Chernobyl

Chapter 24

The village of Yuzhevin has an unfortunate label that was affixed to it by the ministry in Moscow. The label is "unpromising." The easiest way for a village to become unpromising is for it to lose most of its young people to better jobs in the cities, the factory complexes, or (in the case of Yuzhevin) the mines of the Don basin. There is no development capital for an unpromising village. As it dwindles, it is likely to lose its electricity and (if it ever had them) its telephones. The village is lucky if it keeps its store, its clinic, its school. Yuzhevin has not been that lucky, but, like many unpromising villages, it does have a surplus of one useful commodity that is very scarce indeed in most of the USSR. There is plenty of unused housing in Yuzhevin. To be sure, the available housing is not in any sense luxurious. Hardly any of the houses in Yuzhevin have more than one room. They have no indoor plumbing, and no one in the village has seen any reason to do any repairs or cleaning on the houses that have been abandoned. Yuzhevin, however, is definitely not radioactive, and in that way, at least, it is far better to be there in Yuzhevin than to remain in Pripyat.

Since Yuzhevin was not even on the highway, Bohdan Kalychenko had to walk a kilometer and a half, picking his way around the muddiest parts of the road, to meet Raia's bus.

Then he had to wait an hour for it, because the bus was late, and then Raia was not even on the bus. By the time he was back in the village he was not only hot and thirsty, he was beginning to be very hungry.

Although Kalychenko was a nuclear-power engineer — well, an operator, at least, which in his view was almost the same thing — he was defeated by the kerosene stove in the cottage he shared with another male evacuee. After a good deal of swearing he managed to get one of the burners alight to make tea, hacked off a few chunks of bread from what the truck had brought the day before, and, chewing slowly, sat on his doorsill to look out at the village street. In the village square thirty meters away a group of his fellow evacuees were playing cards around a table in the hot sunshine. They waved invitingly, but Kalychenko was not in a mood to join them.

At least his roommate, the postman Petya Barisov, was not there to bother him. When the villagers had offered farm labor to any of the evacuees willing to work the fields, Barisov had been quick to accept — not so much for the money as to get away from the ancient mother who had been evacuated to the same village and never stopped complaining about the treasures she had been forced to abandon in Pripyat. Now Barisov was off in the cattle pastures, repairing fences. So Kalychenko had a moment of privacy.

Unfortunately, Raia was not on hand to make some use of it. Not that there was ever any real privacy in Yuzhevin anyway, with the villagers always obsessively curious about their new neighbors, and the walls of the cottages made of cracked boards. He was certain that he had heard the sounds of people breathing just outside his window at night. The people of Yuzhevin were certainly friendly to the rich city people. It was not only that the evacuees were so much more sophisticated than the kolkhozists. The city people were a great boon to Yuzhevin, because they had brought with them the every-other-day trucks with food and even, sometimes, such things as toilet paper and occasional articles of clothing. It was not like having the village's own store again, but it was more than they had had for half a dozen years.

Kalychenko contemplated the options available to him. At home he would have had no problem. He would have turned to his East German radio, or his well-loved stereo from Czechoslovakia, but, of course, those were still in Pripyat, along with his television and all the other treasures, and even if he had had them, there was no electricity to make them work.

He could, he thought, write a letter to the plant at Chernobyl, asking to be returned so he could go back to work now that his arm was healed. Surely one day soon at least Reactors No. 1 or 2 would be back in service, now that (one heard) the fire was out in No. 4. But that would entail explaining the not very explicable reasons why he had never been treated for injury or evacuated with other wounded.

Well, then. There were other alternatives. He could have done some of the things he had promised Raia he would do. Sweep the floor of the cottage. Wash again some of the windows that Raia had already washed once — but the coal dust in the air dirtied them in no time. He could have tried, as he had promised, to repair the door to the privy in the back yard, which had warped so that it would not close properly and a decent person had to hold it closed with one hand while going about his business inside, in the dark.

