Morning rain fell on the Chernobyl Yacht Club, a gap-toothed dock on the Pripyat River. Planks had dropped through, leaving a slippery checkerboard for Arkady and Vanko to cross with the aluminum rowboat that Arkady was renting for the day from Vanko. Vanko had offered for an extra bottle of vodka to come along and point out this place or that to fish, but Arkady had no intention of fishing. He had borrowed a rod and reel for form's sake only.
Vanko said, "That's all you've got? No bait?"
"No bait."
"A light rain like this can be good fishing."
Arkady changed the subject. "There really used to be a yacht club here?"
"Sailboats. They sailed away after the accident. Now they're all sold to rich people on the Black Sea." The idea seemed to delight Vanko.
Vapors drifted around a fleet of commercial and excursion boats scuttled or run aground, rusting from white to red. An explosion seemed to have lifted ferries, dredgers and scows, coal barges and river freighters out of the water and set them haphazardly along the river's edge. The dock's end was guarded by a padlocked gate and signs that read high radiation! and no swimming and no diving. Taken together, the signs were, it seemed to Arkady, redundant.
"Eva lives up there in a cabin." Vanko pointed across the bridge toward a brick apartment block. "Way back. You'd never find it."
"I'll take your word for it."
Vanko had a key for the boat's padlock and helped Arkady portage the boat over a floodgate and bridge to the north arm of the river. Arkady had noticed before that Vanko, with his stolid manner and calflike fringe of hair, seemed to have keys to everything, as if he were the town custodian. "Chornobyl was a busy port once. A lot of business went up and down the river when we had Jews."
Arkady thought that conversations with Vanko sometimes skipped a groove. "So you haven't had Jews here since the war? Since the Germans?"
They scrambled down to the water. Vanko slid the rowboat in and gripped it by the stern. "Something like that."
As Arkady got in with the oars, he gave a last glance at the posted warnings. "How radioactive is the river?"
Vanko shrugged. "Water accumulates radiation a thousand times more than soil."
"Oh."
"But it settles to the bottom."
"Ah."
"So avoid the shellfish." Vanko still held the boat. "That reminds me. You're invited to the old folks' tonight for dinner. Remember Roman and Maria from the village?"
"Yes." The old woman with the bright blue eyes and the old man with the cow.
"Can you come?"
"Of course." Dinner in a black village. Who could pass that up?
Vanko was pleased. He gave a push. Arkady slipped the oars into the oarlocks and pulled a first long stroke, then another, and the boat eased into the sluggish current of the Pripyat.
He was here because the Plumber had kept his promise and called in the morning with instructions: Arkady was to come alone in a rowboat to the middle of the cooling pond behind the Chernobyl power plant and bring the money.
Arkady's camos and cap were reasonably water-resistant, and as he settled into even strokes, he soon had the rowboat clear of shipwrecks and decaying piers. He dipped his hand in. The water was glassy, brown from peat bogs far upstream and dimpled with light rain. The land ahead was low-lying, riddled by the myriad channels of an ancient river and softened by pines and willows. It was four kilometers against the current from the yacht-club dock to even reach the cooling pond. Arkady checked his watch. He had two hours to cover the full distance, and if he was a little late, he figured the Plumber would probably wait for a hundred dollars.
Arkady didn't have the money, but he couldn't miss the chance to make contact. In fact, he thought his lack of money might be his safe passage out if the Plumber's only interest was robbery.
Mist steamed from the riverbanks, snagged on birches, drifted free. Frogs plopped for cover. Arkady found that the discipline of rowing led to a trancelike state that left whirlpools of oar strokes behind. A swan cruised by, a white apparition that deigned to turn its head in Arkady's direction. There were, as Vanko might have said, worse ways to spend a day.
Sometimes the river silted and broadened, sometimes narrowed to a tunnel of trees, and much of the time Arkady wondered what he was doing. He wasn't in Moscow, he wasn't even in Russia. He was in a land where Russians were not missed. Where a dead Russian was kept for weeks on ice. Where a black village was a perfect place for dinner.
