Chernobyl

Chapter 27

Smin's mother, Aftasia Smin, is four feet ten inches tall and weighs less than ninety pounds. At one time she was taller, though not much. Then old hunger and later osteoporosis knocked a few inches off her height.

She is eighty-six years old — the same age as the century, she says. Aftasia celebrates her birthday on the first of the year. That is really only a guess, since it was not the custom in the shted at the turn of the century to pay much attention to recording the birth of Jewish female babies.

Although she was never very big, she carried a rifle in the Civil War from 1918 until, seven months pregnant with Simyon, she left her husband to pursue the last of the White forces in the Ukraine. Aftasia returned to the shtetl to give birth. She still has a puckered scar, very high on the inside of her right thigh, where a bullet from the Czech legion put her out of action for two cold, painful, hungry months. The fiery young revolutionary husband she had left the shtetl to marry was later captured by Kolchak's forces. He was executed, after some barbaric questioning, the week after Simyon was born. Simyon was a year old before Aftasia learned that her husband was dead. She never found out where his body was buried.

What Aftasia Smin represented to her downstairs neighbor, Oksana Didchuk, was hard to define. To Oksana, the frail old woman was a bit of a conundrum, and a rather worrying one sometimes. There were some very good and neighborly things about Aftasia Smin. She was a generous acquaintance who always had something for the Didchuks' little girl on New Year's Day, and not just a chocolate bar or a kerchief but even things like a pretty, flaxen-haired doll from the Children's World store in Moscow, or even wonderful sugared almonds that had come all the way from Paris. Nor was it only the daughter who benefited from Aftasia's largesse. Let Oksana happen to mention that she had been unable to find plastic hair curlers in the store, say, and old Aftasia was likely to turn up the next day with a box of them, saying that her son had brought them back from a trip to the West, like the sugared almonds, and after all what did an old woman like herself want with such things?

On the other hand, there were things about Aftasia Smin that were troubling to her neighbors from the floor below. It was not simply that Aftasia appeared to be, in some sense, Jewish. There was nothing really wrong with being Jewish, provided you didn't actually become religious about it. Aftasia had never shown any signs of observing the Saturday Sabbath or of creeping off to Kiev's only functioning synagogue. (Though it was true that the Didchuks had been quite shocked to find that the meal she had invited them to on April 25th had been taken by the Americans to have some ritual significance in the yid faith.)

It was certainly not disturbing that Aftasia was an Old Bolshevik. Actually, it was quite an honor to know such a person. She had personally known some of the great heroes of the Revolution! She still knew some of their sons and grandsons, it seemed. But really, the Didchuks had often asked each other, if she is what she is, why does she live as she does?

To that the Didchuks had no answer. But when she asked them for any sort of favor, to use their telephone (but why didn't the woman have one of her own?), or to translate for those fascinating American cousins, the Didchuks were happy to oblige. And when she knocked on their door this worrying May morning, with all of Kiev in an uproar, they were downcast to be unable to agree at once. "But, you see," Oksana

Didchuk said sadly, "today they are sending all the children away from Kiev for a bit — purely as a precaution, of course. We would certainly be glad to help you get your American cousins to the airport, but we must get our own daughter to the train station. Also I must go to the market to buy some food for her to take on the train. Also there is some mixup with her papers for the trip, so really my husband and I should go to the station now to straighten it out."

But Aftasia Smin said crisply, "Leave that to me, please. My cousins don't leave until this afternoon. There's plenty of time to get to the station. To buy food first? Why not? If you will let me use your telephone, I'll simply have the car come a bit early and we'll go to the Rye Market together."

And so Oksana Didchuk found herself in the backseat of a handsome new Volga, with Aftasia Smin perched in front, next to the driver, ordering him to take them to the market and wait while they made their purchases. It was certainly a great improvement over standing in line for a bus, especially on this particular Wednesday, when everybody in Kiev seemed to be trying to get somewhere else. The radio and television broadcasts had been very specific. The city was not being evacuated; only foolish people and rumormongers would say such things. It was only that on the very remote chance that the levels of radiation might rise, it would be better for the young children, who were most at risk from such things, to be somewhere else. So there was no reason for anyone to be afraid.

It was astonishing, however, to see how many of the people on the street looked that way anyway.

Even the old Rye Market looked strange that morning. Ordinarily the vendors would not only fill the hall but overflow into the streets outside, on so beautiful a spring day, with all the fruits and vegetables coming in from all the private plots around Kiev. Not today.

