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The smell of stale cigarettes was the first thing Sansa noticed. Not out of place in a Kiev apartment block, but for some reason it was particularly noticeable—maybe because she couldn’t smell anything else, except a faint odor of disinfectant. Like a hospital.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “Sit wherever you’re comfortable. Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you,” she said. Quiet and polite, just as she’d been raised.
The man grunts. “Suit yourself.” He pulls a cup from his cabinet, pouring equal parts tea and vodka. He’s more than earned the right to it, she can tell that much; even though she knew next to nothing about this man, except one of his medals, his steps were heavy with the weight of duty. He looked old enough to be her father.
It started with his hair, thinning and greying unnaturally for his age. Weakness, fatigue; that might’ve all been combat stress. A lot of men who’d gone to Afghanistan aged young. The first time he had coughed up blood, he went to the doctor the next day. Then, he was referred to the hospital—a battery of tests, biopsies, blood work—before the results came back. Stage three cancer. “From smoking,” even though it wasn’t in his lungs.
Trudging over to the kitchen table, he sits down across from her. She nods, clicks on her tape recorder with a loud thunk.
“April 20th, 1996,” she begins. “Can you start by telling me about yourself?”
He sighs. “My name is Jon Snow. I have lived in Kiev my whole life. Komsomol, joined the Red Army at 18. I was a liquidator, at Chernobyl.”
Liquidator. That word that contained so much. So much pain and effort, service and sacrifice.
She swallows, her mouth suddenly dry. “Can you tell me about your work in the Zone?”
“Of course,” he begins, heavily. “I worked to clear the roof of Reactor Building Three.”
“The roof?”
Jon nods. “After the explosion, there was a bunch of debris on the roof of the neighboring reactor. It had to be cleared, or no one could work up there to build the Shelter Object. Too much radiation. The roof was in three sections—Katya, Nina, and Masha. I think Masha peaked at 12,000? Maybe 13,000 roentgens an hour? I asked a dosimetrist, but I don’t remember.” A drag on his cigarette. “That much radiation would kill you with about five minutes’ exposure.”
The other two roofs had been cleared already, old Lunokhod rovers taken out of storage and put to work. He could see on the TV footage, the sharp, boxy outlines of the robot that had tried to clear the third. Joker—supposedly it was West German, or maybe British. It had died up there quickly. Masha had a horrible kiss.
Sansa manages to keep her face neutral—this isn’t the first of these stories she’s heard. She already knew about the ones who died. She nods for him to continue.
“So, obviously, we couldn’t stay up there for very long. We worked in shifts lasting ninety seconds.”
“Ninety seconds?”
He nods again. “A minute and a half. You and three or four or five of your comrades would rush out onto the roof, pick up a block of graphite or a few shovelfuls of concrete, throw it back into the reactor, and come back in. And that was it—you were done.” His voice is hoarse; she can’t tell if it’s from health complications or grief.
The air up there was clear—too clear. Too bright. He can remember just smudges of the rest of his service, but every one of those ninety seconds were burned into his mind forever. Rushing out—every placement of his footsteps—the taste of metal in his mouth—labored breathing in his ears. The crunch of the dust going into his shovel, the arc it made as it was thrown over the side—don’t look! Do NOT look over the side—now another, a chunk of the graphite itself, muscles straining to lift it. Drops it by the edge and miraculously it rolls down into the maw of the dead reactor. He turns to retrieve another, the German police robot a flash of yellow in his peripheral vision, when the harsh ring of the bell sounds. Time’s up.
“That’s how it was supposed to work, anyway. But I…I wasn’t going to let someone else go up there, not if I could prevent it. I had already been burned up; no sense letting someone else die too, if I could still hold a shovel. So I found the cowards. There were a few; men who were too afraid to go up on the roof. I can’t blame them. I won’t judge them. None of us did; anyone could back out, because no one wanted someone unreliable at their back up there. All I did was ask for their dosimeter, and pinned it on my shirt instead of theirs…” With shaking, pale hands, he lifts his teacup to his lips. “It was my duty.”
Quietly, Sansa prompts him. “You all wore dosimeters?”
Another nod. “Yes. We had a little badge with some film on it—all of us, that is, not just us on the roof. When it hit twenty-five roentgen, we were sent home. If it hit twenty-six, our commander would be in trouble.”
“How much radiation were you exposed to?”
A wry smile. “Twenty-five roentgen.”
Slowly, it dawned on Sansa exactly what that meant. She felt dizzy.
Jon continues. Not unaware; she can see it in his eyes, the hand that reaches out briefly before retreating. But he continues anyway, and it brings her back to the present.
“I don’t know how many sorties I did, just that I was there at the end of it. I shook General Tarakanov’s hand…” He holds out a hand, smiling, still disbelieving after all these years. I serve the Soviet Union. “That last sortie was stupid. Raising the flag, like it was the Reichstag. Do you know it took them three or four tries to get up there? They tried landing a helicopter on that roof once it was cleared…” He breaks off and chuckles. “Eventually, they got three men up the vent stack and dropped the banner. It was stupid—senseless—an absolute waste of three men, but when I saw it…When I saw that red banner, I knew the job was done.”
After a moment, she clears her throat. “How did you come to be a liquidator?”
Jon smiles faintly, leans back. Fond memories of his service. “I was in the Red Army when the accident occurred. The army was who they called to work. Us, reservists, civilian conscripts. One day, we were sitting in the barracks, and our platoon commander came and told us we were going to Chernobyl.” Another drag. “And then it was onto a train, and then a truck, and when we dismounted, we were given dust masks and a billet and there we were.”
She thought for a moment—she had been in graduate school then. A sickening realization struck her.
“How old are you?”
His face falls. Eyes mist. He knows what that question means. “I’m 34 years old."