Читать книгу The Perestroika Effect - Cecilia Tanner - Страница 6

Sergey entered the large foyer. The interior was warm, heated by radiators lining the walls of the large room. Steam generators which extracted excess heat from the nuclear reactors provided hot water for the radiators.

“Ahhhh, that’s more like it,” and he took off his top coat.

The sounds of the plant were a combination of rumbles, whirs, and distant whining gears, making a white noise a little too loud to be a sleep inducer. The place smelled flat - of old concrete and unused metal.

The area was brightly lit because there was no shortage of electrical power in the plant and because the former plant director had overstocked with light bulbs. At the time, he had no way of knowing that his overstocking mistake would pay dividends when the closing of factories created a shortage of them.

High up on the feature wall was a big medallion with an embossed hammer and sickle. It would have been removed after the collapse of the Soviet Union except the officers liked the work as a work of art. The massive wooden podium, formerly used to exhort the workers to achieve higher production, also remained but stood empty and unused.

Sergey could hear voices coming from the reception/ lunchroom at the front of the building.

“Women are from Planet Crybaby,” a male voice asserted loudly.

“And men are from Planet Stupid,” came the female reply., as the outside door closed.

The reception door opened and there was Kushi, the receptionist/secretary frowning before she looked up. Besides the night crew, he hadn’t expected anyone to be working in the front.

Sergey waved and called across the large foyer, “Hello, Kushi.”

The frown disappeared and Kushi smiled broadly at the Colonel, not alarmed to see him. “Hi, Colonel.”

“You are working late!”

“I took time off yesterday to take my mother to the dentist, so I am making up the time I took off.”

“Very good. But I think you can probably call it a day. I don’t think people will get upset if they don’t get their electricity bills on time.”

Now that the town was no longer a company town, the townspeople were charged for the power they used – not much, but enough to pay for the billing.

Kushi laughed honestly. Sergey loved the sound of an honest laugh. Kushi was a slightly chubby young woman of the indigenous Evenki people with a beautiful tight-skinned high cheekboned face that would never age. Her joyous nature lived up to her name that meant ‘living happily’. Some people simply personify their names.

“You don’t need to tell me twice, Colonel,” she said, the silver tube on her bracelet clattering lightly as she went to the coat rack and pulled her coat off the hanger.

“Is Katya in her office? I saw the light on up there.”

“Probably,” she said, not helpfully.

“I saw you two talking.”

“She was asking me about my bracelet,” and she jingled the tube on her wrist. “I tried to explain to her about Buddhism and prayer wheels. She couldn’t understand, ‘How can spinning wheels convey anything to anyone anywhere, she said?

“I tried to explain that they symbolize prayers, almost a shorthand for a prayer, sort of a spiritual technology. She just didn’t get it. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected her to understand. It takes many years of study and practice.”

“She’s obviously a skeptic,” Sergey offered.

“More to the point, she’s Ukrainian, you know,” and she laughed.

Sergey couldn’t help it, his eyebrows shot up – this criticism from a young woman in Siberia, the outback of the outback. Does every tribe and nation in the world have to be superior to another? It was so easy to put down the brother or the neighbour when you know a little about them. He waved his hand over his shoulder as he walked to the elevator.

The elevator was slow and sometimes balky, a Russian feature more common than the reliable computer equipment. Only yesterday he had been trapped in the stalled cab for ten minutes. His alternative was to climb the back stairs to his office on the 4^th floor, but he wanted to warn the operator in the Security Control Centre that he was in the building, so he waited to ride up.

So there is a sticky lock and the unreliable elevator – both essential repairs.

He left his coat and package in his office. He poured himself a mug of coffee. On his way back to the desk, he glanced out the window and saw Pavel, the gatehouse guard, arrive at the plant on his motorcycle. He watched absently as Kushi hurried out to him, gave him a hug and climbed on the back of the bike huddling down behind him in her parka.

Well, so they are a couple, he thought, with a pinch in his heart.

