Deceit

FIFTY

First off, it was Karabolka.

Just one word-Benjy had no talent for syntax. It must’ve sounded like someone’s name to him.

The name for hell on earth. For purgatory. For whoops.

The name of a Russian town.

A Russian town situated just upwind from a Russian city that had no name.

A city that never appeared on any map.

Never.

Not one.

You could search and search and you would never, ever find it. It was invisible to the mapmakers of the world. McMillans would’ve never heard of it.

No one dared breathe a word.

It was built in the Ural Mountains by walking skeletons from the gulag. They were its very first casualties, thrown into open pits after they died from malnutrition and TB and general beatings, then sprinkled over with lime. Just like the Nazi Einz gruppen had done to the Russians at Babi Yar and Stalingrad and Minsk in the Great Patriotic War.

This nameless city would serve one purpose and serve one god.

The great God of Plutonium.

That’s it.

It was one note, one track-a one-trick pony ridden into oblivion.

Mother Russia’s illegitimate child.

It had no name; it was Secret with a capital S.

Its secret nuclear lab churned out secret plutonium.

Its secret nuclear workforce dumped secret radioactive waste into secret storage tanks.

Its secret police watched over 80,000 secret citizens.

What was the very first whisper of this secret?

The smoke.

Lots and lots of it.

Long, thick, twisting plumes of it, like braids of a babushka’s hair.

That’s what it looked like to the people in the town of Karabolka.

Tartars, most of them, part of the ethnic soup Stalin liked to stir to a slow boil, occasionally skimming the fat off and dumping it somewhere in Siberia.

The Tartars came out of their houses and stared at the smoke billowing out from the tree line downwind from them.

Forest fire, they thought.

A huge, hellacious inferno of a forest fire.

But a forest fire.

They didn’t know what it really was because the secret city was so secret that they had no idea it was there.

None.

They had no clue there was a massive atomic city sitting just twenty-two miles away from them in a deep dark wood.

That the forest fire wasn’t a forest fire.

They couldn’t know that the cooling system of the secret nuclear reactor in the city with no name had unaccountably shut down.

That the heat had ballooned in a storage tank filled with toxic radioactive sludge.

That it had finally and irrevocably blown sky-high.

That it had exploded with the power of seventy tons of TNT.

Of four Chernobyls.

Of ten Hiroshimas.

That it had torn the roof off the storage building and sent radioactive debris hurtling miles into the atmosphere.

They only knew what their eyes told them.

By the next morning, thick orange-black soot covered everything in Karabolka.

Every single thing.

That’s when a squad of Red Army soldiers showed up and sealed off half the town.

The Tartar half.

No one in. No one out.

Because there were really two Karabolkas. The Tartar Karabolka and the native Russian one.

The native Russians were told the truth. They were immediately evacuated in long black lorries. They never came back.

The Tartars were told a lie.

They remained.

Once there were two villages. One village where they always told the truth. Another village where they always lied.

Crude oil had seeped into the groundwater. This was the lie the Tartars were told.

That’s why their cows and sheep and pigs and horses were all dead or dying.

That’s why their well water tasted like metal.

That’s why orange-black soot covered everything.

That’s why the Red Army was there.

Crude oil.

Someone had to clean it up.

They’d been elected.

The Red Army soldiers marched them out to the fields, where they ripped potatoes and carrots and yams out of the ground with their bare hands and buried them in long pits.

They were led single file into the now-deserted Russian half of Karabolka, where they scrubbed the soot off bricks and tore down the single-room clapboard houses.

They were taken into eerily silent barns, where dead livestock was pulled out by the tails and thrown into pits of noxious lime.

Most of the workers were children-8, 9, 10, 11.

Boys and girls.

Making daily class excursions into the hot zone.

Their hands began to bleed.

Lesions soon covered their bodies like mosquito bites.

They vomited green bile.

No problem, said the soldiers.

It’s the oil. Clean up the town and everyone will feel better. All the sickness will go away.

All the headaches and the nausea. All that rectal bleeding and green vomit. All those open sores and bald scalps. Gone.

The cleanup continued for an entire year.

When winter came, snow refused to stick to the ground.

The well water remained brackish, foul. It tasted like tin.

A kind of sleeping sickness took over the town.

It didn’t matter.

They stayed put.

The children kept going into the fields, into the dead barns and deserted houses.

Later on, they’d be referred to as the young liquidators-much later, when things became known.

The children with radioactive hands. The children of the damned.

An entire generation that simply dropped dead.

Five thousand Tartar children eventually dwindling to under a hundred.

Including the newborns.

The ones born weeks, months, even years later.

Children unlike any other children on earth. Children that belonged in a traveling carnival or suspended in specimen jars.

Which is where some of them ended up. You can go to the Chelyabinsk Museum of Embryology today and see them there.

The ones torn from polluted ovaries, pickled in formalin, and arranged into rows on long wooden shelves.

Faces of fish. Legs of newts. Eyes of eels. Scaly skin, hoofed feet, and puppy-dog tails.

Like an ancient curse come calling.

As if it hadn’t been radioactive sludge in that secret storage tank at all, no, but a witch’s brew spewed out onto the innocents.

That was the secret.

The secret that couldn’t be told. Must not be. Can’t ever be.

Except…

Every so often, when the children were out there in the fields, digging their bare hands into soil the color of night. Every so often a noise. Up over their heads, somewhere in the heavens. Like a whisper from God. Loud enough to hear even if it was soft enough to forget.

But there.

The Red Army men watching over them with rifles never seemed to hear it.

But they did.

Maybe God whispered only to children.

To the young liquidators who were fast becoming the liquidated. Maybe it was for their ears only.

A promise.

A vow.

An acknowledgment of their suffering.

I will not forget.

I won’t.

God sees everything, doesn’t he?

Someone was watching.

It wasn’t God.

It was a single glass eye.

It was a shutterbug zipping along at five hundred miles an hour.

Clicking away at fifty frames per second in a belly of aerodynamic steel. Whooshing above the radar, like Icarus on his way to the sun.

The U-2.

The secret plane.

Take a moment to marvel at the symmetry, to bask in the ironic glow before you laugh yourself sick.

America’s secret plane. On a secret flight. Over a secret Russian village. Which had just suffered the biggest secret nuclear explosion in history.

We won’t tell if you won’t.

We won’t tell because we’re not flying secret planes over Russian airspace. No.

You won’t tell because you’re not churning out secret plutonium that has just gone up in smoke. You’re not murdering your own children. No.

Deal.

God wasn’t whispering to the children.

It was the whisper of two enemies unable to scream.

Back home where the secret film was blown up and pored over and analyzed and dissected, they took what lessons they could. If something should ever happen here-not that it would, not that it could, but just supposing it did, just preparing for any contingency, no matter how preposterous, how blatantly ridiculous, but still-if it did, we’d know the drill. We’d understand how to deal with it.

We’d take the proper measures.

Then it did.