Wolves Eat Dogs

8

Each commuter on the six p.m. train from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station began his trip by standing in the booth of a radiation detector and placing his feet and hands on metal plates until a green light signaled that he could continue to the platform. The train itself was an express that passed through Byelorussian territory without stopping, bypassing border checks. It was a cozy ride through pine forests on a summer evening.

Men rode at one end, women at the other. Men played cards, drank tea from thermoses or napped in rumpled clothes, whereas the women held conversations or knit sweaters and were painstakingly well dressed, with not a gray hair among them, not while henna grew on earth.

Halfway, the car became more subdued. Halfway, eyes wandered to the window, more and more a mirror. Halfway, thoughts turned to home, to coping with dinner, children, private lives.

Arkady, too, nodded from the rhythm of the train. One thought dissolved into another.

He gave Eva Kazka credit for bringing medical service, however minimal, to people in villages no one else dared visit. But she had played him like a thief before a jury in front of the old women. Eva had that knack of making a person draw too little air or speak too loud. In front of such an individual, a man could become so aware his weight was on his left foot that he might fall over on his right, and the village women had practically cackled while watching the show. She had called them survivors. What kind of appearance did he present, an intrepid investigator following clues to the end of the earth, or a man lost by the wayside? At a dead end, at least. A signal flashed by the window, and Arkady thought of Pasha Ivanov flying through the air. Arkady didn't approve or disapprove. The problem was that once people landed, other people had to clean up the mess. And what had he learned on his excursion with Alex? Not much. On the other hand, he'd seen at least three wolves behind the white trunks of the birches, eyes shining like pans of gold, weighing the deer, he and Alex and the deer much the same. He remembered how the hairs had stiffened down the back of his neck. The word "predator" meant more when you were potential prey. He laughed at himself, imagining that he was on his motorcycle being chased by wolves.

Slavutych had been built for people evacuated from Pripyat. It was a successor city, with spacious squares and white municipal buildings that looked like a child's building blocks-arches, cubes, columns-on a giant scale. It was a city with modern amenities. A sunken football field was serviced by espresso bars. The Palace of Culture offered feng shui and origami. Even better, the apartment blocks themselves were designed with architectural themes like fanciful Lithuanian trim or the grace notes of Uzbeki brickwork.

Oleksander Katamay lived on the fifth floor of an "Uzbeki" building. A young woman in a jogging suit and top-heavy blond hair let Arkady in and immediately left him in a living room arranged around a taxidermy worktable with lamps and a stand-up magnifying glass aimed at a badger skin rolled up with the head inside. Another badger, farther along, bathed in a bucket of degreaser. Shelves held plastic sacks of clay and papier-mâché and a menagerie of stuffed and mounted animals: a lynx with bared fangs, an owl looking over its shoulder, a slinking fox. A pair of hunting rifles resided in a glass cabinet with a Soviet flag: small-bore, single-shot, bolt-action rifles polished as lovingly as a brace of violins. Hung on the walls had to be twenty framed photos of men in hard hats studying plans, setting pilings or working the levers of a crane, and in the middle or taking the lead in each was the same tall vigorous figure of Oleksander Katamay. Arkady was studying a photograph of workers in front of a power plant and realized that it was the first photo he had seen of the intact Chernobyl Reactor Four, a massive white wall next to its twin, Reactor Three. The men in the picture were as relaxed and confident as if they stood on the prow of a mighty ship.

A deep voice called, "Is that the investigator? I'm coming."

While Arkady waited, he noticed a framed plaque that displayed civilian medals, including Veteran of Labor, Winner of Socialist Competition and Honored Builder of the U.S.S.R., plus rows of military ribbons. Arkady was standing by them when Oleksander Katamay rolled into the room in a wheelchair. Though a pensioner in his late seventies, he still had a laborer's chest and shoulders, with a broad, pushed-in face and a mane of white hair. He gripped Arkady's hand firmly enough to squeeze the blood out.

"From Moscow?"

"That's right."

"But Renko is a good Ukrainian name." Katamay leaned close, as if to peer into Arkady's soul, then abruptly spun and shouted, "Oksana!" He brought his gaze back to Arkady and the taxidermy in progress. "You were admiring my hobby? Did you see the ribbons?" Katamay rolled to the plaque of medals and pointed out one with writing in Arabic. " 'Friendship of the Afghan People.' The friendship of niggers, I guess that's worth my son's life. Oksana!"

The woman who had let Arkady into the apartment brought a tray of vodka and pickles, which she set on a coffee table. Although there was something negligent about her, her hair was a golden beehive. She sat on the floor by Katamay's wheelchair while he drew close a stand-up ashtray on the other side. Arkady settled on an ottoman and had the sense of being in a scene both posed and askew. It was the table with the two badgers, one in the stew, one out. It was Oksana. Her stiff hair was a wig. But it was more than that.

