All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  In his final weeks there, when all of his authority had been stripped away, Grigory drove from farm to farm at the perimeter of the zone, showing his credentials, advising people of the dangers they were in. None of them believed him, until he took out the dosimeter and the machine beeped shrilly: 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 micro-roentgen per hour—hundreds of times the level of natural exposure. It was a method he’d adapted when it became apparent that all Vygovskiy’s grand statements about a new beginning, about a thorough, methodical cleanup, had been quashed by one phone call from the Kremlin.

  THE DAY AFTER the evacuation, reports came in of a radioactive cloud that hung over Minsk. Grigory approached Vygovskiy about it. His superior nodded: “I’ve been informed.”

  “And they’re evacuating?”

  “They’re doing everything they can.”

  A few hours later he realized that supply trucks were still arriving from the city. Again he approached his superior.

  “They haven’t evacuated, we’re still getting supplies from there.”

  “They don’t have the resources yet.”

  “We have spare troops here, men sitting around waiting for instructions. What are they waiting for? We know every hour is crucial.”

  Vygovskiy gestured towards the stacks of paperwork on his desk, the ringing phone.

  “I have a power plant to clean up, Grigory. I have a team of nuclear engineers arriving any moment. There are men taking care of it.”

  “What men?”

  “Good men.”

  Grigory returned to his office and called the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Party. They wouldn’t connect him: the man was on another line. Grigory was incredulous. He waited five minutes and called again. He reminded them forcefully who he was, where he was calling from, under whose authority he worked. Still no connection. Eventually, after a half hour, he got through.

  When he mentioned the accident, the line went dead.

  He walked into Vygovskiy’s engineering briefing and gestured to speak to him outside. The group was arguing over procedure. Vygovskiy waved him away. Grigory remained until the group fell silent. Irritated, Vygovskiy followed him into the corridor, then indicated they should go to Grigory’s office. Neither of them spoke until Vygovskiy closed the door.

  “The KGB are suppressing our calls. I can’t even speak with the Belarussian general secretary.”

  “Why are you speaking to the general secretary?”

  “Because there’s a fucking radioactive cloud hanging over his capital.”

  Vygovskiy spoke in a pointedly calm tone.

  “They have orders to contain the information, in order to avoid a mass panic.”

  “The KGB?”

  “The KGB. The general secretary. Everyone.”

  “So there’ll be no evacuation?”

  “No. It’s a direct order from the highest levels in the Kremlin.”

  Grigory sat down at his desk. Vygovskiy remained standing in front of him, as though he were the inferior. He adjusted his tie.

  “It’s a direct order. What do you want me to do?”

  Their voices rising in steady progression.

  “I want us to do what we said we’d do. I want to deal with this situation openly, properly, with accountability. I’m getting reports that the city has background radiation of twenty-eight thousand micro-roentgen per hour.”

  “That meeting in my office. The engineers are figuring out a way to get the water out from underneath the reactor. If uranium and graphite get in there, a critical mass will form and we might be dealing with an explosion of maybe three, four, even five megatons. If that happens you’ll have to evacuate half of Europe. Should I get on the phone to the Polish premier, to Berlin? Fuck it, why not Paris?”

  “Why not? They could help. There would be more resources, more expertise.”

  “More hysteria. And that’s not even taking into account what it would mean for our international profile.”

  “You’re talking like a politician, Vladimir.”

  “This has international consequences. This is our most critical moment, politically, since the war. We both know this. Of course politics comes into it. Politics comes into everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, comrade. I’m getting things done.”

  He strode out the door, slamming it after him.

  Grigory picked up the receiver, then put it down again in its cradle.

  He grabbed his jacket and a dosimeter and found Vasily in one of the medical tents, checking exposure rates amongst the soldiers.

  “Come with me—that can wait.”

  Grigory had one of the soldiers drive them to the apartment blocks. They walked up a staircase and into one of the apartments.

  “Can you tell me what we’re doing here?”

