Good As Gone (27 page)

Finally, the man brushed past her into the house, while the young woman remained in front of us, arms folded over an ample chest.

“I am Darja Kovalev,” she said with no warmth whatsoever. An older woman materialized at her side. “And this is my mother, Olga.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, offering my hand to the mother.

From their reaction I thought I’d accidentally pulled out my Glock. The old woman took several steps backward while her daughter swatted my hand away.

“Never offer your hand over the threshold of someone’s home,” Darja scolded me. “It is very bad luck. You should not even say hello.”

As if to avoid an utter calamity, Darja quickly ushered us inside.

The home was humble, to say the least. Small, the furniture no doubt dating back to the Soviet era, maybe even back to Stalin.

It was late; indeed, both women appeared ready to turn in. Yet, before we could stop them, they were in the process of setting a table and starting the burners. Salami suddenly appeared, and what I was told were pickled mushrooms. Ana and I sat at the table as Olga reheated some beetroot soup—what I knew as
barszcz
—the fantasy food Ana had introduced me to back in Krakow. Not until the food began hitting the table did I realize I was famished.

I reached for a pickled mushroom and Ana immediately slapped my wrist. I looked up. The man had disappeared into the rear of the house and the women were busy with their backs turned to us.

“Not the mushrooms,” Ana whispered.

For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Then it hit me: contamination from Chernobyl. During the ill-fated train ride from Odessa to Kiev, I’d read in the guidebook that more than 80 percent of human radioactive contamination was caused by eating contaminated food. The primary hazard was in the soil rather than the air. Radiation was transferred from the soil to the plants, and the Gomel region suffered the worst contamination of all.

We were only 120 kilometers from the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, where the Chernobyl nuclear plant was located. Levels of radiation in this region continued to be alarming and would remain so well into the twenty-second century. The guidebook I’d read made it sound as though eating berries or mushrooms cultivated in the Gomel region were tantamount to swallowing a liter of drain cleaner while playing a heated game of Russian roulette.

I quietly thanked Ana and helped myself to a slice of salami instead.

The large man returned and set a fifth of vodka down hard on the table between us. He motioned to Darja, who promptly produced two tall shot glasses.

“My father, Vladislav, wishes you to drink with him,” Darja said directly to me.

I was about to demur when Ana poked me in the ribs and whispered, “It would be very bad manners to refuse. Drinking with someone is an act of friendship.”

“Of course,” I said, recalling a long-ago trip to Moscow to track down a fugitive from Brighton Beach. It took sharing a bottle of vodka with his cousin for me to capture him and return him to the Eastern District of New York, where he would later be convicted of twelve counts, including murder and racketeering. Before I left for Moscow, I’d read everything there was to read about Russian culture and customs, drinking being an important part of both.

So now, as Vladislav filled the shot glasses, I searched my mind for the unwritten rules. When he was through with the pour, I raised my glass and clinked it against his as he said,
“Za vstretchu!”

“To our get-together,” Ana explained, holding a glass of ice water to her lips.

I maintained eye contact with him and downed most of the shot in a single gulp. It was important not to allow your glass to touch the table again until it was empty. I finished off the last bit, then finally set it down. Before I could remove my hand from around the glass, Vladislav was already refilling it. Once a bottle was opened, I suddenly recalled, the bottle had to be drained dry. No exceptions.

“Za milyh dam!”
he said, clinking his glass against mine just as Darja took a seat at the table.

“To lovely ladies,” Ana explained.

I swallowed the vodka, fought the burn in the back of my throat.

As I chased the vodka with a few more slices of salami I listened to Ana make small talk with Darja.

“Your country is so beautiful,” Ana told her.

For the first time, Darja smiled. “Thank you. It is a difficult time in Belarus, but then, I think it is a difficult time everywhere.”

Vladislav shot his daughter a look.

Darja said, “He cannot speak English, my father. But he heard me say ‘Belarus’ and he feared I was talking politics.”

