All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Page 29
First he sees the strip of light below the door. As he nears, he can take in the smell. He recognizes it instantly: zharkoye. One of the other surgeons must have finished as late as he; the nurses and attendants rotate surgeries so their meals are earlier in the evening. He pauses, thinks about turning back for his room; conversation is inevitable. But the smell of onion proves irresistible, the thought of a warm meal so comforting.
He opens the door and sees a woman standing over the cooker. The mother of the boy.
She turns, smiles.
“They said you were almost finished. It’s ready for you.”
The surprise makes him wary.
“How did you get in?”
“One of the nurses.”
“She should have asked permission.”
“From who? No one’s going to deny you a decent meal. They practically kissed my feet when I suggested it.”
“I’m not your responsibility.” He says this and then regrets his words. He can leave his authority back in the surgical ward.
She slides the wooden spoon back into the pot, leans against the counter facing him. She speaks slowly, gently, aware of his tiredness. Perhaps it’s the light, but he seems even paler than those few days before.
“I understand. I’m not here to mother you. I’m here to thank you. It’s a celebratory meal.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“My Sofya is getting better. She has been in bed with a temperature, diarrhoea, having trouble holding down food. Of course I thought the worst. But they did some tests and she’s a lot healthier, eating her food, colour back in her cheeks again. It turns out it was only an intestinal infection. It feels as if she has been brought back to life.”
Grigory runs his hand through his hair. He’s still not sure he wants to discuss someone else’s situation. Even if they have good news.
“And we’re celebrating the return of my Artyom. That dog has brought him back to me again. He’s talking again, telling me things. That crippled dog has helped more than you know.”
Grigory nods, relenting, and slumps into a chair.
She serves him and they eat without speaking. The beef and garlic steams up into his face and he drags down the smell and eats heartily. When he finishes she fills his plate again. She waves her finger before he can refuse. “We have enough. It’s a celebration, remember.” She watches him eat, a satisfied smile on her face.
Now that he can look at her, properly consider her, he sees lines of worry etched into her forehead and around her mouth. But her smile is a flare of crooked teeth, a burst of energy and light.
When he finishes she pushes aside the plate, takes a bottle from one of the cupboards, and fills his glass.
“I shouldn’t.”
“None of us should.”
She dips a finger in her glass, then kisses her fingers and flicks a few drops of vodka on the floor. They drink and crack their glasses down.
She puts an elbow on the table and rests her chin on her palm.
“Tell me why you are here.”
This woman can change the tone of the room in an instant. Her manner is both open and direct. Not aggressive, simply without triviality. He puts his two hands flat on the tabletop, tucks his thumbs underneath, settles himself, and thinks about his reply.
“Well, my superior at the hospital recommended me to an advisor at the Ministry of Fuel and Energy. I was sent to Chernobyl, and then they transferred me to a resettlement camp.”
“That’s not why, that’s how, but no matter, we’ll get to it.”
“What about you? Did you come from Pripyat?”
“We lived in the Gomel region. A small village near the plant, obviously. But I’m from Moscow originally, like you.”
“Artyom told you?”
“Don’t worry, we all know about you. Silence is no defence around here.”
He doesn’t test her statement, doesn’t want to know. Grigory takes the bottle and pours both of them another glass.
“How did you end up in Gomel?”
“I fell in love.”
A meandering smile on her mouth.
“Did he . . . your husband . . .”
The words came stuttering out. Without his white coat, he is lost with such a topic. He has no idea how to discuss such things outside the realm of professional expertise.
“Yes. He died before they moved us to this camp. He worked as a liquidator for the plant. They gave him the job of cutting down the neighbouring forests.”
“I’m sorry.”
A pause.
“Thank you.”
He considers changing the subject, but there is no other subject here.
“How did you meet him?”
She thinks about her reply. She’d like to describe it all to someone. Why not this doctor? She hasn’t had a chance to relive it in a story. The day Andrei walked into the tailor’s workshop near Izmaylovsky Park and was introduced to the assistant, who was chalking up some suit material for cutting. Pins clamped in her teeth, her jaw clenched in concentration. She looked up at him in acknowledgement, and immediately his blue eyes were the only colour in the room, eyes as resonant as a lingering piano note. She stopped what she was doing to look, and he looked back at her. She took in the way he stood, feet planted on the floor, shoulders back, a man who knew the world, who was equal to its vigour. She slid the pins from her mouth and had to make her apologies and leave, confused. She walked for hours that afternoon, trying to locate the sensation within herself, but she couldn’t read her own feelings, they were new to her, and it was only later that she realized it was the elusive sensation of love that had crept up on her unawares, a sensation for which she had no reference point. And when the thought began to develop into realization, her inclination was to dismiss it: such things are the preserve of adolescents, not someone as old as she. She told herself she is someone who knows the hardness of the world, who understands that to survive is to nurture the practical, to keep steady and quiet and choose things based upon their value.
