Mishko grinned. He was taller than his partner, and dapper in a pale tan sports jacket and paisley tie. "In fact," he said, "if my father had not been purged in the Stalin years, you and I might now be stepbrothers."
"So my mother has told me," Smin said. "She has spoken often of the Stalin years."
"Which, I am sure, she never wants to see return."
They had been speaking softly in any case, but Mishko both lowered his voice still more and glanced at the gap in the curtains as he spoke. So even a member of the Central Committee wondered who might be listening at times! "I do not suppose," Smin said, "that you came here to discuss the cult of personality with me. Would you mind telling me what you want?"
Mishko sighed. "Actually we have two purposes. The official one is to ask you some questions about the accident."
"The GehBehs have already asked me."
"And no doubt they will ask you more." Mishko nodded. "The organs are still thorough. But it is, after all, a serious matter, Simyon Mikhailovitch. I suppose you know that every RBMK generator in the Soviet Union has been shut down?"
Smin was shaken. "I didn't know that."
"The economic consequences are serious. We've lost export sales of food because the foreigners think our tomatoes will make them glow in the dark. Production is down in the factories requiring electrical power. Tourism, of course — there is no tourism now. And I do not even speak of the loss of life."
"Am I charged with sabotage?"
"Simyon," the other man said gently, "you aren't being charged with anything. Do you mind if I smoke?"
There were Ne kurit signs all over the room, but Smin shrugged. "I wish I could join you."
Milaktiev lighted up before he spoke. He considered for a moment. Then: "When the Party entrusted you with a very high position, it expected you to live up to its responsibilities. Have you given your people good leadership?"
"I gave them good food, good housing, good pay, fair treatment — as much as I could, with the First Department breathing down my neck. I don't know how to measure leadership."
"One way to measure it," said Milaktiev, "is by the number of shift chiefs, engineers, and others who deserted their jobs. There were one hundred fifty-eight of them at the Chernobyl Power Plant."
"And nearly three thousand others remained for duty," Smin replied.
"What about defective materials?"
"There were some, yes. I have reported this in full. They were not in essential places. After the article in Literaturna Ukraina appeared — I believe you are familiar with it—"
"Oh, yes," Mishko smiled, answering for both of them.
"— I instituted a complete inspection of all essential systems. Where there were faults, I replaced them. In any case, if anything failed and so helped to cause the accident, it probably was the instrumentation."
"The instrumentation?"
"Which was imported from France and Germany," Smin pointed out. "Go sue the French."
The man from the Central Committee said, "We are not speaking of lawsuits, Simyon Mikhailovitch. We are speaking of faults in the management of the plant. If you say to me, 'I did everything correcdy,' then I say to you, 'But still it happened.' "
Smin shrugged. "I was only Deputy Director."
Mishko sighed. "The Director will face prosecution," he
said.
"And will I?"
"I hope not, Simyon Mikhailovitch. Of course, you are likely to be dismissed from your post. You may also, of course, be expelled from the Party."
"Of course," said Smin bitterly. "Now, if you will excuse me, I would like to vomit."
The two men looked at each other. Then Milaktiev, stubbing out his cigarette, leaned forward and spoke more softly still. "If you must vomit, do it. But now we're finished with the official part of our visit, and there is another matter to discuss."
"And what is that?" asked Smin, fighting against fatigue; there was something going on here, and he had to know what it was.
"Would you, Simyon Mikhailovitch, make a complete statement for us of what happened at Chernobyl? I don't mean the accident. I mean before the accident. We are asking you to describe everything that made it difficult for you to run the plant properly. Directives which could not be complied with, or which did actual harm. Political pressures. The appointment of a Director who was incompetent. The corruption. The drunkenness and absenteeism. The interference from the First Department. Everything. Do you understand what I mean by 'everything'? I mean everything."
Smin was feeling really faint now. The sober old face grew fuzzy before him. "I don't follow you," he said faintly. "I've already given all this to the organs."
"Who may or may not pass it all on to us. We want it all."
"Do you mean that you want me to put on paper everything that is kept secret?"
"Exactly that, yes."
"And—" Smin licked his sore lips. "And if I do, what use will you make of it?"
They looked at each other again. Then, "I cannot say. I don't know," said Milaktiev. "Yet."
When Leonid Sheranchuk finally came back to his room, he saw that the curtains around Smin's bed were still drawn. Someone was there, because Sheranchuk could hear an almost inaudible mutter of voices. And when he bumped against his bed, a head popped out of the curtains to stare at him. It withdrew in a moment, and he heard one of the voices say to another, "Smin is almost asleep, anyway. We'll come back another time." But Sheranchuk thought that that head had looked familiar, and when its owner came out with another man, nodding politely to him as they left, he thought the face on the other man looked familiar too. Not as friends. Not even as someone he had run across in a casual meeting; as a face he had seen in a newspaper or on television. He lay down on his bed, pondering the question. Then he got up. Tired as he was, he hobbled to the open window and peered out at the courtyard.
Sure enough, a few moments later, there they were, tan sports coat and conservative gray, appearing on the steps below. From the other side of the little grove of trees in the courtyard a car purred forward from its parking niche to meet them.
The car was a Zil.
Sheranchuk stared at it as it spun away, traffic miraculously opening before it. He had never been in the presence of two members of the Central Committee before.
Chapter 27
Smin's mother, Aftasia Smin, is four feet ten inches tall and weighs less than ninety pounds. At one time she was taller, though not much. Then old hunger and later osteoporosis knocked a few inches off her height.
She is eighty-six years old — the same age as the century, she says. Aftasia celebrates her birthday on the first of the year. That is really only a guess, since it was not the custom in the shted at the turn of the century to pay much attention to recording the birth of Jewish female babies.
Although she was never very big, she carried a rifle in the Civil War from 1918 until, seven months pregnant with Simyon, she left her husband to pursue the last of the White forces in the Ukraine. Aftasia returned to the shtetl to give birth. She still has a puckered scar, very high on the inside of her right thigh, where a bullet from the Czech legion put her out of action for two cold, painful, hungry months. The fiery young revolutionary husband she had left the shtetl to marry was later captured by Kolchak's forces. He was executed, after some barbaric questioning, the week after Simyon was born. Simyon was a year old before Aftasia learned that her husband was dead. She never found out where his body was buried.
What Aftasia Smin represented to her downstairs neighbor, Oksana Didchuk, was hard to define. To Oksana, the frail old woman was a bit of a conundrum, and a rather worrying one sometimes. There were some very good and neighborly things about Aftasia Smin. She was a generous acquaintance who always had something for the Didchuks' little girl on New Year's Day, and not just a chocolate bar or a kerchief but even things like a pretty, flaxen-haired doll from the Children's World store in Moscow, or even wonderful sugared almonds that had come all the way from Paris. Nor was it only the daughter who benefited from Aftasia's largesse. Let Oksana happen to mention that she had been unable to find plastic hair curlers in the store, say, and old Aftasia was likely to turn up the next day with a box of them, saying that her son had brought them back from a trip to the West, like the sugared almonds, and after all what did an old woman like herself want with such things?