Talk of politics was generally avoided in the former Soviet Union, especially around strangers.

“Vashe zdorovie!”
Vladislav said, lifting his glass again.

“To your health,” Ana translated.

That’s ironic,
I thought as I fired another direct shot at my liver.

“Your home is beautiful,” Ana told Darja. “You live here with your parents?”

Affordable housing in the former Soviet Union was in short supply, forcing many young people to live with their parents well into their thirties. Even if they were married. Even if the couple had children. Which, as it turned out, was the case with Darja. Her husband was sleeping one off in their bedroom, their two children asleep in the small room opposite.

“Vipiem za lubov!”
Vladislav said with a roll of his eyes as Darja told Ana about her husband.

Ana turned to me as I downed another shot. “He said, ‘Let’s drink to love.’ But I think he was being sarcastic.”

“Yes, I caught the sarcasm,” I said. “Any way you can help us out with this bottle, Ana?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I do not like straight vodka.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Well, that makes two of us.”

Dizzy, I scanned the room for something to talk about, anything that would forestall the next toast. Through the walkway into the living room, I saw a square piece of black velvet hanging from the wall.

“Is there a Monet hiding behind that curtain?” I said.

Darja and Ana turned to look at it.

“It is a mirror behind that wall hanging,” Darja said.

“Is it broken?”

Darja shook her head. “We have suffered a death in the family,” she said calmly. “When a family member dies, it is necessary to cover all the mirrors in the house. The dead, their spirits linger for forty days. They cannot be seen by the naked eye, of course. But they may be sighted in any reflective surface. When it occurs, it can be very unsettling.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“I am so sorry you lost someone,” Ana said, glancing at Olga, who was still at the burners, cooking something. “Was it someone very close to you?”

Darja nodded her head slowly, dropping her eyes to the table.

“It was my daughter,” she said.

The air immediately seemed to be sucked through the windows, leaving us without oxygen. I inhaled deeply, suddenly on the verge of inexplicable panic.

Chapter 48

Elena was nine years old when she died at the end of the preceding month. She’d succumbed to complications from thyroid cancer, an unbelievably common disease in Belarus, particularly in the Gomel region, which had suffered the worst fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in the entire country. Levels of contamination continued to be dangerously high, even right here, in the air circulating in the room in which we sat. Thinking about it gave me the shivers, and I hoped we wouldn’t be here long enough to suffer any ill effects.

“I have had four children,” Darja said stoically. “Elena was my first. She was born healthy, which is very rare in our region. Only one out of ten infants born here are so lucky.”

“Because of Chernobyl,” Ana said.

Darja’s expression didn’t change. “Of course, Chernobyl.”

The world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred on a night in late April 1986, when reactor number 4 at the nuclear power plant was scheduled to be shut down for regular maintenance. Workers decided to use the opportunity to conduct an entirely unnecessary safety test. There were purportedly a number of contributing factors to the accident—design flaws, operator errors, flouted safety procedures—but whatever the cause, the result was unthinkable: nearly nine tons of radioactive material (the equivalent of more than ninety Hiroshimas) burst into the sky in a massive ball of fire, ultimately blowing north over all of Belarus and Ukraine. The fallout likely culminated in tens of thousands of deaths in the years and decades to follow, and caused an area the size of the state of New York to become unsafe for human habitation for the next five hundred years.

Because of Soviet silence, the fifty-three thousand residents of the nearby city of Pripyat were not evacuated for two full days following the disaster. Located within the deadly thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, Pripyat remains a ghost town even today.

But the most horrifying effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe were undoubtedly absorbed by the children of Belarus and northern Ukraine. Currently, only 15 to 20 percent of infants in the affected regions were born healthy, and even those children generally developed weaker immune systems and later contracted radiation-related diseases such as thyroid cancer.

