Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  The window displayed no items, which is probably why I had not noticed the store before. A large woman in a white lab coat stood behind the counter. Enormous jars of pickled tomatoes filled a mesh wire bin in the centre of the store. The shelves were bare and the store, empty.

  “Do you sell any food besides tomatoes?” I asked the woman.

  “Nyet”

  “Do you have milk?” The woman grew impatient. “Dievushka, I just told you we have nothing else,” she said. “If you want milk, go to a milk store.”

  I held up the ginger cookies and asked if she had more of these. She became very angry and told me to leave. I was being thrown out of a grocery store for trying to buy food.

  At least I now understood how to identify a grocery store. My eyes properly trained, I eventually spotted the word moloko [milk] and found a milk store. It was also empty. This store did not even have a cash register. A woman in a white lab coat and tall white chef’s hat stood beside an abacus with big black and brown wooden beads.

  “Do you, by any chance, have milk?” I asked.

  “Dievushka, of course not,” she shouted. She paused and looked at me for some time. Are you a foreigner?” she asked. I explained that I had only just arrived in Kiev.

  “Come tomorrow by about 6 a.m. and you should be in the line early enough to get some milk,” the woman said. I left the shop.

  I had never encountered food shortages in Budapest. The supermarket near my apartment was always stocked to capacity. But it unfortunately sold products with unilingual Hungarian labels and no pictures to provide visual clues as to the content. The first time I shopped at the supermarket I bought one of each item that appeared to be food. At home, if the dictionary provided no appropriate translation, I snipped open the packages to taste and identify the contents. I managed not to sample anything poisonous. Here, even though everyone on the streets looked well fed, I could not find any food to taste. I would have to ask Yaroslav for help.

  I walked home convinced more than ever that Communist Kiev and Communist Budapest had nearly nothing in common. I wondered whether my move here had been rash and worried that I might not be able to manage in Kiev on my own. I decided to call the foreign editor to let him know that I had arrived safely and to give him my phone number. It would be comforting to hear a familiar voice. I dialed the international operator to place the call. She asked me the day and time for the booking.

  “I’d like to make the call now, please,” I said.

  “Impossible,” the operator said and hung up. I phoned the operator again and heard a different voice. This woman was patient and explained that all calls out of the country had to be booked twenty-four hours in advance. The outside world, including my family, was sealed off for the next full day.

  I felt panicky. I paced the apartment, oppressed now by its dinginess and gloom. I called the international operator again and booked calls for the next day. I cursed the phone system and wondered how I could arrange to be free to cover unexpected news events and also be at home for scheduled international calls necessary to report the events.

  After a dinner of Hungarian salami and sweaty cheese I went to bed. I slept well until about 2 a.m. when the doorbell rang. I registered the noise before becoming fully awake. I stumbled from bed, tripped over my suitcase and stubbed my toe on the leg of the desk. Alert now, I walked to the door but did not open it.

  “Who’s there?”

  No one answered.

  “Hello, who is it?” I shouted more insistently.

  The bell rang again.

  “Yaroslav, is that you?”

  The bell rang one more time. I opened the door a crack and saw a heavy-set middle-aged man. He had jowls and was unshaven. I suspected the man wanted Yaroslav’s cousin and asked him if he would like to leave a message. The man glared at me and said nothing. I wondered if he was drunk. He refused to speak and continued to glower. Eventually I shut the door and went back to bed. The man rang the doorbell until dawn. I woke from what little sleep I had, exhausted and agitated. Each night the man returned and rang the doorbell all night long.

  “How do I call the police?” I asked Yaroslav.

  “The police, they’re probably the ones behind it,” he said. “You don’t have a registration stamp to be here. Someone wants you out.” Tired and completely disoriented, I began to think that I was battling a dark, malevolent force with no face and no name that was bent on driving me from this apartment, possibly from Kiev too.

