was a few blocks away, and he waved before disappearing beyond the building across from hers.
The last thing he said before leaving her apartment was that the view from her balcony was better than the view from the balcony on his and Nina’s apartment. Their apartment faced the red lights of the Chernobyl towers, he’d said, while hers faced the dark horizon of the Belorussian Republic to the north.
Juli had not put on shoes, and the snow stung her feet. She was about to step back inside when she heard something, snow crunching underfoot. She turned abruptly, looked at her footprints and Mihaly’s footprints and the impressions his knees had made in the snow. She heard it again, snow crunching. She moved quietly to the railing, leaned out, looked right and left. On the floor of the balcony to the left, she saw boot prints in the snow. Was there a shadow? Had she seen the toe of a boot disappear behind the pri-vacy wall separating the balconies?
She ran inside, locked the sliding door, closed the curtains, turned out the light, and went to the left wall to place her ear against it. There was a gentle thud, a sliding door closing, perhaps the one next door. She kept listening but heard nothing more. Maybe a worker or the landlord had stepped out onto the balcony earlier in the day and made the boot prints. She wanted to believe this because she knew the apartment next door had been vacant several weeks. At least it had been vacant until now.
When the phone rang, she was so startled she backed away from the wall abruptly, fell backward over the hassock, and landed on her hip. She rubbed her hip, cursed the hassock, crawled to the end table, and picked up the phone.
“Hello.”
No answer, but someone there.
“Hello,” she said again somewhat louder, imagining whoever was in the apartment next door might be calling.
“Hello, I said!”
“Hello,” a woman’s voice. “This is Nina Horvath. Is my husband there?”
Cold night air seemed to have come into the apartment. She turned to look at the balcony door, but it was closed. The night again, the winter night threatening to swallow her.
“Nina Horvath?” Juli finally said.
“Yes. I asked if my husband was there.”
“Why would he be here?”
“Oh,” said Nina Horvath. “Then he’s not there?”
“No.”
“Very well. I presume you completed your business and I can expect him any time. Yes. I believe I hear him now. Good night.”
Earlier this evening, while waiting for the bus, she had justified her relationship with Mihaly by telling herself life was too short to worry about the future. Now the future was upon her like a thief in the night. This evening she had played the seductress. Now she felt nothing but emptiness.
Juli wrapped her coat tightly about her, curled up on the sofa, and prayed Marina would come home soon.
7
April 1986
Pavel and Nikolai sat at their long table in the back room of the Pripyat post office opening-reading-resealing the ten percent of the morning’s mail shoveled through the slot in the wall. Last winter the steamer had been welcome. On a warm April day, however, the steamer was an enemy. An exhaust fan clattering on the wall failed to remove the heat and moisture. Their foreheads glistened with perspiration.
“I’m reminded of a steam bath in Moscow,” said Pavel, resealing a letter and adding it to the growing pile on his left.
“The steam baths in Kiev are better,” said Nikolai.
“In what way?”
“The women.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Pavel. “Not even in these so-called times of change. You play with your nuts underwater, and you see tits on boys.”
“That reminds me,” said Nikolai. “Soon it will be May.”
“What does May have to do with women in the Kiev baths?”
Nikolai resealed a letter he had been reading and tossed it onto the pile. “In May chestnuts and lilacs are in bloom. While we sit in our Pripyat sweatbox, workers prepare for May Day parades. Last year, naked women were in the Kiev parade.”
“The recent crackdown on drinking should apply especially to you,” said Pavel. “Or perhaps, like the Chernobyl workers, you’ve taken up hashish.”
“Don’t be a farmer,” said Nikolai, retrieving another letter.
“I’m not a farmer,” said Pavel.
“You smell like one.”
Pavel tossed a letter onto the pile and gave Nikolai a dismissive wave. “No wonder it stinks in here. With all this idiotic talk and all this heat…”
“Captain Putna should issue deodorant,” said Nikolai.
They were quiet for a time, reading letters, frowning, and adding letters to the finished pile. Finally, Pavel spoke.
“The postmaster has an oscillating fan in his office. Tomorrow it will be in here.”
Nikolai fanned himself with a letter he had just opened. “If we had a window like the postmaster, we’d have a view and be able to smell the spring air instead of reading about it. I’m sick of reading about it.” Nikolai read from the letter. “‘Spring is pleasant here also.
Snows of February and March have nourished the winter wheat.
Father has planted our vegetable crop and all is well.’ I’m sick of hearing how all is well.” Nikolai opened a new letter, examined it.
“Here’s another to Juli Popovics, the Chernobyl technician babe.”
“She’s under observation,” said Pavel. “Who’s it from?”
“I know she’s under observation,” said Nikolai, somewhat annoyed. “It’s in Ukrainian from Aunt Magda in Kiev. She has prepared a room so Juli Popovics can visit for several months while the medical matter is addressed.”
“Sounds like she’s a Mommychka-to-be,” said Pavel.
“There must be much activity at Chernobyl,” said Nikolai.
“Aside from radioactivity.”
Nikolai put the letter to Juli Popovics in the tray for copying and began opening another.
“Still no mail for the engineer stud?” asked Nikolai, glancing at a list on the table headed by the words official observation.
“Nothing for Mihaly Horvath since February,” said Pavel.
“First his American cousin bugs him, then a batch of letters from his brother asking about some matter, then nothing.”
“The letters we copied may have had an effect,” said Nikolai.
“Like other Chernobyl workers before him, he’s gone mad and had to be taken away. Perhaps we’ll go mad. It’s spring and I feel like a caged animal. Can you imagine the heat in this room come summer?”
“I doubt if Mihaly Horvath has gone mad,” said Pavel. “As for us, the post office should supply chilled mineral water. Did you hear Gorbachev is now mineral secretary since he replaced vodka at official functions?”
“You already told me,” said Nikolai, wiping his brow with his sleeve.
“Don’t worry about the heat,” said Pavel. “Tomorrow we’ll have a fan to cool us, courtesy of our ersatz supervisor, the noble comrade postmaster.”
Because it had been stored in the underground garage, the inside of the Volga was cool and comfortable.