He sat down at the desk, took a cigar out of the humidor and struck a match. He could have used his lighter, but the cigar tradition called for a solid wooden match. The flame of the match went up and down as he sucked in to get the cigar lit.

Then he sat back to check to read his messages, the security reports, and the operations reports.

During the week when he had checked out the mine administration building that contained maintenance and repair workshops, equipment and material storage rooms, crew rooms and a large assembly foyer, and his own office, he had chosen times when the operation activities were done or during lunch breaks and he had run into few workers. He had spoken to Pavel in the guardhouse, however, and he enjoyed greeting Kushi, but he didn’t want the imposition of socializing to interfere with his focus. Remembering the details always mattered.

Inside the cave beyond the administration building were four reactor rooms lined up side by side like loaves of bread on a shelf. They were joined across the front by a reactor control room and across the back by a plutonium processing room. The plutonium produced in the reactors was molded into pitts; grapefruit-sized spheres destined to be the cores of nuclear bombs.

The remainder of the huge cave was a secure plutonium storage vault where fortified steel canisters containing the plutonium pitts were arranged in grid patterns. They stood on end like welding tanks, each one separated from its neighbour, rank after rank. An overhead crane, remotely controlled, placed and retrieved the canisters as demanded by the operator. The crane extended across the entire grid of canisters to a railway loading dock at one end and to a vehicle interlock port at the other. A battery-powered tractor was equipped with hydraulic arms and hand-like grippers for loading the canisters onto railway boxcars or heavy trucks.

He remembered running his fingers over the plutonium storage vault – not a spot of dust.

“Your mother would be keen to see it all so clean...” he sang to himself. Yet there felt like there was something dark hiding under this bland surface, like the frozen mud under the permafrost.

He looked at the walls in his office. They still had the former director Tarasov’s framed certificates on the wall, his graduation from the technical institute, the winner of the 1986 fishing derby, even his school award for allround athlete. Sergey used to think it was narcissism to surround yourself with reminders of your success in your office, but now he was thinking that, generally, people’s failures loom much larger in their memories than their successes, and this is one way to keep one’s self-esteem: by looking at your wins could counteract the overpowering interior focus on your losses.

Well Tarasov’s successes aren’t going to boost Sergey’s sense of himself, so he removed them and put them on a chair. His family may want to keep them. As he stacked them up, he noticed a family photo that must have been of his parents and siblings. Tarasov would have been about 10. Sergey’s family, when he was 10, didn’t have so many kids – just his brother. Otherwise, they could have been neighbours. You can’t see the person in the photos really. You can’t even see who you are in your own photos. Was Tarasov’s dad a patriot like his own dad had been and like Tolstoy had been in his early years? Had his mother been a pacifist like Sergey’s mom, like Tolstoy had become in his later years?

His mother was all about the later Tolstoy, the critic of the state, the critic of the orthodox religion, the critic of the culture. “It’s not real, these institutions,” she told the family, “They are all pretense; games with their little rules.” They listened, but they each had their own take on the ideas; they would learn their own lessons.

Looking closely at the picture stopped Sergey’s tune in his head – the man was not just a name with a title, “Director”; he had been the man running the plant from this office, sitting at this desk, the man who made the decisions, the man who had died, and died recently. Sergey put the picture down inside the stack of pictures.

He sat down to read the reports from the previous day. As he read, he started to hum again to activate his memory. He had photographic recall connected to the songs he hummed or sang or whistled. It had been a huge help in his student days.

So here they were up the hill from the Yakutya Plains below where much of the industry that had formerly relied on electrical power from the Seytchan plant had ceased to function. Factories had closed and the labour market had dried up. Apart from electricians who serviced the high-tension power lines on the mountain, most of whom had long since moved away from the region, nobody really knew or cared where their electricity came from. They only grumbled if it was interrupted.

The village became even more isolated than it had been under the Soviets. Their whole world changed on December 25, 1991, three days after Belarus, Russia and Ukraine met and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union was no more. Russia and the other fourteen newly independent states scrambled to fill the political void with some form of their own government and authority. Farms, factories, and plants, formerly under the control of the central Soviet government drifted in limbo like ghost ships becalmed on a dark ocean.

