This story was originally published in New York Stories, Fall 2002 (La Guardia Community College/CUNY). It inspired a Chernobyl survivor character in my novel GRAND TRAVERSE, and it especially inspired my novel CHERNOBYL MURDERS.
CHERNOBYL LOVERS a short story by Michael Beres My twin brother Bela was amazed by the speed of my Mustang as I accelerated up and out of the parking garage at the airport. He showed this amazement by grasping his knees, bunching up the fabric of his trousers, and shouting with joy |
"Je! Andras! Now that I am out of the airport I can finally feel the freedom here. It has history. It has tradition. It grabs me by the nuts!"
I should have known then that Bela had things other than freedom and tradition in mind. Although we were not identical twins, we were fraternal twins and I should have known the extent of emotional and physical support he was after.
As I drove from the airport to the Bronx, Bela kept looking past me out the window at the Manhattan skyline.
"Your city is a monster crouched down in the morning mist, Andras."
"It only looks that way because the Twin Towers are gone."
As we curved north toward the Triborough Bridge Bela turned about in the seat to look out the rear window. His arm was around the seat back and, as I glanced toward him, he seemed to cradle the seat's headrest in his hand as if it were not a seat but a woman.
I wondered how the meeting between Mariska and Bela would go. Long ago in Kiev, before the fall of the Soviet Union, before Chernobyl blew up, it could have been either of us who had received the visa. But I had gotten the visa. And I had won Mariska, snatching her from Bela's arms on the train platform in Kiev, ending the triangle that had lasted since our youth. Now we were all three middle-aged.
"Is the hospital in there among those buildings?" asked Bela.
"Yes."
"It must be a world's record for piss to travel. I let go of it in Kiev and it lands here in New York before I do."
"Very funny, Bela. Is that what you thought about on the plane? That you were following your piss across the ocean?"
We were waiting in line to pay the bridge toll. Bela stared at me with sad brown eyes that looked like my eyes in the morning mirror.
"No," said Bela. "On the plane I thought about other things. First I thought about the plane being hijacked and flown into a building. Then, when it seemed the plane would actually make it to the airport, I thought about another explosion in the past. I thought about the poor timing of my visit to Uncle Pista's farm and the fact that the farm, on that particular day, was downwind of the power plant. I thought about how Uncle Pista and I should have gone to the wine cellar instead of standing in the road like everyone else wondering what the hell all the smoke was about. Of course, since so many years have passed and governments have gone the way of lost children, not many ears are willing to listen to the lament of the Chernobyl victim. The Chernobyl victim is even made to feel guilty when daring to have a seat in a clinic waiting room."
"Why guilty?" I asked.
"Because having to deal with illness caused long ago is tedious when everyone is concerned with the future."
I paid the toll and accelerated slowly. "We never really had a chance to talk about the incident, Bela. When did they finally come and tell you it was the Chernobyl reactor?"
"It wasn't until Saturday night, twenty hours after the explosion. By the time the trucks driven by masked soldiers arrived to take us away, everyone on Uncle Pista's collective had gotten their quota of radiation. But I don't want to talk about that now. Right now I want to bathe in freedom."
As Bela stared up through the windshield at the bridge, sunlight strobed him so that each small change in his countenance was frozen on his face making him look, from second to second, like first one corpse than another sitting in the bucket seat next to me. It was a frightful vision because we looked so much alike and I, too, could feel the flash of sun coming through the windshield.
***
The researchers at NYU School of Medicine, which sponsored Bela's trip for the long-term Chernobyl twins research project, performed identical tests on us for several days. Much of the time was spent in a waiting room where Bela and I sat in our hospital gowns resting between bouts of blood draws and enemas and x‑rays.
For many hours we spoke of the past, of our boyhood together on the farm north of Kiev, of our parents who worked all day in the fields and then worked evenings in the private plot so there would be vegetables to preserve for the entire year. We wept as we recounted the death of our father and, a year later, our mother. But mostly we spoke of Mariska.
She lived with her parents and seven brothers and sisters on the northern edge of the collective. Until we were fourteen she was simply one of a swarm of children taken by bus to the Pripyat school each day. But everything changed during the summer of our fourteenth year. During that summer Bela and I became infatuated with Mariska, creating the triangle and the memories that continue to haunt me.
One of my most vivid recollections is of a sunny afternoon in a barley field. A picnic lunch on a blanket. A bottle of wine smuggled from Uncle Pista's wine cellar. A pair of kisses, the first on my lips, the second on Bela's lips. And, finally, a promise that whatever happened, the three of us would remain together forever. But the passage of time chiseled away at our promise and the triangle was broken when Mariska and I left Bela behind on the platform at Central Station in Kiev.
