Chernobyl

— except if they were stupid enough to lie about it, in which case whatever propaganda benefits they had gained from their moratorium would be more than wiped out by the deceit.

Then there was the possibility of an accident of some kind. Warner Borden had told her all about the mysterious Kyshtym event, more than twenty-five years earlier. It seemed that the Soviets had been storing radioactive wastes in Siberia, near the town of Kyshtym, and somehow carelessness had allowed some of them to flow together, reaching critical mass.

It had never occurred to Emmaline Branford that waste could turn itself into a little atomic bomb, but Borden assured her that that was the best explanation for the — the whatever it was — that had poisoned hundreds of square kilometers of the Siberian landscape, caused the abandonment of a dozen villages and any number of collective farms, poisoned lakes and rivers and even changed the Soviet maps.

Of course, the Soviets had staunchly denied that anything of the sort had happened. But, of course, they would.

So when Warner Borden called for her to join him again at the teletypes and said, 'I talked to one of the Swedes. They've fingerprinted the cloud, and it definitely was not a nuclear test,' her first response was, 'Something like Kyshtym again?'

'No, no, nothing like that. Not a nuclear weapons plant, either, although for a minute I thought that might be it. But the wrong elements were in the gases, according to the Swedes. It's' — he looked around and closed the door—'it's got to be an accident in a nuclear power plant. It could even be a meltdown.'

'Oh, my God,' said Emmaline, thinking of the movie The China Syndrome. 'But if there were that kind of an explosion—'

'It wouldn't have to be a big explosion. Anyway, that's what the Swedes are saying — they've tested the cloud, and the proportions of radioactive materials match what the Russians would have if a power plant blew up.' He was studying the teletypes eagerly, but all they were producing now were weather reports. 'I've checked the maps,' he said. 'There are two nuclear power plants up on the Baltic. It has to be one of them. Maybe both of them.'

'Two power plants blowing up at once?'

He grinned at her. He seemed almost happy. 'What are you, one of those no-nuke nuts? These are Russian plants. You have to expert they'll blow up now and then.'

He leaned cozily over the teletype next to Emmaline, one hand negligently resting on her hip. She moved patiently away, not willing for a fight just then. (Why were white Georgia boys so often turned on by a black skin?)

'I'd better get back to work,' she said, and returned to her office. Rima was back, diligently working away on letters in her own room. She didn't look up. Emmaline paused at the window by her desk, looking out on the broad, traffic-filled Tchaikovsky Boulevard. Didn't those people know that their power plants were blowing up? Shouldn't someone tell them? She sighed and sat down.

And there on her desk was an opened copy of a magazine.

She had not left it there. She picked it up and discovered it was something called Literaturna Ukraina. Emmaline's Russian was more or less adequate, or at least as good as anyone else's after taking the crash foreign-service course, but this magazine was not published in the Russian language. It was in Ukrainian.

Most of the words were nearly the same, but with distinctively Ukrainian twists. Emmaline frowned. The article seemed to be about deficiencies in a nuclear power plant, but it wasn't about a plant located on the Baltic. She looked across the hall at Rima Solovjova, but the translator did not look up. Emmaline thought of asking Rima if she had put the magazine there, but if she intended to say so, she would have done it already. But why was Rima — or someone — giving her an article about a place called Chernobyl?

Chapter 19

Monday, April 28

Vremya, the nine o'clock television news broadcast, is a Soviet institution. It is watched by tens of millions of people every night, but not very attentively. Generally it is what would be called in America a 'talking head' show; the real news is read by a man at a desk, briefly and unemotionally, and there is not a great deal of it. The only film clips are generally of collective farmers bringing in a record harvest, or shipyards launching a new icebreaker. Russians joke that one can always tell when the news comes on, because one hears through the thin apartment walls the sounds of neighbors walking about and flushing their toilets as they leave the television set after the night's film or sports event or concert.

In just that way, when the news came on that Monday night, Igor Didchuk got up to go to the kitchen for a cold drink of mineral water from the refrigerator, and Oksana would no doubt have done the same if she had not been occupied in finishing the last row of her knitting. The ballet on television that night had been the Bolshoi company itself, in a production called The Streets of Paris—nothing like La Boheme or Gaite Parisienne, but a sober, stirring dance drama about the French Commune of two centuries before. 'But the dancing was beautiful,' Oksana said to her husband as he returned.

'Of course,' he said with pride. The Bolshoi was a Russian company, not Ukrainian, but Didchuk considered himself a truly internationalist Soviet man. In his view, the Bolshoi troupe was Soviet— and one day, just possibly, their own daughter, Lia, already getting solo parts in the dance academy where she attended school for two days of each week, might well be the Plisetskaya of the year 2000. Lia was nine, and already sound asleep in her 'room' — actually, just an extension of the flat's central hall. Oksana's parents were rustling around the living-dining area which was also their bedroom, and it was, after all, time to go to sleep.

Didchuk paused to glance at the news broadcast when his wife said, 'Yora? Did I tell you? That Bornets boy came in today with a temperature of thirty-eight, can you imagine?'

'No, you didn't mention it,' he said.

'And when I made him go to the clinic, he came back with a note saying that the doctor was not in today. Called away on some emergency.'

'I suppose,' said Didchuk amiably, 'that she is getting ready for May Day, like everyone else. What did you do?'

'What could I do? I couldn't send him home. His parents would both be at work. So I made him lie down in the teachers' lounge but, really, Yora, that isn't fair to the other teachers. And suppose I brought home some virus to our own family?'

'You look healthy enough to me,' he said. 'Well, let's go to bed.' And he was reaching out for the knob on the television set when the announcer put down one sheet of paper, picked up another, and read, without change of expression: 'There has been an accident at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine. People have been injured, and steps are being taken to restore the situation to normal.'

There is a conversion table that Soviet people apply to government announcements of bad news. If the news is never broadcast but only a subject of rumor, then it is bad but bearable. If the event is publicly described as 'minor,' then it is serious. And if there is no measure assigned to it at all, then it calls for resorting to 'the voices.'

The only radio the Didchuks owned was not in the kitchen with the television set; it was in the other room, where the grandparents were preparing for bed. Didchuk knocked on the door and excused himself. 'The radio,' he said. 'I think we should listen for a moment.'

'At this hour?' his mother-in-law demanded, but when she heard about the news announcement, she said, 'Yes, I understand now. That Mrs. Smin Saturday morning, it was clear that she was concealing something. But please, not too loud for the voices.'

Didchuk didn't need to be told that. He turned on their Rekord 314 radio, the size of a baby's coffin, and waited patiently for the tubes to warm up. The volume he set only to a whisper. It is not exactly illegal to listen to the Voice of America and the other foreign broadcasts beamed into the USSR, but it is not something most citizens want to advertise.