Chernobyl

Chapter 34

Around the ruin of Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, concrete shields are being poured. The demon still rages inside, but the worst of the radiation from the core itself is contained. Cranes with lead-shielded cabs lift slabs of contaminated debris into trucks with lead-lined drivers' seats to be hauled away. In the other buildings, on the grounds, in the town of Pripyat, the surfaces that have not been paved over or covered with fresh earth have at least been washed down, sprayed, or painted with a latex compound. Even the farms within the thirty-kilometer radius of the evacuation zone have been attended to. The farmers are begging to be let back in to tend their crops, for that area north of Kiev is the breadbasket of the USSR. Its winters are milder than Moscow's, and the soil is black or gray, the richest in the world. Moscow grows cabbages and rye. Around Chernobyl they grow wheat and corn, and Private Sergei Konov knows that the Soviet Union needs that food.

So when he was ordered to accompany one of the white-suited technicians through the grain fields, Konov followed without complaint. The sun was hot. The red-and-white stripes of the Chernobyl exhaust tower were visible on the horizon — at least there was no smoke coming from the plant anymore.

The assignment in the grain fields was hard work. Harder,

almost, than plugging drainage sewers with quick-drying cement or shoveling rubble, for Konov carried two oil tanks on his back so he wouldn't have to waste time going back for more, and they were heavy. When the technician's detectors sniffed a patch of radioactivity among the tall stalks, Konov would step up and spray it thoroughly, destroying that square meter of ripening crop so that the rest might grow unharmed— though who was going to eat that grain when it ripened Konov could not guess.

'At noon the technician insisted on taking a break — his decision, not Konov's — and Konov asked him what would happen to the wheat. The man pulled the gauze mask away from his mouth to answer. "It's all a matter of radiation levels," he said. "After the harvest they'll measure it. If it's above the danger level, they'll just put it in storage until it cools down." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Konov, but Konov shook his head. It was all very well for the technician to remove his mask if he chose to, but Konov had not forgotten the standing orders.

And that night, back in the barracks, when he took off the gauze mask over his mouth and nose and handed it to the barracks orderly for testing, he heard faint but ominous wbeepwheepwheep sounds from the snub-nosed radiation detector. "Nothing serious," said the orderly, yawning as he turned off the wand; but there had been nastiness in the dust after all, and Konov was glad he, at least, had kept the mask on.

Dinner was the usual — thin soup, salt fish, potatoes — but to go along with it there was a rumor: after thirty days the troops were to be relieved, for then the summer intake would provide new Army recruits in plenty.

"Good," said his friend Miklas, dipping his bread in his tea. "Let the rookies fry their balls."

Konov ate silendy for a moment. Then he said offhandedly, "I think I would like to stay on here."

Miklas could not conceal his astonishment. "What are you saying? What is it, Seryozha?" he demanded. "There are no girls here to make you want to stay!"

"There are no girls back in Mtintsin, either, just pigs," said Konov, calmly folding his second slice of black bread in half to bite into it.

"The pigs in Mtintsin at least speak Russian. There's not even anything to drink here!"

"And if you go on drinking what they sell you in Mtintsin you will be blind."

"It is better to be blind than to have your balls fried," Miklas said seriously. "How do you know you won't be the next one to find a hero's grave?"

To that Konov had no good answer. As a matter of fact, he had given that prospect a lot of thought. His conclusion was that, for once, the Army orders made a good deal of sense. Therefore Konov meticulously followed the instructions about what he touched and breathed and did. He had never been cleaner. He showered at least six times a day. When off duty he stayed in the old stable with the windows nailed down that was their barracks.

He washed his clothes — his own uniform, not the coveralls that were issued every time he went outside — every time he wore it. Outside, he never removed cap, mask, or gloves, no matter how sweaty. And every other day he would line up at the medic-point at the end of the barracks to let them draw blood, and every time when the report came back it said that his blood still contained plenty of those little white things that the radiation killed first.

In three and a half weeks Konov had worked at a dozen different tasks in the cleanup of the Chernobyl explosion. Scariest was to run out onto the roof of the dead power plant itself for lumps of graphite, where you could feel the heat from the sun on one side of you and that other heat still smoldering out of the great graphite and uranium core warming the other. He had done that three times now, but that particular job was over.