Those were all useful and productive things Kalychenko could have done, but none of them appealed. Besides, he remembered that he had a more interesting project.

He had managed to buy half a kilo of early raspberries from one of the villagers that morning — at a shocking price, almost half of what he would have had to pay in the private markets at Pripyat. He took the raspberries out of the cupboard, along with the two bottles of vodka, which had cost him four hours of standing on line to get. He unscrewed the tops of the botdes and set them on the table. Patiently he plucked the stems from the raspberries and, one by one, dropped them in to flavor the vodka. As the bottles began to fill, he soon had to stop. He was equal to that challenge. He wiped out a cup and poured off enough of the liquor to get the remaining berries in.

As there was no sense leaving the vodka in an open cup, he sipped at it as he added the berries. By the time he replaced the caps on the bottles and put them away, he had swallowed the warm surplus. He was therefore in an agreeable mood when one of the villagers appeared in the doorway. "You Kalychenko?" he asked.

"That's my name," Kalychenko agreed, polite to this shitkicker in the dirty shirt. "Would you like a drink?"

The man grinned. He was a big old fellow, nearly bald, and although he wore rough clothes and shitkicker boots, there was an impressively expensive-looking watch on his thick wrist. "Never say no to gorulka," he said. "What, it's not gorulka? The Russian stuff? Well, by all means, anyway."

His name, he said, sitting down, was Yakovlev—"Call me Kolka" — and he had heard that Kalychenko was some kind of engineer. When they had each tossed down a glass of the vodka, barely flavored yet with the berries, Yakovlev asked, "Does that mean you know anything about machines?"

"I know everything about machines," Kalychenko boasted.

"Yes, well, no offense," Yakovlev persisted, "but what I mean is, do you know how to drive a tractor?"

"Dear Kolka," said Kalychenko, refilling their glasses, "I. did not come to this metropolis of Yuzhevin in order to help you out with your agricultural pursuits. I shouldn't even be here, do you understand? Our bus was the only one sent to a place like this."

"I only asked if you could handle a tractor," the man persisted.

"A tractor? I am a nuclear engineer, do you understand what that means? It means that I am an expert who has trained for many years with the highest of high-tech machinery. I will be recalled to duty very soon, because there are not very many of us in the Soviet Union, and we are not only scarce, we are very well paid."

"Uh-huh," said Yakovlev agreeably. "More than nine hundred rubles a month, I suppose."

Kalychenko's eyes bulged as he Was swallowing the new shot. He almost exploded, but managed to gasp, "How many rubles?"

"It is what I would be paying my son to help me drive the tractors, only the boy has decided he would rather be poor in Odessa than rich in Yuzhevin. Does that sort of salary interest you? Yes? Then, dear Bohdan, I think we've had enough of this duck piss. Come to my place and we will drink some good French brandy while I find out if you know enough to take an eighteen-year-old's place."

When Kalychenko's fiancee, Raia, trudged back to the village, she went to the hut Kalychenko shared instead of the one where the three single women had been assigned. She was not surprised that he wasn't there. She wasn't surprised, either, at the fact that none of the repairs had been done, and nothing had been cleaned, although the empty vodka bottles on the table did raise her eyebrows.

Still, she told herself, setting about trying to restore order, you could not expect a man like Bohdan Kalychenko to turn into a housewife.

Raia did not have very many illusions about the man she intended to marry. It was his pale skin and his blue eyes that had made her willing to go to bed with him, not his character. True, his job at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was socially well above her own status — Raia worked as a conductor on the town buses — but in Pripyat there were plenty of young men with good jobs. Only they didn't look like Bohdan Kalychenko.

She knew quite well that Kalychenko was scared. She saw no reason to mention it to him. There was no way she could reassure him, because he had every reason to be afraid. There was inevitably going to be an enormous investigation of the disaster at Chernobyl, and her fiance had nominated himself for the position of major scapegoat by running away from his post of duty.

