Читать книгу The Perestroika Effect - Cecilia Tanner - Страница 3

The contrast was startling, much like cold Iceland and its thermal pools or the freezing nights on the hot Sahara Desert or this freezing northern Siberian village with its nuclear powered plant. And Sergey looked like a big contradiction himself, a former KGB operative in a little village, current population 225, in the outback of the planet.

The job was at a remote facility in Seytchan that produced the silvery white metal, Plutonium 239, a power plant that was highly automated and self-sustaining. Only the electrical power generated by Reactor-4 left the plant. One single reactor generated enough electrical power to provide light and heat and operating electricity for the entire plant, for all of the homes in Seytchan and for the houses down on the Lena River basin. All of the plutonium that the plant had ever produced, over a thousand tons of it, was still stockpiled at the site.

Because the plant had been built in a mountain cave that formed a natural containment vessel, it was virtually impossible for an accidental explosion of the reactors to breech the cave walls or for radioactive debris to escape into the atmosphere. The plant had been built in secrecy and was never on official record. It was remote, and everyday Sergey was made more and more aware of the distance the community was from more progressive centers, almost as though the social development of the village was unchanged for two generations.

Two weeks before, when Sergey and Yuri were having coffee in his office in Moscow and Sergey told him about the job in Seytchan, Yuri had swung his feet down off the desk, thump. “Siberia, Sergey? Siberia? Northern Siberia? We haven’t done anything terrible, have we?”

“Yuri, my man, it is an honor and a privilege to take a fall holiday in the pristine beauty of the far north. It promises to be an adventure of the highest order. The state will even buy you a big fur hat with big fur earflaps.”

“Earflaps? You think you can persuade me with bloody earflaps?”

“And long winter nights with your beautiful wife and daughter. They always want more time with you Yuri.”

“Uh huh.” Yuri ran his fingers through his dark curly hair, “You are proposing we move from the penthouse to the outhouse. Isn’t that how it is? And a very cold outhouse at that, where I can wear my nice fur earflaps?”

“No, no, no. A chance to make new friends, a small village, new friends. Get away from the pollution and intrigues.”

Yuri raised his eyebrows at Sergey, and sat back again, a miserable look on his face. “No intrigues? Have we ever gone anywhere where someone wasn’t plotting some nasty thing for someone, usually us? And what nasty thing is the General sending us to northern Siberia to do, exactly? Measure snow drifts, harvest permafrost, build a better yurt?”

“Ah, now. The General is concerned about a nuclear power plant out there. He picked up a rumour…?”

“A rumour about some nasty thing connected to nuclear power. A nuclear-powered nasty thing. Probably no worries there, eh, Sergey?”

Sergey ignored the demanding question. “Mind you, no opera for you out there,” Sergey grinned.

Yuri looked up, helpless as a smile nudged his moustache, “What no shrieking cows?”

Ever since Yuri had seen a poster with the diva of an opera wearing a metal helmet with horns, he dismissed the whole genre with the same ‘shrieking cow’ comment.

“And money, Yuri, yes, money, my friend… and …I’m going.”

He waited, leaning back in his tilting chair.

“I’ll have to talk it over with Magda.”

“How modern of you, Yuri. Not the Cossack way.”

“It’s the Russian way, as you well know, boss.”

“I’m sure they will have vodka and crosswords, and maybe some hunting and fishing. Clear our heads.”

“Freeze our heads, for godssake.” He threw his hands in the air knowing he was mounting a losing resistance. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Madga, - Siberia, Sergey, Holy Mother Russia.” He paused, “Unless I don’t tell her.”

“You will have to tell her.”

“Not if you just happen to tell her, old boy.” Sergey was two years older than Yuri, but Yuri used the ‘old boy’ stuff whenever Sergey was stepping on his neck.

So here was Sergey driving to the plant late in September as the Siberian winter sent signals of the deep freeze that was coming fast.

He sang boisterously, drumming a beat on the steering wheel with the fingers of his right hand as he drove the cumbersome uncomfortable, old, as in very old, grey J40 Toyota Land Cruiser with its raised axle and big tires over the mostly deserted snow-covered streets through the village, the headlights on as dusk settled over the early Siberian night.

“When I am a rich man, yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum, All day long I’ll drink vodka by the glass, When I am a wealthy man…”

The sky was a wispy dark grey without a horizon as a few tiny snowflakes flickered down. Gradually, bigger, fluffier snowflakes sparkled in the headlight beams like white moths as they fluttered down, sometimes reversing and lifting briefly before dropping once again toward the windshield. As he drove, the flakes gained momentum and size increasing in numbers until he was straining to see through the curtain of flakes. It was beautiful. Sergey knew that it would soon be too cold for this kind of snowfall as the country moved into the deep freeze of winter.

Sergey missed the luxury ZIL he had left in Moscow. It was his happy place. The interior of the ZIL would have been dark, warm, and comfortable with only the dim glow of the dashboard instruments and reflections from the headlights to ease the darkness. The heater would have been blowing a steady current of warm air from under the dashboard to combat the cold. This wreck of an old J40 Toyota Land Cruiser was neither warm nor comfortable, with cold drafts from every direction, but it was a find compared to the other wrecks available, the jacked-up Lada, put together with many different colored parts from many different Ladas, and an unidentifiable car that had been cut in two with a box welded on to the front half to simulate a truck supported on a big raised frame on monster truck wheels. Given the choices, the beatup J40 most resembled a working vehicle and looked the least ridiculous. The seats in the thing were bumpy and hard like the original jeep it was modeled on. But, if the Toyota could adapt to the Sahara and the Australian outback, it would probably function fine in Siberia. One thing it had was traction.

Besides, in his big black ZIL, he would have looked like a mafia ganglord to the locals, and he wanted to be perceived as a man of simple honesty and honor. Which, of course, he was.

“I wouldn’t have to work hard, Ya ha deedle, deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum…” thump thump

There was plenty of land on the edge of the tundra, and the streets were wide, iced dirt expanded in honeycombed permafrost most of the year, - and the houses were set well apart from each other. Unlike southern European towns which had grown beyond the traffic expectations with lanes and streets too narrow to accommodate modern traffic; a century on, there would be no need to move anything in order to widen the streets for more people in Siberia. Though Sergey doubted that in another hundred years, there would be that many more people who would want to live there.