All That Is Solid Melts into Air (6 page)

Chapter 4

I
n the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, ten kilometres from the sleeping boy, as the hour hand on his small clock inched its way between the two and the three, flaming particles of graphite and lead, great molten wads of steel, spiralled through the night air, finding refuge in the roofs adjacent to Reactor No. 4. Fire spread fire spread fire, skimming over bitumen and concrete, boring itself down shafts, through ceilings, engulfing stairs, engulfing air. Elements blindly raging into the great surround: xenon and caesium, tellurium and iodine, plutonium and krypton. Set free unseen, accompanying the swathes of pirouetting sparks. Noble gases, expanding into the noble land. Neutrons and gamma rays streaming up and out, pulsing into the sky, over the earth, atoms careening into atoms, rippling through a continent.

In the control room, the operators watch the glass panel billow outward, testing its extremes, then retreating and attacking once more, sending particles into skin, into walls and floors, lodging itself into doors and keypads and necks and lips and palms. They see control rods launched vertically from the floor of the reactor hall; streaking upwards, dozens of weighted rods fleeing gravity and order, seizing their moment to soar above all they were made for, all they had known.

Steel girders buckle and twist. The baritone of wrenching metal thrumming with the steady bass vibrations of a blast.

Water everywhere: gushing through ventilation ducts, clambering over partition walls, racing down corridors. Steam filling the senses. A wall of steam, a chamber of steam, squirming its way into nostrils and earholes, seeping into eyes, down smoke-caked throats. They plunge their arms through steam, arms swimming while legs walk or buckle. Bulbs blown, the only light now from falling embers; blue flashes from electrical systems that spit out their protests.

The operators pick themselves up, dazed. There is a task, a function. What to do? Surely there’s a button, a series of codes, a procedure, always a procedure. Miraculously they find the operating manual, damp but usable. They locate the section. There’s a section. Ears numb from the piercing alarm. Eyes streaming. A section. Scanning through pages. A title: “Operational Procedures in the Event of Reactor Meltdown.” A block of black ink, two pages, five pages, eight pages. All text has been wiped out, paragraphs hidden behind thick black lines. An event such as this cannot be tolerated, cannot be conceived, such a thing can never be planned for, as surely as it can never happen. The system will not fail, the system cannot fail, the system is the glorious motherland.

Workers burst out from the canteen and the locker rooms and run through waterlogged corridors, gas and dust whirling from the air vents. All is washed in the red glow from emergency lights. They wear white laboratory coats, white caps tied over their heads like kitchen porters. They are in a painting, a movie, a palette of red and black, light and shadow. They run into the bowels of the building finding stricken bodies: men foaming at the mouth, writhing listlessly on the floor. Radiation has already worked its way through their cells, their skin showing large, dark blotches mapping their bodies. The rescuers lift their fellow workers to standing, slipping hands underneath their armpits and heaving them upwards, their bodies limp as marionettes. They hoist these men over their backs and struggle down the stairwells.

One of them remembers the first-aid room in Sector 11, three doors away from his former office. He reaches the room, but the door is locked; it takes him several minutes to kick it open, several critical minutes. He knows that the radiation must be rising to deathly levels. Eventually the door plunges open and he staggers into a room lined with metal shelves, a gurney in its centre. There is nothing else. No iodine or medicine. No bandages. No cream for treating burns. Grey metal shelving and a steel gurney. Why stock a first-aid room in a building where no accident could ever occur?

Outside, the firemen arrive dressed in shirtsleeves. None of them thinks to bring radioactive protection. None of them has even heard of such a thing. Small fires are dotted everywhere, but they gaze at a single thick column of smoke rising thirty metres into the sky. Two of them walk to the roof adjoining the smokestack to assess the damage, their shoes lingering on the melting tar. They kick the lumps of burning graphite at their feet back into what remains of the reactor hall. Through the smoke they see the upper plate of the reactor’s biological shield, a giant slab of concrete, a thousand tonnes in weight, shaped like a jam-jar lid. They see it resting casually against the rim of the chamber, lying askew, as if the owner had been distracted by a boiling kettle or a knock at the door and had neglected to replace it. They look at the span of the thing, the sheer bulk of the thing, and they feel smaller, weakened, standing there in their shirtsleeves, witnesses to the raw force of this mysterious energy.

When they return, they find the militia has arrived and are arranging the gathered firemen into groups. The men in uniform pass out some respiratory masks, made from thin, white cloth. These will last mere minutes before collapsing from heat and sweat and dust, and the men discard them midwork so they can still be seen, several weeks later, cartwheeling around the complex or lingering guiltily on chain-link fences.