  Grigory looked around and found the phone and carried it to the dining table, the cord straining to reach.

  “There’s a radioactive cloud over Minsk. We need to make some calls.”

  He got on his knees and, dipping his head to search under the sofa, found what he was looking for. He dragged out a phone book.

  “Who are we calling?”

  Grigory threw the book towards the table. On landing it thudded and skidded along the vinyl covering.

  “Everyone. Pick a letter and start from there. It’s a lottery. See who lives according to their surname.”

  Vasily placed his hand calmly on the book, flipping the corners of pages with his thumb, a rasping sound.

  “This is ridiculous, Grigory. What are we doing here? Someone’s apartment? You have an office and an administrative staff.”

  “The KGB are monitoring our calls. I can’t talk to anyone in the city or there’ll be consequences. Not that I’m worried about that, but they’ll cut us off immediately. We can’t get anything done that way. I’ll be next door, doing the same.”

  Vasily slid the book away.

  “We can’t go against KGB diktats, Grigory. Who knows what will happen? It’s the KGB.”

  Grigory was halfway out the door. He stopped, turned, looked at his friend, twisted the door handle at his side.

  He spoke quietly, all his momentum subdued.

  “I hadn’t expected it would be a problem.”

  “It’s the KGB.”

  “There’s an entire city blindly walking into an early grave.”

  “I have a family.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  They were silent.

  “Open a page,” Grigory said. “There’s a hundred families on each one; a hundred and fifty, who knows? What if it were a Moscow directory? What if we were to look under Simenov?”

  Vasily stood up.

  “I can’t help you with this, Grigory. I’m sorry.”

  Grigory stepped aside to let him pass.

  When he called people he introduced himself as a doctor and explained what was happening. He told them to put their food in plastic, to put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a cloth, then put the rag in a bag and throw it away. If they had laundry drying outside, they should put it back in the wash. Put two drops of iodine in a glass of water and wash their hair with it. Dissolve four more drops and drink it, two for a child. He told them to get out of the city as soon as they could. Stay with a relative. Don’t come back for at least a few weeks.

  He made probably sixty calls until finally they cut him off. Sitting on a stranger’s chair, pacing up and down someone’s brown, patterned carpet.

  Every reaction was the same. People were calm. They thanked him. They didn’t question him or panic. Perhaps they didn’t believe him or didn’t understand the importance of what he was asking. Such simple things: wash your hair, wash your clothes, drink some iodine. It hardly seemed credible that these few actions could save your life.

  That evening he went to his quarters to pack his bag and bedding and find another place to sleep. Vasily, lying in the next bunk, watched him place his belongings away.

  “I’m not t
he enemy, Grigory. I’m not one of them.”

  “Really? Then who are you?”

  The next day he went to Minsk himself. Forced his way into the chairman’s office, gaining access by holding the dosimeter up to people’s necks, showing them the readings. They all had family here; they couldn’t bring themselves to refuse him. The chairman told Grigory he could only spare five minutes.

  “I’ve been on the phone this morning with the chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board. He’s assured me everything is normal, everything is under control.”

  “Comrade, I am the deputy head of the cleanup commission. I’m telling you, you need to evacuate the city. You need to demand that military personnel come here at once.”

  “They are already using vast numbers of troops at the accident site.”

  “And I’m telling you to order more for yourself.”

  “Doctor, there are only so many soldiers to go around.”

  “We have the largest army on earth. Are we not always proclaiming the greatness, the scale of our forces? We need to get people out of here. This accident, believe me, will make Hiroshima look like an aberration.”

  “You are exaggerating, Doctor.”

  “I’ve personally taken background readings of five hundred micro-roentgen per hour outside. There should be no one within a hundred kilometers of this city.”

  The chairman stretched out his arms as if he were addressing a rally.

  “I am a former director of a tractor factory. I do not understand such things. If comrade Platonov from the Radiological Protection Board tells me that things are fine, then what can I tell him: he’s lying? Please, of course not, they’d take my Party card.”