Katamay pointed to the stuffed animals and asked Arkady, "Which do you like most?"

"Oh. They're all lifelike." Which was the best Arkady could come up with, considering his first instinct had been to say, There's a dead cat on your shelf.

"The trick is suppleness."

"Suppleness?"

"Getting off all the flesh and then shaving the inside of the skin until it's blue. Timing, temperature, the right glue are all important, too."

"I wanted to ask about your grandson, Karel."

"Karel is a good boy. Oksana, am I right?"

Oksana said nothing.

Katamay half-filled the glasses with vodka and passed one to Arkady.

"To Karel," Katamay said. "Wherever he is." The old man put his head back, took the vodka in one continuous swallow and watched out of the corner of his eye to make sure Arkady and Oksana did the same. Maybe he was in a wheelchair, but he was still the man in charge. Arkady wondered what it was like to have been chief of construction of such a huge enterprise and now to be restricted to such a small arena. Katamay refilled the glasses. "Renko, you came to the right part of the Ukraine. People of the western Ukraine say the hell with Russia. They pretend they can't speak Russian. They think they're Poles. People in the eastern Ukraine, we remember." Katamay raised his glass. "To-"

Arkady said, "I'd like to ask some questions first."

"To fucking Russians," Katamay said and downed his glass.

Arkady opened the file he carried and passed around a photograph of a young man with half-finished, impatient features: a pinched nose, a thin mouth, a gaze that challenged the camera.

Oksana said, "That's my brother."

"Karel Oleksandrovich Katamay, twenty-six, born Pripyat, Ukrainian Republic." Arkady skipped to the salient points. "Two years' service in the army, trained as a sniper. He's a marksman?"

"He can shoot and leave something worth stuffing, if that's a marksman," Katamay said.

"Twice demoted for physical abuse of newer recruits."

"That's hazing. It's a tradition in the army."

True enough, Arkady thought. Some kids were hazed enough that they hanged themselves. Karel must have stood out among the tormentors.

"Disciplinary action once for theft."

"Suspicion of theft. If they had been able to prove anything, they would have put him in the brig. He has a wild side, but he's a good boy. He couldn't have joined the militia here without a clean record."

"In the militia, Karel was frequently late or absent from his post."

"Sometimes he was hunting for me. We always got things straightened out with his chief."

"That would be Captain Marchenko?"

"Yes."

"Hunting for what? Another fox or lynx? A wolf?"

"A wolf would be the best." Katamay rubbed his hands at the thought. "Do you know how much money a properly mounted wolf would bring?"

"Karel's father died in Afghanistan. Who taught Karel how to hunt?"

"I did. That was when I still had functioning legs."

"Karel's mother?"

"Who knows? She believed all that propaganda about the accident. I've talked to the top scientists. The problem at Chornobyl isn't radiation, it's fear of radiation. There's a word for it: radio-phobia. Karel's mother was radiophobic. So she left. The fact of the matter is, these people are lucky. The state built them Pripyat and then Slavutych, gave them the best salary, the best living conditions, schools and medicine, but the Ukrainian people are all radiophobic. Anyway, Karel's mother disappeared years ago. I raised him."

"Dressed him, fed him, sent him to school?"

"School was a waste of time. He was meant to be a hunter; he was wasted indoors."

"When did you lose the use of your legs?"

"Two years ago, but it was a result of the explosion. I was operating a crane for the firemen when a piece of the roof came down. It came down like a meteor and crushed my back. The vertebra finally gave in. There's a citation on the wall; you can read all about it."

"Had Karel ever been to Moscow?"

"He'd been to Kiev. That's enough."

"You haven't seen him since he found that body in the Zone?"

"No."

"Heard from him?"

Arkady noticed Oksana's glance at yet another hide lolling in a bucket of degreaser in a corner. For a man who hadn't seen or spoken to his marksman grandson in months, Katamay seemed to have no lack of fresh material for his craft.

Katamay said, "Nothing, not a word."

"You don't seem worried."

"It's not like he did anything wrong. He resigned from the militia-so what? Karel's a big boy. He can take care of himself."

"Did you ever hear of two physicists named Pasha Ivanov or Lev Timofeyev?"

"No."

"They never visited Chernobyl?"

"How would I know?"

Arkady asked for the names of family or friends whom Karel might have visited or contacted, and Katamay dispatched Oksana to make up a list. While they waited, Katamay's gaze drifted back to the photographs on the wall. One had probably been taken on International Women's Day, because a younger version of Katamay was surrounded by women in hard hats. In another photograph he strode ahead of technicians in lab coats, who struggled to keep up.

"That must have been a great responsibility, being head of construction," Arkady said.