An hour later, Arkady had fallen into such a rhythm that it took him a moment to react to a crowd of radiation signs on a sandy beach. His target. He gathered speed, drove the boat onto the beach and jumped out, dragging the boat over the sand and up to the crown of a causeway that separated the river from the man-made reservoir of the cooling pond. The pond was twelve kilometers long and three wide; it took a lot of water to cool four nuclear reactors. When the plant had been active-when Chernobyl had four reactors online and two more under construction-water had constantly circulated from the pond, around the power plants in a grid of channels and out a discharge main back to the pond. Now it was a block of granite-black water wreathed in fog.
A causeway road was blocked by a chain-link fence, bent on one side as if to say, "Come this way." Saplings had uprooted the cement slabs that were the walls of the pond; at one point a red shirt tied to a tree marked where slabs had shifted and, in their disrepair, become stairs down to the water. Arkady checked his meter, which ticked with increasing interest; then he lowered the rowboat onto the surface and pushed off as he stepped in.
In fair weather, the cooling pond might have been a clever rendezvous. With binoculars, the Plumber could have made sure Arkady was alone, in a rowboat and far from help. No doubt the Plumber would have the advantage of an outboard engine. Whatever the plan, Arkady didn't like approaching with his back turned, bent over oars. And it was raining harder; visibility was down to a hundred meters and closing in. People made mistakes when they couldn't see clearly. They misconstrued what they did see, or saw what wasn't there. What did he know about the Plumber? The brief phone conversation suggested that he was hardly an experienced professional, more a slovenly middle-aged Ukrainian male with bad dental work. He had probably lived in Pripyat and, to judge from his choice of rendezvous, had probably worked at the power plant. A scavenger rather than a poacher, a man likely to carry a hammer rather than a gun, if that was a comfort.
Arkady stayed in sight of the causeway to keep his bearings and checked his watch to determine how far he had come. For a moment he thought he'd caught the throb of an outboard engine ahead in the rain, but he couldn't honestly say which way it came from, or whether he'd really heard it. All he heard for certain was his own oars ladling water.
He had rowed for half an hour along the causeway when he glimpsed, over his shoulder, two red-and-white chimneys hanging in the fog. Mist closed in, but not before he had a new bearing, directly toward the reactor stacks. He rowed and coasted until he got a new sighting, rowed and coasted again. Perhaps it was going to work out after all. The Plumber would putt-putt into view, and they would talk.
Arkady rowed to what he guessed was halfway across the pond and waited, turning the boat every minute or two for a different view. He was aware of boats far off on the periphery, but not a single one approached. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. By then he wished he had a cigarette, damp or otherwise.
He was about to quit when he heard a metallic rattle and an empty boat drifted sideways out of the rain. It was an aluminum tub like his, with a small outboard engine clamped to the stern and a chain swinging at the bow. The engine was off. An empty vodka bottle rolled forward as Arkady stopped the boat. Nothing else was in it, not a cigarette butt, not a fishing rod, not a paddle.
Arkady tied the empty boat to the back of his and started rowing to another boat he saw on the reactor side of the pond. He couldn't imagine why anyone besides the Plumber or Vanko would be out in such weather, but maybe the other boat's occupant had seen someone or knew whose boat this was. Towing the boat was awkward; with every pull, it snapped against Arkady's boat and produced the sound of a bass drum lightly kicked, the perfect acclaim for a day wasted.
There were two men in the boat, fifty meters off, and every ten meters the rain got worse, veiling the boat even as Arkady approached. The Woropays. Dymtrus stood and Taras sat, all their attention on the water directly by their boat until Dymtrus knelt and hauled a body out of the water. It was a woman with long black hair. Her gray skin suggested a long immersion, but she was slim and sleek, her face secretively turned away, a dress adhering to her arms and the smoothness of her back. She was still one moment, and the next she thrashed and nearly capsized the boat.