  I began to consider other housing options. Hotels charged foreigners highly inflated rates, so I could not afford a room. I soon also learned that as a foreigner I could not legally rent an apartment. I had nowhere to go. I did not think that anyone would try to hurt me – crime against a foreigner would result in too much unwanted attention in such an insular place as Ukraine. I mustered my dignity and courage and decided to ignore the doorbell ringing. No reaction might end the nightly visits.

  Yaroslav gave me a small black cylinder of mace. I slept with the mace on my night table and a pillow over my head to muffle the sound of the doorbell. I still did not sleep well. The doorbell man persisted. My nerves were fraying. I decided I had to find somewhere new to live. Then Yaroslav left for a long holiday. I lost my lifeline.

  I told anyone that I met about my housing dilemma. A woman from Rukh felt sorry for me and invited me to stay. We did not know each other well. There was also a large age difference between us. I felt grateful for the offer but also suspicious. I wondered why she had extended the invitation and what she might want from me. I also worried obsessively about language. I had found a Ukrainian teacher but Russian and Ukrainian were so similar that I sometimes confused the two languages. I did not know whether I should speak to her in mangled Ukrainian or more fluent but grammatically incorrect Russian.

  On the day of the move, I stood outside my building on Yaroslaviv Val nervously contemplating my move and trying to flag down a car. Forty-five minutes later no one had stopped. This had never happened before.

  A man sat in a tan-coloured square Lada across the road. I became convinced that he worked for the KGB and that no motorist would stop while he stayed there. After an hour I became impatient and thought KGB or not, the man could be useful. I asked him for a lift. He said yes and put my bags in the trunk of his car.

  I gave the man the correct name of the neighbourhood but the wrong address. I now considered Kiev such an odd and sinister place that I thought it possible the Rukh woman would be punished if the KGB discovered I was her guest.

  The man interrogated me along the way.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Canada.”

  “Do your parents live there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they Canadian Ukrainian?”

  “No. My mother is British and my father is Canadian.”

  “There are no real Canadians. Your father’s family must come from this area.” I found these questions intrusive but responded to allay the man’s suspicion that I was hiding something from him.

  “No, he’s from a Loyalist family that left Connecticut after the American Revolution. I have no link at all with Ukraine.” We approached the outskirts of the city. I found the cracked concrete apartment blocks that lined the road depressing. Most of the balconies looked ready to fall off the buildings. The man began to question me again. He still did not seem to believe that I had no Ukrainian ancestry. Fortunately we arrived at the address I had given the man. I tried to pay. The man refused to take any money.

  I dragged my suitcases into the dank entryway of the building where I would not be staying. It smelled of urine. I hid there for an hour. I wondered if I had crossed a line and was no longer thinking rationally. Deep down, I thought not. I peered out to make sure that the man had gone away and would not follow me. I did not see him, so I dragged my suitcases to the correct address.

  The entryway of this building smelled of garbage. Otherwise the building looked identical to every other ap
artment block that stretched across fields as far as I could see. I was marooned beyond the subway line. The building had no elevator, so I trudged up the stairs and knocked on my host’s door. She opened it and gave me a welcoming smile that revealed a gold front tooth. Bleak though the surroundings might be, I felt incredibly grateful to have somewhere to stay.

  We ate a modest meal and then prepared for bed. I could not understand where I would sleep but did not like to ask. The apartment consisted of one room only, furnished with a two-seat sofa and an armchair. There was no space for anything else. The tiny galley kitchen contained a table, barely big enough to qualify as a table, and two small, square stools. The windowless bathroom had a rough cement floor and a bath faucet that would not stop dripping, no matter how tightly I turned the tap.

  When I emerged from the bathroom after brushing my teeth, the former living room had been converted into a bedroom. The sofa and armchair both folded out into beds. Later, when I needed to use the bathroom I had to hopscotch my way across the mattresses to reach the bathroom. I could not possibly inconvenience my host with an extended stay. I would need to find somewhere else to live. Too tired to worry further about accommodation, I fell into a deep, unbroken sleep for the first time since arriving in Kiev.

