Komarov stood up from his chair, holding onto the side of the house for balance. He studied the vodka bottle. Although the label was unreadable in the dark, lights from the house reflected in the glass. He tried to feel the reflected light with his thumb, and when he could not, he held the bottle high over his head and threw it against the porch railing. It shattered across the floor of the porch, and eventually he heard vodka dripping through the floorboards to the earth below. He stood swaying in the dark, listening, waiting, and planning his next move.
8
Spring rains had moistened the Ukraine soil, preparing its rich farmland for the job of feeding the USSR. In the far northern Ukraine, waterfowl had returned to the Pripyat marshes. East of the marshes along the Uzh and Pripyat Rivers, gulls followed tractors, feasting on unearthed insects. Farther east, where the Uzh and Pripyat emptied into the Dnieper for the journey to the Black Sea, waterfowl congregated at a large pond. The pond bordered the Pripyat River but was separated from the river by a man-made dike. Water in the pond was warmer than the water in the river or in any other ponds in the area because it was used to cool superheated steam emerging from several turbines.
From the far side of the pond, the sound from the Chernobyl Nuclear Generating Facility operated by the Ministry of Energy was a steady drone. To some, it was a sound of unlimited power. To others, trained in engineering and physics, it was not one sound, but many sounds. Pumps, turbines, generators, and transformers formed an orchestra. The failure of one instrument would diminish the score.
Early in the morning on Friday, April 25, 1986, a technician in an off-white uniform walked near a turbine and generator of Chernobyl’s unit four. The combined structure was over fifty meters long. On the generator side, thick copper bus bars in protective pipe went through the wall of the building to the transformers outside.
On the turbine side, large pipes brought steam from the reactor to drive the turbine, and more pipes carried steam off to be cooled.
The concrete floor to which the structure was mounted vibrated.
The noise was deafening and there was the smell of oil and hot metal and graphite in the air.
One wall of the huge room was a mass of piping, wiring, gauges, solenoids, and valves. The technician paused in this area, watching solenoids and valves doing their work. But to stay long enough to watch every solenoid-valve combination go through a cycle would have taken hours, and the technician had further rounds to make.
The operators had already begun the hours-long process of reducing power leading to the tests to be performed during shutdown.
The technician mounted a metal stairway, pausing to watch a particular valve, painted red, being actuated. Then he continued his climb. He met another technician at the top of the stairs, and the two shouted to be heard above the roar of the turbine hall.
“How do the emergency cooling switches look?”
“They look… content!”
“They’d better be content because the idiots in the control room are insane!”
“Everyone working here is insane! Especially the bosses!”
“They were smart enough to build the bunker below their offices!”
“Who put Pavlov in charge of programming the computer? The dog doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing!”
“His name fits the situation! I hope we get this bitch shut down for May Day!”
“The parade banners kids make in school have construction superior to anything here!”
“Antiquated technology is our business!”
The two technicians laughed, slapped one another on the back, and went on their way.
In another wing of the building, in the relative quiet of the main control room, several technicians dressed in similar off-white uniforms sat at a semicircular console. At one end of the console, a two-by-six-centimeter rectangular panel lit bright red for two seconds, then went out. The technician nearest the panel was speaking on the telephone. After the red light went out, the technician looked in the general direction of the panel for several seconds, his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and resumed his conversation.
In a large room above the reactor core, one of the technicians making his rounds walked a catwalk. He paused a moment and stared down at the ends of graphite columns. It looked like a giant circular checkerboard. He reached into the vest pocket of his uniform, took out a dosimeter, held it up to the light, and looked into it. Then he hurried along the catwalk, went out a side door, and descended an outdoor stairway.
Outside the building, the technician paused to speak with the operator of a large diesel front loader carrying gravel. The technician stepped up on the side platform and shouted at the man in the cab. Amid the throbbing of the diesel engine, he pointed to a small high-tension tower a few meters behind the front loader. After the technician dismounted, he stood with his hands on his hips and watched as the front loader left the area.
The technician walked back to the far end of the building and climbed a flight of stairs. Before entering the building, he paused to watch a pair of ducks fly over the yard and out above the cooling pond. He lifted his head and inhaled deeply of the spring air before going inside through a set of double doors to rejoin his comrades in the control room and fill out the morning inspection report.
The morning chatter of birds through the open window awakened her. The previous evening she’d gone for a walk alone. Pripyat’s lin-den trees had thickened, and she’d stood watching skylarks building nests. She went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror, trying to see if she had changed, if her complexion was rosier, her cheeks puffier, her eyes calmer. The only change was a slight thickening of her abdomen. To see it she had to stand on a stool and study her profile. Six weeks, and the baby was beginning to show. She’d noticed the change this week, and now she was certain she could see the bulge beneath her slip.
“It’s still too early to see,” said Marina, standing in the bathroom doorway watching her.
Marina was like a sister, someone she could confide in. They had spent many nights discussing what she should do, and she had decided to request a medical leave to have the baby. She would stay with Aunt Magda in the town of Visenka during the last months of pregnancy. Finally, the most difficult decision, she would arrange for the baby’s adoption.
Juli stepped off the stool and began combing her hair. She glanced to Marina. “I’m going to tell my supervisor today, assum-ing she doesn’t already know.”
“No one knows,” said Marina. “Nobody was in the apartment next door last winter. The footprints on the balcony were made during the day. The following week, our new neighbors moved in, so there’s nothing to worry about. Another pair of powerless women like us.”
“Are you going to lecture me again, Marina?”
“Not a lecture, Juli. I simply wondered when you would tell your secret to someone besides me and the doctor and your aunt.”
“I’ll tell my supervisor late in the day so I’ll have the weekend to prepare for the gossip.”
“And Mihaly?”
“We’ve been through this, Marina. I’m not trying to protect him! A fool protecting a fool! His wife finds out about us, and we continue seeing one another! It’s an insane situation! Nothing good can come of it!”
“The baby is good,” said Marina.
“I know. I didn’t mean to yell. I’ll… tell Mihaly today. After work. After I tell my supervisor and get the hell out of there.”
“You still won’t consider an abortion?”
“No. Don’t ask why. Maybe because my father is dead and I was his only child.”
Juli looked in the mirror, saw her own face sneering back at her.
“I should have gone to medical school like my father wanted instead of working at a damned nuclear plant. I’d be a doctor in Moscow sitting behind my desk, and on the other side of the desk is an unmarried girl come to get the results of her test. I should have stayed in Moscow after school or gone to some other job away from here so I would never have met Mihaly.”