The Boy from Reactor 4

CHAPTER 35

AT 7:00 ON Thursday night, Anton sped north from Kyiv up the expressway along the Dnipro River in Radek’s van. Nadia sat upright in the backseat while Hayder slouched in front beside Anton. He had ebony skin with rich Turkish features. He wore a dark turtleneck, blue jeans, and a mid-length black coat, with a thin black scarf wrapped around his neck.

Hayder spoke Crimean, Russian, and English, but not Ukrainian. He spoke Russian with Anton but insisted on speaking English with Nadia.

“What is your business in the Exclusion Zone?” Nadia said.

“What?” Hayder twisted and glowered at her. “Why do you inquisition me about my business?”

He turned to Anton and asked him a question under his breath. Nadia couldn’t hear a word except for kurba, the Russian and Ukrainian word for “whore.”

“You want to know about my business?” Hayder said. “I tell you about my business. One, I’m in the import business. Two, I’m in the export business. And three, I’m in the ‘none of your fucking business.’ That’s my business.”

Nadia looked away and let a few seconds pass. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry,” she lied. “I was just trying to get acquainted.”

“Okay, okay,” Anton said. He murmured some soothing words in Hayder’s direction. “We’re all friends here, right?”

“Tell him that,” she said.

“Sure, we are all friends,” Hayder said. “My father can’t get the job in Crimea because he is Muslim. My brother, who was the best chef in Sevastopol, is kidnapped by American government and locked up in Gitmo for no reason when he go to Chicago to open restaurant. And here I am, the black man, in the car with the Ukrainian and the American. Oh, yeah. We are the best friends.”

Nadia studied Anton’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Anton, are you sure about this?”

Anton cracked a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. Hayder likes to rant. But Hayder is good people. He went to the London School of Economics.”

The most dangerous people in the world weren’t the extremists, Nadia thought; they were the highly educated and super-intelligent extremists. Hayder’s presence made her trip—in the dead of the night, to a radioactive wasteland, in search of a notorious uncle she’d never known existed—all the more surreal. Less than a week ago, she thought she was meeting a nice old man who’d known her father. And now, here she was.

While Anton exited the expressway and turned right, Hayder handed her a small device the size of an old-fashioned transistor radio.

“Dosimeter,” he said. “It measures your exposure to radiation per hour. After the explosion, the reading in the control room was three hundred sieverts. You died in one minute. Today the reading in the control room is thirty-four sieverts. You die in fifteen minutes. In States or in Moscow, normal reading is ten microsieverts. In Kyiv, the normal reading is twelve to sixteen micros. In the Zone, the reading is up to one thousand micros, depending how close to the reactor.”

Nadia held the device gingerly. “That sounds like a problem.”

Hayder shook his head. “No. That is not the problem. Exposure is not the problem. Accumulation is the problem. If you spend five hours in the Zone, you radiate as much as if you spend two hours in the airplane or on the beach in Rio de Janeiro.”

“Then why bother with the dosimeter?”

“To avoid getting particles on the clothes or body. Reactor Four explosion released twenty nuclear substances. Most are not harmful anymore. Three are harmful: plutonium, strontium, and cesium-137. Cesium-137 is in the dust. If cesium-137 gets on body, accumulation is problem. You must scrub quickly or die. The particles are the very big problem.”

The road curved through the night. A pine forest hovered over both sides. The truck’s headlights provided the only illumination. Hayder pointed at something up ahead and whispered to Anton.

Anton swerved left onto a dirt road. Nadia bounced in her seat as the van rolled over uneven terrain. Ten minutes later, Anton killed the lights. They drove five miles per hour until they came upon a barbed-wire fence and stopped. Anton flashed his lights twice. A pair of headlights flashed three times from the other side of the fence.

“Bingo,” Hayder said. “My man. Let’s go.”

The barbed wire meant they were at the border of the Zone of Exclusion, thirty kilometers from the reactors, and thirty-three kilometers from the Hotel Polissya in Pripyat.

“I would go with you,” Anton said, “but we can’t leave the car here unattended. It might not be here when we got back. And we can’t take the car inside the Zone. It would be too hot by the time we were done. Cars that go in the Zone stay in the Zone.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Nadia said. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” Anton said. “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.”

“You better be.”

A steel pole stabilized the hole in the fence so that it opened and closed like a door. A covered military-supply truck was parked on the other side. Hayder opened the passenger door and told Nadia to get in. She slid next to a sullen driver in camouflage gear. The cabin smelled like diesel, cigarettes, and hair tonic.

“This is Volodya,” Hayder said, after climbing inside and sitting beside her. “Volodya will be the driver tonight.” He switched to Russian. “Volodya, this is Nadia.”

Volodya barked a hello in Russian, turned the truck around, and took off down a path with the lights on. A dosimeter on the front dashboard chattered lightly.

The forest gave way to the steppe, which yielded to pockets of woodlands. They passed eleven abandoned homes, all made of square logs with thatch roofs. With fifteen kilometers to go, they sneaked through another barbed-wire fence. The roof of the next house they saw protruded from the ground at an odd angle. The home had been bulldozed and buried. “After the reactor explodes,” Hayder said, “they water and bury everything.”

“Why the water?” Nadia said.

