We Are Not in Pakistan (5 page)

Maybe it is not Chernobyl at all, maybe it's because they know Galina is a zhid.

Olena has told Galina she should be more friendly in school and not hold grudges over small things. She must remind Galina again.

“Galina, the sirniki are getting cold!” Olena opens the door of the tub room. A pale oval framed in wet black curls turns to her from the tub.

“Mamushka,” says Galina. Her eyes — so wide.

Olena draws closer. She leans forward to wipe that miserable expression from her daughter's face.

“What? What happened, Galina?”

Water pooling between her daughter's legs flows pinky red.

Olena laughs, she explains, she tells Galina she has become a woman. She holds Galina's wet body close, pulls the tub stopper and washes away her little girl's fears. But she cannot laugh away her own.

Is not ten years too early for Galina's first period? Olena's came at fifteen. And so much blood — was Olena's flow as heavy? Galina's nosebleeds and dizzy spells have kept her home from school more days than other children.

Olena's just-fried sirniki cool. The fourth movement, Festival in Baghdad, plays itself out in the distance. She finds a sanitary napkin, helps Galina dress, brushes her hair. The hairbrush needs cleaning again. Is the amount of hair in it more or less than usual?

That evening, she refrains from telling Viktor about Galina until he has finished dinner. When she finishes, he sits grim faced,
a muscle twitching in his cheek. Olena's inside voice begins to say,
oh no, oh no,
as if she could have prevented Galina's period from arriving.

“I had a letter from Vienna today,” Viktor says. “The nuclear station has been cancelled.”

Another disappointment. Added to the disappointment that all the Soviet power stations to which Viktor applied have halted their expansions.

“And a letter from Italy,” he says. “They are cancelling all their nuclear power plans. Anatoli says not to bother trying Sweden — the government there is not hiring. They're phasing out all nuclear power by 2010.”

“Protesters?”

“Protesters know nothing!” shouts Viktor and bangs his fist on the table. “They're going to return all of us to coal and steam. They're going to force us into wars for oil. Reactors are safe — if you run them safely!”

Olena thinks of exemption certificates but erases the thought. In the market yesterday she met Laima wearing a scarf that couldn't hide the red, swollen side of her face. And Viktor is as quick-tempered as Anatoli.

“Maybe nuclear power is not good,” she says. “Couldn't we harness the wind?”

“Windmills? Yes, and maybe we can design them with hay storage right from the beginning.”

“What about the sun?”

“Olena, I'm not trained for the sun, the moon, the wind or the stars. The atom is all I know. After the accident, the Lenin station was supplying power again within five months — can protesters do that? After their protests, they go home to dinners made on stoves, to lights that run on electricity, to refrigerators that draw power from a grid.”

“Don't worry, Viktor,” says Olena in her most soothing voice.
“Jobs in capitalist countries are not for life — they can hire you but also fire you. So why leave our country? If you don't like this apartment, they are building new ones in Slavutich for all the workers.”

“Slavutich is too close to Pripyat.”

Viktor cannot trust official assurances that the food is safe, that the water is pure. And he cannot trust what is revealed now because revelation means it was concealed before, and where there was concealment, there may be more to reveal — how can he know?

Lies breed more lies: doctors who sign death documents that do not mention radiation exposure, scientists who sign fraudulent dosimeter readings, directors who tear pages of radiation level readings out of the records. International energy conferences where plant operators are blamed for pushing the emergency A-Z button.

Maybe it would be better if Viktor were like Anatoli, able to read only Russian and Ukrainian, because the scientific journals he reads in English confuse and upset him. International agencies are now saying exposures lower than thirty-five rems can be dangerous. One article said boiling the water does not eliminate radiation, another that the Soviet Union's remaining fourteen RBMK reactors are flawed.

He'd be really upset if she told him their new neighbours say vodka and cranberry juice are useless and may even be harmful. And Viktor is too angry for Olena to tell him, but two days ago Rivka called to say goodbye — she is taking a leave of absence to travel to some villages far outside the Forbidden Zone. Soldiers are taking more radiation readings and moving cows from collective farms and she wants to find out why.

“No one tells our comrades any results,” she said. “I wrote an article asking who gave orders for a nursery school to be built beside a radioactive meadow, but my director will not publish it. In
another article, I asked why contaminated meat is being shipped to other parts of the nation, and why clean milk and meat is not being brought into the Forbidden Zone. He will not publish it.”

Olena wakes at three o'clock and finds Viktor writing to the Jewish Social Services: yes, we'll go.

Plans are secret, Viktor says. Besides Matushka, Anatoli and Laima are the only ones he trusts with the news. So Olena couldn't bid Rivka do svidanya, even if Rivka were back in Kyiv. Goodbye to Matushka will only be temporary, Viktor promises.

If Dedushka could be allotted an apartment in Kyiv, Olena would want to stay. But since he is now forbidden to leave the Zone of Exclusion, it doesn't matter if she is in Kyiv or America. Maybe once she and Viktor are settled, they will let all the people like Dedushka go where they want. Maybe then Dedushka can come to America too.

Anyway, no one has asked Olena. Where Viktor goes, she and Galina go, as if blown by the wind.

