Chernobyl

Chapter 26

Moscow's Hospital No. 6 takes up most of a large city block. The hospital is not entirely devoted to patients who suffer from radiation sickness. If that were so it would be nearly empty nearly all the time; Chernobyls are rare. But when a Chernobyl happens, Hospital No. 6 is ready, for it is there that the USSR has concentrated the best doctors specializing in that ailment. It is a very good hospital. The wing devoted to radiation disease is built to an old-fashioned plan, with high ceilings and large rooms, and in this warm May the sun floods in. The wing has a total of 299 patients flown in from the Chernobyl explosion. These are the worst cases, the ones who have taken the most radiation. They are getting the best care possible, but for many of them it is not enough.

When Leonid Sheranchuk got there, however, he was protesting that it was more care than he needed, and more than he really wanted by far. The admitting doctors paid his arguments no attention. Since he was there, he would stay until released; but they did allow him one boon. Most of the patients were in private rooms, but they granted his plea to share the room of Deputy Director Leonid Smin, and that kindness made him stop protesting.

Sheranchuk was not at all sure, however, that it was a kindness to Smin. The Deputy Director had certainly wel-corned his company. But the Deputy Director had been fading rapidly ever since then. On the first day Smin had been alert, if very sick; he had even greeted his Comrade Plumber and joked about his own internal plumbing. But now, as Sheranchuk could hear, Smin's internal plumbing was giving him trouble again. After the bone marrow, the next targets that radiation destroyed were the soft tissues of the mouth and the intestinal tract, and one of the most unpleasant effects of an overdose was the terrible bloody diarrhea that resulted.

When the nurse came out, carrying the covered bedpan with respect because what came out of Smin's body was not only unpleasant but contaminated with radioactivity, Sheranchuk asked, "How is he?"

She said, "I think he will sleep for a while. How about yourself? How are you feeling?"

"I am feeling quite well," said Sheranchuk automatically. It was almost true, not counting the aches and twinges where needles had been stuck into him. He was even thinking of getting up for a visit to some of the other patients, although he felt, as always, a bit fatigued.

She nodded, not even listening — after all, she knew his condition better than he did. "Do you need anything?"

"Only to get out of here." He grinned. "Preferably alive."

"You have a very good chance," she said strongly. "And in any case, you have a new doctor. Four or five of them, if you count the Americans, but one doctor in particular I am sure you will be glad to see."

"And who is that?" asked Sheranchuk, but she only smiled and left him.

Sheranchuk picked up a magazine, shifting uncomfortably in his bed. A voice from behind the curtain said softly, "She did not tell you the truth, you know."

"Deputy Director Smin?" Sheranchuk cried. "But I thought you were asleep."

"Exactly, yes. You thought that because that nurse told you I would be, but, as you see, I am not."

"Let me pull the curtain back," said Sheranchuk eagerly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

"No, please! Don't exert yourself. I am not at my most handsome just now, as you may suppose, and I prefer not to exhibit my wretchedness. We can talk perfecdy well this way."

"Of course," said Sheranchuk.

There was a silence for a moment. Then Smin's Voice said gravely, "I am told you behaved with great courage, Comrade Plumber."

Sheranchuk flushed. "They needed to get concrete under the reactor. Someone had to do it. I hope only that they have succeeded."

"At least it is well begun," Smin said, and paused to cough for a moment. Then he said, "I spoke to the plant on the telephone last night. It is going well. They decided they needed to drill a tunnel under the core to get the concrete in, but the mud was too soft. Then they found an engineer from the Leningrad Metro to show them how. They froze the mud with liquid nitrogen, and now the concrete is in place."

"So everything is safe now."

There was a long silence from Smin. "I hope so, Comrade Plumber," he said at last. "Isn't it almost time for the doctors' morning rounds? I think I will sleep a little until then, after all."

When the doctors came through, they kept Smin's curtains closed, and Sheranchuk sat on the edge of his bed, kicking his heels irritably against the metal legs, listening. There was not much to hear. All the resources of Hospital No. 6 were not making Smin better. He was weaker today than he had been when Sheranchuk was admitted. As the doctors moved about and the curtains parted a bit, Sheranchuk could see how bad the old man was. His skin looked like — like — like a leper's, Sheranchuk decided, though he had never seen a leper. It was blotchy. Under the dressings were sores that ran. The part of his chest that was not covered with the great old burn scar now was dotted with the little pink blossoms of burst blood vessels the doctors called "petechiae." Reminded, Sheranchuk examined his own chest and arms, but there were none of the things there.

