Chernobyl

Chapter 18

The Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow is on the ring boulevard, in the section of the boulevard named after the composer Tchaikovsky. The Embassy isn't a single building. It is a collection of several structures, linked together in a ramshackle red-brick compound. At every entrance to the compound a couple of uniformed KGB guards loiter, smoking cigarettes and chatting to each other, until someone approaches: then they interpose themselves in front of the door and request U.S. passports or hotel cards. When the documents are found to be in order, the KGB guards then say, or the more polite ones say, "puzhalsta," which means "please," and perhaps they even touch the visors of their caps as they step out of the way. (There have been times when they have been less polite and a very great deal more energetic, especially when, as has now and then happened, some desperate Soviet citizen has tried to hurl himself past them to sanctuary.)

Really, the American Embassy in Moscow is a slum. It should have been abandoned at least a dozen years ago, but the chilly state of U.S.-Soviet relations has caused endless bickering and delays over every detail, and so plans for the splendid, modern new embassy building have remained incomplete. Its best feature is its cafeteria. There the American staff can get the only authentic hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes to be found anywhere in Moscow. Its worst feature may well be that of its scores of drivers, telephone operators, translators, kitchen workers, and cleaners, almost all are locally employed Soviet nationals and nearly every one of those is known to have a second career — or, really, a first one — as an officer in the KGB.

Warner Borden, the assistant Science Attache at the Embassy, was yelling at Emmaline Branford, the Press and Cultural Affairs officer, about the fact that the astonishing news was coming in over the open teletypes. "Keep the nationals out," he said angrily, meaning the translator and the cleaning man.

Emmaline Branford looked at him in astonishment. "But all we've got here is the open news services, Warner. There isn't anything secret about it."

Lowering his voice, Borden hissed, "Sometimes we talk in here, don't we? Keep 'em out till I come back!"

"Are you going to check the code room?" Emmaline asked, and Borden gave her a mock frown.

"See what I mean?" he asked, and then, "I'm gone." Emmaline sighed as he dashed off toward the secure teletypes in another part of the Embassy, with their Marine guard always at the door. At least, she reflected, he hadn't patted her bottom this time.

Across the narrow hall her translator, Rima, was bent over her morning Pravda, meticulously putting a story about fisheries production goals in the Baltic Sea into her careful English. Rima had a last name — it was Solovjova — but for most of the American Embassy staff most of the Russians had only one name, like plantation hands in old Dixie. For Emmaline, a black woman, some of whose ancestors had been named Cuffee, Napoleon, or Jezebel, the practice was unpleasing. But the Russians themselves seemed to prefer it that way. Perhaps that was because they didn't enjoy American attempts to pronounce names like "Solovjova." Emmaline stopped beside her and said, "Look, Rima, we'd better do what he says."

Rima said, looking down at her desk, "It is no problem, Emmaline."

If the Russian woman had any interest in this nuclear radiation flap that was burning up the teletypes, she was keeping it to herself. Emmaline tarried for a moment, thinking. She wanted to ask Rima Solovjova if there were anything at all in Pravda about unexplained radioactive emissions, but she already knew there was not. Emmaline herself had already scanned the paper. Although her command of Russian was still a long way from easy, she would not have missed a story like that— not even in, or actually especially not in, the short paragraphs on an inside page where any kind of bad news was usually to be found.

Of course, Rima could not have missed hearing something about what was going on. There had been plenty of talk in the teletype room, just as Borden had said. The simplest thing would be to come out and ask her what she'd heard and what she thought, but nothing was that simple in the relations with Soviet nationals. The relations between Emmaline and her translator were friendly enough. Certainly they did friendly things. Emmaline saw no harm in an occasional gift to Rima of a box of American tampons or a shopping bag advertising Macy's or Marshall Field's. And Rima was helpful beyond the call of duty in locating off-the-books painters, plumbers, and carpenters, and supplying Emmaline with homemakable recipes to replace the things that even the hard-currency stores always seemed to be out of — roach spray, for instance. Still, Emmaline had not been stationed in Moscow long enough for them to become anything like close enough to bring up politically embarrassing subjects. While she was debating whether or not to try it anyway, Rima Solovjova looked up, her face drawn.

"Is it possible that I could be excused for an hour?" she asked. "I do not feel well."

"Oh? Is there anything I can do?"

"Simply that I could lie down for a bit," the translator said apologetically. "One hour at the most, then I will be all right."

