CHAPTER 15
Ukraine: so here we were. The countryside was one of low hills, but as the road fell into line alongside a lengthy stretch of water, more like a Scottish loch than a normal lake, a vista opened up to the west of open fields. The sky seemed showy, a projection rather than a reality: large irregular flint-coloured clouds against a shining grey expanse. The clouds looked as if painted upon a vast transparency that was being slid slowly from left to right along the backrail of the horizon.
We were driving to Chernobyl, Saltykov and I. Dora Norman was settled into a pleasant room in a downtown Kiev hotel room. Saltykov’s taxi was not quite the same after its collision with the deer as it had been before. It creaked and rolled awkwardly when taking corners; never a rapid machine, it appeared to have less capacity for velocity now. But it was still working.
‘The question,’ I said, ‘is what we do when we get there.’
‘There is a conspiracy to blow the facility up. We must find the bomb. Where exactly in the facility the bomb will be — that is the real question.
‘The real question,’ I countered, ‘is whether we will get there at all, in this galvanised lizard cock of a car.’
‘That is a question on nobody’s lips,’ Saltykov replied in a peevish voice. ‘That is a ridiculous and insulting question. Do not, by talking, distract the driver.’
The car creaked, and the engine continued making the sound of a man continually throwing up, and slowly, slowly, we followed the road round, and the blocky profile of Chernobyl nuclear facility rose up amongst the trees, shouldering the low hills aside and pushing its roofs towards the sky as we approached.
Though the guard at the gate was young — no more than eighteen, at a guess — he was nevertheless completely bald. It made him look, oddly, vulnerable. First of all he peered at us through the glass of his little hut. Then he stepped outside, fumbling with his hat, fitting it over his egg against the chill of the early spring air. His face looked like something drawn in felt-tip pen upon an elbow. ‘Pass?’
‘Pass,’ repeated Saltykov intently.
It occurred to me that we ought to have foreseen this eventuality. But the guard seemed disproportionately impressed by Saltykov’s response.
‘You’re with the others,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see your badges?’
His inflection was such that it took me a moment to understand that he was asking a question. ‘That’s right,’ said Saltykov, quicker on the uptake than I.
‘Go in, comrades. You want to go left at the end there,’ he stuck his arm out, ‘and park in Car Park One.’
‘Reactor One is where we’re going,’ I said, as my elderly brain caught up. ‘To join our colleagues.’
The guard stepped back and raised the barrier, and we drove through. I turned my head as we drove off, watching him scurrying back inside his little booth. Saltykov followed the road left and drove past the hangar-shaped enormity of the first reactor. ‘But we don’t want Reactor One,’ I said.
‘No. We want Reactor Four. So you said.’
‘I only know what Coyne told me.’
‘His dying words.’
‘How do we tell,’ I asked, ‘which reactor is which?’
‘Are you asking,’ he growled, as we drove past the ranks of parked cars, ‘whether the reactor buildings have large numerals painted upon them? If you are, then the answer is: no they don’t.’
‘I can see that they don’t.’
‘Then perhaps you would limit yourself to useful questions?’
‘I would ask a useful question,’ I said, sourly. ‘But I wouldn’t want to distract the driver.’
We exited the far side of the car park and drove along one-track tarmac, round a bend and between two separate huge cubes of architecture. ‘That’s One,’ I hazarded, tipping a thumb behind us, ‘so this must be Two.’ The road turned again, flanking the second reactor, and past a fumble of low buildings. We passed a second, less crowded car park. The road went through a copse of trees, and then ran alongside a pond. ‘That pond will supply cooling for the reactors,’ noted Saltykov.
‘Won’t that make it radioactive?’ I asked.
‘Everything in the world is radioactive,’ said Saltykov, with a humourless chuckle in his throat, ‘to one degree or another. You learn that when you are educated about nuclear power, as I have been. There’s no getting away from radiation.’
‘There are, I assume however, degrees.’
‘Indeed. A little radioactivity is fine. A lot is not fine.’
I peered at the pool with suspicious eyes. The water, perfectly still, looked like mahogany in the grim light. We were moving slowly enough for me to note that carp were crowding the pond. A single fin was unzipping the surface of the water.
‘Radioactive fishes,’ I said.
Then we turned again and Reactor Three filled our windshield, like a grey iceberg. We drove round it and yet another huge shed loomed into view.
‘That one, then,’ said Saltykov.
We followed the road round until it decanted us into another car park. It was almost wholly unoccupied: a few cars, but then nothing more than the white-painted sets of IIIs and Es on the ground, like a giant practising his lettering. Saltykov parked, and we got out. I rubbed life back into my stiff old legs. Saltykov was spryer than I.
‘So here we are,’ I said. ‘Reactor Four. It’s hard to believe.’
‘Things are either believable or they’re not,’ said Saltykov, pursing his lips. ‘Belief is not something that admits of degree.’
‘How true. For example, I believe,’ I said, ‘that you are the single most annoying human being on the planet. I also believe that you’re quite mad.’
‘By no means! My syndrome is a thing apart from insanity.’ He locked the driver’s door, and unlocked it. Then he locked it again, and unlocked it. Lock, unlock, lock. ‘Perfectly sane,’ I agreed.
As we walked towards the main entrance, I said, ‘It is strangely deserted.’
‘And why should it be crowded? Didn’t you hear the guard at the gate? Everybody is with our colleagues in Reactor One.’
‘Whoever our colleagues are.’
‘Whoever,’ agreed Saltykov.
‘And you, as an expert, will tell me it’s safe to leave a nuclear reactor untended like this?’
‘These things run themselves,’ said Saltykov. ‘The best thing to do is leave them alone. The last thing you want is some foolish operator tinkering with the controls.’
The reactor building itself loomed over us as we approached. The air was colder in its shadow. I felt a tingle of dread. More than a tingle: a tang. ‘It looks,’ I noted, ‘like a pastiche of an aristocratic country house. Two wings, one on either side. A main entrance. But all in concrete, and with hardly any windows. And so much bigger — it must be ten floors high. Like a country house built by giants as a satire on bourgeois wealth.’
‘It sounds,’ said Saltykov, ‘as if you are groping towards a description of the Revolution itself.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Come! Revolution is a giant enterprise. A giant construction. A satirical reworking of bourgeois life on a larger scale.’
‘Just when I think you’re some kind of idiot savant, comrade,’ I told him, ‘you surprise me with a sudden perceptiveness.’
‘I am highly intelligent,’ he said blandly.
There was nobody at the entrance; although there were two porter’s lodges immediately inside the door, one on either hand. We stepped into a capacious hallway, battleship-grey walls and linoleum underfoot. Despite the cold of the morning it was, inside, warm as a Crimean summer. There was a curious, not unpleasant odour. I couldn’t place it.