H
E HAD BEEN TRAVELING FOR MONTHS, THROUGH SOUTHERN
A
SIA
then down to Australia—filming its cities and frontier towns. Finally wearying of crowds, he headed out to the desert, driving for days, the sun so white-hot it threatened to blister his eyeballs. He drove with wet rags over his mouth until he reached Alice Springs, a makeshift town in the dead red heart of the Outback.
There he took up with Aborigine trackers who lived in their campsites outside Alice. Most days before dawn, they left to hunt game—goanna lizards, even kangaroo. Then, in the heat of the day, they lazed in the shade of acacia trees, eating witchetty grub and honeyants. At night, the incredible heat stepped back, so the sky seemed a great black belly of cold, and the trackers sat at their campfires drinking and laughing at jokes Nikolai never caught on to.
He didn’t mind. He played with their dingoes and listened to their deep melodic voices and found their musty odor comforting. Their faces were old and wise, their fingers extremely long and black, making their gestures graceful as they spoke of their history, how carbon-dated paintings had proven their claims that Aboriginal ancestors had walked this land for forty thousand years.
Nikolai forgot about moving on. A languidness overtook him, a feeling he had not known since early childhood. There was nothing extra here, nothing hindered them. At night, the stars were close enough to freeze their cheeks; the moon so huge they saw its craters clear enough to name them. Here was humor, conversation, food, and warmth. A
place where the arc was perfect, where human beings were generous to one another with no motive. He felt absolved, at peace. Weeks passed. He did not even lift his camera.
I
T WAS DUSK WHEN, RATHER DREAMILY, ONE OF THE TRACKERS
leaned back and flipped on his transistor. The static sounded brilliant in the hush, then the remnants of a broadcast. A word repeated and repeated.
“Chernobyl … Chernobyl …”
The Aborigines sat up. They stared at the radio, listening, then turned to Nikolai. Hearing the news, he fell silent. When he woke in the morning, they were gone, their saucepans, dingoes, everything. They had not even said good-bye. When he stopped for gas in Alice, the attendant heard his accent and narrowed his eyes.
“Well, mate, looks like your country’s bent on blowing itself up. Probably poisoned the atmosphere for good.”
He went to a bar looking for his friends; the owner shook his head. “You won’t find any Abos now. Gone into hiding. Happens every time they hear that word ‘radiation.’ ”
He explained to Nikolai how Aborigines had been poisoned back in the 1950s and ’60s when the British were testing atomic bombs in the deserts of Australia.
“No one warned them. Whole tribes of Abos out there going ‘walkabout’ in that filthy toxic fallout. Thousands went blind, or slowly died … set off a whole new generation of mutations. That stuff is still in their genes.”
Everywhere he went, the talk was of Chernobyl. And everywhere, he encountered a new word.
Radiophobia
. Fear of radiation. As a Russian, he was no longer welcome anywhere, and so he went home to a government in shreds.
I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY TO SLIP OVER BORDERS, TO SLIP PAST
security and film Chernobyl’s aftermath—contaminated villages, the unnumbered dead, and dying. But Nikolai was interested in the larger canvas, wanting to record how Russian peasants had, for decades, generations, been sacrificed in the name of progress. He suspected that the real tragedy was in the provinces where they still lived in medieval squalor, vast stretches of land now desolate, abandoned. Since the time
of the Tsars, their history was unchanged. Enslavement, starvation. Stalin had only made it worse. How, he wondered, would the fall of Communism affect them? Would it touch their lives at all?
He had learned of two places said to be the most hazardous in all of Russia, both located in the vast region of Kazakhstan, far southeast of Moscow, bordered on the west by the Caspian Sea and on the east by China and Mongolia. A state compromised of one million square miles of steppes, deserts, and mountains rich in natural resources.
Nikolai flew south, crossing the border into Kazakhstan, where he traveled to the town of Muslyumovo on the Techa River. A town that seemed composed of mud, it stood fifty miles downstream from a once-secret complex named Chelyabinsk-65, a producer of weapons-grade plutonium.
