Like You'd Understand, Anyway

I left, explaining I was going to look at the site myself. I found Mikhail. He was already dark brown by that point. I was told that he was one of those selected for removal by special flight to the clinic in Moscow. His skin color had been the main criterion, since the doctors had no way at that point of measuring the dose he'd received. He was on morphine and unconscious the entire time I was there. As a boy he'd never slept enough, and all of his face's sadness emerged whenever he finally did doze. There in the hospital bed, he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from a rich tropical wood. At some point I told an orderly I'd be back and went to find Petya.

While hunting his apartment address I asked whomever I encountered if they had children. If they did I gave them potassium iodide pills and told them to have their children take them now, with a little water, just in case.

I found Petya's apartment but no Petya. A busybody neighbor with one front tooth hadn't seen him since the day before but asked many questions. By then I had to return to the meeting. The group had barely noticed I was gone. No progress had been made, though outside the building teenagers were filling sandbags with sand.

All of Them: Heroes of the Soviet Union

By late afternoon the worst of the prevaricators had acknowledged the need to prepare for evacuation. In the meantime untold numbers of workers had been sent into the heart of the radiation field to direct cooling water onto the nonexistent reactor. The helicopters had begun their dumping, and the rotors, arriving and departing, stirred up sandstorms of radioactive dust. The crews had to hover for three to five minutes directly over the reactor to drop their loads. Most managed only two trips before becoming unfit for service.

Word finally came through that Petya too had been sent to the medical center. By the time I got over there he'd been delivered to the airport for emergency transport to Moscow. When I asked how he'd gotten such a dose, no one had any idea.

At ten a.m. on Sunday the town was finally advised to shut its windows and not let its children outside. Four hours later the evacuation began.

Citizens were told to collect their papers and indispensable items, along with food for three days, and to gather at the sites posted. Some may have known they were never coming back. Most didn't even take warm clothes.

The entire town climbed onto buses and was carried away. Many getting on were already intensely radioactive. The buses were washed with decontaminant once they were far enough out of town. Eleven hundred buses: the column stretched for eighteen kilometers. It was a miserable sight. The convoy kicked up rolling billows of dust. In some places it enveloped families still waiting to be picked up, their children groping for their toys at the roadside. That night when the commission meeting was over, I went my own way. Even the streetlights were out. I felt my way along with small steps. I was in the middle of town and might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Naturally, I thought, Petya had somehow been there, on the river. Whenever the shit cart tipped over, there was Petya, underneath.

The Zero Meter Diving Team

It turned out Petya was installed on the floor below Mikhail's in Moscow's Clinic No. 6. When I asked an administrator if some sort of triage was going on, she said, “Are you a relative?” When I said I was, she said, “Then no.”

He was hooked up to two different drips. He didn't look so bad. He was his normal color, maybe a little pale. His hair was in more riot than usual.

“Boris Yakovlevich!” he said. He seemed happy to see me.

At long last he'd gotten his chance to lie down, he joked. His laziness had always been a matter of contention between us.

“Has Father been by to see me?” he asked. “I've been out of it for stretches.”

I told him I didn't know.

“Has he been to see Mikhail?” he asked.

I told him I didn't know. He asked how his brother was holding up. I told him I was going to visit Mikhail directly afterward and would report back.

“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.

“Of course I am,” I told him.

“With you sometimes it's hard to tell,” he said.

“What can I do for you?” I asked after another pause.

“I have what they call a ‘period of intestinal syndrome,’” he said glumly. “Which means I have the shits thirty times a day.” And these things in his mouth and throat, he added, which was why he couldn't eat or drink. He asked after the state of the reactor, as though he were one of the engineers. Then he explained how he'd ended up near the reactor in the first place. He described his new Pripyat apartment and said he hoped to save up for a motorcycle. Then he announced he was going to sleep.

“Get me something to read,” he said when I got up to leave. “Except I can't read. Never mind.”