Taras leaned on a gunwale to keep the boat steady. He noticed Arkady through the rain and shouted, "She likes to fight."
Arkady had stopped rowing. The woman was gone, replaced by a catfish weighing at least sixty kilos, a slippery, scaleless monster that thrashed this way and that and turned its blunt face and jelly eyes to Arkady. Oriental whiskers spread from its lips, and what looked like sopping embroidery fell into the water.
"You netted it?" Arkady asked.
"They're too heavy to pull up otherwise," said Dymtrus.
"Chornobyl giants," said Taras. "Mutants. Glow in the dark."
"Then don't catch them." Arkady noticed that the Woropays had sidearms. He supposed he was lucky they weren't fishing with grenades. "Let it go."
Dymtrus opened his arms. The fish dropped with a great splash into the water, swirled to the surface and then sank ponderously out of sight. "Relax, it's just for fun. There are bigger fish down there."
Taras said, "Twice as big."
The brothers wore slack, calculating smiles.
"We wouldn't cat one," Dymtrus said. "They're loaded with all sorts of radioactive shit."
"We re not crazy."
Arkady felt his heart rate start to slow. He pointed to the empty boat. "I'm looking for the man who came in that."
The Woropays shrugged and asked how Arkady knew there had been someone in it. People hid boats around the cooling pond. The wind could have blown the boat in. And since when did they take orders from fucking Russians? And maybe they could use a fucking outboard engine of their own. They made the last comment too late, after Arkady had switched boats and retied the lines and was towing Vanko's boat away, under power, into the face of a squall that drenched any idea of pursuit.
Arkady switched boats again at the causeway to take Vanko's back downstream. At least this time he would have the current working with him. A stork with a red beak as sharp as a bayonet and white wings trimmed in black sailed by and passed over another stork that waded in slow motion along the edge of the river, painstakingly stalking a victim. The streets of Chernobyl were empty, but the river was full of life. Or murder, which was sometimes the same thing.
As he began to row, however, the mist cleared enough for the apartment blocks of Pripyat to loom like giant headstones. Hadn't Oksana Katamay described her block in Pripyat as overlooking the river? He swung the boat around.
The Katamay apartment wasn't difficult to find. Oksana had given him the address, and although the flat was on the eighth floor, the stairs were clear of the usual debris. The door was open and the view from the living room took in the power station, the river, the dark wormholes of former river tracks and banks of steamy mist. Arkady could imagine Oleksander Katamay, Chief of Construction, standing like a colossus before such a panorama.
The family must have returned on the sly to remove items they hadn't been able to carry with them at the evacuation. This bare wall had been covered by a tapestry. Those empty shelves had held books or a stuffed menagerie. Overall, however, the family had been selective and Arkady had the impression that squatters and scavengers knew to give the Katamay flat a pass. Sofa and chairs still sat in the parlor; wiring and plumbing still seemed intact. Someone had cleaned out the refrigerator, taped a broken window, made the beds, scrubbed the tub. The place was practically in move-in condition, disregarding radiation.
One bedroom was, Arkady guessed, the grandfather's; it was stripped clean but for a few pails of taxidermy degreaser and crusted glue. A second bedroom was decorated with Happy Faces, pictures of pop stars and posters of girl gymnasts tumbling with manic energy on a mat. Names swam back from the past: Abba, Korbut, Comaneci. Stuffed toys sat on the bed. Arkady ran a dosimeter over a lion and produced a little roar.
