We Are Not in Pakistan (6 page)

Viktor's English was always much better than Olena's, but he has to learn American English in place of the British kind. He works in a microbiology laboratory, testing and labelling. He tells Olena what food to buy: only brands he has tested in the lab himself. This year she gathers rituals as well as religion: replace foods used, no changes in brand or size. Write checks carefully, add them up each month.

Olena writes the address. Her handwriting looks unfamiliar in English.

She puts the check on the table in the hall and returns to her seat.

Her memory — it's no good any more. Places and faces at home erase themselves slowly, decaying from the core outwards till they are swallowed into black.

She draws a canary yellow notepad toward her and writes to herself in Ukrainian:

Take clothes to laundromat

Write letter to Dedushka

Make lokshyna for Galina

Make potato varenyky for Viktor

•   •   •

April 1992

Again Olena is sitting at her kitchen table, writing checks. But now Matushka is also here, sitting before the TV in the living room, a notebook and an English-Russian dictionary beside her. Her arrival was a Passover surprise from Jewish Social Services.

Four Los Angeles policemen have been acquitted of beating a black man, Rodney King, and Matushka is trying to understand why people are shocked and enraged by the verdict. If there were a God, Olena would thank it for American TV, which fascinates and persecutes Matushka by withholding what she is expected to believe.

American TV and newspapers all told Olena that the Soviet Union had dissolved, that the Soviet parliament had gone out of existence, but did Olena believe them? She could not believe two republics simply declared their independence and the Kremlin didn't send in troops to teach everyone a lesson. They told her Yeltsin was installed and the Communist Party was powerless, but did she believe them? Not until Matushka resigned from the Party.

Maybe she didn't believe the news on TV because Viktor said Americans give credit to the actor who was in the White House six years ago instead of to Unit 4 at Chernobyl.

On May 1, 1992, one hundred and twenty dollars will come out of her account for the landlord. And another one hundred and twenty for Jewish Social Services. Now Olena has to write another. Fifty dollars, for Matushka. Fifty dollars Olena cannot save for Galina — how much is that in rubles?

If Olena doesn't write this check, will they send Matushka back?

Oh, she will pay, she will pay. Of course.

Olena doesn't talk to Matushka unless she has to. Let her live in her room, Olena in hers. Olena cooks and clean for her, that's enough.

Olena puts the check on the hall table and returns to her seat in the kitchen. She draws her notepad toward her.

Take clothes to laundromat

W
rite letter to Dedushka

Make lokshyna for Galina

Get vodka for Viktor

Make potato varenyky for Matushka.

October 1992

Viktor is spending hours at the Constant Reader, a used bookstore several blocks away. Every weekend. Perhaps he has found a pretty bookseller there. Olena will surprise him.

The wind is beginning to whip leaves from flaming maples. As she walks, Olena admires the carved pumpkins with which people decorate their doorsteps. A volunteer said none of those pumpkins will be eaten, they will all go to waste. Competing election signs ask her to vote for Clinton, Perot or Bush, but she is not a citizen here. Is she now a citizen of Ukraine or the Soviet Union? American immigration authorities will decide.

Olena tells the bookseller she is looking for language tapes because she can't find the words to say anything else.

She wanders up and down the stacks until she finds Viktor. He's sitting on a stepstool, old copies of Moscow News spread on the floor beside him. He shows her a 1989 article, “The Big Lie.” It says Soviet leaders covered up Chernobyl. It is news for the world, he says, and he's glad it was printed. And he shows her another in English about a place called Three Mile Island.

“For the health of so few, the company paid five million dollars in compensation,” he says. “And in the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl allowance is negligible. Oh, it's not only the money — we could have learned much from the mistakes of others.”

Olena rests her hand on the slope of his shoulders. How thin he is! Perhaps they should take the bus home.

She leads him from the bookstore. At the bus stop, she stifles her habit of staring at dark-skinned people.