  I was used to roaming where I pleased, but I soon realized the rules differed here. I was a prisoner in Kiev. Once again I thought of Ute and understood her need to escape. I had islands of safety: one, the Rukh office; another, the Foreign Ministry press centre. I remained convinced that Mr. C. and Mr. I. stood as allies in this struggle with that unknown force that wished to deny me accreditation and drive me from every home. I had decided that the large and imposing Mr. I. might kill me if ordered to do so but that he would do it reluctantly, and that for now he was on my side. So, when the press centre asked me to hand in my passport for a registration stamp, I did so willingly, thrilled at the prospect of a stamp that might actually enable me to live somewhere legally. However, when I tried to retrieve my passport, I could not get it back.

  4

  CHERNOBYL

  I saw from the window of Natalia Ivanovna’s kitchen how the soft rays of evening August sun turned St. Sophia’s gold dome more golden. Hens clucked on the balcony. Natalia Ivanovna and I sipped tea from tin cups. I had met her daughter, Ira, who was a few years older than me, through a colleague. Ira took me in, along with a stray cat named kotyonok [kitty]. Natalia Ivanovna allowed us both to stay.

  Still passport-less and without accreditation, I dared to hope that my circumstances would soon change. Tomorrow I would make my first trip outside Kiev. A nod and a wink from the Foreign Ministry press centre had enabled me to join a trip to Chernobyl planned by visiting Swiss scientists. I still did not know where I stood with the press centre officials. Sometimes they were strict and scary, but other times they were indulgent and helpful.

  “I interviewed one of the liquidators today,” I told Natalia Ivanovna.

  “Those men were heroes,” she said. I thought so too. I told her about Sergei Mertz, a middle-aged engineer who worked at the plant at the time of the accident: “He looked so normal, but when he went to the bathroom his wife listed twelve of his radiation-related illnesses. Sometimes he collapses and has to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance.”

  Natalia Ivanovna winced. “Poor man,” she said. “Most of the firemen died.”

  They’d been the first responders after operators at the plant carried out a failed experiment that led to fire, an explosion and the release of radioactive material into the air on a scale that surpassed Hiroshima. Even after the firemen had extinguished the blaze, material still smouldered inside the facility that housed the destroyed reactor.

  “Mertz said he and his colleagues worried that molten debris might melt through the concrete floor, hit the water table and that the steam build-up would cause another explosion. We call that a China syndrome in English,” I said or at least that’s what I tried to say. I knew that not all the Russian words I used were that exact. Natalia Ivanovna looked confused. A handsome, thick-waisted no-nonsense woman, she usually told me when I made no sense but tonight said nothing, so I skipped along.

  I told her that Mertz and thirteen other volunteers in a team worked around the clock for five days. They tried to enlarge a shaft. They wanted it to accommodate pipes for cooling the reactor.

  “They gave us one hundred grams of alcohol for courage before we went in,” he said. “The heat was terrible.” The volunteers dressed in white lead-lined suits with military air filters.

  “It was impossible to breathe in the spaces where we worked,” Mertz added. To swelter, suffocate and be irradiated, how much worse could it get? I asked Mertz whether he was forced to help. I could not imagine volunteering for such a job.

  “Everyone could refuse and there were instances of people saying, ‘I’m afraid, I’m not going in,’ but we were the experts and we were the ones who knew the plant, so most of us went in,” Mertz explained.

  “Heroes,” Natalia Ivanovna repeated. She got up and walked slowly toward two burlap bags in the corner of the kitchen. One bulged with potatoes, the other with carrots.

  “I grew them myself,” Natalia Ivanovna said, her statement full of pride. “They’re clean.” I learned what clean meant from Ira. I occasionally shopped at the Bessarabskyi Market at the junction of Khreshchatyk and Taras Shevchenko Boulevard. Sometimes lettuce, tomatoes, mushrooms, cucumbers, berries and a whole host of local produce spilled over stalls. Often though, tabletops stood bare, displaying only pickled garlic and jars of pickled tomatoes. On one good day, I came home with a sack of fresh fruit and vegetables. Ira was horrified and made me promise not to shop at the market again.