Katamay said nothing while Oksana rustled through papers in the other room. Then he refilled his glass. "It's all political, you know, shutting down the other reactors. Totally unnecessary. The other three could have run for another twenty years, and we could have built Five and Six, Seven and Eight. Chornobyl was and is the best power-plant site anywhere. The charities got in and blew up statistics. What's easier, to milk foreign aid or run a power plant? So we went from a world power to a third-class nation. Do you know how many died because of Chornobyl, the real figures? Forty-one. Not millions, not hundreds of thousands. Forty-one. The wonderful thing we have discovered is that the human organism can live with much higher levels of radiation than we once thought. But radiophobia has taken over. Forty-one. You have that many dying of lung cancer in the hospitals of Kiev every day of the week, but people don't abandon Kiev." The mention of lung cancer prompted Katamay to find a cigarette. "There are always those who fan hysteria and undermine efforts at normalization, the same elements who always profit from chaos. Except we used to be able to control them. This time they overthrew the entire Soviet Union. Together we were a respected power, now we're a pack of beggars. Can I show you something? Come with me."

Katamay energetically swung his chair around and propelled himself into the next room, a study where his granddaughter had been gathering names and phone numbers at a desk. The desk and all the furniture had been pushed against the wall to make space for a draftsman's table holding an architectural model of the Chernobyl power plant, with stylized green trees and a broad blue Pripyat River cut from blue plastic. All six reactors were there, suggesting a moment in time-past, present or future-that never existed. The panorama was complete with cardboard cooling towers, turbine halls, fuel storage, the domes of water tanks and a parade of transmission towers. On the access roads were miniature trucks and human figures for scale. Here the accident had never happened. Here the Soviet Union was intact.

Arkady was aware of being followed by Oksana from the apartment. She was in her jogging suit but had replaced her wig with a knit cap and darted like a mouse from doorway to doorway. Arkady had an hour until the next train. He stopped at a café called Colombino and took two coffees to an outside table where he had a view of the shallow pools of light cast by the plaza lamps. The structures of civilization-city hall, football stadium, cinema, supermarket- were apparent, just not the activity. He watched Oksana buy an apple from a farmer outside the supermarket, then start to eat the apple as she crossed the plaza and act surprised to find him.

"You were expecting someone?" She looked at the second cup.

"As a matter of fact, you."

She looked cautiously around. Her cheeks were flushed. Now that she was close, it was obvious that under her cap, Oksana's head was shaved. She tucked in her ears. "I must seem pretty ridiculous to you."

"Not a bit. I was hoping you would join me."

She inched into the chair without taking her eyes off Arkady. He waited until she was settled before pushing the second cup in her direction. They sat for a minute quietly. Shoppers weighted with bags came out of the supermarket and lurched from side to side under archways decorated with symbols of a peaceful atom.

Oksana sipped her coffee. "It's cold."

"I m sorry."

"No, I like coffee cold. I usually have it cold after serving my grandfather."

"He is a strong personality."

"He's the boss."

"He's close to Karel?"

"Yes."

"Are you?"

"Karel is my little brother."

"Have you seen him or talked to him?"

Oksana turned a wide smile toward Arkady. "Did you really like my grandfather's stuffed animals?"

"I'm not a great fan of taxidermy." Perhaps because of my line of work, he thought.

"I could tell. 'Lifelike.' Like us at Slavutych."

"Do you work at the station?"

"Yes."

"Why is that amusing?"

"The pay was good, a fifty percent bonus to live here and work at Chornobyl. We called it coffin money. My grandfather gets an added pension for his disability. But there's a catch."

"Because you're just cleaning up Chernobyl and you'll have to find a new job in a few years?"

"At the rate we're going? It will take a hundred. That's not the catch."

"What is the catch?"

"They cut our pay seventy-five percent. After rent and utilities and school, we end up paying to work at Chornobyl. But it's a job, and that's saying something in the Ukraine. Anyway, that's still not the catch."

"What is the catch?"

Oksana adjusted her cap so her ears showed. "Quiet, isn't it?"

"Yes." Arkady saw a customer leaving the illumination of the market? a couple of schoolgirls with backpacks, a man with a cigarette stuck in a weathered face, no more than ten people, in all, along the square and its promenades.

"Everyone is leaving. They built the town for fifty thousand people, and there are fewer than twenty thousand now. Over half the town is empty. The catch is, they built on contaminated land. Cesium from Chornobyl was waiting for us here. Pripyat to Slavutych, we didn't escape at all." Oksana smiled, as at a joke that never grew stale, and she rolled her cap down. "I wear the wig because it makes women here unhappy to see me shaved. I feel a little like a stuffed animal with it on, though. What do you think?"

"The shaved look is very popular."

"Want to see?" She pulled off the cap, revealing an almost perfectly round skull with blue tones. The nakedness made her eyes seem large and luminous. "You can feel." She took his hand and moved it around her head, which felt almost polished. "Now what do you think?"

"Smooth."

