another.”
After drinking to secrecy, Lazlo and Mihaly hugged in the darkness of the wine cellar as if they were the last two souls on earth.
While they hugged, Lazlo promised himself he would someday be honest with Mihaly and tell about the killing of the deserter. Someday soon.
3
Morning dew weighed heavily on late-summer foliage along the Pripyat to Chernobyl Road. At the gate of the nuclear facility operated by the Ministry of Energy, a guard inspected a car waiting to get in.
The few employees who commuted by car had to stop at the main gate for identification and sometimes a look into the luggage compartment. Buses passed more quickly because a guard assigned to each bus checked identification and inspected briefcases and lunch containers while the bus was in transit.
When entering the main gate, the first buildings one saw were laboratory buildings, including the low-level counting laboratory operated by the Department of Industrial Safety. Incoming buses stopped here first. The building, set back from the road, was inside another fence and inspection gate. This inner fence was not capped with barbed wire like the main fence. Its purpose was to keep out stray animals or ignorant maintenance workers who might bring unwanted radiation into the building. If there were a “spill” of nuclear material at Chernobyl, however small, and if some of it were to contaminate the low-level laboratory, it would put them out of business. Recently, the head of safety at the plant had ordered low-level laboratory personnel to take their pocket dosimeters home with them in the unlikely event they picked up radiation on the bus or elsewhere. Along with the written order was a strongly worded message saying the measure was experimental and anyone generating unfounded rumors would be dealt with severely.
The low-level laboratory housed a monitoring system to analyze samples from numerous locations surrounding Chernobyl, as well as samples from all over the Ukraine. The equipment here could detect radiation levels so small, background radiation caused by cosmic rays from outer space had to be shielded out using steel vaults. Within the vaults, samples were analyzed by counting ionizing particles of radiation through the use of ionization chambers commonly called Geiger counters.
The building had two upper floors, a basement, and a sub-basement. The upper floors contained offices for engineers and scientists, laboratories for converting samples into gases to be put into Geiger tubes, and computer equipment to analyze data. The electronic counting equipment and the vaults, referred to as “tombs” by technicians, were below ground in the windowless basement and sub-basement. The technicians called themselves “moles.”
Juli Popovics was a mole. Like many technicians who worked in the sub-basement, she was well acquainted with radioactivity and its terminology. Strontium, half-lives, and the characteristics of radionuclides such as krypton-85 and cesium-137 were second nature to her. Although the advertised reason for the low-level counting lab was safety, she knew it had another purpose. Scrubbers were installed on site to camouflage the extent to which reactor fuel was reprocessed before dangerous fission products had a chance to decay.
Few technicians at Chernobyl were aware the Americans and British had developed a way to measure radionuclide off-gassing and use the measurements to estimate weapons-grade fuel reprocessing.
The only reason Juli knew of these techniques was because of another technician named Aleksandra Yasinsky.
Juli and Aleksandra graduated university together and came to work at Chernobyl and live in Pripyat the same year. Aleksandra was a dear friend, but she was also an activist. Aleksandra kept charts in her desk showing ongoing increases of radioactive noble gases based on air samples taken outside the plant. Aleksandra said scientists throughout the world would someday have to answer for increases caused by nuclear production. Aleksandra thought she was helping by keeping the charts. The plant manager, notified by plant security, felt differently. One day Aleksandra was at work; the next day she was gone. According to the fabricated story, Aleksandra had transferred to the Balakovsky power plant. But Juli knew Aleksandra no longer worked for the Ministry of Energy because on a visit to Moscow, she had met with Aleksandra’s mother, who broke down in tears when asked about her daughter.
Each morning, before going downstairs where she once worked side by side with her friend Aleksandra, Juli paused at the windows inside the building entrance near the dosimeter rack. After dropping off her dosimeter and picking up a recharged one, she looked back outside to memorize weather conditions before descending into her hole. At lunchtime, when she came out of her hole, she immediately looked out the window again to see how the weather might have changed. After lunch she repeated the process, looking forward to the end of the shift. In winter, however, after being in the fluorescent-lit basement all day, the darkness outside became an even deeper hole, a hole into which she, like Aleksandra, would someday disappear.
Last winter had been terrible. Sergey broke off their year-long engagement. Then, a week later, her father died, and she took the train to Moscow on funeral leave. Her mother, to whom she had never been close except when she was a very small Muscovite, was especially cold. It was during this trip she discovered Aleksandra was missing. It was during this trip she felt closer to Aleksandra’s mother than to her own mother. After the trip to Moscow last winter, Juli returned to the loneliest time in her life. Each night, as she left the building, the demon darkness drained her, emptied her of purpose the way the gurgling vacuum pumps in the main-floor labs sucked air from the Geiger tubes.
But spring came as it always does, and darkness no longer awaited her after work. In spring she moved in with Marina. Having Marina for a roommate was like having the sister she’d always wanted. On days off they shopped together, waiting in lines, giggling like schoolgirls. Evenings they’d lie awake late into the night, talking about the future, which of course always included wealthy men who would give them the lives they deserved. The lonely nights were when Marina was out with her boyfriend, Vasily. This was how spring went. Then in summer, Juli met Mihaly.
Mihaly was slender with dark hair and eyes. He reminded Juli of her father when she was a little girl. Small chin, thin nose, forehead sloping back to his hairline. Like her father, Mihaly was Hungarian. Although they simply rode the bus home from work together during June, Juli knew she had fallen in love the very first day when they sat together and spoke in Hungarian, keeping their voices low so others would not overhear them. Russian was the official language at the facility. Ukrainian was looked down upon.
Hungarian was barbaric.
On a warm July day, Mihaly got off at Juli’s stop so he could walk her home. On a hot August day, he came to her apartment.
They sipped wine and made love. The next time Mihaly came to her apartment, he told her he was married and had two daughters.
Juli didn’t want to hurt Mihaly or his wife and daughters. She kept trying to convince herself she needed Mihaly only for the moment.
Another man would appear, and Mihaly would remain a good friend. But now, after he’d been gone three weeks on summer holiday, she knew differently.
When Juli paused at the entrance to the laboratory building before going down the stairs, she looked out to the southeast where the red and white reactor stacks pierced the sky. Today was Monday, and she knew Mihaly was back to work, had taken the earlier bus as usual. Tonight, after a three-week absence, he would catch her bus and she would see him again.
By applying herself to her work, Juli made the morning go by quickly. She turned off the overnight counters, did her calcula-tions, removed the counting tubes from the tombs, and sent them up the dumbwaiter to be refilled with fresh samples. After lunch, she would busy herself again-new samples into the tombs, voltages set, samples logged, tombs closed, overnight counts started. But for now, the moles were out of their hole for lunch.
Juli sat alone at a table near the windows until a lab technician who worked on the main floor joined her. The technician’s name was Natalya, a plump girl with a loud voice. Juli might have gotten up to leave, but it was obvious she had just started eating.
Natalya placed a large brown bag on the table and began empty-ing out food, making their table look like a
