The bomb had gone off near the center of town. Ever since the early days of the twentieth century, Russians in Harbin had built substantial churches and offices and blocks of flats in that part of the city, so that central Harbin had been a reminder of what a prerevolutionary Russian city was like.
No more. Those buildings were sturdier than the Chinese-style ones surrounding them. They weren’t sturdy enough to survive having a small sun suddenly kindled not far above them. Some of the brick and stone had melted to something very much like glass. Steel and copper had puddled and flowed like water.
And people…Those substantial Russian buildings had substantial Russian sidewalks in front of them. Here and there on the scorched sidewalks, and on walls that hadn’t quite melted and hadn’t quite come down, Vasili saw what looked like the silhouettes of men and women. He didn’t need long to realize that was exactly what they were. The atom bomb’s flash had printed people’s shadows on those sidewalks and walls. Then, a split second later, it seared the people who cast them to hot gas. The shadowprints were all that remained to show they had ever lived.
That was bad. Finding charred, shrunken corpses inside ruins a little farther away from where the bomb went off was worse. You stuffed those into burlap bags and carted them away. With water and fat boiled off, with even bones burnt fragile, you could fit several into one sack. You could, and Vasili did, over and over again.
After the first few days, he wasn’t dealing with the wounded and dying any more. The dying had mostly become the dead. He saw burns worse than anything he’d ever imagined, burns that put him in mind of roast meat forgotten on its spit over the fire. Roast meat, though, didn’t moan and shriek and beg for someone to put it out of its anguish. He took care of that a couple of times, with the knife he wore on his belt. He had dreadful dreams about the things he saw, but not about helping people die. As best he could tell, he was doing them a favor.
Some of the dying on the edge of the blast area escaped that torment to fall victim to a different one. Their hair fell out. They grew nauseated. They pissed blood. It dripped from their rectums, and sometimes from their eyes and even from the beds of their nails. When they vomited, the black, curded crud they heaved up showed they were bleeding inside, too.
Nobody could do anything for them except give them opium so they hurt a little less. The Chinese doctors called it radiation sickness. Some of the people with it lived: the ones who bled least or not at all. But the doctors admitted they didn’t have much to do with that. The only thing that mattered was how big a dose the sufferers got to begin with.
Every evening, when Vasili and the other men and women trying to clean up after the atomic bomb came out of the blast zone, secret policemen searched them. It would have been contrary to human nature not to plunder what the dead needed and protected no more.
But the secret police were as desperately overworked as everyone else near Harbin and the other shattered Manchurian cities. They didn’t find everything the laborers secreted on their persons. And even the secret police were human beings. Some of them would take a cut of what they did find and let the laborers keep the rest. If they confiscated it all, the laborers might stop plundering. Then they wouldn’t get anything.
“What have you got today, round-eye?” a tough-looking Chinese policeman with a PPD asked.
“Here’s your squeeze, pal.” Vasili handed him a jade bracelet and some heavy gold earrings set with pearls and rubies. He spoke the same rough northeastern dialect of Mandarin as his watcher, and spoke it about as well. The older he got, the more he used it. The way things looked, his Russian would be the language that got rusty.
“Let me check these.” The secret policeman took off a mitten and hefted the earrings. A smile spread across his broad, flat face. “That’s gold, sure as the demons! Go on through.”
“Thanks. I’m not dumb enough to try to trick you,” Vasili said. He made as if to shrug off his quilted jacket. “You want to frisk me?”
“No. Just get out of here.” The Chinese gestured with the barrel of the submachine gun.
Vasili got. The secret policeman turned to see what he could extract from the next laborer in line. Vasili walked slowly, as if he were very tired and his feet hurt. He was very tired, and his feet did hurt. One reason they hurt was that he was walking on gold coins he’d stashed under the soles of his feet.
The coins were English sovereigns. Most of them bore Victoria’s jowly profile; a few carried her son Edward’s bearded visage. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any: probably before the Sino-Japanese conflict joined the wider river of World War II. His father had used sovereigns, or maybe gold rubles, to get out of Russia, and to do things he needed to take care of after that.
Even in Mao’s aggressively Communist China, gold was bound to have its place. Gold always had a place. Vasili’s father’d said so more than once, and Vasili didn’t think his old man was wrong. Neither had the people who’d stashed away these coins. But, while gold could do all kinds of things, it couldn’t stop an atom bomb. Those people didn’t need their sovereigns any more. Vasili was sure he’d be able to use them, even if he didn’t know how just yet.
Next stop after the secret-police check was the feeding station. He got a small bowl of rice with a few vegetables on top. No soy sauce-nothing to flavor the mess. Another bowl of the same, or sometimes noodles or a roll, was breakfast. That was it. Along with cash and jewelry, the laborers took whatever canned goods they came across.
“You didn’t fill this bowl as full as the one I got yesterday!” groused the man in front of Vasili. Vasili never complained. Getting along in a country where hardly anybody looked like you was hard enough without doing anything to make it harder.
“You’re right. It isn’t,” the guy on the other side of the kettle answered. “Not as much came in today. With the railroads all smashed up the way they are, it’s heaven’s own miracle we’re getting anything.”
“But I do hard work every day,” the laborer said. “How can I keep it up if I’m hungry all the time?”
“Plenty of people hungrier than you.” The server jerked a thumb in the direction the line was moving. “Get out of here, you greedy turtle. You’re holding up the works.” Glaring, the man walked on. Vasili came up and held out his bowl. Glaring, the fellow with the ladle said, “You going to give me a hard time, too?”
“No, not me.” Vasili definitely knew better than to piss off anybody who worked in the kitchens. Plenty of people around Harbin were hungrier than the laborers. The government was trying to keep them from starving to death. It didn’t worry about anything past that, not yet.
But men and women who handled food never starved. If that wasn’t a law of nature, it should have been. This guy wasn’t fat, but he sure wasn’t starving. If you annoyed these people, they’d find ways to make you sorry. “Well, here, then,” the server said. He gave Vasili a little more than the other fellow’d got.
“Thanks!” Vasili sounded as if he meant it. A little grease on the axle helped the wheels go round.
–
Ihor Shevchenko ate pickles and drank vodka. Pickles, salt fish, meat dumplings…Those were the kind of zakuski that gave the booze some style. He wasn’t smashed yet, but he was getting there.
He raised his glass. “Here’s to good old antifreeze!” he said, and knocked back the snort at a gulp. The vodka was icy cold, which made it burn less on its way down the hatch.
“To antifreeze!” echoed the kolkhozniks drinking with him. They downed their toasts, too. His wife giggled. Anya was a little bitty thing. She didn’t need to drink much to get plastered.