Riding home, Viktor says, “So many big lies. Even in America. Nothing is free here — not health, not good education, not housing. Only they say you are free. I think they mean you can buy blue jeans, black jeans, white jeans, so long as they're jeans — this is what they call freedom. You can rent an apartment and it looks same as your neighbour's — just like in Kyiv. You can buy a desk, a chair, a sofa, and there are ten thousand others like it in the homes of other people. And thousands sit before a TV that looks like ours. This is individualism?”

He is decaying as if a half-life had expired. A doctor told him his white cell count is low. But Olena thinks grief for so many lost comrades, sorrow and self-disgust kill slowly.

Viktor shows her a book he bought. “For you,” he says. “Taras Schevchenko, in English.”

A showcase in Olena's mind displays every gift from Viktor, from the large box with the thousand kisses inside to her iron, a Swiss knife, a blanket from their early days in Moscow. All left far away in Pripyat. Never before has he given her poetry.

Olena looks out of the bus window and back; everything has blurred.

The book falls open and she reads slowly, “In foreign lands live foreign folks; their ways are not your way. There will be none to share your woes or pass the time of day.”

She shows Viktor.

He has bought himself a book in English, too.
The Gulag Archipelago.
It looks very difficult.

A few blocks later she says, “You know that Zone of Exclusion they made at Pripyat? I'm living in one here. I can't speak to anyone, they don't understand me.”

Viktor takes out his wallet, opens it and holds out a small square of paper. A photo of Galina. Olena gazes at it with him.

“Did you know, she wants to study public health?” he says. Pride, surprise and admiration are mixed in his voice.

Olena envies Galina.

December 1993

After giving three massages, Olena leaves the spa at two o'clock. Sunshine reflects off store windows and snow-furred lintels. It's ten below zero with the wind chill factor. It's good she found a sheepskin jacket and a hat, scarf and boots at the thrift shop. Good that she doesn't have to wait long at the bus stop.

She walks home on plowed and salted sidewalks. Snow trenches come almost to her waist. The wind would freeze her cheeks the same way in Moscow or Ukraine right now.

What's happening there? She has to read Russian newspapers to know — American TV showed only a few seconds of the panic after the ruble recall. Even when Yeltsin stopped the old Communists with a day-long battle that left Moscow's parliament building blackened and smoking, it was news for just a few minutes. But American intentions, they are good. They have even opened a Holocaust museum in Washington.

What is Rivka doing now? And Laima? And the teachers she worked with in Moscow? They are not so lucky. If there's a story about Russian women on TV, it's about trafficking and prostitution.

Olena doesn't look for Rivka among those faces but listens carefully to the names of the reporters. One day she will hear Rivka's.

Does the old country stay the same, frozen, immobile as we wander and wonder? Do we fade as people forget us?
Why do so many memories come now, when we are safe? Here, where few seem to have heard of Chernobyl and few seem to care that it happened? Are my memories real or contaminated?

In the mailbox is a letter unevenly plastered with new Ukrainian stamps. Smiling inside, Olena climbs the back stairway to the apartment, puts her handbag on the hall table.

Viktor and Matushka are sitting on the futon in the living room, watching the CBS news. Paula Zahn says many Russian women want rich men to marry them and take them to America. “Prostitutes!” says Matushka.

She comes into the kitchen and says reproachfully to Olena, “Viktor is hungry,” when she means, “I'm hungry.”

“Da, da!” Olena says, to send Matushka back to the living room.

She opens the freezer above the refrigerator as if about to take out something. She holds the letter from Dedushka to the light to read it.

Her face chills.

A doctor writes to tell Olena Dedushka is no more. Something about a gas connection that Dedushka never got because a politician wanted the connection for his chauffeur. Poor Dedushka must have died of the cold last month — and Olena was not with him.

Olena pulls the freezer door toward her like a shield, holds the handle to keep from falling. Again she reads the letter. And again.

Oh, Dedushka, you who were more father than my father! I am truly an orphan now. You — keeper of memories, witness of my childhood — are lost to me. Forgive me for leaving you.

Now no one of her blood is left anywhere in the former Soviet Union.