Suddenly, there was no clear leadership; nobody knew who was in charge of what. The KGB was disbanded and nothing had clearly taken its place, the FSB partially in control under Yeltsin. So the people obeyed an order if it was to their personal advantage; otherwise, they ignored it. Without the structure of Soviet communism, the country was in near anarchy, many determined to get their expectations of a new regime met no matter how unreasonable those expectations might be.

If they saw someone else get ahead or they weren’t getting the promotion or the “break” they expected, the jealousy was often violent, unleashing their well-developed paranoid emotions in gangster style. How much of the sabotage here at the plant was the work of disgruntled workers who felt cheated out of their chance to make it big? The rat race brought out the rat in people, willing to chew their way through the floorboards holding them down.

People who could were becoming entrepreneurs, both big and small. And since not all the rats had two legs, those little four legged rats being ubiquitous around the world and always a problem, Yuri’s sister had figured out a better mousetrap – literally – and started making them in her husband’s workshop. She now operated a small factory turning out mousetraps and rat-traps that she was selling to a wider and wider market. Her husband was finding his niche in logging trucks, taking out the precious Siberian spruce that was so highly valued for bicycling velodromes around the world. For some, the new order was a good thing.

For the unemployed, those without the stronger survival instincts, and the elderly, however, who lost their social benefits in the breakdown of the bureaucracy, all of them unused to the capitalist competition, their focus was down to putting bread on the table and scrambling for the basic necessities of life.

The black market flourished. Former state assets were suddenly looked upon as ownerless and theirs for the taking. Pilfering of equipment and material for sale on the black market was thought by many of the people as only selling what was already theirs.

No matter how corrupt the Soviet Union was, there had been a sense of order, but now the law was Darwinian and held in the hands of the ruthless and the violent on the street instead of in the hands of the ruthless in the government. Fortunately, ruthless and violent were the byways Sergey and Yuri had been walking most of their lives. They had the skills well developed to survive on the new open range.

When finished reading the reports, Sergey got up to take another look through the facility. He went down the stairs past the Security Control Centre that was on the third floor. Once more through the facility with his boots on the ground wouldn’t hurt.

He continued on down the stairs to the second floor where the analysis laboratory sat above the port. Sergey planned to check out the new analyst, Katya Bodnarchuk, later the next day. Though he had avoided her during the week, he heard from Yuri that she was young, good looking and competent.

“You are going to like this woman,” Magda warned him.

Yuri & Magda would love to find a companion, maybe even a love, for Sergie. They had brought relatives to dinners to meet him, but Sergey was cut off – dead emotionally - the extent to which they gradually came to understand. With every new prospect, he was as courteous as the occasion demanded, but nothing more. He knew Magda and Yuri were disappointed, but out of respect, they tried not to interfere. However, with Yuri’s interest in this woman, Sergey looked forward to meeting her.

As he passed her office, he was surprised to see her looking intently at her monitor. What is she working on at that hour, and what was she looking at? From the shadows he peered through the office window. She’s watching Elovach, for goddsake. She had noted his car, and now she was spying on him. Was she attracted to the man? Maybe she is a woman who likes reckless men, men they can rescue. Or are they working together and she doesn’t trust him?

Sergey found Elovach to be a shabby piece of a man, but he knew that people can have many different faces for many different people. One person’s nemesis is another person’s hero.

Did she come to Seytchan because she knew he was here? Or did they both have another reason to be here?

Sergey’s soft-soled work boots made no echo, and he ducked down the stairs to the main floor without being seen.

In the next few days, as he examined the plant, he hummed and sang his way around, committing to his visual memory everything he saw: the special air handling systems that filtered and refreshed the air trapping even the smallest grain of radioactive debris, and the one-way valves that brought in filtered outside air, preventing any inside air from escaping, even under the pressure of an explosion.