I told anyone that I met about my housing dilemma. A woman from Rukh felt sorry for me and invited me to stay. We did not know each other well. There was also a large age difference between us. I felt grateful for the offer but also suspicious. I wondered why she had extended the invitation and what she might want from me. I also worried obsessively about language. I had found a Ukrainian teacher but Russian and Ukrainian were so similar that I sometimes confused the two languages. I did not know whether I should speak to her in mangled Ukrainian or more fluent but grammatically incorrect Russian.
On the day of the move, I stood outside my building on Yaroslaviv Val nervously contemplating my move and trying to flag down a car. Forty-five minutes later no one had stopped. This had never happened before.
A man sat in a tan-coloured square Lada across the road. I became convinced that he worked for the KGB and that no motorist would stop while he stayed there. After an hour I became impatient and thought KGB or not, the man could be useful. I asked him for a lift. He said yes and put my bags in the trunk of his car.
I gave the man the correct name of the neighbourhood but the wrong address. I now considered Kiev such an odd and sinister place that I thought it possible the Rukh woman would be punished if the KGB discovered I was her guest.
The man interrogated me along the way.
“Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
“Do your parents live there?”
“Yes.”
“Are they Canadian Ukrainian?”
“No. My mother is British and my father is Canadian.”
“There are no real Canadians. Your father’s family must come from this area.” I found these questions intrusive but responded to allay the man’s suspicion that I was hiding something from him.
“No, he’s from a Loyalist family that left Connecticut after the American Revolution. I have no link at all with Ukraine.” We approached the outskirts of the city. I found the cracked concrete apartment blocks that lined the road depressing. Most of the balconies looked ready to fall off the buildings. The man began to question me again. He still did not seem to believe that I had no Ukrainian ancestry. Fortunately we arrived at the address I had given the man. I tried to pay. The man refused to take any money.
I dragged my suitcases into the dank entryway of the building where I would not be staying. It smelled of urine. I hid there for an hour. I wondered if I had crossed a line and was no longer thinking rationally. Deep down, I thought not. I peered out to make sure that the man had gone away and would not follow me. I did not see him, so I dragged my suitcases to the correct address.
The entryway of this building smelled of garbage. Otherwise the building looked identical to every other apartment block that stretched across fields as far as I could see. I was marooned beyond the subway line. The building had no elevator, so I trudged up the stairs and knocked on my host’s door. She opened it and gave me a welcoming smile that revealed a gold front tooth. Bleak though the surroundings might be, I felt incredibly grateful to have somewhere to stay.
We ate a modest meal and then prepared for bed. I could not understand where I would sleep but did not like to ask. The apartment consisted of one room only, furnished with a two-seat sofa and an armchair. There was no space for anything else. The tiny galley kitchen contained a table, barely big enough to qualify as a table, and two small, square stools. The windowless bathroom had a rough cement floor and a bath faucet that would not stop dripping, no matter how tightly I turned the tap.
When I emerged from the bathroom after brushing my teeth, the former living room had been converted into a bedroom. The sofa and armchair both folded out into beds. Later, when I needed to use the bathroom I had to hopscotch my way across the mattresses to reach the bathroom. I could not possibly inconvenience my host with an extended stay. I would need to find somewhere else to live. Too tired to worry further about accommodation, I fell into a deep, unbroken sleep for the first time since arriving in Kiev.
I was used to roaming where I pleased, but I soon realized the rules differed here. I was a prisoner in Kiev. Once again I thought of Ute and understood her need to escape. I had islands of safety: one, the Rukh office; another, the Foreign Ministry press centre. I remained convinced that Mr. C. and Mr. I. stood as allies in this struggle with that unknown force that wished to deny me accreditation and drive me from every home. I had decided that the large and imposing Mr. I. might kill me if ordered to do so but that he would do it reluctantly, and that for now he was on my side. So, when the press centre asked me to hand in my passport for a registration stamp, I did so willingly, thrilled at the prospect of a stamp that might actually enable me to live somewhere legally. However, when I tried to retrieve my passport, I could not get it back.
4
CHERNOBYL
I saw from the window of Natalia Ivanovna’s kitchen how the soft rays of evening August sun turned St. Sophia’s gold dome more golden. Hens clucked on the balcony. Natalia Ivanovna and I sipped tea from tin cups. I had met her daughter, Ira, who was a few years older than me, through a colleague. Ira took me in, along with a stray cat named kotyonok [kitty]. Natalia Ivanovna allowed us both to stay.
Still passport-less and without accreditation, I dared to hope that my circumstances would soon change. Tomorrow I would make my first trip outside Kiev. A nod and a wink from the Foreign Ministry press centre had enabled me to join a trip to Chernobyl planned by visiting Swiss scientists. I still did not know where I stood with the press centre officials. Sometimes they were strict and scary, but other times they were indulgent and helpful.
“I interviewed one of the liquidators today,” I told Natalia Ivanovna.
“Those men were heroes,” she said. I thought so too. I told her about Sergei Mertz, a middle-aged engineer who worked at the plant at the time of the accident: “He looked so normal, but when he went to the bathroom his wife listed twelve of his radiation-related illnesses. Sometimes he collapses and has to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance.”
Natalia Ivanovna winced. “Poor man,” she said. “Most of the firemen died.”
They’d been the first responders after operators at the plant carried out a failed experiment that led to fire, an explosion and the release of radioactive material into the air on a scale that surpassed Hiroshima. Even after the firemen had extinguished the blaze, material still smouldered inside the facility that housed the destroyed reactor.
“Mertz said he and his colleagues worried that molten debris might melt through the concrete floor, hit the water table and that the steam build-up would cause another explosion. We call that a China syndrome in English,” I said or at least that’s what I tried to say. I knew that not all the Russian words I used were that exact. Natalia Ivanovna looked confused. A handsome, thick-waisted no-nonsense woman, she usually told me when I made no sense but tonight said nothing, so I skipped along.
I told her that Mertz and thirteen other volunteers in a team worked around the clock for five days. They tried to enlarge a shaft. They wanted it to accommodate pipes for cooling the reactor.
“They gave us one hundred grams of alcohol for courage before we went in,” he said. “The heat was terrible.” The volunteers dressed in white lead-lined suits with military air filters.
“It was impossible to breathe in the spaces where we worked,” Mertz added. To swelter, suffocate and be irradiated, how much worse could it get? I asked Mertz whether he was forced to help. I could not imagine volunteering for such a job.