Looking down on the trading floor from the balcony, Oksana Didchuk saw gaps in the usually shoulder-to-shoulder line of white-capped farm women standing before their wares. In the aisles were plenty of shoppers, but they didn't seem to be buying much. More than once Oksana saw a customer pick up a couple of tomatoes or a clump of beets, peer closely at them, even sniff them and then reluctantly put them back.

"Well, then," said Aftasia Smin. "What is it you wish to buy?" She listened courteously while the mother explained what she wanted, and then corrected her plans. "Cheese, yes, but an old one — from milk taken before the accident. And, all right, a sausage, and bread, of course. And a herring, I think. There is nothing wrong with the oceans yet, at least!"

And when Oksana tarried before the slabs of snow-white pork fat and the naked-looking skinned rabbits, thinking of the supper she would have to make for her husband and parents that night, Aftasia vetoed those too. "Sausage again, if you please — and again an old one. Inspected? Yes, of course they are inspected— " For they could not have missed the long lines of vendors waiting their turns to put their strawberries and fresh hams under the radiation detectors so they could get a permit to sell them if they passed. "But if I were to stay in Kiev, I would not buy fresh meat just yet. Let the situation settle down a little."

"Then you're leaving Kiev?" Oksana ventured.

The old lady smiled at her. "Wouldn't you? I don't think that anyone named Smin will be popular in Kiev just now."

But, popular or not, Aftasia Smin still had friends. As she demonstrated to the Didchuks. They set off for the railroad station in good time, Aftasia Smin up front with the driver to give orders, the elder Didchuks in back with their daughter, and their daughter's boxes, bags, and paper-wrapped food parcels, squeezed between them.

The last hundred meters were the slowest, because the militiamen had roped off the square in front of the train station. The approaches were jammed. Oksana Didchuk made a faint worried sound as she saw the red numbers on the digital clock above the station. "But the train is to leave in an hour," she said.

Aftasia turned to her; she was so tiny she had to lift herself to peer over the back of the seat. "It won't leave in an hour," she said. "Look, the trains are just coming in now." So they were; the Didchuks could see the long trains snaking slowly in to the platforms beside the station.

Oksana made another worried sound, but she muffled it. The regular night trains between Kiev and Moscow were streamlined, modern cars built in East Germany, proudly lettered with the names of the cities they connected. The ones now creeping in were something quite different. These extra trains to Moscow were made up in a hurry, of cars taken from repair shops and sidings, hard class and soft, dilapidated and spanking new, and for every space on the trains there were two people who wanted to hoard them.

The special trains were meant to carry children under ten away from the radioactive cloud that threatened Kiev, but every ten-year-old child had parents, older siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts. Nearly every one of them wished they, too, could get on that train for Moscow and air that did not threaten lingering death. Some tried.

Some, on that Wednesday in Kiev, were trying all sorts of strange things. It was said that potassium iodide capsules saturate the thyroid gland with the element, and so would prevent the radioactive iodine from entering into the body and breeding a cancer in the throat. It was said that Georgian wine immunized one against radiation, or that vodka did; or that a cocktail of equal parts of vodka and turpentine did, or the white of egg, or even more repulsive substances. The first of those rumors happened to be quite true, and, as in Poland, potassium iodide vanished from the apothecaries overnight. The others were not, but that didn't keep people from trying them.

Many of the people in the terminal were all but reeling drunk, there were even one or two glassy-eyed children, and a few wound up in hospitals with assorted poisonings. Everyone was wearing a hat. Many of the children were sweating in winter clothes on this hot May morning, because everyone had been advised to stay bundled up whenever they were out in the open. Those near the doors of the station were constantly shouting at the people milling in and out to close them, shut them tight, keep them closed, to keep the outside air with its secret burden of sickness from poisoning the hot, sweaty, unwell air of the terminal.

When the driver had found a place to put the car, Aftasia ordered the Didchuks: "Wait here." She was gone nearly an hour, but when she came back she was triumphantly waving a boarding pass that let the Didchuk child into one of the newest cars on the train. Such passes were not for everyone. But not everyone had a Party card originally issued in 1916, and even an old woman had friends of friends who could do a favor. Even now.

When the child was settled, surrounded by her boxes and neat little traveling bag and sausage and bread for the long ride, the Didchuks thanked Aftasia. Businesslike, she brushed their thanks aside. "You can do me a favor in return if you will," she said. "I must take my American relatives to the airport. If you will come with me to translate, Didchuk, I am sure your wife can stay here with the child until the train leaves."

