Last Night of the World

by Joyce Wayne

  The bosses at the reactor continued to find work for the four of us. Vine, Rose, Sybil and I were useful to them, each in our own way. I continued to translate, Rose taught English, Sybil cooked for the Party brass when officials from Romania were feted by the Soviets. Vine was the least useful of all, but they coddled him. After all, he was a hero; he’d rescued the atomic diagrams against all odds and brought them to the Director.

  Remarkably, Zabotin was promoted to the position of Chairman of Human Resources at Reactor Number Four, the one that eventually caused the demise of Chernobyl and the Soviet nuclear program. His management skills were unmatched among the Soviet bureaucrats who were responsible for the mood and well-being of the reactor’s staff.

  The men and women from Pripyat adored him. Everyone wanted to be under Colonel Zabotin rather than the three other chairmen of health and welfare, who treated their workers with disdain and stole from them. As Zabotin had been at the embassy in Ottawa, he was at Chernobyl: generous and permissive, always ready to turn a blind eye to human errors and misdemeanours. Perhaps the workers at Reactor Number Four grew lazy under his watch, or worse, reckless, but as I recall, Zabotin did encourage his people to take chances and to ignore the warnings from the top brass at the plant. He expressed pleasure in their discoveries and encouraged the scientists to experiment with ways that nuclear energy could enrich the human race rather than destroy it. I do believe he handed them much too much rope.

  When Reactor Number Four exploded and a plume of radioactive vapour shot into the heavens, causing the greatest nuclear accident in history, Zabotin was prepared. For at least five years beforehand, he had claimed the reactors could explode at any moment and we should be ready to run. About twelve months prior to the accident, he’d convinced me to keep a suitcase packed, as I had in Ottawa before Gouzenko defected. Zabotin warned me that, otherwise, I would be without the clothes I cherished or my precious locket that had once held a sample of plutonium. Philby had returned it to me by registered mail from England after he delivered its contents to the Director of the GRU.

  I was sleeping at 1:23 in the morning when the accident happened. Zabotin was reclining in front of our bed in his reading chair. He hardly slept at night but took catnaps during the day in his office at Reactor Number Four. The sound of the reactor exploding woke me. Zabotin crawled into bed with me and held me as the twelve-hundred ton cover of the reactor blasted into the atmosphere. Then we waited.

  Zabotin explained to me that the scientists were undertaking an experiment that night and had turned off the safety mechanisms on the reactor. It was a combination of human error and faulty equipment, the same poison recipe that was destroying the entire country. From our apartment, we could hear the sirens of the first firefighters. They couldn’t extinguish the inferno of raging plutonium and uranium.

  “What frightens me is that the bosses at the plant believe they can put out the fire with water. With water,” Zabotin said softly, still holding me in his arms.

  “And they can’t?”

  “It could be a chain reaction. Another explosion that will not only contaminate us, but half of Europe.”

  Just after 5 a.m., Zabotin received the phone call from the plant. Gorbachev had been alerted to the disaster, but the information relayed to him was scant and he wasn’t prepared to make the decision to evacuate Pripyat. The director of the nuclear plant was terrified he’d be blamed for the disaster, so he sent for Zabotin, who had the talent to be diplomatic when speaking with political leaders.

  “I won’t leave you to fend for yourself.” Zabotin assured me, pulling me from the bed. “Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

  At the nuclear station, firefighters without protective gear were shooting streams of water onto the base of the melting reactor. The air was on fire with radiated particles that danced around our heads. Not one of the firemen was wearing a mask or gloves. Two died that morning. During the next weeks hundreds more as the radiation contaminated the flesh of the men sent by our leaders to control the damage.

  Zabotin and I were handed protective suits as we were ushered into a lead encased office, a small room insulated from the exploding reactor. The director assured us that there was no cause for worry and demanded that Zabotin try to convince Gorbachev of the same. The director believed he’d be able to handle the fallout and restore order to the plant.

  Zabotin kept shaking his head as the director spoke of his plans to pour more water over the meltdown.