Karel's room was at the end of the hall. He must have been about eight at the time of the accident, but he was already a marksman. Paper targets punched in the middle were taped to the wall, along with a boy's selection of posters of heavy metal musicians with painted faces. The shelves were lined with Red Army tanks, fighter planes, shark's teeth and dinosaurs. A broken ski leaned in a corner. A bedpost was hung with ribbons and medals for a variety of sports: hockey, soccer, swimming. Taped over the bed was a photograph of Karel at a fun fair with his big sister Oksana; she was no more than thirteen, with straight dark hair that hung to her waist. Also pictures of Karel fishing with his grandfather and posing with a soccer ball and two surly teammates, the proto-Woropays. Squares of peeled paint were left where tape had peeled off. Under the bed Arkady found pictures that had fallen: a team picture of the Kiev Dynamo soccer team, the ice hockey great Fetisov, Muhammad Ali and, finally, a snapshot of Karel posed with his fists up with a boxer. Karel was in trunks just like a real fighter. The boxer wore trunks and gloves. He was maybe eighteen, a skinny, slope-shouldered boy as white as soap, and his autograph was scrawled across the photograph: "To My Good Friend Karel. May we always be pals. Anton Obodovsky."
Roman introduced Arkady to a pig that rubbed with exquisite pleasure against the slats of its sty as Roman poured in slops.
"Oink, oink," said Roman, "oink, oink," his cheeks apple red from the rays of the setting sun and pride of ownership. It was possible that Roman had had a nip before Arkady arrived. Alex and Vanko followed in Arkady's footsteps; the rain had stopped but left the farmyard ankle-deep in mud. The scene reminded Arkady of the official inspections that had once been Soviet fare: "Party Secretary Visits Collective Farm and Vows More Fertilizer." "Oink, oink," said Roman, the soul of wit. He seemed delighted to be leading the tour without his wife's assistance. "Russians raise pigs for meat, we raise pigs for fat. But we're saving Sumo. Aren't we, Sumo?"
"For what?" asked Arkady.
Roman placed a finger to his lips and winked. A secret. Which struck Arkady as appropriate for an illegal resident of the Zone. Roman led the way to a chicken coop. In the cool after the rain, Arkady felt the heat of the sitting hens. The old man showed Arkady how he tied the bar of the door shut with a twist of wire. "Foxes are very clever."
"Perhaps you should have a dog," Arkady suggested.
"Wolves eat dogs." That did seem to be the consensus of the village, Arkady thought. Roman shook his head as if he'd given the matter a lot of consideration. "Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they'd all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization." He opened a barn with an array of shovels and hoes, rakes and scythes, a grindstone, a pulley hanging from a crossbeam and bins of potatoes and beets. "Did you meet Lydia?"
"The cow? Yes, thank you."
A pair of huge eyes in the depths of a stall beseeched the tour to leave her alone to masticate her hay. Which reminded Arkady of Captain Marchenko when Arkady alerted him to the possibility of a body floating in the cooling pond. The captain had suggested that a loose boat was not sufficient reason to leave a dry office, and the pond was a large body of water to go pounding around in the rain or the dark. The empty vodka bottle aside, had there been blood in the boat? Signs of struggle? Professional to professional, didn't this sound like a wild goose chase?
Roman led his guests out by a half-shed packed so tight with firewood that not another piece could have been inserted. Arkady suspected that when Roman was too drunk to stand, he could still stack wood with lapidary care. Roman waved to an orchard and identified cherries, pears, plums and apples.
Arkady asked Alex, "Have you gone around the yard with a dosimeter?"
"What's the use? This is a couple in their eighties, and their own food tastes better to them than starving in the city. This is heaven."
Maybe, Arkady thought. Roman and Maria's house was a weathered blue, windows trimmed with carving, one corner resting country-style on a tree stump. It shone amid abandoned houses that were as black as if they'd been burned, with tumbledown barns and fruit trees wrapped in brambles. One dirt path led from the house to the village center; another climbed toward the wrought-iron fence and crosses of the cemetery, within a few steps a compass of peasant life and death.