The work was not all scary. Some was simple drudgery, sandbagging the dikes around the plant's cooling pond, diverting the flow of the little streams that led to the Pripyat River, standing guard in the lonely nights at the thirty-kilometer perimeter of the zone, between the hastily erected watchtow-ers, to keep the foolish ones from trying to return to their lost homes.

What Konov liked best was to be assigned some kind of work in the deserted town of Pripyat. Any kind of work, from spraying liquid rubber on the abandoned cars to shoveling debris into trucks to be hauled away. He had come to think of Pripyat as his town. He knew it as well as he knew the Leninskaya Prospekt by his home in Moscow, from the little children's amusement park (where were those children now? And would anyone ever get into the litde red and white cars of that Ferris wheel again?) to the churned-up earth along the main boulevard, where rosebeds and greensward alike had been bulldozed up and carried away.

He even liked the long nights of guard duty in the town, carrying his rifle over his shoulder against looters, with the sorrowful baying of abandoned dogs coming from nowhere under the full moon. But whatever the job was, Konov did it all, and never complained, and arose bright and eager the next morning to do more.

His lieutenant hardly recognized the new Private Sergei Konov anymore.

The next morning was piss-in-a-bottle day. Before breakfast every soldier in the barracks was lined up to urinate into a specimen jar, one by one. The radiation technician would gingerly sniff at that with his radiation detector; but, so far, none of those wheeping little poison bullets seemed to have got into Konov's body. So, Konov thought, there really was no reason not to stay on if he chose. And he did choose, though he didn't like the idea of sharing the zone with a thousand raw recruits who would not understand what it had been like in the first frightening days after the explosion.

He wondered soberly what would happen with new officers on the scene. The present crew had become quite easygoing; Senior Lieutenant Osipev had even stopped ordering him to get his hair cut. But new ones from outside might change all that around, and it could be as bad as the training base again.

Still, he knew he wanted to spend the remaining — what was it, just thirty days? Less than a thousand hours? — of his enlistment right where he was: in the evacuated zone, helping to clean up Chernobyl's deadly mess.

When Konov had picked up his breakfast that morning and taken it to a corner of the barracks, the lieutenant came over and sat down next to him, lighting a cigarette. "Go on eating, Konov," he ordered. "This is not official. Just a little chat, if you don't mind."

Konov said, "As you wish, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"I would like to ask you "a question, Konov. Why did you volunteer to stay on here?"

"To serve the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"Yes, of course," grunted the lieutenant, "but you have not always been so eager. You have puzzled me for a long time, Konov. You're not an asshole. You have some education, after all. You could have become a lance corporal. You could even have gone to a training battalion to become a sergeant. Why were you such a fuckup?"

Konov looked at him consideringly and decided to tell the truth. "The fact is, all I wanted was to get out of the Army as fast as possible, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"Um," said the lieutenant, who had expected no better answer. "But actually, Konov, being in the Army is not altogether bad. As a private, of course, it is one thing. But you could consider applying for one of the service academies — even the Frunze, which is where I myself trained. As an officer the life is entirely different."

"I am grateful for the lieutenant's consideration," Konov said politely, finishing the dark bread and porridge, and saving the one slice of white to savor with his tea.

"The Soviet Union needs good officers, Konov," the lieutenant pointed out. "The Great Patriotic War was not the last that will ever happen, you know." Konov nodded courteously, and the lieutenant went on. "Our country was in great danger then. Great battles were fought in this area. Hider's Germans, in 1941, came through right here, and these marshes of the Pripyat were our best defense."

"But still they broke through?" Konov offered.

"Not through the marshes. Tanks could not do that, then. There was heavy fighting in Chernigov, a hundred kilometers east of us, and around Kiev, down to the south. It was a bad time, Konov, but where did the Fascists get to in the end? They got as far as Stalingrad, and there they learned how to retreat. Why? Because of the brave men and officers of the Soviet Army. You could be one of them. No," he said, getting up, "don't give me an answer now. I only want you to think about it."

When the lieutenant was gone Miklas came over from his own bunk. "What'd he want?" he demanded.

"To invite me to tea at the officers' club, of course," said

Konov. "What did you think? Now let's get to work. We're going back to Pripyat today."

When the armored car had let them out by the empty radio factory, Konov ordered, "Hand it over."

Miklas made a sarcastic show of reaching into his white coveralls and taking out the sack of leftover food Konov had reclaimed from the kitchen garbage. "Your dinner, your honor," he said obsequiously. "May your honor dine well."