A week later, he was there again, as she had hoped, modesty and confidence combined in his honest face, back for his second fitting. When the tailor left the room for more pins, Andrei stood there, wearing the frayed material, unable to move, a living dummy, and she approached and put her hand to his waist, folding the swatches for a better fit, and adjusted the angle of his lapels, her breath rippling over his chest as she did so, and he gathered her neck in his hand and they kissed briefly, in the moment. When he returned, the tailor tweaked and tucked the material while they stole glances at each other, the gorgeous pain of anticipation.
Later still, when the streetlights had come on and the tailor had walked away in his hat and coat and she had locked the door, she saw Andrei silhouetted in an alcove, and she unlocked the door again and his shoes clicked against the wet cobblestones and she let him into a darkened corner of the vestibule under the stairs. He bunched her hair in his right hand and placed his left flat and vertical on the downward valley of her smooth stomach, and they kissed a kiss that was a language unto itself, a kiss that was a separate country, until she pulled away from him and smoothed her hair behind her ear, and he saw her flat lobe with two elliptical holes and a small crescent-shaped scar just under it, the healed skin whiter than the rest of her. She, in turn, rotated his face into the light and traced a finger along his jawline. Not speaking, just watching, each of them observing the other.
On the stairs they were all decorum again, playfully affecting nonchalance, both understanding that once through the door there would be a torrent of hands and tongue and want, and she even made a little game with the keys, as though she couldn’t quite remember which was the right one, playing with him, drawing the tension out, until it seemed that Andrei was likely to put his shoulder to the door and pop it off its hinges, and then she did a double take with him. She looked at him casually and put the key in the slot, then paused and turned and looked into his eyes, serious as fire, then turne
d the key fully and pushed her way in, and his hair was on the cusp of her neckline, his hands on her upper arms, before they even managed to close the door.
She understood the word “belonging” then. Inside herself she was honed and made real and cast around his form, morphing into the same shape, and there was heat and lust and strands of thread in her hair, and a pincushion by her right ear and the dummy looming over them, sides filleted out, and she was there but not there, experiencing everything in the moment, consuming every detail of the experience but also outside herself, fragments of her past blurring through her mind, and he smiled reflectively in the middle of it, their thoughts linked, and they broke somehow into giddy trills of laughter, almost losing the moment and then serious again with a twist of his pelvis and a tightening of her mouth.
TANYA WOULD LIKE to explain some of this to the tired surgeon. She would like to talk about love once more, to share her experiences, but the wounds are still too raw.
She answers his question.
“I worked as a tailor’s assistant and he came in one day to get a suit adjusted.”
“And you moved soon after.”
“A while after. He was doing his military service. When it finished, then I became a farmer’s wife. A life, I’m surprised to admit, I loved. Feeding chickens. Milking cows. Who knew a city girl like me would adapt so well?”
Tanya rises quickly and takes their empty plates and places them in a plastic container. She’ll wash them later. When she returns Grigory offers her a glass and they drink and he waits for her to continue.
“Sometimes on TV they show things from the area. One night they showed people swimming in Pripyat River, people tanning themselves by the banks. The reactor in the background, smoke still coming from it. They get an old lady to milk a cow, she pours the milk into the bucket, and a man comes over with a military dosimeter and measures the radiation level, and it’s normal. Then they measure some fish on a plate. It’s normal. Everything is fine, says the commentator, life is going on as normal. In the shelter, after we were evacuated, some of the other women would get letters from their husbands at the plant. Same thing. Life is returning to normal. Everything normal.”
There is a box of matches on the next table. Grigory reaches over for it, takes one from the box, lights it, and watches it burn down to a stub in his fingers. He lights another. Then he speaks.
“I had a contact in Minsk. A surgeon also. In the earliest days I approached the hospital to tell them what was happening. There was a radioactive cloud hanging over the city. We were forbidden to speak officially of this. So, I spread the word any way I could, talked to people who were in contact with large groups.”
She sits back in her chair, folds her arms, listening intently.
“I talked to this surgeon and he was already aware of the situation. Nobody was coming in yet with radiation poisoning; that would happen in the following weeks. But there were plenty of people, many of them prominent Party members, who needed to get their stomachs pumped after overdosing on iodine tablets. So the medical staff naturally drew their own conclusions. But then he said something else. He said his friend was a librarian and that, the day after the explosion, four KGB guys came into the library and confiscated any relevant books they could find. Anything on nuclear war, radiography—even basic science primers, books to get kids excited about physics. They went to such lengths, of course people believe the propaganda.”
Tanya shakes her head.
“Did you meet any liquidators?”
He’s unsure if she wants an answer. He looks up to see how he should reply and she stares back calmly, waiting for a response.
“A lot of people volunteered. Thousands, not just locals like your husband. That first week they brought in busloads of factory workers, students. They were throwing people at the problem, offering them three, four times the average wage. Not everyone came for the money, though. Some were just put on a bus. They thought they were coming for just a weekend, a reward for their productivity. I saw people taking photographs of each other in front of the reactor, to prove they were there, as if it were a tourist stop.”