The interior was a single room: a combination kitchen, bedroom and parlor centered around a whitewashed brick stove that heated the house, cooked the food, baked the bread and-peasant genius!-on especially cold nights provided a second sleeping bench directly over the oven. Lamps and candles lit walls covered with embroidered cloths, tapestries with forest scenes, family photos and picture calendars collected from various years. Photos framed a younger Roman and Maria, he in a rubber apron, she holding an enormous braid of garlic, together with an urbanized group that must have been their son and his family, a timorous wife and a skinny girl about four years of age. A separate picture of the girl showed her maybe a year older, in a sun hat by a rust-pocked sign that said Havana club.
Maria glowed so, she could have been polished for the occasion. She wore an embroidered shirt and apron, a tasseled shawl and, of course, her brilliant blue eyes and steel smile. Despite the crowded quarters, she was everywhere at once, setting out bowls of cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickles in honey, thin and fat sausages, apple salad, cabbage in sour cream, dark bread and home-churned butter and a center plate of salted fat with an alabaster glow.
"Don't even think about your dosimeter," Alex whispered to Arkady.
"How often do you cat here?"
"When I feel lucky."
The rattle of a car muffler drew up outside, and a moment later, Eva Kazka appeared with flowers. She also wore a scarf. It seemed to be her style.
"Renko, I didn't know you were going to be here," Eva said. "Is this part of your investigation?"
"No. Purely social."
"Social is as social does." Roman arranged a row of small glasses around a bottle of vodka. The party had gone a long time without vodka, Arkady thought; Vanko looked as if he had crawled on his knees to a water hole. The host poured every glass to the trembling brim, and Maria watched proudly as he distributed each without the loss of a drop. "Wait!" Roman magisterially struck a match and lit his glassful like a candle, a yellow flame dancing on the surface of the liquid. "Good. It's ready." He blew out the flame and raised his glass. "To Russia and Ukraine. May we lie in the same ditch."
Arkady took a swallow and gasped, "Not vodka."
"Samogon." Alex wiped his eyes. "Moonshine from fermented sugar, yeast and maybe a potato. It doesn't get much purer than that."
"How pure?"
"Maybe eighty percent."
The samogon had its effect: Eva looked more dangerous, Vanko more dignified, Roman's ears went red and Maria glistened. There was a solemn dipping into the food while Roman poured another round. Arkady found the pickles crisp and sour, with perhaps a hint of strontium. Roman asked him, "You went fishing in Vanko's boat? Did you catch anything?"
"No, although I did see a very large fish. A Chernobyl Giant, people said." He noticed Vanko smirking at Alex. "You know about this fish?"
Eva said, "The catfish? It's Alex's joke."
"A catfish is a catfish," Vanko said.
"Not quite," said Alex. "People here are accustomed to channel catfish that grow to a paltry meter or two. Someone-I couldn't say who-seems to have imported Danube catfish, which grow to the size of a truck. That's a respectable fish."
"It's a sick joke," Eva said. "Alex would like a plague to sweep across Europe and kill all the people to make room for his stupid animals."
"Present company excluded, of course," Alex said. Maria smiled. The party seemed to be off to a nice start.
"What shall we drink to?" Roman asked.
"Oblivion," Alex suggested.
Arkady was better prepared for his second samogon, but he still had to step back from the impact. Eva declared herself warm. She loosened her scarf but didn't remove it.
Maria advised Arkady to eat a slice of fat. "It will grease the stomach."
"Actually, I'm feeling fairly well greased. This picture of the girl by the Havana Club sign was taken in Cuba?"
"Their granddaughter," Vanko said.
"Maria, after me," Maria said.
Alex said, "Every year Cuba takes Chernobyl kids for therapy. It's very nice, all palm trees and beaches, except the last thing those kids need is solar radiation."
Arkady was aware of having introduced an element of unease. Roman cleared his throat and said, "We're not sitting. This is irregular. We should be sitting."
In such a small cabin, there were only two chairs and room for only two on the bench. Alex pulled Eva down on his lap, and Arkady stood.
"Truly, how is the investigation going?" Alex asked.