He really was not, he told himself again, sick enough to be in this place.

When it was Sheranchuk's own turn, the doctors were more relaxed. It was only, "Open your mouth, please" and "Please, if you will just remove your pajama bottoms" — so they could poke around his balls — and then they peered at his charts for just a moment.

"I should be sent away from here," he told them. "I'm taking up space others need more."

"We have plenty of space, Leonid," the head doctor smiled. "We also have plenty of doctors — even some new ones coming from America, soon."

But actually Sheranchuk thought they already had all too many doctors, especially the radiation hematologist, Dr. Akhsmentova. He did not care for the woman, and was not pleased when she stayed on after the other doctors had left. "Just a few more drops of your blood, if you please, Comrade Sheranchuk," she requested. She didn't wait for permission. She had already pushed him back on the bed and seized his arm.

"The nurses are gentler than you," Sheranchuk complained as she stabbed once more into the heart of the bruises left from other needles.

"The nurses have more time. Stop wriggling, please." He glared silently at her. Glancing at his bright steel teeth as she withdrew the needle, she said, "And one other thing. When the American doctors see you, try not to smile. We do not want them to think so poorly of Soviet dentistry."

When she had gone, Smin said from behind the curtains, "I hope the Americans don't see Dr. Akhsmentova at all, because we don't want them to have a poor opinion of Soviet hematologists."

His words were cheerful enough, but his tone so faint that it alarmed Sheranchuk. "Please, Simyon. Don't tire yourself talking."

"I am not tired," Smin protested. "Weak, a little, yes." He stirred fretfully; through the gap in the curtains Sheranchuk could see him trying to adjust the sheet more comfortably over his body. "Although perhaps you are right and I should rest again. I am told that I am to have distinguished visitors today, and I should try to be alert and witty for them."

The GehBehs again! Couldn't they leave the poor man alone? Sheranchuk begged, "Then do it, please. And try to eat your lunch when they bring it." But he heard the anger in his voice, and to account for the bitterness in his tone he added, "But it is true that I should not be here."

"Leonid," Smin said patiently, "you are here because you are a hero. Do you think everyone has forgotten what you did under the reactor? You are a precious person, and everyone wants to make sure you don't die on us because you foolishly did one heroic thing too many. Now go and eat your lunch."

The patients' dining room was half the floor away, and as he walked down the hall toward it, Sheranchuk peered into each room he passed. To have the Deputy Director call him a hero! But everyone in this place was a hero — the firemen, the operators who had stayed steadfast, the doctor who had come back and back to help the victims until he became a victim himself — not least among the heroes was Deputy Director Simyon Smin himself, if it came to that! And almost all of them were far worse off than Leonid Sheranchuk, who had merely been weak enough to faint from exhaustion.

The patients' dining room proved that. There were hardly more than a dozen patients at the tables that could have seated dozens more. It was not that there was any shortage 'of patients to fill the room. It was simply because so many of them were too sick or too weak, or merely too encumbered with pipettes and catheters and tubes of trickling medicines to get up and walk to their meals.

Sheranchuk paused in the doorway to sniff at what was offered. Fish soup at least, he thought approvingly; say what you will, the food was better here than in any other hospital he had ever heard of. He looked toward one of the tables by a window and was surprised to hear his name called.

The man who got up was hard to recognize at first, in the hospital whites, and then Sheranchuk saw that it was Vladimir Ponomorenko, one of the Four Seasons of the football team. "Autumn!" Sheranchuk cried in shock. "Not you, too!"

"Oh, no, Comrade Sheranchuk," the football player said apologetically, and Sheranchuk recognized that he was in the whites of a visitor, not the red-striped pajamas of the patients. "The nurses said it was all right for me to eat here, but I'm only here to see my cousins, in case they.can use my bone marrow."

"Your cousins? Both of them?" Sheranchuk repeated blankly. "But, Autumn, I had no idea. Both Spring and Summer, here in this hospital? Here, let me sit down with you, tell me what's happened to them."

But none of the news was good. The two who were

Vladimir's cousins, the fireman, Vassili, who was called "Summer," and the pipefitter, Arkady, who was called "Spring," had both taken serious amounts of radiation. The prognosis for both of them was not good. The fireman did not merely have radiation sickness. He had been badly burned; one foot, at least, was so destroyed that he was almost sure to lose it, and he was so full of morphine that he had not even recognized Autumn beside his bed. And the pipefitter Arkady — when he went back to turn off the hydrogen flare he paid for it. "But he's in my own section," Sheranchuk said, stricken. "I let him go there! And I didn't even know he was here!"

