All That Is Solid Melts into Air (16 page)

“I think he’s still being bullied.”

“Don’t worry. He’s a stubborn kid, he’s smarter than any of them. He’ll do okay.”

“The other day, I get him to slice some carrots. I tell him to roll up his sleeves—why add to the laundry basket?—he refuses. I get suspicious. I walk over and pull up his sleeves and there’s a red mark on his arm. He says they call it a Chinese burn. He says it’s nothing, some game. Says it’s just a thing they’re doing.”

“It’s a Chinese burn. This is what kids do.”

“Since when? It never happened when we were young.”

“It happened, it just never happened to us.”

“Meaning?”

Maria didn’t mean to bring it up. The age-old argument leaking out again, slipping its way between sentences.

She sighs. “Meaning what it means.”

Alina shakes her head in disbelief.

“And so it begins. Cling to it, dear sister, cling to your bitterness. What else do you have?”

Maria shrugs her shoulders.

“It’s not bitterness. I’m just willing to recognize him for what he was.”

“How do I spend my hours? In a hairnet pulling sheets from a line, feeding them through a mechanical roller. Ironing like a madwoman in the evenings. I have a mouth to feed; he had four. It was some extra money. A side job. People, the few who knew what he did, understand that. There are such things as shoes and bread and soup. I never saw you refuse them; our bones never jutted like some other children. Necessity. People understand, even now. Those who know.”

The tension rises, a particular tension for this particular subject.

“It was not laundry work. It was not even work. And people don’t understand. And everybody knew, everyone knows. Name his friends—go ahead, count them. Who came to console us when he disappeared?”

“They were frightened. They didn’t wish to be connected. They were all involved to some extent. He took no pleasure in it. How can you make this be anything else? We had dolls, we had books. Do you think you would have led the life you did if we had no books?”

“It was not just a side job.”

“Did he beat us? Did he make her life a misery? Not him. Be ashamed of those men instead. Set your life against those men. I say it again: you had dolls.”

“It was not a side job. The day that you realize it, that day will arrive.”

“Well, I’m not young and it has no marking on the calendar. I’m still waiting.”

Neither of them speaks. Maria goes back inside and places the pressed clothes into a delivery bag, one hand on top, one on the bottom. She puts a saucepan of water on to boil and spoons tea into the pot.

Their father went to the races on a Saturday afternoon and never returned. There were no explanations or justifications for his work, how he betrayed others, led them to a life of imaginable misery. They couldn’t sit with him, understand him, listen to an old man’s regrets. Only a void remains, and it continues to wrap around their lives, tying them together in ignorance.

Maria sits listening to the water boil, currents of the past lapping inside her. The clank of a card hitting the metal bucket occasionally makes its way into the apartment. It’s always like this. The recurring subject that dominates their lives. Every lengthy conversation comes around to it eventually, teasing out the intangibles, the unknowables. Because who really can have a clue as to why Nikolai Kovalev did what he did, pushing his little wood pieces, aligning all his forces. Maybe it was valour or self-sacrifice or vanity or greed. Maybe it was something he never thought about, just numbers on a sheet, little codes. Maybe he was more worried about his opponent’s opening gambit or the exposed position of his rook.

Alina shuts the balcony door and places the near-empty bottle on the kitchen counter. She wets the tea with the boiling water and waits for the leaves to settle into zavarka. Maria watches her by the reflection in the glass door.

Alina fills the pot and takes down two cups and puts them on the table, letting the tea stew again, then, after a few minutes, pouring. It smells strong, relaxing. Maria thinks that she’d like to take a bath, but she’d have to clean off everyone else’s scum first, not something she’s prepared to do right now. Instead she tells Alina about the meeting.

“I know all the arguments. Of course you’ll say it’s a good opportunity, and it is. But I can’t think about coming home, after my day, and opening that book and taking notes for hours on end. Three, four, five years of this. Already I can’t face that thought.”

“But you said you never get to use your brain. You’d be pushing yourself, thinking in a new way. That’s good, surely?”

“I don’t have a natural aptitude for it. I could do it, but I’d have to grind it out. I’d have to study harder than most other people.”

“And there’d be classes. You enjoy classes. Other engineers with opinions, curiosity.”

“But I already have classes. They respect me in the Lomonosov. There’s talk of giving me more hours—even a junior position. I was hoping that by next year they’d offer me some lectures, give me a research brief. You want to know about longer term, the Lomonosov is longer term. It holds more possibilities than being another clipboard holder in a factory. And it wouldn’t take years of drudgery.”

