Greenish sparks poured from his eyes. The snow leopard patted me on the shoulder with his front paw. In an instant he was gone.
But when I awoke, shivering from the coolness of the morning, and began to rub my shoulders with my palms, I suddenly noticed that on my left arm there were fresh long scratches. «The snow leopard! They are his claw marks!» flashed across my mind. «But how is it possible? It wasn’t a day-dream. I was asleep and just woke up. How, how is it possible?»
With the sunrise, soldiers appeared in the hills. «Where did they come from?» said my grandfather in amazement.
«Indeed, it’s as if they have come out from under the earth,» the old man Arkham said fearfully.
The soldiers approached us and one of them, obviously the oldest, said: «Everything will begin in half an hour. During the explosion you should cover yourselves with your felt mats and don’t get up until told to do so. Put out the fires immediately.»
The soldiers were already pouring water over the flames. Their short sharp commands exploded in the mellow morning calm. People began to take out the felt mats, gather in small groups, making themselves as comfortable as possible. Kenje lay between grandmother and myself. Her gentle face grew haggard and her wide eyes once again filled with fear, her long lashes scarcely moved. My grandfather whispered a prayer. Grandmother covered me from head to foot by force. I broke free. She became cross.
The soldiers rushed about to and fro. I could hear their cracked, hoarse voices. Suddenly, their commander shouted loudly:
«Attention! Attention! Everyone down! Lie still!»
And – the earth rocked gently. It seemed like an eternal cradle, lulling us to sleep. But, all of a sudden, it shuddered and from below the ground something lashed out at us with violent tremors that struck our legs, chest, face; grandmother’s embrace slackened, the earth reared up like on horse; the earth, the hills in their final convulsions resisted extinction. As I stuck my head out from under the felt mat, I saw an enormous mushroom cloud filling the sky and fire-spitting flashes danced in an unimaginable turbulent blaze of kaleidoscopic colour. In an instant, my very being was paralysed by fear and wonder. I had not seen anything like it even in my worst nightmares. The mountains groaned, huge stones crashed down arid trees bowed and creaked, and suddenly amidst the hellish tumult of sounds, a desperate, ear-splitting cry emerged – or was it a scream? To this day I do not know how to describe that awful sound. A little girl, in a white dress, evading the hail of boulders, was running for her life. I had not realized that I had got out from under the felt mat and was standing, benumbed, following her with my eyes. As the fiery mushroom cloud struggled upwards we were blinded by bright flashes, and the little girl continued to run toward some unknown destination, along the reeling earth. I was frozen as if rooted to the ground, not knowing what I should do. Her scream was ear-splitting. Or perhaps there was no scream? Perhaps I had imagined it? Perhaps her gaping mouth was silent and she was running into the mountains arid not the steppe, and the stones were flying past her. «Shell be killed. I have to save her, I have to run after her. I have to catch up with her,» I thought and shouted, «Kenje! Kenje!» I rushed after her but suddenly it dawned on me that she had certainly gone mad! Shocked by this sudden revelation, I tripped and fell. At that very moment a large stone flew past me and I realized that Allah had saved me. Kenje had gone mad, she had gone mad… I caught up with her. Her thin shoulders were quivering, she was running and crying, and then I could clearly hear her heart-rending cry – «Aaaah!» Suddenly, once again everything was illuminated by flashes of light. I reached Kenje’s side and we both fell to the ground. I could hear the stamp of heavy boots behind us, but before I could turn around, we were covered with a heavy felt mat. I heard a gruff voice say, «Be still! Don’t get up!» Kenje lightly squeezed my hand. «Don’t be afraid,» I whispered to her, but she did not answer. The touch of her moist fingers, could one ever forget that?…
Once again the earth shook, this time stronger – it throbbed as in an epileptic fit and my heart throbbed in fits and starts, as if my spirit was fading away. I forgot about Kenje, I forgot about everything on earth. I realized that the WORLD HAD COLLAPSED and I too would be killed in its devastation. I thought only of myself. Death stood over me with her axe – swish, swish, swish. I could see the blade being lowered onto my childish neck; I lost consciousness, sensing in a fleeting moment that Kenje’s hand had grown cold. «She’s dead,» I thought as I gradually came round from my dull stupor. Under the felt mat, in total darkness, I lay trembling slightly and bathed in sweat, next to the dead Kenje. In my boyish heart, I suddenly realized that I had been in love with ‘this little, sickly girl. I stirred, trying to get nearer to Kenje’s face, to kiss her for the first and last time. «Don’t move! Lie still!» I heard the same thunderous voice say. I nevertheless, somehow managed to edge my way closer to her and kissed her on the forehead. Again he shouted at me, but the voice was muffled and I realized that its owner also spoke from under afelt mat.
And it seemed that the end of the world had come.
That ragged young man, who had been handing out leaflets, had been talking about the same thing.
After the explosion, we lived in the Genghiz Hills for another one and a half weeks. Here, on a high reach, we buried Kenje – the first innocent victim of the hydrogen bomb exploded on the proving ground near the town of Semipalatinsk.
Semipalatinsk! That dear, dusty, inconspicuous town; from that day on it became famous throughout the world!
They say that Kurchatov, immediately after the explosion, exclaimed, «This is monstrous! God willing, this will never be used against people. We mustn’t allow such a thing…»I was sitting on a warm boulder which had fallen from the hills during the explosion, intently gazing at the spot where Kenje had just been buried. It was far from the mound, but I could clearly see a light vapour rising from the little grave, like the soul, like the atomic mushroom cloud after the explosion. The soldiers had vanished just as suddenly as they had appeared. Only a medical vehicle remained, a few army doctors and a young nurse, Galya. There was little for her to do and she would frequently drop into my grandmother’s and quietly sit and have a chat about this and that. Sometimes, grandfather would participate in these conversations. Both he and grandmother knew Russian well – naturally, after all, during the years of the great famine they had found salvation in the town where they worked as unskilled labourers and in this way survived.
Grandfather recalled:
«The whole wretched steppe was covered in corpses. We rushed, although you could hardly call it that – it was more like crawling – towards the town accompanied by the howl of jackals and cries of cawing vultures. We had only one aim – to reach the town; once there, somehow things would come right in the end. Every one believed in this, as I did. Everyone believed in this but not everyone survived…»
The poisoned, terrible thirties – bitter like the smell of wormwood. Galya listened attentively. She would often flinch. She could not comprehend how, under socialism, there could be famine, humiliation, repressions, although her twenty-year-old mind understood that this terrible, deadly explosion was also a bad thing. She whispered this to grandmother and added, wide-eyed, that although she was not sure, of course, but had heard that the doctors were waiting for the arrival of nine people who had been specially left in the immediate vicinity of the area where the tests had been carried out, and who had stood throughout the whole test without protective cover. They would be put under observation for approximately ten days and then they would be sent to Semipalatinsk where they would be observed by «Moscow professors». Galya maintained that this was what they had been told by Major Zhavoronkov of the Medical Corps who headed this small group of medics. «Such observations are necessary for the future,» Zhavoronkov said. But Galya, after having listened to grandfather, no longer believed in the words pronounced by her commanding officer.