Authors: Michael Beres
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Ukraine, #Chernobyl Nuclear Accident; Chornobyl; Ukraine; 1986, #Chernobyl Nuclear Accident; Chornobylʹ; Ukraine; 1986
The bus lumbered past, lifting dust from the road. In the windows Nikolai saw the faces of wide-eyed farmers staring at the strange sight of two men sitting at the side of the road at dawn in a black Volga.
“The farmers are off to their fields,” said Brovko as he started the Volga and began driving down to the hotel in the village.
Five hundred kilometers east, near the town of Korostyshev, another collective bus drove down a dusty road. The bus was full of men and women wearing layers of clothing to keep away the morning chill. Some on the bus commented on the dry weather of the past few days allowing planting to progress. Some talked about family matters. But most conversations eventually turned to a more serious matter. These workers, belonging to the Kopelovo collective, a hundred kilometers southwest of Kiev, were now providing food and shelter for several hundred refugees forced to flee the Opachichi collective near Pripyat.
A man in a leather cap at the front of the bus stood facing the back, firing questions at those sitting near him.
“How do we feed our own families? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“You’re not starving,” said a woman in a yellow babushka.
“Not yet,” said the man. “But we’re the ones working the fields.
We need food so we can continue working.”
The man sitting next to the woman in the yellow babushka waved his hand. “Nothing makes sense when people are forced from their homes. How would you like to lose everything and be forced to sleep in barns and tents and practically beg for food for your children?”
“At least,” said the man in the leather cap, “they could come work in the fields. What else have they got to do?”
“The people in my barn wanted to work,” said the woman in the yellow babushka. “But the chairman said no. He said they all have to stay where they are because officials are arriving today from Kiev.”
“What for?”
“A census,” said the woman. “The chairman says they might relocate some people farther south and west.”
“Good,” said the man in the leather cap. “Maybe things will get back to normal and I’ll have a decent meal. Look how thin I am.”
The bus passengers laughed, and even the man in the leather cap smiled as he turned to look out the bus windshield. The only one who didn’t laugh or smile was the driver, who was in his own world, the world of the throbbing engine and the shifting of gears and the dodging of holes in the road.
Within the Kopelovo collective village, behind one of the houses lining the road, Lazlo lifted the canvas tent flap and looked outside. The tent opening faced away from the house, with a view of the family’s freshly planted private plot. A thin layer of ground fog was being burned away by morning sun. The damp morning air smelled of livestock and smoldering trash fires.
Lazlo heard footsteps in the weeds, leaned out, and saw the man from the next tent over. The farmer from the north lived in a tent with his wife and two children. A goat tethered outside during the day was allowed inside the tent at night. The farmer walked back from the outhouse carrying a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a tin cup in the other. He hummed a Ukrainian folk song. Although Lazlo did not know the name of the song, he knew it glorified morning. A cheerful song of hope and hard work, a song he sometimes heard the skinny baker at his favorite bakery whistle in the back room before bringing out a fragrant tray of pastry.
The thought of the warm Kiev bakery made Lazlo shiver. He dropped the tent flap and sat back on his heels. He reached up to touch the warm slope of the tent where the orange of the sun glowed.
Although the cut on his wrist was healed, his ankle still ached from the jump to the scaffold at the Hotel Dnieper. He turned and crawled to the back of the tent where Juli slept. He lifted the blankets carefully so as not to let in cold, damp air. Beneath the blankets, he felt Juli’s warmth against him and his shivering stopped.
After the narrow escape at Lenkomsomol Square, Lazlo met Juli at the hospital. Dressed as peasants and with Lazlo wearing an eye patch to disguise himself, they’d gone to one of the roadblocks and joined the line of people trying to enter Kiev. Lazlo had worked the roadblocks long enough to know how to use the situation to their advantage. He knew that instead of being allowed in, they would be transported with others to a collective many kilometers away. He also knew they could do this without identification because during the rapid evacuation, many refugees failed to obtain passes. He let Juli do most of the talking, saying they were from Pripyat and had worked in a department store. He kept his face hidden, and none of the militia officers recognized him.
