We Are Not in Pakistan (3 page)

Just past them, at the entrance, stands a woman with a cloud of brown hair, a notebook in her hand. Olena screams Rivka's name.

Rivka says something to someone. Olena is allowed in.

So many patients, so many beds in plastic cubicles. A nurse points to Viktor's. Olena rushes.

Then stops.

Viktor is attached to a drip. She approaches slowly.

“I felt faint,” he says, taking Olena's hand. “Then I started vomiting. The nurse made me wash and lie down.”

The nurse's face is blank. If only she would tell Olena not to worry or say, Your husband will be home soon. But she just takes Viktor's blood sample and leaves without saying anything.

“Do you have diarrhea?”

“Not yet.” He closes swollen eyes.

Her inside voice repeats
one hundred rems, one hundred rems.

She doesn't know what to say.

His grip on her hand tightens. “Bring milk and vodka,” he whispers. “And BTs.”

“Couldn't … couldn't that be dangerous?”

“Just bring those cigarettes!”

“Da, da!”

“Give Galina iodine tablets immediately. Buy all the iodine tablets you can. There are a few extra packets in the saddlebag of the motorcycle.”

After a moment he says, “We detached from the power grid, lowered enough control rods into the core to reduce power to seven hundred megawatts. But the reactor became unstable. So the shift foreman pushed the emergency A-Z button to lower all the rods and shut down.”

“Where were you?”

“I wasn't in the control room. When I felt the thud, such a thud, I thought it was an earthquake. But it could be — we don't know, but it must be — that actor in the White House pressed some button at the same time. Star Wars.”

“Like Hiroshima?” says Olena. “Why not all of Pripyat, then?”

“I don't know. All I know is that the reactor did not explode.” But his Party voice is speaking, so Olena knows: the reactor did explode. But now what is to be done? Can it be repaired?

“It will be all right,” says Viktor. “I saw the smoke moving north, away from Pripyat.”

“Get well, Viktor, and we'll go to the dacha some other time soon.” Olena kisses his forehead.

•   •   •

Three days after the accident that was not an explosion, the Moscow Symphony is playing Tchaikovsky on the record player and Olena is ironing with the iron Viktor bought as her first anniversary present. She's waiting for
Vremya
on TV.

The announcer will say that those firemen who so bravely fought the blaze have been evacuated to Hospital 6 in Moscow. They probably won't mention that their wives didn't have a chance to say goodbye. Olena is so lucky Viktor is not a fireman.

The nurse took a blood sample from Viktor — what was the result?

It must be all right because Viktor was discharged from the hospital.

He was called back to work, and Olena is very glad he is not at Unit 4 right now. Instead he's escorting a KGB general and Party leaders from Moscow who have come to assess the damage. His director told him that, as he flies with the leaders in helicopters and rides with them in Zils, he must remind them that Soviet reactors do not need contingency plans and that there are not enough gas masks for the entire population. And he must reassure them that the reactor will be functional again very soon.

Was it right to send Galina to school? She took her iodine pills with breakfast, but …

It must be all right because the May Day parade has not been cancelled.

Olena stands her iron up and goes out on the balcony. She pushes the wash aside and peers across the city.

The red glow at the base of the spray of fire seems diminished. Smoke still billows up and descends. But now it's leaning toward her, toward Pripyat.

Oh no, oh no. The wind is changing.

Was the sun so bright at this time last year? Did the cherry blossoms shine as pink? Was the scent of pine trees as strong?

She hasn't been in Pripyat long enough to know.

Oh, let it not rain. Viktor said if it rains, radioactivity can enter the reservoir of the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers and poison Pripyat's water supply.

The neighbour who looked after Galina the morning of the accident said boiling water will purify it.

Olena returns inside and shuts the door tightly.

Almost at the end of the news, the announcer reads, “One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident.”

It went by so fast. He said it so fast — was she mistaken?

Olena keeps her gaze on the TV while she answers the phone. It's Rivka. She wants Olena to ask Viktor, now he is better, what really happened.

But of course Viktor won't tell Olena, and if he did how could she tell Rivka? Because what if Rivka is working for a foreign government? The most charming people usually do.

Rivka says she heard on Voice of America that there was a massive steam explosion followed by a rapid reaction. Then the thousand-ton roof flew off as a second explosion blew the core. Glasnost or no glasnost, Olena knows better than to listen to Voice of America. And if Rivka did listen, she shouldn't admit it — a counter-revolutionary act like that could cost Rivka her Writer's Union card. But Rivka seems to have thrown caution to the wind, the changing wind.

Rivka's angry — she's good at being angry. She doesn't mention that trucks, trains and buses have been commandeered by the army, or that reservists who expected to be summoned to duty in Afghanistan are being trucked into Pripyat. Or that a commission of inquiry was appointed by eleven o'clock on the morning of the accident. Rivka is angry that Director Burkhanov has wasted thirty-six hours before coming to the decision he should have made immediately:
Evacuate!

Olena tries to explain that Director Burkhanov could not have
made that decision. A decision affecting half a million people and possible panic must come all the way from the Politburo, from leaders in Moscow. And as for the delay,
Shcho zrobysh!
What can you do? Rivka must understand that people like Viktor and Olena are their comrades, not their wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Just comrades.

May 1986

Four days later, the balls of Olena's feet treadle a Podolsk sewing machine in Matushka's tiny spare room. She and Galena — and Viktor on weekends — will share the bed and a floor mattress. Only for a while, until they can return or retrieve their belongings from Pripyat. Refugees are pouring into Kyiv and housing has become impossible, but Viktor has been assured he will be allotted one of the first available apartments.

