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Vladimir Dubisskiy 

Living On The Edge

            Near the nine-story apartment house where we lived in Kiev, just across the yard and behind a tall fence made of concrete blocks topped with barbed wire, there was a restricted area belonging to some unknown military unit. Kids playing in the yard witnessed a routine garrison soldiering " sluggish wrangling of armed guards bored on their watch-towers, undersized privates sneaking between the fence and neighboring grocery Gastronom  with ugly bottles of cheap liquor or filterless cigarettes called Prima. Kids used to play under the gaze of sentries, and the whole life in the neighborhood passed as if in custody'. And from our small balcony on the ninth floor one could see rather picturesque hills, with trees and bushes here and there, a bluish streak of the Dnipro river in the distance and very tall striped red and white fixtures supporting the aerial cobweb of the broadcast-jamming station ironically located on the so-called Witch’s Hill.

            When our son left the house at eight a.m. going to school he walked along the side of guarded perimeter avoiding smashed bottles, heaps of canine and sometimes human dung, rusty and dirty trash. On his return in the afternoon he might often behold the groups of local caretakers who had their lunch with the inevitable vodka just next to the path, on the cast-iron lid of a sewage shaft. During the twenty minute walk from our place to the local public school kids had to pass by the huge gray hulk of a public hospital (full of half-starved patients and nasty cockroaches), with a busy mortuary behind, then  go around the big open-air parking lot (mean watchdogs) and enter a bad-smelling zone of the regional sewage collector. And here we lived, with the school only a hundred meters further along the street!

            When Chernobyl blew up I was out of Kiev, on my vacation in Sochi " a popular Soviet resort on the Black Sea coast. We were sitting in the restaurant of the rest home enjoying lunch when someone loudly complained about his total failure to reach Kiev by telephone " "every time I was told that the line was out of order, it was simply outrageous!"

            I was not listening, but then nearly fainted when my neighbor at the table, a sanguine railway engineer from Siberia, asked me whether I knew the location in the Ukraine of a certain nuclear power station in Chernobyl or Chornobay that was rumored to have exploded according to Western radio-voices. The previous evening I had also tried to phone my parents in Kiev but failed and now there was this news about the accident'. But Soviet officials and media kept total silence, (secretly cutting public long-distance telephone calls to Kiev and stopping telegraph communication as well). I hurried to the airport hoping to get any information there. When the flight from Kiev had landed the empty Arrivals filled with sobbing women, many with quiet kids and no luggage. Nobody could say anything worthwhile. Although the registration for the return flight to Kiev was already opened " there were no passengers listed. The same thing occurred when I decided to break off my vacation and return to Kiev, worried about my family and parents. The airplane was nearly empty " I could occupy any seat, chat with unoccupied flight attendants and even pilots " there were four passengers on board'

            The big Borispil International Airport was subdued and empty. No more than eight of us silently boarded the empty shuttle outside and headed to Kiev. On the way to Kiev the road was blocked by servicemen wearing plastic overalls and gas masks. They washed the lower part of our bus with pressured water and signaled for us to proceed. There were several such posts further on and an uneasy silence reigned everywhere.

            My wife and son were out of the city having a rest on the Crimean coast in the town of Sudak. The first telephone call, from my old pal Vadim, came just as I entered our apartment. "You are here already, guy, that’s great " he shouted excitedly " there is a lot of cheap red wine everywhere, and they say we all have to drink it as much as we can if you wanna keep all your male virtues with you."

            The city was unusually clean and vacant. From time to time the watering trucks passed here and there, pouring more water over already wet pavements and roadways. People were crowded mostly near the liquor stores " vodka and red wines were bought by boxes. Then the shop assistants got orders to limit the number of bottles sold per person " but customers had been well trained already and came with friends, grandparents, neighbors and bought as much lekarstvo as they could drink.