To this day I am still not certain how I won Mariska away from Bela. There seems to be no answer in the past because it is clouded with the memory of a juvenile conversation in Ukrainian, roughly translated as follows:
"You two are going to pull me apart someday."
"I wouldn't want you pulled apart."
"Neither would I."
"I know. You each want me whole. You each want me all to yourself. But it's impossible. You'll have to share me. Just like now, you each get a kiss. Nothing could be more fair."
"Why can't Andras and I each have an arm and a hand? You've got two of them."
"You're right, Bela. We can each have a leg, and each an eye. Anything Mariska has two of we can share equally."
"Shame on you two!"
"What's wrong?"
"I see where you're looking!"
Mariska and I were married in New York shortly after our arrival. During our first year in New York we went to classes and spoke only English to one another. We took citizenship classes and soon the only connection to our homeland was Bela who wrote monthly in Ukrainian. At the end of each letter Bela would ask the same question. "Will I be an uncle soon?" After several years, when Mariska and I still hadn't had a child, Bela stopped asking and instead wrote every month that he was studying for the day he would also come to America.
"I never dreamed I'd be treated like this in America," said Bela after we completed a lower G‑I series.
We were in the waiting room. It was afternoon and, because of the test, we had been forced to fast since the previous evening. On other days, which involved simple blood tests and interviews, Mariska had arrived at the hospital at noon to lunch with us in the hospital cafeteria. That morning, as we left for the hospital saying we were both starved because of our fasting, Mariska had promised a dinner feast of Hungarian goulash.
"We'll make up for it tonight," I said. "Mariska is probably at work in the kitchen right now with neighbors on the phone inquiring about the wonderful odors seeping into their apartments."
"Stop," said Bela, holding up his hand. "I'm hungry enough already. When I open my mouth tonight I'll suck the food in like a vacuum cleaner."
At that point I asked the question that began the conversation Bela must have been planning for a long time. "Tell me, Bela. Do you think Mariska is as good a cook as Mama always was?"
"Certainly she is," said Bela. "How can you think otherwise?"
"Because years have passed and it's hard to make an accurate comparison."
"Time flavors the past," said Bela. "But still, everyone enjoys bringing back pleasant memories."
"Yes," I said, "especially these days. I remember specific scenes of our boyhood very fondly, very vividly."
"How old are we in these scenes, Andras?"
"I don't know, various ages."
"Infancy?"
"Not that young."
"Six or seven?"
"Older, during our adolescence."
"We were very close," said Bela, touching my hand.
"Yes, we were."
"And when we grew older Mariska became very close to both of us."
A nurse came in and drew blood from us. When she was gone Bela stared at me for several seconds before speaking.
"Did you notice whose blood she took first?"
"What?"
"The nurse. She took blood from you before she took it from me."
"What difference does that make?"
"It's symbolic, Andras. You were born first."
"We were born together, Bela. I just happened to be first at the gate."
"You didn't plan it?" asked Bela.
I laughed, then stopped laughing when I saw the look on Bela's face. When I placed my hand on his shoulder he stood and walked to a window that overlooked nothing but a section of graveled roof with exhaust vents sticking out. He spoke without turning around.
"You were always first through the gate, Andras. You surpassed me in school. You rode Papa's stallion better than me. You climbed higher in trees. You found work in Kiev and moved away from the farm before I did. And when I arrived in Kiev you had already mastered the swim to Trukhanov Island."
"But Bela, none of that makes any difference. It was simple fate. We were young and that's just how things turned out. The tragedy of it all, indeed the thing that really makes me unhappy, is the fact that you were left behind and the fact that you happened to be at the farm when Chernobyl blew up. It would have been so much simpler if the Union had fallen apart before Chernobyl blew up. Then you would have been here with us in New York instead of on Uncle Pista's farm."
Bela continued staring out the window, watching as a wisp of steam from a vent blew past. "No, if I had been here in New York in 1986, somehow fate would have intervened years later and placed me in The World Trade Center. I would have been in one of the towers. Chernobyl would have been denied me, but not the terrorists. That is the way fate works. I thought I'd never say these things. I thought I'd hold them inside until my death. Everything has gone your way, Andras. You were first to obtain a visa. And when you left you took Mariska with you."
"Fate could have turned it the other way, Bela. She was torn between us and has never forgotten you. That's something I've had to live with."
