Their job turned out to be getting the people out of the town of Pripyat. An endless creeping caterpillar of buses — city buses, highway buses, military buses; Konov had never seen so many buses in one place, eleven hundred of them someone said! — were snaking along the highway toward the town. The first task of the soldiers was to get the people out of their houses and onto the transport. Immediately. In pairs they were assigned blocks and buildings. And Konov found himself running up and down stairs, bawling to the occupants that the town of Pripyat was to be evacuated — simply temporarily, as a precaution — and everyone was to be ready to leave in half an hour. Meanwhile, were there any sick? Pregnant women? Old people, or people with a heart condition who would need special help?
It surprised Konov that the Pripyaters took his shouted orders so lightly. Of course, they had had ample warning that something was up. If somehow they had missed seeing that worrisome distant smoke cloud, then certainly the militia cars cruising every block with their loudspeakers blaring were letting them know. And yet there were people who didn't want to go, there were people who couldn't make up their minds to go and people — many, many people — who definitely wanted to be taken out of the threatened town as fast as possible, but first wanted to be given time to make decisions, help to pack up their food, their clothes, their pets, their children.
There was no time. "In thirty minutes," shouted Konov, "you will be out of this building, or we will be back to drag you out! You must take food and necessities for three days, do you understand? And in thirty minutes there will be a bus at your door to take you!"
When he first saw Pripyat, Konov felt almost jealous. The eight-story concrete buildings of flats on the outskirts were quite like those that had swallowed all the green fields around Moscow — like, in fact, the ones Konov's parents still lived in just off the Leningradskaya Prospekt. But the ones farther into the town were something quite different. They were, in a word, beautiful. They were well kept, too, and surrounded by trees and parks. It was not just that someone with a bulldozer had sculptured a greensward here, a circular flower bed there; Pripyat's trees were native firs as well as chestnuts and fruit trees, and some of them were already in blossom. How fine it would be to live in a place like this, Konov thought. The only things that reminded him of home were cars drawn up on the sidewalk, some of them on blocks, nearly half of them still covered with the canvas shrouds that had protected them through the Ukrainian winter. And inside the buildings it was even more like home, for, new as they were, the hallways held that omnipresent Russian aroma of old cabbage.
For the first time in his Army career Konov felt he was doing a job that was worth his while.
It was frightening, at first — a nuclear accident! But it was obvious that the important thing was to get all these people to safety. Konov moved faster than he had moved in the last year and ten and a half months, and yet it didn't seem to him that it was fast enough. By the time they had made their first pass through the two buildings assigned to them, Konov was itching to get on with the job. Pripyat was a town of young, healthy people, it seemed. Hardly any had needed special attention because of age or illness. The men of Konov's platoon hunkered down and smoked, waiting for the orders to finish the job.
"Miklas," Konov said to his partner, a dark-complected Armenian. "We can do this faster if we split up."
"Why do we want to do it faster?"
Konov hesitated. "To help these people?" It had turned into a question as he said the words.
Miklas looked at him with curiosity. "Seryozha," he said reasonably, "if we finish fast, they'll just find something else for us to do."
"Even so."
Miklas shook his head. "Well, why not? All right. You take the tall building, I'll take the other one."
Well, that served him right, Konov thought as he entered the second apartment house in the block. He had already figured out a new skill to meet the needs of the situation. It was better to start from the bottom of the building and to work his way up than to begin at the top. In his new system, he reasoned, you could double-check every flat on the way down because when the people were out of the top floor the ones lower down were already informed of what they had to do. Even, if you were lucky, many of them might already be in the street, trudging toward the loading zones on the sidewalks with their belongings in their arms and perhaps one child on their backs. He had to use threats at one of the first-floor apartments, but on the second floor he got unexpected help.
A tall, pale man with his arm in a sling was standing at the stairs, waiting for him.
Surprisingly, although the weather was warm in this late afternoon, the man was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a woolen cap. "Let me help you," he said, his tone oddly supplicatory. "My name is Kalychenko. I am an engineer. I worked at Chernobyl."
Konov frowned at him. "And how can you help now?" he demanded.
The man said apologetically, "At least I can explain to the people what they are facing! Many of them simply do not understand the danger of radiation."
"But you are hurt," Konov objected, eyeing the man's arm. It was not in a proper sling but a woman's shawl. "If you go down now, there may still be some ambulances for the sick people."
"I don't need an ambulance. I'll have it looked at later."
"Come on then," said Konov, turning away. He paused as the man tossed his own suitcase inside his apartment door. But he left the door open. "Aren't you afraid that will be stolen?" he asked.
The man laughed. "But that is impossible," he said. "There is not one person leaving Pripyat who can carry one more thing than he already has. Come on! The sooner we get these people moving, the sooner we all will be gone!"
Konov would not have believed it possible, but in less than ninety minutes from the time they entered Pripyat, a town of nearly fifty thousand people had become a wasteland.
The street Konov had been assigned to was almost the last to be evacuated. He patrolled the sidewalk with Miklas, always watching to see that none of the complaining citizens obeyed that impulse to go back for one more thing while they waited. "It would have been better," Miklas told him, observing the scene with a critic's eye, "to assemble everyone in the main squares and load from there."
"Nonsense," Konov said, equally critical. "They keep them at their houses because they don't want them to panic. Only they should have assigned each bus to a specific address at once, of course, so there would not be this long waiting."
"Nonsense to you too," said Miklas amiably, "and up your asshole. What would the Soviet Union be without long waiting? That is why you are not an officer, Sergei. You do not understand Soviet life."
"I will understand it perfectly when I am back in it," Konov said, and then, calling sharply, "You! Stay by the curb! Your bus will be here directly."
It wasn't, though. Konov could hear buses grinding their gears in the next block, but so far their own had not been reached. Only soldiers were moving on foot in any of the streets. Militia cars were all that roamed the avenues. Konov watched the knots of people on their block carefully for those who might change their minds, or remember something irreplaceable that they must certainly go back at once to retrieve. Some tried. None got through.
Now they could see the next block loading almost the last of Pripyat's people, as they were herded into the hundredth, or perhaps it was the thousandth, of the buses that patiently crawled through the emptying streets, loaded, and rolled away. The buses were of all kinds. Some had been making their runs in Pripyat itself, most seemed to be from the distant city of Kiev, others perhaps came from other communities nearby. There were even a few trucks with Army markings, perhaps the ones Konov and his comrades had come down in not two hours before. "So we walk back to our campground," grumbled Miklas, and Konov clapped him on the shoulder.