•   •   •

August 1994

Matushka is trying her glass of Stoli with a drop of Tabasco because she cannot find Stoli Pertsovka in the local stores. What a waste of good vodka! But it keeps her sitting before the TV, waiting for Viktor to return from the lab and Olena to serve her holupki. Olena takes her time stuffing beef, rice and tomato filling into boiled cabbage leaves so she doesn't have to sit beside Matushka on the sofa or on Galina's floor cushion.

These days, thanks to Jewish Social Services, Matushka's been retiring to her room at night smiling. “S bogom!” she says, and, coming out in the morning, “Shalom.”

“You know the accident,” Olena overheard her tell Galina. “It happened because of the communist atheism. They fell away from Yahweh.”

What a thing to tell a child. And Galina is still a child, even if she is almost fifteen.

And Matushka has begun opening the door to strangers who offer to replace her television-induced confusion with their certainty — Jehovah's Witnesses, Evangelical Christians. This morning, she accosted Olena as she was leaving for work and made her listen to a passage from the book of Revelation. “The Third Angel blew his trumpet and a huge star fell on a third of all rivers and springs; this was the star called wormwood, and a third of all water turned to bitter wormwood so that many people died from drinking it.”

And Chernobyl means wormwood, she told Olena, as if Olena didn't know.

Olena said, “I d idn't know Jews believe in the book of Revelation.”

And left for work.

Always, Matushka's logic leads back to Olena; Viktor is preabsolved
by love. But what if it is Olena's fault — Chernobyl is her fault? Yet many who believed in God and prayed surreptitiously died there and Olena survives. Which monster God allowed that?

She is still thinking about this when Viktor comes home. Dinner takes a long time now his thyroid is so enlarged. He chews and chews. Suddenly, he says to no one in particular, “What percentage of Russians do you think trust their leaders?”

For the first time in Olena's life, the anger dwelling blue-hot in the crater within her shouts, “What per
cent?
How should I know? Is there no book or magazine in English that can answer your question? Did I just come back from Russia after interviewing every single Russian? Believe me, I don't know! And I don't know how many Ukrainians trust their leaders either, or Belorussians, or Lithuanians, or Americans. And I don't know how many cockroaches fried at Chernobyl, either.”

Matushka looks shocked, Viktor merely surprised. He chews more. Swallows.

“Americans,” he says in a low voice, as if she hadn't spoken, “think leaders and country and people are all the same — heh!”

Matushka's eyelids flex like tiny bows releasing poison arrows at Olena. Then she turns back to Viktor. Her tone softens and changes to coaxing. Olena too would like to feed Viktor more, but Matushka's solicitousness now stands in her way.

It's good that she pushes him to eat. Everything tastes of lead to him. He's always not hungry, just tired. So very tired.

Finally, Matushka waves to Olena to clear away his half-eaten meal.

“They trust too much,” says Viktor. “Just as we did.”

Were people too trusting, too accepting? Chernobyl may not be Olena's fault, but, like Viktor, she too failed to speak. Should she have told someone about the many certificates of exemption, the boron control rods, recommended but never ordered, never installed? Rivka, perhaps?

Why would anyone have listened to her, what would she know about too-few control rods? She didn't want Galina to lose her father, perhaps grow up in a camp as her grandmother did.

Oh, that's only partly true.

Admit it now: Olena had not wanted to lose her nice airy apartment, Viktor's motorcycle, the possibility of trips to the Black Sea. After Viktor had worked for ten years, she could have shopped at the kashtan for clothes for Galina, French perfumes and Kashmiri carpets. And should she have been willing to lose all these present and future advantages just to be
right?
She had the habit of obedience, unlike her mother, and by speaking she could have lost her Viktor.

Maybe Olena is losing Viktor, but if ever she could persuade herself to believe in a miracle it might be now — Viktor has survived so long, when so many of his former comrades and thousands of the liquidators have not.

Olena begins washing the dishes.

“Letter from Anatoli,” says Viktor. He gives it to Matushka to read aloud. Olena tries not to clink the plates so she can hear.