Sitting at the lunchroom table with Lyudmila, I felt my mind perform a trick that it had never attempted before. In a mental back bend, I reached my own conclusion.
Perhaps the woman with the sallow face standing in line wasn’t imagining she was sick; perhaps she truly was sick from the radiation.
“What’s wrong?” Lyudmila asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. If Papa had been mistaken about that woman, what about all the other things he had told me?
I felt dizzy as if I had stood up too suddenly from a back bend.
“Come with me to my aunt’s,” Lyudmila said. “I got this photo from her. She has lots of information.” I had heard about Lyudmila’s aunt before. She had moved to Slavutich from Kiev a few months ago, and Lyudmila proudly described her as crazy, in a good way.
“When?” I asked.
Lyudmila’s fuchsia lipstick spread into a grin. “After school today.”
Margarita Pikalova, Lyudmila’s aunt, kept an apartment on top of Café Sunflower where Lyudmila and her mother worked. That afternoon after school, Lyudmila and I began climbing up a windowless stairwell that wound its way upwards. On the third floor, the stairs stopped and picked up again in a corner. Although this last flight of stairs was narrower and darker, we had no problem finding the way because the steps shimmered. Trying to identify this unusual glow, I remembered the snails that I used to watch as I sat by my boulder. The stairs sparkled as if a large snail had preceded us and deposited its shiny slime.
The stairs dead-ended into one door. It was small and gray.
Lyudmila knocked. “Margarita Pikalova.”
A woman flung open the door. “Hello. Hello.”
When I ducked inside under the low door frame, I realized immediately that I didn’t know anyone else who looked like Lyudmila’s aunt. She was a big, fleshy woman, a common type in Slavutich, but she was dressed as if she were a young beauty. Most of the older women I knew wore their hair short or in a bun. Margarita Pikalova’s stringy hair fell loose past her shoulders. Unlike Mama’s dark sensible skirts, hers were purple and flowing. A string of crystals hung around her wrinkled neck.
“Welcome to my crystal palace,” Margarita Pikalova said. Her arms expanded as if to embrace the whole world. “Who’s your friend, Lyudmila?”
“This is Katya Dubko.”
After our exchange of greetings, my gaze turned to her living room. Crystals of all sizes and shapes hung on every available wall, and separated and spread the daylight flowing in from the windows throughout the otherwise ordinary apartment. Even the ceiling was unexpected. Although the green and the pink bands had smeared, an artist had painted an impressive rainbow over the breakfast table.
The way the light filled the room reminded me of my stream. The sunlight and rocks had broken down the clear water into bits of colors similar to those gleaming around me. I stood for a moment enjoying my memories of my forest stream. It had been a long time since I remembered the way the water looked when it had tumbled over the rocks on a sunny day. Too long.
Margarita seemed to notice and approve of my gaze. “I’m so proud,” she said, gesturing at the crystals, “to be healing our damaged land.”
Margarita described her business, Crystal Creations. “I sell three lengths of necklaces with five different auras. The auras promote healing, happiness, wealth, spirituality, and love. Upon receipt of the crystals from a supplier in the U.S., I bless each in a mysterious process and designate its aura.” These ceremonies took place at night after Lyudmila and I had gone home. Following the blessings, the rocks took on light hues: health was green; happiness, violet; wealth, blue; spirituality, yellow; and love, red. The gradations in shade were so slight as to be almost imperceptible.
“Auntie,” Lyudmila’s tone was wheedling. “Katya wants a job.”
Again, Lyudmila was arranging my life without consulting me, but I immediately liked her idea. It was time for me to get a job. I hated asking Papa for money. He never complied without grumbling.
Margarita gestured toward the packages of crystals piled on her breakfast room table. “Katya, you can be my assistant in this noble venture.”
I wasn’t sure about her theories or what she was offering. But I wanted to learn more about the birth defects, see more pictures like the one of the colt. “O.K.,” I agreed.
Margarita slipped a crystal tied on a green ribbon around my neck. It bumped against the silver chain that Papa had given me.
“What’s this for?”
“To guard against radiation. It’s your first week’s pay in advance,” Margarita said. She clapped her hands. “Now, girls, don’t just stand there. We need to get busy.”
“Katya, you can help me,” Lyudmila called from the kitchen counter. It was piled high with order forms, envelopes, plastic baggies, ribbons and crystals of all shapes, sizes and colors.
“Katya, the first thing you must understand is this: my little apartment in Slavutich is doing more to keep us safe than the entire Soviet military industrial complex,” Margarita began.
I sat down eagerly next to Lyudmila. I so wanted to believe.
Two months later, I was still stringing crystal necklaces at Margarita’s. That was long enough for me to earn several prize crystals as wages and to discover that my employer knew very little about the effects of radiation. One afternoon, I had finished work and was walking down the stairs of Margarita’s apartment when I saw a boy’s blond head, glowing in the dark like a light. At that moment, I felt none of the shyness that had kept me quiet for so many years, and I called out: “Vasyl!”
He turned then and showed me his profile. In the dark stairwell, I shouldn’t have been able to see his eye color, but I could. His eye was bluer than blue; as blue as the sky on the day of the explosion. And it was round and glittered like a marble.
“Wait!” I shouted. But Vasyl passed through the door. This time, he was dressed in brown pants and an ordinary soft-brown shirt. When I stuck my head out, I saw that he had been swallowed up by the crowd.
Trying to reach him, I pushed through the throng of people with grocery bags returning from the market. I spotted him ahead of me. “Vasyl, wait. Wait,” I called. He was dodging into the market.
It was a small market with booths of brightly colored vegetables and fruits and a single bread vendor. A rickety fence separated the booths from the adjacent parking lot.
Vasyl had stepped behind a vegetable vendor’s stall. A woman with a careworn face and a dark shawl covering her head was selling a customer a string of beets. She didn’t seem to notice Vasyl as he brushed past her, heading towards the fence behind.
I was running blindly towards him, not looking where I was going. I had just seen Vasyl lift up a fence plank and slip through it when I bumped into a man bending down over a tub of luscious-looking blueberries. I started trying to excuse myself and get around him when he lifted his head. It was Victor Kaletnik.
Not only did I tower above him now, but he wore glasses. I was so surprised to see him I just watched him, not saying anything.
Oblivious to the fact that I had just bumped into him, he directed his attention at the vendor. “I saw a local farmer unload these blueberries,” he said quietly. “They’re not safe.”
“What else is there to eat?” the vendor asked, before shrugging his big shoulders and turning away.
“Don’t buy the blueberries!” Uncle Victor shouted to all the surprised shoppers.
I cast one more glance in Vasyl’s direction. But the plank was in place; the fence looked solid again, and Vasyl was gone. Why had he come back now? I needed to know, but Uncle Victor was leaving. I made a split-second decision and began following the man I knew was real.