I hit him with the flat of my hand across an ear. His head jerks impressively. It is not a hard blow. It is a token blow and the head-jerk is overdone.
"Watch what you say about her, Brian."
He lowers his eyes, looking for a fetch of sympathy. Here he is, hungry, thirsty, jet-lagged, unkempt, being held prisoner, sort of, cuffed around in a basement cell. But I don't think he has serious reason to worry.
"She told you about the heroin?"
"She told me everything."
"Only once, I swear. Scared the shit out of me."
He reaches over and takes some food out of my plate and begins to eat it. I watch him. He keeps his head down, reaching into my plate, eating and reaching, and I let him do it.
"I'm sorry, Nick. Kill me. I want you to. But I have to tell you it didn't last long. And I have to tell you I was not always-how do I want to put this if I don't want to get hit again?"
"She told me."
"I was not always willing."
I watch him eat.
"I'm the one who was reluctant and I'm the one who was scared you'd find out. And when you didn't find out, she told you."
He reaches and eats, head down. I let him go to the sink and splash water on his face. Bomb or no bomb, he says, that's a boring bunch of people out there. We head back to the room with the food. The guests are spread through several areas, drinking coffee or tea or brandy, some of them, or holding dessert plates up to their chins, those who are standing.
We feel a ground motion, a rumble underfoot. There is a guncot-ton thud, some far-off shift or heave that is also a local sensation, a hollow body sound. Someone says, "Da" or "Ja." Then people begin to head for the exit, one by one, leaning under the low portals, room to room, trying not to be overeager, a chain of rustling sighs, and we gather outside the complex and look toward ground zero although there is nothing to see, really, but the sweep of the Kazakh plain.
We stand and look for some time, a few of us speaking briefly, soft-voiced, and there is a sense of anticipation left dangling in the wind.
No ascending cloudmass, of course, or rolling waves of sound. Maybe some dust rises from the site and maybe it is only afternoon haze and several people point and comment briefly and there is a flatness in the group, an unspoken dejection, and after a while we go back inside.
We spend the night in the city of Semipalatinsk drinking warm beer and eating horsemeat pate and in the morning, instead of flying back to Moscow first thing, Viktor Maltsev decides we ought to see something.
He takes us to a place he calls the Museum of Misshapens. It is part of the Medical Institute and I note how Brian begins to shy away, to fall back a bit even before we enter the museum proper, a long low room of display cases filled with fetuses. Viktor is a man who evidently likes to deepen the texture of an experience. The fetuses, some of them, are preserved in Heinz pickle jars. There is the two-headed specimen. There is the single head that is twice the size of the body. There is the normal head that is located in the wrong place, perched on the right shoulder.
We look into the jars in silence. We go slowly from one display case to the next because the occasion seems to demand a solemn pace and we say nothing and look only at the jars and never at the walls or windows or each other. Then Viktor says something but not about the jars. He talks about the years of testing. We look into the jars and listen to Viktor and move slowly from one display to the next. Five hundred nuclear explosions at the test site, which is southwest of the city, and even when they stopped testing in the atmosphere, the mine shafts they dug for underground detonations were not deep enough to preclude the venting of dangerous levels of radiation.
He looks at me when he says this.
Then there is the cyclops. The eye centered, the ears below the chin, the mouth completely missing. Brian is also missing. We find him outside, standing by the taxi and looking through factory smoke at the low mountains that run across the steppe. But we don't take the taxi to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport. Viktor gives directions to a radiation clinic on the outskirts of the city and we drive out there in a mood of some disgruntlement (Brian and I) even if we are unresisting, too stilled by the pickle jars to make an open complaint.
He is taking us, basically, downwind. Not that the clinic was downwind of the testing in the years of frequent detonations. The clinic was probably not even here at the time. No, it is the people who were downwind, the villagers who are patients now, and their children and grandchildren, and Viktor takes us inside and we're not in a museum this time.
Viktor has been here four times, he says. He says this in a way that's hard to read. Every time he has gone to the Polygon he has also come here. This is a man who is trying to merchandise nuclear explosions- using safer methods, no doubt-and he comes here to challenge himself perhaps, to prove to himself he is not blind to the consequences. It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each brow. It is the bald-headed children standing along a wall in their underwear, waiting to be examined. It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl who wears a T-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hamburg, Germany, bottom edge dragging on the floor. It is the cheerful cretin who walks the halls with his arms folded. It is the woman with features intact but only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her shoulders like the crescent moon.
She is wearing a T-shirt like the dwarf's and Viktor says this is the result of an importing ploy gone awry. A local businessman bought ten thousand T-shirts without knowing they were leftovers from a gay celebration in Europe. Very crazy thing, Viktor says, bringing these shirts into a place where Islam is stronger every day.
But this is part of the same surreal, isn't it, that started on the forty-second floor of that Moscow tower.
The clinic has disfigurations, leukemias, thyroid cancers, immune systems that do not function. The doctors know Viktor and let us wander here and there. He talks to patients and nurses. He says there are unknown diseases here. And words that are also unknown, or used to be. For many years the word radiation was banned. You could not say this word in the hospitals around the test site. Doctors said this word only at home, to their wives or husbands or friends, and maybe not even there. And the villagers did not say this word because they didn't know it existed.
Some of the rooms have rugs on the walls. Old men wear skullcaps, sitting motionless in shabby halls.
We stand in the cafeteria doorway watching a group of young people eat lunch. Their hair, nails and teeth have fallen out and they are here to be studied. I look around for Brian.
"Sickness everywhere around. And I tell you something," Viktor says. "They are blaming us. They are saying this is calculation. The Kazakhs believe this."
"Blaming who?"
"The Russians. They are saying we tried to murder the whole population. Red Army did not always evacuate villages before a test. People see the flash and then a great cloud climbing the sky. They don't know what this is. Red Army exploded hydrogen bomb, very big yield, you know, and they left behind a hundred villagers to see what effect on people."
"Do you believe this?"
"I believe everything."
"Do you believe it was intentional?"
"Believe everything. Everything is true. Every time they did a test, hundreds of towns and villages exposed to radiation. Ministry of Health says, Okay we raise limit again. When limit is passed, Okay we raise again."
Viktor is talking mostly to himself, I gather. But he is also talking to me. These faces and bodies have enormous power. I begin to feel something drain out of me. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist. I look around for Brian. But Brian does not want to see toothless people eating lunch. He is outside somewhere.