Bela turned and glared at me. "How hard it must have been for you, Andras. Was it difficult in bed? Did Mariska's thoughts of me interrupt your lovemaking? How sorry I am to have inconvenienced you!"
Bela turned back to the window and spoke more calmly. "Yes, I suppose fate could have turned it another way. Mariska could have failed to get a visa and stayed behind with me. Perhaps we would have both been at the farm and been irradiated together. Or perhaps she would have had to stay behind in Kiev, busy at her job while I paid my fatal visit to Uncle Pista. Or perhaps the chain of events would have progressed differently. The explosion occurs. I hear it in the middle of the night and I am worried about Mariska in Kiev. After all, none of us knew at first where the explosion came from. I leave immediately for Kiev and in so doing I pass through the greatest radiation. I am hospitalized in Kiev and in a few weeks I die. And then what would have happened, Andras?"
"I don't know."
"I'll tell you. It's in the Bible."
"Bela, this is idiotic. I don't know what you're talking about."
Bela came toward me. He stopped in front of me, his hands on his hips, his elbows out making the hospital gown look like wings.
"Onan!" he shouted.
"Onan?"
"Yes. You would have come back then, Andras. You would have come back to Kiev to do your brotherly duty after I died."
"Onan spilled his seed on the ground, Bela."
"I know! Spilled on the ground the way a hypocritical zealot would do! Spilled on the ground like so much radiation! Spilled on the ground as you must have done all these years so that I'll not even have the privilege of being an uncle!"
Bela smiled a strange smile, like putting on a smile in the mirror to see how it looks.
An orderly came to take us for another test. Later that day, when I tried to get Bela to speak freely again, he waved his hand, said he had acted foolishly and that I was to forget what he had said.
***
Several weeks after our tests winter set in. On a snowy evening with dinner late because of traffic, Bela announced he had leukemia. The three of us clung to one another that evening and, instead of retiring to our two separate bedrooms, sat up the entire night talking about the days of our youth in the old country. At one point, after several shots of brandy, Bela stood at the window looking down at the snow‑covered streets and exclaimed that the weather was appropriate because he had now entered his nuclear winter.
"Just as the eastern bloc and the union came apart, just as those planes flew into the Twin Towers, my own blood tears me apart. I am the fish that rots from the head first. And I prove it by making insane statements. Fraternal twins do not share insanity the way identical twins do. Therefore you are safe, Andras. That's one good thing we learned during the experiments. Andras is safe from my weaknesses. It's a good thing you didn't marry me, Mariska. No one wants to be married to a madman being eaten by cancer. When I die and they cut me open for the sake of research, be sure you aren't downwind!"
Neither Mariska nor I commented on the statements Bela made that night. I think we didn't answer because we felt Bela wanted us to disagree with him so he could start an argument, then accuse us of ganging up on him. He had made the mistake of staying behind in a melancholy and morose land where a reactor could be allowed to blow up and officials could deny-deny-deny. He had made the mistake of leaving only after it had become easy to leave. His leaving had not resulted in headlines about a defecting ballet dancer or violinist. He had no sponsors in the U.S. except Mariska and me and the researchers at NYU who were more interested in comparing his body chemistry and mental state to that of his twin brother than in his physical or emotional survival.
After the radiation and chemotherapy treatments, Bela refused to leave the apartment except for visits to the hospital, this despite the wig Mariska had purchased to cover his bald head. In spring, when sounds of children came in through the open windows, Bela remained in his room all day while Mariska and I were at work. And he stayed there in the evening so that we had to take food to him and encourage him to eat.
In June Bela's hair and his spirits grew back. He'd gotten a part-time job before being diagnosed with leukemia and now spoke of getting a full-time job, earning enough to buy a Mustang of his own and travel throughout the U.S. He bought new clothes to fit his thinner physique and spent his evenings, as he put it, "Using my accent to attract shameless American girls."
The relapse came in July. And by August, after a brief hospital stay, Bela was back in the spare bedroom day and night.
***
In September, on the Saturday following the anniversary of the September 11 attack, I sat alone on a bench along a walkway. Although people strolled by and I heard voices, I did not hear words or sentences. In the distance I heard the roar of a tiger or lion and I imagined the beast standing guard over its battered and bloody prey.
