‘Shut your face,’ was Big Ivan’s angry reply, ‘or I will pitch you head first into the inferno at the heart of this reactor. Our lives are over anyway, none of us has a chance.’
The next day it was Jagdish who collapsed on the rooftop and — as Jimfish watched, horrified — Big Ivan bent over him, rifled through his pockets, removed his wallet and, without a second thought, tipped him as if he were no more than a sack of coal into the jagged hole where the fuel rods pulsed in the eerie blue water.
When Jimfish shouted out in horror at what he had seen, Big Ivan merely flourished Jagdish’s wallet and announced: ‘To each according to his needs.’
Then he clambered down the ladder and made off, closely followed by Jimfish and Soviet Malala, who ran clumsily in their heavy hoods, masks and lead-lined aprons, shouting, ‘Stop, thief!’ and looking for all the world to the liquidators who watched the chase from the roof of the reactor like actors in some antique black-and-white film.
CHAPTER 6
Pripyat, Ukraine, 1986
Jimfish and Soviet Malala followed Ivan to the nearby town of Pripyat, where an enormous street party of thousands of revellers was in progress, and in the melee of marching bands, choirs and fair-ground fun, they lost their man. Jimfish turned in some perplexity to his friend and mentor.
‘Surely this is no time for a party? That reactor could explode a second time and destroy much of Europe.’
‘Today is the First of May,’ Soviet patiently explained. ‘And on May Day everyone in the Motherland celebrates the triumphant workers of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be more natural.’
Jimfish pondered the crowds dancing in the streets: ‘Chernobyl is close by and these people celebrating here in Pripyat don’t even have lead-lined aprons. They’re taking in so much radiation it will kill them.’
‘All the more reason for a good party — if things are as bad as that, which I doubt, they will die happy,’ Soviet assured him. ‘What we face at Chernobyl is certainly a technical challenge, but we must trust the Party to think of a way. Finding Ivan will not be hard. He’s an assassin who has insulted the Motherland and sold his Soviet citizenship for the dollars in poor Jagdish’s purse. He’ll have headed for some place he can spend the money and there aren’t many of those. We must track him down and denounce him to the authorities, who will certainly send him to a labour camp.’
And he was right. They found the absconding soldier in the best restaurant in Pripyat, on the corner of Lenin Avenue and International Friendship Street, eating sturgeon and knocking back vodka. In between bites of fish and swigs of vodka, he was singing a popular Soviet song: ‘We were born to make fairy tales a reality…’
Except, as Soviet explained somewhat testily to Jimfish, instead of skaska, the Russian word for ‘fairy tale’, Ivan used a shocking pun, and his song now went: ‘We were born to make Kafka a reality.’
When the two friends challenged Ivan and demanded he hand back Jagdish’s wallet, he laughed, opened another bottle of vodka and told them to get lost. ‘I’ve done you a big favour. If you had stayed up on the roof of the reactor, you’d be goners. Just like all these fools marching and dancing in the streets of Pripyat.’
‘Why have this May Day parade if Pripyat is a death zone?’ Soviet demanded.
‘Because it diverts attention from the horrible reality of things,’ said Ivan. ‘The May Day charade is the purest summation there can be of how things are done here. Today the party, tomorrow the death march. Hundreds of thousands of people will be moved out of Pripyat; the fairground will stand empty, the swimming pools deserted, the children’s swings in the parks will rust and no one will ever be allowed back.’
Big Ivan had no sooner said this, while continuing to guzzle his sturgeon, when Jimfish began to feel nauseous; soon he was vomiting, then he had a feverish headache and sat down, overcome by dizziness.
‘Help me — I am not myself,’ he implored.
‘All very typical symptoms of radiation sickness. Your fishy friend will almost certainly kick the bucket,’ Big Ivan told Soviet Malala, taking a gulp of vodka. ‘He’s better off dying here than on the roof of Reactor Number 4. You know how this will be handled if ever we put the fire out. At the end of the day the bio-robots still standing will be thanked, presented with 100 rubles and a big medal and be sent home to die. That won’t be the end of it. They’ll have to be buried in lead-lined coffins, because their bodies will be radioactive for many thousands of years. Like Chernobyl itself.’
‘It is inconceivable that heroes of the Soviet Union should perish, having done everything to save the Motherland,’ Soviet Malala said firmly. ‘The Party would never allow it.’
Big Ivan laughed: ‘On the contrary. The patriotic duty of a liquidator is, precisely, to liquidate himself, as your friend is now doing. The fewer witnesses there are to this catastrophe, then so much the better. That’s why our rulers fiddle while Chernobyl burns. Here we see the worst nuclear accident of our times, a deadly danger to millions, from Iceland to America and yet, to read our papers, you’d believe nothing has happened.’
‘That is not true,’ said Soviet Malala, seizing a copy of the newspaper Pravda from a nearby table. ‘Look at this paragraph on page three: “Small mishap at Chernobyl, now under control.”’
‘You are either a madman or a devil,’ Big Ivan told him. ‘The radioactive cloud from Reactor Number 4 — in the middle of which we ridiculous bio-robots worked so recently — is now wafting across the globe, poisoning whatever it touches.’
‘Ah, that goes to show the immense moral gulf between the US and the USSR,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘When a nuclear reactor leaked radioactivity into the atmosphere in New York a few years ago the authorities tracked the fallout in America meticulously, but they were blind to the damage in other countries. The USSR alone develops the peaceful atom and shares it with the whole world.’
‘At least the US plans to murder its enemies with its nuclear weapons,’ said Big Ivan, ‘but the Soviet Union kills its own citizens at Chernobyl and says nothing about it.’
Then he paid for his lunch from Jagdish’s wallet, handed the waitress a large tip, put his arm around her waist and they headed upstairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Soviet Malala followed him, but Ivan simply picked him up and threw him into the stairwell, saying as he did so, ‘I have a full belly, a head nicely addled with vodka, dollars in my pocket and I’m on my way to bed with a willing waitress: things I have prayed for all my life have come to me now in this ruined city.’
‘Courtesy of the good Jagdish.’ Soviet Malala spoke from the bottom of the stairwell.
‘He was better than good!’ Big Ivan roared. ‘He made a Russian happy! He was a saint!’ And he vanished into a bedroom with the willing waitress.
‘For heaven’s sake, get me a doctor!’ Jimfish begged.
But the joyous music of the May Day bands and the hubbub of happy children drowned his words and Jimfish passed out in the corner of the restaurant.
There he may have died, but luckily the waiters in the restaurant had alerted the KGB to the presence of two strangers, one of whom was black and the other too many different shades of colour to be safe. The black man, they reported, had been spreading all sorts of ridiculous lies about the Soviet Union.
When the police arrived and arrested him, Soviet protested his great love for the USSR, his reverence for Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Soviet Atoms for Peace. It was clear to everyone that this man understood nothing whatever about life in the Soviet Union and must be a foreign spy. So, indeed, was his pallid companion, except he seemed to know nothing at all about anything. The authorities decided that it made sense to shoot the black spy, since he was surely of far less importance than his paler partner. So it was that Soviet Malala was taken out into the town square, a firing party of soldiers from the May Day parade, very much the worse for vodka, was hastily assembled and, after several botched attempts, the poor philosopher was shot.