Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Our mother died of the flu when I was eleven. Petya lost his only protector and grew more disheveled and strange and full of difference. Mikhail for a full year carried himself as though he'd been petrified by a loud noise. Later we joked that she'd concocted the flu to get away, and that she was off on a beach in the Black Sea. But every night we peeped at one another across the dark floor between our beds, vacant and alone.

In the mornings I took to cupping Mikhail's fist with my palms when he was thumb-sucking, as though I were praying. It brought us nose to nose and made me shudder with an enraged tenderness. Petya sucked his thumb as well, interested.

That Warm Night in April

What is there to say about the power station, or the river on which it sits? The Pripyat just a few kilometers downstream drains into the Dnieper, having snaked through land as level as a soccer pitch with a current the color of tea from the peat bogs nearby. In the deeper parts, it's cold year round. For long stretches it dips and loops around stands of young pines.

Mikhail was pleased with the area when he settled there. He was a young tyro, the coming thing, at twenty-eight a senior turbine engineer. There were three secondary schools, a young people's club, festive covered markets, a two-screen cinema, and a Children's World department store. Plenty of good walking trails and fishing. Petya followed him. Petya usually followed him from assignment to assignment, getting odd jobs, getting drunk, getting thrown in jail, getting bailed out of trouble by his brother. Or half brother.

“Why doesn't he ever follow you?” Mikhail asked me the night Petya showed up on his doorstep yet again. Mikhail didn't often call. It was a bad connection that sounded like wasps in the telephone line. Petya was already asleep in the dining room. He'd walked the last twenty versts after having hitched a ride on a cement truck.

They found him a little apartment in town and a job on the construction site for the spent fuel depository. As for a residence permit: for that, Mikhail told me on the phone, they'd rely on their big-shot brother.

I was ready to help out. We both treated Petya as though he had to be taught to swallow. “Let me do that,” we'd tell him, before he'd even commenced what he was going to attempt. Whatever went wrong in our lives, we'd think they still weren't as fucked-up as Petya's.

Mikhail's shift came on duty at midnight, an hour and twenty-five minutes before the explosion. Most of the shift members did not survive until morning.

Petya, I was told later, was fishing that night with another layabout, a friend. They'd chosen a little sandbar near the feeder channel across from the turbine hall, where the water released from the heat exchangers into the cooling-pond was twenty degrees warmer. In spring it filled with hatchlings. There was no moon and it was balmy for April, and starry above the black shapes of the cooling towers.

Earthenware Pots

As chief engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, I was a mongrel: half technocrat, half bureaucrat. We knew there were problems in both design and operating procedures, but what industry didn't have problems? Our method was to get rid of them by keeping silent. Nepotism ruled the day. “Fat lot of good it's done me,” Mikhail often joked. If you tried to bring a claim against someone for incompetence or negligence, his allies hectored you, all indignation on his behalf. Everyone ended up shouting, no one got to the bottom of the problem, and you became a saboteur: someone seeking to undermine the achievement of the quotas.

People said I owed my position to my father, and Mikhail owed his position to me. (“More than they know,” he said grimly, when I told him that.) At various congresses, I ran my concerns by my father. In response he gave me that look Mikhail called the Dick Shriveler. “Why's your dick big around him in the first place?” Petya once asked when he'd overheard us.

We all lived under the doctrine of ubiquitous success. Negative information was reserved for the most senior leaders, with censored versions available for those lower down. Nothing instructive about precautions or emergency procedures could be organized, since such initiatives undermined the official position concerning the complete safety of the nuclear industry. For thirty years, accidents went unreported, so the lessons derived from these accidents remained with those who'd experienced them. It was as if no accidents had occurred.