"He was on another floor," Autumn explained. "They only moved him up here yesterday, when a room became vacant." Sheranchuk winced. He knew how rooms became vacant in this wing of Hospital No. 6. Although he ate all of the good meal — the fish soup, and the shashlik and the cucumber salad and the heavy, dark bread — he hardly tasted any of it. "Volya," he said, "are you finished? Then let's go see Arkady, please. I want to apologize for not coming to him before."

But when they entered the pipefitter's room, Spring would have none of it. "Apologize for not visiting me? But, Comrade Sheranchuk, I at least knew you were here, so it is I who am at fault for not coming to you." And he grinned, because the plastic pouch of blood that was trickling into his arm was evidence for all that he was not in a position to pay social calls.

"When you're feeling better we will visit back and forth like grandmothers," Sheranchuk promised.

But he knew it was not a promise they would be able to keep. The pipefitter was not likely to walk very far. Radiation sickness took different people in different ways, and what it had done to Spring was stop his digestive system. Big, tough, muscular Spring had suddenly become gaunt. He was no longer the flame that licked down the football field. He wasn't the shy, hesitant, preoccupied pipefitter Sheranchuk had worked with all these months, either. As his body grew weak, his spirit had become almost boisterous. He joked and laughed, and winked at the nurses.

"So you like it here," Sheranchuk offered, feeling like a visitor instead of a fellow patient.

"Why not? The food is good, the nurses are pretty, and photographers come every day to take my picture. Next they will want me to autograph the photos for them. I may stay right here in Moscow. The Dynamo team can use a few good players!"

But the nurses would not let them stay very long, and when Sheranchuk walked out with Autumn, the other member of the Ponomorenko family was solicitous. Of Sheranchuk! He said seriously, "You should not be tiring yourself, should you? Let me walk you back to your room."

"I would like to see your other cousin," Sheranchuk said obstinately.

"But he is on the first floor. The stairs—"

"I can manage a flight of stairs," Sheranchuk growled. "In any case, my roommate is having important visitors. It is probably better if I stay away for a while."

Autumn shrugged. "Imagine," Sheranchuk went on, thinking about the disaster. "Both your cousins in the hospital at once. What a terrible thing! But at least your brother Vyacheslav is not here—" He broke off as he saw the way the football player was looking at him. "What is it? Has Winter been injured too?"

Autumn said apologetically, "I thought you knew. My brother was in the Number Four reactor room itself. They say he was the first to die, but they haven't been able to find his body. It's still there, they think."

Smin was dozing lightly when he became aware he had company again. "We didn't wake you, I hope?" said the taller of the two men who had parted his curtains.

"It's a pleasure to know that I can still wake up," Smin said, nodding to them. "Fedor Vassilievitch Mishko. Andrei Pavlovich Milaktiev. I am honored to be visited by two members of the leadership."

"By two old friends, Simyon Mikhailovitch," Mishko corrected. "If not friends, at least men with whom you have worked in the past. Are you feeling well?"

"I am feeling very poorly," said Smin, his smile now an uncomfortable grimace. "I would feel a little better if I knew whether you were here to inquire after my health or to tell me I am in disgrace."

"Unfortunately, both," Milaktiev said heavily. He was a slim old man except for a pot belly that his expensive, Western-cut clothes nearly succeeded in concealing. His hair was still dark and so was his thick, bristly mustache — almost a Stalin mustache, Smin thought.

"Nevertheless," Mishko added, "also as friends. I hope you believe that, Simyon Mikhailovitch."

Smin thought that over carefully. The men had pulled the curtains behind them, but they had taken chairs in with them. They had seated themselves, waiting patiently for his answer. "I believe," he said at last, "that my mother had the very highest regard for your father, Fedor Vassilievitch."

Mishko grinned. He was taller than his partner, and dapper in a pale tan sports jacket and paisley tie. "In fact," he said, "if my father had not been purged in the Stalin years, you and I might now be stepbrothers."

"So my mother has told me," Smin said. "She has spoken often of the Stalin years."

"Which, I am sure, she never wants to see return."

They had been speaking softly in any case, but Mishko both lowered his voice still more and glanced at the gap in the curtains as he spoke. So even a member of the Central Committee wondered who might be listening at times! "I do not suppose," Smin said, "that you came here to discuss the cult of personality with me. Would you mind telling me what you want?"

Mishko sighed. "Actually we have two purposes. The official one is to ask you some questions about the accident."

"The GehBehs have already asked me."