“And now this.”

“And now this.”

“We can’t do without your teaching money for a few years. There’s only so much ironing that will fit in this place.”

They both look around. There are stacks of finely pressed sheets everywhere. They have to tiptoe around them. Shirts hang from a specially constructed rail, dozens of them. They sit in a sea of cotton and polyester.

“They’re saying, ‘We own you, you can’t do something else.’ ”

“Well, maybe show them your fidelity, prove your love to them, they might move on to some other person.”

“So I make a gesture?”

“Yes. Show how it benefits them to have you do other things. Show them you bring them something of benefit. You’re cultured. They respect culture. Bring that to them in some way.”

“What about a recital? If they come and they like it, they donate. Use it to get Zhenya a rehearsal room. It might even brighten everyone up a bit.”

“So then. Zhenya will play.”

“You know how he is, though. Maybe he can’t handle it.”

“It’s for his aunt. If I asked, maybe not; but you, he’d learn to walk on his hands for you.”

They finish their tea and unfold Maria’s bed and Alina helps her to change her sheets and pillowcase and they turn off the lights and settle down in their separate rooms and think about how they’ve survived together. No husbands or parents to rely on. If they disagree on their past, then they disagree on their past. It can’t separate them. And each of them thinks how good it is to have a sister.

In the morning Maria walks across the courtyard and watches the watchers. Curtains flick overhead, figures stepping away from the glass. Nothing that happens in this stretch of land goes unseen. She steps over the kerbstones that are half painted, a job which the maintenance men occupied themselves with for a few days, before finding some other distraction.

She hasn’t slept well, her mind ticking over after her conversation with Alina and then one thing leading to another, thoughts whirring uncontrollably in the dark. When this happens, which isn’t often, she thinks of it as her mind unspooling, all those blank working hours being cast out, reclaiming their freedom.

She passes a car with brown tape in place of a back window. There are great mounds of uncollected rubbish on the sides of the pomoyka. Plastic bags stacked upon plastic bags. The children use them as combat shelters for their snowball fights, and she can conjure up the sour stench that will rise again when the snow melts and the air heats. The smell of a new spring.

Children adapt.

They take an untreated football pitch and use it as an obstacle course. They play volleyball with taped-up wads of newspaper. They don’t have basketball hoops here, so they kick the seats out of old kitchen chairs and lash them to drainpipes. They spend their young lives inventing games with stratified, nuanced, ingenious rules and spend their adult lives resenting the constraints around them.

The bus steams up and bobbles to a stop.

Maria looks at bare branches set against the sky, lines running into one another, sturdy boughs tapering off into a fine filigree.

She wants to make love on a warm night with moonlight shimmering down rain-slicked streets.

When Mr. Shalamov arrives Maria’s waiting in the armchair outside his office. The secretary refuses to look at her, resenting her intrusion. A different species from the people that inhabit these rooms, with their well-cut suits. Even the secretary in a matching jacket and skirt. Maria wonders if the secretary changes into her work clothes, just like everyone else. Surely she can’t wear a skirt like that outside in such cold, even with thick tights on. She can’t have a locker room, and Maria thinks of her changing in the management toilets, rising in status as soon as she slips on the soft material, and in the evening shedding that skin again, becoming just another nameless face, sneaking onto the bus home, averting her eyes, hoping that she won’t see a worker she recognizes. Or more likely she feeds off the high-powered lives that surround her, massaging their bodies as well as their egos, sharing their beds.

Maria stands and speaks before the secretary has a chance to interject.

“Mr. Shalamov.”

He stops and looks at her and then looks at the secretary.

“I’m sorry to intrude. I just wanted to continue our conversation from yesterday evening.”

A glaze in his eyes. She can tell he doesn’t recognize her.

“We talked about the Lomonosov.”

He turns when recollection strikes him.

“Yes. We’ll pick the matter up another time. Anya will set up an appointment. You’ll be notified.”

His back is to her and he’s moving towards his office door. She rattles off her prepared lines.

“I would like to make amends for my lack of participation in some of our previous cultural activities, I have a suggestion for an event that would be good for morale.”

He stops and turns.

“Is there a problem with morale?”

His voice is icy. He’s focusing intently on her. A cool, dispassionate glare.

Maria’s nervousness melts away, instinct kicks in. She’s faced a look like this dozens of times, someone uncertain about her intentions. She slows her pace, lifts her shoulders, talks to him clearly and warmly, like an equal.