The infant-mortality rate in Belarus was 300 percent higher than it was in all of Europe. Infants who survived birth were frequently afflicted with Down syndrome, chromosomal aberrations, and neural-tube defects. Indeed, congenital birth defects were incredibly common; in fact, such defects had increased 250 percent following Chernobyl. Congenital defects often affected the kidneys, lungs, and heart, and frequently required surgery, even organ transplants.

Presently, there were more than seven thousand children on the list for cardiac surgery. Doctors in Minsk had the know-how to treat most conditions, but not the money. Often not the organs.

“Since Elena was born healthy, my mother said we were blessed and we needed to have more children. The population of our country has steadily declined since the disaster. Soon, my mother warned, there would be no Belarusians left. We were obligated, she told us. So we got pregnant again. The second baby was a boy. He was stillborn, like so many other infants in Belarus.”

Ana held a hand to her chest. “I am so sorry,” she said.

“We had two more children, as you know. Polina and Margerita, both who are asleep in back.”

“And they’re healthy,” Ana said hopefully.

Darja shook her head. “No. The older girl, Margerita, was born with Down syndrome and a cleft palate. She, too, has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The other, Polina, she was born with a hole in her heart. So many children here are born with the condition that the doctors, they have a name for it—Chernobyl Heart.”

All of us fell silent.

Olga, who stood leaning against the kitchen counter, appeared to be crying, though other than her grandchildren’s names, I was certain she hadn’t understood a word her daughter said.

Vladislav stared motionlessly at the bottle of vodka, until he finally lifted it and poured himself a shot. He downed the shot without ceremony. And without inviting me, a slight for which I would be eternally grateful.

“My parents are angry with me,” Darja said. “Such things should not be spoken about in the presence of strangers.” She swallowed hard. “But I am tired of being so quiet.”

“And your husband?” Ana said. “What is his name?”

“Kirill.”

The moment she said the name, Vladislav spit on the floor.

Olga witnessed it and gave him hell for it.

He yelled back, pounding the table with his fist, knocking his shot glass to the floor, where it shattered.

I silently wished it were my shot glass that had fallen.

Darja continued as though nothing had happened.

“My father, he does not like my husband. Kirill is an alcoholic, like most husbands in Belarus—including my father. Both are depressed, neither have ever helped around the house. The only difference is that my husband fools around on me. Sometimes Kirill is so drunk, he brings the women to the house. This truly enrages my father.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

When Darja looked up at me, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. The shots of vodka had kicked in and I was already incapable of censoring myself.

“It is very common here,” Darja said defensively. “Men cheat on their wives.”

“They do so in Poland, too,” Ana threw in.

“In the States, too,” I said, not wanting to alienate myself at the table. “But they try to be more discreet about it.”

“How noble of them,” Darja said.

I wanted so badly to peel myself away from this conversation that I felt ready to do another shot with her father. But Vladislav was still busy yelling at Olga, now pounding both fists on the table so hard that he knocked over the bowl of beetroot soup. It, too, shattered on the floor and made one hell of an ugly mess.

Suddenly another voice entered the fray. A male mouthpiece shouting in Russian at the top of his lungs.

“Kirill?” Ana said quietly to Darja.

“Of course, Kirill.”

Darja said his name with the same acidity she’d used when saying the name Chernobyl.

The battle, meanwhile, continued as Vladislav leaped from his chair, knocking it over in the process.

Kirill, a thin, bearded man dressed in loose jeans and no shirt, had lurched into the room. He pointed a finger at Vladislav with one hand and intentionally knocked over a small vase with the other.

Vladislav bent over to pick up his chair, and I was sure the argument was over. But instead of setting it back down at the table, he lifted the chair over his head as though to swing it at his son-in-law.

Olga immediately intervened, gripping the chair legs from behind her husband.

Kirill took advantage of the opportunity and punched the old man in the stomach. The blow was so powerful, it knocked both of Darja’s parents down.

I’d already jumped up. So had Ana and Darja.

When Darja witnessed her parents fall in a heap, she moved to attack her husband. Calmly, Kirill turned, gripped her by the hair with his left, and nailed her in the face with his right.