Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  Miklas sighed. "Are you still determined to volunteer to stay here?"

  "Why not?"'

  "A thousand reasons why not! If you must volunteer, why not to work on one of the new villages they are building for the farmers? At least there would be people there."

  "And work fourteen hours a day to dig foundations for their houses? Not me," Konov said, though that was not the real reason he had rejected the idea.

  "But at least from that you may come away without two heads," Miklas grumbled.

  "For you," Konov said, "another head would be a very good thing. Pick your building."

  "Oh, I think the factory needs to be guarded most closely," Miklas said at once.

  "Then do it," said Konov, knowing that what Miklas most wanted to guard there was the dozen cases of canned kvass and Coca-Cola the first soldiers had found in the radio factory's canteen. Now they were more than half consumed. He debated warning Miklas against taking off his mask to drink a Coke, but he knew that would be no use. Anyway, he consoled himself, the inside of the factory was fairly clean.

  Almost a quarter of Pripyat was fairly clean, in fact — well, nearly fairly clean. On the best of its blocks there were pockets of intractable radiation — soaked into the paving or trapped in the cracks of a building — that would take a demolition crew to remove. You marked those with the warning signs, and you hurried past them. But there were whole buildings where the radiation level was barely above background.

  On the surface, though, the town of Pripyat had hardly changed in three weeks. It was like some lifeless geological formation. No doubt it would weather and perhaps erode away, but only over long periods of time. Nothing else would change. Doors that had been left open remained open. The skis and baby carriages and bicycles on the balconies stayed untouched. Cars that had been left behind by their owners, pulled up under a tree with their canvas coverings protecting them against the elements, were still unmoved. The winds and the rains had wrapped some of the washing around the lines so that the garments no longer danced in the breeze; some garments had danced a bit too passionately and torn themselves free, and now lay crumpled in a gutter or draped across a dead rosebush. Konov stopped at a corner, hesitated, then entered the six-story apartment building on the right.

  These were good new buildings, put up for the workers at the Chernobyl plant, and although they had been erected in haste, someone had seen that the concrete was solid and the fittings worked. Of course, there was no power in these buildings now. The little elevator was there on the ground floor, its door open, but Konov hardly glanced at it as he began to mount the stairs.

  Most of the tenants of the building had locked their apartments carefully when they left. On the top floor, Konov tried each door with a firm twist and a solid shake, but all four were locked. That was all he was required to do, but he took a moment to put his ear against each door in turn. It was not looters that he expected to find, but there was always the chance that some family had, in its panic and rush, forgotten a cat, a dog, a bird.

  There was nothing to be heard. Konov descended a flight of stairs and repeated the process on the fifth floor. Again nothing, but on the fourth floor a family named Dazhchenko— the name was on a card by the door — had been so hopelessly rushed or so foolishly trusting that they had left the door to their flat unlocked. Konov opened it and entered the gloomy hallway for a look around.

  He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the air inside. There were some very bad smells in this place. His business, however, was not to smell but to look, and he began his inspection. Just on the left of the entrance was a child's room — no, actually a room for two children, Konov corrected himself; there were clothes for two young girls hanging against the wall. One had perhaps been a four-year-old or thereabouts. The other possessed the skirt and blouse of a teenage Young Pioneer. The next room belonged to the parents, a double bed nearly filling it; it was still unmade, and the drawers of the chest were pulled open, the contents in disarray. There was a picture of Lenin on the wall, but (Konov smiled) there was also an ikon. Both bedrooms were bright in the sun from the windows, but the unpleasant smells remained.

  If it had been his own apartment, Konov thought, he would have opened all the windows at once; but it was not, and besides, what was the use? Whatever smelled foul would go on doing so, and an open window would let the rain in next time the weather changed.

  And in this place at this time it was not only rot and mildew that the rain might bring.