Hoses are hefted from their spools and carried through to the sites of ancillary fires. There are five fire trucks, and they travel back and forth to the Pripyat River, sucking thirstily at its waters. Men climb onto roofs with their ladders, traversing contorted iron and shattered concrete. They climb over withered pylons and steel joists that point aimlessly towards the heavens, stripped of their function. These men are efficient and brave, swiftly overcoming the smaller, scattered blazes. They return to the fire trucks and vomit. Vomiting men dot the scene, a choreography of retching: men doubled over, lab technicians and firemen and militiamen discharging the contents of their bodies onto the quivering landscape. A warm, metallic sheen lingers on their tongues, as if they have spent the evening sucking on coins. They lick their sleeves but the taste remains.

They feel so alone, individually, but collectively too. Here in this field, this nowhere, there are no panicked crowds to confirm their private fears, no mass concentration of shared terror, just a relentlessly churning sense of apprehension.

There are hundreds of men outside now, many standing furtively, wondering what to do. Nobody flees the scene. They stand in groups but do not speak. Conversation seems inappropriate. Someone comes down with a case of bottled water from one of the other reactors and the men take it and dispense it to those on the ground. They cradle their colleagues’ heads and slowly pour water down their throats.

Some local doctors arrive, startled by what they observe, their training providing them with an intuitive appreciation of the consequences of such a morning. They set up improvised consultation tables around the perimeter of the plant and dispense whatever iodine is available, shine torchlight into pupils, check heart rates, spread gauze and ointment over rapidly angering burns. They order ambulances from every hospital within driving range, screaming of the urgency of the situation to impassive military orderlies.

Some men stand and smoke, despite the nausea, because really, what else is there to do?

The firemen make their way to the roof adjacent to the central reactor hall—by now the only remaining fire. They are red-eyed and tear-dappled, their eyes streaming in silent protest to the cut and taint in the air. They feel unsteadied, disconcerted by the vomiting, but there is a job, they have been called upon, they work.

The military officials have finally recognized the risks of exposure, and they adjust their procedures accordingly. The men are separated into five groups, with each group assigned to a hose. Two men stand at the front of the hose for no more than three minutes, then are relieved by their co-workers. Men sprint forward and back on the long roof, lungs bursting, attempting to hold back the impulse to gulp down great draughts of air as they reach their destination. Those who view them from a distance see the silhouettes of these men stretched against the dawn sky, moving with a regularity that is somehow comforting to observe, forward and back, merged together in the all-encompassing smoke, pushing on relentlessly, enduring.

Ambulances make multiple journeys, drivers setting out from Zhytomyr and Chernigov, from Kiev and Rechytsa and Mazyr and Gomel, and when they return, there are militiamen standing guard outside the hospitals, keeping all nonessential staff from the contaminated vehicles.

The constant drone of sirens, blending together with varied frequencies, their pitch rising and falling in accordance with movement and distance. Sirens droning on through the morning into the middle of the day.

Chapter 5

A
nother interminable meeting. The sound of paper being shuffled. Monotone speeches. Grigory sits in the hospital committee room at the weekly gathering of department heads. They each have assigned chairs, all wearing the same suit they had worn the previous Saturday, and the one before that, and the one before that. He sits and listens and has no idea of the time. These meetings can take hours, speaker after speaker; the same statements being uttered; the same political posturing.

The only element of change with these sessions is the different seasons displaying themselves outside the window. Afterwards he usually drives to the allotment to sift soil through his hands. Today, he will tend to his potatoes, pile the ridges covering the sprouting tubers. A simple pleasure the spring delivers. April. A warm April Saturday. And he longs to be out there, with the drizzle and the birds, out where things are things, a growing potato, a gardening fork, rubber boots, where language is real—solid nouns—not contorted to ensure the satisfaction of one’s superior or one’s superior’s superior and so on and so on along the line of carefully manicured delusion.

Outside the window there’s a small man-made pool with a single-tube fountain pockmarking the smooth glaze of resting water. He wonders if he should purchase a sprinkler for his tomato plants, if the summer would be a hot one. He has wondered this every week since February.

Zhykhov is summarizing; the meeting is nearly over. Grigory could mouth the words in advance: “All indices of work are good and we are accomplishing success in all the planned tasks.” A few months ago, over lunch, Vasily had composed a melody to accompany these words and, on hearing them, the tune plays in Grigory’s head once more, an unconscious trigger that simply confirms his disdain for Zhykhov. Balance sheets taking precedence over patients, buying inferior equipment because it looks good, even if it brought with it tangible medical problems, the total subjugation of all their medical decisions to the whims of the Secretariat.

As his colleagues gather their papers, standing them vertically on the table and banging them into a cohesive order, Slyunkov, the administrative secretary, hovers through the room and passes a note to Zhykhov, whispering as he does so. Zhykhov reads it to himself, then announces, “We have received a communiqué from the Chairman of the Council of Ministers.” He reads it aloud.

