We Are Not in Pakistan (2 page)

Viktor, Anatoli and Anatoli's twenty-year-old wife Laima take Olena and Galina to admire the huge white blocks of the power station. In the shuttle bus, Anatoli and blond, plump Laima steal a long kiss in the seat behind Olena as Viktor points out the turbine halls, the administrative block where he works, the three chimneys of the old reactors and the red and white chimney of the new one, Unit 4. Olena half turns, catches Laima's eye, hides a smile. But Viktor is pointing out a line of pylons marching like giants across sunflower and wheat fields and telling Galina they supply electricity to Kyiv. If he has noticed, he will say Laima should be more dignified.

Anatoli shows them the flagstone commemorating the opening of the power station in March, 1984. He and Laima attended the ceremony, along with ministers, Party leaders from Kyiv, and the President of the Academy of Sciences. Olena wishes they had been here for the speeches, the fireworks, the lights, the Zils pulling up before the entrance to the House of Culture, and so many Volgas in a cavalcade down Lenin Street.

The bus passes a slogan painted on the wall of the plant: Communism Will Triumph! When Anatoli rises, stands in the aisle, and salutes, Olena wonders if he is joking. Laima and Viktor don't laugh, and others in the bus don't laugh, so Olena doesn't either.

“We employ seventy people per shift,” Viktor tells Olena on
the way home. “In capitalist power stations, they can only employ ten or eleven.”

Olena is proud for Viktor, so proud she could cry.

But a few days later, as Viktor slices into the molten core of Olena's Chicken Kyiv, he says, “It's nothing like Moscow. My title is Assistant Safety Engineer, but maybe it should be Official Signer of Certificates of Exemption. And now I know which workers work and which play cards and read books. Most are happy with grades of four and three.”

Olena remains silent.
I too sometimes miss my friends in Moscow, and my little students, but not for long. Viktor will get used to it soon. He must — what else can he do?

Viktor dips half the chicken in the butter oozing from the other half and stuffs it in his mouth. “But for everyone to get a five and be rated a pyatorka would take more organization and training. Effort that can't be shown off to Party leaders visiting from Moscow.”

With that, he licks his fingers and laughs as she never heard him laugh in Moscow.

It's better that I'm at home now. Viktor will never have to wait for dinner. He'll never get frustrated enough to slap me. Many other women are not so lucky.

As she undresses for bed, Olena can smell warm garlic from her special borscht all the way to the bedroom. She made it for Viktor and Galina as a celebration: only a month since their arrival at Pripyat, and already someone is transferred and Viktor has been promoted to Deputy Safety Engineer in Unit 4. He has received permission to own a motorcycle. And a paper Viktor wrote, published under his director's name, as all his papers are, actually came to the attention of Plant Director Brukhanov.

Olena has put Galina to bed and persuaded her to stay there. She slips into her nightgown, then between the sheets with Victor. His body presses hers to sizzling elation.

With the weight of his arm and leg across her, Viktor whispers, “One more promotion, and we'll celebrate without a condom.”

Olena's inside voice is saying,
Tell him. Say it, tell him.
But her unthinkable is unsayable.

“I want a boy,” she says instead. “To know what you were like when you were a little boy. And maybe another girl. Galina should never feel alone when we are no longer with her. She must not be an only child, as we are.”

Viktor rolls away, clasps his hands behind his head and looks beyond her. “When I was a boy, the plans for the RBMK reactors were just approved, and look, here I am, husbanding them.”

Husbanding is not the right word. Maybe Comrade Borodin created a new temple and Viktor is part of its priesthood — but Olena doesn't want to say that.

She is drifting but Viktor is now awake. “We move so much faster these days. Can you believe it's taken nine years for a recommendation from the head of safety in Moscow to arrive on my desk?”

“Was it not important?” says Olena.

“Oh, it was just telling us that extra boron rods should be installed here in the Lenin station, because they found they needed more for the Kursk reactor. But nine years!”

“What will you do?” Olena yawns, head on his chest, his heartbeat steady in her ear.

“Do? Nothing. We have heat sensors, water to absorb neutrons, automatic pumps, the Skala computer, and two hundred and eleven control rods installed already. If our reactors were designed by capitalists only interested in profit, maybe I would worry. But they're designed by Soviet engineers for the people.
We have procedures, safeguards, rules, rules — almost too many to remember.”