“To keep radioactivity dust from blowing to the other cities. Government tells people: bury vegetable gardens, bury topsoil, too. But people do not believe anything is really wrong. They think it is just the fire. They say, ‘We won’t get propagandized again.’ So they bury topsoil but eat the vegetables. And keep the manure from the top. They think, ‘Why waste good shit over government scam?’

“While he tells people in Chernobyl to destroy the farms, Gorbachev goes on television and tells the world there is no radioactive leak. They put dosimeters in the food in Pripyat and show all is good. But government dosimeters are only good to measure the air. You need different dosimeter for the food. The truth is that Gorbachev does not want to mess up the May Day parade in Kyiv. So he does the Soviet thing.”

“He lies,” Nadia said.

“He denies,” Hayder said. “The explosion is on April twenty-sixth, but the government does not tell about radioactivity leak until May fifth. That was the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of the free Ukraine. Chernobyl is the single-biggest reason this is the free country. Chernobyl containment cost eighteen billion rubles. Destroyed the economy. Proved the communists could not take care of their peoples. Destroyed the Soviet Union.”

They sat quietly for a moment as Volodya guided the truck through a patch of brush.

“You know a lot about the history here,” Nadia said, “don’t you?”

Hayder let a quiet moment pass between them. “I am from here,” he said.

“I don’t understand. I thought you were from Crimea.”

“Born in Crimea, yes. But I am the child of the Zone. My father was the bio-robot. My father was… Robot Hayder. The Soviet government gives order: biological resource are dispensable. The liquidators who work on the reactor call themselves bio-robots. Like dispensable machines. Robot Ivan, Robot Volodya, Robot Hayder… No one tells them radioactivity leak. No one tells them they will die. Some are militia, some are volunteer. My father came for the money. By the time they know the true gig is up, it is too late. My father moves blocks of radioactive graphite in reactor with bare hands. He dies two weeks after explosion. My mother lives in Pripyat. I am born eight months later.”

Lights shone a hundred yards away over the top of a grove of pine trees. Volodya stopped at the edge of the woods.

“We get out here,” Hayder said. “Bicycles on the other side of trees. Dosimeter on. Follow me.”

He bent low to the ground and scampered along a well-worn path to the edge of the clearing. Nadia followed his footsteps carefully, wondering how many particles of cesium were dangling within a foot of her clothing. She burst out of the forest behind Hayder and knelt down beside him on a block of cracked asphalt.

Two rusty bicycles with headlights bolted to the handlebars lay beneath a tree. In the foreground, spotlights illuminated a giant chimney encased in scaffolding. It rose from a dome a few hundred yards away. The silhouettes of two other smokestacks and a dozen cranes surrounded it.

“Welcome to the village of Chernobyl,” Hayder said.

He scanned the reactors and the buildings around them, his eyes blazing with anticipation.

“The thing people don’t know about the Zone,” he said, wetting his lips, “is once you are here, you want to come back. You need to come back. The Zone… It pulls you in.”

Hayder loosened his scarf. He turned to Nadia and revealed a V-shaped scar on his neck.

“Last chance to turn back,” he said.

Nadia recognized the scar from photographs of children at the Chernobyl Museum. Cancer of the thyroid.

Her dosimeter chattered steadily. Meeting her uncle suddenly seemed far less compelling than it had in Kiev. But then again, she needed the money, and there was also the boy, her cousin. How dangerous could Pripyat be if they offered daily tours of the place?

Nadia swallowed but shook her head.

“You go on?” he said.

Nadia imagined having a little cousin who looked up to her, and logging onto her brokerage account and seeing a seven- or eight-figure cash balance. “I go on.”

“Okay. You go on.” The tips of his silver-and-gold teeth shined in the dark. It was the first time she’d seen him grin. “You go on. I have some respectability for you.”

Hayder disappeared into the forest to tell Volodya he could leave and returned thirty seconds later. The truck rumbled away in the darkness.

Nadia checked her watch. It was 8:34 p.m. “I have twenty-six minutes. Will I make it to Pripyat in time?”

“Sure, sure. Three kilometers. I put you on the main road to Pripyat before I go. We meet back here ten thirty p.m.”

Nadia recoiled. “You go? Go where? You told us you’d take me to Pripyat yourself. To the Hotel Polissya. That I would wait for you afterward in the Chernobyl café. Where there are people.”

He pursed his lips sympathetically. “Small change in the plan. Very small. Before we go in the truck, Volodya relay message from the business contact. Schedule change. I meet him at nine o’clock now, so cannot go with you. You must go alone.”

“But isn’t Pripyat a ghost town? Are there any lights there at all?”

“Sure, sure. Good light on the bicycle, and I give flashlight, too,” he said. “Check cell phone. The coverage good. Is very good.”

Nadia pulled out her phone. Five bars lit up in green. Hayder did the same and nodded reassuringly. She punched his number into her phone and hung up as soon as it rang.

“See?” Hayder said. “No worries. Hayder is the stand-up guy. You get lost, any problem, you call me, we work out together. Just like New York.”

“Yeah,” Nadia said. She eyed the wreckage on the horizon and imagined a team of human robots cleaning it all up. “Just like New York.”

At the outskirts of the power station, the edge of a cooling pond shimmered in the night. Nadia remembered the skates the boy was wearing in the photo and wondered if he played hockey on it during the winter. Perhaps that was as good as it got for her cousin out here, a topless Madison Square Garden manufactured out of radioactive water, as frozen during the winter as Chernobyl was in time.