Goodbyes to Dedushka are possible only by telephone and through Anatoli, who has an official pass to visit the zone. When he returns, Anatoli says Dedushka looks well, has only a touch of radiophobia. He spends all day writing to the regional authorities — “Send clean products, send Geiger counters, send clean milk, send sugar, send fish. Our wood is contaminated — please install gas.”

In the spring he will be forced to evacuate to an apartment in Minsk and given fifteen rubles a month to buy uncontaminated meat and vegetables. Anatoli called Dedushka ungrateful because Dedushka called it coffin money.

The only message Dedushka sent for Olena was, “Go soon. For Galina's sake, go.”

It's December, and almost a new decade. A future has arrived when Olena thought there was no future.

She is not ready.

March 1990

Going to America means going to Italy. Soon after they arrive in the apartment building run by the Jewish Social Services, Viktor says he feels better. His burns have faded, he looks stronger. Galina's hair has recovered its curly sheen, and she hasn't had a dizzy spell in weeks. At first her little mushroom wept for Matushka, but now she runs errands and gives the other refugees in the building haircuts. When they pay her in chocolates, she brings it all “home” to Olena in her satchel, her eyes shining.

“No chocolates, you don't need chocolates,” Olena says. “You tell them they must tutor you in English and mathematics. Tell them you will pay by haircuts. Or I will pay by haircuts.”

Galina is learning Italian and English so fast she even translates for Olena. But Olena worries about Galina going on buses with Italian men — they admire her black curls. They look and look at her, as if she is a prostitute. And Galina just laughs at them. Italian men don't like it when a little girl laughs at them … one followed her home and stood below her window all night, waiting. Then Galina didn't laugh.

Olena tells Viktor they should go to Austria, Germany, anywhere. “We must leave now — I don't like this!”

“Germany!” he says. “They have enough refugees and now no wall to keep them out. And I don't speak German. That man will go away.”

But then a week passes and the man is still there every night, looking up at Galina's window.

Viktor becomes sure that man is KGB — who else would watch an apartment night after night, maybe in the daytime as well?

“He is dark and short,” says Olena. “To me, he looks Italian.”

“No,” says Viktor, “he's KGB.”

“But why would he follow us? Gorbachev and the KGB have enough to worry about — Azerbaijan, Czechoslovakia, now Lithuania.”

“Because I resigned from the Party before leaving. Otherwise, how can I enter America?”

“You could have just
said
you had resigned.”

“I don't want to begin my life there with a lie.”

So again they leave for America, this time by way of Austria, again thanks to Jewish Social Services. On a cool, breezy night, in a rented Fiat.

This is a good feeling, that we are together, just the three of us. And that everything we own can move with us in this car, away from Unit 4.

October 1991

Olena is sitting at the kitchen table of a two-bedroom apartment above the Teri-Oat convenience store in Shorewood, a town on the lakeshore north of Chicago. She is trying to write her November rent check.

She would like to plug her ears against Bette Midler's voice wafting from Galina's room. And Galina's ears too. Her daughter has begun to believe what the song says, “God is watching us,” as if the mythical spirit is KGB. And if God is watching, why must he do it “from a distance”? Galina is not the only one who plays the song till it is inescapable; all this year it was the favourite of American soldiers sitting in dusty tents in Kuwait fighting what Viktor called the First Oil War.

A hundred and twenty dollars. How much is that in rubles?

Do not calculate it — just write.

Such a rich country, with no propiska — anyone can just live where they want. But they make their comrades pay so much for housing. And education! Only school is free — how can the state be so irresponsible that it will not pay for college? And so many schools, none of them teaching the same thing to children the same age, no one in Washington telling them what to teach so they can compete with children in other countries. Some people in Olena's ESL class graduated from those schools, born right here in America and can't read their own language. The volunteers who teach her English can't speak Russian or Ukrainian. They teach English as a Second Language, as if Olena grew up like them, speaking only one language.

A hundred and twenty dollars is also the amount she has paid thirteen times now, every month, to Jewish Social Services for the air fares, for their three months in Italy, for the three months in Austria. And she will pay it twenty-three times more.

And Jewish Social Services volunteers are teaching her that Passover, Yom Kippur, Purim and Hanukkah are not just days for cooking special foods. They say real Jews don't eat sausage, or any pork for that matter. They say God is everywhere. Like radiation.

Already Olena has a job; after three months of training last year she works at the Windy City Day Spa giving massages. She doesn't have to speak English for that. She gives “great” massages, say her clients. Olena thought the word “great” should only be used for Party officials or tsars and tsarinas, but here everything and everyone is “great.” Her old country, the Soviet Union, is like Great Britain — no longer great. The newspapers and TV all rejoice that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have declared their independence.

Would the women she massages think Olena was no longer “great” if she told them she comes from Chernobyl? Maybe they
wouldn't want her hands on their skin. She'd become like her poor Dedushka. His letter says no one talks to him in his new apartment in Minsk, no one visits, so afraid are they.

Olena writes the check, puts it in an envelope and seals it. She licks a stamp before she realizes it is self-sticking, unlike Soviet stamps. She presses it to the envelope anyway, not wanting to waste it.