“Don’t mention that man’s name,” Papa snapped. “I’ve heard that his group is trying to close the station. The station is our livelihood.”
With my eyes closed, I dragged my finger along the cardboard surface. The globe stopped spinning. When I peeked, I saw that my finger had stopped on a patch of blue, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I thrust the globe at my father.
“Here, Papa. Here’s where I want to live.”
PART III
SLAVUTICH, 1990
Chapter Twenty
THE NAME SLAVUTICH MEANS GLORY in Russian, and the nation’s best builders were tapped to construct this model city. Crews from eight Soviet Republics worked overtime to complete high-rise office buildings and concrete-block apartment houses in the styles of their homelands. When the town was finished in 1987, almost 25,000 people moved there. Virtually every adult resident worked at the station.
It was February, a few months before my fifteenth birthday. We had been living in Slavutich for almost two years.
Although Slavutich was surrounded by woods and streams, I had never visited them. When I asked Papa to take me hunting or fishing, he always made up an excuse. He muttered he had seen too many dead animals. As a consequence, my memories of my childhood woods had grown dim. Now that I was almost fifteen, my early belief in magic embarrassed me. I had decided that Vasyl had been some kind of horrible nightmare. He was the result of birthday excitement and too much sugar.
In fact, my transition from villager to townsperson was nearly complete. When I approached my home, I no longer expected to smell manure and grass as I had when I was younger. I didn’t listen for a dog to bark out a welcome. I didn’t long to feel the cooling shade of an old oak tree.
Just like everything else in our new city, Slavutich Apartments was made out of quickly poured concrete. Our home was a standard two-bedroom unit. The parking lot was devoid of trees and stunk of auto exhaust. We had no garden. “No Pets Allowed,” the sign in front read.
My bedroom was not a granny or a teen room, just a nondescript, modern space. I had a brand-new desk, an oak bureau and a new bed fitted with soft sheets, all paid for by my father’s wages at the station. Although I could have covered my walls in posters, I had hung only one, the poster of the Yava that Boris had given me.
Like my bedroom, the shiny walls of our living room were blank, too. My parents hadn’t snapped any photographs to replace the ones that had been buried. Perhaps to them as well, our new lives in Slavutich felt too unreal to be documented.
Papa was still big and strong, although he had a touch of gray in his hair. Crow’s feet fanned out from his eyes. While he had kept his job as driver for the station, Mama had begun a new career as a teacher’s aide. Her tan had faded, and her latest glasses were almost as thick as Aunt Olga’s. Of my two parents, I would have to say that Mama had aged the most.
Angelika Galkina, Sergei Rudko, and Lyudmila Pikalova and I were finishing our freshman year at Slavutich High School #1. Angelika was now the best student in our entire grade, and I certainly didn’t care enough to challenge her for the position. Sergei was almost six feet tall and a soccer star, and every girl in the entire school liked him. In Kiev, I had spent two years hiding from my fellow classmates. Now, even though I had grown tall, almost 5’10”, and had thick, shiny brown hair and unusual eyes that Mama said were the color of new leaves, no one at school seemed to even see me. I passed through my classes and the halls, unnoticed and unengaged.
My only friend was Lyudmila Pikalova. While our shared history kept Angelika and me apart, Lyudmila and I enjoyed listening to each other reminisce about Yanov. Lyudmila humored me by hunting through magazines with me for a shade of blue, the same color as the shutters on my cottage. We liked to argue about whether we had been studying math or science when the policeman appeared in our doorway that morning shortly after the explosion. I remembered a newly drawn picture of the solar system on the blackboard; she claimed we were dividing fractions. We enjoyed sharing stories about our old pets. Lyudmila had had a mutt named Leo who ate mushrooms.
Lyudmila liked giving me fashion tips, such as “Wear short skirts. White nail polish looks best.” I never followed her advice. “Why should I care about my appearance?” I asked her. “So you can get a boyfriend, Katya,” Lyudmila would say.
I never responded seriously to her quips, but I thought to myself, why would I want a boyfriend? Some days, I felt like boys had destroyed my world.
This particular noon, as always, I sat by myself in the large indoor cafeteria, surrounded by tables of laughing and talking kids. Many of them were eating food purchased from the school’s kitchen, sausage and sauerkraut or corned beef and slaw, but like me, most were enjoying home-made sandwiches. We were all dressed in the uniform of Slavutich High. The girls had on brown or navy dresses with black aprons. The boys wore their dark suits.
Lyudmila plopped down next to me. Because I had known Lyudmila as a kid, I understood that her sex appeal was manufactured. Back in Nina Ivanovna’s class, she didn’t swing her hips when she walked. She didn’t purse her lips at the end of her sentences. Her voice wasn’t low and husky. In fact, as a young girl, she rarely said anything at all. Now, she acted the part of a French movie star.
Lyudmila glanced at me to make sure that I was watching her. She slipped a photo out of her pocket and set it down on the table in front of me. I felt as if she were issuing a challenge.
“What’s this?” I said.
“A freak of nature,” Lyudmila said with the air of an expert.
I picked up the photo. At first, I thought it was a giant spider, but on closer examination, I found that it was an animal. A colt, but with eight legs.[20] No longer hungry, I abandoned my cheese sandwich.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“The radiation is causing birth defects,” Lyudmila said quietly.
I remembered the girl in Kiev who had asked me whether I could ever have children. Involuntarily, my hands touched my stomach.
“But the Dead Zone is clean now,” I protested. Although the authorities admitted that the area would be uninhabitable for thousands of years, they had buried the most contaminated villages and forests, removed topsoil, and resurfaced roads so that people like my father could work there safely.
Lyudmila laughed. “Katya, you’re so gullible. Lots of animals and people are sick.”
I rushed to defend my father’s position. “But Papa said…”
“Your father works for the station,” Lyudmila interrupted. “Of course he’s going to say that everything’s perfect.”
Although I had been raised to trust my father absolutely, I couldn’t clamp down and control my thoughts with the self-discipline he encouraged. Hadn’t both Angelika Galkina’s father and Boris Boiko died of radiation sickness? Even my own father had been sick after the accident. It was four years ago, but I still remembered the people standing in line at the clinic in Kiev. In my mind’s eye, I could still see the woman at the clinic who had visually scolded me for staring at her. My father had mocked her. He had claimed that she only thought she was sick.
I’d taken a gymnastics class at school in Kiev, and I would always remember my first back bend. With my head upside down, my hair streamed to the floor. Suddenly, the blood rushed to my head, and the gym, the bleachers, and the students all looked different.