Juli thought about Aleksandra and wondered what Mihaly was thinking. Insane, the system ignores possible problems while heroes like Aleksandra are made to disappear.
Finally, Juli said, “The energy ministries have been degrading the environment to produce energy for years. And for what? So they can make cheap, ill-fitting shoes.”
Mihaly pulled her to him and kissed her. “You’re the one person I can discuss these things with.”
“How touching,” said Juli. “Chernobyl is part of our relationship.”
Mihaly tickled her tummy. “Aha. A reaction gone wild. Radiation levels increasing, but where’s it coming from?” Mihaly tickled lower. “The core! We need to put in the master control rod! What do you think, Comrade Technician Popovics?”
Juli got the upper hand by tickling Mihaly’s ribs. He rolled off the bed with a thud.
“Too late!” said Mihaly from the floor. “It’s a meltdown. In America they call it the China Syndrome.”
Juli looked over the edge of the bed. “Where would it melt down to from here? What’s on the other side of the world from us?”
“The South Pacific,” said Mihaly, folding his hands behind his head.
“How do you know?”
Mihaly lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. “I checked a globe for the hell of it.”
“So sad,” said Juli. “You’re thinking about our future again. It’s Wednesday evening. Soon you’ll be leaving, and it’s time to get depressed.”
“I was thinking of what I told my brother about Chernobyl.”
“Didn’t you explain when he visited last week?”
“I told Laz everything was in tip-top shape at the plant. I gave him a rosy picture because of his persistence about something else…”
Mihaly got up and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her.
“I’ve been thinking of divorcing Nina.”
Juli pictured Nina in a flowered cotton dress. She’d met Nina and Mihaly’s two daughters at the fall picnic. A beautiful wife, two beautiful daughters.
Juli reached out and touched Mihaly’s shoulder. “Leave it be, Mihaly. We can see one another on Wednesdays.”
“You wouldn’t marry me?”
“If you were single, if we lived in one of your parallel worlds…”
Mihaly turned, smiled. “How about the South Pacific? How about an island where nobody knows us?”
Instead of answering, Juli put her hand on Mihaly’s shoulder.
“It’s an idiotic situation,” said Mihaly.
“And we’re the idiots,” said Juli.
Mihaly stood and went to the chair where his clothes lay. “I’d better go. Your roommate will be home soon.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Juli. “She knows about us.”
“You told her?”
“Marina is like a sister.”
Mihaly began dressing, turned to stare at Juli. “And I told my brother.”
“Did he scold you?”
“Severely.”
“We deserve it.”
After dressing, Mihaly helped Juli refold the sofa bed. They did not speak, and Juli thought how sad it was to fold the bed. Like folding a dead person’s clothing or closing a coffin. So sad. So final.
Juli put on her coat and stepped out on the balcony to watch Mihaly jog across the courtyard. His apartment was a few blocks away, and he waved before disappearing beyond the building across from hers.
The last thing he said before leaving her apartment was that the view from her balcony was better than the view from the balcony on his and Nina’s apartment. Their apartment faced the red lights of the Chernobyl towers, he’d said, while hers faced the dark horizon of the Belorussian Republic to the north.
Juli had not put on shoes, and the snow stung her feet. She was about to step back inside when she heard something, snow crunching underfoot. She turned abruptly, looked at her footprints and Mihaly’s footprints and the impressions his knees had made in the snow. She heard it again, snow crunching. She moved quietly to the railing, leaned out, looked right and left. On the floor of the balcony to the left, she saw boot prints in the snow. Was there a shadow? Had she seen the toe of a boot disappear behind the pri-vacy wall separating the balconies?
She ran inside, locked the sliding door, closed the curtains, turned out the light, and went to the left wall to place her ear against it. There was a gentle thud, a sliding door closing, perhaps the one next door. She kept listening but heard nothing more. Maybe a worker or the landlord had stepped out onto the balcony earlier in the day and made the boot prints. She wanted to believe this because she knew the apartment next door had been vacant several weeks. At least it had been vacant until now.
