Vasily slid the book away.
“We can’t go against KGB diktats, Grigory. Who knows what will happen? It’s the KGB.”
Grigory was halfway out the door. He stopped, turned, looked at his friend, twisted the door handle at his side.
He spoke quietly, all his momentum subdued.
“I hadn’t expected it would be a problem.”
“It’s the KGB.”
“There’s an entire city blindly walking into an early grave.”
“I have a family.”
“So you keep saying.”
They were silent.
“Open a page,” Grigory said. “There’s a hundred families on each one; a hundred and fifty, who knows? What if it were a Moscow directory? What if we were to look under Simenov?”
Vasily stood up.
“I can’t help you with this, Grigory. I’m sorry.”
Grigory stepped aside to let him pass.
When he called people he introduced himself as a doctor and explained what was happening. He told them to put their food in plastic, to put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a cloth, then put the rag in a bag and throw it away. If they had laundry drying outside, they should put it back in the wash. Put two drops of iodine in a glass of water and wash their hair with it. Dissolve four more drops and drink it, two for a child. He told them to get out of the city as soon as they could. Stay with a relative. Don’t come back for at least a few weeks.
He made probably sixty calls until finally they cut him off. Sitting on a stranger’s chair, pacing up and down someone’s brown, patterned carpet.
Every reaction was the same. People were calm. They thanked him. They didn’t question him or panic. Perhaps they didn’t believe him or didn’t understand the importance of what he was asking. Such simple things: wash your hair, wash your clothes, drink some iodine. It hardly seemed credible that these few actions could save your life.
That evening he went to his quarters to pack his bag and bedding and find another place to sleep. Vasily, lying in the next bunk, watched him place his belongings away.
“I’m not the enemy, Grigory. I’m not one of them.”
“Really? Then who are you?”
The next day he went to Minsk himself. Forced his way into the chairman’s office, gaining access by holding the dosimeter up to people’s necks, showing them the readings. They all had family here; they couldn’t bring themselves to refuse him. The chairman told Grigory he could only spare five minutes.
“I’ve been on the phone this morning with the chairman of the Soviet Radiological Protection Board. He’s assured me everything is normal, everything is under control.”
“Comrade, I am the deputy head of the cleanup commission. I’m telling you, you need to evacuate the city. You need to demand that military personnel come here at once.”
“They are already using vast numbers of troops at the accident site.”
“And I’m telling you to order more for yourself.”
“Doctor, there are only so many soldiers to go around.”
“We have the largest army on earth. Are we not always proclaiming the greatness, the scale of our forces? We need to get people out of here. This accident, believe me, will make Hiroshima look like an aberration.”
“You are exaggerating, Doctor.”
“I’ve personally taken background readings of five hundred micro-roentgen per hour outside. There should be no one within a hundred kilometers of this city.”
The chairman stretched out his arms as if he were addressing a rally.
“I am a former director of a tractor factory. I do not understand such things. If comrade Platonov from the Radiological Protection Board tells me that things are fine, then what can I tell him: he’s lying? Please, of course not, they’d take my Party card.”
“Well, I’m a doctor, a surgeon, responsible for the cleanup. I’ve arrived here directly from the site and yet you’re happy to tell me that I’m a fool.”
The chairman leaned forward, snarling.
“There will be no evacuation.”
“Where are your wife and children?”
“They are here, of course. How can I ask others to trust the system if I can’t show them that my own family does the same?”
Grigory exhaled, shook his head.
“You’re really that naïve.”
The chairman was unnerved by Grigory’s tone. He spluttered out a response.
“The Party has made me what I am, made this country what it is. I have always trusted its judgement. A fire in a power plant won’t change that.”
They argued for another half hour until Grigory, defeated, picked up his bag and placed it on his lap.
“The city has iodine concentration in reserve—I know this is policy in case of a nuclear attack. At least put that in the water supply.”
“That, as you’ve mentioned, Doctor, is for the purposes of nuclear attack.”
“So we’ll protect our people from the Capitalist Imperialists, but not from each other?”
“Get out before I have you arrested for spreading anti-Soviet sentiment.”
“It’s not only the air that’s contaminated. It’s your minds too.”
“Get out!”
GRIGORY STOPS his walk and takes a breath of the fresh evening air, savouring it.
The stars are coming out. He’ll need to go back soon, do a final pass through the wards before bedtime. Through the gloom, he can make out the main road to Mogilev with the wedges of light from car headlamps moving in a steady trajectory. Remnants of corn stubble crunch under his feet, he can feel its stubbornness under his boots. A few weeks ago he watched men come with cans of fuel, dousing the stubble in small sections and then lighting it, guiding the flame, encouraging it to other areas with loose straw and pitchforks, so that it spread as a blanket of gentle fire, a carpet of heat bending the air above it. Now a silent plain of snow greets him on his walks and Grigory knows that in a couple of months they’ll return with tractors and ploughs and turn the soil over upon itself once more, ready for sowing in the spring.
In the exclusion zone, there were great flaming pyres of cattle and sheep. They were folding the land inside out using diggers and tractors and shovels to make craters large enough to hold everything in sight: helicopters and troop wagons, shacks, trees, cars, motorcycles, pylons. They flattened homes by tying a huge chain around an izba, then hauling it forward with a giant digger so the izba would collapse onto itself; then they’d heave everything into a pit. They were cutting down forests and wrapping the trunks in plastic before laying them under the earth. Grigory saw so much of this that when people tell him where they’re from, when they mention the names of the surrounding villages and towns—Krasnopol, Chadyany, Malinovka, Bragin, Khoyniki, Narovlya—they bring to mind not only the landscape but what lies beneath it. He sees the places as a diagram, in cross section, with figures working busily on top of the earth and other pockets underneath it, all neatly ordered—a section for helicopters, one for the izbas, another for diseased animals—which, of course, isn’t the case. There is nothing neat about this tragedy.
He hears sounds from the road: a squeal of brakes and then glass shattering. Grigory looks in the direction of the noise and sees a sulphurous light, stalled. He runs towards it, the cold air inflaming his lungs.
As he nears he sees a man standing over a dog, waving his arms in the air, admonishing the felled animal.
The driver directs his invective at Grigory, but Grigory ignores it and kneels over the dog. It’s a German shepherd, young, less than a year old, Grigory estimates. The animal faces the front of the car with thick ribbons of blood around its hindquarters and a web of drool laced around its mouth, its eyes turned upwards, their lids flickering in pain. Grigory rests a calming hand on its neck and the animal raises its head a few centimetres from the road and lunges forward, snapping its jaws. Grigory leans backwards, unafraid, and speaks softly to it, his tones reaching under those of the driver, who is still spitting out his complaints.