  “Well, I’m a doctor, a surgeon, responsible for the cleanup. I’ve arrived here directly from the site and yet you’re happy to tell me that I’m a fool.”

  The chairman leaned forward, snarling.

  “There will be no evacuation.”

  “Where are your wife and children?”

  “They are here, of course. How can I ask others to trust the system if I can’t show them that my own family does the same?”

  Grigory exhaled, shook his head.

  “You’re really that naïve.”

  The chairman was unnerved by Grigory’s tone. He spluttered out a response.

  “The Party has made me what I am, made this country what it is. I have always trusted its judgement. A fire in a power plant won’t change that.”

  They argued for another half hour until Grigory, defeated, picked up his bag and placed it on his lap.

  “The city has iodine concentration in reserve—I know this is policy in case of a nuclear attack. At least put that in the water supply.”

  “That, as you’ve mentioned, Doctor, is for the purposes of nuclear attack.”

  “So we’ll protect our people from the Capitalist Imperialists, but not from each other?”

  “Get out before I have you arrested for spreading anti-Soviet sentiment.”

  “It’s not only the air that’s contaminated. It’s your minds too.”

  “Get out!”

  GRIGORY STOPS his walk and takes a breath of the fresh evening air, savouring it.

  The stars are coming out. He’ll need to go back soon, do a final pass through the wards before bedtime. Through the gloom, he can make out the main road to Mogilev with the wedges of light from car headlamps moving in a steady trajectory. Remnants of corn stubble crunch under his feet, he can feel its stubbornness under his boots. A few weeks ago he watched men come with cans of fuel, dousing the stubble in small sections and then lighting it, guiding the flame, encouraging it to other areas with loose straw and pitchforks, so that it spread as a blanket of gentle fire, a carpet of heat bending the air above it. Now a silent plain of snow greets him on his walks and Grigory knows that in a couple of months they’ll return with tractors and ploughs and turn the soil over upon itself once more, ready for sowing in the spring.

  In the exclusion zone, there were great flaming pyres of cattle and sheep. They were folding the land inside out using diggers and tractors and shovels to make craters large enough to hold everything in sight: helicopters and troop wagons, shacks, trees, cars, motorcycles, pylons. They flattened homes by tying a huge chain around an izba, then hauling it forward with a giant digger so the izba would collapse onto itself; then they’d heave everything into a pit. They were cutting down forests and wrapping the trunks in plastic before laying them under the earth. Grigory saw so much of this that when people tell him where they’re from, when they mention the names of the surrounding villages and towns—Krasnopol, Chadyany, Malinovka, Bragin, Khoyniki, Narovlya—they bring to mind not only the landscape but what lies beneath it. He sees the places as a diagram, in cross section, with figures working busily on top of the earth and other pockets underneath it, all neatly ordered—a section for helicopters, one for the izbas, another for diseased animals—which, of course, isn’t the case. There is nothing neat about this tragedy.

  He hears sounds from the road: a squeal of brakes and then glass shattering. Grigory looks in the direction of the noise and sees a sulphurous light, stalled. He runs towards it, the cold air inflaming his lungs.

  As he nears he sees a man standing over a dog, waving his arms in the air, admonishing the felled animal.

  The driver directs his invective at Grigory, but Grigory ignores it and kneels over the dog. It’s a German shepherd, young, less than a year old, Grigory estimates. The animal faces the front of the car with thick ribbons of blood around its hindquarters and a web of drool laced around its mouth, its eyes turned upwards, their lids flickering in pain. Grigory rests a calming hand on its neck and the animal raises its head a few centimetres from the road and lunges forward, snapping its jaws. Grigory leans backwards, unafraid, and speaks softly to it, his tones reaching under those of the driver, who is still spitting out his complaints.

  “Good boy. You still have some fight in you. Let’s see what we can do.”

