Chapter Nine
* * *
Morning rain fell on the Chernobyl Yacht Club, a gap-toothed dock on the PripyatRiver. 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 eat 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 c
hase?
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.