He runs a match through his fingers. He would like a cigarette.
“At first they treated it like a holiday camp. They worked of course, shovelled topsoil, dug drains, and in the evening they’d get smashed. There was plenty of vodka to go around. Although eventually that ran out and they started drinking anything they could get their hands on: cologne, nail polish remover, glass cleaner. By then they were drinking to blank out their days, to forget what they’d seen.”
“Why weren’t they replaced? Why were they made to stay for so long?”
“At first they were supposed to be there for two weeks. The initial guidelines made sense—I myself demanded many of them—but they quickly became compromised because of budgetary restrictions, or stubbornness from some senior official. Every man had a radiation meter around his neck. No one was supposed to be exposed to more than twenty-five micro-roentgen, the maximum dose the body can withstand. We gave each of them three sets of protective outfits. But my superior revoked his decision to supply washing machines; he wanted to save whatever clean water sources we had left. So the men had no way of washing their gear. After the third day, they were constantly wearing radioactive clothes. After those initial two weeks, they decided not to replace the liquidators, not to sacrifice others. In the morning planning meetings they would calculate how many lives they’d use up on a particular task. Two lives for this job, four for this. It was like a war cabinet, men playing God. Worst of all, it did no good. Those people were replaced anyway, they became too sick to work.”
“That was when you left?”
“No, even then I stayed for another few weeks. I thought I could be useful as the voice of reason, as someone who would defend the workers. Then I found out that the Party had organized protected farms near Mogilev. They were growing their own vegetables, scrutinizing the water supply. Everything was being overseen by experts, the very people who were needed on the ground, in the local villages. They had their own herds of cattle; each bullock had a number and was routinely tested. They had cows which they were certain gave out fresh milk. Meanwhile, in the stores around the exclusion zone, they were selling condensed and powdered milk from the Rogachev factory—the same stuff we were using in induction lectures as an example of a standard radiation source. That was when they had to get rid of me. I went back to Minsk and talked to Aleksei Filin, the writer. Told him everything I knew. He spoke out during a live TV interview, some literary programme. It was brave of him, he was arrested over it. He’s still in confinement, I haven’t been able to trace where they put him.”
“Why weren’t you arrested?”
“They threatened it. I was prepared to go. They were going to put me in an insane asylum. They whispered that if that didn’t suit I could find myself in a tragic accident. ‘Look around,’ I told them. ‘You’re too late.’ But irony is something the KGB can’t quite grasp.”
He looks out of the window, running a finger along the rim of his glass.
“Ultimately, they need surgeons, and I’m more useful working here than sitting in a padded cell.”
They’re silent for a few moments.
Each with their own resentments. Tanya is the first to speak.
“Andrei told me a joke, before he died, one that was going around the site.” Grigory realizes she’s looking for his assent to tell it, and he nods and she continues. “The Americans fly over a robot to help with the cleanup. So the supervising officer sends it to the roof of the reactor but, after five minutes, it breaks down. The Japanese have also donated one, so the officer sends that one up to replace the American robot but, after ten minutes, word comes back that it can’t withstand the conditions either. By now the officer is angry, he’s cursing their shoddy foreign technology. He shouts at his subordinate, ‘Send one of the Russian robots back up, they’re the only reliable machinery we have around here.’
His subordinate salutes and turns to go. As he’s leaving, the officer barks after him, ‘And tell Private Ivanov we’ve lost a lot of time, he has to stay up there for at least two hours before he gets his cigarette break.’ ”
Tanya smiles at the memory of Andrei telling it, his caustic humour, lips curling around his teeth, his words a combination of defiance and regret. She begins to weep.
Grigory waits until her tears lose their force, then takes her hand.
“I’ve just realized you’ve never told me your name.”
“Tanya.”
“I’m sorry, Tanya.”
“Thank you.”
She wipes away her tears with the base of her palm.
“Enough. This is a celebration, and I’m under orders.”
He sits up, his shoulders pushed back.
“Orders?”
“Of course. There’s endless speculation. They want me to find out something. You think a disaster like this is enough to keep us from gossiping? We embrace any distractions.”
He smiles. “What kind of speculation?”
“The only kind there is.”
“You want to know if there’s someone back home?”
“Well, there’s no one here—look at yourself, that’s obvious. I’m asking the why. You came here to help, I know this, we all appreciate it. But there’s always something else.”
He cradles his glass, eyes downturned.
“I don’t mean to pry.” A mother’s voice, soft with concern. “It’s just harmless chatter.”
THERE WAS THE VASE exploding against the wall. There were the remains of their kitchen chair, a pathetic, desultory thing that lay beaten beside his legs as he sat near the stove. Walking in, she already knew—of course she did; she had placed the note that morning. Not seeing anything—not noticing the wreckage of their home—other than his look, the rage in his eyes.