  “Water doesn’t extinguish nuclear explosions,” Zabotin said boldly. “It doesn’t work that way. Once the energy in the reactor is released…”

  The director cut Zabotin off. He asked his assistant to reach Gorbachev.

  When Gorbachev came on the line, Zabotin began screaming into the receiver. “Evacuate Pripyat! Please, I beg you, Comrade—don’t wait. This explosion is a thousand times more powerful than the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan.”

  I’d only known Zabotin to lose control once before, and that was the night our comrades were imprisoned by the RCMP in Ottawa.

  Gorbachev offered to send a committee of the Soviet Union’s best nuclear scientists to Pripyat to investigate the effects of the explosion. He’d wait for their decision before ordering an evacuation. He’d confer with the local officials.

  Outside the office was mayhem. It was war, the conflict that Soviet leaders had been preparing for since 1946 but which had never come to pass, not in the fashion they’d envisioned. For them it had to be the war between the US and the Soviet Union that would harm Russian citizens, not something they’d built themselves. The Chernobyl disaster was unique. Our leaders couldn’t see the enemy because the enemy was them and their entire fossilized system. The 2,700 Soviet warheads, each one more powerful than one hundred Chernobyls combined—and all aimed at America—couldn’t save the people of Pripyat or those in Kiev and Minsk who suffered from the radioactive fallout.

  Zabotin put down the phone on Gorbachev and demanded that we be taken back to our apartment. He was ready with his Lada to rescue us. He woke Rose, Sybil and Vine and rushed them into the car. Even our cat, Matilda, came along. As we drove across the town, we watched children and their parents strolling to school, playing on swings and slides or teeter-totters. Not one of them was aware of what was happening ten kilometres away at the nuclear power station. A travelling circus had come to town the day before the explosion, and the Ferris wheel loomed above the town square, awaiting the curious children who longed to ride to the top.

  Masha remained in Kiev. A few hours after the accident, she was whisked away to an underground bunker with the other Party officials in our district. Not one of them ended up suffering from exposure to radiation, unlike the ordinary residents or the miners and soldiers sent into the bowels of the reactor to contain the damage—the liquidators, as they were called. They perished in droves. Those still alive are slowly dying from radiation poisoning. To this day, I can’t fathom why it took the authorities two days to decide to evacuate the citizens of Pripyat after the accident.

  We went to ground at Zabotin’s dacha, until he discerned that the five of us would be better off surviving in the Chernobyl forest. No one would bother with us there, he proclaimed. He didn’t want to come up against the director at the ruined reactor, who could scapegoat him for the accident. After all, it was Zabotin who had hung up on the Supreme Leader. In the forest we could live without interference, without rules and without responsibility, except to each other. “What else could anyone wish for on this earth, but that?” he asked, looking up to the heavens. It would be our own private paradise.

  “Back to the garden,” is exactly how Zabotin described our return to Chernobyl, but it was also where I discovered that my brother Simcha was still alive, so perhaps Zabotin’s optimism was overstated. At least for me, the return to Eden was not possible. Perhaps not possible for anyone.

  * * *

  Chernobyl journal

  1988

  Mas
ha was coming to visit. We’d know her by the white hazmat suit she would be wearing and the Geiger counter in her hands. A few days ago, she’d left word with one of the guards at the ruined reactor, who’d bravely made his way with the news to our cabin in the radiated forest. He brought hazmat suits for Zabotin and me in case we contaminated Comrade Masha just by standing beside her. It was only two years after the accident, and more and more of the former residents of Pripyat were falling ill and dying.

  Yet again, Elka happened to be visiting when the guard had arrived with the message. After he left, Elka had mused, “Masha. Yes… Masha Linton, I remember her. The one with the long red scar on her face. She must have been beautiful once. Who ruined her face?”

  Elka was anxious to see my sister, who she remembered from early days at the Chernobyl laboratory. We were sitting together on the screen porch drinking tea and smoking Elka’s hand-rolled cigarettes. Zabotin had recently built a fence to enclose our cabin, and now he was out scrounging for wild flowers to plant along the barrier.

