Crossing the second field, Artyom changes his path slightly, walking in an arched trajectory so he can approach some of the scattered bullocks chewing lazily in the morning air. He likes to rub his hand along them, the quivering life they hold underneath their hairy exteriors passing itself into his fingers. He likes the packed concentration of muscle beneath the beasts. When he was younger, he and his friends would punch the cattle hard, hoping for a response, but they never managed to provoke anything more than a disinterested look.
Artyom runs his hand over the head of the nearest one and feels the morning dew slicking his fingers, the heat emanating from its neck. The dew feels different than on previous occasions, as though it has the texture of fine material, and the boy looks at his fingers and finds them tipped with liquid. He scans the body and sees a channel of blood slowly pouring from the animal’s ear, dripping to the grass below. He checks the next bullock, ten feet away, and finds precisely the same.
He deliberates whether to call his father, by now almost out of earshot, but the decision isn’t a difficult one: cattle are important here, the difference between livelihood and starvation; he had known this even as a small child. His father hears the shout and stops, irritated, but then makes his way back to the boy. Andrei’s son always displays good judgement. If he considers something worth stopping for, it is worth at least some consideration. The other men are as unhurried as the beasts; they rummage in their pockets and light another cigarette and watch and wait.
These cattle belong to Vitaly Scherbak. Though all the men work for the kolkhoz, each of them has an acre or two of their own upon which they keep a few thin animals. These cattle will spend next winter wrapped in old newspaper, sitting in stacked lumps in old fridges or packed underneath hard clay. For now, though, they stand, bemused, chewing their cud, looking at Andrei Yaroslavovych and his son walk amongst them, tilting their heads to the morning sun.
When Andrei returns he consults the group and they decide to let Vitaly sleep an extra hour. The beasts will need attention but they seem in no great distress and their neighbour could do with his rest. But the news brings some conversation to the remainder of their walk, murmurs of speculation as to what could possibly cause a whole herd to bleed in such a way. And Artyom is proud of this; he has gained further degrees of respect, a boy who could notice such things would soon no longer be a boy, could soon make jokes and observations and judgements of his own.
They nestle into the ditch and Artyom takes in the sky once more. The great, roiling sky, looming over the earth, drawing all things together in their relative insignificance.
The men load their guns and stabilize themselves with their legs. Each one focuses on a particular bird and readies himself to shoot. A single shot would scatter the flock and leave the rest of the men cursing their lost opportunities. They would shoot as a group, just as they worked as a group, drank as a group, lived as a group. This is Artyom’s favourite part, the moment before the moment, when he can feel the concentration spread evenly amongst the men, the tufts of air from their morning breath spreading outwards simultaneously. Breathing together, being together. A hushed voice speaks out—“ready”—not as a question but a statement, a confirmation of their collective state, and the shots are released, two rounds each, noise obliterating the silence like a fist launched through a glass pane.
They are skilled shots, all having been through military service. All hit their prey, with the exception of the boy, who has yet to become as attuned to the sensitivities of the gun, the barrel bobbling slightly in front of him, tracing out a small, uneven circle. All is as it should be.
It’s the following moments that mark the beginning of something distinctive, a tilt in the balance of the natural order, a moment they would relate in a thousand conversations that stalked their future lives.
Immediately after the first shot, the grouse flurry into the air, but when normally they would then glide in a smooth and rapid flight, low over the earth, today they rise and wobble back to ground, or skim along for a few feet before crashing to the grass, rolling in a drunken, graceless sprawl of floundering wings and buckling legs.
The men reload and shoot, but quickly stop, all of them feeling a strengthening unease at the absurd sight before them. They rise from the ditch and walk out into the field and flip the carcasses over with their toes, the remaining live birds still twisting in the grass, disorientated. Artyom pulls a sack from his satchel, collecting the game as he had done on other mornings, but his father tells him to put it away, these birds should not be eaten.
They have lived most of their lives on this small patch of earth. They know the tides of growth and season, the disposition of nature, its wonts and moods. They recognize a disharmony here, in the strange events of the morning. As they return to their homes, to sleeping families, they consider this strange morning, wondering if the strangeness would extend itself to them, to the humans who live in this place. And they know that this, as with all other things, would reveal itself with time.
Chapter 4
In the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, ten kilometres from the sleeping boy, as the hour hand on his small clock inched its way between the two and the three, flaming particles of graphite and lead, great molten wads of steel, spiralled through the night air, finding refuge in the roofs adjacent to Reactor No. 4. Fire spread fire spread fire, skimming over bitumen and concrete, boring itself down shafts, through ceilings, engulfing stairs, engulfing air. Elements blindly raging into the great surround: xenon and caesium, tellurium and iodine, plutonium and krypton. Set free unseen, accompanying the swathes of pirouetting sparks. Noble gases, expanding into the noble land. Neutrons and gamma rays streaming up and out, pulsing into the sky, over the earth, atoms careening into atoms, rippling through a continent.
In the control room, the operators watch the glass panel billow outward, testing its extremes, then retreating and attacking once more, sending particles into skin, into walls and floors, lodging itself into doors and keypads and necks and lips and palms. They see control rods launched vertically from the floor of the reactor hall; streaking upwards, dozens of weighted rods fleeing gravity and order, seizing their moment to soar above all they were made for, all they had known.
Steel girders buckle and twist. The baritone of wrenching metal thrumming with the steady bass vibrations of a blast.
Water everywhere: gushing through ventilation ducts, clambering over partition walls, racing down corridors. Steam filling the senses. A wall of steam, a chamber of steam, squirming its way into nostrils and earholes, seeping into eyes, down smoke-caked throats. They plunge their arms through steam, arms swimming while legs walk or buckle. Bulbs blown, the only light now from falling embers; blue flashes from electrical systems that spit out their protests.
The operators pick themselves up, dazed. There is a task, a function. What to do? Surely there’s a button, a series of codes, a procedure, always a procedure. Miraculously they find the operating manual, damp but usable. They locate the section. There’s a section. Ears numb from the piercing alarm. Eyes streaming. A section. Scanning through pages. A title: “Operational Procedures in the Event of Reactor Meltdown.” A block of black ink, two pages, five pages, eight pages. All text has been wiped out, paragraphs hidden behind thick black lines. An event such as this cannot be tolerated, cannot be conceived, such a thing can never be planned for, as surely as it can never happen. The system will not fail, the system cannot fail, the system is the glorious motherland.