When the phone rang, she was so startled she backed away from the wall abruptly, fell backward over the hassock, and landed on her hip. She rubbed her hip, cursed the hassock, crawled to the end table, and picked up the phone.
“Hello.”
No answer, but someone there.
“Hello,” she said again somewhat louder, imagining whoever was in the apartment next door might be calling.
“Hello, I said!”
“Hello,” a woman’s voice. “This is Nina Horvath. Is my husband there?”
Cold night air seemed to have come into the apartment. She turned to look at the balcony door, but it was closed. The night again, the winter night threatening to swallow her.
“Nina Horvath?” Juli finally said.
“Yes. I asked if my husband was there.”
“Why would he be here?”
“Oh,” said Nina Horvath. “Then he’s not there?”
“No.”
“Very well. I presume you completed your business and I can expect him any time. Yes. I believe I hear him now. Good night.”
Earlier this evening, while waiting for the bus, she had justified her relationship with Mihaly by telling herself life was too short to worry about the future. Now the future was upon her like a thief in the night. This evening she had played the seductress. Now she felt nothing but emptiness.
Juli wrapped her coat tightly about her, curled up on the sofa, and prayed Marina would come home soon.
7
April 1986
Pavel and Nikolai sat at their long table in the back room of the Pripyat post office opening-reading-resealing the ten percent of the morning’s mail shoveled through the slot in the wall. Last winter the steamer had been welcome. On a warm April day, however, the steamer was an enemy. An exhaust fan clattering on the wall failed to remove the heat and moisture. Their foreheads glistened with perspiration.
“I’m reminded of a steam bath in Moscow,” said Pavel, resealing a letter and adding it to the growing pile on his left.
“The steam baths in Kiev are better,” said Nikolai.
“In what way?”
“The women.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Pavel. “Not even in these so-called times of change. You play with your nuts underwater, and you see tits on boys.”
“That reminds me,” said Nikolai. “Soon it will be May.”
“What does May have to do with women in the Kiev baths?”
Nikolai resealed a letter he had been reading and tossed it onto the pile. “In May chestnuts and lilacs are in bloom. While we sit in our Pripyat sweatbox, workers prepare for May Day parades. Last year, naked women were in the Kiev parade.”
“The recent crackdown on drinking should apply especially to you,” said Pavel. “Or perhaps, like the Chernobyl workers, you’ve taken up hashish.”
“Don’t be a farmer,” said Nikolai, retrieving another letter.
“I’m not a farmer,” said Pavel.
“You smell like one.”
Pavel tossed a letter onto the pile and gave Nikolai a dismissive wave. “No wonder it stinks in here. With all this idiotic talk and all this heat…”
“Captain Putna should issue deodorant,” said Nikolai.
They were quiet for a time
, reading letters, frowning, and adding letters to the finished pile. Finally, Pavel spoke.
“The postmaster has an oscillating fan in his office. Tomorrow it will be in here.”
Nikolai fanned himself with a letter he had just opened. “If we had a window like the postmaster, we’d have a view and be able to smell the spring air instead of reading about it. I’m sick of reading about it.” Nikolai read from the letter. “‘Spring is pleasant here also.
Snows of February and March have nourished the winter wheat.
Father has planted our vegetable crop and all is well.’ I’m sick of hearing how all is well.” Nikolai opened a new letter, examined it.
“Here’s another to Juli Popovics, the Chernobyl technician babe.”
“She’s under observation,” said Pavel. “Who’s it from?”
“I know she’s under observation,” said Nikolai, somewhat annoyed. “It’s in Ukrainian from Aunt Magda in Kiev. She has prepared a room so Juli Popovics can visit for several months while the medical matter is addressed.”
“Sounds like she’s a Mommychka-to-be,” said Pavel.
“There must be much activity at Chernobyl,” said Nikolai.