“But what if …”

“An accident is unthinkable. And besides, the rods cost billions of rubles! By the time we ask Moscow to buy them, it could be another nine years until we get them.”

Olena drifts beneath a leaden shield. Boron rods dip and plunge in her dreams, cooling the core.

March - April 1986

Olena takes Galina to a performance of the Babi Yar Symphony and meets Rivka in the line before the House of Culture. A Belorussian, like many here. Rivka too lived in Moscow before she came to Pripyat.

She has no husband or children. But somehow Rivka doesn't look sorrowful. With her cloud of brown hair, her sharply pointed chin and large eyes, she looks like Princess Diana.

Olena isn't sure Rivka likes her. Olena likes Rivka but she doesn't say that to Viktor. He might say, in his Party voice, She's too chatty, when he really means, Don't see her again.

Two weeks later, in Pripyat's central square, Olena stops to buy radishes from a babushka — she still has the Moscow habit of always carrying her string shopping bag. A big sign above the weather-beaten old woman reads
Tribuna Energetica.
Pripyat's newspaper, where Rivka works.

Olena decides she will apply for an office job, just a few days a week and while Galina is at school. Two salaries will be better than one. She climbs the stairs into the grey concrete building beneath the sign and asks a stern-faced woman for Rivka. When Rivka enters the reception area, the room feels brighter.

How kindly she greets Olena! She even shows Olena her office.

Such a big newspaper with such a big sign is published from only a few rooms. But it's a new city, a new newspaper.

Rivka shows Olena into her director's office and introduces her. The director says to Olena, “Your husband is working at the power station? Tell him a fourth unit is unnecessary, and so are the fifth and sixth. Just hook all the pylons to Rivka and her energy will fuel the country.”

Rivka laughs, and a spark flies between her and the director like a little of the current that flows between Viktor and Olena at night. In her own office, Rivka shows Olena a poem she wrote to commemorate International Women's Day. Olena has never met anyone who writes poetry. Rivka asks what Olena thinks of her poem.

“It is beautiful,” says Olena immediately. “Believe me, beautiful!”

Without checking with her director, Rivka tells Olena she can start working with her the day after May Day.

Olena feels she has been given a great gift. But then she is not sure … how will she tell Viktor?

Back in the square, Olena adds carrots from the babushka to her shopping bag. Then the joke strikes her and she laughs. Rivka asked what Olena thought of her poem — as if what Olena thinks mattered!

Viktor is picking at his food, though Olena has served one of his favourites, fish kotlety. She wants to tell him about Rivka, about Rivka's poem, about her new job. She will tell him that Laima is working too, and Anatoli doesn't object. She is waiting for the right moment.

“Our power station has been ordered to produce consumer goods,” says Viktor, washing his breaded fish down with vodka. “Because of Gorbachev and his glasnost.” His eyebrows knot and rise. “What can a reactor make but electricity? Personal nuclear bombs and batteries, maybe?”

This is not the right moment.

Viktor tosses and turns all night, worrying, worrying, till Olena rises, fetches oil and massages him. “You'll think of something,” she assures him as he falls asleep.

And the next day, over breakfast, he does think of a good suggestion: meat-mincing machines. He leaves for a meeting with his director and Plant Director Burkhanov. But that evening, he tells her they rejected his suggestion. They decided to propose hay storage facilities to Party leaders in Moscow.

“Imagine how that will look: horse-drawn carts delivering hay to the Lenin reactor,” he says with a hurt laugh.

Olena will tell Viktor about her job when he is more calm. Maybe on the weekend before May Day, when they are going to Sochi on the Black Sea.

Olena packs a picnic basket with three matzoh in a napkin, a bottle of Georgian wine, and horseradish. She adds a few sweet prune-stuffed pampushky and a lokshyna noodle ring filled with creamed vegetables. No salo, no sausage.

With Galina, she rides an accordion bus that stops at a village with no name. Her grandfather is lean and bright-eyed, and these days he's more hopeful, he says because of the new man Gorbachev and his glasnost, but Olena knows it's because she is closer. Who else will remember to bring him Passover foods he cannot find in old Chernobyl, the nearest town?

