The forest turned orange, and they said to each other, “Maybe Mother Nature’s blood is crusting over?”
One day they realized that the straw in their tents came from stacks near the reactor. They decided to clear out their tents, but after three nights sleeping on the bare ground, they brought it back in. Yuri said he made a joke, “Better to die of radiation than pneumonia,” but nobody laughed. They stopped laughing after the first few weeks, after the chainsaws broke down again.
One night it rained, and in the morning the water in the puddles was green and yellow, like mercury.
All around them, soldiers and men like themselves were burying everything. Gennady Polovinkin came up with a slogan: Fight the atom with a shovel. They said this to each other sometimes as encouragement. They said it ironically, bitterly, but also with defiance: let nature come and fight them, they each had an axe.
Artyom’s father told him he thought about him all the time. There were sparrows everywhere, littered dead on the ground. You couldn’t help standing on them, he said. They were covered in autumn leaves, even though it was still May. When he felt them underfoot he thought about that morning, out shooting. He prayed that Artyom was somewhere safe, somewhere clean, untouched by all this perversion of nature.
Artyom didn’t get to see his father when the tumours metastasized, not within his body but instead crawling to its surface, till they clasped his face, trailing his features like poison ivy. He didn’t get to see him when he was producing a stool thirty times a day, composed mainly of blood and mucus. When his skin started cracking on his arms and legs. When every evening his sheet would be covered in blood and Artyom’s mother would give the militiamen directions as to how to move him, and make sure her husband had fresh bedding for the night.
Artyom stayed with Sofya in the nurses’ quarters and roamed the city for fresh food, which they paid for with Maksim’s roubles and which they would bring back and make into soup, which their mother would take down when she came back to sleep for a few hours. She came back to sleep and to lie to her children, to pretend that their father wasn’t in any pain, just resting.
At the end she couldn’t lie anymore, not when his tongue fell out. Not when she’d hold a bedpan at the side of his bed to catch the blood which ran in rivulets from no particular place in his body. Not when he would cough and spit up pieces of his lungs, his liver, choking on his internal organs. She would never tell them that she’d look at him and see him crying out to her as though from the end of a long corridor. His eyes wailing their pain, like an infant when it can’t express its need, can’t make itself be understood. She couldn’t lie and couldn’t face her children, so she stayed there beside him, slept on the chair next to him, unable to touch him because it would bring too much pain. Her children brought the soup to the attendant at the reception desk, who would deliver it to a table at the entrance to the ward. They never asked to see their father. He belonged to their mother now.
IN THE CLEARING Artyom waits for the air to return to stillness, leaves vibrating from the thudding hooves. Around him, the bushes are dappled in red. Kalyna berries.
Those nights by the wireless, when the music had quietened and they watched shadows from the candlelight wrap around the plates and saucepans, his father would tell him stories. In one that they returned to often, the living and the dead were connected by bridges made from kalyna wood. They crossed easily from one side to the other, doing this so readily that after some time they could no longer distinguish between the two realms.
Particles skimming through the air. Underneath what he sees and smells and hears. Snowflakes concealing their star-tipped patterns. Animals curled up under the ground seeing out the winter, their hearts beating with only the faintest of rhythms. His father is here: a shadow dancing, merged into the life around him. Inhabiting the cells of these things, just as radiation, displaced atoms, inhabited his own living cells, changing him.
He would listen to his father’s tales, drinking his glass of milk, resting like a sick calf in his father’s arms.
Chapter 19
A slight buzz bores through the air. If you look across Red Square at this particular moment, you can see several people twist their heads in sync, turning their faces towards the noise. A small white plane edges its way under the clouds, emerging strange and determined. A ripple of awareness, people nudging each other at the sight, anticipation building as the sound gains clarity, closing in on them. The plane banks and sweeps its way towards St. Basil’s cathedral, looking like a fixed-winged gnat in contrast to the grandeur of the iconic, bulbous domes. Everyone gazes at the same point. Hands are raised, the scattered gathering pointing at the sight, following its direction, the plane travelling along the flight path of their fingers as if they are guiding it downward, the autonomy of the small craft abandoned to the will of the collective. The plane circles once more, lower now, the propeller hum dominating everything until it dips from sight. Those closest can hear the short screech of a landing and a rattle of wheels on the cobbles along Vasilevsky Spusk, the plane bouncing and jolting as it taxis along parallel to the Kremlin walls and emerges into the expanse of Red Square. The crowds stream towards it, waiting for the solid figure of Gorbachev to emerge, the premier descending from on high, landing just outside his office, but the plane contains only a lone pilot, a tall, skinny, dark-haired young man wearing sunglasses and a red aviator’s suit.
They encircle him, curious. Tourists thrust notebooks towards him, asking for an autograph. Others place bread into his hands, and he chews it sidemouth and nonchalantly takes the pens and signs his name. Mathias Rust. Alighting from the heavens with a twenty-page plan to end the Cold War.
Chapter 20
The bus stops in the Arbat, and Margarita, Vasily’s wife, gets off and takes two steps and feels a hand on the small of her back. She turns quickly, ready to strike, then stops, shocked.
“Come with me.”
Maria guides her through an alleyway crammed with street vendors selling nuts and dried fruit, and there’s a smell of spices in the air, mixed together, indistinct, and they take several turns left and right, slipping through the crowd, and end up in the Mololodjosh Café on Gorky Ulitsa. It’s a Saturday afternoon, which means there’s a jazz band playing. They sit side by side in the back, in the dark.
“I’m sorry for all this,” Maria says. “I called to your apartment this morning, but there was a white Volga parked outside with a good view of your window. I wasn’t sure if you were aware.”
“Don’t worry. I’m aware.” Margarita repeated the words, ruefully this time, letting her spite roll over the syllables, “I’m aware.”
Maria waited for her to continue.
“I don’t know why they’ve decided to pitch up on my doorstep. This is the worst of it. If there was something I could do or stop doing, it would be so much easier. Some kind of solution to this. But there isn’t. I’ve gone weeks without sleep, thinking over the possibilities. I’m sick with fear. What would the girls do without me?”
The waiter brings water and a glass of cognac for each of them.
Maria says, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to make things worse. I felt I had no choice but to follow you. I haven’t had any word. I just need to know something. The hospital won’t help. There’s no one else to turn to.”