I could have been in any city zoo on a warm afternoon. I could have been in the Kiev Zoo, the zoo Bela and Mariska and I visited so long ago. Perhaps the same monkeys that Bela and I made faces at were here, or perhaps the children of those monkeys. Perhaps Bela and Mariska are gone to America leaving me here to visit the Kiev Zoo alone where the monkeys make faces at me. I've been left behind and now the monkeys perform backflips and scratch their genitalia and make faces at me causing great laughter at my expense. That is what Bela told me, that the monkeys made faces at him during a visit to the Kiev zoo just before he left for the U.S.
The bench on which I sat that September Saturday was at the Bronx Zoo. As the three of us agreed the previous evening, Mariska and Bela were spending the day alone in the apartment. It was his final wish before his entrance into the hospital Monday for what he insisted would be the dose of radiation and chemicals that kill him.
On the path before me a young couple pushed a double stroller with twins aboard. The bridge between the connected seats was narrow and one of the twins poked the other in the eye causing tears. At this young age‑‑still so close to that fetal similarity all mammals possess‑‑I could not tell whether they were girls or boys or one of each.
The poked twin glanced back toward its parents, and apparently unsatisfied with their reaction, let out a scream that stopped passersby in their tracks. The mother lifted the screaming twin from the stroller, the father smiled at me and shook his head, the twin still in the stroller sucked its thumb.
A siren blared outside the zoo and I saw the reaction of others to it. Since the previous year sirens had meant much more than in the past. Visitors to the zoo turned and stared toward the siren the way animals sometimes do when an unknown danger presents itself. I stood and walked toward the siren. By the time I reached the zoo exit the siren was ear-shattering and I found myself running. A fire truck sped past and I ran after it. In my head I replayed the video of the Twin Towers being hit again. But then I put the towers back in their cubbyhole in my head and instead imagined my apartment building ablaze. Mariska and Bela there and the apartment on fire!
Although gasping for breath when I reached the apartment I somehow managed to run up the stairs. Of course the apartment building was not on fire, but I still ran. By the time I made it to the landing on my floor I was dizzy, the landing tipping backward. I stumbled down a step, spun around, almost went down face first but managed to hang onto the railings on both sides. Just as I envisioned myself lying on the landing below, the EMT from the floor below, who works second shift and knew two coworkers who died on September 11, peeked out of her apartment in full uniform.
"Are you okay up there?" She crooned it like an EMT on an emergency show where some poor slob is obviously dying. "Take it easy, okay?"
"Mind your own business!"
"Well shit, okay," she said, and went back into her apartment.
Back on my landing I hung on, catching my breath. I dropped my keys twice and finally pushed the correct key into the lock. I shoved inward expecting the security chain to slam against the door edge. But the door flew open, pivoted against Bela's suitcase, which had been stored behind the door since his arrival in the U.S., and bounced back, slamming in my face.
I pushed the door open again and this time ran through. Mariska let out a screech before I got to the bedroom. The bedroom door was closed and I choked the knob in my grasp, flinging the door open.
They were naked. Of course they were naked, what did I expect? Bela looked like a toppled tower lying atop Mariska. He was so skinny some of his bones seemed to be lost inside her. They both stared at me, animals caught in the headlights. Mariska had her hands on Bela's ribbed sides and in one quick movement lifted his weight off, causing Bela to tumble to the floor between the bed and the wall.
Then, with Bela on the floor, I could see only Mariska. She pulled the blanket about her. My own wife covering herself, covering her thighs and belly and breasts as she sat up in bed!
"Andras!"
I fell across the bed, snatching at the blanket as if it were an animal let loose in the bed.
"Andras! Stop!"
Bela lay in the narrow space between bed and wall. When I looked down at him he stared not at me but at the ceiling, his hands folded across his chest.
"What--what are you doing?" I asked.
"Practicing my coffin pose," answered Bela.
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"Yes. Northern Ukraine humor is very dark."
***
After I calmed down and we were all three in the kitchen sipping tea, Bela told us about the day after the explosion at Chernobyl. He'd put on jeans and a loose tee shirt so we didn't have to look at his bones. Mariska had put on her robe cinched up tight, the folds of the collar gathered close to her neck like a noose.
Bela treated his cup of tea with respect, looking into it occasionally to make certain it heard what he said. He spoke about Chernobyl as though telling the story to strangers. He revealed details he had not spoken when he first arrived in New York.
"I was walking between rows of radish plants. Perhaps I was helping Uncle Pista cultivate, I'm not sure. I remember one of the collective's trucks speeding down the road. Uncle Pista said Vasily the joker was driving and I thought I'd hear some rural gossip about Gorbachev. Some jokes I could tell my friends back in Kiev. What happened instead was that we were told the cause of the explosion we'd heard during the night. Back then it wasn't at all like today where disasters are instantaneously on every television in the world. Back then we were in the dark.
