Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

He drove back to Chernobyl, his headlights carving a tunnel of light in the darkness. There were only bare trees and the snowy road. He turned on his cell phone to try to get the news, but this deep into the Exclusion Zone, there was no reception. The phone was useless, which meant there was no WiFi either. No way to know what was happening with the crisis.

When he got to Chernobyl, he’d have to bribe the militsiyu at the checkpoint, he thought. But driving up to the checkpoint, he saw it was closed. Evidently no one ever came this way at night. Why should they? It was a dead world.

He parked the Lada not far from the Tourist Office and left the keys in the ignition, taking Dennis’s map of the Exclusion Zone from the glove compartment. Since he’d been wearing gloves all along, he didn’t need to wipe the Lada down for prints. He went back to the Volkswagen, got in, and turned on the car’s inside light to check Dennis’s map. Krasnoe was almost exactly due north of the nuclear reactor.

He drove back toward the reactor site. It took a while in the dark, but he found the unmarked road to Krasnoe. Meanwhile, having turned on Dennis’s Geiger counter beeper, he listened to it beep. The radiation level was serious, and he knew if he wasn’t careful, there was a good chance he’d come out of this with cancer.

The road north from the reactor site led through a wooded area, spindly limbs covered with snow. A single pair of tire ruts and the four-wheel drive kept him moving through the snow. It took a half hour to cover half a dozen kilometers. When he saw a house with no lights covered with vegetation like a house in a fairy tale and trees growing through the roof, he knew it had to be Krasnoe. Stopping in the middle of the road, he got out and checked the Geiger counter. It read: 1.824. It would have to do, he thought, grabbing his gear and the Glock.

He walked into the deserted village. There was an onion-domed wooden church next to what might have once been a village square, now taken over by the woods. The houses were like wooden islands in the forest, every one of them abandoned, covered with moss and trees. He tried to stay in the clear, not touching the trees if possible, turning off the Geiger counter’s clicking sound. Icicles and dead branches hung down from the trees like stalactites. There were no sounds, not even birds.

He walked through the town looking for a hut with a light on the outskirts that might belong to Pani Mazhalska, tramping for what seemed hours through the foliage, though it was only minutes by his watch. Seeing a light glimmering through the trees, he stopped.

When Scorpion got closer he saw that the light was coming from a low hut, almost a shed, hidden in the trees. The window was shuttered, the light leaking from an opening where the shutters didn’t fit together. He peered through the opening into the hut, saw a candle on a table and a pot cooking on a burning log in the fireplace. He didn’t see anyone. The door to the hut was so low he had to stoop to knock.

“Pani Mazhalska, dobry vecher,” he called out in Russian. Good evening. There was no answer. He knocked again, harder. “Pani Mazhalska?”

Still no answer. He opened the door and went in, ducking his head to clear the top of the door. The walls were covered with animal skins, vegetation, and a shelf full of bottles with dark colored liquids. There was a wooden bench near the fire. Scorpion checked it with the Geiger counter: 1.271. He sat and waited. About ten minutes later the door opened and a tiny old woman with a round peasant face came in. She was carrying a bundle of wood and a dead squirrel. When she saw Scorpion, she screamed and dropped the wood and the squirrel. She reached into her sack and pulled out a straw doll that she held before her.

“Ne byyete mene!” she cried out. Don’t hurt me!

“Ya droohoo.” I’m a friend. “I won’t hurt you,” Scorpion said.

“Ne trogaite moyu belku,” don’t touch-he couldn’t catch the rest-she said, putting the dead squirrel on the table. Scorpion guessed belku meant squirrel.

He took the bottle of Nemiroff out of his pack and asked if she wanted some.

“Khto vy? Shcho vy khochete?” she asked, going to a cupboard. Who are you? What do you want? She took out a mismatched pair of jars that served as glasses and put them on the table. Scorpion poured them both good shots.

“Ya droohoo. Budmo,” he toasted, and drank. She watched him, her eyes narrow, then sat down and drained her jar.

‘What do you want?” she asked again, in Russian.

“Informatsiya,” he said. “I can pay,” and he put a few hundred hryvnia on the table.

“The tours come in the day. Tourists come. Always the same questions. Why do you live here? Aren’t you afraid of the radioactivity? Stupid.” She shrugged, holding up her jar for a refill.

“You’re not afraid?” Scorpion asked, pouring her another drink.

“Pah,” she sneered, and tossed back the horilka. “The same tourist people who ask me, you think they’ll live forever? What difference?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “When God wants to crush us, we’re done,” she said, crossing herself. “An old Jew once told me-you know before the war, there were many Jews in Chernobyl-he told me a saying: ‘Men make a plan-and God laughs.’ I like this saying. I like it very much,” she said, taking the money and sticking it in her pocket. “What do you want to know, miy drooh?”

“I’m looking for a man. Big man, long blond hair.” Scorpion gestured hair falling over his eyes. “His name is Dimitri Shelayev. He is maybe using a different name. He came here in the past four or five days. Have you seen him?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I see nichoho. ” Nothing. “No one,” she added, and looked away. She stood and got a knife, spit on it, then came over to the table and started skinning the squirrel in front of him. “What makes you think I know?”

“Dennis. The tour guide,” Scorpion said. “He says you know everything, everyone in the zona.”

“I know nothing, nichoho,” not looking at him.

“I know he’s in the zona. Gde on? ” Scorpion asked. Where is he?

She didn’t answer. When she finished skinning the squirrel, she wiped her hands on her dress and speared the squirrel on an iron spit, head and all. She went over to the fire and lifted the lid on the pot. The smell of kasha groats filled the hut.

“You’ve seen him, this Dimitri, haven’t you?” Scorpion said. “What did he tell you? That people were coming to kill him?”

She stopped what she was doing and took a crude wooden crucifix on a string, the kind that might be found in any flea market in Ukraine, from around her neck. She slapped it into his palm and closed his hand around it.

“You are a ubiitsa,” killer. “I see it in your eyes,” she said. “Why?”

“Not by choice.”

“I see that too,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “What do you want with this man?”

“I want him to tell the truth.”

“Only that?”

Scorpion nodded.

“Worse and worse. Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than an army,” she said, putting the spit over the fire to roast the squirrel. She turned the spit. The hut filled with smoke and the smell of roasting meat.

“True,” he said.

“This man,” she said. “He is not called Dimitri. He says his name is Yevhen. Most of the samosely- the squatters-who live in the zona of Exclusion are old, like me. We come to live our last days in a place we know. Here there is no rent, no taxes. Only death. But this Yevhen is new. He lives in a cabin near Zimovishche. It’s three kilometers from here, east of Pripyat.”

“Spasiba,” thanks, Scorpion said, getting up. He handed the crucifix back to her. He started to close his jacket and put the bottle of Nemiroff back into his pack.