White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  Garin paid the treasure hunters a dollar per kilogram of copper. Depending on the current price on the London exchange, the Chinese paid him 1.1 – 1.3 dollars. He said he exported more than 2000 tons of it, so he must have made almost half a million.

  Garin built a mosque in Sarzhal at his own expense, and brought in a mullah, but the fellow hanged himself, so he brought in another one.

  In 1959 two small atomic blasts of 1.2 kilotons each were detonated within the Polygon, eighteen kilometres from Sarzhal.The result were the lakes,Tel’kem-1 and Tel’kem-2. Garin was ten years old at the time. It was during the summer holidays, so he spent all day out on the steppe with the work brigades, who were busy harvesting the hay.

  ‘One day some army people came and told us to stay at home tomorrow, because there were going to be some tests. What, and leave the hay unharvested? That’s a good one – what foreman would let that happen? When it went off, I was no more than two kilometres from the site of the explosion. Some people were barely a kilometre away. Everyone who was closer than that was driven away. It was terrible. Our hayricks fell apart, and the people who were nearest to it were blinded. We piled onto the lorries and went back to the village.’

  Right behind them the army drove in with medical teams. They gathered all the people who had been close to the explosions. They lined them up in the street, told them to undress and very carefully examined each one, looking them over, taking measurements and blood for analysis, making notes and taking photos.

  ‘They weren’t quick enough to examine everyone – some people died in the queue for the doctor.’

  Then the doctors made a list, with 275 names on it, men and women, old, young and children. These people were always falling ill. Every so often they had to go and be examined at the oncology clinic in Semipalatinsk.

  ‘They kept us there for ten to fifteen days and examined us again, did X-rays, took blood and photos. By then we knew it was a death list, and that all the people on the list were bound to die, and die they did. First of all from radiation, then from cancer, if they hadn’t hanged themselves or cut their own throats earlier. Only eleven people from that list are still alive. I’m the eleventh.’

  THE SIXTH CIRCLE – THE CONQUISTADORES

  The military and scientists who conducted the tests worried most about the wind. The main thing was that it shouldn’t blow north, because there, on the border of the Polygon, was the city of Semipalatinsk-22, where they lived. In 1960, following the death of Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, the man who built the atom bomb for the Soviet Union, the city acquired his name.

  At one time 30,000 people lived here, nothing but scientists and military. You could say they were the Soviet elite. Almost all of them were Communist Party members, and almost all of them were Russians. There were no academic institutions training nuclear energy specialists in Kazakhstan.

  In Kurchatov there are four scientific institutes concerned with nuclear physics. There are three atomic reactors in operation here. Dimitr Zelensky is director of the Institute of Atomic Energy. He has been living here for thirty-seven years. He is a citizen of Russia in the service of Kazakhstan.

  ‘Why are you asking about the winds?’ He’s not happy that I’ve started with this. ‘After all, there were just some isolated incidents when radioactive gases were released from the tunnels. And as soon as the eruption took place, it was all dispersed in the sky, spread and blown around.’

  ‘Except that the oncology hospital . . .’

  ‘Oh! You’re still on about that hospital. People contracted cancer here in the days of Ghengis Khan as well, and there weren’t any explosions then. People fall ill because of tough living conditions, and because of dirt, especially in the villages, where there’s no hygiene or decent food. Poverty is a hundred times worse for cancer than radiation.’

  ‘Then why do more than thirty people commit suicide each year in Sarzhal?’

  ‘While the nuclear tests were being conducted here, the Soviet Union pumped loads of money into developing the region around the Polygon. When the Land of Soviets collapsed, the Soviet money came to an end, and these people were left with no source of income. They have nothing to feed their children. After the Russian army left, out of 30,000 people living in Kurchatov only 10,000 remained. The place emptied.’

  The flats are unoccupied. Windows look eerie with their frames torn out. The Irtysh restaurant and the Rossiya department store have closed down. Once my hotel was full of scholarly guests, but now I am the only customer. I’m the only person in the city to have hot water on tap. Even the house of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, head of the NKVD, who as chairman of the USSR’s special commission on armaments, built this city, has been converted into a church.

