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In June, there are sunny days where all seems beautiful again in Pripyat. There are no birds, of course, since they started spraying. But the warmth is good and Valery walks the two miles between the plant and the hotel. He finds the cat about halfway there. It sits on a porch. It looks like cats do when they have been living with humans for some time, then lost for some time: its fur is unclean, it has a nick in one ear and one of its eyes closes smaller than the other; but it doesn't run away when Valery stops to look at it.
Two days later, it is there again, sitting on its porch. It is red. When Valery crouches to beckon it closer, it doesn't come. It meows softly. Maybe it's happy to see someone else that isn't a cat or a dog; maybe it misses humans; maybe it misses, somehow, the way things used to be, if it had any perception of that.
It does come when Valery brings it food. Valery has to place the sausage bits on the first steps of the porch, walk back to the street and then wait. The cat starts eating. There is no one here to share Valery's joy, except the two men in the car following him, about one hundred yards back. Valery doesn't hide his smile from them, even if he feels laughable, obvious, naive.
The cat is a she and lets Valery pet it now. What does radiation do to such a small body? Humans and felines are different, but size matters most. A man--sixty-five kilos, a cat--four kilos, this one--maybe three, Valery wagers. There are other things he needs to know: how close she was to the plant when the core exploded (very close, if this porch is hers)--has she been drinking rain water--was she outside when it happened.
Valery stops with the questions.
He finds a box in the deserted hotel's kitchen for her and brings her back to his room.
She is a very silent cat, does not ever make a sound; she does not sleep with him either, although she does stay in his bed once he wakes to go about. She plays with his pens and naps on his notebooks. He wonders if she was owned by a family, or a lone man like himself, or a student, or a grandmother.
"What's the name of your cat?"
Valery looks up from their maps of block 4. The mild surprise that Boris knows about her fades quickly into oh well. Nothing is quite private, but one can only hope there are some things that the KGB might just not immediately care about. He smirks to himself at the thought, and it comes out clumsy, like he's making fun of Boris, and Boris frowns, and Valery is once again reminded of what odd pair they are. But he's fine with that now. Boris Shcherbina, it turns out, is the least horrible thing on a scale of horrible things ranging in hell, nightmares and lies tall like the twisting ionized fire shooting into the skies.
"Natasha," he says.
Boris doesn't say, You cannot keep it. They'll come for it. We've scheduled animal control, you know that. Nor It's dangerous, it'll kill you. Yes, Valery knows. Boris also doesn't ask if Natasha is sick. She is--in the same way they all are here; it is not anything that can be perceived, when it can be seen it is too late. The damage is done.
"She a good pet?"
Grinning, Valery rubs his neck. "She tried to claw her way up my pant leg this morning." He points at his half-eaten lunch. "She loves the sausage."
Boris nods gravely. From that moment on, he leaves a share of his lunch aside.
Natasha reminds Valery of his home cat, Sasha. Except that Sasha is energetic, friendly, and always seems occupied with some secret, crucial feline business. Natasha is calm and dignified, like a queen who waits for her end, peacefully; it's like boredom with a touch of grace. They'll never meet, but Valery is certain that Natasha and Sasha would have been good together.
August comes in hot and damp. Boris has asked Valery if they could open the windows of their work trailer--Valery threw his arms up and said, "No. Yes. Go ahead."
They work in their shirtsleeves. Boris learns about graphite. All he knew about it is that it was black, heavy and that it was everywhere around block 4. Now he knows how graphite is a kind of carbon synthetized from pitch and tar, that the neutrons are normally not absorbed by it ("normally... not when it is superheated, as this one here was"), that the graphite caught fire during fission, caused the explosion, caused the fire, and also that it can dissolve a man's flesh in seconds.
But today Boris learns nothing. He pries the words from Valery one at a time.
"What is it?" he asks, when Valery fails to answer a question for the third time.
"Nothing."
Boris blinks slowly.
Valery gives up. "Natashka vomited this morning." He must have been crying. Boris can see it clearly now that he takes off his glasses.
He sighs. You knew the cat was dying. We're dying. Countless men will die. He says, "Cats throw up all the time. Might be nothing." He sets his pen down. "There was a cat when I was a boy. He ate grass to make himself sick. Cats do that sometimes."
"It's for digestion. To purge their stomachs and evacuate the hair."
"No grass for Natashka?"
Valery shakes his head.
He goes to smoke outside. When he comes back his eyes are less red, but Boris sees through men. He always has and he's good at it.
Natashka does not make it to September.
Boris finds Valery in the lobby with a glass of vodka he hasn't touched and a cigarette he isn't smoking.
They make the call from Boris's phoneline. "We need a shovel. Yes, a shovel. What do you care what for? A damn shovel. To dig a grave for a cat. Yes, a fucking cat."
Valery brings Boris to his room. The cat is bundled away, wrapped into one of Valery's shirts, the sleeves folded over her body, like it's holding her. Boris has never even seen her, he realizes, when he settles her into the box where she slept on a rugged brown pillow.
"What kind was it?"
"Red. A tabby."
The Comrade soldier holding the shovel looks at the both of them--Boris holding the box, Valery marching like a ghost--as if they'd just told him they'd be going for a ride to the moon.
They walk for a while in Pripyat's streets. The lights are out and it is night. Valery stumbles and catches himself on Boris's arm.
It has been thirty minutes. "Are we far enough?"
"Never," Valery says. "And we'd need cement. Her body must be radioactive."
"Our bodies must be radioactive. The ground is radioactive."
"To an extent," Valery admits.
Boris sets down the box on a patch of grass near a playground.
He digs until his back hurts, then Valery puts out his cigarette and finishes. The hole is a meter in depth. They fill it with soft, warm, poisonous earth.
They stand motionless in front of the unmarked grave. Valery smokes. He has cried while he was digging; not sobbing, just crying. He didn't care that Boris was watching.
The only attendance to this funeral is them and their KGB escort. It is an unfair funeral, an unfair death, an unfair everything.
"We should say something," Boris says.
Valery says no.
"If we don't say anything, we'll just be two old men crying about a cat."
"I'm the only one who's crying," Valery says. "And Natashka is not a ridiculous thing to cry about. She's not anymore ridiculous than everybody else who'll die--who has died--here. It's all made of atoms, after all, you know? All of this. Cat, us, the ground, the playground, the trees, the hotel, the radiation, the bullets. It's all the same thing. It's all dying."
"Look at us, Valera. Made of invisible bullets and crying about a cat."
"We're not made of bullets-"
"You're right. We're made of lies. They're invisible and they kill too."
Before they split on their way to their rooms, Boris says that they should drink to Natashka. Valery has the appearance of a man who is exhausted with his grief, the grief of all mankind, and Boris cannot think of something else to say or do.
They get properly drunk. It's not the first time. They've been drinking often enough together now that they have learned what kind of drunk they are. Valery becomes friendly and energetic; he talks a lot, always of the same things--boron, neutrons, reactors, tanks, conductors. When Boris is drunk, he is calm in a dignified way. He grows cozy and warm. So he listens to Valery.