Konov disregarded him. He took out his own sack, heavy with crusts of moldy bread and the pork bones from the officers' evening meal and looked about for a likely place to leave them for Pripyat's abandoned pets. "They're all going to die anyway, you know," Miklas offered.

"Sooner or later so are we," Konov said cheerfully. "I will put it off a litde longer for the dogs if I can."

Miklas sighed. "Are you still determined to volunteer to stay here?"

"Why not?"'

"A thousand reasons why not! If you must volunteer, why not to work on one of the new villages they are building for the farmers? At least there would be people there."

"And work fourteen hours a day to dig foundations for their houses? Not me," Konov said, though that was not the real reason he had rejected the idea.

"But at least from that you may come away without two heads," Miklas grumbled.

"For you," Konov said, "another head would be a very good thing. Pick your building."

"Oh, I think the factory needs to be guarded most closely," Miklas said at once.

"Then do it," said Konov, knowing that what Miklas most wanted to guard there was the dozen cases of canned kvass and Coca-Cola the first soldiers had found in the radio factory's canteen. Now they were more than half consumed. He debated warning Miklas against taking off his mask to drink a Coke, but he knew that would be no use. Anyway, he consoled himself, the inside of the factory was fairly clean.

Almost a quarter of Pripyat was fairly clean, in fact — well, nearly fairly clean. On the best of its blocks there were pockets of intractable radiation — soaked into the paving or trapped in the cracks of a building — that would take a demolition crew to remove. You marked those with the warning signs, and you hurried past them. But there were whole buildings where the radiation level was barely above background.

On the surface, though, the town of Pripyat had hardly changed in three weeks. It was like some lifeless geological formation. No doubt it would weather and perhaps erode away, but only over long periods of time. Nothing else would change. Doors that had been left open remained open. The skis and baby carriages and bicycles on the balconies stayed untouched. Cars that had been left behind by their owners, pulled up under a tree with their canvas coverings protecting them against the elements, were still unmoved. The winds and the rains had wrapped some of the washing around the lines so that the garments no longer danced in the breeze; some garments had danced a bit too passionately and torn themselves free, and now lay crumpled in a gutter or draped across a dead rosebush. Konov stopped at a corner, hesitated, then entered the six-story apartment building on the right.

These were good new buildings, put up for the workers at the Chernobyl plant, and although they had been erected in haste, someone had seen that the concrete was solid and the fittings worked. Of course, there was no power in these buildings now. The little elevator was there on the ground floor, its door open, but Konov hardly glanced at it as he began to mount the stairs.

Most of the tenants of the building had locked their apartments carefully when they left. On the top floor, Konov tried each door with a firm twist and a solid shake, but all four were locked. That was all he was required to do, but he took a moment to put his ear against each door in turn. It was not looters that he expected to find, but there was always the chance that some family had, in its panic and rush, forgotten a cat, a dog, a bird.

There was nothing to be heard. Konov descended a flight of stairs and repeated the process on the fifth floor. Again nothing, but on the fourth floor a family named Dazhchenko— the name was on a card by the door — had been so hopelessly rushed or so foolishly trusting that they had left the door to their flat unlocked. Konov opened it and entered the gloomy hallway for a look around.

He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the air inside. There were some very bad smells in this place. His business, however, was not to smell but to look, and he began his inspection. Just on the left of the entrance was a child's room — no, actually a room for two children, Konov corrected himself; there were clothes for two young girls hanging against the wall. One had perhaps been a four-year-old or thereabouts. The other possessed the skirt and blouse of a teenage Young Pioneer. The next room belonged to the parents, a double bed nearly filling it; it was still unmade, and the drawers of the chest were pulled open, the contents in disarray. There was a picture of Lenin on the wall, but (Konov smiled) there was also an ikon. Both bedrooms were bright in the sun from the windows, but the unpleasant smells remained.

If it had been his own apartment, Konov thought, he would have opened all the windows at once; but it was not, and besides, what was the use? Whatever smelled foul would go on doing so, and an open window would let the rain in next time the weather changed.

And in this place at this time it was not only rot and mildew that the rain might bring.

The stink of decay came from the kitchen. The refrigerator door had been left open. Whatever was inside had rotted thoroughly. Gasping, Konov closed the door; it was all he could do, though he wondered if the gases of decomposition from whatever was in there — a stew? a chicken? — might not blow the door off as they swelled.