  The stink of decay came from the kitchen. The refrigerator door had been left open. Whatever was inside had rotted thoroughly. Gasping, Konov closed the door; it was all he could do, though he wondered if the gases of decomposition from whatever was in there — a stew? a chicken? — might not blow the door off as they swelled.

  It was, he confirmed for himself, a very nice apartment. There were two little doors at the end of the hall; one opened on a sink and tub, the other on a commode; and someone had carefully cut out pictures from some foreign magazine — the language appeared to be Swedish or German to Konov — and pinned them to the back of the door. The pictures were of Lady Di and her husband, the Prince of Wales; so this was where the little girls sat for their private business, gazing romantically at the beautiful royal pair. In the dining room there was a small but quite new television set; it was on the floor, its electrical cords wrapped neatly around it — the father had tried to take it with them, no doubt, and discovered at the last minute that it was impossible to add one more thing.

  But there was neither looter nor abandoned pet to be found in this place, and Konov had other floors to investigate. He fiddled with the lock on the apartment door until he got it to snap in the locked position behind him; so at least when the family returned they would find their home as they left it. Smells and all.

  If ever the family returned.

  When Konov started on his second building he paused on the step, looking about and listening. It was a warm day, but not a silent one. He could hear bulldozers in some other part of the town, scraping away at the tainted soil so that the worst of it could be hauled away and buried. A nearer rumble was one of the bright orange water trucks, methodically washing down the empty streets of their poisoned dust one more time. (But who would wash the poisons from the roofs, the walls, the windowsills?) Konov started to call to Miklas, who was no doubt smoking a cigarette with his hood off as he loitered in the factory building across the way. . and then he stopped, listening.

  Someone had very quietly closed a door somewhere not far above him.

  If it was a looter, it was a very small one. Konov stood out of sight behind the elevator door, listening to tiny, secretive footsteps and the occasional rustle of clothing and panting breath as the person came down. When the intruder was on the last flight of stairs, he stepped out and confronted the person.

  "In God's name," he said, staring in astonishment. "What are you doing here, Grandmother?"

  The woman was at least eighty, and even tinier than he could have guessed. Her hair, slate and silver, was pulled into a bun, so tighdy (and the hair so sparse) that her scalp showed on the top of her head. She wore a grandmother's black blouse and long black skirt, and she carried a gardening trowel in her hand.

  She thrust it suddenly toward him, threateningly, almost as though it were a weapon. "Where else should I be, stupid?" she shrilled. "It is my home!"

  "Oh, Grandmother," Konov said reproachfully. "Weren't you evacuated with the rest? How did you get back? Don't you know that it is dangerous to be here?"

  She asked reasonably, "How can my own home be a danger to me? My name is Irina Barisovna, and I live here. Go away, please. I am very well here; simply leave me alone."

  But, of course, Konov could not leave her alone, and, of course, after a spirited ten minutes of argument the old woman accepted the inevitable. Her only other options were either to kill Konov and hide his body, which would only cause a search, or to have him whisde for the rest of the detac
hment to carry her off. "But please, dear young man," she bargained. "One favor? A small one? And then, I promise, I will go with you…"

  When he had delivered her, with her little bag of treasures, to the control post, she kissed his gloved hand. Grinning, Konov went back to his officer to report. Lieutenant Osipev listened with resignation. "These old people!" he sighed. "What can one do with them? They have been told they risk death here. They know that this is true, in one part of their heads they know.it — but they come back. What was that she was carrying?"

  Konov hesitated, then admitted. "Some things from her. apartment. And, yes, also some other things: a religious medal, her wedding ring, a few small things; she had buried them in the ground and I helped her dig them up."

  The officer shrugged. Lieutenant Osipev was a reasonably compassionate man but, after all, it was not his concern. "Your pen, then, Konov," he ordered, and when Konov handed over the dosimeter pen, the officer glanced casually through it, then stiffened. "What have you done, you fool?" he demanded. "Get away from me! Have yourself scanned at once!" And twenty minutes later, after the special radiation crew with their counters had run the snouts of the instruments over his entire naked body, Konov stared at the grime under his fingernails.

