Jimfish (4 page)

C
HAPTER
6

Pripyat, Ukraine, 1986

Jimfish and Soviet
Malala followed Ivan to the nearby town of Pripyat, where an enormous street party of thousands of revellers was in progress, and in the melee of marching bands, choirs and fair-ground fun, they lost their man. Jimfish turned in some perplexity to his friend and mentor.

‘Surely this is no time for a party? That reactor could explode a second time and destroy much of Europe.'

‘Today is the First of May,' Soviet patiently explained. ‘And on May Day everyone in the Motherland celebrates the triumphant workers of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be more natural.'

Jimfish pondered the crowds dancing in the streets: ‘Chernobyl is close by and these people celebrating here in Pripyat don't even have lead-lined aprons. They're taking in so much radiation it will kill them.'

‘All the more reason for a good party – if things are as bad as that, which I doubt, they will die happy,' Soviet assured him. ‘What we face at Chernobyl is certainly a
technical challenge, but we must trust the Party to think of a way. Finding Ivan will not be hard. He's an assassin who has insulted the Motherland and sold his Soviet citizenship for the dollars in poor Jagdish's purse. He'll have headed for some place he can spend the money and there aren't many of those. We must track him down and denounce him to the authorities, who will certainly send him to a labour camp.'

And he was right. They found the absconding soldier in the best restaurant in Pripyat, on the corner of Lenin Avenue and International Friendship Street, eating sturgeon and knocking back vodka. In between bites of fish and swigs of vodka, he was singing a popular Soviet song: ‘We were born to make fairy tales a reality . . .'

Except, as Soviet explained somewhat testily to Jimfish, instead of
skaska
, the Russian word for ‘fairy tale', Ivan used a shocking pun, and his song now went: ‘We were born to make
Kafka
a reality.'

When the two friends challenged Ivan and demanded he hand back Jagdish's wallet, he laughed, opened another bottle of vodka and told them to get lost. ‘I've done you a big favour. If you had stayed up on the roof of the reactor, you'd be goners. Just like all these fools marching and dancing in the streets of Pripyat.'

‘Why have this May Day parade if Pripyat is a death zone?' Soviet demanded.

‘Because it diverts attention from the horrible reality of things,' said Ivan. ‘The May Day charade is the purest summation there can be of how things are done here. Today the party, tomorrow the death march. Hundreds of
thousands of people will be moved out of Pripyat; the fairground will stand empty, the swimming pools deserted, the children's swings in the parks will rust and no one will ever be allowed back.'

Big Ivan had no sooner said this, while continuing to guzzle his sturgeon, when Jimfish began to feel nauseous; soon he was vomiting, then he had a feverish headache and sat down, overcome by dizziness.

‘Help me – I am not myself,' he implored.

‘All very typical symptoms of radiation sickness. Your fishy friend will almost certainly kick the bucket,' Big Ivan told Soviet Malala, taking a gulp of vodka. ‘He's better off dying here than on the roof of Reactor Number 4. You know how this will be handled if ever we put the fire out. At the end of the day the bio-robots still standing will be thanked, presented with 100 rubles and a big medal and be sent home to die. That won't be the end of it. They'll have to be buried in lead-lined coffins, because their bodies will be radioactive for many thousands of years. Like Chernobyl itself.'

‘It is inconceivable that heroes of the Soviet Union should perish, having done everything to save the Motherland,' Soviet Malala said firmly. ‘The Party would never allow it.'

Big Ivan laughed: ‘On the contrary. The patriotic duty of a liquidator is, precisely, to liquidate himself, as your friend is now doing. The fewer witnesses there are to this catastrophe, then so much the better. That's why our rulers fiddle while Chernobyl burns. Here we see the worst nuclear accident of our times, a deadly danger to millions,
from Iceland to America and yet, to read our papers, you'd believe nothing has happened.'

‘That is not true,' said Soviet Malala, seizing a copy of the newspaper
Pravda
from a nearby table. ‘Look at this paragraph on page three: “Small mishap at Chernobyl, now under control.”'

‘You are either a madman or a devil,' Big Ivan told him. ‘The radioactive cloud from Reactor Number 4 – in the middle of which we ridiculous bio-robots worked so recently – is now wafting across the globe, poisoning whatever it touches.'