“For your information, there has been a fire reported in Reactor 4 of the Ukrainian nuclear-power plant, Chernobyl. The incident is under control but we have reports that the damage may be significant. However, I can reassure you that this incident will not stop the advance of nuclear energy.”

The last line is startling: it sits far outside the usual linguistic format of official communiqués. They are defending nuclear energy, as if anyone had questioned it, as if they were in the midst of a debate. Statements always come as unambiguous information. The Politburo communicates with orders or blank generalities. Grigory looks across the table at Vasily and can see he’s sharing the same thought. They’re saying it to reassure themselves.
Something catastrophic must have occurred.

They all gather their papers and leave the meeting. Outside, amongst the department heads, there is some speculation as to what it might mean for them. This generalized discussion always happens afterwards, rival departments picking through the gossip, looking for ways to gain an advantage in their allocation of resources, awaiting talk of any unofficial developments.

Vasily and Grigory stand in the group and listen and offer a few opinions and then walk to a quiet corridor to talk freely. They decide to break with protocol and pay a visit to the administrative secretary. Ordinarily this would be perceived as an affront to Zhykhov, a subtle accusation that he didn’t thoroughly cover an important issue in the meeting. But the news has just come in, and they could merely inquire as to any further developments.

When they push the door open, Slyunkov is sitting upright at his desk, typing. He is reluctant to give any information, but they both stand there in silence until Slyunkov can no longer bear the tension and informs them of the only extra details that he knows: that a state of emergency has been announced in the region; they’ve declared the disaster at 1–2–3–4, the same level as an all-out nuclear strike. The doctors are visibly shocked. They ask to speak to Zhykhov, to make any preparations that might be necessary, but are told that he is already on his way to the Kremlin; all the committee chairmen from the surrounding hospitals have been called for an emergency meeting.

There is nothing left for them to do but go home. It’s not expected that they will be needed, but they’ll be contacted if necessary.

Grigory drives Vasily to his apartment. They’re mostly silent for the trip, it’s too early to draw any conclusions. People are going about their weekends. They’re almost all carrying something, preparing for something. Kids holding footballs, older women dragging shopping trolleys with leeks or carrots peeking out from the side panels. Grigory pulls up outside the block, his brakes letting out a moan. He’s been meaning to have them looked at.

“You’re sure you won’t come in for some lunch?”

“Yes. But thanks. I want to go and get my hands dirty.”

“Margarita will take it as a slight on her cooking.”

“I’ve put away enough of her food to prove my devotion. But thank you. I just want to get some fresh air.”

“I know how you feel. Why not stop in for a drink on your way back?”

“Thanks, I’ll think about it.”

In the allotment it begins to rain as he’s kneeling, scooping the soil. The day is damp and sullen and he looks up and feels the drops break on his face and watches them transform the skin of the soil, black freckles appearing all around. He stands in the small wooden shed where he keeps his tools and listens to the staccato patter. There are a few families near the southern end of his section, and he can hear parents ordering their kids to shelter, some muffled screeches punctuated by their yelping dog.

He would like the chaos that children bring. He’d like crayon marks on his walls, stains on his rugs that are so ingrained that they’re mistaken for part of the pattern. He’d like a child to push against him, force him to rethink what he knows, reshape his personality, something that other adults had long since stopped doing. He watches Vasily with his own kids sometimes, watches the way they casually hold his hand, sitting over lunch, the child like a smitten teenager. His meeting with Maria has stirred up layers of settled sediment, but he doesn’t want to think about it too much. He’s reluctant to have expectations.

Grigory usually brings a flask of tea. Now would be the time to drink it. But he’s forgotten it, too busy thinking about this morning’s news. Puddles form in the walkways between the plots. He’d like to indulge in the sheer pleasure of kicking into puddles, another reason to bring a child here; there are many things a grown adult needs permission to do.

The rain keeps coming. He should go, but he’ll work on.

He returns to kneeling, progressing slowly along the rows, oblivious to the rest of the world. He becomes soaked, but he doesn’t notice this until he hears his name being called and watches Vasily striding towards him from the road and he wipes his hand on his sweater, which now hangs heavy, filled with wet.

Grigory stands. It can only be something serious.

Vasily shouts to him before he comes within speaking range, clambering over a chicken-wire fence.

“Zhykhov called, looking for you.”

“I would have thought he has more important things to worry about.”

“Not really. We’re pretty important right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a committee flight leaving Zhukovsky Airfield at five thirty. We’re to be on it.”

“To go to the Ukraine? To . . . what is it called?”

“Chernobyl. Yes.”

Vasily reaches him now, talking at normal volume, panting slightly.

“But that’s idiocy. What do we know about emergency medicine?”

“An endocrinologist and a cardiothoracic surgeon, it’s not a bad place to start.”

“I mean, they surely have a team of experts for these situations.”

“For what situations, Grigory? When does something like this ever happen?”