"To translate?" Didchuk asked. "But surely at the airport people will speak English—"

"I want to show my cousins something first," said Aftasia harshly. "If it is not too much of a bother?"

Of course it was not too much of a bother, though it was certainly not no bother at all, either; Didchuk would really have preferred to stay with his wife on the platform, waving and smiling at their daughter as needed until at last the train pulled out. Aftasia would not be denied. So the two of them got back in the car, its windows shut tight (as all windows were ordered to be) against the outside air, and the driver took them through the crowded streets to the hotel.

The Garfields were waiting just inside the door, guarding their pretty pale blue matched luggage from California. "A moment," said Aftasia, and got out to explain to the hotel porter that (if he would not mind) he should send the Gar-fields' luggage to the airport on the Intourist bus, since there was no room in the car for all of it. He, too, agreed not to mind, or not to mind much, and Aftasia ordered the Americans politely to hurry into the car. "But can't we have the windows open, at least?" Candace Garfield asked, and when Didchuk translated the driver exploded:

"Of course not! We have been told to keep out the air as much as possible and it is, after all, only May! We will be quite comfortable in here if no one smokes. If," he added, glancing at Aftasia Smin, "it is really necessary to make this side trip instead of going directly to the airport."

"It is necessary," Aftasia said flatly. When the driver had surrendered, the old woman began to engage her American cousins in a polite conversation through the teacher. It was wonderful, she said, that they had had a chance to meet, after all. She hoped that they had not been too frightened with this difficulty of her son's power plant. They would be all right, she was sure, because they had been exposed to whatever it was for no more than a few days. It was perhaps more dangerous for those who must remain in the Ukraine, but in just a few hours they would be in Moscow, and then the next day on their way to — where were they going first? Paris? Ah, how wonderful! She had always dreamed of seeing Paris — and, oh yes, especially of California, which (she said) she had always thought of as a sort of combination of Yalta, Kiev, and heaven.

With the snail pace of polite conversation relayed through an interpreter, it took half an hour for all these pleasantries to be exchanged, while the car crossed the Dnieper bridge, snaked through the traffic, and drove along the streets of the suburbs.

Aftasia fell silent, watching the streets they passed, and Didchuk took up the burden of conversation for himself. "This part of Kiev," he said proudly, "was only open countryside as recently as the war — did you manage to see our Museum of the Great Patriotic War while you were in Kiev? Yes? Then you know that there was much fighting around here. Now it is all very nice homes, as you see. The people who live here have the bus or the Metro, and in the morning it's twenty minutes and they're at work." He glanced ahead, and frowned slightly. "This particular area," he mentioned diffidently, "was in fact quite famous, in a way.. . Excuse me," he said abruptly, and leaned forward to talk to Aftasia.

Candace Garfield looked around. They were passing a tall television tower, surrounded by nine-story apartment buildings. "I don't see anything that looks famous," she told her husband. "Unless it's that little park up there on the right."

Her husband was dabbing sweat off his brow. "What I'd like to see," he said, "is an airplane."

"Think of Paris," his wife said good-naturedly. "Paris in the springtime? The sidewalk cafes?"

"Those long, romantic evenings," Garfield said, perking up. "Dinner in our room, with plenty of wine—"

"Down, boy," his wife commanded, as Didchuk sank back and smiled nervously at them.

"This is the place," he said. "Mrs. Smin asks me to ask you if you have ever heard of Babi Yar?"

"Well, of course we've heard of Babi Yar," said Garfield, and his wife, concentrating, added, "I think so. During the war, wasn't it?"

"Yes, exactly. During the war. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a very famous poem about it, and there has been music, books, all sorts of things about Babi Yar," Didchuk confirmed. He seemed ill-at-ease, but waved toward the park. "Do you see the monument there? It is quite beautiful, don't you think? Many people come here to pay their respects, even leaving flowers— but," he added sadly, "Mrs. Smin does not wish to stop here. Still, you can get quite a good look at it as we go by."

By craning their necks, the Garfields could see a statuary group on a heroic scale. From directly in front it was only a crowd of stone figures, packed tighdy together like subway riders, with a mother holding her child despairingly aloft. Then, as the car moved slowly along, Candace said, "What are they doing? It looks like the ones in back are falling into the valley there."

"That's it," Didchuk agreed. "They are falling into that ravine. I thought we would stop there, by the scientific institute, so that we, too, could pay our respects. But Mrs. Smin wants to go just a little farther — ah, yes, we are stopping here. She says this is the real Babi Yar. She says she does not care much for the monument," he finished unhappily.