"Of course," said Emmaline, and watched the woman put a paperweight on her translation, pick up her imitation-leather pocketbook, and depart. Rima didn't look back. Emmaline listened to her modish heels clatter down the narrow staircase until the bang of the outside door informed her that Rima hadn't gone to the little ladies' room on the ground floor, but outside the building.

It had been Emmaline's assumption that the Russian woman was having the onset of her period. Now she revised it. More likely she was going somewhere outside to make a telephone call, perhaps to ask for instructions on what to do in the light of the unexpected news. Emmaline sighed, and remembered the cleaning man. Practicing her Russian, she said, "Andrei, can you finish this later on, please? After lunch would be good." And went back to the teletype room to see what else was coming in.

What else was coming in was scores on yesterday's National League baseball games, the Cubs at Montreal, the Mets at St. Louis. Emmaline waited a moment to see what the Atlanta Braves had done, but it seemed they'd been rained out.

She went back to her own desk and opened the folder on the American jazz pianist who was being brought in to tour Moscow, Leningrad, and Volgograd, and the novelist who had a special invitation from the Union of Soviet Writers to follow. Her heart wasn't in it. Clouds of radioactive material coming from the USSR was big news.

Emmaline's first thought, of course, had been the same as everybody else's, namely that the Russians were sneaking in a nuclear test in spite of their self-imposed moratorium. But that made so little sense! The United States was going on with testing whenever it chose. There was nothing to prevent the Soviets from doing the same — except if they were stupid enough to lie about it, in which case whatever propaganda benefits they had gained from their moratorium would be more than wiped out by the deceit.

Then there was the possibility of an accident of some kind. Warner Borden had told her all about the mysterious Kyshtym event, more than twenty-five years earlier. It seemed that the Soviets had been storing radioactive wastes in Siberia, near the town of Kyshtym, and somehow carelessness had allowed some of them to flow together, reaching critical mass.

It had never occurred to Emmaline Branford that waste could turn itself into a little atomic bomb, but Borden assured her that that was the best explanation for the — the whatever it was — that had poisoned hundreds of square kilometers of the Siberian landscape, caused the abandonment of a dozen villages and any number of collective farms, poisoned lakes and rivers and even changed the Soviet maps.

Of course, the Soviets had staunchly denied that anything of the sort had happened. But, of course, they would.

So when Warner Borden called for her to join him again at the teletypes and said, "I talked to one of the Swedes. They've fingerprinted the cloud, and it definitely was not a nuclear test," her first response was, "Something like Kyshtym again?"

"No, no, nothing like that. Not a nuclear weapons plant, either, although for a minute I thought that might be it. But the wrong elements were in the gases, according to the Swedes. It's" — he looked around and closed the door—"it's got to be an accident in a nuclear power plant. It could even be a meltdown."

"Oh, my God," said Emmaline, thinking of the movie The China Syndrome. "But if there were that kind of an explosion—"

"It wouldn't have to be a big explosion. Anyway, that's what the Swedes are saying — they've tested the cloud, and the proportions of radioactive materials match what the Russians would have if a power plant blew up." He was studying the teletypes eagerly, but all they were producing now were weather reports. "I've checked the maps," he said. "There are two nuclear power plants up on the Baltic. It has to be one of them. Maybe both of them."

"Two power plants blowing up at once?"

He grinned at her. He seemed almost happy. "What are you, one of those no-nuke nuts? These are Russian plants. You have to expert they'll blow up now and then."

He leaned cozily over the teletype next to Emmaline, one hand negligently resting on her hip. She moved patiently away, not willing for a fight just then. (Why were white Georgia boys so often turned on by a black skin?)

"I'd better get back to work," she said, and returned to her office. Rima was back, diligently working away on letters in her own room. She didn't look up. Emmaline paused at the window by her desk, looking out on the broad, traffic-filled Tchaikovsky Boulevard. Didn't those people know that their power plants were blowing up? Shouldn't someone tell them? She sighed and sat down.

And there on her desk was an opened copy of a magazine.

She had not left it there. She picked it up and discovered it was something called Literaturna Ukraina. Emmaline's Russian was more or less adequate, or at least as good as anyone else's after taking the crash foreign-service course, but this magazine was not published in the Russian language. It was in Ukrainian.

Most of the words were nearly the same, but with distinctively Ukrainian twists. Emmaline frowned. The article seemed to be about deficiencies in a nuclear power plant, but it wasn't about a plant located on the Baltic. She looked across the hall at Rima Solovjova, but the translator did not look up. Emmaline thought of asking Rima if she had put the magazine there, but if she intended to say so, she would have done it already. But why was Rima — or someone — giving her an article about a place called Chernobyl?