"And no doubt they will ask you more." Mishko nodded. "The organs are still thorough. But it is, after all, a serious matter, Simyon Mikhailovitch. I suppose you know that every RBMK generator in the Soviet Union has been shut down?"

Smin was shaken. "I didn't know that."

"The economic consequences are serious. We've lost export sales of food because the foreigners think our tomatoes will make them glow in the dark. Production is down in the factories requiring electrical power. Tourism, of course — there is no tourism now. And I do not even speak of the loss of life."

"Am I charged with sabotage?"

"Simyon," the other man said gently, "you aren't being charged with anything. Do you mind if I smoke?"

There were Ne kurit signs all over the room, but Smin shrugged. "I wish I could join you."

Milaktiev lighted up before he spoke. He considered for a moment. Then: "When the Party entrusted you with a very high position, it expected you to live up to its responsibilities. Have you given your people good leadership?"

"I gave them good food, good housing, good pay, fair treatment — as much as I could, with the First Department breathing down my neck. I don't know how to measure leadership."

"One way to measure it," said Milaktiev, "is by the number of shift chiefs, engineers, and others who deserted their jobs. There were one hundred fifty-eight of them at the Chernobyl Power Plant."

"And nearly three thousand others remained for duty," Smin replied.

"What about defective materials?"

"There were some, yes. I have reported this in full. They were not in essential places. After the article in Literaturna Ukraina appeared — I believe you are familiar with it—"

"Oh, yes," Mishko smiled, answering for both of them.

"— I instituted a complete inspection of all essential systems. Where there were faults, I replaced them. In any case, if anything failed and so helped to cause the accident, it probably was the instrumentation."

"The instrumentation?"

"Which was imported from France and Germany," Smin pointed out. "Go sue the French."

The man from the Central Committee said, "We are not speaking of lawsuits, Simyon Mikhailovitch. We are speaking of faults in the management of the plant. If you say to me, 'I did everything correcdy,' then I say to you, 'But still it happened.' "

Smin shrugged. "I was only Deputy Director."

Mishko sighed. "The Director will face prosecution," he

said.

"And will I?"

"I hope not, Simyon Mikhailovitch. Of course, you are likely to be dismissed from your post. You may also, of course, be expelled from the Party."

"Of course," said Smin bitterly. "Now, if you will excuse me, I would like to vomit."

The two men looked at each other. Then Milaktiev, stubbing out his cigarette, leaned forward and spoke more softly still. "If you must vomit, do it. But now we're finished with the official part of our visit, and there is another matter to discuss."

"And what is that?" asked Smin, fighting against fatigue; there was something going on here, and he had to know what it was.

"Would you, Simyon Mikhailovitch, make a complete statement for us of what happened at Chernobyl? I don't mean the accident. I mean before the accident. We are asking you to describe everything that made it difficult for you to run the plant properly. Directives which could not be complied with, or which did actual harm. Political pressures. The appointment of a Director who was incompetent. The corruption. The drunkenness and absenteeism. The interference from the First Department. Everything. Do you understand what I mean by 'everything'? I mean everything."

Smin was feeling really faint now. The sober old face grew fuzzy before him. "I don't follow you," he said faintly. "I've already given all this to the organs."

"Who may or may not pass it all on to us. We want it all."

"Do you mean that you want me to put on paper everything that is kept secret?"

"Exactly that, yes."

"And—" Smin licked his sore lips. "And if I do, what use will you make of it?"

They looked at each other again. Then, "I cannot say. I don't know," said Milaktiev. "Yet."

When Leonid Sheranchuk finally came back to his room, he saw that the curtains around Smin's bed were still drawn. Someone was there, because Sheranchuk could hear an almost inaudible mutter of voices. And when he bumped against his bed, a head popped out of the curtains to stare at him. It withdrew in a moment, and he heard one of the voices say to another, "Smin is almost asleep, anyway. We'll come back another time." But Sheranchuk thought that that head had looked familiar, and when its owner came out with another man, nodding politely to him as they left, he thought the face on the other man looked familiar too. Not as friends. Not even as someone he had run across in a casual meeting; as a face he had seen in a newspaper or on television. He lay down on his bed, pondering the question. Then he got up. Tired as he was, he hobbled to the open window and peered out at the courtyard.

Sure enough, a few moments later, there they were, tan sports coat and conservative gray, appearing on the steps below. From the other side of the little grove of trees in the courtyard a car purred forward from its parking niche to meet them.

The car was a Zil.

Sheranchuk stared at it as it spun away, traffic miraculously opening before it. He had never been in the presence of two members of the Central Committee before.