We Are Not in Pakistan Read online

  Olena understands. Her life was once divided too. The unthinkable was her Chernobyl.

  As fabric moves beneath her fingertips, gratitude toward some big spirit begins to sing within Olena. Just think what could have happened to Viktor, but didn’t. She has the urge to praise some force that kept him from harm that night and has allowed him to recover so quickly from his stay in the hospital. His hair is falling out, but he is alive. Three of his colleagues were not so lucky, and maybe more have died; glasnost will not go so far as to make the Party tell.

  Olena doesn’t want to know what might happen. She just wants to know what she should do to keep Galina safe.

  “Most possibilities,” said Viktor, “become what does not happen.”

  Possibility means not yet.

  Not yet, creaks Olena’s treadle, not yet.

  Fifteen days after the accident that was not an explosion, Olena and Galina are sitting at the kitchen table. Galina is pretending to feed the Misha-bear Matushka bought her.

  Matushka has gone shopping for Swiss mineral water for Galina, which she says is better than boiled water, even if it isn’t Soviet-made. Radionuclides have been found in the Pripyat River and in wells. Olena has been boiling water for Matushka, Viktor and herself.

  “Come, Galina,” says Olena. She shows the little girl a paper with hash marks made by Viktor. Each is for a helicopter. Brave pilots flew over the crater of the reactor, Viktor said. Soldiers opened the doors and heaved out gunny sacks filled with sand, boron and lead to neutralize the radiation and plug the hole in the reactor as fast as they could. “But,” he said — and Olena heard a click as he bit a nail — “one hundred ninety-five tons of nuclear fuel are still burning.”

  “Count these for me,” says Olena.

  Galina drops her bear on the floor.

  “How many flights the first day?”

  Galina’s black curls obscure the paper. She looks up. “Ninety-three!” she squeals.

  “And how many the second?”

  A small pink triangle emerges from a corner of Galina’s mouth as she counts the hash marks on the second paper.

  “A hundred and eighty!”

  Of all the seven-year-olds she used to teach, Olena can’t remember one who is better than Galina at counting. Or one more beautiful, or dear … who is more dear — Galina or Viktor?

  A centrifuge churns in Olena’s stomach each night till Viktor returns from work and calls her from their old apartment. When he comes to Kyiv on weekends, he doesn’t want her or Galina to sleep beside him, but they have been together so many years, Olena can’t let him sleep alone. And it would disturb Matushka if Galina slept in her room.

  The latency period has passed. Viktor’s chest and pubic hair comes away in Olena’s hand. His testicles have darkened.

  Last night he said an expert has proposed that the army build a concrete sarcophagus. “To seal away dust, fuel, two hundred tons of uranium and a ton of radioactive plutonium for at least thirty years,” Viktor said, “and the blue glow I saw from the helicopter.”

  The sarcophagus, he said, will have to be constructed elsewhere and “assembled like a puzzle by liquidators.”

  “What are liquidators?”

  “Army reservists.”

  “Won’t they be in danger?”

  “We,” said Viktor’s Party voice, “will give them lead-shielded vehicles.”

  He fears more rems, and blame. Blame. Someone has to be blamed, everyone knows that. Olena doesn’t want anyone to blame her Viktor.

  Olena picks the Misha-bear off the floor and dusts him off.

  Dust is dangerous. Olena has become afraid of the stirrings of leaves. Today the pen-like dosimeter Viktor gave her peeped at every vegetable in the market, even here in Kyiv. A babushka from whom she bought sunflower seeds said she caught a huge fish — a fish with long hair instead of gills. Such stories are not only market talk from comrade peasants; the woman in the flat below said she heard a sow gave birth to a litter of piglets without eyes.

  Matushka must have heard such things too, because today, even after listening to speeches at her Party meeting, she came home and said to Olena, “You can’t have another baby.”

  In a practical voice. As if she had decided this for Olena. Decided again for Olena.

  Galina is leaning over Matushka’s proudest possession: Victor’s old chess set. She advances a white pawn two paces, then a black one. Then another white one. She pulls up a low stool and sits down. Her brow furrows.