‘Ah, that goes to show the immense moral gulf between the US and the USSR,' said Soviet Malala. ‘When a nuclear reactor leaked radioactivity into the atmosphere in New York a few years ago the authorities tracked the fallout in America meticulously, but they were blind to the damage in other countries. The USSR alone develops the peaceful atom and shares it with the whole world.'

‘At least the US plans to murder its enemies with its nuclear weapons,' said Big Ivan, ‘but the Soviet Union kills its own citizens at Chernobyl and says nothing about it.'

Then he paid for his lunch from Jagdish's wallet, handed the waitress a large tip, put his arm around her waist and they headed upstairs.

‘Where are you going?' Soviet Malala followed him, but Ivan simply picked him up and threw him into the stairwell, saying as he did so, ‘I have a full belly, a head nicely addled with vodka, dollars in my pocket and I'm on my way to bed with a willing waitress: things I have prayed for all my life have come to me now in this ruined city.'

‘Courtesy of the good Jagdish.' Soviet Malala spoke from the bottom of the stairwell.

‘He was better than good!' Big Ivan roared. ‘He made a Russian happy! He was a saint!' And he vanished into a bedroom with the willing waitress.

‘For heaven's sake, get me a doctor!' Jimfish begged.

But the joyous music of the May Day bands and the hubbub of happy children drowned his words and Jimfish passed out in the corner of the restaurant.

There he may have died, but luckily the waiters in the restaurant had alerted the KGB to the presence of two strangers, one of whom was black and the other too many different shades of colour to be safe. The black man, they reported, had been spreading all sorts of ridiculous lies about the Soviet Union.

When the police arrived and arrested him, Soviet protested his great love for the USSR, his reverence for Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Soviet Atoms for Peace. It was clear to everyone that this man understood nothing whatever about life in the Soviet Union and must be a foreign spy. So, indeed, was his pallid companion, except he seemed to know nothing at all about anything. The authorities decided that it made sense to shoot the black spy, since he was surely of far less importance than his paler partner. So it was that Soviet Malala was taken out into the town square, a firing party of soldiers from the May Day parade, very much the worse for vodka, was hastily assembled and, after several botched attempts, the poor philosopher was shot.

This spectacle greatly cheered the spectators, which was
just as well, for it was the last enjoyment they were to have. At the end of the May Day party dozens of yellow coaches – like the one that had met their plane when Jimfish, Soviet and Jagdish arrived at Kiev Airport – drew up and, under the watchful eye of armed soldiers, tens of thousands of people were removed from their city; then farm animals and domestic pets were shot, farmhouses were dynamited, guards were posted on roads and bridges to ensure that no one returned, and the city of Pripyat was closed for ever.

C
HAPTER
7

Moscow/Perm, 1987–9

Jimfish knew he
might have died in Pripyat; perhaps he
should
have died, whether by firing squad or of radiation sickness like many bio-robots of Chernobyl. He had seen the good Jagdish cruelly killed by Big Ivan, whose life he had saved; he had watched his mentor Soviet Malala clumsily executed by a drunken firing squad. Yet for reasons he did not understand his life was spared and he had been flown – on the very plane in which he had arrived in Kiev – to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow, the sole establishment capable of dealing with severe cases of radiation sickness.

Thanks to special treatment his symptoms abated. The effects might resurface in years to come, he was told by the doctors, but for now he was fine. When Jimfish thanked the medical staff for their care, they replied that his brave work as a bio-robot on the roof of the ruined reactor at Chernobyl had won their admiration, even if they felt a certain regret that, having helped to save his life, he was to be transported to a distant penal colony as an American spy.

‘But I'm not a spy!' Jimfish cried. ‘I am not even American. I come from a little town called Port Pallid in South Africa.'

But none of the doctors at Hospital Number 6 had the vaguest idea where South Africa was – and even if this were true, they asked, why was he not black?

The secret camp to which he was sent was known as Perm 35, one of a constellation of jails, mental asylums and penal colonies a thousand miles east of Moscow. It was a ‘special' prison for ‘special' prisoners, one of a type which the authorities claimed had been closed down, and so it did not officially exist. Row upon row of desolate wooden barracks where the huts were furnaces in summer and iceboxes in the snow, and the guards were paid extra well to see to it that prisoners never escaped. In any case, it would have been hopeless to have done so, because beyond Perm 35 stretched endless, empty forests.