Arkady said, "It's not going anywhere. I've never made less progress."
"You told me that you weren't a good investigator," Eva said.
"So when I tell you that I've never made less progress, that's saying something."
"And we hope you never make any progress," said Alex. "That way you can stay with us forever."
"I'll drink to that," Vanko said hopefully.
Eva said, "None of us makes progress, that's the nature of this place. I will never cure people who live in radioactive houses. I will never cure children whose tumors appear ten years after exposure. This is not a medical program, this is an experiment."
"Well, that's a downer," Alex said. "Let's go back to the dead Russian."
"Of course," said Eva, and she filled her own glass.
Alex said, "I can understand why a Russian business tycoon would have his throat slit. I just don't understand why he would come all the way to this little village to have it done."
"I've wondered the same thing," Arkady said.
"There must have been plenty of people in Moscow willing to accommodate him," Alex said.
"I'm sure there were."
"He was protected by bodyguards, which means he had to escape his own security to be killed. He must have been coming here for protection. From whom? But death was inevitable. It was like an appointment in Samarra. Wherever he went, death was waiting."
"Alex, you should be an actor," Vanko said.
Eva said, "He is an actor."
"You were a physicist before you became an ecologist," Arkady said to Alex. "Why did you change?"
"What a dull question. Vanko is a singer." Alex poured for everyone. "This is the entertainment section of the evening. We are on a night train, samogon is our fuel and Vanko is our engineer. Vanko, the floor is yours."
Vanko sang a long song about a Cossack off to the wars, his chaste wife and the hawk that carried their letters back and forth until it was shot down by an envious nobleman. When Vanko was done, everyone applauded so hard they sweated.
"I found the story absolutely believable," Alex said. "Especially the part about how love can turn to suspicion, suspicion to jealousy and jealousy to hate."
"Sometimes love can go right to hate," said Eva. "Investigator Renko, are you married?"
"No."
"Been married?"
"Yes."
"But no more. We often hear how difficult it is for investigators and militia detectives to maintain a successful marriage. The men supposedly become emotionally cold and silent. Was that your problem, that you were cold and silent?"
"No, my wife was allergic to penicillin. A nurse gave her the wrong injection, and she died of anaphylactic shock."
"Eva," Alex whispered. "Eva, that was a bad mistake."
"I'm sorry," she told Arkady.
"So am I," said Arkady.
He left the party for a while. Physically he was present and smiled at the appropriate times, but his mind was elsewhere. The first time he'd met Irina was at the Mosfilm studio, during an outdoor shoot. She was a wardrobe mistress, not an actress, and yet once the sun lit her huge deep-set eyes, everyone else seemed made of cardboard. It was not a placid relationship, but it was not cold. He could not be cold around Irina; that was like trying to be cold beside a bonfire. When he saw her on the gurney, dead, her eyes so blank, he thought his life had ended, too, yet here he was years later, in the Zone of Exclusion, lost and stumbling but alive. He looked around the room to clear his head and happened to light on the icons high in their corner, Christ on the left wall, the Madonna on the right, the two framed by richly embroidered cloths and lit by votive candles on a shelf. The Christ was actually a postcard, but the Mother was the genuine article, a Byzantine painting on wood of the Madonna in an unusual blue cowl with gold stars, her fingertips lightly pressed together in prayer. She looked like the stolen icon he had seen in the motorcycle sidecar. That icon had been taken over the border to Byelorussia. What was it doing here?
Vanko said, "The Jews are here."
"Where?" Arkady asked.
"In Chernobyl. Everywhere, walking up and down the streets."
Alex said, "Thank you, Vanko, we've been warned." He added to Arkady, "Hasidic Jews. There's a famous rabbi buried here. They visit and pray. Maria's turn."
