Uncle Victor smiled. “You may find this hard to believe, but with my wife in Canada, I need someone to look after me.”
He looked so silly standing in front of the messy table in his house shoes that I laughed out loud.
“While I’m at the station, it would be great if you could stop by and check to see that I remembered to take out the garbage.” His nose wriggled in mock disgust. “Too often, my apartment stinks when I return.” He gazed around the room as if looking for more chores. “Also, you could check my voice machine.”
I shook my head, puzzled. A machine for voices? “Excuse me. I don’t know what that is.”
Uncle Victor started walking to the kitchen. “Come here.”
I followed him to a black box resting on the kitchen counter. “People can call my phone number and leave messages.” He punched a button, and the machine began talking. “Uncle Victor, your laundry is ready.” He picked up a pencil. “Now, where’s a notepad?”
The kitchen counter was bare. I glanced at the long table, but all I saw was a mess.
As he turned off the machine, he smiled. “Your first job is to find a notepad. Then,” he said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d jot down my messages.” He glanced at me as if to see if I was finding all this agreeable. “I’ll give you more assignments as we go along.” He paused. “If your father agrees, that is. I pay fifty grivnas a month. Is that O.K.?”
“Yes.” The money wasn’t really important to me, only to my father.
“In a few days, I leave for a shift at the station. I hope your father will have granted his permission by the time I return,” he said.
I could tell that he was about to dismiss me. “Uncle Victor, do you have any more articles like the ones you showed me?”
He eyed me appraisingly. “I do,” he said.
“Could I read them?” I asked.
“I wish everyone in the whole world would read about the accident,” he said. He turned to his ‘filing cabinet’ and began hunting through the stacks of paper.
When he wasn’t looking, I picked up a dirty sock from the table and dropped it on the floor. Uncle Victor made even me look neat.
When I got to the apartment that night, my father and mother were standing together next to the electric stove in the kitchen. Our freshly painted beige kitchen had brown linoleum floors that sparkled and broad windows that let in a lot of light. A factory-made cuckoo clock purchased in Kiev hung on the wall next to the sink. Papa liked to point out that the cuckoo and our family had changed places. “We live in a luxurious, modern apartment, and our cuckoo lives in a simple peasant’s hut with a thatched straw roof. It’s as it should be,” Papa would say.
My father’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. As was his custom after a trip to the gym, he was slugging down glass after glass of water. He always worked out like a maniac before and after his return from his two-week stint at the station. Neither Mama nor I were ever very curious about the details of his work life. It was as if we pretended that he didn’t spend two weeks of every month at the station, and his real life happened only when he was at home.
Mama stirred a big pot of something that smelled like beef. She had tied an apron over her teacher’s outfit. Since Papa was well-paid, he insisted on eating meat at every meal. Most people considered themselves lucky to have it once a day. “How was your day, Katya?” she asked.
“Good,” I mumbled. “What’s for dinner?”
“I’m trying a new recipe for varenniki,” Mama said. These large stuffed dumplings, the national dish of Ukraine, were one of Papa’s many favorite meals. “I hope it’s good.”
Papa laughed. “What’s not to like about beef, fried potatoes and onion?”
I had finished a cheese sandwich hours ago but felt as if I hadn’t eaten all day. “When’s it going to be ready?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Mama said.
Papa walked over to the kitchen counter. “Come see,” he said. “A friend from the station gave it to me.” He unfurled a poster of a cartoon-like man who grinned up at us. By his camouflage uniform, gas mask and goggles, I knew the man was a liquidator.
As if I couldn’t read, my father recited the poster caption out loud: “We understand what the homeland requires of us and we will do it. Therein lies the heroism of our Soviet man.”[24]
“Yes, my dear,” my mother said. “You are a hero.” She patted my father on his broad back.
Papa beamed. I could see the outlines of his muscles straining his dark blue T-shirt.
From the little I had gathered about my father’s job, I did know that for someone earning his living in the Zone, Papa was lucky. Unlike some, he wasn’t required to handle any highly contaminated materials. Instead, his job consisted of just driving dignitaries around the Dead Zone. Still his frequent exposure to the contamination meant the government considered him a liquidator. I didn’t like thinking about this classification. Uncle Victor’s journals claimed that many of the liquidators had already died from illnesses caused by radiation. But as if something I read in a book couldn’t have anything to do with me or my family, I brushed away this fact. “May I have the poster?” I asked him.
“Why?” he asked. He sounded suspicious.
“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t lying. I had no idea why I wanted it.
Papa considered my request. “It will do you good,” he finally decided.
Alert to a truce between Papa and me, Mama called happily, “Wash up. I think this is going to be the best varenniki ever.”
I went into my room and found a shoe with a hard heel in the pile in my closet. I collected a few tacks from my desk. As I pounded them into the wall, I began thinking about the article that I had just finished reading at Uncle Victor’s.
At 1:23:58 a.m., the explosions began. The initial blast tore off the reactor’s roof and cast aside the biological shield as if these tons of steel and concrete weighed nothing at all. The blast broke apart the graphite and fuel with the force of about thirty to forty tons of TNT, throwing the most deadly debris outside the reactor.
The floor of the building housing Reactor Number Four started shaking. The engineers heard loud banging noises. The upper biological shield covering the reactor came to life, rocking and twisting. It was almost as if a four-story building made of concrete and steel started dancing a jig.[25]
About a minute later, at 1:25 a.m., as the yellow and white flames leapt up to 600 feet in the air, the alarm sounded at the fire station. Boris’s unit responded.
Fiery sparks showered the sky and an unearthly glow poured up into the night—a shaft of radiation from the reactor core.[26] Vasyl’s fire. How hard I had tried not to believe him when he said our world would change. How much it had.
I stepped back from the wall and reexamined the tough-looking liquidator. I decided that I liked the new poster; it reminded me of the stupidity of the top officials at the station. For three whole days, the government had tried to keep the accident a secret from the world. For several weeks, the managers still officially clung to the delusion that the disaster was only a ‘trifling incident, with no lasting damage.’
Because of their trifling incident, my friend, Boris, had died. My old cottage was buried under mounds and mounds of earth. Not only could I never return home, I had to live next to the largest nuclear waste dump in the world. And the worst might not be over. Uncle Victor had told me, “It’s not likely. But the damaged reactor could explode again at any time without warning.”
I pounded the final tack in the wall so hard that the glass panes in the window shook.
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