“Aside from radioactivity.”
Nikolai put the letter to Juli Popovics in the tray for copying and began opening another.
“Still no mail for the engineer stud?” asked Nikolai, glancing at a list on the table headed by the words official observation.
“Nothing for Mihaly Horvath since February,” said Pavel.
“First his American cousin bugs him, then a batch of letters from his brother asking about some matter, then nothing.”
“The letters we copied may have had an effect,” said Nikolai.
“Like other Chernobyl workers before him, he’s gone mad and had to be taken away. Perhaps we’ll go mad. It’s spring and I feel like a caged animal. Can you imagine the heat in this room come summer?”
“I doubt if Mihaly Horvath has gone mad,” said Pavel. “As for us, the post office should supply chilled mineral water. Did you hear Gorbachev is now mineral secretary since he replaced vodka at official functions?”
“You already told me,” said Nikolai, wiping his brow with his sleeve.
“Don’t worry about the heat,” said Pavel. “Tomorrow we’ll have a fan to cool us, courtesy of our ersatz supervisor, the noble comrade postmaster.”
Because it had been stored in the underground garage, the inside of the Volga was cool and comfortable. Major Komarov tried to relax as Captain Azef drove slowly through Kiev’s noon-hour traffic. On the far side of Kirov Street, beyond Petrovsky Promenade, office workers lunched on benches beneath chestnut trees and on the green April lawn of Pervomaisky Park. Beyond the park, the river sparkled in the sun. Out in the river, the beach on Trukhanov Island glowed like a hot ember.
While he drove, Azef talked about automobiles. “Although the Zil is still used by high officials and has certain prestige, I still prefer the Volga. Even modified Chaikas with yellow fog lights are no match for the well-equipped Volga. Look at all those pieces of shit everyone else drives. Even the militia drives shitbox Zhigulis.”
Azef glanced to Komarov. “Sorry, Major. I’m speaking too much again.”
“Sometimes, Captain, it’s not how much you speak. It’s the nature of your conversation. Perhaps it would be better to concentrate on our visit to militia headquarters.”
Azef stopped the Volga behind a line of traffic waiting for pedestrians crossing to the park. “Will you tell Chief Investigator Chkalov about the investigation into shoddy parts from Yugoslavia?”
“Shoddy parts relates to new construction,” said Komarov. “Detective Horvath’s brother works in unit four, which is fully operational.”
“What about the woman?” asked Azef. “Will you tell Chkalov about her?”
“Detective Horvath’s brother managing to impregnate a co-worker is of no concern to the Kiev militia. Our purpose today is simply to determine whether the letters Detective Horvath sent his brother earlier in the year might have some relation to Chernobyl.”
“Chkalov is a brutish fellow,” said Azef.
Komarov glanced at Azef and had to restrain a smile. Azef of the KGB and Chkalov of the militia, what a pair of plump brutes they both were.
When they got out of the Volga at militia headquarters, Komarov had a quick cigarette before entering the building. Azef seemed about to mention the cigarette until Komarov glared at him. Then Azef simply waited for Komarov to finish his smoke.
Chief Investigator Chkalov’s office did not look like the office of a man who worked for a living. Except for a brass pen set, an intercom, and telephone, the desk was clear. Behind Chkalov on either side of an ornately curtained window stood flags of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine, the city of Kiev, and the Kiev militia. The walls contained photographs of appropriate officials surrounding a larger rendering of Lenin looking skyward. There were no maps of the city with stickpins, no scheduling boards, no piles of reports. A room meant for giving proclamations rather than the office of the chief of Kiev’s detectives, who sat behind the desk picking remnants of his lunch from his teeth with his fingernails.
Captain Azef sat to Komarov’s left, slouching in one of the plush guest chairs. Komarov had turned his chair at an angle so he could view both brutes at once. Because there was no ashtray, he did not smoke.
“So,” said Chkalov, “the KGB wishes to inquire about Detective Horvath.”