After the formalities of modesty and protest, Maria sat up in her chair, closed her eyes and broke into a song that transformed her from an old woman into a girl looking for her lover at a midnight tryst, and singing in a register so high the windowpanes seemed to vibrate like crystals. When Maria finished, she opened her eyes, spread a smile of steel teeth and swung her feet with pleasure. Roman tried to follow with selections on a violin, but a string broke, and he went hors de combat.
"Arkady?" Alex asked.
"Sorry, I'm low in entertainment skills."
"Then it's your turn," Alex told Eva.
"All right." She ran her hands through her hair as if that combed it, fixed her eyes on Alex and began:
We're all drunkards here and harlots:
How wretched we are together…
The poetry was coarse and blunt, Akhmatova's words, familiar to Arkady, familiar to any literate man or woman over the age of thirty, before the new poetry of "Billions Served" and "Snickers for Energy!"
I have put on a narrow skirt
to show my lines are trim.
The windows are tightly sealed,
What brews? Thunder or sleet?
How well I know your look,
Your eyes like a cautious cat.
She swung her own gaze from Alex to Arkady and hesitated so long that Alex took over the last line:
O heavy heart, how long
before the tolling bell?
But that one dancing there,
will surely rot in hell!
Alex pulled Eva's face to his and collected a deep kiss until she pulled away and slapped him hard enough to make even Arkady smart. She stood and plunged out the door. It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon.
Arkady's mobile phone rang. It was Olga Andreevna, from the children's shelter in Moscow.
"Investigator Renko, you have to come back."
"A second, please." Arkady gestured apologies to Maria and went outside. Eva was nowhere in sight, although her car hadn't left.
Olga Andreevna asked, "Investigator, what are you still doing in the Ukraine?
"I am assigned here. I am working on a case."
"You should be here. Zhenya needs you."
"I don't think so. I can't think of anyone he needs less."
"He goes and stands by the street, waiting for you and looking for your car."
"Maybe he's waiting for the bus."
"Last week he was gone for two days. We found him sleeping in the park. Talk to him."
She put Zhenya on the line before Arkady could get off. At least he assumed Zhenya was on; all Arkady heard at his end was silence.
"Hello, Zhenya. How are you doing? I hear you've been causing people at the shelter some anxiety. Please don't do that." Arkady paused in case Zhenya wanted to offer any response. "So I suppose that's all, Zhenya."
He was in no mood and no condition to have another one-sided conversation with the garden gnome. He leaned back to take a breath of cool air and watched clouds cover the moon, slipping the house in and out of shadow. He heard the cow shuffle in her stall and a twig snap and wondered whether it was a night for wolves to be abroad.
"Still there?" Arkady asked. There was no answer; there never was an answer. "I met Baba Yaga. In fact, I'm outside her house right now. I can't say whether her fence is made of bones, but she definitely has steel teeth." Arkady heard, or thought he heard, a focusing of attention at the other end. "I haven't seen her dog or cat yet, but she does have an invisible cow, who has to be invisible because of the wolves. Maybe the wolves wandered in from a different story, but they're here. And a sea serpent. In her pond she has a sea serpent as big as a whale, with long whiskers. I saw the sea serpent swallow a man whole." There was unmistakable rustling on the other end now. Arkady tried to remember other details of the fairy tale. "The house is very strange. It is absolutely on chicken legs. Right now the house is slowly turning. I'll lower my voice in case it hears me. I didn't see her magic comb, the one that can turn into a forest, but I did see an orchard of poisonous fruit. All the houses around are burned and full of ghosts. I will call in two more days. In the meantime, it's important that you stay at the shelter and study and maybe make a friend in case we need help. I have to go now, before they see that I'm missing. Let me say a word to the director."
There was a passing of the phone, and Olga Andreevna came back on. "What did you tell him? He seems much better."
"I told him that he is a citizen of a proud new Russia and should behave like one."
"I'm sure. Well, whatever you said, it worked. Are you coming to Moscow now? Your work there surely must be done."
"Not quite yet. I'll call in two days."
"The Ukraine is sucking us dry."