  It did not seem that he would be going back to the 416th Guards Rifle Division barracks in Mtintsin very quickly, after all. He had heard the chatter of the counter shrill loudly as it reached the fingers of his right hand, the hand from which he had taken off the glove in order to help the old babushka scrabble in the ground under the rainspout for her precious oilskin packet of valuables. And when the medical officer looked at Konov's hand, he swore angrily. "If you wouldn't cut your hair, at least you should have cut your fingernails! How long has that stuff been under there?" "I don't know. An hour, maybe."

  "An hour! Well," the medical officer said sorrowfully, reaching for his bag, "those nails will have to come off, at least. If we're lucky, perhaps we can save the fingers."

  Chapter 35

  Monday, May 19

  The Black Sea coast is the Florida of the Soviet Union. It is the only place where the water is warm and the beaches are sunny. The coast is lined with holiday hotels, sanito-ria, youth camps, and campgrounds, and they are all filled all the time. Foreign tourists spend hard currency there, but most of the vacationers are Soviet citizens who have deserved so well of their country or their factory that they are given a week or two of luxury. Swimming, snorkeling, windsurfing, fishing, mountain-climbing, strolling, sunbathing — there is so much to do along the Black Sea! And each community has its own special attractions — at Yalta, the place where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met in World War II, the Nikitsky Botanical Garden, the old house where Chekhov lived and wrote nearly a century ago. Near Sochi, the mineral springs, and the caves at Novy Afon. Sukhumi, Matsesta, Simferopol, and a hundred other communities vie for the tourist, and no one is disappointed.

  As Sheranchuk stepped off the IL-86, he saw his wife waiting for him in a knot of people just outside the door of the terminal. He kissed her tenderly, exclaiming, "What do you think of that? A real jumbo jet, three hundred and fifty passengers! When Boris comes back, let us make sure he gets to ride in one like it, shall we?"

  "Of course," Tamara said, looking at him anxiously. He returned the look. His wife had been at the resort only a week before him, but already she looked — well, tropical. She was tanned. She wore dark glasses, with a gay green and white scarf over her head, and white shorts and a white blouse. She seemed at least ten years younger, except for the strained expression on her face. "Will you have to go back to the hospital?" she asked.

  "Never!" he proclaimed. "Complete release! I have even been given permission to go back to work at Chernobyl after our little vacation here — it is all in the medical records, and you can read them for yourself. But not now. Now I want to enjoy this recreational paradise of the workers' state!"

  He found his bag quickly and slung it over his shoulder. "How wonderfully hot it is," he exclaimed as they went out of the terminal into the Black Sea sun. "You made a good choice, my dear."

  "Are you sure?" she asked anxiously. "It is so hard to know where to go. If we had gone to Sochi instead, there would be the Agur waterfalls and the caves—"

  "But isn't it nice," he grinned, "to be so lucky as to be able to choose what we want? And anyway, here we are nearer to Boris at his camp, so tomorrow we will drive over and see him. But today is ours, my dear Tamara, because we have a great deal to celebrate."

  Tamara surrendered. "As you wish, my dear," she murmured. "Only, please, you are just out of the hospital. Don't tire yourself."

  It could have been, Sheranchuk said to himself, that she was worried about his health. That would account for the slight reserve, the occasional abstraction, the hesitant way she spoke now and then.

  It could also be that what was on Tamara's mind was the same thing that was on Sheranchuk's own, specifically, what Dr. Akhsmentova had told him at Smin's funeral.

  Although he had had four days to think about it, he had spoken to no one about it, not even his wife — especially not his wife. But for four days he had thought about very little else. He rehearsed every moment of his married life. In particular he cudgeled his memory to try to recall each incident and detail around the time his wife became pregnant. Yes, it was true, he recalled dismally, they had gone through something of a stormy period in their marriage at that time. They had had a number of quarrels. Foolish ones! He had been astonished to learn that she was, of all things, jealous.