            At that time I was working as a customs officer at the Borispil International Airport. During the daytime shifts we did not have any passengers at all, and the international sector was virtually closed " those foreigners who happened to be in Kiev had already left. But the representatives of foreign airlines (actually not very foreign yet at that time " from Polish Lot, Bulgarian Balkan, Hungarian Malev) had to stay because their chiefs, being properly instructed by Big Brother Moscow, issued strict orders to all personnel to stay in Kiev "to prevent panic." The young Malev representative, intelligent and extremely courteous Dury, suffered most. His bosses did not permit him to evacuate his wife and two kids, and just before the catastrophe they had come from Budapest to stay with their loving husband and daddy to enjoy the warm and beautiful Kiev spring. Later his youngest daughter, who got an overdose of radioactivity, was forced to pass a course of special medical treatment at a Budapest hospital. But Ukrainian children were not so lucky " in most cases they had neither the means nor places to go.

            Gorbachev made sure that TV demonstrated the smiling faces of Kievan moms dangling their kids under luxuriant chestnut trees in Hreschatik, Kiev’s main street. But a thoughtful viewer could easily notice the menacingly clean and deserted sidewalks, usually crowded with pedestrians. Many of those happy moms ended crying helplessly in the parlors of radiological centers and hospitals.     

            During every night shift we observed a long line of black Volgas with tinted glasses that passed one by one through special gates and headed for airplanes by going directly onto the airfield without any checking, ticket or baggage control. The big-shots were rescuing their kinsmen and themselves, despicably telling their lies to people in the daytime. They ran away every night for several weeks, moving slowly onto the airfield like big silent black bugs, usually guarded by a couple of watchful KGB agents with impassive faces.

Uncle Nick

            My uncle Nick was a devoted fan of O. Henry’s short stories. He collected the Russian translations and planned to read the author in the original English. He knew quite a number of passages and took great pleasure in reciting the adventures of O.Henry’s picturesque heroes of the Wild West. Nick was a bright young scientist, and in his forties he was known abroad as an author of several research publications on the application of the latest electronic novelties in the field of thermophysics.

            He refused to join the Communist Party and it was the only reason he was a deputy head of a research lab in the Kiev Institute of Technical Thermophysics: the lab was headed by a retired KGB general, the blockhead martinet with Party membership and ideologically impeccable conduct. Several times Nick had been invited to participate in the international forums of specialists in his field but he could never leave the Motherland even for a short period of time. He lacked the inevitable accessory of those Soviets who voyaged abroad: Party membership.

            But Nick did not care and, in fact, he seemed to be satisfied with his undeservedly low salary. His name always followed the name(s) of his bosses on his own research papers. Yet he was invincible. He did not ask for any privileges and posts, and he liked O. Henry, American sci-fi novels, fantasy, fishing and hiking. He did not like politics, red banners, stupid Soviet administrators and Party bosses, so he continued to reject their tempting proposals to join the ranks of legalized vultures.

            Now you can often hear the revelations of repenting communists regarding those terrible times when everybody there had to be in the Party to preserve family safety, their kids’ future, etc. But ask those guys whether they tore up their red membership cards when the Soviet Union fell apart' silence. My dad, a retired air force colonel with two academic degrees was forced to join the Party (every Soviet officer must be a Communist) but when he retired he gave up his membership card to a local party committee, publicly summing up that he could not stay with thugs any longer.

            It was Nick, not the chief of the  research lab, who was recommended by the Institute to join the team of thermophysicists and some other scientists who were to explore and observe the exploded reactor. They worked there quietly in two-week shifts, without a big fuss in the media, because the data they obtained was classified. All of these scientists were considered to be on a long-term business trip, but for most of them this Chernobyl assignment had turned out to be final, including my beloved uncle Nick.

            At that time Nick lived alone, because his small daughter and wife were with his wife’s parents. It was simply more convenient to permit the young mother to work leaving small Katya with her grandmother. During the final years of his short life he lived in shifts, coming home for a fortnight and then returning back to the field lab near the dead nuke station unit. When he appeared, he usually called me first saying quietly ‘Hey, student, I’m here.’ It was he who nicknamed me ‘A Student’ and I was always waiting to hear his tired, slightly cracked voice. I was ready to sit opposite him in his small kitchen looking on impatiently as he inhaled bluish cigarette smoke and raised a small glass of vodka or brandy saying ‘Nu, davai, Student, budem zdorovy!’ (Let’s drink, Student, cheers!). And with him I had always been a student. Indeed, I gained much knowledge from him till his death. Between sipping brandy and smoking we talked about Chernobyl, about the present and the future, about life and eternity.