Komarov was about to speak when Azef broke in. “Yes, Comrade Chief Investigator. We would like to know something about him.”
Komarov glared at Azef. “If you don’t mind, Captain.”
Azef gripped the arms of his chair as if to pull himself from its depths. “Certainly, Major.”
“Thank you,” said Komarov, turning to Chkalov, who seemed amused at this pettiness. “Chief Investigator Chkalov, as you know, it is often in the state’s interest to gather information about certain citizens. This is not to imply these individuals have broken laws; it is simply part of the overall fact-gathering responsibility of the KGB.”
Komarov knew he was stating the obvious. He often used this technique when interrogating officials. A few minutes of this, and Chkalov would relax his defenses. Komarov went on, stating in general terms the need for militia and KGB cooperation. During the speech, Komarov noticed Chkalov sit back, fold his hands on his desk, and smile. When he felt Chkalov was sufficiently relaxed, Komarov began the questioning.
“Chief Investigator Chkalov, is Detective Horvath a convinced or an unconvinced Communist?”
Chkalov’s smile changed to a frown. “These are questions of conscience. My men do their duty.”
Komarov sat forward, stared at Chkalov. “Surely you know your men. Especially a man like Detective Horvath who has been with you for many years. Is he convinced or unconvinced?”
“He’s not a Party member.”
“Party membership has nothing to do with it. I want to know if Detective Horvath, who originates from a frontier area and is of Hungarian descent, does his job simply to maintain his position, or if he does it for the good of the system.”
“He’s a hard worker,” said Chkalov, sounding defensive. “Detective Horvath is a bachelor and often makes use of his own time to solve a case.”
“Are you aware he has relatives in America?”
Chkalov smiled. “Many Ukrainians and Russians have relatives in America, so it would not surprise me if Detective Horvath has an American relative or two. Perhaps you should have visited the American consulate instead of coming here.”
Komarov ignored the smile. “A second cousin visited Detective Horvath here in the Ukraine while he was on holiday.”
“I know,” said Chkalov. “He told me about it.”
“Did you also know Detective Horvath associates with members of the artistic intelligentsia in Kiev?”
“He’s a lover of the arts,” said Chkalov. “Especially music.”
“Hungarians do love their music,” said Komarov. “Gypsy music.
Contrived emotion so they can alternately dance and weep.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” asked Chkalov.
Komarov glanced to Azef.
“Background data,” said Azef, obviously glad to join in. “Major Komarov is simply establishing Horvath’s character.”
“I suppose next we’ll go into his preferences in women,” said Chkalov.
“Perhaps,” said Azef.
Komarov nodded to Azef, a signal to continue.
“For instance,” said Azef, taking his notebook from his pocket.
“Were you aware Detective Horvath has been seeing a Miss Tamara Petrov, who is editor of a literary review known to publish the works of anti-Soviets?”
“A detective’s personal life is none of my business,” said Chkalov.
“A moment ago it was,” said Azef. “A moment ago you said Detective Horvath has much free time because he is a bachelor, and he uses this time to put in extra duty.”
“He doesn’t give up all his free time,” said Chkalov, obviously annoyed. “I simply meant he is often available on call.”
“He should be,” said Komarov. “He has a car at his disposal, which he is also permitted to use for personal trips.”
“It is valuable to have our detectives in their own cars, Major.
This is a large city, and a detective can be called to duty at a moment’s notice.”
“Do you also permit out-of-town trips?”
“Occasionally.”
“A hundred kilometers away?”
Chkalov sat forward, fists clenched on his desk. “I see no point to this questioning. If militia policy is in question, perhaps you would be candid enough to say it.”
“On the contrary,” said Komarov. “I don’t question militia policy. I simply want to inquire about several trips Detective Horvath made to Pripyat.”
Chkalov smiled. “Detective Horvath was visiting his brother.
Even so, there is a militia office in Pripyat, and it is not uncommon for our detectives to communicate with one another.”
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