I mutant.
Baloney! So’m I!
You know nothink.
Well, you’re right about that, I thought. I know.
Eto z Chernobyla.
Oh yeah, here come the horror stories. He’d told them before. About how when it blew they ail went outside to look at the beautiful glow. About how the murderers fed them all kinds of crap about everything bein all right. About how various bandits and wretches snuck into the evacuated villages and lived there. And mutated. And died.
Wheeler-dealers took a fancy to the thatching on the roofs of the former Czech villages and cheerily sold them off. And not only thatching. Zones’re big byznys. Radiation, who knew what that was? It won’t kill you now, Vanya, so what’s all the fuss about? Can’t see it. Doesn’t exist. There were other things you could see. Later on.
Vasil told stories about children who thought a two-headed calf was normal. Wondered why their dads buried the sweet little thing on the spot. Three-eyed birdies. A zoo’s about the only thing that would’ve amazed the children of Chernobyl. A botanical garden probably would’ve bored them to tears.
Vasil was a champion of monstrosity, a connoisseur of curios. He told us how when he was fleeing the area, people on trains got up and changed seats when he told them where he was from. One time he hung his coat on the rack in some pub and they tossed it into the fire. Cause it’d touched the other coats.
The people they evacuated from the Zone, and we’re talking entire villages, were cursed wherever they went. No one was allowed to write about Wormwood,* and people believed that radiation was contagious like the flu. Some evacuees couldn’t stand it and went back. Ran the army barricades and returned to their land. Illegally. Vasil was afraid they might spot him from the helicopters. So he dug a pit in the cellar and spent the winter there. Come summer he couldn’t believe his eyes. The grass wasn’t green. The trees weren’t trees. He didn’t see a single living thing. Then a pigeon. He couldn’t eat it though, it had something wrong with its eyes. It had something instead of eyes. Vasil thought it was the end of the world. That God had gone mad and he, Vasil, was the last human left. It never occurred to him for one second that he might be the one who’d gone insane. That intrigued me. I made him tell me that part more than once. He reached the barricades, but the soldiers saw him and chased him away. Said he needed a pass. He got through somewhere else. But he couldn’t stand to be around people. Nobody believed him when he said what was going on in the Zone. The radio didn’t report anything out of the ordinary.
He went back. And there were others. He met a girl that was also alone. All her relatives had died. Couldn’t get a foothold anywhere else so she went back on her own. They ate the animals. When it got really bad they lived on eggs. He said, you don’t know … what’s in those eggs. They traded with people on the other side of the barricades, farm tools for food. Hid from soldiers. Vasil always enjoyed describing that period … it seemed like he was happy then.
No chairmen, no meetings, no statues of leaders jutting up absurdly, nakedly, from the empty village squares … he didn’t have to bow down to anyone, he wasn’t a dog anymore … he had a woman.
But then he started growing the nails. I don’t know if there was anything wrong with the girl, Vasil never said. Once he told us about the thing the girl gave birth to. She snapped. He buried her and fled. Felt like a monster. And he had no idea what would happen next. To his body. He expected to die soon. That explained why he was so shy and preferred to sleep down in the cellar. He saw himself as stigmatized.
Seriously, Vasil, I don’t give a damn. If you got a trunk growin outta you. Your business, hell. Everyone’s different. It’s all the same.
Da?
You Chernobyl Czech you …
Bot I no haf legitimatsya.
You want some ID? What for?
Legalizovatsya.
We’ll fix that! I still know people! Got any proof though?
He brought me some tattered papers. We did a little lookin into em. Yep, issued in a city that didn’t exist, in a region that’d changed names, in a country that’d split up … signed by dead people … somebody else’s picture … classic.
It’ll work somehow, don’t worry.
But it didn’t. Vasil got taken in by the People of the Faith, servants of the Great Mother. Or whatever.
The People of the Faith were the only ones that took him under their wing during his destitute trek across the Union. Probably would’ve ended up in the clink otherwise. Didn’t have any proof for the two years of his life he’d spent in the Zone. Made up some story about workin on an oil rig. But he was scared. Even back then he knew it was dangerous, he knew too much about the Zone.
Then he found his way to some journalists … from the desirable countries. Met with em in somebody’s flat. That was the first and last time he let anyone look at his nails. They rolled the cameras and he told his whole story. Gave a fake name though, he didn’t want to take any chances. A week later the story came out in one of the desirable world’s leading weeklies, duly dressed up with quotes from the poor fugitive railing against the Soviet government. Splashed across the cover was a photo of the man with the nails. With his real name of course. All the other prominent glossies ran the story too. He had to make himself scarce, in a hurry. Go to meet Anyushka. That was what his new colleagues from the cheap seats called death, he explained. That intrigued me too. Anyushka. Really? Such a tender name? Da. Vasil didn’t expand on what kind of enterprise he and his new colleagues were involved in. But in Moscow he’d also met People of the Faith.
At that point you could say all kinds of things out loud. The Great Mother, who got money from her followers, said them over the radio. From what I gathered from Vasil, she promised to change people … the same old song … give me all that’s yours and I will strike you like a bolt of lightning, tear you up by the roots, change you … I think Vasil … and he never said this … I think he wanted to get rid of his nails, sure, he could trim em, but I think he wanted to be free of all the horrible things he’d been through … and the Great Mother found a lot of people like him.
Skolko, Vasil? How many?
Miliony. In Ukraine. Many in Bulgaria. Bait!
When he saw how interested I was, he brought me a picture. A photo actually. Of the Great Mother.
Is icun.
Icon?
No, is new. So: Icun.
On the back was a strange picture, a drawing. In color. A face, a woman’s, with a cross in one eye, a star in the other. The eyes followed you wherever you moved, like those photos of the deceased they put on tombstones. Same technology. What was even worse, the face had a … nail through its forehead. Or a screw. I didn’t like the look of it.
Behind the face was a railroad car. But the Great Mother’s face was kind. She looked to be about forty. Dark-skinned. Like some woman from India, I guess. Where’s she from … this lady?
Is born in Chernobyl.
Right there, yeah?
I no know. Nobotty know. Ana … change? … She change people to her rebyonky, her children … ana yeh zashchichayeh.
She protects them?
Da. Protekts.
When Vasil finally got the chance to make his plea to the Great Mother … she told him no. She told him he was on the right path … nails or no nails, and that he had to stay with her. That he, more than anyone else, was her child. And then Vasil told me, and this was one thing he didn’t share with the others … maybe Bohler, I donno … that the Great Mother had chosen him, along with several others, to send to Prague, just as she sent people to Sofia, Bucharest, Bratislava … Poland, all over … to herald her coming and gain new adherents who wanted to change themselves … and give her all their money and land, because the final great change was approaching, and only those who changed in time would survive …