“Lilya. I’m your sister. Let us in.”
“You’re poison, don’t you know this? You can’t stay around other people.”
Artyom’s mother starts to cry. He hasn’t seen his mother cry since he was a child. Sofya kicks the door, but his mother brushes her aside. They both lean against the wall, hiding their faces.
The man with no shirt speaks.
“You heard. You’re fucking poison. Get out of here.”
This half-naked bastard shouting at them. Artyom drops the bags and runs towards him, arms wide, a slur of dense breath in his throat, but the man sidesteps him easily, and Artyom skids along the ground, tearing the knee of his trousers, skinning his flesh. The man steps into his doorway.
“If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’ll come out with my knife.”
He spits in Artyom’s direction, the blob landing near Artyom’s shoes.
“Five minutes.”
The man closes his door, and the three of them bunch on the floor in individual piles, beaten. After a few moments, Artyom’s mother walks over to him, cradles his neck in her hand, and kisses the top of his head.
“Let’s find a bed.”
They walk back towards the stairwell, their feet echoing in the corridor.
Chapter 10
In Pripyat, night has drawn in and Grigory walks through the town alone. He passes a small carnival with a Ferris wheel creaking in the breeze. The apartment blocks are dark, uninhabited now, looming.
Coloured paper still lies scattered around the town, mocking the tone of the day. Dead dogs littered everywhere, stagnant blood glistening through the darkness. Grigory occasionally catches the darting gait of wolves, drifted in from the forest, attracted by the scent of blood, courageous in the emptied streets.
He makes his way back to the operations centre in the main square, approaching from a side street, and as he enters the square he pauses in realization at the statue in the middle, the iron figure half kneeling, raising his open arms to the heavens, full of fury. He has passed it a dozen times in the last day, unaware of its subject: Prometheus, the Greek god who gave fire to the people.
This statue in this place.
Grigory slumps under the figure, spent. A young lieutenant approaches and sits beside him. He also is too tired to attend to his duties. He pulls out a cigarette and offers one to Grigory, who readily accepts, his first cigarette in ten years. And Grigory remembers how Prometheus was punished for his betrayal of godly secrets: Zeus had him chained to a rock and each day would begin with an eagle ripping his liver from his body, which grew back by evening, so that the suffering would be repeated to eternity.
They stay there, unspeaking, until Grigory says, “I’m a surgeon. I never expected to live through a day like this.”
The soldier dabs a loose strand of tobacco off his tongue and spits.
“You remember, my friend, what comrade Lenin told us: ‘Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.’”
They finish their cigarettes in silence.
November 1986
Chapter 11
Sometimes Maria looks up and a day has passed, or longer, a month. Most evenings Alina, her sister, asks how her day was and she replies, “Unremarkable.” And they add up, those unremarkable days. Days that, when you look back on them, even two weeks later, retain not a single distinctive moment. And if she’s to admit the thing she fears most, it’s this: the stealthy accumulation of unremarkable months, the rows and stacks of nothing, the unfilled columns when she sits down to account for her life.
She turns from her lathe and looks up at the small, dust-caked clock that sits over the door to the locker room. It’s quarter past four, and Maria remembers her lunch—tea and herring and beetroot—remembers sitting with Anna and Nestor, but nothing else. How can the rest of it have escaped her? How can another day have almost ended?
In the past few years, life has become unrecognizable to her, existing somehow outside of her; in the passage of the seasons, in the momentum of a city.
“Maria Nikolaevna.”
Her line supervisor is standing behind her, clipboard, as ever, at the ready. He’s a small man with a string around his glasses that he never uses, preferring instead to perch them on the top of his forehead.
“Are you with us?”
“Yes. Sorry, Mr. Popov.”
“Mr. Shalamov wants to see you.”
“Yes, sir. Should I go straight to see him or get cleaned up first?”
“Mr. Shalamov doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Shalamov is their personnel officer. He oversees their initial training, and that’s the last most people see of him. Hearing his name puts Maria instantly on edge. She turns off her lathe and makes sure that the red emergency stop, the one at her knees, is also pressed. Two fragments of an unconscious routine, two more actions that add up to serious time when you calculate the repetition.
He may not like to be kept waiting, but she’ll step into the toilet nonetheless, put her hair back, wash her face. Because it’s a universal law that the prettier you look, the more things will go your way. Sometimes she thinks her entire education was based on this. If she learned nothing else in school, it was how to prime yourself for passing men.
She stands over the washbasin, takes a nail scrub to her hands, scoops some water up and over her face, and hears it shatter on the floor around her. Her hands are hard now, calloused, which is definitely an undesirable trait, but there’s no way of avoiding it. They don’t use gloves at the lathes, even though regulations require them to, because two years ago Polina Volkova, three workstations down, had the machine catch her glove, and her hand went with it. Half a second of gore, in which her hand went from being a hand to a shredded tangle of bone and ligament. So they wear gloves according to the regulations, but they don’t wear gloves according to reality. It does mean, though, that her face is usually clean and clear, because her calloused hands have just the right texture to keep her skin invigorated. So there are compensations.
This job was not of her choosing, and yet she’s not necessarily ungrateful for it, knowing the alternatives.
She runs her fingers along the bases of her eye sockets, massaging them. Hazel eyes, as dark as her hair, full and alert. She pulls her lips over her gums and rubs a wet finger across her teeth. Strong, symmetrical teeth, a point of envy amongst her friends. Her gums a little more prominent than she would like, so that in photographs she’s careful to contain the full breadth of her smile.
Grey hairs are multiplying across her head, with no discernible pattern. She thinks of Sunday mornings when Grigory would lie beside her and pick out the rogue strands like those gorillas on the nature programmes that forage through their mate for lice. When he couldn’t isolate the single hair and plucked two or three at once, she would let out an involuntary whimper, which he found amusing. These sessions would end with him coaxing her back from her irritation, smoothing his hands over her. Lazy Sundays.
She ties her hair back and adjusts her fringe.
On her return to Moscow, not long after she and Grigory were married, she secured a job as a staff journalist at a notable newspaper, where she worked her way up to features writer. A position she held for several years until some underground articles she’d written came to light. What followed was a dangerous time for her. She had to realign all aspects of her personality, was forced to erase her outspoken nature; every word she spoke from that moment would be sifted through and interpreted.