The Game of I Know Nothing Played Long Enough
The teachers in the schools heard about the accident through their relatives, who had heard from friends overseas—routine measurements outside Swedish power stations having already flagged an enormous spike in radioactivity—but when they inquired whether the students should be sent home, or their schedule in any way amended, the Second Secretary of the Regional Committee told them to carry on as planned. The Party’s primary concern at that point seemed to be to establish that an accident on such a scale could not happen at such a plant. We had adequate stores of potassium iodide pills, which would at least have prevented thyroid absorption of iodine-131. We were forbidden as of yet to authorize their distribution.
So throughout the afternoon children played in the streets. Mothers hung laundry. It was a beautiful day. Radioactivity collected in the hair and clothes. Groups walked and bicycled to the bridge near the Yanov station to get a close look into the reactor. They watched the beautiful shining cloud over the power plant dissipate in their direction. They were bathed in a flood of deadly x-rays emanating directly from the nuclear core.
The fire brigade which had first responded to the alarm had lasted 15 minutes on the roof before becoming entirely incapacitated. There followed a round-the-clock rotation of firemen, and by now 12 brigades, pulled from all over the region, had been decimated. The station’s roof, where the firefighters stood directing their hoses, was like the door of a blast furnace. We learned later that from there the reactor core was generating 30,000 roentgens per hour.
What about helicopters, someone suggested. What about them? someone else asked. They could be used to dump sand onto the reactor, the first speaker theorized. This idea was ridiculed and then entertained. Lead was proposed. We ended up back with sand. Rope was needed to tie the sacks. None was available. Someone found red calico gathered for the May Day festival, and all sorts of very important people began tearing it into strips. Young people were requisitioned to fill the sacks with sand.
I left, explaining I was going to look at the site myself. I found Mikhail. He was already dark brown by that point. I was told that he was one of those selected for removal by special flight to the clinic in Moscow. His skin color had been the main criterion, since the doctors had no way at that point of measuring the dose he’d received. He was on morphine and unconscious the entire time I was there. As a boy he’d never slept enough and all of his face’s sadness always emerged whenever he finally did doze. There in the hospital bed, he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from a rich tropical wood. At some point I told an orderly I’d be back and went to find Petya.
While hunting for his apartment address I asked whomever I encountered if they had children. If they did I gave them potassium iodide pills and told them to have their children take them now, with a little water, just in case.
I found Petya’s apartment but no Petya. A busybody neighbor with one front tooth hadn’t seen him since the day before but asked many questions. By then I had to return to the meeting. The group had barely noticed I was gone. No progress had been made, though outside the building, teenagers were filling sandbags with sand.
All of Them: Heroes of the Soviet Union
By late afternoon the worst of the prevaricators had acknowledged the need to prepare for evacuation. In the meantime untold numbers of workers had been sent into the heart of the radiation field to direct cooling water onto the non-existent reactor. The helicopters had begun their dumping, and the rotors, arriving and departing, stirred up sandstorms of radioactive dust. The crews had to hover for three to five minutes directly over the reactor to drop their loads. Most managed only two trips before becoming unfit for service.
Word finally came through that Petya too had been sent to the medical center. By the time I got over there he’d been delivered to the airport for emergency transport to Moscow. When I asked how he’d gotten such a dose, no one had any idea.
At 10 am on Sunday the town was finally advised to shut its windows and not let its children outside. Four hours later the evacuation began.
Citizens were told to collect their papers and indispensable items, along with food for three days, and to gather at the sites posted. Some may have known they were never coming back. Most didn’t even take warm clothes.
The entire town climbed onto buses and was carried away. Many getting on were already intensely radioactive. The buses were washed with decontaminant once they were far enough out of town. Eleven hundred buses: the column stretched for 18 kilometers. It was a miserable sight. The convoy kicked up rolling billows of dust. In some places it enveloped families still waiting to be picked up, their children groping for their toys at the roadside.
That night when the Commission meeting was over, I went my own way. Even the streetlights were out. I felt my way along with small steps. I was in the middle of town and might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Naturally, I thought: Petya had somehow been there, on the river. Whenever the shit cart tipped over, there was Petya, underneath.
The Zero Meter Diving Team
It turned out Petya was installed on the floor below Mikhail’s in Moscow’s Clinic No. 6. When I asked an administrator if some sort of triage was going on, she said, “Are you a relative?” When I said I was, she said, “Then no.”
He was hooked up to two different drips. He didn’t look so bad. He was his normal color, maybe a little pale. His hair was in more riot than usual.
“Boris Yakovlevich!” he said. He seemed happy to see me.
At long last he’d gotten his chance to lie down, he joked. His laziness had always been a matter of contention between us.
“Has Father been by to see me?” he asked. “I’ve been out of it for stretches.”
I told him I didn’t know.
“Has he been to see Mikhail?” he asked.
I told him I didn’t know. He asked how his brother was holding up. I told him I was going to visit Mikhail directly afterwards and would report back.
“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked, after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course I am,” I told him.
“With you sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he said.
“What can I do for you?” I asked, after another pause.
“I have what they call a ‘period of intestinal syndrome,’” he said glumly. “Which means I have the shits 30 times a day.” And these things in his mouth and throat, he added, which was why he couldn’t eat or drink. He asked after the state of the reactor, as though he was one of the engineers. Then he explained how he’d ended up near the reactor in the first place. He described his new Pripyat apartment and said he hoped to save up for a motorcycle. Then he announced he was going to sleep.
“Get me something to read,” he said when I got up to leave. “Except I can’t read. Never mind.”
The next floor up, the surviving patients were sequestered alone in sterile rooms. Mikhail was naked and covered in a yellow cream. Soaked dressings filled low bins in the hall. Huge lamps surrounded the bed to keep him warm.
“Father’s been to see me,” he said instead of hello.
He said that four samples of bone marrow had been extracted and no one had told him anything since. Most of the pain was in his mouth and stomach. When he asked for a drink, I offered some mango juice I’d brought with me. He said it was just the thing he wanted. He was fed up with mineral water. He shouted at a passing doctor that the noise of her heels was giving him diarrhea.
“When we got outside, graphite was scattered all around,” he said, as if we’d been in the middle of discussing the accident. “Someone touched a piece of it and his arm flew up like he’d been burned.”
“So you knew what it was?” I asked.
I assumed I wasn’t allowed to touch him because of the cream. He was always the boy I’d most resented and the boy I’d most wanted to be. I’d been the cold one, but he’d been the one who’d made himself, when he’d had to be, solitary and unreachable.
An orderly wheeled in a tray of ointments, tinctures, creams, and gauzes. He performed a counterfeit of patience while he waited for me to leave.
“Have you had enough of everything?” I asked Mikhail. “Is there anything I can bring?”
“I’ve had the maximum permissible dose of my brother Boris,” he said. “Now I need to recuperate.” But then he went on to tell me that Akimov had died. “As long as he could talk, he kept saying he did everything right and didn’t understand how it had happened.” He finished the juice. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
Mikhail had always said about me that I was one of those people who took a purely functional interest in whomever I was talking to. Father had overheard him once when we were adults and had laughed approvingly.
“Someone’s going to have to look after Petya,” he said, his eyes closed, some minutes later. I’d thought he’d fallen asleep. As far as I knew, he wasn’t aware that his brother was on the floor below him.
“I have to get on with this,” the orderly finally remarked.
When I told him to shut up, he shrugged.