They had been here at the Kopelovo collective a full week, freez-ing in the tent each night and keeping trim on the daily ration of food provided. Kiev was a hundred kilometers northeast, and he might never see it again. His sprained ankle had healed, and he was ready to move on. The question was where to go and when. The only logical direction was west, to Czechoslovakia or Hungary or even farther. The time would be soon, because yesterday there were rumors of relocation. Paperwork would be completed, names put on file, and representatives of the militia or the KGB milling about.
They were fugitives, both considered criminals—him a murderer and Juli his accomplice. It didn’t matter if the agent aimed his pistol at them. To the KGB, one of their own was dead. No matter if the incident was a setup and Tamara’s poet friend was a KGB informer.
He recalled Tamara’s anger at the poet when he met her at the river, saying she would kill him if she saw him again. Lazlo had insisted she not make trouble for herself. He needed her to follow through on the faked betrayal so she would not be implicated when he and Juli escaped.
Would he ever see Tamara again? Would he tell her about his confusion when he realized he was attracted to Juli? Would he tell her about the past week, during which he and Juli posed as husband and wife living in an army tent on the Kopelovo collective? Would he tell Tamara he was in love?
As he lay beside Juli, Lazlo could feel the heat of her breath on his face. He kissed her cheek and held her close. But at his back the chill of morning touched him, reminding him that Nina, Anna, and little Ilonka were in Kisbor. Komarov would know Lazlo must go there. If he and Juli escaped across the frontier without going to Kisbor, Komarov would take revenge. The thought of going to Kisbor and of what he must do became icy fingers pulling him away from Juli and her unborn child.
Coming awake, Juli thought she felt her baby move. She wondered if time had sped up, if months had passed and she was in a bed in an apartment with Lazlo by her side. But when she opened her eyes, she saw the tent roof. Time had not sped up. They were still at the collective. She was still in her seventh or eighth week of pregnancy and certainly would not have been able to feel the baby move. The momentary thought of being in a bed with Lazlo was a dream. But at least part of it was true. Lazlo was with her, holding her tightly.
“I thought you were my baby.”
Lazlo kissed her cheek. “I am your baby.”
“When you moved, I thought it was my baby moving. I dreamed we were somewhere safe with no one looking for us. I was big and fat, and you still loved me.”
Lazlo smiled. “It’s a wonderful dream.”
“I hope it comes true.”
“It can if we cross the frontier. We’ll be able to go to a good hospital and get you and your baby checked. We’ll be able to tell someone what you know about Chernobyl. We’ll find somewhere to live instead of a moth-eaten tent.” Lazlo sat up and looked down at her with a broad grin. “It’s nothing but good news from now on.”
“I like seeing you smile, Laz.”
“I rarely smiled before I met you.”
They kissed and made love beneath the rough army blankets.
After a breakfast of canned sardines, bread, and bottled water, Juli reviewed with Lazlo the information about Chernobyl they hoped to get to officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The information included what Mihaly told Juli before he died—the experiment to see how long the inertia of the turbine could generate emergency power, the emergency backups turned off while the reactor was still running, the absence of the chief engineer who had ordered the experiment, printouts of reactor conditions not available directly to control-room personnel, speculation about Chernobyl being used as a guinea pig for other reactors of the same type throughout the country. Juli had memorized as much as possible and recited the details each day to Lazlo. She also included information she knew from her job, including specific figures she recalled concerning radionuclide sampling around the power station before the explosion.
“It’s like being in school again,” said Lazlo. “A big tough guy with his Makarov pistol strapped to his chest back in school.”
Juli touched Lazlo’s chin, realizing how much he resembled Mihaly.
“You’re not such a tough guy, Laz.”
“What am I?”