  Olena takes the Misha-bear to the spare room. She pulls her suitcase from the cupboard, thrusts it in, and locks it away.

  Ten days later, there’s a knock at Matushka’s apartment door. Olena wipes her hands and takes off her apron. Not Galina — she’s at her new school this afternoon. Not Viktor, not on a weekday. He must be at the station right now, answering more questions. It’s probably the woman in the flat below, asking to use Matushka’s telephone.

  But no, Matushka is showing Rivka into her small living room — as if Rivka were her friend, rather than Olena’s. She orders Olena to serve poppy-seed cake and tea as if Olena wouldn’t have done so otherwise. She offers Rivka a seat on the sofa beside her, then a cigarette. She lights one for herself and slides her brass ashtray within Rivka’s reach.

  “Tell me,” Matushka says to Rivka. “Have they found where the sabotage occurred?”

  “It does not appear to be sabotage, comrade,” says Rivka.

  “But surely it was a spy, a foreign hand,” says Matushka.

  Rivka glances at Olena and takes a slice of the poppy-seed cake.

  Olena pours tea for Matushka and Rivka as Rivka asks about Galina. Matushka regales her with Galina’s seven-year-old wisdom. Rivka listens and smiles as if she’s really interested.

  In the voice of a concerned friend, Rivka asks about Viktor’s exposure, his symptoms. What did he see from the helicopter? What recommendations are being made to the KGB and the Politburo? Can Units 1, 2 and 3 really be blocked off from Unit 4? The wind, she says, will carry radionuclides over a million square miles. Miners and metro workers are being trucked in from all over the country — is it just to dig new wells? Is it true what she’s heard, that water from the fire hoses has pooled beneath the reactor, and they have to tunnel under it, drain it out and make a refrigeration chamber, or else there will be a second explosion? Does Viktor believe families can ever go back to Pripyat to live? Is there danger to the rest of the Soviet Union? Could Europe become uninhabitable?

  Suddenly Olena does not want to tell Rivka anything. For once, she is grateful to Matushka for her expert and polite evasion of Rivka’s every question.

  “Where are you living?” says Olena to change the subject.

  Rivka says the babushka who sold radishes in the central square in Pripyat happened to be one of the peasants choosing townspeople to take home. She chose Rivka and a few others to live with her. But now Rivka has been allotted an apartment in Kyiv, so she can interview visiting dignitaries and reassure the foreign press. She came here because she remembered Olena, remembered promising her a job after May Day — can Olena work with her?

  “I didn’t know you had been offered a job after May Day,” says Matushka. She leans toward Rivka and taps her cigarette into the ashtray. “She forgets things,” she says in a conspiratorial tone. “I called Viktor the night before the accident, and Olena forgot to give him my message.”

  Olena knows what Matushka wants her to say. She hears herself using many words and a deeply apologetic tone to say what could be said in a single word: nyet.

  Disappointment passes over Rivka’s face, but there’s nothing to be done.

  She rises. Olena doesn’t want her to leave. Not without a smile.

  “I’m trying to imagine you,” she says, “such a Moscow sophisticate, living in a hut, eating white borsht and potato puddings.” It’s a joke — a feeble joke.

  “Studying life everywhere is my job,” says Rivka.

  Olena says,
“I want to live my own life, not study other people’s.”

  “Then you must want that so much that nothing else and no one else is important to you.” Matushka closes the door behind Rivka and says, “You have such individualist friends.”

  She picks up her handbag, jerks her chin at the crumbed dishes and says, “I have a meeting. I’ll return by the time Galina comes home from school.”

  Olena takes the dishes to the kitchen.

  How can any woman ever want anything so much that nothing else and no one else would be important to her?

  Viktor is important to me, Galina is important to me, Dedushka is important to me. Matushka too, because Viktor loves her. In the face of their needs, my wants can’t possibly matter.