"Good night, Olga Andreevna."
As Arkady put the mobile phone away, Eva stepped out of the orchard, silently applauding. "Your son?" she asked.
"No."
"A nephew?"
"No, just a boy."
She shifted like a cat getting comfortable. "Baba Yaga! Quite a story. You are an entertainer after all."
"I thought you were going."
"Not quite yet. So you're not with anybody now? A woman?"
"No. And you, are you and Alex married, separated or divorced?"
"Divorced. It's that obvious?"
"I thought I detected something."
"The residue of an ancient disaster, the crater of a bomb, is what you detect." The window light on her was watery, the stamp of linen making her eyes darker. "I still love him. Not the way you loved your wife. I can tell you had one of those great faithful romances. We didn't. We were more… melodramatic, let's say. Neither of us was undamaged goods. You can't be in the Zone without a little damage. How much longer do you plan to stay?"
"I have no idea. I think the prosecutor would like to leave me here forever."
"Until you're damaged?"
"At least."
What was disturbing about Eva Kazka was her combination of ferocity and, as she said, damage. She had been to Chernobyl and Chechnya? Maybe disaster was her milieu. Her smile suggested that she was giving him a second chance to say something interesting or profound, but Arkady thought of nothing. He had spent his imagination on Baba Yaga.
The door opened. Alex leaned out to say, "My turn."
"Our new friend Arkady may not know all the facts. Facts are important. Facts should not be swept aside."
"You're drunk," Eva said.
"It goes without saying. Arkady, do you enjoy comedy?"
"If it's funny."
"Guaranteed. This is Russian stand-up comedy," Alex said. "Comedy with samogon."
Maria opened a new bottle, releasing the sickeningly sweet smell of fermented sugar, and toddled from guest to guest refilling glasses.
"April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. The actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment-to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves." Alex walked rapidly back and forth, attending to imaginary switches. "Turn off the automatic control, block the steam control, disable the pre-sets, switch off design protection and neutralize the emergency generators. Then start pulling graphite rods from the core by remote control. This is like riding a tiger, this is fun. There are a hundred and twenty rods in all, a minimum of thirty to be inserted at all times, because this was a Soviet reactor, a military model that was a little unstable at low efficiency, a fact that was, unfortunately, a state secret. Alas, the power plunged."
"When does this start to become funny?" Eva asked.
"It's already funny. It just gets funnier. Imagine the confusion of the technicians. The reactor efficiency is dropping through the floor, and the core is flooding with radioactive xenon and iodine and combustible hydrogen. And somehow they have lost count- they have lost count!-and pulled all but eighteen control rods from the core, twelve below the limit. All the same, there is one last disastrous step to take. They can replace the rods, turn on the safety systems and shut down the reactor. They have not yet turned off the turbine valves and started the actual experiment. They have not pushed the final button."
Alex mimicked hesitation.
"Let's pause and consider what is at stake. There is a monthly bonus. There is a May Day bonus. If they run the test successfully they will likely win promotions and awards. On the other hand, if they shut down the reactor, there would certainly be embarrassing questions asked and consequences felt. There it is, bonuses versus disaster. So, like good Soviets, they marched forward, hands over their balls."
Alex pushed the button.
"In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe that they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report that there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow."
Alex picked up his glass of samogon.
"And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, 'How is the reactor core?' They answered, 'The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.' Moscow is relieved. That's the punch line. 'Don't worry.' And here is my toast: 'To the Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!' Nobody's drinking?"
Roman and Maria sat numb and deflated, feet hanging free of the floor. Vanko looked away. Eva pressed her fist to her mouth, then stood and applied the fist to Alex, not slapping him as she had before but hitting him solidly in the chest until Arkady pulled her away. For a moment no one moved, like marionettes gone limp, until Eva bolted again for the door. This time Arkady heard her car start.
Alex's glass spilled. He refilled and raised it a second time. "Well, it seemed hilarious to me."