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“I thought you were going into Kiev today,” Ihor Shevchenko told his wife. “It’s Sunday, after all.”
Instead of answering, Anya sneezed. It was one of those horrible, wet sneezes that show somebody has a genuinely awful cold. She blew her nose-a mournful honk-into a handkerchief. Ihor got a glimpse of her snot. It was yellow, almost green, the kind you would expect to see dribbling from a three-year-old’s snoot.
“Never mind,” Ihor said. “I see why you’re staying here.”
Anya made a feeble, get-away-from-me pushing gesture. “Go to the common room. Go outside. Go somewhere,” she said. “If you stay around me, you’ll catch this. Believe me, you don’t want it.” As if for emphasis, she sneezed again.
“Bless you,” he said, and then, “I’m going, I’m going.” Sometimes arguing with your wife was a losing proposition. That had to be doubly true when she wasn’t fit company any which way.
Ihor did go outside. If he didn’t want Anya’s company, he didn’t want anybody’s. Besides, if he went to the common room, he’d start drinking. The kolkhozniks were celebrating the news of the blows the Red Air Force had struck against the West Coast of the United States-and against Newfoundland and a city called Bangor, Maine. Yuri Levitan bragged about the devastation the Soviet bombers had left behind.
Ihor lit a papiros. Yuri Levitan hadn’t said a word about what the USA was liable to do next. The Americans and the Russians were playing a game like the one snockered Ukrainian peasants sometimes enjoyed. Two men stood facing each other. One slapped the other’s cheek. Then the second guy slapped him back. They took turns till one man either couldn’t stand the pain or fell over.
Blowing out smoke, Ihor remembered he’d played that game a few times. You had to be drunk, the drunker the better. When you were, it was funny and full of ridiculousness. If you tried it sober, it would just hurt. Not much fun in that.
He smoked and walked, walked and smoked. The Soviet Union had just slapped the United States hard enough to stagger it. He wished the slap would have been harder. Why not some really big cities on the U.S. East Coast? Maybe the Soviet bombers couldn’t reach them. Or maybe they got shot down trying. But was this slap hard enough so the Yankee imperialists couldn’t whack you back? How could you know? All you could do was wait and find out.
Snow still lay on the ground. The trees near the stream remained as bare-branched as if they’d never heard of leaves. Spring was on the way, but winter always hung on as long and hard as it could. Summer was the season that seemed to vanish as soon as you looked away.
And this was the Ukraine. Up in Russia, things were worse. No wonder the Russians thought they were tougher than their cousins down here. It wasn’t just that there were more of them. They had to put up with more to get anything out of where they lived.
He walked on. A weasel stared at him. Pretty soon, its white winter coat would turn brown. It hadn’t yet, though. The weasel darted behind a tree trunk and disappeared. Disappeared from Ihor’s view, anyhow. But the mice and voles would find out it was still around.
He looked back at the clump of buildings that made up the heart of Kolkhoz 127. They were all cheap and shabby, punished by winter cold and summer sun, their paint faded, roof tiles coming loose and blowing off. They didn’t get fixed up as often or as well as they should have.
But the buildings were collectively owned, along with almost everything else on the collective farm. What everybody owned together, nobody cared about individually. And so things wore out, and mostly didn’t get repaired. Ihor had never heard of a kolkhoz that worked any differently, whether in the Ukraine, in Russia, or, for that matter, in Bulgaria.
Three women rode by on bicycles, bound for Kiev. Ihor stared after them, scowling. Had Anya decided she was going, horrible cold or no horrible cold? She’d be lucky if she didn’t come back with pneumonia. But he didn’t think she was one of the riders. For her sake, he hoped not.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, something started to squeal, far off at the edge of hearing. Not a pig kind of squeal-a machine-made kind of squeal. Rising and falling…Air-raid sirens? Ihor lit another papiros. Stalin had sown the wind. Was the whirlwind on the way?
Screams in the air-those were jet fighters taking off and getting as high as they could as fast as they could. Could they get high enough fast enough? Everybody anywhere near Kiev would find out soon.
Through those urgent, even desperate, screams, Ihor’s ear caught another jet roar, this one high and distant, as if the airplane making it had already got as high as it needed to get and didn’t have to worry about any interlopers late for the party.
Off in the distance, as far away as the sirens, guns began to pound. Ihor hadn’t thought they had antiaircraft guns that could shoot as high as the plane moving from west to east was flying. For all he knew for sure, they didn’t have flak like that. Whether they could reach high enough or not, they were shooting for all they were worth. Why not? What harm would it do?
None, probably. Whether it would do any good, though…That question got answered moments later. It did no good at all. For all the antiaircraft fire, for all the screaming MiGs, a new sun burst to life over Kiev. Even from kilometers away, the heat of that burning was fierce on Ihor’s face.
He threw himself flat on the cold ground and tried to dig himself into it like a mole, the way he had when the Germans started throwing 105s around. But shells from a 105 were gravel on a tin roof next to that mountain of flame incinerating the ancient city.
“God, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” He gabbled out the Old Church Slavonic prayers again and again, hardly knowing he was doing so. Had anyone heard him, he might have got in trouble for it. But if they weren’t also praying back at the kolkhoz, he would have been mightily amazed. They were praying wherever they could…wherever they weren’t dead. And he had to pray Christ had had mercy on those bicycle riders out for a shopping trip to the city-and that Anya really wasn’t one of them.
Not half a dozen centimeters in front of Ihor’s frightened eyes, a corpse-pale mushroom no taller than the last joint of his little finger pushed its way out of the Ukraine’s black earth. There above Kiev, that monstrous mushroom thrust its way untold kilometers into the Ukraine’s gray-blue sky. Lightnings crackled about it.
Blast picked him up and flipped him over. It didn’t fling him into a tree and smash him; it wasn’t quite strong enough for that. But it did lift snow and send it skirling along. It lifted pebbles, too. One hit his boot, hard enough to hurt his foot. A little nearer and it might have pierced him like a rifle round.
“Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” Suddenly, Ihor was praying in earnest, praying as he hadn’t prayed since he was a boy, not just spitting out words by reflex the way the least pious man would do when in danger of his life. He wasn’t thinking about his life now. There was Anya, rushing out to see the terrible cloud for herself.
If not for that miserable head cold, she would have got on her bicycle and gone into Kiev with the other women. She wouldn’t have been there yet, but she would have been much closer than Ihor was. How much closer? He couldn’t know. Close enough for her clothes to catch fire from that blast? Close enough for her hair to catch fire? Close enough for her to catch fire?
“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!” Ihor still had his wife, still would have her for as long as the two of them could go on putting up with each other. In the circle of villages and collective farms around Kiev, how many people would tell their children and grandchildren those stories down through the years? And how many wouldn’t be there to tell them, because they’d gone into the city after all?