Outside Dedushka's wooden farmhouse, the scent of black
earth surrounds Olena as if she were a child again. Dedushka has a Passover present for Galina — a mink purse that belonged to her great-grandmother. He brings out photo albums and gives her a black and white snapshot of Olena's mother. The little girl balances her plate on her knees and chews solemnly as she listens to a story about the night Olena was born. Later, Dedushka goes inside and returns triumphant, the tarnished rattle that once cheered baby Olena clutched in his hand. “I remember things your mother cannot,” he says, laughing as he gives it to Galina.

Friends stop to greet him, linger to exclaim over Olena and Galina and ask his advice. A farmer gives Galina a ride in his cart; Olena will bathe the manure smell away when she gets home.

Olena tells Dedushka they will leave on Saturday morning, tomorrow, after Viktor finishes the safety test at the station. She cannot hide the pride in her voice: they will be guests of Viktor's director at his dacha. And now, since Viktor's director is travelling with Director Burkhanov to Moscow to report their progress on hay storage, it will be just Viktor, Galina and Olena.

Six days — just the three of them in Sochi! Olena has made pampushky and berry-filled nalysnyky. Viktor has stocked up on vodka because Anatoli told him Gorbachev will ban it after May 1. Olena has packed cans of dried milk in a suitcase.

They'll be home on Thursday to watch the May Day parades. Galina is excited about May Day, and so are all her friends. Olena too loves the parade, the streamers, the flags, the placards with the familiar slogans.

“Enjoy this week, Olena,” says Dedushka, as she kisses his forehead and brings Galina forward to say goodbye. “There'll never be another like it.”

As soon as Olena gets home, the phone rings. Matushka, from Kyiv. A message for Viktor: “Ask what have I done that he is not coming to visit his Matushka on Passover weekend.”

The column of Olena's neck feels as hollow as if she had scoured it, removed her larynx and other organs. Her anger sours the sauerkraut soup she makes for dinner.

And she doesn't tell Viktor before he takes the bus to work at ten that evening.

She will tell him when he gets back.

There was an accident. At the plant. Viktor's voice is telling Olena this. He says it again. It's five o'clock on Saturday morning, and he is saying to keep Galina home and stay inside. “Not serious,” he says. “Don't worry. Not serious at all.”

“Are you telling the truth?”

“I'm so tired,” says his Party voice. “Stop your chatter. Close all the windows.”

Outside the balcony window, past the laundry, Olena sees it — a red column rising over the power station into the dark sky. She closes her eyes and the afterglow pulses against her eyelids. Viktor said she shouldn't worry. Fire engines will be there already. But her inside voice is saying
oh no, oh no.

Seven o'clock comes and Olena is still waiting. Instead of dawn, a lesser darkness is spreading behind a column of smoke. Red flames glow and grow. What is Viktor doing? Where is he? What is his exposure? Thirty-five rems an hour is the limit. Then evacuation. But a safety engineer must continue working as long as he can. What does she know but the basics? Radiation sickness — nausea, diarrhea, changes in the blood.

But only if a person is exposed to more than one hundred rems in an hour.

Olena opens the balcony door a crack and sniffs.

Trees. The last fragrance of April. A faint scent like rain falling on a dusty road.

Olena can't see the radiation, she can't sense it in her body. But it's there. Is it going into and through her Viktor right now?

Her knees turn liquid. She has a sudden need to pray. She, an atheist. Dedushka would laugh at her. And she doesn't know a single prayer. A Schevchenko poem is all that comes to mind: “No, let us not depart, nor go. It is early still …”

She will wait till eight, and if Viktor isn't home by then, she will even pray to Lenin.

Seven-thirty. Another call. Viktor has been taken to Pripyat hospital. “It's only gas,” says the nurse on the phone.

Olena leaves Galina with a neighbour. She runs to the bus stop.

Is it the air or fear burning her eyes, her throat?

Ten minutes. She has wasted ten minutes.

She walks and runs all the way to the hospital. Military vehicles pass, soldiers block some roads — she takes detours. Other women, young and old, are running like her. They join her in the crowd outside the hospital. Olena begins to jostle and yell at the soldiers.