  “Your man always disappears when things get interesting,” said Elka.

  “Not always,” I replied.

  “When was the last time you saw your sister?” asked Elka. “She looks like you, I think. I also remember her from Kiev, where she was a bigshot in the Party. I’m surprised she didn’t help out her brother, find him a position in the bureaucracy.”

  I’d asked Elka to stop mentioning Simcha, but she didn’t care what I wanted or how much her stories about my brother destroyed me. I changed the subject to Masha, who was easier to discuss.

  “She’s still a bigshot in the Party,” I said. “We met as soon as I returned from Canada, at the train station in Kiev, just after the war. I haven’t seen her for two years, since the accident.” I never knew why I supplied so many details to Elka.

  Elka looked me straight in the eyes. “You probably haven’t changed that much, since the accident. High cheekbones, large grey eyes. Your parents were good looking.”

  “They were,” I agreed. Elka’s obsession with beauty knew no bounds.

  Elka pursed her lips. “My folks were plain, round-faced and broad-nosed with small eyes, and that’s why I turned out the way I did. Ugly. I was an ugly child. Wild hair, buck teeth, spindly arms and legs.”

  “No child is ugly,” I said, correcting her.

  “I was,” Elka insisted. “You never know what happens to people, but I believe my life would have been different if I’d been a beauty like you.”

  “You never know.” I understood that Elka was not complimenting me and that something worse would now follow.

  “It’s men who make the difference,” she declared. “What if Zabotin came across an unattractive woman like me rather than you? He probably would have killed me in Nesvicz.”

  I had no idea how she knew about the Red Cavalry’s pogrom in Nesvicz.

  Elka changed the subject. “Your sister, Masha, is tough. Toes the party line no matter what the consequences. I admire that about her. You know that she gave the order to evacuate, but not until two days after the explosion. I was already gone. I escaped to the forest as I soon as I heard the explosion in the morning.”

  I wanted to slap Elka. “That’s not true,” I told her. “It was the director of Reactor Number Four who was charged with the evacuation orders.” I refused to confess to Elka about our early morning visit to the reactor and how Moscow stalled for time.

  “That’s what you think,” Elka retorted. “Masha was senior to the director. She was the conduit between Gorbachev and the scientists he ordered to investigate the accident. But what do you know? Spoiled, that’s what you are. Spoiled and naïve.”

  I cut Elka off. “I need to prepare now.”

  “Just a minute,” she said, clutching at my hand. “Didn’t Zabotin contact the Supreme Leader on the night of the accident, but Gorbachev didn’t trust him, not after what your man did in Canada? You and Colonel Zabotin. It’s probably your fault, and his, rather than Masha’s that Pripyat wasn’t evacuated sooner. Think of how many lives would have been saved. And the suffering.”

  I pulled my hand away from hers. There was plenty of blame to go around. “That’s ridiculous, Elka. Zabotin was trying to get people out of the plant and away from Pripyat. No one told Gorbachev for hours after the accident, and when he found out he didn’t order the evacuation until two days later. It had nothing to do with Zabotin or me.”

  “Nope, you’re wrong,” Elka insisted. “How could anyone with a brain rely on Zabotin? Not after Gouzenko. He always makes things worse.”

  When Elka left that day, I told her never to return. I wanted her out of the way when Masha arrived. And out of my life. I didn’t want Elka questioning my sister.

  Masha had survived the Revolution, the pogroms, the Nazis and the radiation sickness caused by the explosion at Chernobyl. If Countess Zabotin hadn’t hidden her in the cold storage room when the Germans stormed their dacha, she’d be dead. A Red Army sergeant carried my sister out of the storage room long after the Zabotins were shot. The Nazis never managed to find her. She hid for eight months on her own, eating potatoes and cabbage and drinking rainwater or melted snow.

