День, когда рухнул мир - [9]

Once again the earth shook, this time stronger – it throbbed as in an epileptic fit and my heart throbbed in fits and starts, as if my spirit was fading away. I forgot about Kenje, I forgot about everything on earth. I realized that the WORLD HAD COLLAPSED and I too would be killed in its devastation. I thought only of myself. Death stood over me with her axe – swish, swish, swish. I could see the blade being lowered onto my childish neck; I lost consciousness, sensing in a fleeting moment that Kenje’s hand had grown cold. «She’s dead,» I thought as I gradually came round from my dull stupor. Under the felt mat, in total darkness, I lay trembling slightly and bathed in sweat, next to the dead Kenje. In my boyish heart, I suddenly realized that I had been in love with ‘this little, sickly girl. I stirred, trying to get nearer to Kenje’s face, to kiss her for the first and last time. «Don’t move! Lie still!» I heard the same thunderous voice say. I nevertheless, somehow managed to edge my way closer to her and kissed her on the forehead. Again he shouted at me, but the voice was muffled and I realized that its owner also spoke from under afelt mat.

And it seemed that the end of the world had come.

That ragged young man, who had been handing out leaflets, had been talking about the same thing.

After the explosion, we lived in the Genghiz Hills for another one and a half weeks. Here, on a high reach, we buried Kenje – the first innocent victim of the hydrogen bomb exploded on the proving ground near the town of Semipalatinsk.

Semipalatinsk! That dear, dusty, inconspicuous town; from that day on it became famous throughout the world!

They say that Kurchatov, immediately after the explosion, exclaimed, «This is monstrous! God willing, this will never be used against people. We mustn’t allow such a thing…»

I was sitting on a warm boulder which had fallen from the hills during the explosion, intently gazing at the spot where Kenje had just been buried. It was far from the mound, but I could clearly see a light vapour rising from the little grave, like the soul, like the atomic mushroom cloud after the explosion. The soldiers had vanished just as suddenly as they had appeared. Only a medical vehicle remained, a few army doctors and a young nurse, Galya. There was little for her to do and she would frequently drop into my grandmother’s and quietly sit and have a chat about this and that. Sometimes, grandfather would participate in these conversations. Both he and grandmother knew Russian well – naturally, after all, during the years of the great famine they had found salvation in the town where they worked as unskilled labourers and in this way survived.

Grandfather recalled:

«The whole wretched steppe was covered in corpses. We rushed, although you could hardly call it that – it was more like crawling – towards the town accompanied by the howl of jackals and cries of cawing vultures. We had only one aim – to reach the town; once there, somehow things would come right in the end. Every one believed in this, as I did. Everyone believed in this but not everyone survived…»

The poisoned, terrible thirties – bitter like the smell of wormwood. Galya listened attentively. She would often flinch. She could not comprehend how, under socialism, there could be famine, humiliation, repressions, although her twenty-year-old mind understood that this terrible, deadly explosion was also a bad thing. She whispered this to grandmother and added, wide-eyed, that although she was not sure, of course, but had heard that the doctors were waiting for the arrival of nine people who had been specially left in the immediate vicinity of the area where the tests had been carried out, and who had stood throughout the whole test without protective cover. They would be put under observation for approximately ten days and then they would be sent to Semipalatinsk where they would be observed by «Moscow professors». Galya maintained that this was what they had been told by Major Zhavoronkov of the Medical Corps who headed this small group of medics. «Such observations are necessary for the future,» Zhavoronkov said. But Galya, after having listened to grandfather, no longer believed in the words pronounced by her commanding officer.

«…because even in the town, many became bloated from hunger,» continued grandfather. «My wife here,» he said pointing to grandmother, «she’s my second wife, you know; my first wife died; she could not bear the separation from her eldest son. When we arrived in the town, we left our son at the orphanage; this way we thought that at least he would not die of hunger. And the youngest, his father, and grandfather stroked my head, we kept with us. We thought we would be able to manage to feed one. Well, it’s a long story. But no matter how much you explain only someone who has himself suffered hunger can really understand. And so, my first wife pined for her first-born. She would frequently cry at night – we should bring our son home. She became thin, could not eat anything, not that there was anything to eat. She understood that if we were to bring him back, he would surely die, but her heart told her otherwise. She went to the orphanage, against my will, I won’t hide the fact. But they had all already been evacuated. They had moved them to some far-off place and no one knew exactly where. From that day on, she began to fade away before my very eyes. She died in forty-three. And she never found out where our first son was, and she didn’t see her second son return from the war – his father», grandfather clarified again and repeated, «No, she didn’t see him return. But I survived. Although I still do not know whether my eldest son is alive or whether he has laid his head to rest– somewhere. By the end of the war, I was quite alone. And then, well, I met my old lady… she’s a good woman.»