“Let me begin again. My nephew is a talented pianist, a candidate for the Conservatory. I’d like to arrange a concert, in recognition of the abilities that are nurtured here. So many of our workers are gifted. Of course, you’re in a better position than anybody to recognize this. I would like to arrange an evening in celebration of such great talents, an evening that honours the efforts of the simple worker, our ability to work in harmony. Perhaps some Prokofiev sonatas.”

He nods, taking in her words.

“A fine suggestion Mrs. . . .”

“Brovkina.”

“Mrs. Brovkina, but perhaps now is not the right time.”

“I should mention that my nephew is nine years old. The evening could function as a symbol of our potential.”

“Nine years old. The child can play Prokofiev?”

“Yes, sir. He’ll be auditioning for the Conservatory in the spring.”

He looks at the floor and looks up again.

“I’ll think about it. As you say, such an event may contain a powerful symbolism. And we do our best to support talents, in whatever form they appear. I’ll discuss it with our director of culture.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He turns in to his office. The secretary looks at her. Maria smiles.

“Thank you for your patience.”

She walks down the metal steps and makes her way to her bench, and her working day begins. She tells herself that this is a good morning. She’ll keep telling herself this, even if she doesn’t believe it.

Chapter 13

O
nce again Grigory walks this flat landscape with the pale evening light drawing down, his only respite from the plain, hastily constructed buildings that are now his home. He came to this resettlement camp three months ago, when swathes of corn covered the fields and combine harvesters traced the land, supported by locals who tied the straw in bundles, standing it on end to dry and be taken home later for their horses. Rows and rows of them inching forwards, like a local mob whose intent was to beat the land into submission. A year before, this would have been a sight to take pleasure in, to watch a community reap their harvest, but Grigory has developed a suspicion of all types of agriculture, all signs of growth. He knows the dangers that lurk in the most innocuous things.

When he left Chernobyl they were harvesting too. Men from the clean villages on the outer rim of the exclusion zone would enter their neighbours’ evacuated farms and pluck beets or potatoes from the earth. Often they’d take their children out of school, bring them along; their wives also. These were men who had always trusted the soil; it had never failed to provide for them. How could they believe the earth had betrayed them when vegetables were growing in front of their eyes? They would ask why they were allowed to work their own farms and yet their neighbours were forced to move because of some imaginary boundary. If their cattle needed feed, their neighbours wouldn’t begrudge them. The feed sits in sacks—how can it be contaminated? Even the kolkhoz offices endorsed this view. They posted signs saying it was permissible to eat salad vegetables: lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers. There were instructions for dealing with contaminated chickens. They advised people to wear protective gear and boil the chicken in salt water, to use the meat for pâté or salami and pour the water down the toilet.

In his final weeks there, when all of his authority had been stripped away, Grigory drove from farm to farm at the perimeter of the zone, showing his credentials, advising people of the dangers they were in. None of them believed him, until he took out the dosimeter and the machine beeped shrilly: 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 micro-roentgen per hour—hundreds of times the level of natural exposure. It was a method he’d adapted when it became apparent that all Vygovskiy’s grand statements about a new beginning, about a thorough, methodical cleanup, had been quashed by one phone call from the Kremlin.

THE DAY AFTER
the evacuation, reports came in of a radioactive cloud that hung over Minsk. Grigory approached Vygovskiy about it. His superior nodded: “I’ve been informed.”

“And they’re evacuating?”

“They’re doing everything they can.”

A few hours later he realized that supply trucks were still arriving from the city. Again he approached his superior.

“They haven’t evacuated, we’re still getting supplies from there.”

“They don’t have the resources yet.”

“We have spare troops here, men sitting around waiting for instructions. What are they waiting for? We know every hour is crucial.”

Vygovskiy gestured towards the stacks of paperwork on his desk, the ringing phone.

“I have a power plant to clean up, Grigory. I have a team of nuclear engineers arriving any moment. There are men taking care of it.”

“What men?”

“Good men.”

Grigory returned to his office and called the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Party. They wouldn’t connect him: the man was on another line. Grigory was incredulous. He waited five minutes and called again. He reminded them forcefully who he was, where he was calling from, under whose authority he worked. Still no connection. Eventually, after a half hour, he got through.

When he mentioned the accident, the line went dead.

