The pipefitter was gasping for breath as he spoke. He was telling the air that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had no right to be where it was. 'It is the Russians, you see,' he said dreamily, gazing at the ceiling. 'They're the ones who need it, not us. We have farms in the Ukraine! We grow food, the best in the world; we don't need their factories or their power plants. If we want electrical power, we have the Dnieper River!
Already there are two dozen great dams on the Dnieper, so why bring in these atomic contraptions?'
'Shhh,' said Sheranchuk nervously. 'You should rest, please, Arkady.'
The pipefitter gave no sign of hearing him. He addressed the ceiling reasonably. 'So why do we have this nuclear power station at all? Because the Russians want it, you see. It is not a thing for Ukrainians at all. It is so the Russians can turn on the lights in Moscow and sell electricity to the people in Poland and Bulgaria. Let them make their own!'
'Please rest,' Sheranchuk begged, glancing toward the door. Where were the doctors when you wanted them?
'But no!' cried Ponomorenko, suddenly loud again. 'The Russians insist, and what can we do? Can we say no to them? Can we ask them please to make their filthy atomic messes somewhere else? Can we live freely in our own dear Ukraine, that Bogdan Khelmnitski freed from the Poles? Can we even speak the truth when we want to? No, we cannot, and do you know why? I'll tell you why!' he shouted.
'This is why!' Ponomorenko cried, raising himself on his elbows. 'Because we are
He burst out in a fit of coughing and fell back. And what his only wish was no one would ever know, because the way his head hit the pillow, the way one eye was half open and the other shut, the way his jaw hung slack, they all told the story: the brave pipefitter and daring football player, the 'Spring' of the Four Seasons, Arkady Ponomorenko, was dead.
Chapter 29
Emmaline Branford is a conspicuous figure on the streets of Moscow, not only because she is a woman who wears fashionable American slacks and sometimes listens to her Walkman as she strolls, but because she is black. That is not the color of her skin, which is a pleasing caramel; it is her ethnic description. She knows that it is also the reason she has the career-building Moscow posting, since the U.S. State Department, like any other American employer, needs to burnish its equal-opportunity image. Her gender helped in this, too, of course; as Cultural Attache, she is the second-highest ranking woman in the Moscow Embassy. Emmaline is a pretty woman, with a master's degree in sociology and a minor in Slavic languages. Her mother did not want her to go to Moscow. What Emmaline's mother wants is for her to take a teaching job in Waycross, Georgia, get married and get on with producing a grandchild. Emmaline's boyfriend wants pretty much the same thing; but, at twenty-seven, Emmaline is not yet ready to settle down.
The first thing on Emmaline's agenda as she dragged herself out of bed each morning was to start the brewer for that indispensable first cup of hot, black, kick-your-mammy coffee. The second was harder. That was the nasty task of taking out the brush and dustpan (actually that was the lid of a cardboard box, but it worked well enough) to sweep up the morning's accumulation of dead cockroaches. There were only a dozen or so this time, not much for a bright May morning, so Emmaline was into the shower and out of it again by the time the coffee was ready.
Dressed and ready to go, Emmaline looked out the window of her flat in the foreign ghetto as she finished her grapefruit — the last grapefruit she was going to have, until someone from the Embassy took another courier flight to Helsinki. She was waiting for Warner Borden, the Embassy's Science Attache, to knock on her door. She had not made up her mind what to tell him — whether she would accept a ride to the Embassy in his little red Nissan hotrod or walk it on her own for the sake of the exercise. (At 124 pounds, Emmaline was convinced she'd grown hog-fat over the Russian winter.)
Then, she hadn't really made up her mind about Warner Borden at all. It was spring. It had been a long winter. It had been a lonely one for Emmaline, and along about March even Borden had begun to seem interesting; there were very few unattached American males in Moscow; and no black ones at all, unless you counted the nineteen-year-old Marine guards at the Embassy. Emmaline was not formally engaged to the guy back in Waycross, and she wasn't constitutionally opposed to a little experimenting around. She wasn't even, really, opposed to Warner Borden. But it took a lot of the fun out of fornication when you knew that the telephone headset, a microphone in the wall, and another in the bathroom were very likely to be faithfully transmitting every moan, gasp, grunt, and babble to someone with a headset and a tape recorder a block away. And the ears under the headset were not necessarily always Russian.
So (Emmaline being by nature a fair person) the decision to make about Warner was whether to encourage him or not. It was a decision that needed to be made. She thought about it as she was tidying up the remains of her breakfast, everything tightly wrapped to discourage the bugs, and was still thinking about it as she peered at herself in the bathroom mirror. As she gave her teeth a final brushing, she found three more roaches stirring feebly by the toilet. She went back for the brush and cardboard and, of course, that was just when Warner Borden knocked at her door.
She stood inside the doorway to greet him. 'Thanks, anyway,' she said, 'but I think I'd better walk.'
He did not seem disappointed. 'You've got a nice day for it. Can I have a cup of coffee anyway?'
It was absolutely foolish to be embarrassed about the roaches, which were everyone's cross to carry. 'Help yourself,' she said, turning away. As she was capturing the last sick bug, cowering behind the toilet but unable to move fast enough to get away, Borden appeared in the bathroom door, holding his cup, to watch her flush them down.
He said with scientific interest, 'You'll be lucky if you don't plug up the pipes with those buggers. What'd you knock them out with?'
'Rima's grandmother's recipe. You mix boric acid into cold mashed potatoes and roll up little balls. Rima says it makes them thirsty but it keeps them from being able to drink. So they die. Sometimes they do, anyway. I guess that's why they're always around the toilet and the sink.'
Borden grinned. 'Hanging around what they can't get. I do the same thing myself.'
Emmaline slammed the toilet lid down to change the subject. 'What do you hear from Chernobyl?'
He said sourly, 'Still nothing. They've been having press conferences at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, but only for the commie countries and Ted Turner. So much for
Emmaline made an effort to look at the bright side. 'If it did come, it might at least kill the damn roaches.'
'Oh, hon, no
'That many?' she asked, dampened.
'The million roaches? Oh, you mean the dead people. Well, how are you supposed to know? The Russians've only admitted to two. Everybody in Washington is saying it's a lot more, maybe hundreds — there was a story in New York that said there were fifteen thousand dead already.'
'Which one do you believe, Warner?'
'Hon,' he sighed, turning to rinse out his cup before leaving, 'when you're in this place as long as I am you'll learn not to believe
On this pleasant May morning, the air, as Emmaline walked from the foreign compound past the walled Sovkino motion-picture studios to the Kiev railroad station, was just cool enough to be comfortable. The sun was bright. Still, she was glad she'd taken a sweater. There were traces of dirty snow at the bases of the tallest north-
