pumps for our building.'
Selena poured tea. 'You ought to rest,' she scolded.
'When I have eaten,' he said, 'I will sleep for one hour. No more. Be sure to wake me.'
'You really must go back to the plant?'
'Who else?' said Smin, his mouth full of bread. 'The Director is still in Moscow. The Chief Engineer fell apart last night. Now he is attempting to run things from six kilometers away.'
Selena put a spoon in her own bowl of soup, but just stirred it around. 'It is really bad,' she said, not as a question.
Smin said, 'Of the three hundred technical workers forty are in the hospital and one hundred and three have reported for duty. The rest have simply run away and not come back.'
'I don't blame them!' Selena cried, surprising herself. 'I wish—'
'You wish,' Smin filled in for her, 'that you hadn't come back, either. So do I. It is not safe here, Selena.'
'It might blow up?'
'It already has blown up,' he corrected her. 'It is not explosions you have to worry about. That smoke is full of poison. Every bit of it — oh, God, wait!' And he got up from the table, closing the windows. 'Never leave a window open until I say you may!' he commanded. 'While I am sleeping dust the sills! Dust everything that has dust on it, any kind of dust. Use newspapers, then throw them away and wash your hands very carefully!'
'But the maid—'
'We will see the maid again,' Smin said heavily, 'when pigs fly. Or when this situation is under control, whichever comes first. And the clothes I just took off are in a paper bag. Don't open it, just throw them away.'
'Your good suit!'
Smin sighed and didn't answer. Then, mopping up the last of the soup: 'When Vasya wakes up, don't let him go out. If anyone comes for him, say he has been vomiting; they will think it is radiation sickness and they will leave him alone.'
'Radiation sickness!'
'Can't you do anything but repeat what I say?' Smin asked almost jocularly. 'Please. Do it. And don't go out yourself. When I have an opportunity I will arrange to have both of you evacuated, perhaps back to Babushka in Kiev. Pack what you need, but no more than two suitcases.'
'For how long must I pack?' Selena asked. She was not surprised when her husband didn't answer. He got up from the table and walked slowly into their bedroom, moving as though his back pained him, as it often did.
She cleared the table, bent to find some old newspapers, and began carrying out her husband's instructions about wiping up dust. When she dampened the wadded-up papers, the flow from the kitchen faucet was even weaker than before. She thought she would weep. Instead, she flung the papers to the floor and marched into the bedroom.
Smin was not in bed. He was standing at the window, looking at the pall of smoke. 'Selena,' he said without looking at her, 'it is really very bad. It exploded. There was no chance to do anything. If we don't put it out there will be dead people all over the Soviet Union from the radiation in that smoke, and how we will put it out God alone knows. Nothing is working.'
She said desperately, 'You will find a way, Simya.'
'I hope so. I do not have your confidence.'
'But you will! I am sure of it! And then, when the inquiry
is held, of course the Director will have to go, and then your tum—''
She stopped, because her husband had turned to stare at her. 'My dear Selena,' he said, 'are you thinking that I will gain from this?'
'Everyone knows you do all his work! Certainly you are entitled to promotion.'
'Promotion!'
'It is true,' she insisted. 'The Director — he wasn't ever here — And he is, after all, the man in charge. As everyone understands, you simply correct his mistakes and cover up his failings. Surely he is the one to blame!'
Smin studied his wife for a moment. 'Can you really believe,' he asked gently, 'that there will not be blame enough for everyone?'
Chapter 13
The town of Pripyat, with its shops, its film theater, its library, its five schools, its hostels and apartments for nearly fifty thousand people, exists only to serve the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Pripyat is a new town, enclosed by wide fir and pine forests. Few of the buildings are much more than ten years old. Neither is the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station itself. During the Great Patriotic War, the ground where the town stands was a battlefield where Germans and Soviets slaughtered each other in thousands. When the foundations were dug for the pretty sixteen-story apartment towers, skeletons of men and machines came up with the backhoes.
The people who live in Pripyat think themselves lucky. They are affluent, because pay is good at the power plant, and even at the radio factory and the construction works that are the town's other chief industries. They are young — the average age is no more than thirty, even without counting all the children. Their town is architecturally 'advanced.' Town planners come from all over the USSR to study it. It was purpose-built, but it serves its purposes not only well but gracefully. Even with a human dimension; Pripyaters are proud to say that their main avenue was redirected so that three cherished old apple trees, that somehow survived the war, could be preserved. The apartment buildings are faced with ceramic tile, white
and pink and blue, and they glow in the sun. The boulevards are wide. It was sensible to make them so. After all, the land was cheap, being nothing much but sand. The town is filled with greenery. No Pripyater would ever have considered being tempted away with another job — at least, until now.
Senior Operator Bohdan Kalychenko woke to a thunderous pounding at his door. Kalychenko crossed himself as he hurried to answer, but when he opened it, the person standing there was not from the First Department of the plant, come to demand to know why Kalychenko had run away from his post. It was only Zakharin, the man from the milk store around the corner. Without his white jacket and little white cap Zakharin looked quite different, and he was oddly hesitant after his violent banging. 'Did I wake you, Comrade Kalychenko?' he asked. 'I wasn't sure you were here. I thought you might be at the power plant.'
'It is my day off,' said Kalychenko, rubbing at his right arm, which was nestled in a siing made from a large red kerchief.
'Oh? Are they keeping to a regular schedule, even now? But I thought—' The man from the milk store took a closer look at Kalychenko's arm. 'Oh, but I see you are injured.'
Kalychenko cradled the arm in his other hand. 'What do you want?' he demanded.
The man cleared his throat. He was much shorter than Kalychenko. Looking up, he began diffidently, 'You understand these things, Kalychenko. I do not. I am only a storekeeper. You have technical training. You see, we are frightened. This explosion — this smoke — some of us think it is not safe to stay in Pripyat. Is it so serious, do you think?'
'The authorities will decide that,' Kalychenko said gruffly. Zakharin was insistent. 'The authorities are completely overwhelmed, Kalychenko. There is hardly a militiaman on the street. There is not a fireman left in Pripyat, or a piece of equipment. Hot coals have fallen in the woods! My own sister's husband saw them. What if this building should catch on fire now, what would we do?'
'None of this is my concern,' Kalychenko said angrily. He looked with hostility at the man from the milk store, quite strange in his Sunday morning suit and tie. Zakharin looked both older and less sure of himself than in his store, counting out eggs for a shopper or carefully stowing the plastic bags of milk in the cooling compartment. He also seemed quite frightened, though he was trying to conceal it. That touched a chord in Kalychenko's own heart. 'I don't know what it is you want from me,' he said unwillingly.
'Information, first of all, if you please! You are a scientific man. My son, who is fourteen, says that the smoke from the power plant contains atoms of radium and other substances which can cause our hair to fall out and our