  ‘Our city used to be awash with flowers and full of children’, says Larissa Yakovlevna Bogushova. ‘You could leave your baby outside and go and gossip in a shop for hours. No-one would do him any harm. There was no fear of the pram being stolen. The women used to hang their washing out to dry in the yard and it never disappeared, even if you left it there for a week, but now we’ve been invaded by collective-farm workers from the greater area, and they’re a completely different sort.You never hang your washing out nowadays.’

  Larissa Yakovlevna is a clerk at the city administration. Her husband was a colonel, military commander for all the nuclear tests in the final decade of the Polygon’s active life. They’re waiting to leave for Russia, but there’s no apartment for them there. The fatherland no longer needs a physically and mentally ill officer suffering from lapses of memory.

  ‘It’s all because of the work he did, but here we never used to make a fuss. An army man’s an army man. The Party told him what to do and that was that. If I knew life was going to be the same as it used to be here, we’d never leave. But they’re always bringing in new people. There used to be nothing but Russians on our staircase, but two Kazakh families have moved in now. I’ve got nothing against them, but they’re different, so unpleasant, the place is so full of them, they spit on the stairs, but it wasn’t built for them. We’re at home, but it doesn’t feel like our home. It’s impossible to live here.’Tears drip onto her knees, but suddenly her eyes light up. ‘Down this street, which runs from the administration building, there were always parades on 9 May. The army used to march past at a ceremonial pace. So very neat, so extremely elegant, so smart! Officers and young men, the soldier boys. Our husbands came at the head, and we women would be there in our light clothes, short coats, with the children, waiting for them. There was laughter, joy, balloons, red carnations . . . and suddenly it’s all gone, and that was my whole life. I’d give anything to have it back.’

  ‘Your husband is seriously ill because he served within the Polygon.’

  ‘We were proud of this posting.’

  ‘Proud?’

  ‘Of course. He did exceptional things. The Party let him in on the Soviet Union’s top secrets. He was chosen for it. He did important, useful and necessary things.’

  ‘Necessary to whom, Larissa Yakovlevna?’

  ‘To you as well.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes indeed.You.The entire socialist camp. It was necessary for the balance of power in the world, for peace.’

  LarissaYakovlevna’s parents come from Armenia, although they are Russians. She was born in Batumi on the Black Sea, where her father served in the army. Then they lived in Brest on the Polish border, and when she married she came to Kazakhstan.

  ‘So where is my fatherland?’ she wonders. ‘Maybe it’s like in the song: “My address is not a city, a house or a street. My address is the Soviet Union.” When a person lived in communism, he saw a light ahead of him, he had hope for the future, but once that hope is gone, he doesn’t feel like living.’

  Tears drip onto her knees again.

  ‘I haven’t seen my parents for seven years now. I’d like to go, but whenever a person visits their old father and mother, he should take something, help them somehow, but I have
n’t the means. And I don’t know if it would be better to go to them with my pockets empty, or send them a little money, though of course they could die at any moment.’

  THE SEVENTH CIRCLE – THE STUDY AIDS STORE

  In a corridor at the Institute for Radiation Safety and Ecology in Kurchatov there are some exhibits in jars full of formalin.

  The rabbit is ideal for researching ocular damage. So in the jar we have a whole, black rabbit with burned-out eyes. There’s also a sheep with no wool, some lacerated camel lungs, burst dog hearts, brains with haemorrhages visible to the naked eye, and an entire piglet that looks roasted, as if it were fresh off the grill. There’s also a cow’s head and a dog with its fur burned off, stark naked. It must be a mongrel, or a Pomeranian, but it’s hard to tell without the shaggy coat. Or maybe it’s a Laika, like the dog abandoned in space to die of starvation or suffocation. Instead of a collar there’s a piece of steel wire embedded in its flesh because of the heat. It had to be tied up somehow so it wouldn’t scarper from its zone. Even so it was lucky – the one from the 1250-metre zone didn’t croak until the next day.