It was, he confirmed for himself, a very nice apartment. There were two little doors at the end of the hall; one opened on a sink and tub, the other on a commode; and someone had carefully cut out pictures from some foreign magazine — the language appeared to be Swedish or German to Konov — and pinned them to the back of the door. The pictures were of Lady Di and her husband, the Prince of Wales; so this was where the little girls sat for their private business, gazing romantically at the beautiful royal pair. In the dining room there was a small but quite new television set; it was on the floor, its electrical cords wrapped neatly around it — the father had tried to take it with them, no doubt, and discovered at the last minute that it was impossible to add one more thing.

But there was neither looter nor abandoned pet to be found in this place, and Konov had other floors to investigate. He fiddled with the lock on the apartment door until he got it to snap in the locked position behind him; so at least when the family returned they would find their home as they left it. Smells and all.

If ever the family returned.

When Konov started on his second building he paused on the step, looking about and listening. It was a warm day, but not a silent one. He could hear bulldozers in some other part of the town, scraping away at the tainted soil so that the worst of it could be hauled away and buried. A nearer rumble was one of the bright orange water trucks, methodically washing down the empty streets of their poisoned dust one more time. (But who would wash the poisons from the roofs, the walls, the windowsills?) Konov started to call to Miklas, who was no doubt smoking a cigarette with his hood off as he loitered in the factory building across the way. . and then he stopped, listening.

Someone had very quietly closed a door somewhere not far above him.

If it was a looter, it was a very small one. Konov stood out of sight behind the elevator door, listening to tiny, secretive footsteps and the occasional rustle of clothing and panting breath as the person came down. When the intruder was on the last flight of stairs, he stepped out and confronted the person.

"In God's name," he said, staring in astonishment. "What are you doing here, Grandmother?"

The woman was at least eighty, and even tinier than he could have guessed. Her hair, slate and silver, was pulled into a bun, so tighdy (and the hair so sparse) that her scalp showed on the top of her head. She wore a grandmother's black blouse and long black skirt, and she carried a gardening trowel in her hand.

She thrust it suddenly toward him, threateningly, almost as though it were a weapon. "Where else should I be, stupid?" she shrilled. "It is my home!"

"Oh, Grandmother," Konov said reproachfully. "Weren't you evacuated with the rest? How did you get back? Don't you know that it is dangerous to be here?"

She asked reasonably, "How can my own home be a danger to me? My name is Irina Barisovna, and I live here. Go away, please. I am very well here; simply leave me alone."

But, of course, Konov could not leave her alone, and, of course, after a spirited ten minutes of argument the old woman accepted the inevitable. Her only other options were either to kill Konov and hide his body, which would only cause a search, or to have him whisde for the rest of the detachment to carry her off. "But please, dear young man," she bargained. "One favor? A small one? And then, I promise, I will go with you…"

When he had delivered her, with her little bag of treasures, to the control post, she kissed his gloved hand. Grinning, Konov went back to his officer to report. Lieutenant Osipev listened with resignation. "These old people!" he sighed. "What can one do with them? They have been told they risk death here. They know that this is true, in one part of their heads they know.it — but they come back. What was that she was carrying?"

Konov hesitated, then admitted. "Some things from her. apartment. And, yes, also some other things: a religious medal, her wedding ring, a few small things; she had buried them in the ground and I helped her dig them up."

The officer shrugged. Lieutenant Osipev was a reasonably compassionate man but, after all, it was not his concern. "Your pen, then, Konov," he ordered, and when Konov handed over the dosimeter pen, the officer glanced casually through it, then stiffened. "What have you done, you fool?" he demanded. "Get away from me! Have yourself scanned at once!" And twenty minutes later, after the special radiation crew with their counters had run the snouts of the instruments over his entire naked body, Konov stared at the grime under his fingernails.

It did not seem that he would be going back to the 416th Guards Rifle Division barracks in Mtintsin very quickly, after all. He had heard the chatter of the counter shrill loudly as it reached the fingers of his right hand, the hand from which he had taken off the glove in order to help the old babushka scrabble in the ground under the rainspout for her precious oilskin packet of valuables. And when the medical officer looked at Konov's hand, he swore angrily. "If you wouldn't cut your hair, at least you should have cut your fingernails! How long has that stuff been under there?" "I don't know. An hour, maybe."

"An hour! Well," the medical officer said sorrowfully, reaching for his bag, "those nails will have to come off, at least. If we're lucky, perhaps we can save the fingers."