A noise in the bushes to his left. Komarov sat forward, put down his glass. A figure moved swiftly along the side, then the front of the porch. Komarov took the knife from his pocket. For an instant he thought of Chkalov, of militia vengeance. He recalled one of his agents, Allika, who had been mysteriously killed last year. He was out of his chair and had begun to open the knife when he recognized his son coming up the stairs.
“Dmitry!”
“What’s new, Pop?”
He slipped the knife back into his pocket, allowing it to close within its handle. “You frightened me.”
“What else is new?”
“Why don’t you use the front door?”
“Why do you sit out here every night?”
“Why do you always ask questions in response to mine?”
“Why do you always ask questions?”
It was no use. Komarov sat back in his chair, took a drink of vodka, lit a cigarette.
Instead of going into the house, Dmitry sat on the steps facing the yard. Komarov stared at the dark outline of his son. So thin he seemed unhealthy. His hair, cropped on the sides and long on top, sticking straight up. His damnable earring catching the light from the house.
“I got a job today,” said Dmitry.
“A job?” No. He must not sound overly excited. “What kind of job?”
“At the art museum in Kiev.”
“Which one? There are several art museums.”
“Not the Museum of Russian Art. This one’s a few doors away.”
“What matters is you’re employed, Dmitry.”
“So now you don’t have to say your son was kicked out of the university and he’s a parasite. Am I right? Is this why you’re so impressed?”
“No,” said Komarov. “I’m interested. Which museum is it?”
“Oriental and Western Art. I’ll work in the gift shop. Fyodor got me the job.”
Fyodor, the one Dmitry brought to dinner last month, the one who put his arm around Dmitry as they walked down the street.
Komarov took another drink, then another. His own son, the son of a major in the KGB, a homosexual. And now his… his what?
Mate? Bed partner? Lover? And now his son’s lover had gotten Dmitry a job.
“So, what do you think, Pop?”
“I think it’s good to have a job.” Komarov wanted to be alone with his vodka but knew he must go on, he must try despite the fact he had left the state of euphoria and was descending into the depths of drunkenness. “I also think relationships should be with the right people.”
“Like who?”
The wind blew across Komarov’s face, but he could not smell the air. All he could smell was the vodka.
“A long time ago,” said Komarov, “when I was stationed in East Berlin, there was a woman named Gretchen. Golden blond hair, eyes like fine crystal, skin soft and fair…”
Dmitry stood and walked to the back door.
“Where are you going? I was speaking!”
“I’ve heard this story before, Pop.”
“No. You… you couldn’t have.”
“I have. And so has Mom. You always talk about Gretchen when you’re drunk. You always tell us how she was murdered and what a hero you were to have avenged her death. You’re drunk like this every night. Go ahead. Try to stand up. See? You can’t. You don’t know what you’re talking about. There are no Gretchens here.
I have my own friends. Telling me about the old days in Berlin when you used your whore, Gretchen, to lure poor bastards to be tortured doesn’t mean anything here. Maybe you killed the bastards she brought to you. Why don’t you get your gun and kill me? You can’t even get out of your chair!”
Komarov reached into his pocket and pulled out the knife. Before he could open it, Dmitry snatched it away.
“Ha! A knife! You pull a knife on your own son?”
Dmitry opened the knife, held the blade up to the light coming from the window. “Such a big knife for such a little man.” Then Dmitry stabbed the knife into the door frame and went into the house, leaving the back door to slam shut like the shot from a pistol.
Komarov held the arms of his chair and twisted to stare at the knife sticking out of the door frame, the knife he’d used so he could be where he was today. But where was he? Was this hell? Was there really a vengeful God? If so, why didn’t God kill the Gypsy landlord so he could live a different life? A life along the other path instead of this one with its marriage producing a homosexual son who, despite his appearance, had become stronger than him. What was a man?
Were the brutes Chkalov and Azef men? Was he a man?
Komarov picked up the vodka bottle, felt the weight of it, the heft of poison, of slow death. He would fight it. He would regain his manhood. Perhaps he would uncover a conspiracy at Chernobyl, a conspiracy involving the Horvath brothers. Gypsies, whose relatives dress and dance like women while others pick pockets. Gypsies, who converse in languages others cannot understand. Gypsies, who wear earrings. A world of symbols. A world in which a spy from American intelligence can, if he wants, squirm in the bushes like a snake and mount a surprise attack on a KGB official simply trying to get through another evening at his own home.
Komarov stood up from his chair, holding onto the side of the house for balance. He studied the vodka bottle. Although the label was unreadable in the dark, lights from the house reflected in the glass. He tried to feel the reflected light with his thumb, and when he could not, he held the bottle high over his head and threw it against the porch railing. It shattered across the floor of the porch, and eventually he heard vodka dripping through the floorboards to the earth below. He stood swaying in the dark, listening, waiting, and planning his next move.
8
Spring rains had moistened the Ukraine soil, preparing its rich farmland for the job of feeding the USSR. In the far northern Ukraine, waterfowl had returned to the Pripyat marshes. East of the marshes along the Uzh and Pripyat Rivers, gulls followed tractors, feasting on unearthed insects. Farther east, where the Uzh and Pripyat emptied into the Dnieper for the journey to the Black Sea, waterfowl congregated at a large pond. The pond bordered the Pripyat River but was separated from the river by a man-made dike. Water in the pond was warmer than the water in the river or in any other ponds in the area because it was used to cool superheated steam emerging from several turbines.
From the far side of the pond, the sound from the Chernobyl Nuclear Generating Facility operated by the Ministry of Energy was a steady drone. To some, it was a sound of unlimited power. To others, trained in engineering and physics, it was not one sound, but many sounds. Pumps, turbines, generators, and transformers formed an orchestra. The failure of one instrument would diminish the score.
Early in the morning on Friday, April 25, 1986, a technician in an off-white uniform walked near a turbine and generator of Chernobyl’s unit four. The combined structure was over fifty meters long. On the generator side, thick copper bus bars in protective pipe went through the wall of the building to the transformers outside.
On the turbine side, large pipes brought steam from the reactor to drive the turbine, and more pipes carried steam off to be cooled.
The concrete floor to which the structure was mounted vibrated.
The noise was deafening and there was the smell of oil and hot metal and graphite in the air.
One wall of the huge room was a mass of piping, wiring, gauges, solenoids, and valves. The technician paused in this area, watching solenoids and valves doing their work. But to stay long enough to watch every solenoid-valve combination go through a cycle would have taken hours, and the technician had further rounds to make.