  He reaches his hand towards the neck again, asking the animal’s permission through the slow deliberation of his movement. He slides his fingers into its thick coat and moves downwards, feeling the strong pulsing of its heart, never taking his eyes from those of the dog, which are searching now, darting to various points in their circumference, showing tentative trust; placing its hopes in this stranger. Grigory moves his hands nearer the wound and the dog releases a moan, a sound as stark and elemental as its surroundings.

  He looks up to the driver.

  “Its pelvis is broken.”

  “This is your dog? It’s smashed my headlight, it’s damaged my bumper. This fucking dog, coming out of nowhere. This is your dog? Someone will be paying, I assure you.”

  “It’s not my dog.”

  “Of course you say that. ‘Not my dog.’ But you come and look after it. Why do you care? Coming out of nowhere. Of course it’s your dog.”

  “Please. It’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Who are you? A hero? A vet looking for animals to save?”

  “I’m a surgeon.”

  “Good. Then you can afford to pay for my headlight.”

  Grigory stands and takes in the car, a black Riva. He walks nearer the man and looks him in the eye, a bullfrog wobble of skin under the man’s chin.

  “I don’t know who owns the dog. I do know that it’s in a lot of pain. I live in those buildings back there. If you take me home we can look after the animal and then ask around.”

  The driver steps back, his gaze spiralling downwards in short, sharp bursts. His voice is now so muted that Grigory has to strain to hear him.

  “I tell you what, you keep your dog. I’ll pay for the damage myself.”

  He steps into the car and drives off. There’s a rattle from the front bumper as it drags along the ground.

  Alone on the road with a shattered dog.

  Grigory looks back to the settlement, the buildings taking on a deeper light by now, incandescent;
then turns to the animal.

  “You’re a brave one, aren’t you?”

  He kneels once more and scoops the dog into his arms. The animal wails softly, but doesn’t resist, recognizing the authority of its new master. Grigory walks back over the puffed snow, struggling under the dog’s weight, its heart beating close to his.

  EACH NIGHT after his walk he enters once again the few low rooms of the clinic. Returning to hear the breath of sleeping children, all of them waiting to pass under his knife. Grigory knows he has a weaker will than any of them, and there are nights when he lies amongst them, hoping that their courage, their thirst for life, might pass into him, replenishing him.

  Children who have already undergone thyroid operations and are regaining their strength sleep on thin mattresses laid out in rows along the floor. In the morning they rise and roll them into a wheel, tie them up with string, and place them in the corner. There is a playground outside with a high net strung across it. They’ve received a batch of tennis balls as part of an aid consignment, and the children invent complicated rhythmical games with them. In the breaks between surgery Grigory watches them and tries to decipher their rules, but they change daily, hourly, and so he pays attention only to the fluid motion of these children, identical scars running horizontally across the base of their necks. These are the healthier ones. The weaker ones lose consciousness while standing. They buckle to the ground, marionettes whose strings have been cut. Nosebleeds break out all the time. At any moment he can look across the yard and see half a dozen children pinching their noses, looking up to the sky, unperturbed by the spontaneous flow from their nostrils.

  There are those for whom the sickness has spread to the lungs or pancreas or liver. They lie sweating in the few beds available. Many are placed back with their families in their accommodation, where they are guaranteed somewhere to rest and a visit by a nurse. In the past few months, infants have emerged from the womb with fused limbs, or weighed down with oversize tumours. There are children whose bodies have no sense of proportion, football-size growths on the back of their skull or legs as thick as small tree trunks, or one hand minuscule and the other swollen to grotesque dimensions. Others have hollowed-out eye sockets, lined with flat patches of skin: it looks as though the human eye is an organ that has yet to evolve. For many, there are tiny holes where the ears should sit. A child, a girl, was born two weeks ago with aplasia of the vagina. Grigory couldn’t find any references to such a thing in his textbooks. He had to improvise by creating artificial holes in her urethra through which the nurses would squeeze out her urine.