Raia didn't excuse him for that. She didn't bother blaming him, either. Certainly it must have been terrifying to be right on the scene when Reactor No. 4 blew itself up. She simply accepted as a fact of life that there was a real chance that when her child was born, its father might be five thousand kilometers away, chopping logs to lay across some Siberian permafrost. This did not make Raia reluctant to marry him. It made her want to get the ceremony performed — soon — right away, in case one night the organs appeared and the next morning he was on his way to Lefortovo Prison. As to the possibility that her son might suffer any effect from radioactivity, after her first horrid vision of a child with no eyes, Raia had simply dismissed any such idea. After all, she was healthy. It could not happen to her..

Raia paused and lighted a cigarette, frowning at the stove that would not give up its coat of grease.

It was necessary, she thought, to make alternative plans in case the worst happened.

Raia's capacity for reasoning was excellent. She perceived that she had four alternatives. First, she could marry Kalychenko and bear his child; that was the best thing, if it could be made to happen. Second, she could bear the child unmarried. A poor second choice; a single woman with a child would never marry, and Raia definitely wanted, if at all possible, to have a home and a husband. Third, she could have an abortion — but that she simply ruled out, not by logic but only because she could never do such a thing.

There remained a fourth possibility.

There was Volya Kokoulin, her fellow bus conductor, who had let her know very clearly that nothing would give him more delight than to steal off into the woods with her and make love.

If Kalychenko were taken away before they married, it would not be hard, Raia thought, to discover where Kokoulin had been evacuated to. She could find him. Having found him, it would be quite easy to sleep with him, to inform him a few weeks later that he had made her pregnant, and to marry him. There might be some unpleasantness about dates when the child was born, but by then what would it matter? And if Kokoulin were as hungry for her flesh as he indicated, he should be easy enough to convince that premature babies ran in her family.

She was smiling to herself, perched on the edge of the table, when Kalychenko came unevenly in the door. She threw her arms around him in real pleasure. There was nothing feigned about it; this was the man she intended to marry — if at all possible — because really, when you came right down to it, all of Kokoulin's virtues did not outweigh the fact that Kalychenko was tall, blue-eyed, and graceful, and Kokoulin was ugly.

When Kalychenko stumbled back to his cottage to find Raia entering just before him, he was glowing all over with his news. "Really, my dear," he said at once, "this Yuzhevin is not such a bad place after all."

His fiancee was flushed and sweaty, with two filled string bags still on the table. Kalychenko peered into them even as he greeted her with a cheerful kiss. "Ah, my darling," he said fondly. "You've had a long walk, I'm afraid. But I have good news! I've been offered a job driving a tractor here! No, no, don't look so disapproving. Wait till you hear what they pay tractor drivers! Why, this head driver, Kolka Yakovlev, he has that big house just outside the village, you know? With fruit trees all around it? And the Volga parked in the backyard? Sixteen thousand rubles he paid for that car, that's what kind of money a tractor driver earns in Yuzhevin, because everyone with skills runs off to the city!"

"That's very nice," Raia said, gazing out the cottage door with sudden intensity.

"And if you're not too tired tonight, he has invited us to come to his house to watch some American films! He has television tapes of all sorts of things—The Wizard of Oz, and motion pictures with Clark Gable and even Mickey Mouse! Oh," he said apologetically, "but, of course, you're worn out carrying those things. It's my fault. I went to meet the bus, but—"

"I did not come on the bus; I missed it. I came in a car, Bohdan. Two men gave me a ride almost to Yuzhevin."

"Well, that was lucky," he beamed.

"No, Bohdan," she sighed. "It wasn't really lucky, I think. The men didn't say much to me, but I didn't think they were coming quite to the village. Only there is their car, just across the square. Do you know what I think, Bohdan? I think those men came here to interview evacuees like us. I think they are from the organs."