Jimfish was happy to discover that many of his fellow prisoners were poets and philosophers; gentle people who helped him to learn some Russian and who talked about openness, renewal, liberty and love, much as they had been doing before they were arrested and sent to Perm 35. What he found hard to fathom was why they had been locked up for such talk. What would his old teacher Soviet Malala have said about this?

‘Obviously the Party in Moscow has made a mistake,' Jimfish decided, ‘and as soon as this is corrected, we will be freed.'

His fellow prisoners were at first amused, then alarmed by a man so secure in his ignorance, so quick to take moral
positions, so blind to what was in front of his nose that he must be a holy fool, a lunatic or even an American, as the authorities in Moscow had charged.

Jimfish had spent a couple of years in Perm 35 when one day without warning he was freed from his cell, driven to an airport and placed on a plane, which took off for an undisclosed destination. It was November, snow was falling and, looking down upon the vastness of Russia below him, he wept when he recalled the fate of Jagdish, dead in Reactor Number 4, and Soviet Malala, shot for all the wrong reasons in the ghost city of Pripyat.

Some hours later the plane circled above a city seemingly cut in half by what looked like a long wall, but he had no idea where he might be. Only when he had been securely locked in a new prison cell did an officer from State Security (its motto: ‘The Sword and Shield of the Party') inform him that he was in Berlin, a guest of the German Democratic Republic. As an important American spy he would be exchanged for an important Soviet agent. A few days later the same man from the Stasi took him to a place called Checkpoint Charlie to rehearse the coming exchange. Curious, as always, about the traditions of foreigners, Jimfish asked him about the long dividing wall he had seen from the air.

‘It is not a wall,' the Stasi officer told him. ‘We never use that word. What you see is an anti-fascist protection rampart running for a hundred miles, consisting of concrete, wire mesh, trenches, fences, mines, listening devices, dogs and armed guards.'

‘Is it there to keep people in or out?' Jimfish asked.

‘It's there to protect us from the subversion and aggression of those on the western side of the rampart, and thus on the wrong side of history,' came the reply. ‘The guards are ordered to shoot anyone silly enough to try crossing to the other side.'

From which Jimfish concluded that anyone even glancing across the rampart was already on the wrong side of history.'

The Stasi officer agreed. ‘Being wedded to the purest form of socialism, we occupy that point where history ends; we are its culmination and its apotheosis. In other words, the right side of history is us.'

Jimfish was deeply impressed and longed for the day when he would be closer to that point himself.

His cell included a small television set on which he saw, day after day, political speakers addressing large crowds in the streets. None of it did he understand, but he took it that the speakers were assuring the crowds that they were wedded to the purest form of socialism, as well as being the culmination of history. But the crowds seemed to listen less and less and took to climbing the anti-fascist protection rampart and riding on it, as if they were children and it were a nursery rocking horse instead of a concrete barrier many miles long, bristling with guards, dogs and barbed wire. Next, the climbers began chipping away at the antifascist protection rampart, using hammers and chisels, and no one came to stop them. It was all very puzzling.

At night Jimfish lay in his cell listening to chisels chinking on concrete, as if legions of steel-beaked woodpeckers were chipping to bits the anti-fascist protection barrier.
Soon there were large holes everywhere and people walked through these gaps, helped by the very guards who, just days earlier, were ready to shoot anyone who did this.

Jimfish's TV screen began showing pictures of whole families of East Germans clambering though holes in the barrier and heading into western Berlin, stopping to stare for long minutes at cakes and shoes and pickles in the bright windows of the supermarkets, or wandering down Martin-Luther Strasse, awestruck by billboards advertising ‘Big Sexy Land'. If the western side of the barrier was on the wrong side of history, why did these people want to go there?

Jimfish wished he could have talked this over with his mentor Soviet Malala: surely he would have known why the world seemed so suddenly to have been stood on its head; why the barrier had great holes in it and why State Security headquarters, where he had been locked up, had gone so very quiet. It was the strangest feeling: his prison, a hubbub of clanging cell doors and shouted orders, was suddenly as silent as the grave.