  THE EIGHTH CIRCLE – CHILDREN OF THE POLYGON

  Father Fyodor from the Semipalatinsk church tells me about her.

  She was a Russian. Her name was Sveta. She lived in Semipalatinsk. She was a student in Moscow, at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, in the highly prestigious department for diplomacy and international relations. That was in the Soviet era, when the Land of Soviets used to educate thousands of left-leaning students from Third World countries. Perestroika was soon to begin.

  The girl married a black student from the same department, broke off her studies and went with him to Sudan. Once there, her husband turned out to have three wives already, and several mistresses, whom he kept in a harem. He was a communist, as well as being very rich and a devout Muslim. In Africa that is entirely possible.

  So a girl from the fatherland of Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space, ended up in a harem. And she fought. A hundred times she tried to escape. Once she was even hidden on the yacht of a French journalist who tried to steal her away, but somehow they always caught her. Not even the Soviet consul’s intervention was of any help.

  Finally the girl gave birth to a son. He was very badly handicapped. The husband threw Sveta out, so she took the child and went home to her parents in Semipalatinsk.

  ‘What a life she had’, says Father Fyodor out of pity.‘It was painful to look at them when they arrived here. The child – not just black as the devil, but sick too.’

  He was ten years old when he died.

  Even the smallest dose of radiation can cause damage to the hereditary mechanism, in other words the DNA molecules, and consequently lead to the genetic disorder, handicap or death of the irradiated person’s offspring.

  There is no threshold, no minimum dose below which no damage will ever occur. Genetic defects are probabilistic in nature, which means that the probability, i.e. the frequency of disorders, rather than their nature, depends on the dose of radiation.

  The greatest number of disorders are found in Ayaguz, 300 kilometres south of Semipalatinsk.

  There were two cities in the Soviet Union – Odessa, and small Ayaguz, a city of 50,000 – two cities deserving the worst reputation as the most dangerous, bandit-infested places. Odessa had the sea and a port, while here there is nothing but the steppe and some prison camps – dozens of them. So it has remained to this day. Most of the bandits eventually come out of prison, but as they have no money for a ticket home, they stay here and do their robbing in Ayaguz.

  The children’s home, or dyetdom as the Russians call it for short, was founded here in 1942 for war orphans evacuated from Russia. By 1956 the orphans had grown up, but meanwhile a large number of mentally handicapped children had suddenly appeared in the area. The home changed its profile.

  A gate. On the fence, high up, there are tangles of barbed wire. A courtyard. A group of boys have come out for a walk – but they’re not allowed to. Now and then an old bag in a white coat screams ‘Sit!!’, and the boys sit down on a bench.

  ‘Sit!!’ This time it’s a trusty who screams it. It’s easy to recognize him by his better clothing. The trusties are cleverer than the others, they’re able to talk, so they are the chosen few, they’re set apart and are more important. They do loyal service and they know no mercy. Sylvia, for example, is so good that they let her stay on at the dyetdom even though she reached the age of seventeen twelve years ago. She’s very smart. She got an Adidas tracksuit from the principal, because she really is good.

  The art of it depends on keeping the kids in a single bunch. The old bag in white sits and keeps an eye on it all from a distance like a shepherd. The trusties are like sheep dogs – if a kid wanders off, he smacks him on the ear. The children are sitting squeezed onto the bench, on the rim of a small sandpit and in a metal cage suspended above the ground.This is the place they like best, so about six of them are crowded in there. Once upon a time there was a slide here too, but it broke.

  For twenty-seven years Sabr Ramazanov taught PE, and now he’s principal of the orphanage. His face is almost purple, with burst blood vessels in his eyes.

  It’s fitting to drink to our acquaintance. He gets a bottle of ‘Old Russian’ vodka out of the cupboard.

  ‘We’ve got twenty morons, 120 imbeciles and eight idiots here, and I have to feed them’, he says. ‘Let’s do it this way. You send me, that is the children’s home, humanitarian aid, I’ll write you out all the necessary receipts, so you won’t pay any customs tax, and we’ll split the profit.’

