Chernobyl

long time, Konov. You're not an asshole. You have some education, after all. You could have become a lance corporal. You could even have gone to a training battalion to become a sergeant. Why were you such a fuckup?'

Konov looked at him consideringly and decided to tell the truth. 'The fact is, all I wanted was to get out of the Army as fast as possible, Senior Lieutenant Osipev.'

'Um,' said the lieutenant, who had expected no better answer. 'But actually, Konov, being in the Army is not altogether bad. As a private, of course, it is one thing. But you could consider applying for one of the service academies — even the Frunze, which is where I myself trained. As an officer the life is entirely different.'

'I am grateful for the lieutenant's consideration,' Konov said politely, finishing the dark bread and porridge, and saving the one slice of white to savor with his tea.

'The Soviet Union needs good officers, Konov,' the lieutenant pointed out. 'The Great Patriotic War was not the last that will ever happen, you know.' Konov nodded courteously, and the lieutenant went on. 'Our country was in great danger then. Great battles were fought in this area. Hider's Germans, in 1941, came through right here, and these marshes of the Pripyat were our best defense.'

'But still they broke through?' Konov offered.

'Not through the marshes. Tanks could not do that, then. There was heavy fighting in Chernigov, a hundred kilometers east of us, and around Kiev, down to the south. It was a bad time, Konov, but where did the Fascists get to in the end? They got as far as Stalingrad, and there they learned how to retreat. Why? Because of the brave men and officers of the Soviet Army. You could be one of them. No,' he said, getting up, 'don't give me an answer now. I only want you to think about it.'

When the lieutenant was gone Miklas came over from his own bunk. 'What'd he want?' he demanded.

'To invite me to tea at the officers' club, of course,' said

Konov. 'What did you think? Now let's get to work. We're going back to Pripyat today.'

When the armored car had let them out by the empty radio factory, Konov ordered, 'Hand it over.'

Miklas made a sarcastic show of reaching into his white coveralls and taking out the sack of leftover food Konov had reclaimed from the kitchen garbage. 'Your dinner, your honor,' he said obsequiously. 'May your honor dine well.'

Konov disregarded him. He took out his own sack, heavy with crusts of moldy bread and the pork bones from the officers' evening meal and looked about for a likely place to leave them for Pripyat's abandoned pets. 'They're all going to die anyway, you know,' Miklas offered.

'Sooner or later so are we,' Konov said cheerfully. 'I will put it off a litde longer for the dogs if I can.'

Miklas sighed. 'Are you still determined to volunteer to stay here?'

'Why not?''

'A thousand reasons why not! If you must volunteer, why not to work on one of the new villages they are building for the farmers? At least there would be people there.'

'And work fourteen hours a day to dig foundations for their houses? Not me,' Konov said, though that was not the real reason he had rejected the idea.

'But at least from that you may come away without two heads,' Miklas grumbled.

'For you,' Konov said, 'another head would be a very good thing. Pick your building.'

'Oh, I think the factory needs to be guarded most closely,' Miklas said at once.

'Then do it,' said Konov, knowing that what Miklas most wanted to guard there was the dozen cases of canned kvass and Coca-Cola the first soldiers had found in the radio factory's canteen. Now they were more than half consumed. He debated warning Miklas against taking off his mask to drink a Coke, but he knew that would be no use. Anyway, he consoled himself, the inside of the factory was fairly clean.

Almost a quarter of Pripyat was fairly clean, in fact — well, nearly fairly clean. On the best of its blocks there were pockets of intractable radiation — soaked into the paving or trapped in the cracks of a building — that would take a demolition crew to remove. You marked those with the warning signs, and you hurried past them. But there were whole buildings where the radiation level was barely above background.

On the surface, though, the town of Pripyat had hardly changed in three weeks. It was like some lifeless geological formation. No doubt it would weather and perhaps erode away, but only over long periods of time. Nothing else would change. Doors that had been left open remained open. The skis and baby carriages and bicycles on the balconies stayed untouched. Cars that had been left behind by their owners, pulled up under a tree with their canvas coverings protecting them against the elements, were still unmoved. The winds and the rains had wrapped some of the washing around the lines so that the garments no longer danced in the breeze; some garments had danced a bit too passionately and torn themselves free, and now lay crumpled in a gutter or draped across a dead rosebush. Konov stopped at a corner, hesitated, then entered the six-story apartment building on the right.

These were good new buildings, put up for the workers at the Chernobyl plant, and although they had been erected in haste, someone had seen that the concrete was solid and the fittings worked. Of course, there was no power in these buildings now. The little elevator was there on the ground floor, its door open, but Konov hardly glanced at it as he began to mount the stairs.

Most of the tenants of the building had locked their apartments carefully when they left. On the top floor, Konov tried each door with a firm twist and a solid shake, but all four were locked. That was all he was required to do, but he took a moment to put his ear against each door in turn. It was not looters that he expected to find, but there was always the chance that some family had, in its panic and rush, forgotten a cat, a dog, a bird.

There was nothing to be heard. Konov descended a flight of stairs and repeated the process on the fifth floor. Again nothing, but on the fourth floor a family named Dazhchenko— the name was on a card by the door — had been so hopelessly rushed or so foolishly trusting that they had left the door to their flat unlocked. Konov opened it and entered the gloomy hallway for a look around.

He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the air inside. There were some very bad smells in this place. His business, however, was not to smell but to look, and he began his inspection. Just on the left of the entrance was a child's room — no, actually a room for two children, Konov corrected himself; there were clothes for two young girls hanging against the wall. One had perhaps been a four-year-old or thereabouts. The other possessed the skirt and blouse of a teenage Young Pioneer. The next room belonged to the parents, a double bed nearly filling it; it was still unmade, and the drawers of the chest were pulled open, the contents in disarray. There was a picture of Lenin on the wall, but (Konov smiled) there was also an ikon. Both bedrooms were bright in the sun from the windows, but the unpleasant smells remained.

If it had been his own apartment, Konov thought, he would have opened all the windows at once; but it was not, and besides, what was the use? Whatever smelled foul would go on doing so, and an open window would let the rain in next time the weather changed.

And in this place at this time it was not only rot and mildew that the rain might bring.

The stink of decay came from the kitchen. The refrigerator door had been left open. Whatever was inside had rotted thoroughly. Gasping, Konov closed the door; it was all he could do, though he wondered if the gases of decomposition from whatever was in there — a stew? a chicken? — might not blow the door off as they swelled.

It was, he confirmed for himself, a very nice apartment. There were two little doors at the end of the hall; one opened on a sink and tub, the other on a commode; and someone had carefully cut out pictures from some foreign magazine — the language appeared to be Swedish or German to Konov — and pinned them to the back of the door. The pictures were of Lady Di and her husband, the Prince of Wales; so this was where the little girls sat for their private business, gazing romantically at the beautiful royal pair. In the dining room there was a small but quite new television set; it was on the floor, its electrical cords wrapped neatly around it — the father had tried to take it with them, no doubt, and discovered at the last minute that it was impossible to add one more thing.

But there was neither looter nor abandoned pet to be found in this place, and Konov had other floors to investigate. He fiddled with the lock on the apartment door until he got it to snap in the locked position behind him; so at least when the family returned they would find their home as they left it. Smells and all.

If ever the family returned.

When Konov started on his second building he paused on the step, looking about and listening. It was a warm day, but not a silent one. He could hear bulldozers in some other part of the town, scraping away at the tainted soil so that the worst of it could be hauled away and buried. A nearer rumble was one of the bright orange water trucks, methodically washing down the empty streets of their poisoned dust one more time. (But who would wash the