For decades, workers at the complex had poured wastes containing millions of curies of radioactivity into the Techa River—so that even now riverbanks and fields were still alive with long-lived cesium and strontium. And for decades, people had swum with their children in the river. From the Techa, they had irrigated their fields and taken their drinking water while scientists studied them and told them nothing.
A second town, Oskemen, most eastern city of Kazakhstan, was just southeast of a nuclear weapons test field called Semipalatinsk. Since the 1950s, almost five hundred nuclear bombs had been tested there, and fallout from these bombs had rained down on the people. So many tests, and so many accidents, land surrounding the town for five hundred miles was a moonscape, uninhabitable perhaps forever. For three decades people were exposed, their children exposed. Scientists had monitored them, watching them suffer and die.
Nikolai would not be able to distinguish in his memory one town from the other. Each town a living bouquet of horrors. One group of children seemed intelligent, coherent, but where their eyes should have been were pouches of flesh hanging from their brows. Their spines had not developed; they could only squat.
“I’m fifteen,” a boy told him. “I have been asking to be put to sleep since I was ten. But they would only do that if I was a cretin.”
And there were cretins, thousands. In decrepit clinics in each town, doctors dragged him from ward to ward pointing to children whose conditions they had no names for.
“Our next generation. A brand-new species.”
He aimed his camera, but each day less of him emerged from behind it. He traveled back and forth between those towns for months, and
everywhere he encountered “funny dust,” the air and soil still alive with contaminants.
“It’s like pollen covering fields and livestock,” a doctor explained. “It covers humans and their food. Open your mouth—do you feel it on your tongue? Look, how I sneeze it into my hands!”
When he could not bear to film the children anymore, Nikolai filmed the ravaged faces of the old. They allowed him, wanting the world to know. Finally, exhausted and depressed, he went back to Moscow.
Alone in his shabby room, he lost himself again in mathematics, brooding over the theories of Descartes and that old intuitionist, Poincaré. He spent whole evenings dwelling on Möbius’s theory on mathematical ability, debating out loud with himself. Were most abstract ideas developed through mathematical reasoning? Or word reasoning? Did Helmholtz’s rest hypothesis still hold up?
Math lifted him out of a world that seemed to be dying. For him, it was human reason in its highest form. He felt only great music could approach it. In the years at university, he had come to love Mozart, Bach, and that shy, unshined-on genius, Satie, whose compostions he felt were like math—each note pure, unhurried. Music in the background calmed him down, helped him focus and root out certain mathematical equations. One seemed to spill into the other.
But always he was haunted by the children he had seen. The “new species” that doctors did not have a name for.
This is what my country has come to
. He did not leave his room for weeks. Finally, an old “roofer” friend tracked him down, saw what shape he was in, and dragged him to the Moscow Circus.
N
IKOLAI WOULD ALWAYS RECALL THE CROWDS, AND CIGARETTE
smoke that turned the night into a dream. He would recall a lion tamer in high boots that he was sure concealed cloven hooves. And bareback riders bursting into the Big Ring on jangling, feathered Clydesdales. Then everything receded.
He lifted his eyes to a young girl soaring overhead. When she looked down, he imagined that their eyes met and, through the glitter of spangled lights and sawdust, she seemed to shower him with gold. It was his first glimpse of the girl, and he gazed up in silence at a creature that seemed like a delicate moth floating out of the pages of his old composition book. In that moment, he experienced such a sense of wonder, he
felt his brain step back to reconnoiter, fearing that maybe the ceiling, those artificial stars, would fall down on his face.
At times she sailed so high he could hardly make her out. Yet he had such a feeling: that this graceful, fragile form might give him reason to live again. For suddenly his whole life meant nothing, just sweets gone soft in his pocket. He stood up slowly as she paused on her platform looking down, her face hanging pale and lovely. He raised his arm, cupping his palm so the girl became a small statue of a bird held in his hand. Security men stiffened and moved forward, then they saw his face. A fool in love!
The band played, the girl floated out again on her trapeze, and Nikolai was struck with spasms like the frog when Galvani discovered electricity. The rest of the night in that crowded tent each time he looked up, her eyes seemed to touch his forehead. Green, then yellow, then scarlet spotlights followed her, turning her into a flying chameleon. The announcer called out her name. Irini.