  And foolishly he had tried to make a joke of it. "Oh, yes," he cried with savage humor, "all the girls are after me. It is my steel teeth that make them wild with desire!"

  She had said icily, "I don't care what girls are after you. I care that you are interested in the girls."

  "But it isn't true!" he groaned. "You're simply being stupid." And that night she had slept in a chair on the other side of their single room, while Sheranchuk tossed sleepless and alone in their bed.

  The difficulty was that her jealousy had not been entirely stupid.

  There was a woman who interested him. She worked in the personnel department of the peat-fired power plant near Moscow. Sheranchuk had never touched the woman, but he admitted to himself that he had had feelings about her. There was worse than that. Since the two of them worked in the same power plant, they had had their vacations at the same time, in the same place. Nothing had happened — mostly, Sheranchuk conceded, because she had at once taken up with another man — but he had been prepared for an explosion when he came back.

  To his surprise, his wife had welcomed him back. In fact, she had been exceptionally loving — it was almost another honeymoon.

  The question in his mind now was, what had she been doing while he was away? And with whom?

  They spent the afternoon on the beach. Even in May the water was still a little cool for Sheranchuk's taste, but he gladly lay in the warm sun that filtered through the palm leaves overhead, Tamara solicitously replenishing the sunburn cream on his back. When they went back to the airy, clean room in their sanitorium, they made love in the daylight, hardly even speaking as they fell into each other's arms. Not speaking at all of anything important, in fact, because afterward, when Tamara got a serious look on her face and cleared her throat as though about to say some weighty thing, Sheranchuk jumped up and proclaimed that he was starving for dinner.

  It was a good dinner, at a seaside restaurant. They took their time over it, talking about Smin's funeral, and their plans for their son, and what was likely to happen at the Chernobyl plant. It was quite late by the time they got back to the sanitorium. "Come, let's enjoy the air a bit," said Sheranchuk, and they found a rocker for two in a quiet part of the broad veranda, looking down a hill and out over the distant water. Sheranchuk had his arm around his wife.

  "You are very quiet, my dear," he said at last.

  "I've been thinking," she said slowly, hesitantly, and in t
he dim light he could see that she had that look of being about to speak seriously on her face again.

  "If," he said quickly, "what you are thinking about is the future, let me tell you some good news. There is a new personnel man at the plant, his name is Ivanov, and he stopped at the hospital before I was discharged. He promises a job will be waiting for me, actually with more money. He also talked about what sort of place we will have to live in for the next six months or year."

  She turned to look at him with a spark of interest. "In Pripyat?"

  "Not in Pripyat, no. No one is going to live in Pripyat for a long time. But in the town of Chernobyl. You remember it's beyond the thirty-kilometer perimeter and it is now quite safe. And then there will be a new town that will be built, with good construction. It will be called 'Green Peninsula,' after the place where it is being built. We will have a flat even nicer than our old one, once the new buildings are finished. Ivanov has promised we will be at the top of the list for new housing, and the foundations have already been begun."

  He waited for a response. "That sounds good," she said at last, her voice colorless.

  "Of course," he said, "without Smin to keep an eye on things, who knows how soon the walls will crack and the doors will come off their hinges? But there is also good news. Ivanov says they will put you on the medical staff at the plant."

  "Oh, wonderful," she said, her face lighting up for the first time. But then she withdrew again.

  "Are you cold?" Sheranchuk asked solicitously. "Maybe we should go in and get a good night's sleep. And tomorrow morning we will go to see our son."

  She was silent for a long moment. Then she turned to him and said, her voice rapid and almost harsh, "There is something we must discuss. Did Dr. Akhsmentova speak to you?"

  He was quite calm. "The bloodsucker? Oh, yes. She was full of some nonsense about blood types; I could not understand such things."