The car stopped. The teacher looked at Aftasia Smin for instructions, then shrugged and opened the door. "Mrs. Smin would like us to get out and look around here."

"I thought she was afraid of radiation or something," Garfield said doubtfully.

"She is not," the teacher said, and trailed the old woman meekly up a grassy slope. Candace Garfield followed with her husband, perplexed. "I don't have much film left," Candace fretted, taking her camera off her shoulder.

"Please," said Didchuk hastily, glancing back. "It would be better not to take any pictures. Because of the television tower. A transmission tower, after all, is a legitimate military objective in case of war, and such things may not be photographed."

"Well, I'll just take a picture of the apartments, then."

"Please," he said abjectly, looking at the cars whizzing by along the road as though he expected a troop of soldiers to leap out and arrest them.

Aftasia stopped at the crest, looking out over the little valley. Then she turned and spoke rapidly to Didchuk, who translated. "In September of 1941," he said, "Hitler decided to put off taking Moscow for a few weeks while he conquered the Ukraine. He ordered his troops to take the city of Kiev. Stalin ordered the Red Army to hold it. Hitler won. His armies passed to the north and the south of the city, then they joined together. Four Soviet armies were surrounded, more than half a million men. Most of them were killed or captured, and the Germans entered Kiev."

Aftasia was listening patiently to the English translation. When Didchuk paused and looked inquiringly at her, she thrust a hand out toward the city and spoke in rapid Russian. The teacher flinched and said something, but she shook her head firmly, gesturing him to go on.

"Mrs. Smin says to tell you that when the Nazis occupied Kiev, many ill-informed Ukrainians welcomed them. They even—" He hesitated, then said miserably, "They said things like, well, like, forgive me, 'Thank God we are free of the Bolsheviks' and 'Now we can worship God again!' Well, it is true, though perhaps there were not as many people like that as Mrs. Smin suggests." Aftasia rattled on. Didchuk nodded and relayed the message: "So when the German officers arrived, some Kiev people, even leaders, even Party members, came out to greet them with the traditional gifts of bread and salt, to show they were welcome. The Germans only laughed. Then they got serious. They stole everything, Mrs. Garfield, even the pots and pans from the people's kitchens."

He paused for the next installment. "Some Ukrainians even went to work for the Germans. Not simply as farmers or that sort of thing, you understand. As their allies against the Soviet Union. There were even Ukrainians who acted as police for the Germans. There were some — there was a man named Stepan Bandera, another named Melnik, others — some who led bands of guerrillas even before the Germans occupied the city, attacking the rear of the Red Army even while they were fighting against the invaders. They even wanted to join with the Germans to form a Vlasovite Army—"

"A what?" Garfield asked, frowning.

Didchuk seemed reluctant to answer. "Well, it was not only Ukrainians who became traitors; there was a Russian named Vlasov, a famous general; he was captured, and then he formed an army of Soviet soldiers who actually fought on the German side. But Mrs. Smin asks me to tell you about the Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians. When the Red Army liberated Kiev in 1944 they found posters — I'm sorry to say, Ukrainian posters — pictures of people tearing down the hammer and sickle, with slogans like 'Down with the Bolsheviks' and even, excuse me, 'None will cease to fight while our Ukraine is enslaved by the Communists.'" He was sweating now. He gave Aftasia an imploring glance, but she rattled on and doggedly he translated.

"The Ukrainians, of course, were fools. The Germans starved them and enslaved them and shot them. But some of them still tried to lick the boots of the Nazis. Especially about the Jews, because — please, I am just saying what she tells me, it is not true. Altogether. Because the Ukrainians hated the Jews as much as Hitler did. (But only a few of them, believe me!) The Ukrainian Nazi-lovers helped the Germans round up the Jews in the Ukraine. They robbed them, they stripped them, they put them into the death cars that went to the concentration camps.

"But that was not fast enough for them. So then, on September twenty-eighth, the Germans posted orders all around Kiev to say that all Yids — excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, that is the word Mrs. Smin says was in the orders — must report the next day with warm clothing and all their valuables." There was a single sentence from Aftasia. "She says, 'I did not report.' "

"Well, of course she didn't," Garfield put in, scowling. "By then everybody knew that when the Jews were ordered to report, it meant the concentration camps."