  The kitchen manageress brings a snack and the chief accountant the relevant document. It’s already filled in, all that has to be added is what, where from, and the dispatch date.

  ‘I did some business here in the Soviet era’, says the principal. ‘I fired bricks. In a single season I used to deliver a million of them to the state farm. I wasn’t even in the Party, because a Party member couldn’t get away with doing business.’

  During the day the children aren’t allowed to sit in the bedrooms or in the dayrooms. Each group has its own tiny room, with the charm of a prison cell.They’re not allowed to leave it, or Sylvia will give them a slap. There’s nothing here apart from benches fixed to all the walls. The children are on sedatives. All day they sit and rock. They have no occupation, no toys, and in the entire house I only found one board game. When I stretch out a hand to stroke their faces, many of the children flinch as if dodging a blow.

  I go round all the groups, but at the end I go back to the little ones again, where I started. The ragged clothes they were dressed in when I looked in on them the first time are their ‘Sunday best’. They were changed again while the principal was treating me to Old Russian. Now I’m seeing the kids in their everyday tatters, miserably torn and dirty. They’re barefoot and almost naked.

  THE NINTH CIRCLE – THE ROOM UPSTAIRS

  The ninth circle, inmost hell, is in a room upstairs. This is the room for children who cannot control their bodily functions, but they are not entirely disabled and are not lying in bed. They’ve devised a very sophisticated instrument of torture for them – all day long they suffer in the stocks.

  You know the sort of church furniture that stands against the walls in the chancels of old cathedrals? They’re choir stalls, long carved benches with armrests. The children in this group are stuck in something similar, but smaller, with a hole instead of a seat. Their little arms and legs are tied to the bench. The seats have been cut out of their clothes, I mean their rags, so their bare behinds hang above the holes, with full potties underneath them.

  All day long they writhe, bend, flex and tense in their bonds. But they want to run, fly, or scratch their ears . . .

  For the time being we are designing our apparatus on the supposition that there are no sentient beings either on Mars or Venus. But what if they are discovered there? Then we shall try our best to construct equ
ipment enabling us to make wireless and television contact with them. Only then shall we set about man’s flight to those planets.

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  The town.The men are moving a piano.

  A small corner of heaven

  The first time, Christ rode on a donkey, drank wine and lived in chastity. Now he prefers a Yamaha snow scooter, he’s a vegetarian and teetotaller, and his wife is pregnant again. His second wife. He divorced the first one, so she went off to the city and started studying clinical psychology.

  Three of the world’s six living Christs are in Russia. One of them has not yet manifested himself, but he already has followers and his own Church. The second is called Grigory Grabovoy and he’s in prison, because he took money for their resurrection from the parents of children murdered by the terrorists at Beslan. The third is Sergei Anatolievich Torop, a former militiaman and self-taught painter whose followers call him Vissarion, which means ‘Life Giving’. However, their usual name for him is the Teacher.

  But this Christ doesn’t shout himself hoarse by a lake, in a town square or up a hill. He is happiest using the Internet, where his Last Testament is being published on a running basis, a vast, currently eight-volume tome in which an ex-rock musician called Vadim Retkin, who is now Vissarion’s court evangelist, records his deeds and words. This book provides very strict regulations for the life of his followers, who claim to number almost 100,000 worldwide.

  The Teacher instructs them on how to satisfy a man in bed, as well as how to keep him happy at the table, how many children to have and how to bring them up, what to eat, how to boil the water to make tea, for whom to vote in elections and where to piss – meaning where not to.

  In the Soviet era the Russian got used to prohibitions, so the Teacher has been able to serve them up as many as sixty-one commandments. Here we find a creative development and elaboration of the ten that mankind received from God on Mount Sinai, such as the ban on taking offence, for example, on gossiping, or on eating meat, which is obligatory even for animals – it definitely falls within Moses’ ‘Thou shalt not kill.’