Chernobyl

And when Oksana tarried before the slabs of snow-white pork fat and the naked-looking skinned rabbits, thinking of the supper she would have to make for her husband and parents that night, Aftasia vetoed those too. 'Sausage again, if you please — and again an old one. Inspected? Yes, of course they are inspected— ' For they could not have missed the long lines of vendors waiting their turns to put their strawberries and fresh hams under the radiation detectors so they could get a permit to sell them if they passed. 'But if I were to stay in Kiev, I would not buy fresh meat just yet. Let the situation settle down a little.'

'Then you're leaving Kiev?' Oksana ventured.

The old lady smiled at her. 'Wouldn't you? I don't think that anyone named Smin will be popular in Kiev just now.'

But, popular or not, Aftasia Smin still had friends. As she demonstrated to the Didchuks. They set off for the railroad station in good time, Aftasia Smin up front with the driver to give orders, the elder Didchuks in back with their daughter, and their daughter's boxes, bags, and paper-wrapped food parcels, squeezed between them.

The last hundred meters were the slowest, because the militiamen had roped off the square in front of the train station. The approaches were jammed. Oksana Didchuk made a faint worried sound as she saw the red numbers on the digital clock above the station. 'But the train is to leave in an hour,' she said.

Aftasia turned to her; she was so tiny she had to lift herself to peer over the back of the seat. 'It won't leave in an hour,' she said. 'Look, the trains are just coming in now.' So they were; the Didchuks could see the long trains snaking slowly in to the platforms beside the station.

Oksana made another worried sound, but she muffled it. The regular night trains between Kiev and Moscow were streamlined, modern cars built in East Germany, proudly lettered with the names of the cities they connected. The ones now creeping in were something quite different. These extra trains to Moscow were made up in a hurry, of cars taken from repair shops and sidings, hard class and soft, dilapidated and spanking new, and for every space on the trains there were two people who wanted to hoard them.

The special trains were meant to carry children under ten away from the radioactive cloud that threatened Kiev, but every ten-year-old child had parents, older siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts. Nearly every one of them wished they, too, could get on that train for Moscow and air that did not threaten lingering death. Some tried.

Some, on that Wednesday in Kiev, were trying all sorts of strange things. It was said that potassium iodide capsules saturate the thyroid gland with the element, and so would prevent the radioactive iodine from entering into the body and breeding a cancer in the throat. It was said that Georgian wine immunized one against radiation, or that vodka did; or that a cocktail of equal parts of vodka and turpentine did, or the white of egg, or even more repulsive substances. The first of those rumors happened to be quite true, and, as in Poland, potassium iodide vanished from the apothecaries overnight. The others were not, but that didn't keep people from trying them.

Many of the people in the terminal were all but reeling drunk, there were even one or two glassy-eyed children, and a few wound up in hospitals with assorted poisonings. Everyone was wearing a hat. Many of the children were sweating in winter clothes on this hot May morning, because everyone had been advised to stay bundled up whenever they were out in the open. Those near the doors of the station were constantly shouting at the people milling in and out to close them, shut them tight, keep them closed, to keep the outside air with its secret burden of sickness from poisoning the hot, sweaty, unwell air of the terminal.

When the driver had found a place to put the car, Aftasia ordered the Didchuks: 'Wait here.' She was gone nearly an hour, but when she came back she was triumphantly waving a boarding pass that let the Didchuk child into one of the newest cars on the train. Such passes were not for everyone. But not everyone had a Party card originally issued in 1916, and even an old woman had friends of friends who could do a favor. Even now.

When the child was settled, surrounded by her boxes and neat little traveling bag and sausage and bread for the long ride, the Didchuks thanked Aftasia. Businesslike, she brushed their thanks aside. 'You can do me a favor in return if you will,' she said. 'I must take my American relatives to the airport. If you will come with me to translate, Didchuk, I am sure your wife can stay here with the child until the train leaves.'

'To translate?' Didchuk asked. 'But surely at the airport people will speak English—'

'I want to show my cousins something first,' said Aftasia harshly. 'If it is not too much of a bother?'