  The Red Army had carried Masha with them when they entered Kiev. She weighed seventy-eight pounds. The sergeant deposited her at the military camp hospital, where she was nursed back to health. In the first forty-eight hours after the explosion, what choice did Masha have but to obey the Supreme Leader? What choice did anyone have?

  I supposed Simcha’s story was worse than Masha’s, but I hadn’t managed to locate him. Communication with the outside world was limited from our forest. No one was invited in, and no one left the forest. Ordinary people thought we were radioactive and that we’d contaminate them. Like the three-eyed beasts that roamed our infected corner of the earth, we, too, were medical curiosities, monsters of the aftermath.

  Although I’d sent word to Masha months ago telling her that a neighbouring squatter believed Simcha was alive, I never heard back from her. Not until the guard showed up with her message.

  I’d seen her infrequently after Zabotin came to me in Chernobyl. She avoided us. To my mind, Masha had never forgiven me for deserting the family during the pogrom. She couldn’t stop judging me. Once when I challenged her and then begged her to exonerate me, she simply shook her head and stated that I was cooking up stories to make myself appear more important than I was in the larger scheme of things.

  She’d added then, “Only you know what you did; how you endangered the family by leaving us. You were the oldest. Now you want me to comfort you, to assure you it is forgivable that you deserted us and didn’t respond to my letters when I wrote to you that we were starving.” Masha bit her lip. “Your own flesh and blood.”

  How could I argue with her? I was guilty. But when I considered what I could have done for them from Canada, I never arrived at a suitable answer, one that would assuage her resentment and my guilt.

  Like Elka, Masha would never shake off the disaster of her life. Few could who had survived the war and the bleak years of Soviet rule. I came to understand that it didn’t matter which side you were on, the Communists or the refuseniks, the warmongers or the peaceniks, no one could be a normal person again, not after the war. You either followed orders, joined a cause or disappeared. I didn’t mind becoming invisible; it wasn’t exactly the coward’s way out. Although it certainly wasn’t brave or noble.

  Whenever I pleaded with Masha to forgive me, she spoke about our house in Nesvicz after the Revolution. “It was divided into twelve apartments, a family to each room, with the lot of us sharing Mama’s kitchen. Mama couldn’t stand it, the overcrowding, the noise, the filth.”

  “I’m not your enemy because I wasn’t there, suffering with you,” I would say in my defence.

  But Masha would hear none of my excuses. “Our parents couldn’t adapt to Communism and the house rules, the constant surveillance. Papa was once caught stealing chocolate from the commis
sar’s room. Our parents thought they were special, that they deserved better, and in that way they were not unlike Zabotin’s parents. The count and countess believed they were unique, too. Aristocrats. But they were shot and killed by the Nazis just as our parents were. When you’re dead, you are no longer special.”

  Masha and Elka were the same. They wore their terrible suffering like a badge of honour. They both loathed Zabotin, who was a symbol of old Czarist Russia and the ultimate traitor in their eyes. I saw it differently: Zabotin acted from good intentions. He didn’t cave in to conformity. He’d saved innocent people in Ottawa and tried to again in Chernobyl, although he was less successful here than he’d been after the war. I was coming to believe that there were three kinds of people: those who acted, those who obeyed and those, like me, who made an effort to do both. My kind was the least effective. Maybe there was a fourth kind as well. A person who’d survived the ghetto or the camps who didn’t act or obey but who forgave. I wanted to see my brother again and ask him who he had become.

  When Masha arrived, the day after the guard told us she was coming, it was raining; a real downpour that trickled into our leaky cabin. Mud spilled onto the sloping floor, but Masha pretended not to look down her nose at how we lived. Two officers accompanied her. They rode in an all-terrain vehicle, outfitted in hazmat suits. The men looked frightened to be so close to us and the perimeter of the disaster, but not my sister. Nothing frightened Masha.

  Zabotin returned to our cabin after Masha arrived. He was not kind to her. He refused to indulge her self-righteousness tinted with officiousness. “Take off that suit, Masha,” he bellowed. “It’s summer, hot and steamy. You’ll suffocate inside that silly thing.”