            In time he began to feel more and more tired. His strong body, that of a former boxer and scuba diver, had to endure great stresses, multiplied by the high radiation level of the working site. Later I understood that Nick deliberately forced his wife and daughter out of the house, out of direct contact with him. He knew that he was already marked by unknown and definitely dangerous Chernobyl evils. Once he confessed that from time to time he had started to experience sudden momentary blackouts " they lasted for seconds and nobody around could notice it " however, in the course of time the periods of total unconsciousness became longer and longer. Nick did not complain, ever. He just described to me his own new state as a thoughtful researcher and scientist, exploring, observing, comprehending. I know that he had suffered from strong radioactive burns several times during two years. When it happened Nick simply disappeared just after returning from a routine Chernobyl shift. Like his colleagues after similar accidents he flew to the Black Sea coast where the medical specialists treated him with such remedies as black caviar. According to Nick, they had never before eaten this expensive delicacy in such scandalous amounts.

            Nick told me that in Chernobyl there were a lot of unknown phenomena that modern science could hardly explain without careful study. Day after day these young and talented scientists entered the collapsed reactor’s premises trying to curb the unleashed demons. They entered the nuke hell like martyrs, stripped of their everyday clothes and clad in immaculately white cotton robes. This clothing had to be  burned after each shift, since it was covered with radioactive particles. Nick " and the other guys as well " saw a lot of strange things and experienced odd sensations there, in the Zone. He had never expanded on the subject, saying with his usual quiet smile ‘Hey, student, you’d better not ask, who needs your bad dreams afterward'.’ But once he mentioned some weird growth they had discovered just under the reactor’s hall. This thing was so hard that even the bullets of a Kalashnikov jumped off its surface like rubber balls. Any close examination was hardly possible; even robots failed to approach the enigmatic formation due to the fantastic radiation levels nearby. 

            The more he worked there, the more his face was changing. Some inner transformations and enormous stress deepened shadows under his vivid bright eyes, and long tragic vertical wrinkles cut through his cheeks, which became sunken. At that time I did not know anything about this fatal sign. Only later did it become known as the Chernobyl Mask, sort of a death mark. At first you can hardly notice any difference, especially if you meet such a person somewhere on the Kiev streets or in a crowd. But more than two of them together, especially clad in their white cottons, make an impression. You can never forget the abandoned eyes, hollow cheeks, mournfully tightened mouths and an overwhelming sense of the tremendous strain and sadness they  emanate.

            They looked as if they were estranged from the mundane, preparing to leave this world calmly and consciously, as if taking a prearranged flight to somewhere. Actually, most of them passed away soon, and Nick led again.

            At the end of January he called me from the Zone lab and we had a short talk. It was not unusual, since he warned me long before that he had chosen me to be his contact. All such calls from the Zone were certainly monitored by secret services, and from time to time he made such calls simply to relax a little from his night labors, to chat with somebody close and at the same time far from that dead, poisonous, and totally unreal world he was in. We talked a little and Nick told me that he looked forward to coming from the Zone several days early in order to come to my birthday on February fourth. It would be marvelous to have him at the birthday party; it was a really valuable present and I appreciated that. But I never got it.

            The next day there was another call from the village around forty kilometers away from Chernobyl. We were told that Nick’s body was there, in a small local morgue and we’d better take it from there, because the temperature was not low enough to keep the body intact. The voice from the telephone was hoarse and sounded so routine ' but the message was unbelievable. First we thought that it was some mistake, a bad joke. What could Nick do in this small village, far from his work site?! But, no, there was no mistake. Becoming slightly annoyed, the strange voice told us that the body was brought by emergency car: the guys had taken it from the station. But why? What happened? No answer.