Of course it was not too much of a bother, though it was certainly not no bother at all, either; Didchuk would really have preferred to stay with his wife on the platform, waving and smiling at their daughter as needed until at last the train pulled out. Aftasia would not be denied. So the two of them got back in the car, its windows shut tight (as all windows were ordered to be) against the outside air, and the driver took them through the crowded streets to the hotel.

The Garfields were waiting just inside the door, guarding their pretty pale blue matched luggage from California. 'A moment,' said Aftasia, and got out to explain to the hotel porter that (if he would not mind) he should send the Gar-fields' luggage to the airport on the Intourist bus, since there was no room in the car for all of it. He, too, agreed not to mind, or not to mind much, and Aftasia ordered the Americans politely to hurry into the car. 'But can't we have the windows open, at least?' Candace Garfield asked, and when Didchuk translated the driver exploded:

'Of course not! We have been told to keep out the air as much as possible and it is, after all, only May! We will be quite comfortable in here if no one smokes. If,' he added, glancing at Aftasia Smin, 'it is really necessary to make this side trip instead of going directly to the airport.'

'It is necessary,' Aftasia said flatly. When the driver had surrendered, the old woman began to engage her American cousins in a polite conversation through the teacher. It was wonderful, she said, that they had had a chance to meet, after all. She hoped that they had not been too frightened with this difficulty of her son's power plant. They would be all right, she was sure, because they had been exposed to whatever it was for no more than a few days. It was perhaps more dangerous for those who must remain in the Ukraine, but in just a few hours they would be in Moscow, and then the next day on their way to — where were they going first? Paris? Ah, how wonderful! She had always dreamed of seeing Paris — and, oh yes, especially of California, which (she said) she had always thought of as a sort of combination of Yalta, Kiev, and heaven.

With the snail pace of polite conversation relayed through an interpreter, it took half an hour for all these pleasantries to be exchanged, while the car crossed the Dnieper bridge, snaked through the traffic, and drove along the streets of the suburbs.

Aftasia fell silent, watching the streets they passed, and Didchuk took up the burden of conversation for himself. 'This part of Kiev,' he said proudly, 'was only open countryside as recently as the war — did you manage to see our Museum of the Great Patriotic War while you were in Kiev? Yes? Then you know that there was much fighting around here. Now it is all very nice homes, as you see. The people who live here have the bus or the Metro, and in the morning it's twenty minutes and they're at work.' He glanced ahead, and frowned slightly. 'This particular area,' he mentioned diffidently, 'was in fact quite famous, in a way.. . Excuse me,' he said abruptly, and leaned forward to talk to Aftasia.

Candace Garfield looked around. They were passing a tall television tower, surrounded by nine-story apartment buildings. 'I don't see anything that looks famous,' she told her husband. 'Unless it's that little park up there on the right.'

Her husband was dabbing sweat off his brow. 'What I'd like to see,' he said, 'is an airplane.'

'Think of Paris,' his wife said good-naturedly. 'Paris in the springtime? The sidewalk cafes?'

'Those long, romantic evenings,' Garfield said, perking up. 'Dinner in our room, with plenty of wine—'

'Down, boy,' his wife commanded, as Didchuk sank back and smiled nervously at them.

'This is the place,' he said. 'Mrs. Smin asks me to ask you if you have ever heard of Babi Yar?'

'Well, of course we've heard of Babi Yar,' said Garfield, and his wife, concentrating, added, 'I think so. During the war, wasn't it?'

'Yes, exactly. During the war. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a very famous poem about it, and there has been music, books, all sorts of things about Babi Yar,' Didchuk confirmed. He seemed ill-at-ease, but waved toward the park. 'Do you see the monument there? It is quite beautiful, don't you think? Many people come here to pay their respects, even leaving flowers— but,' he added sadly, 'Mrs. Smin does not wish to stop here. Still, you can get quite a good look at it as we go by.'

By craning their necks, the Garfields could see a statuary group on a heroic scale. From directly in front it was only a crowd of stone figures, packed tighdy together like subway riders, with a mother holding her child despairingly aloft. Then, as the car moved slowly along, Candace said, 'What are they doing? It looks like the ones in back are falling into the valley there.'