He walked into Vygovskiy’s engineering briefing and gestured to speak to him outside. The group was arguing over procedure. Vygovskiy waved him away. Grigory remained until the group fell silent. Irritated, Vygovskiy followed him into the corridor, then indicated they should go to Grigory’s office. Neither of them spoke until Vygovskiy closed the door.

“The KGB are suppressing our calls. I can’t even speak with the Belarussian general secretary.”

“Why are you speaking to the general secretary?”

“Because there’s a fucking radioactive cloud hanging over his capital.”

Vygovskiy spoke in a pointedly calm tone.

“They have orders to contain the information, in order to avoid a mass panic.”

“The KGB?”

“The KGB. The general secretary. Everyone.”

“So there’ll be no evacuation?”

“No. It’s a direct order from the highest levels in the Kremlin.”

Grigory sat down at his desk. Vygovskiy remained standing in front of him, as though he were the inferior. He adjusted his tie.

“It’s a direct order. What do you want me to do?”

Their voices rising in steady progression.

“I want us to do what we said we’d do. I want to deal with this situation openly, properly, with accountability. I’m getting reports that the city has background radiation of twenty-eight thousand micro-roentgen per hour.”

“That meeting in my office. The engineers are figuring out a way to get the water out from underneath the reactor. If uranium and graphite get in there, a critical mass will form and we might be dealing with an explosion of maybe three, four, even five megatons. If that happens you’ll have to evacuate half of Europe. Should I get on the phone to the Polish premier, to Berlin? Fuck it, why not Paris?”

“Why not? They could help. There would be more resources, more expertise.”

“More hysteria. And that’s not even taking into account what it would mean for our international profile.”

“You’re talking like a politician, Vladimir.”

“This has international consequences. This is our most critical moment, politically, since the war. We both know this. Of course politics comes into it. Politics comes into everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, comrade. I’m getting things done.”

He strode out the door, slamming it after him.

Grigory picked up the receiver, then put it down again in its cradle.

He grabbed his jacket and a dosimeter and found Vasily in one of the medical tents, checking exposure rates amongst the soldiers.

“Come with me—that can wait.”

Grigory had one of the soldiers drive them to the apartment blocks. They walked up a staircase and into one of the apartments.

“Can you tell me what we’re doing here?”

Grigory looked around and found the phone and carried it to the dining table, the cord straining to reach.

“There’s a radioactive cloud over Minsk. We need to make some calls.”

He got on his knees and, dipping his head to search under the sofa, found what he was looking for. He dragged out a phone book.

“Who are we calling?”

Grigory threw the book towards the table. On landing it thudded and skidded along the vinyl covering.

“Everyone. Pick a letter and start from there. It’s a lottery. See who lives according to their surname.”

Vasily placed his hand calmly on the book, flipping the corners of pages with his thumb, a rasping sound.

“This is ridiculous, Grigory. What are we doing here? Someone’s apartment? You have an office and an administrative staff.”

“The KGB are monitoring our calls. I can’t talk to anyone in the city or there’ll be consequences. Not that I’m worried about that, but they’ll cut us off immediately. We can’t get anything done that way. I’ll be next door, doing the same.”

Vasily slid the book away.

“We can’t go against KGB diktats, Grigory. Who knows what will happen? It’s the KGB.”

Grigory was halfway out the door. He stopped, turned, looked at his friend, twisted the door handle at his side.

He spoke quietly, all his momentum subdued.

“I hadn’t expected it would be a problem.”

“It’s the KGB.”

“There’s an entire city blindly walking into an early grave.”

“I have a family.”

“So you keep saying.”

They were silent.

“Open a page,” Grigory said. “There’s a hundred families on each one; a hundred and fifty, who knows? What if it were a Moscow directory? What if we were to look under Simenov?”

Vasily stood up.

“I can’t help you with this, Grigory. I’m sorry.”

Grigory stepped aside to let him pass.

When he called people he introduced himself as a doctor and explained what was happening. He told them to put their food in plastic, to put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a cloth, then put the rag in a bag and throw it away. If they had laundry drying outside, they should put it back in the wash. Put two drops of iodine in a glass of water and wash their hair with it. Dissolve four more drops and drink it, two for a child. He told them to get out of the city as soon as they could. Stay with a relative. Don’t come back for at least a few weeks.

He made probably sixty calls until finally they cut him off. Sitting on a stranger’s chair, pacing up and down someone’s brown, patterned carpet.

Every reaction was the same. People were calm. They thanked him. They didn’t question him or panic. Perhaps they didn’t believe him or didn’t understand the importance of what he was asking. Such simple things: wash your hair, wash your clothes, drink some iodine. It hardly seemed credible that these few actions could save your life.

