Chernobyl

Chapter 19

Vremya, the nine o'clock television news broadcast, is a Soviet institution. It is watched by tens of millions of people every night, but not very attentively. Generally it is what would be called in America a "talking head" show; the real news is read by a man at a desk, briefly and unemotionally, and there is not a great deal of it. The only film clips are generally of collective farmers bringing in a record harvest, or shipyards launching a new icebreaker. Russians joke that one can always tell when the news comes on, because one hears through the thin apartment walls the sounds of neighbors walking about and flushing their toilets as they leave the television set after the night's film or sports event or concert.

In just that way, when the news came on that Monday night, Igor Didchuk got up to go to the kitchen for a cold drink of mineral water from the refrigerator, and Oksana would no doubt have done the same if she had not been occupied in finishing the last row of her knitting. The ballet on television that night had been the Bolshoi company itself, in a production called The Streets of Paris—nothing like La Boheme or Gaite Parisienne, but a sober, stirring dance drama about the French Commune of two centuries before. "But the dancing was beautiful," Oksana said to her husband as he returned.

"Of course," he said with pride. The Bolshoi was a Russian company, not Ukrainian, but Didchuk considered himself a truly internationalist Soviet man. In his view, the Bolshoi troupe was Soviet—and one day, just possibly, their own daughter, Lia, already getting solo parts in the dance academy where she attended school for two days of each week, might well be the Plisetskaya of the year 2000. Lia was nine, and already sound asleep in her "room" — actually, just an extension of the flat's central hall. Oksana's parents were rustling around the living-dining area which was also their bedroom, and it was, after all, time to go to sleep.

Didchuk paused to glance at the news broadcast when his wife said, "Yora? Did I tell you? That Bornets boy came in today with a temperature of thirty-eight, can you imagine?"

"No, you didn't mention it," he said.

"And when I made him go to the clinic, he came back with a note saying that the doctor was not in today. Called away on some emergency."

"I suppose," said Didchuk amiably, "that she is getting ready for May Day, like everyone else. What did you do?"

"What could I do? I couldn't send him home. His parents would both be at work. So I made him lie down in the teachers' lounge but, really, Yora, that isn't fair to the other teachers. And suppose I brought home some virus to our own family?"

"You look healthy enough to me," he said. "Well, let's go to bed." And he was reaching out for the knob on the television set when the announcer put down one sheet of paper, picked up another, and read, without change of expression: "There has been an accident at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine. People have been injured, and steps are being taken to restore the situation to normal."

There is a conversion table that Soviet people apply to government announcements of bad news. If the news is never broadcast but only a subject of rumor, then it is bad but bearable. If the event is publicly described as "minor," then it is serious. And if there is no measure assigned to it at all, then it calls for resorting to "the voices."

The only radio the Didchuks owned was not in the kitchen with the television set; it was in the other room, where the grandparents were preparing for bed. Didchuk knocked on the door and excused himself. "The radio," he said. "I think we should listen for a moment."

"At this hour?" his mother-in-law demanded, but when she heard about the news announcement, she said, "Yes, I understand now. That Mrs. Smin Saturday morning, it was clear that she was concealing something. But please, not too loud for the voices."

Didchuk didn't need to be told that. He turned on their Rekord 314 radio, the size of a baby's coffin, and waited patiently for the tubes to warm up. The volume he set only to a whisper. It is not exactly illegal to listen to the Voice of America and the other foreign broadcasts beamed into the USSR, but it is not something most citizens want to advertise.

There did not seem to be anything coming in from abroad in Russian, and most of the other foreign stations, of course, were jammed. All they could find was the broadcast from France. That, for reasons no one had ever explained, was almost never jammed; but it was also in French, and none of the Didchuks spoke that language.

But even they were able to pick a few phrases out of the rapid-fire announcements, and those included "deux milles de morts" and "«« catastrophe totale."

"But the Chernobyl power plant is more than a hundred kilometers away," Oksana protested, her face pale.

"Yes, that's true," her husband agreed somberly. "We are very fortunate to be so far. They say that radiation can be very dangerous, not only at once but over a period of many years. Cancers. Birth defects. In children, leukemia…"

And they looked at each other, and then into the hall, where Lia lay peacefully asleep, with her head on her fist and her lips gently smiling.