We Are Not in Pakistan Read Online Free PDF Page B

expected to do the cooking for Matushka, Viktor and Galina and be quiet. So she does, and she is.
    She misses what she never knew, the clean papery smell of the
Tribune Energetica,
a desk, a chair. Rivka, who listens as if what Olena says matters.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    June 1986
    Sleeping, Olena senses that Viktor’s weight is not on the bed beside her. She wakes. Galina is sleeping on her back, an arm thrown across her forehead, on the mattress at the foot of their bed. But where is Viktor? She listens for clacking and pinging. Since Victory Day, when Viktor heard that Director Burkhanov would be dismissed and sent to a KGB prison somewhere to await trial, he has been using a borrowed typewriter each weekend night. He has applied for transfers to nuclear stations at Kursk, Smolensk, Khmelnitzky and Rovno. He has applied to Austria, where a brand new nuclear power station is being built. He has applied to Italy. He moans that he and Anatoli are the only Ukrainians in the world who do not have relatives in Canada.
    But tiptoeing from the spare room tonight, Olena finds only silence and a soft glow from Matushka’s kitchen. Viktor is sitting at the table, writing in longhand — a heartfelt plea to the Jewish Social Services of America.
    â€œIf they will not listen,” he says, “I’ll volunteer to fight in Afghanistan.”
    â€œBut I thought you said … the actor in the White House?”
    â€œI said what I was expected to say. But he didn’t do it, Olena.”
    The next morning, Olena takes the metro across the river to the east side of Kyiv to confuse any KGB who may be watching and posts the letters for him.
    November - December 1989
    The Kalendar Prince movement of
Scheherazade
spins from Olena’s new turntable. She sets a small ceramic bowl of sour cream beside a plate of piping hot sirniki on the table and calls, “Galina!”
    Galina, who has grown thin and sickly in the three yearssince they fled Pripyat, had another headache and sore throat this morning before school. She has returned now but is taking so very long in the bathroom. Maybe she still feels unwell. It’s November and changing to winter. Around this time last year, she got pneumonia.
    Olena doesn’t want to be a radiophobe, but how can continuous low doses of ionizing radiation be, as the Ministry of Health says, an improvement to the body? Especially a child’s body?
    Olena places a fork and knife beside Galina’s plate. She fetches a glass of water from the kitchen.
    This apartment is not as large as the one Olena left in Pripyat and its hallways smell of old cabbage, but it’s adequate. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan and liquidators of the cleanup don’t have apartments this large, or telephone connections. For Olena, though not for Galina, its beauty lies in its location, three trolleybus rides from Matushka’s.
    Galina will get used to it.
    You can get used to anything — Dedushka says so, now all his neighbours have left. All he has is his photo albums.
    Olena has torn up worn-out linoleum and repainted Galina’s room lemon. She was lucky to find an old sofa and striped purple material for slipcovers. She covered up the mottled wall in the living room by hanging a carpet over it.
    If only she had the black and white snapshot of her mother to frame and hang on the wall and the mink purse Dedushka gave Galina. These, the motorcycle, Viktor’s balalaika and her father’s novels were abandoned in Pripyat.
    The carpet on the floor still looks dark and worn, though Olena gave it a good scrubbing in the tub.
    â€œGalina!”
    That carpet was still a little wet last week, when Galina’s friends sat on it in a circle and ate wedges of her tenth birthday cake. All from Pripyat. Galina said she doesn’t have new friends inKyiv. More than three and a half years after the accident, so many parents still keep their children from