“A Gypsy, like me. I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to live somewhere else, to be someone different. We can’t help it. It’s in our blood. It was in Mihaly’s blood.”
Lazlo lifted her hand from his chin, kissed her hand, stared at her. “Mihaly wasn’t attracted to a desire to try something new. He was attracted to you because you’re special.”
“How can you say that? I’m the one who initially thought of our affair as a game. I wasn’t married so who could get hurt? No, Laz.
Don’t call me special.”
“I’ll call you whatever I like,” he said in a deep voice.
They both laughed, pulling the heavy blankets over their heads so others would not hear them and wonder who would be insane enough to tell jokes in a situation like this.
Later in the morning, while Juli washed the tattered peasant clothes they managed to pick up along the way, officials arrived. She was behind a nearby house using a washtub set up for refugees. From where she stood, she could see a militia car pull up and three men get out. Two men in suits and a local uniformed militiaman. Juli stayed at the washtub, watching as Lazlo stood in line to speak with the men. Lazlo looked like any of the other farmers, his hands in the pockets of baggy trousers, his ill-fitting cap pulled down tightly on his head.
Because they had agreed not to panic, Juli stayed at the washtub. If Lazlo recognized any of the men, he would not have gotten in line.
One of the officials had a clipboard. When a refugee made it to the front of the line, the man would flip through pages on the clipboard and write something down. The procedure took only a minute or so for each. But when Lazlo got to the front of the line, the man with the clipboard kept flipping pages, Lazlo kept shrugging his shoulders, and the militiaman standing to the side stood closer. Finally Lazlo leaned forward, pointing at something on the clipboard and the questioning became more serious. They questioned Lazlo for several agonizing minutes. When he was finally allowed to leave, Juli hurried to the tent to join him.
Lazlo retrieved the sock in which he kept his money and his pistol from the hole dug in the ground through a slit in the tent floor.
He took the pistol out, checked the magazine, put the pistol in one pocket and the sock with the money in his other pocket, and turned to Juli.
“We’ve got to leave.”
“Do they know who we are?”
“Not yet. But I couldn’t convince them I was on the list. I tried mispronouncing a name to see if I could fake one, but they wanted family details. I guess you saw what happened when I tried to look at the list myself.”
“I thought they would arrest you.”
“I pushed them close to it. Soon they’ll report back about a man and wife named Zimyanin, a name not on the refugee list.”
“Where should we go?”
“I don’t know yet. There’s a bus due early tomorrow morning for those being shipped out. We’re supposed to stay here until the officials come back. If we get out of here tonight, or at least before morning, maybe they’ll think we got on the bus. We’ll spread the word we’ve been told to leave on the morning bus.”
Lazlo took off the hat he had worn, combed his hair, and put on a shirt with fewer holes in it. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Get ready while I’m gone. I like your idea of posing as radiation technicians.”
“I’ll put things together.”
After Lazlo kissed her and left the tent, Juli looked out and watched him go. He walked quickly, one hand deep in the pocket where he had put the sock containing money saved during his years in the Kiev militia, the other hand deep in the other pocket where he had put his pistol.
Juli had gotten the idea to pose as radiation technicians when she saw technicians in lab coats while being bussed out of Kiev.
Creating makeshift lab coats out of bedsheets had taken three days.
The needles and thread and a pair of scissors were available at the village store. Although they were simply smocks rather than coats, it didn’t take much to look official in this region. Especially when she made a fake Geiger counter by taping an old radio tube from the local trash to a length of wire and inserting the other end of the wire into her black overnight case.
Juli removed the fake lab coats from the overnight case and spread them on the floor of the tent to get out the wrinkles. She took out a bottle of pink nail polish she had purchased at the village store and closed the overnight case. The smell of nail polish quickly filled the tent as she pulled out the brush connected to the cap. Juli did not polish her nails. Instead, she pulled the overnight case close and began filling in letters she had earlier outlined on the side of the case. The letters spelled out in Russian the words, danger, radioactive samples.