Didchuk translated, then listened as Aftasia Smin, shaking her head vigorously, spoke in angry tones. "She says," he said uncertainly, "that they did not know what that meant. She says" — he glanced about apprehensively—"that because of the, ah, the — what can one call it? — because, that is, of the special relationship that existed at that time between the Soviet Union and the German nation — just before the invasion, that is—"

"Ah," said Garfield, understanding. "The Hitler-Stalin pact."

Didchuk flinched. "Yes, exactly," he said weakly. "The, ah, pact of nonaggression. At any rate, she says that for that reason nothing was known in the Soviet Union of German anti-Semitism. It had not been reported."

"For Christ's sake! How could they not know?"

Didchuk said obstinately, "I was not born then, Mr. Garfield. It is Mrs. Smin who says that even the Jews didn't know, and I suppose she is right. So all the Jews reported as they were told, almost all, and the Ukrainian Nazi police and the SS troops rounded them up and marched them out here. To this place. Babi Yar."

Garfield glanced around with a puzzled expression. "I heard of Babi Yar, sure, who hasn't? But I thought it was, like, a valley, way out in the country."

"At one time it was a valley, Mr. Garfield. It has been filled in so this road could be built, and then the city grew to take it in. But this is Babi Yar, yes, and they were all taken here. Men and women. Grandmothers. Little children. Even babies in arms. And they were made to strip naked, a few dozen at a time. And then the Germans shot them, and buried them, right here in this valley. You are looking, Mrs. Smin says, at one hundred thousand dead Jews." He stole a quick glance at Aftasia, and added, almost in a whisper, "I do not think it is quite that many, perhaps."

"My God," said Candace, clutching her husband's arm. "That's unbelievable."

"Yes, exactly," Didchuk said quickly. "It could not have been a hundred thousand of just Jews. Everyone knows there were also Party members, hostages, gypsies — oh, the gypsies were hunted quite as much as the Jews, though, of course, there weren't as many of them. And, as Mrs. Smin asks me to tell you, the Jews who failed to report were hunted down. Not just by the Germans. They were chased by Russians and Ukrainians as well because, you see, if someone reported a hidden Jew, he was granted the right to take what he liked from the Jew's belongings."

He glanced at Aftasia Smin almost hopefully, as though he thought his work over. His face fell as she went on.

"Well," he sighed, "there is more she wants me to say to you. Later, when the heroic Soviet armies counterattacked and were in the process of driving the Hitlerites out of our land, the Germans got scared. They did not want all those bodies found. So they captured some more prisoners, and forced them to dig up as many of the bodies as they could." He wrinkled his nose unhappily. "They had been buried for several years, you understand. They were quite decayed, of course. Often, they fell apart. Then the Germans made their prisoners take down the headstones from a Jewish cemetery that was here — it was where the television station is now, Mrs. Smin says — and put the stones together to make big ovens. And in those ovens they burned the bodies. With wood they cut from the forests that were around here then. A layer of logs, a layer of Jews, and they burned them all."

As he paused, Aftasia said something in a somber tone. "Yes, yes," Didchuk said impatiently. "She wants me to be sure to tell you this part, although it is not a pleasant subject. She says to tell you that after the burning, the Germans took the ashes and the bones. They crushed them, and spread them on the farms. She says that this made the cabbages grow very well. She says that since then she does not care to eat cabbage."

They were all silent for a moment, even Aftasia. The Garfields peered down the length of the green park toward the distant monument, but there was nothing for them to say. The cars humming by on the roadway, the handsome apartment buildings, the tall television tower on the horizon, seemed to contradict the horror of the story of Babi Yar.

Finally Candace ventured, "I don't see why she didn't want us to stop at the monument."

"One moment," Didchuk said politely, and exchanged a few words with Aftasia. "She says the monument is all very well, but it comes a bit late. It was erected only eight years ago, and the plaque does not even mention Jews. That is what she says," he finished, his voice reedy with strain. "May I tell Mrs. Smin that you have understood what I have been telling you?"

"Damn right we have," said Garfield, shaking his head.

Aftasia rattled another sentence, and Didchuk translated. "In that way, Mrs. Smin says, we Soviet people learned not to trust foreigners. We discovered that the Germans were not interested in — she says, in 'liberating' us. They did not come to do us good. They were thieves, brigands, rapists; they were murderers."

Aftasia nodded and added a sentence more. Didchuk hung his head as he translated. "And we Jews, she says — I am speaking as Mrs. Smin says, you understand; I am not myself Jewish — we Jews learned not to trust even our neighbors."