            All our family was in despair. My other uncle Volodia, Nick’s younger brother, took a car from work and we rushed to the village. We all were shocked, but the news was so lightning-fast that nobody lost his temper. There was no time for that. The road was covered with dirty semi-melted snow; the old battered van nearly slid in some places, we were cold and silent.  I became numb as if I had been burned inside. No thoughts, nothing, only total incomprehension' My uncle Volodia felt the same.

            At last we reached the place. A disheveled guy smelling of vodka in a formerly white gown and dusty glasses was tired and laconic. "Show me your IDs' OK, here’s your death certificate. Who’s his closest relative? You?"

            My pale uncle simply nodded. "Then you guys better sniff some nashatyr  (liquid ammonia) first. We’ve been out of power for several days and it smells in the morgue, you know. By the way, do you have some plastic bags in the car? No? I need them badly; everybody who’s coming actually should bring some bags. Here in the village you can’t find them at all, damn that place'" He sniffed nashatyr, began to cough and spit on the dirty floor, "What a life' no power, no bags' shit ' will I  keep organs? Well, take a sniff and let’s find your Chernobyl guy'."

            I held my breath and entered hell. It was a dark, stuffy room with immovable white-covered figures on the tables. Occasionally you could see a protruding leg or drooping hand. There was no fear at all " just a sort of a stupor"- only a passive complicity while waiting for the next episode to come. And it came.

            Nick’s body was there. But there was no O. Henry aficionado lying on the crooked table in the fetid room of the small village mortuary. I did not feel even the smallest portion of his presence there, thank God! This house " his body"- was already empty. However, when a cloth cover was pulled back I could not help but scream. Volodia gasped, "What’s that? What happened to him?"

            The corpse looked as though it had been disemboweled and carelessly mended: chest and abdomen were crossed with rough black-and-blue scars. His high brow was also severely scarred. Why?  Our semi-drunk guide mumbled only, "What could I do? I’m a small fry' there are orders, he died there. I had to do this to him' but they always only give orders and not even one damn bag'."

            We tried to clear up the details such as who ordered him to eviscerate perished Chernobyl victims, where he had to transfer the organs, why Nick’s body was transported into this village from the Zone. But he only said, "Don’t ask, you’d better not ask. This knowledge can only harm you guys, and me too if I tell. Take him and go away."

            And we did. We drove Nick directly to the old cemetery in Puscha-Voditsa, a resort suburb of Kiev. There were the graves of his mother Varvara and stepfather Ivan, my babousia and did (my grandparents). The solemn pines around stood quietly and everything was covered with snow. The ground was frozen and the gravedigger begged for help. We uncorked a bottle of vodka and sipped generously, my uncle Volodia and I. Actually, it was a digger’s tip, this bottle, but he agreed to it. He honored Chernobyl’s liquidators very much as he said, and welcomed us to remove the stress. Then we finished digging the grave and buried the body of Nick, the one who had loved O. Henry.

            My dad, a retired air force colonel and Chernobyl volunteer, was not able to approach the grave. He just stood for several hours near the cemetery gate and cried, cried like a child, looking hunched and very aged. I embraced him and led him to the car, but he only shuffled and repeated, "Why him, not me' why him, not me."

            I escaped and left the edge, finding a new life here in Canada for my wife and our son. Only Nick’s pipe and an old black-and-white picture traveled with me to Vancouver. In this picture all three of us stand smiling in each other’s embrace: my beloved uncles Nick and Volodia and I. Volodia, a soccer player and cross-country skier, a former member of the Ukraine all-star ski team, suffered through a kidney-removal operation and became disabled at forty-five.     

            Nick died at forty-five too. He worked in his Chernobyl lab late at night (probably trying to finish his research faster in order to be on time for my small birthday party). Then he supposedly went into the hall for a smoke break and never came back. He was found there sitting on the floor dead. According to his death certificate in that small village far from Chernobyl and his lab, he died of a heart attack.