"Yes." As she pulled the cap back on, she wore the smile of someone who had divulged a secret.

"You miss Pripyat."

"Yes." She recited her old address there: street, block and flat. "We had the best view, right on the water. In the fall we would watch the ducks follow the river south, and in the spring follow the river north."

"Oksana, have you seen your brother?"

"Who?"

"Have you seen Karel?"

Arkady's mobile phone rang. He tried to ignore it, but Oksana seized the interruption to bolt down the rest of her coffee and get up from her chair. "I have to go. I have to cook for my grandfather."

"Please. This will just take a second." A local number on the caller ID. Arkady answered, "Hello."

A man said, "This is your friend from the Pripyat Hotel."

The scavenger with the plumber's tools and bedspring grill whom Arkady had chased through the school. A Ukrainian speaking Russian, so he knew who Arkady was. A penetrating voice husky from years of smoking. No identifiable background noise. A landline, no breaking up. Arkady looked at Oksana, who was disengaging step by step.

"Yes," Arkady said into the phone.

"You wanted to talk, and you're willing to pay money?"

"That's right."

As Oksana slipped away onto the plaza, she whispered, "You're very nice, very nice. Just… don't stay too long."

"What about?"

"The body of a Moscow businessman was found in a village near Chernobyl two months ago. I'm looking into it."

"Can you pay in American dollars?"

"Yes."

"Then you're a lucky man, because I can help you."

"What do you know?"

"More than you do, I bet, because you've been here a month, and you don't know anything."

The longer they spoke, the more Arkady heard a sibilant S and the scratchiness of an unshaved chin. Arkady gave him a name: the Plumber.

"Like what?"

"Like your businessman was really rich, so there's a lot of money involved."

"Maybe. What do you know?"

Arkady saw Oksana run past the supermarket and vanish around a corner.

"Oh no, not over the phone," the Plumber said.

"We should meet," Arkady said. "But you have to give me some idea of what you know so that I'll know how much money to bring."

"Everything."

"That sounds like nothing." And that was Arkady's impression of the Plumber. A blowhard.

"A hundred dollars."

"For what?"

The Plumber hurried. "I'll call you in the morning and tell you how we'll meet."

"Do that," Arkady said, although the Plumber had already hung up.

On the ride back, the train carried the smaller crew of the night shift, all men and most napping, chins on their chests. What was there to see? The moon was obscured by clouds, and the coach moved in a black terrain of evacuated farms and villages, only a rattling of the rails to indicate forward motion. Then a signal light would plunge by like a face at the window, and Arkady would be thoroughly awake.

Pasha's death was complicated because he had been dying already. He had a dosimeter. He knew that he was dying and what he was dying from. That was part of the ordeal. Arkady tried to imagine the first time Pasha became aware of what was happening. He had been a social animal, the sort who took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, as Rina put it, to have a good time. How did it start? In the blurred confusion of a party, had someone slipped a salt-shaker and a dosimeter into his jacket pocket? The meter's sound would have been turned off. Arkady pictured Pasha's face when he read the meter, and the fast, tactful exit away from everyone else. The dose wouldn't have been too high, more like the first probe of artillery. "We flushed the radioactive water right into the Moscow River," Timofeyev had said, so there was a precedent for tossing the shaker overboard. But from then on, Ivanov was vulnerable. There was no way to tell cesium chloride from salt without a meter, and salt came in his food or sprinkled on top, sat in a plastic shaker in the lowest dive or in crystal in the most elegant restaurant. How did he dare eat? Or have any contact with the outside world, when a barely visible grain could arrive in a letter or be transferred onto clothing as someone brushed by in the street? Finally, what to do when he found a gleaming mound of salt in his closet? How to find one grain of poison among a million pure?

And it would go on. Timofeyev was also under attack. So, by sheer proximity, was Rina. Ivanov and Timofeyev had both had cesium pallor. Their bloody noses were signs of platelet failure. They couldn't eat or drink. Each day they were weaker and more isolated. And in the sanctuary of Ivanov's apartment, in the closet of his bedroom was this shining floor of salt. With a saltshaker. It hadn't matched any pepper shaker in the apartment, and Arkady guessed that it had sat on top of the pile like a tiny lighthouse, pulsating gamma rays. Suicides had a pattern, first fatigue and then a manic energy. Here's the chair, where's the rope? Here's the razor, where's the bath? How to dispose of radioactive salt? Eat it. Eat it with wads of bread. Choke it down with sparkling water. The dosimeter screams? Turn it off. The nosebleeds? Wipe it off, wrap the handkerchief around the meter and place them in the shirt drawer. Neatness counts, but hurry. Momentum is important. The stomach wants to throw back what you've fed it. Open the window. Now grasp the saltshaker, climb high above the world, curtains flapping, and fix your eye on the bright horizon. It's easier to die if you're already dead.