  Olena rinses the dishes with cold boiled water. She boils some more, sets it aside for drinking. She pours a tumbler full for herself and watches as the tea leaves fall below the surface. Suddenly, the unthinkable must be thought, the inconceivable must be conceived. Her older daughter. A year before Galina, she lived. At least, maybe she was a daughter. Condoms were expensive — they still are, the Party wants women to produce many babies. Matushka said maybe Olena wanted a baby, but she didn’t need one. Viktor’s career was more important, she said. And he couldn’t afford a child before he graduated, before he had an apartment. How would they raise one without borrowing from her? If Olena didn’t agree, Matushka would tell Viktor to refuse to sign the papers so the baby could get a propiska. And without that resident registration stamp, preferably from Moscow, the baby would have no care from any doctor, no education and no right to inherit from either Viktor or Olena. So Matushka sent Olena to her doctor friend, boasting that he made seventeen abortions for her through the years Viktor’s father was alive.

  When Olena left the doctor she went to the cinema. A black and white movie — she could n’t understand the language. Something Party leaders imported from India to show friendship with a Socialist Democracy. She sat with other living, breathing men and women and let the cramps come. Unseen, a bloodstain crept over her green dress. On screen, a woman with eyes so large they took up half her face shed tears for her, and an actor — she even remembers his name, Raj Kapoor — danced his way through mansions and fields with a smile just like Viktor’s, a smile that said, You know you love me.

  Would Viktor really have refused to sign his own baby’s propis-ka? Viktor always does what Matushka wants. If he knew what Matushka had made Olena do, would it not break his heart too? It was too late to ask him, too late to tell him.

  As Olena bled away a life that could have been, she cursed Matushka with each spasm. She might have to live with Matushka, but no one could command her to love her mother-in-law. Not Viktor, not anyone.

  Olena remained seated as people filed past in the dark, stayed even when the lights came on. Surely there would be another show. Darkness came again and the names of actors began flashing past to tinny music.

  She doubled over, sobbing, till she felt a hand squeeze her shoulder. A grandmotherly woman in uniform offered her a glass of water, her handkerchief and silence.

  Olena sobs as on that day, tears mingling with her cooling tea. Does she cry for the young woman she left in the theatre or her older daughter?

  Matushka has not changed. She is like a cesium isotope, contaminating Viktor with her expectations. Unmeetable expectations. Not one word of concern for Olena since she arrived in Kyiv, and no chance of rest. When Viktor comes on weekends, he might as well still be dressed in that green mask he wears on duty, and she might as well be his butler, personal assistant and cleaning woman. She is expected to do the cooking for Matushka, Viktor and Galina and be quiet. So she does, and she is.

  She misses what she never knew, the clean papery smell of the Tribune Energetica, a desk, a chair. Rivka, who listens as if what Olena says matters.

  • • •

  June 1986

  Sleeping, Olena senses that Viktor’s weight is not on the bed beside her. She wakes. Galina is sleeping on her back, an arm thrown across her forehead, on the mattress at the foot of their bed. But where is Viktor? She listens for clacking and pinging. Since Victory Day, when Viktor heard that Director Burkhanov would be dismissed and sent to a KGB prison somewhere to await trial, he has been using a borrowed typewriter each weekend night. He has applied for transfers to nuclear stations at Kursk, Smolensk, Khmelnitzky and Rovno. He has applied to Austria, where a brand new nuclear power station is being built. He has applied to Italy. He moans that he and Anatoli are the only Ukrainians in the world who do not have relatives in Canada.

  But tiptoeing from the spare room tonight, Olena finds only silence and a soft glow from Matushka’s kitchen. Viktor is sitting at the table, writing in longhand — a heartfelt plea to the Jewish Social Services of America.

  “If they will not listen,” he says, “I’ll volunteer to fight in Afghanistan.”

  “But I thought you said … the actor in the White House?”

  “I said what I was expected to say. But he didn’t do it, Olena.”

  The next morning, Olena takes the metro across the river to the east side of Kyiv to confuse any KGB who may be watching and posts the letters for him.

  November - December 1989

  The Kalendar Prince movement of Scheherazade spins from Olena’s new turntable. She sets a small ceramic bowl of sour cream beside a plate of piping hot sirniki on the table and calls, “Galina!”