Seams of a night-blue fabric with a sun and moon print join as they pass smoothly beneath the presser foot. Of Matushka's whole cupboard full of sewing machines with the new Energia motors, this pre-Soviet monster is the only one that works. When Matushka saw Olena using it, she pressed her lips as if sewing with an imported machine confirmed her low opinion of Olena.

Olena can hardly believe she is in Kyiv. Instead of watching May Day parades, she found herself snatching up the suitcase and repacking in minutes as two blank-faced soldiers stood waiting at the door. Because they could live in Matushka's apartment, west of the muscular vein of the Dnieper, Viktor could arrange for her and Galina to be in the first wave of evacuees. Laima, who could only find a bed in an army barrack with other refugees, says looters will probably take anything left behind.

The suitcase Olena had packed for the weekend at the dacha
lies open on the bed, half unpacked. No clothes, because Viktor said their clothes could be contaminated. But it's good for Galina that Olena had packed dried milk — real milk now comes from irradiated cows. And Viktor said she could bring the cranberry liqueur and vodka; it cleanses the body, he says.

But what can she give Galina once the dried milk is finished?

Dark clothing, Anatoli said, might be impenetrable to radiation. The infinite space of night sky, the pattern of suns and reflector moons on Galina's summer dress should fill Olena's mind, separate her from earth and its troubles. But thoughts filter through.

She can't stop seeing Matushka counting out just enough rubles for this fabric for Galina's dress and for the bolt of white cotton beside her, then writing the amounts for each purchase in her black ledger book. Again she hears that wordless sniff: the money was a loan to Olena — not Viktor, not Galina.

Olena needs some bright yellow floss to embroider the collar and yoke for Galina. She will not embroider a single button.

If there is enough fabric left, Olena may even make a dress for herself. But first — she glances at the bolt of white cotton — she will make a new shirt for Viktor, maybe even one for Dedushka.

Dedushka refused to leave his house. The soldiers burned his neighbour's house and buried it, but he could not be persuaded — he said he doesn't have much time to live anyway.

We'll see him again soon. Yes, we will.

But he is alone.

She stops treadling for a moment, dashes her fingertips over her cheeks.

Matushka has taken Galina to the park. She will let the little girl play there for hours, letting everyone think she's Galina's mother rather than her grandmother. She will give her chocolate smuggled from Switzerland. Yes, Matushka, whom Olena thought a dried husk of a woman, incapable of love. At this moment she's
probably filling the little girl's head with stories about Olena's stupidity. Or with Khrushchev-era slogans which everyone must now forget.

It's very difficult not to remember the many things you need to forget. On the outskirts of Kyiv is the ravine called Babi Yar — Olena tries not to walk in its direction, but that only makes her think of it more. She is an atheist, but she is also a zhid. Viktor too.

Trust no one.

But it's also very difficult to remember what you're supposed to remember. There's a legend that in the 1940s, Russian deportees in a camp here in Kyiv were challenged to a game of football and won against the Nazis 3-0. Dedushka would have told her that story many times if it were true.

Matushka believes it; it's a Party lie.

The sewing machine whirrs faster.

More and more refugees are coming in trucks from Pripyat. But on the telephone last night, Viktor was not worried. It's a precaution, he said. He said this happened before. With the first reactor at Mayak in '57. Ten thousand were evacuated then and many thousands of acres of farms laid waste.

“How do you know?” said Olena.

“A safety engineer is sometimes told what cannot be written down.”

Olena could have asked what else he was told that no one else was told. But she didn't want to know. Did she know or dream of boron rods?

It feels so long ago.

Top academicians and other experts are arriving from all over the Soviet Union, Viktor said. He is not in danger, he said. He and Anatoli are working together, phoning Moscow to arrange shipments of nitrogen, boron and lead. But, he said, his life — everyone's life — has been divided into before and after the accident.

Olena understands. Her life was once divided too. The unthinkable was her Chernobyl.

As fabric moves beneath her fingertips, gratitude toward some big spirit begins to sing within Olena. Just think what could have happened to Viktor, but didn't. She has the urge to praise some force that kept him from harm that night and has allowed him to recover so quickly from his stay in the hospital. His hair is falling out, but he is alive. Three of his colleagues were not so lucky, and maybe more have died; glasnost will not go so far as to make the Party tell.

Olena doesn't want to know what might happen. She just wants to know what she should do to keep Galina safe.

“Most possibilities,” said Viktor, “become what does not happen.”

Possibility means not yet.

Not yet,
creaks Olena's treadle,
not yet.

Fifteen days after the accident that was not an explosion, Olena and Galina are sitting at the kitchen table. Galina is pretending to feed the Misha-bear Matushka bought her.

Matushka has gone shopping for Swiss mineral water for Galina, which she says is better than boiled water, even if it isn't Soviet-made. Radionuclides have been found in the Pripyat River and in wells. Olena has been boiling water for Matushka, Viktor and herself.

“Come, Galina,” says Olena. She shows the little girl a paper with hash marks made by Viktor. Each is for a helicopter. Brave pilots flew over the crater of the reactor, Viktor said. Soldiers opened the doors and heaved out gunny sacks filled with sand, boron and lead to neutralize the radiation and plug the hole in the reactor as fast as they could. “But,” he said — and Olena heard a
click as he bit a nail — “one hundred ninety-five tons of nuclear fuel are still burning.”

“Count these for me,” says Olena.