“But surely they have plans in place.”

“Well, it looks like we’re part of them.”

They both take this in.

“You have children, you can get out of it. I’m sure there’s someone you can plead to.”

“It’s a full-scale disaster. If I don’t go I couldn’t even apply for a box of pencils. My kids need to move schools next year, and Margarita’s parents will retire in a few months. I can’t turn this down. And, anyway, I’d prefer to be involved than to leave it to some backslapping academic. At least we can be useful.”

“You hope.”

“Of course we can. We’ll make sure whatever needs to be done is done.”

Grigory picks a sprouting tuber from the ground, shifting it from hand to hand.

“What else did they say?”

“That’s it. They’ll send a car for us at five. They’ll give us the details at the airfield.”

Grigory throws the tuber into the next plot and gently sidefoots one of the ridges he’s created, watching the soil collapse upon itself. So much for the work he’s put in.

“Tell Margarita to come down here in a month or so. There’ll be a plot of new potatoes waiting for her.”

“I will.”

In his bedroom, Grigory stuffs shirts into a sleek brown suitcase. An expensive purchase from two years ago, although apart from a couple of weekend conferences it has lain unused under his bed. He has no idea what to pack. What should one wear to a reactor meltdown? Socks lie scattered at random in his drawer and he selects several, balling them into pairs before firing them into the case.

A thought causes him to pause. A nuclear disaster. He could die in such a place.

Grigory looks at the striped socks in his drawer. He’s walking into a poisonous lair and is packing shirts and socks. He sits on the bed and stares into the possibilities.

There were Saturdays, in his other life, when Maria would appear in the doorway carrying a bag of bread and a jar of chicken stock. Saturday lunches were a ritual for them, the time of the week when Grigory was at his most relaxed and they would relay news to each other, the small occurrences of the past days.

GRIGORY IMAGINES
the scene if she were here, seeing it as she would. Walking through the door to find her husband sitting frozen on their bed with a hastily packed suitcase. Of course she would think he was leaving her. So often she had asked him the question, usually after their lovemaking, when they were wrapped in each other, glistening from each other, “You’ll never leave me, will you?,” and he would smile and reassure her, amused and astonished that this question could still be asked after all their time together, the infinite doubts in this woman’s mind.

She would stand in the doorway, cradling a bag of bread, her mouth slightly open, framing itself in a question, waiting for voice and breath to complete the process. Her face with that lost look it could take on, like that of a child when it encounters something utterly beyond its experience, when it eats a fistful of sand or crashes into a pane of glass, that momentary suspension before the weeping begins in earnest.

Grigory would approach her, place his hands on her cheeks, and kiss her, leaning in over the shopping.

“There’s been an accident. A plant in the Ukraine. I have to leave in a couple of minutes.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. A few days. No more than a week.”

He would underestimate their time apart, attemping reassurance, but his voice would give him away, a vulnerabilty that only she could detect.

“It’s serious?”

“Yes. But I’ll be careful.”

She would step back and immerse herself in practicalities. She would instantly think through the clothes he would need and issue instructions for him to pick specific things out from the wardrobe and drawers as she grabbed toiletries from the bathroom shelves, towels from the airing cupboard. She’d lay them on the bed, folded and arranged, and he’d pack them with care.

A knock comes to the door.

He looks up, walks over. The driver stands there.

“Dr. Brovkin?”

“Yes. I’m just finishing up. I’ll meet you out front.”

“You must hurry. We can’t be late for the flight. I would be in great trouble.”

“I understand. Just let me pick up a final few things.”

The driver walks down the stairs, looking back to check that Grigory understands the urgency.

He walks into his bedroom, opening drawers, grabbing bundles of clothes and stuffing them into his case. Who cares what he brings? No one will notice if the surgeon is wearing a shirt that clashes with his jacket. He grabs his keys from the kitchen counter and walks into the stairwell, places a hand on the doorknob and looks over his apartment. His furniture. His pictures. He turns the key in the lock and walks down the stairs, and on the first landing he stops and knocks on the caretaker’s door. No answer. He’ll have Raisa give him a call, ask him to send on any post.

He hands his case to the driver, turns to his vacant window, and realizes that he won’t spend another night in that home. He’ll sell the furniture, get a different place. The past has extracted its price. Whoever he was in those rooms, he won’t be again.

At the airport, there are suitcases being loaded onto trolleys, some carpet bags. There are men standing, holding briefcases, looking for a connection, a familiar face. Grigory thinks he should have brought something to eat. He gets edgy, irritable, when he doesn’t eat. This is not something he recognized in himself as a single man; another characteristic that emerged from his time with her. An attendant asks people their names, ticking off a list on a clipboard. Grigory scans the area, just as the others are doing. He doesn’t see Vasily in the gathering. A man in a double-breasted grey suit approaches, offering his hand. Grigory shakes it.