That evening he went to his quarters to pack his bag and bedding and find another place to sleep. Vasily, lying in the next bunk, watched him place his belongings away.

“I’m not the enemy, Grigory. I’m not one of them.”

“Really? Then who are you?”

The next day he went to Minsk himself. Forced his way into the chairman’s office, gaining access by holding the dosimeter up to people’s necks, showing them the readings. They all had family here; they couldn’t bring themselves to refuse him. The chairman told Grigory he could only spare five minutes.

“I’ve been on the phone this morning with the chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board. He’s assured me everything is normal, everything is under control.”

“Comrade, I am the deputy head of the cleanup commission. I’m telling you, you need to evacuate the city. You need to demand that military personnel come here at once.”

“They are already using vast numbers of troops at the accident site.”

“And I’m telling you to order more for yourself.”

“Doctor, there are only so many soldiers to go around.”

“We have the largest army on earth. Are we not always proclaiming the greatness, the scale of our forces? We need to get people out of here. This accident, believe me, will make Hiroshima look like an aberration.”

“You are exaggerating, Doctor.”

“I’ve personally taken background readings of five hundred micro-roentgen per hour outside. There should be no one within a hundred kilometers of this city.”

The chairman stretched out his arms as if he were addressing a rally.

“I am a former director of a tractor factory. I do not understand such things. If comrade Platonov from the Radiological Protection Board tells me that things are fine, then what can I tell him: he’s lying? Please, of course not, they’d take my Party card.”

“Well, I’m a doctor, a surgeon, responsible for the cleanup. I’ve arrived here directly from the site and yet you’re happy to tell me that I’m a fool.”

The chairman leaned forward, snarling.

“There will be no evacuation.”

“Where are your wife and children?”

“They are here, of course. How can I ask others to trust the system if I can’t show them that my own family does the same?”

Grigory exhaled, shook his head.

“You’re really that naïve.”

The chairman was unnerved by Grigory’s tone. He spluttered out a response.

“The Party has made me what I am, made this country what it is. I have always trusted its judgement. A fire in a power plant won’t change that.”

They argued for another half hour until Grigory, defeated, picked up his bag and placed it on his lap.

“The city has iodine concentration in reserve—I know this is policy in case of a nuclear attack. At least put that in the water supply.”

“That, as you’ve mentioned, Doctor, is for the purposes of nuclear attack.”

“So we’ll protect our people from the Capitalist Imperialists, but not from each other?”

“Get out before I have you arrested for spreading anti-Soviet sentiment.”

“It’s not only the air that’s contaminated. It’s your minds too.”

“Get out!”

GRIGORY STOPS
his walk and takes a breath of the fresh evening air, savouring it.

The stars are coming out. He’ll need to go back soon, do a final pass through the wards before bedtime. Through the gloom, he can make out the main road to Mogilev with the wedges of light from car headlamps moving in a steady trajectory. Remnants of corn stubble crunch under his feet, he can feel its stubbornness under his boots. A few weeks ago he watched men come with cans of fuel, dousing the stubble in small sections and then lighting it, guiding the flame, encouraging it to other areas with loose straw and pitchforks, so that it spread as a blanket of gentle fire, a carpet of heat bending the air above it. Now a silent plain of snow greets him on his walks and Grigory knows that in a couple of months they’ll return with tractors and ploughs and turn the soil over upon itself once more, ready for sowing in the spring.

In the exclusion zone, there were great flaming pyres of cattle and sheep. They were folding the land inside out using diggers and tractors and shovels to make craters large enough to hold everything in sight: helicopters and troop wagons, shacks, trees, cars, motorcycles, pylons. They flattened homes by tying a huge chain around an izba, then hauling it forward with a giant digger so the izba would collapse onto itself; then they’d heave everything into a pit. They were cutting down forests and wrapping the trunks in plastic before laying them under the earth. Grigory saw so much of this that when people tell him where they’re from, when they mention the names of the surrounding villages and towns—Krasnopol, Chadyany, Malinovka, Bragin, Khoyniki, Narovlya—they bring to mind not only the landscape but what lies beneath it. He sees the places as a diagram, in cross section, with figures working busily on top of the earth and other pockets underneath it, all neatly ordered—a section for helicopters, one for the izbas, another for diseased animals—which, of course, isn’t the case. There is nothing neat about this tragedy.