by Jerome du Bois
Do you want to know who The Burning Man is? I'll tell you: The Burning Man is Viktor Yushchenko.
Coincidentally, a couple of days after I finished Martin Cruz Smith's stunning new novel, "Wolves Eat Dogs," Vienna confirmed that a Dioxin derivative -- TCDD, related to Agent Orange -- poisoned Ukrainian Presidential Candidate Viktor Yushchenko. I've been waiting but, so far, as far as I know, no blogger, literary or otherwise, has taken advantage of the multiple sad convergences offered by these two events to update some tragic truths, so I will. These are the tears of things.
It pivots on poison, and poisoning. In Mr. Smith's new novel, his incomparable protagonist, homicide investigator Arkady Renko, rides (on a motorcycle!) straight into the heart of radioactive Chornobyl (to use its Ukrainian spelling), to solve the murders of two Russian industrialists. Among his clues: grains of cesium chloride, which look just like grains of sodium chloride -- salt -- except that the former, if you step on a single tiny grain of it with your bare foot, or sprinkle one tiny grain on your pork chops, will kill you from the inside out in less than two months.
Do you know what happened at Chornobyl, dear reader? I know, I know, it was almost twenty years ago; I was very vague about it myself. This big world, our own preoccupations, distracted us. Now Mr. Smith reminds us, in two vignettes. These are fictional, of course, but you can look it up, and Mr. Smith is renowned, in his last six novels for sure, for accurate research. In the first excerpt, Ukrainian nuclear scientist Alex Gerasimov, drunk on samogon, a dangerous Evacuation Zone liquor, describes the "accident" itself:
April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. the actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment -- to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves."
Alex walked rapidly back and forth, attending to imaginary switches.
"Turn off the automatic control, block the steam control, disable the pre-sets, switch off design protection and neutralize the emergency generators. Then start pulling graphite rods from the core by remote control. This is like riding a tiger, this is fun. There are a hundred and twenty rods in all, a minimum of thirty to be inserted at all times, because this was a Soviet reactor, a military model that was a little unstable at low efficiency, a fact that was, unfortunately, a State secret. Alas, the power plunged."
"When does this start to become funny?" Eva asked.
"It's already funny. It just gets funnier. Imagine the confusion of the technicians. The reactor efficiency is dropping through the floor, and the core is flooding with radioactive xenon and iodine and combustible hydrogen. And somehow they have lost count -- they have lost count! -- and pulled all but eighteen control rods from the core, twelve below the limit. All the same, there is one last disastrous step to take. They can replace the rods, turn on the safety systems and shut down the reactor. They have not yet turned off the turbine valves and started the actual experiment. They have not pushed the final button."
Alex mimicked hesitation.
"Let's pause and consider what is at stake. There is a monthly bonus. There is a May Day bonus. If they run the test successfully they will likely win promotions and awards. On the other hand, if they shut down the reactor, there would certainly be embarrassing questions asked and consequences felt. There it is, bonuses versus disaster. So, like good Soviets, they marched forward, hands over their balls."
Alex pushed the button.
"In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite, and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe that they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report that there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow."
Alex picked up his glass of samogon.
"And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, 'How is the reactor core?' They answered, 'The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.' Moscow is relieved. That's the punch line. 'Don't worry.' And here is my toast: 'To The Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!' Nobody's drinking?"
Oh, we're drinking, all right. Pass The Macallan, please. Ahem. That's better.
Later, Arkady has an erotic encounter with Dr. Eva Kazma, and afterward she recites this part of her dolorous history. Eva said:
"Every once in awhile I remember this thirteen-year-old girl parading on May Day with her idiotic smile. She's moved out of her village to Kiev to live with her aunt and uncle so she can go to a special school for dance; their standards are rigid, but she's been measured and weighed and has the right build. She has been selected to hold a banner that says, 'Marching into the Radiant Future!' She is so pleased the day is warm enough not to wear a coat. The young body is a wonder of growth, the division of cells produces virtually a new person. And on this day she will be a new person, because a haze comes over the sun, a breeze from Chornobyl. And so ends her days of dancing and begins her acquaintanceship with Soviet surgery." She touched the scar [on her throat]. "First the thyroid and then the tumors. That's how you know a true citizen of The Zone. We fuck without worries. I am a hollow woman; you can beat me like a drum. Still, once in a while, I remember this fatuous girl and am so ashamed of her stupidity that if I could go back in time with a gun, I would shoot her myself. When this feeling overcomes me, I go to the nearest hole or black house and hide. There are enough black houses that this is never a problem. Otherwise I have nothing to fear. Were you ambitious as a boy? What did you want to be?"
"When I was a boy, I wanted to be an astronomer and study the stars. Then someone informed me that I wasn't seeing the actual stars. I was seeing starlight generated thousands of years before. What I thought I was seeing was long since over, which rendered the exercise rather pointless. Of course, the same can be said about my profession now. I can't bring back the dead."
"And the injured?"
"Everybody's injured."
"Is that a promise?"
"It's the only thing I'm sure of."
I'm sure of a lot more things, but this is a tragic truth, isn't it? Probably a million Ukrainian citizens, mostly kids and teenagers, farmed out unsuccessfully over the Soviet Union after the accident, were poisoned, irradiated, sterilized, transmogrified! -- in the most callous manner imaginable: so that the Soviet May Day ceremonies would proceed smoothly.
The Russians allowed it to happen. And Putin's puppets visited a similar horror on Viktor Yushchenko: they allowed him to live in chronic pain, and with a deteriorating body, for the rest of his damaged life. Now he will burn, inside and out, as his organs fail, one by one. They may as well have salted him with cesium.
There's something particularly evil about using debilitating Dioxin, instead of lethal nicotine or ten dozen other untraceable drugs that would lay you down into the big sleep, to transmogrify a handsome man into what looks like a plague victim. Now, after reading "Wolves Eat Dogs," and seeing this brave man's ravaged face on television day after day, I will remember Chornobyl, and I will remember that one may smile and smile and be a villain, and slip some hell into your soup, or your drink, and change your life forever.
It could happen to you.
Posted by Jerome at December 18, 2004 12:20 AM | TrackBack