Chapter Fifteen
ALTHOUGH WE HAD LIVED IN THE APARTMENT for several months, I hadn’t gotten used to the unusual colors of Kiev’s many buildings: Lime, aqua, and tangerine. The violet facade of the store on the corner still stunned me with its muted beauty.
I was by myself on my walk home from school but was surrounded by pedestrians and groups of students as well as clusters of schoolgirls like me, all wearing brown or navy dresses with black aprons and red ties around the necks.
In Kiev, I had quickly learned that the features—hooked noses, puffy bangs, knobby elbows—I had believed were unique to the people in my village were found everywhere. Once, I had seen a man with his face hidden by a newspaper he was holding.
The hands were familiar. Their thick fingers looked exactly like Boris’. I grew excited thinking that the adults were wrong. Boris was alive, reading a newspaper at a sidewalk café in Kiev. But as I joyfully approached, the man set the newspaper down on the table. The man’s lined face—he was at least forty years old—made my heart sink.
Another time on a crowded street, I was walking behind a set of blonde pigtails that I recognized as Angelika’s. But when the girl stepped onto a bus, I found that she was much younger than Angelika and really looked nothing like her. Having been tricked so often in the past, I was no longer certain when I saw familiar features.
Now, the boy walking in front of me had white-blond hair the color of Vasyl’s. He was the right size. I didn’t understand what Vasyl would be doing in a big city like Kiev, but I didn’t understand what I was doing here either. With the sun beaming down on us, he stopped to take a drink from a water bottle he carried in his pocket. I was able to draw so near that I could see the black roots of his dyed hair and the freckles on his brown weathered skin.
Why, he looks nothing like Vasyl, I realized in disappointment.
“Hey, you.”
I understood someone was calling to me. Over my shoulder, I saw a group of older girls following me. I turned to face them. They looked to be five or six inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than I was, so they were probably in the seventh or eighth grade.
The biggest one stepped out from the group. This girl had a pillow of fat around her stomach and folds of thick skin on her neck, making it easy for me to imagine the overweight factory worker that she would become.
“You’re from there,” she said, a sneer slashing across her rough, red cheeks.
I didn’t have to guess how she knew. My cropped hair was still much shorter than current fashions for young girls. If I happened to glance in a mirror or catch a glimpse of myself in a store window, I saw a stranger. I felt like one, too. When I’d gotten off the bus in Kiev, I’d become different, a Chernobyl person—someone whom everybody was curious about but no one wanted to befriend. And I was one of the lucky ones. At least I was alive. Boris was dead.
“Was it scary?” another girl asked. She had uneven dimples and blonde hair that turned up in perfect waves on her shoulders.
I shook my head.
“What did you see?” her friend who was eating a green apple asked. She was tall and skinny with a crooked nose that looked like it had been broken.
“I was asleep,” I answered shortly, hoping the girls would go away. When the foursome continued staring at me as if I were a zoo animal, I added, “Just a plume in the sky.”
“Did you smell the smoke?” the girl with the blonde hair asked.
Before I could answer, the heavyset girl turned her malicious gaze on me. “Can you have children?”[16]
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She pursed her lips. “Your insides are probably all messed up.”
My stomach felt like I had swallowed a tub of ice. When I had asked Papa why his skin wasn’t burned by the radiation, he said, “Radiation penetrates your skin and burns your insides. One victim got blisters on his heart.” Papa’s remark lent the girl’s claim a frightening plausibility. I turned away and started hurrying towards my apartment complex.
“Hey,” the one eating the apple said. “Don’t go. We want to talk to you.”
“I have to go,” I stuttered.
The girls caught up and walked alongside me. I wondered whether I should start running.
“Look,” the heavyset girl pointed at me.
“Shiny’s angry.” “Shiny’s angry,” the other girls started reciting in a singsong voice.
“Shiny head. Shiny nose. She comes from that place, Where nobody goes,” the apple girl chanted. It sounded like any jump rope chant that Angelika and I would have sung in the school yard in Pripyat, but it was all wrong.
The girls all started laughing.
“If you don’t leave me alone…” I searched for the most terrible threat that I could dream up and found myself thinking of Vasyl. I realized that although I didn’t want it, he had given me power. The worst fire that the world had ever known was my fault. I didn’t know exactly how to use that power, until I remembered why the girls had noticed me in the first place: I had ugly hair. I turned and faced them.
“I’ll rub my head against you and make your hair fall out!” I shouted.
To my amazement, the girls screamed and took a few steps backwards. The girl with the green apple threw it at me, but it landed harmlessly and rolled in the gutter. When I didn’t back down, they scurried away, laughing and shouting in fear and excitement.
For the next five or six blocks, I pretended I was no longer in Kiev. I was on my way home from school in Pripyat. Instead of concrete, the streets were dirt. And instead of the colorful buildings looming up beside me, tall trees lined the rough streets. I heard Noisy bark as I walked up to our cottage. When I entered my room, I saw my divan, covered in the bright colors of spring. I felt such relief as I sat down on it. I told myself: Those girls can’t get inside my cottage. I’ll be safe.
Chapter Sixteen
AFTER A VERY COLD, LONG WINTER, summer arrived. It has been one whole year since we had moved to Kiev, and the trees had turned green again. When I entered our apartment after school, I found Mama talking to Papa on the phone. While I eagerly waited for my turn, I looked out the window at the bustling street below.
We were still far from finding a permanent home or leading a normal life. For one thing, Papa and Uncle Alexander remained absent, making only infrequent visits.
Yuri ran through the living room. He was going to be a big boy. Although we had recently purchased his gray vest at the mall, it was already tight across the chest.
On weekends, my mother and Aunt Olga took us shopping to try to cheer us up. My mother and aunt liked to brag about how their husbands’ pay was unbelievably good. I looked down at my own new blue leather shoes. And I thought about the expensive winter clothes I had hanging in my closet and stuffed into my drawers. A blue wool coat. A dark scarf. Warm wooly gloves. Thick socks. We had all bought department store clothes in the latest fashions to replace the mostly homemade ones we had left behind in Yanov.
My hair had grown out, more brown than red. But now that it was shoulder-length hair again, I was convinced that my unhappiness showed in some other more subtle way, because I still didn’t have any friends. Although these days I looked like the other students at my school, I felt so different inside. I sensed that my classmates all had happy childhoods and that none of their birthdays were tragic memories. Like a lily that died in winter but could bloom many seasons later, I was dormant, waiting and wondering if I would ever have a new life.