To the amusement of his friends, thugs who came to the circus to work the crowds, Nikolai returned again and again until he knew her routine by heart. One night when she stepped from her trailer he was waiting. That was how he learned that she was deaf. She had been born deaf. She was beautiful, eighteen, but with the sweet faltering voice of a child. In time, she taught him to read lips, and how to sign-talk. And Nikolai came to believe that hearing had nothing to do with balance, for she was extraordinary in the air. Immune to gravity.
As a youngster she was very smart and athletic, and so had been schooled in gymnastics. She had dreamed of training for the Olympics, and when the Deaf School refused to recommend her, Irini had run away and joined the circus. Now on cold Moscow nights they lay together, while she told him in sign language and simple words punctuated with sighs of the vast steppes of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where her father had come from when he traveled the trade routes to Kazakhstan.
“Kazakhstan … where he met my mother. So, I was born.”
When she told him the name of her village, Nikolai’s breathing changed. It was one of the places he had filmed, just outside the city of Oskemen. Now he began to understand the cause of her deafness, and he understood that she would probably not grow old. Nonetheless, they fell in love, they married.
He gave up filming and “roofing,” and traveled with her circus, working odd jobs, even working as a clown. And like clowns they lived
in pantomime, always animated. Because she could not hear his joyful words, love for them was spectacle. Deep passion, laughter, tricks! Time evanesced into magic and glitter, while from dawn to dusk they touched, some parts of their bodies touched.
By then Nikolai had learned sign language, but in fact they did not talk much. Somehow they understood that things were truer when not said. They dreamed of children, a little house. Their nights were as soft as the velvet paws of the big cats in repose.
I
RINI ALWAYS HAD THIS LITTLE COUGH
. T
WO YEARS AFTER THEY
married, she miscarried their child. Doctors told her she was ill, that circus sawdust was suffocating her. Since childhood, her lungs had been weak, and now they could hardly absorb oxygen from the air.
They left the circus, and lived how they could, dragging themselves to the outskirts of Moscow. Nikolai swept streets, sold stolen tires, even engines from stolen cars. All the while, he watched his wife’s breathing grow worse. Now it was early summer, the first winter thaw, and there was a window open by her bed through which honeybees flew in, in clouds.
In Russia, honeybees were revered for their intelligence, intuition, even the ability to reverse their sex and age. Many bees now settled in Irini’s hair. Nikolai would always remember their wings glittering, her hair full of tiny stars of midnight blue. Then, in one cloud the bees flew out the window. And they took her soul.
Autumn came. He sold everything, cameras, clothes, to buy fresh meat and milk for her. By then it was too late. One winter day Irini could not breathe, she lay gasping hour after hour. Nikolai pulled back her covers, and saw her flesh was gone. She rattled like paper, her skin a leaf covering her spine.
That night she whispered, “Niki. Take my life, and make it yours …”
She would not go to a hospital. Such places were medieval nightmares—live patients disappearing from their beds, fresh cadavers found sliced open. Gangsters were harvesting human organs, selling them for research. Vowing this would not happen to his wife, he carried her to a field covered in deep snow, and laid her down and knelt beside her.
Tenderly, he gathered her hair in a ponytail with a ribbon, so her hair would remember life as a young, wild horse. Then he undressed her, wanting to lie down and grow cold with her, but afraid their corpses would be desecrated. Wild dogs would come. Or human-organ ghouls.
He knelt there singing old circus songs, his wife’s body naked, her head gathered in his lap, her arms slowly falling, letting go.
He scraped tears from his cheeks and laid them on her chest like crystals, and when he looked up, the world was blue, the time of day in Russia when somewhere the sun was setting.
“Irini,” he whispered. “Look! How blue is the air. The midnight blue of honeybees.”
He knew she was dead. He built a campfire, wrapped her up, and carried her small body to the flames. Soon he could not distinguish what was branch, what was bone. Hours passed. A day. A night. He fed the fire until there were only embers, watching his wife becoming smoke. When there was nothing left but ash, he threw her ashes to the wind and watched her soar, recalling her young face, her lips moving slightly, telling him to live, live for her.