Journey to Chernobyl by Glenn Cheney

Author:Glenn Cheney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1995-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

As soon as I get home I hit the bed, resolving to stay there until I die or feel better, sinking into the mattress for all of the three or four minutes it takes for two truck drivers to arrive and ask if they could sleep in the other two beds in my room for the night. Who am I to say no? They move in quietly and apologetically and set up a meal on my desk. They all but beg me to join them, at least in a dose of schnapps. I decline. I just want to sleep. I retreat to an igloo beneath my covers, but can still hear them chewing bread and slurping schnapps truck-driver style. I can smell their canned fish. Then they sleep quietly and the next morning ship out before dawn.

Still sick, I try to stay in bed, but sweet Vyka, Andrew’s filmmaking partner, arrives to tell me she’s lined up an interview with a certain journalist on the day after tomorrow. Then she invites me to go sightseeing on Saturday at ten o’clock.

Volodya shows up with Volodya II. I let it leak that I’m sick. Volodya tells Alia, the grandmotherly woman a couple of offices down from my room. Now she’s all in a tizzy. She brings me some jam-like stuff made from bitter berries guaranteed to cure bronchitis. Also some strawberry juice in a jar. She phones a couple million people in search of aspirin, though I keep telling her I’m not worth that rare and precious commodity. What I really need is lots of liquid, but there’s none to be had in Kiev except for good old radioactive tap water from the most polluted river in the world. I hate radioactive polluted tap water. Boiled radioactive polluted tap water doesn’t seem half as bad, though, so I subsist on tea.

So, except to deal with well-wishing visitors, and a quick laundry job in the sink of the indoor outhouse downstairs, and typing up notes while I can still read them, I keep to my bed. I also call uptight Elena to set in motion a complicated chain of information and transportation that will result in some interviews of evacuees from the town near Chernobyl. Because of my ignorance of the language, setting things up involves coordinating a translator, a car, and the interviewee. I have to make sure Elena gets all the information straight so she can relay it to the right people. It’s hard on a phone system that’s not much more sophisticated than tin cans on a string. My ear begins to hurt from pressing the phone against it so hard to hear her faint and distant words. We talk for a long time while a cool draft leaks in through the window behind me and trickles down my neck.

Elena’s very concerned about me, a child in a jungle, she says, “like Old Yeller.” She has to repeat that name several times before I get it. She pronounces it well

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