  “Those old babas are probably from the Chernobyl region trying to sell you dirty food,” she scolded. I had noticed other shoppers asked where food was grown. The names of the regions meant nothing to me, but others must have known which ones were contaminated from the Chernobyl fallout. Ira equipped me with a list of items never to buy. This included nearly all the food that I had purchased.

  “Mushrooms and berries are the worst,” she insisted. “They suck up radiation.” I mentioned this to Yaroslav. He told me that he had a Geiger counter, an instrument to measure radiation levels. “But you have to incinerate the food before you can test it,” he said.

  Natalia Ivanovna stood at the counter and cleaned her “clean” potatoes. I heard peelings drop into a small bin lined with newspaper.

  “Go to bed,” she urged. “You have a busy day tomorrow. Have soup for breakfast before you go.” She pointed at a pot that already held broth and would soon also be filled with potatoes.

  I wished her “Spokoinoi nochi [good-night]” and walked out of the kitchen into a dark vestibule, turned right and entered Ira’s wing of this large apartment that was really two combined in one. Kotyonok lazed in a corner of Ira’s kitchen. Her hamster, which she kept in an aquarium, had saved enough of the bread crusts Ira fed her to make a small ladder. I caught her climbing it, trying to escape. I picked the hamster up, held her for a while, and when I thought she might have forgotten about the ladder, dismantled it. I did not have the heart to take all the bread crusts away and deprive this hamster of her dreams of freedom.

  In the morning I walked down the hill to the Dnipro Hotel where the Swiss scientists stayed and boarded their chartered bus for a trip to the “forbidden zone.” This thirty-kilometre radius around Chernobyl was no man’s land. All the villages had been evacuated and checkpoints surrounded the perimeter to keep everyone out other than those still employed at the Chernobyl plant.

  I worried about radiation. In Kiev I studied maps of radioactive fallout. I avoided patches of the city that had been contaminated and also never sat on grass. I dreaded invitations to picnics. Green fields no longer seemed inviting, just potentially toxic.

  I discussed radiation safety with the Swiss scientists. They assured me a day trip into the forbidden zone posed no health hazar
d.

  I boarded their bus and sunk into a plush, padded seat. I found a lever to adjust the angle of the back. I tilted the seat as far as it would go in both directions and settled on a position in between. I rested my feet on a conveniently placed metal bar. I swivelled the overhead air vent until the temperature felt just right for me. I had grown accustomed to trips on the trolleybus, with all the accompanying disadvantages for short people like me. I often stood asphyxiated in the crowds under some taller person’s armpit. Deodorant was not widely available, or used, in Kiev.

  The chatter on board diminished to a hush as we passed through the checkpoint and barbed wire fence into the zone. Signs stamped Forbidden Zone and No Entry Permitted hung on the fence. Soon after crossing into the zone some scientists asked the bus driver to stop. He opened the door and we all stepped down onto the road. I stayed there as the scientists ventured into nearby fields and forest to collect samples. I heard the clicking sound of Geiger counters all around. Some beeped shrilly at highly radioactive spots.

  One scientist returned earlier than the others. He showed me samples of grass and bark that he stored in special plastic bags. He ran his Geiger counter over the specimens. The piercing beeps told me all that I needed to know.

  “Follow me,” the scientist said.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Yes, the ground here is perfectly fine. Look,” he said as he waved his Geiger counter over the earth. The instrument emitted slow evenly spaced clicks that indicated near normal readings.

  “Now listen to this,” he said.

  He wandered a few paces to the right and waved the Geiger counter again. It let out fast, high pitched beeps. Ground so close by was radioactive even though the patch on which I stood was not.

  When all the scientists had returned with their plastic bags filled with flowers, grass, soil, insects, mushrooms and berries, we continued to a nearby village. In such beautiful sunny weather on board a bus full of excited Swiss visitors, I stopped worrying. We drove through the centre of the village to the local administrative building. We all disembarked and climbed the stairs to a reception room.