  Galina, who has grown thin and sickly in the three years since they fled Pripyat, had another headache and sore throat this morning before school. She has returned now but is taking so very long in the bathroom. Maybe she still feels unwell. It’s November and changing to winter. Around this time last year, she got pneumonia.

  Olena doesn’t want to be a radiophobe, but how can continuous low doses of ionizing radiation be, as the Ministry of Health says, an improvement to the body? Especially a child’s body?

  Olena places a fork and knife beside Galina’s plate. She fetches a glass of water from the kitchen.

  This apartment is not as large as the one Olena left in Pripyat and its hallways smell of old cabbage, but it’s adequate. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan and liquidators of the cleanup don’t have apartments this large, or telephone connections. For Olena, though not for Galina, its beauty lies in its location, three trolleybus rides from Matushka’s.

  Galina will get used to it.

  You can get used to anything — Dedushka says so, now all his neighbours have left. All he has is his photo albums.

  Olena has torn up worn-out linoleum and repainted Galina’s room lemon. She was lucky to find an old sofa and striped purple material for slipcovers. She covered up the mottled wall in the living room by hanging a carpet over it.

  If only she had the black and white snapshot of her mother to frame and hang on the wall and the mink purse Dedushka gave Galina. These, the motorcycle, Viktor’s balalaika and her father’s novels were abandoned in Pripyat.

  The carpet on the floor still looks dark and worn, though Olena gave it a good scrubbing in the tub.

  “Galina!”

  That carpet was still a little wet last week, when Galina’s friends sat on it in a circle and ate wedges of her tenth birthday cake. All from Pripyat. Galina said she doesn’t have new friends in Kyiv. More than three and a half years after the accident, so many parents still keep their children from visiting Galina. Maybe they will change, now Viktor has been allotted this new apartment. Maybe they will see that Galina will not be going back to Pripyat but growing up here.

  Maybe it is not Chernobyl at all, maybe it’s because they know Galina is a zhid.

  Olena has told Galina she should be more friendly in school and not hold grudges over small things. She must remind Galina again.

  “Galina, the sirniki are getting cold!” Olena opens the door of the tub room. A pale oval framed in wet black curls turns to her from the tub.

  “Mamushka,” says Galina. Her eyes — so wide.
r />   Olena draws closer. She leans forward to wipe that miserable expression from her daughter’s face.

  “What? What happened, Galina?”

  Water pooling between her daughter’s legs flows pinky red.

  Olena laughs, she explains, she tells Galina she has become a woman. She holds Galina’s wet body close, pulls the tub stopper and washes away her little girl’s fears. But she cannot laugh away her own.

  Is not ten years too early for Galina’s first period? Olena’s came at fifteen. And so much blood — was Olena’s flow as heavy? Galina’s nosebleeds and dizzy spells have kept her home from school more days than other children.

  Olena’s just-fried sirniki cool. The fourth movement, Festival in Baghdad, plays itself out in the distance. She finds a sanitary napkin, helps Galina dress, brushes her hair. The hairbrush needs cleaning again. Is the amount of hair in it more or less than usual?

  That evening, she refrains from telling Viktor about Galina until he has finished dinner. When she finishes, he sits grim faced, a muscle twitching in his cheek. Olena’s inside voice begins to say, oh no, oh no, as if she could have prevented Galina’s period from arriving.

  “I had a letter from Vienna today,” Viktor says. “The nuclear station has been cancelled.”

  Another disappointment. Added to the disappointment that all the Soviet power stations to which Viktor applied have halted their expansions.

  “And a letter from Italy,” he says. “They are cancelling all their nuclear power plans. Anatoli says not to bother trying Sweden — the government there is not hiring. They’re phasing out all nuclear power by 2010.”

  “Protesters?”

  “Protesters know nothing!” shouts Viktor and bangs his fist on the table. “They’re going to return all of us to coal and steam. They’re going to force us into wars for oil. Reactors are safe — if you run them safely!”