A man wearing pants with dirt on the knees stopped Uncle Victor. “I’ll buy the blueberries. For my boss.” He gave a hearty laugh.
As Uncle Victor hurried towards the street, he was muttering to himself. “What ignorance! They think the contamination is funny. They don’t realize…”
I tugged on his arm. “Uncle Victor,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He turned his penetrating black eyes on me. I caught sight of a rainbow in the lines of his bifocals.
“Katya!” He scooped me into his arms and hugged me. “How old are you now?”
“Almost fifteen,” I answered. “What are you doing?”
“I am still working for an international health organization. We’re investigating the disaster,” Uncle Victor said. “My wife stayed in Canada, but I’ll be here for almost a year.”
“Why haven’t you stopped by my house?” I asked.
His gaze dropped to the sidewalk. “I did. Your father and I don’t agree on things anymore.”
The pause was becoming uncomfortable. “What was wrong with those blueberries?”
“I just returned from the Dead Zone. I happened to see a farmer sitting in the back of a truck with some crates marked with black X’s. When I spotted the same crates at the market, I became convinced that the blueberries were grown in the Zone; perhaps in an illicit greenhouse there.” He gazed fondly at me. “That’s my Katya. When you were young, you were always asking questions.”
“I have lots of questions,” I admitted.
Uncle Victor nodded. “I can imagine.” He paused for a moment as if considering something.
“My apartment is around the corner. I have some information that is not available here in the Ukraine. You may be interested.”
Without waiting to see if I was following, Uncle Victor hurried off, taking big strides, and I had to race to keep up. His khaki trench coat blew in the breeze. I noticed that its hem was torn and flapped above his unpolished boots.
When we got to the front door of his modest apartment, he said, “You can stay here. I’ll be right back.” He let himself into the apartment.
I waited impatiently, worrying about whether I had made the right choice. Should I have tried to track Vasyl instead of Uncle Victor?
A few minutes later, he returned, holding what looked like a stack of papers. He pressed them into my arms. “Please bring these journals back. A friend of mine translated them. I work at the station two weeks on and two weeks off, but if you catch me, I’ll buy you a soda and try to answer your questions.” Uncle Victor took a watch out of his pocket and looked at the time. “Now I have to go.” His hand rested on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” I said.
When I returned home, our apartment was empty. I passed through our large front room which served as a living room, small kitchen and breakfast area. The appliances, the carpet, the furniture, and the television were all new. Papa told me every day, “Katya, you should feel grateful.” We did have so much more than we ever had in Yanov, and yet…
I closed my bedroom door and flopped down on the green blanket covering my bed. It was the third green one that my mother had knitted for me. In another life, Vasyl had stolen the first from under the boulder, and as far as I knew, the second still covered my bed in my cottage buried under thousands of pounds of earth.
The first journal article was entitled Alas, Chernobyl. As I began it, I experienced the curious sensation that I should have read this material a long time ago. After all, every word pertained to me—to my lost home. I wasn’t a good student anymore. If a homework assignment had contained all these scientific terms, I would have lost interest after the first paragraph. But tonight, I finished the first chapter in no time and eagerly studied a radiation map, illustrating the fallout from the explosion.
The map used shades of color to show increasing levels of radioactivity, progressing from green to yellow to orange and onto darker shades of red. The worst patches from the explosion were deep brown and looked like lopsided pants legs. One leg was long and thin. It was about a mile wide and reached six miles to the west of the station before gradually fading to lighter colors for a full sixty miles. The other leg was a short, wider lobe that extended northwest over the Pripyat River. Between them, Pripyat was colored a lighter shade, but still the red that indicated serious contamination. Tiny villages like Yanov didn’t appear on the map.[21]
My mother stuck her head in and said, “Time for dinner.”
“Is Papa here?” I asked.
“He’s leaving for the station tomorrow, so guess where he is?” Mama said.
Papa was at the gym. “I’m not hungry,” I told her.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Mama, who never wanted a fight, shut my door.
I read much of the night. Of course, I already knew the outlines of the story of the evacuation, but the journal article filled in the details.
On April 27, the nearly 46,000 residents were evacuated from Pripyat. On May 2, the authorities decided to expand the evacuation orders and remove all residents within a thirty-kilometer (eighteen mile) radius around the station. This area became known as the Dead Zone. Over 135,000 people ended up being evacuated. Authorities flattened and buried seventy villages.[22]
By myself, I had figured out that the sinister black plume in the sky was radioactive. But now I learned that fifty tons of uranium fuel had vaporized in the explosion and were blasted into the atmosphere. Seventy tons of uranium and 900 tons of highly radioactive graphite exploded onto the ground around the reactor. The eight hundred tons of graphite that remained in the reactor core caught fire and created a radioactive inferno. It burned for ten days and discharged a continuous stream of radionuclides. These radionuclides eventually traveled to every country in the Northern hemisphere, polluting lakes in Japan, hill farms in northern Wales, and reindeer herds in Norway.
Before that night, I had been suspicious of the station. Now, living just forty miles away, I was certain that I had a right to be afraid. It was clear that Papa and the government had both lied to me. They told me that the reactor was safe. The Chernobyl accident was not just the worst accident in the history of the nuclear power industry; it was the greatest man-made disaster in all of history. And Alas, Chernobyl said that it could happen again.
I was about to close the journal when I spotted the word ‘fire-fighters.’ My eyes burning from exhaustion, I skimmed the section until I came to a sentence that both puzzled and troubled me. I reread the line: “Of course, since water doesn’t extinguish a nuclear fire, the efforts of the firefighters were in vain.”
So Boris had died for nothing! I couldn’t believe it.
I rubbed my eyes and reread the sentence a third time, but its import stayed the same. Shocked and saddened, I threw the book on the floor. It made a satisfying loud thud. I turned off my bedside light and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Lying in the dark, I gripped the peanut-shaped crystal hanging around my neck.
Help us, heal us, I begged Granny Vera’s God, that kindly father figure who cared about us all. Perhaps he wasn’t just a superstition. But when I remembered the black plume that had appeared in the sky that day, the little rock felt puny in my fingers. My prayer seemed pointless against that devil’s tail.
This night, when a fitful sleep finally rescued me from the horrors of the truth, I dreamed of Boris. He was wearing his firefighting uniform: Black pants. Black coat. Helmet. I knew it was Boris, although I never saw the fireman’s face. He was sitting on top of my boulder facing the stream. “I’ll go to him,” I thought happily, but when I tried to reach him, I found the air was sticky like glue. As hard as I pushed, it was impossible. I couldn’t work my way over to him.