunging into the searing depths of the reactor, and was saved only by Jagdish’s quick action.
Not that his courage was appreciated.
‘Why did you bother?’ the giant snapped.
‘Courage, comrade!’ Soviet Malala cried. ‘We are being tested in the fires of Party loyalty. And if we die, we will be heroes of the Motherland, third class.’
‘Shut your face,’ was Big Ivan’s angry reply, ‘or I will pitch you head first into the inferno at the heart of this reactor. Our lives are over anyway, none of us has a chance.’
The next day it was Jagdish who collapsed on the rooftop and – as Jimfish watched, horrified – Big Ivan bent over him, rifled through his pockets, removed his wallet and, without a second thought, tipped him as if he were no more than a sack of coal into the jagged hole where the fuel rods pulsed in the eerie blue water.
When Jimfish shouted out in horror at what he had seen, Big Ivan merely flourished Jagdish’s wallet and announced: ‘To each according to his needs.’
Then he clambered down the ladder and made off, closely followed by Jimfish and Soviet Malala, who ran clumsily in their heavy hoods, masks and lead-lined aprons, shouting, ‘Stop, thief!’ and looking for all the world to the liquidators who watched the chase from the roof of the reactor like actors in some antique black-and-white film.
CHAPTER 6
Pripyat, Ukraine, 1986
Jimfish and Soviet Malala followed Ivan to the nearby town of Pripyat, where an enormous street party of thousands of revellers was in progress, and in the melee of marching bands, choirs and fair-ground fun, they lost their man. Jimfish turned in some perplexity to his friend and mentor.
‘Surely this is no time for a party? That reactor could explode a second time and destroy much of Europe.’
‘Today is the First of May,’ Soviet patiently explained. ‘And on May Day everyone in the Motherland celebrates the triumphant workers of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be more natural.’
Jimfish pondered the crowds dancing in the streets: ‘Chernobyl is close by and these people celebrating here in Pripyat don’t even have lead-lined aprons. They’re taking in so much radiation it will kill them.’
‘All the more reason for a good party – if things are as bad as that, which I doubt, they will die happy,’ Soviet assured him. ‘What we face at Chernobyl is certainly a technical challenge, but we must trust the Party to think of a way. Finding Ivan will not be hard. He’s an assassin who has insulted the Motherland and sold his Soviet citizenship for the dollars in poor Jagdish’s purse. He’ll have headed for some place he can spend the money and there aren’t many of those. We must track him down and denounce him to the authorities, who will certainly send him to a labour camp.’
And he was right. They found the absconding soldier in the best restaurant in Pripyat, on the corner of Lenin Avenue and International Friendship Street, eating sturgeon and knocking back vodka. In between bites of fish and swigs of vodka, he was singing a popular Soviet song: ‘We were born to make fairy tales a reality . . .’
Except, as Soviet explained somewhat testily to Jimfish, instead of skaska, the Russian word for ‘fairy tale’, Ivan used a shocking pun, and his song now went: ‘We were born to make Kafka a reality.’
When the two friends challenged Ivan and demanded he hand back Jagdish’s wallet, he laughed, opened another bottle of vodka and told them to get lost. ‘I’ve done you a big favour. If you had stayed up on the roof of the reactor, you’d be goners. Just like all these fools marching and dancing in the streets of Pripyat.’
‘Why have this May Day parade if Pripyat is a death zone?’ Soviet demanded.
‘Because it diverts attention from the horrible reality of things,’ said Ivan. ‘The May Day charade is the purest summation there can be of how things are done here. Today the party, tomorrow the death march. Hundreds of thousands of people will be moved out of Pripyat; the fairground will stand empty, the swimming pools deserted, the children’s swings in the parks will rust and no one will ever be allowed back.’
Big Ivan had no sooner said this, while continuing to guzzle his sturgeon, when Jimfish began to feel nauseous; soon he was vomiting, then he had a feverish headache and sat down, overcome by dizziness.
‘Help me – I am not myself,’ he implored.
‘All very typical symptoms of radiation sickness. Your fishy friend will almost certainly kick the bucket,’ Big Ivan told Soviet Malala, taking a gulp of vodka. ‘He’s better off dying here than on the roof of Reactor Number 4. You know how this will be handled if ever we put the fire out. At the end of the day the bio-robots still standing will be thanked, presented with 100 rubles and a big medal and
be sent home to die. That won’t be the end of it. They’ll have to be buried in lead-lined coffins, because their bodies will be radioactive for many thousands of years. Like Chernobyl itself.’
‘It is inconceivable that heroes of the Soviet Union should perish, having done everything to save the Motherland,’ Soviet Malala said firmly. ‘The Party would never allow it.’
Big Ivan laughed: ‘On the contrary. The patriotic duty of a liquidator is, precisely, to liquidate himself, as your friend is now doing. The fewer witnesses there are to this catastrophe, then so much the better. That’s why our rulers fiddle while Chernobyl burns. Here we see the worst nuclear accident of our times, a deadly danger to millions, from Iceland to America and yet, to read our papers, you’d believe nothing has happened.’
‘That is not true,’ said Soviet Malala, seizing a copy of the newspaper Pravda from a nearby table. ‘Look at this paragraph on page three: “Small mishap at Chernobyl, now under control.”’
‘You are either a madman or a devil,’ Big Ivan told him. ‘The radioactive cloud from Reactor Number 4 – in the middle of which we ridiculous bio-robots worked so recently – is now wafting across the globe, poisoning whatever it touches.’
‘Ah, that goes to show the immense moral gulf between the US and the USSR,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘When a nuclear reactor leaked radioactivity into the atmosphere in New York a few years ago the authorities tracked the fallout in America meticulously, but they were blind to the damage in other countries. The USSR alone develops the peaceful atom and shares it with the whole world.’
‘At least the US plans to murder its enemies with its nuclear weapons,’ said Big Ivan, ‘but the Soviet Union kills its own citizens at Chernobyl and says nothing about it.’
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