ERA EMILIA

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

My home town knew neither peace nor people anymore.

A powerful blast at one of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant reactors had become the greatest catastrophe in the history of nuclear energy, but the world was still unaware of the danger. The invisible deaths over a few days covered half of Europe and Ukraine. Just a few kilometres away from my quiet home, the human-made concrete volcano silently threw out radiation that would have sufficed for three hundred Hiroshima. Hundreds of buses in an uneven nervous chain carried the inhabitants of my town away to safer places. I wondered if anyone had guessed that there were no more safe places? The thirty-kilometre contaminated area around the reactor, which would soon become my only decent home, was still inhabited and people were not warned about the danger for a further two weeks. In private gardens and main squares, thousands of people celebrated the spring, and several dozen kilometres from them, forests and woods became brown from radiation, and firefighters fainted forever under the walls of the Station. Hundreds of liquidators of this terrible catastrophe were convinced by the supreme authorities that they were extinguishing, at any rate, a massive but quite ordinary fire. They received lethal doses of irradiation within a few minutes of their last in their lives work. Many tons of uranium dioxide, iodine, cesium, tellurium, and inert gases emanated from the anthropogenic hell, descended to earth and penetrated forever into the ground, the water, and settled on the wool of animals, and infiltrated every cell of any weak human body. Thousands of them would become dust in the first months and years following the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of others would remain disabled until the end of their suffering days. And millions, upon millions of people for hundreds of years to come would feel in themselves and their children the presence of a quiet, invisible killer.

The Heavens told me not to be afraid of the airplanes and of those people who almost always came to ask why during the evenings when our house lights were still turned on. I learned the phrase that worked without fail on those people in uniforms.

“We need to be here. You will go away and never remember that you came here”.

The response was never noticeable, and only the dead sound of the closing door proved that the supervisors of the alienated area had allowed us to stay in our home.

Every day I woke to see that the Heavens were not sleeping and went to bed when they still did not even yawn before the night sleep. There were seven of them, and I am not sure that I knew which two of them had compelled my parents to leave obediently, without money, and without their little Emilia. “Good morning, Emilia”, “Good night, Emilia”, I told myself every day so as not to forget my name. “Era will have a happy day”, “Era will have good dreams”, said one of the Heavens, so that I had no doubt about the carelessness of my easy-going childhood. I drank a cup of milk and took a sweet green triangular pill, which the Heavens carefully placed on the table every morning. “Now you have nothing to fear”, they said, and I had no fear.

We lived on the second floor of an ordinary five-storey Soviet ‘khrushchoba’ – ‘Khrushchev’s’ concrete-block house. They built thousands of these concrete slums, weak, loud, grey, ugly, and unreliable - as if they were only temporary...

It seemed that the whole town was built only to perish gloomily, cursing the entire world. The rooms of our apartment, like everyone else’s, were so small that any Heaven could touch both walls at the same time. In the largest country on this vast planet, there was no more room for a man than a hen in a chicken coop. Mom and Dad loved the Soviet Union so passionately that they did not want to know about those who lived elsewhere. It was a strange love – like that of an abandoned child to his never-known gone-astray mother...

The Heavens told me to believe that my parents were safe and still remembered me, and I believed. I did not know sorrow or despair. The disappearance of neighbouring children and their parents did not disturb my peace – I gained more instead – every day as if on cue, the dogs gathered around me – those poor sweet things left by their owners for several days at a time, which became an eternity. I touched their wet noses, and they nuzzled my wet cheeks ... We brought calmness and peace to one another.

I had no idea where the Heavens got all the delicious foods that they nourished me with and told me to share with my new friends. For hours, I fed dogs with meat, bread, and sweets, played games with them and stroked the fluffy coats of those who were tired and needed a nap. Occasionally, I fell asleep with them under the shade of barely living trees, and sweet tenderness was born somewhere deep in my throat. I felt how it warmed through my chest and fingertips and itched my eyes to tears. I loved those dogs as much as they loved me. Since then, nothing more honest happened in my life...

“Today Era will go for a walk”. It sounded so convincing in my ears that I was surprised why I was not there yet.

“If we are seen downtown, they will force me to leave my dogs and go away”, I tried to object.

“Why does Era think about what she does not want to think of”?

“I think about what can happen! - I was angry but not in a childish way.

“Only what you let happen will happen”.

The indignation was boiling in me like potatoes in a saucepan. How could such adult, self-assured, persuasive creatures not see the obvious things?

“The obviousness is an illusion, Era will understand”.

What was that trick? I did not say anything; how did they hear that! Could Heavens like dogs, understand me without words being spoken?

“Words are optional. Era will learn”.

Miracles ... Nevertheless indeed - I never noticed that the Heavens ever communicated with each other. At least not out loud. It sometimes happened that two of them stared at each other for a long time, but none of the muscles in their faces showed tension or play. It seemed like the whole world was born in their narrow, deep-set eyes – now they lightened, then darkened, or they exploded in bunches of colours that I did not even know the names of. It was my personal mute theatre.

“Era gets acquainted with Nature”, a Heaven stirred me from my thoughts.

“Era has already got acquainted”. I monkeyed him and froze in anticipation of the punishment.

“Era sees only the shell”.

“For Era, it is enough”.

“Era will go for a walk”.

“Goodness gracious”! I remembered how my Mom always ended difficult conversations and gave up.

It was on that very day that the true magic began.