"As you know, Uncle Pista's house was ten kilometers from the plant. Since many lived even closer, we assumed we were safe. Unfortunately we were unaware of the trick the wind was playing as we stood speculating like farmers in any remote district tend to do. I was like the rest of them. A farmer. It wasn't until late that night that masked soldiers herded us onto buses. I remember a guy they called Arkady the bean-eater saying during the long bus ride to Kiev in the dark that we'd been no better in protecting ourselves than cackling hens--"
***
A few weeks later, after Bela's final chemotherapy treatment, we both went back to the university hospital for a meeting about test results. Although I didn't understand the technical details, the results of the tests seemed to be that radiation did indeed change Bela's life expectancy. Something about late nervous system development curtailed by a certain percentage as a result of the radiation exposure. So much for science.
While we were at the hospital, Bela saw a notice on a bulletin board for a cancer survivor workshop. He didn't tell me about it until the night of the workshop. He said he wanted to attend the workshop alone.
The following weekend Mariska and I double-dated with Bela and a woman he'd met at the workshop. Her name was Susie. Bela pronounced her name Zuzie, as in, "I'd like you to meet Zuzie."
We were at an Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue. Bela and Susie had both gotten buzzed on Hungarian wine. Mariska and I were encouraged to see them smiling and having a good time. Susie and Bela hung onto each other as if they'd known one another a long time. I recall feeling a tinge of jealousy seeing my twin brother carry on so with a middle-aged woman he'd just met.
After three bottles of wine were exhausted Susie spoke of her bout with cervical cancer. Very little detail, just that she had an hysterectomy and chemotherapy. Not really much of a story at all, but I could tell by the way Bela watched her and encouraged her to go on that he wanted to hear the story even though he'd already heard it at the workshop. When Susie finished she wanted Bela to tell about Chernobyl. He told the story as he had told it to me and Mariska, the complete story with Uncle Pista and standing in the road instead of going to the wine cellar and Vasily the joker bringing news of the explosion and Arkady the bean-eater on the bus to Kiev. He even told the joke about the world record set by his piss traveling from Kiev and arriving in New York before he arrived.
During Bela's story the waiter interrupted to take our orders. We all chose the stuffed cabbage the place was known for. A sad Hungarian prima played on the restaurant sound system and all four of us were quiet for a while. Then, after the stuffed cabbage arrived and we'd all begun stuffing ourselves, Susie swallowed a mouthful and, waving her fork toward Bela, made the following statement.
"I've heard about you Chernobyl survivors. But I'm also a survivor. I was diagnosed with cancer before September 11 last year and I'm still alive."
***
Bela died before the year ended. His final words, those Mariska and I could understand, were spoken in English. As each of us held one of his hands, he said, "At last, I am first--"
While Mariska and I prepared dinner one night after a long work day and a terrible commute, we received a phone call from Susie's sister. Susie had died and had written in a final note that she wanted us to be notified. We'd never met any of Susie's family and we'd met Susie only that one time, but we decided to go to the funeral in Bela's memory.
It turned out Susie and Bela were buried in the same Bronx cemetery not far from one another. There is a mound in the new section of the cemetery. It seems they can get more bodies into the cemetery that way. Bela is buried on the north downslope of the mound while Susie is buried on the south downslope. When Mariska and I were picking out Bela's burial site, I asked the cemetery lady if the mound was an old trash heap. Mariska shushed me, the cemetery lady frowned, I responded with something to the effect that it was a question Bela would have asked. Actually the mound does look like a buried pile of rubble. It's shaped like a flattened cone with a wide base. Perhaps the Chernobyl sarcophagus is shaped this way, although I admit I've never gone back to the Ukraine to see it.
After Susie's funeral, Mariska put her arm around me in the car and we both wept. Then I started the Mustang's engine and sped out of the cemetery, the Mustang growling through its twin pipes as it carried us away, back to our apartment and our bedroom and our bed in our new land.
Copyright 2009 Michael Beres
I should have known then that Bela had things other than freedom and tradition in mind. Although we were not identical twins, we were fraternal twins and I should have known the extent of emotional and physical support he was after.
As I drove from the airport to the Bronx, Bela kept looking past me out the window at the Manhattan skyline.
"Your city is a monster crouched down in the morning mist, Andras."
"It only looks that way because the Twin Towers are gone."
As we curved north toward the Triborough Bridge Bela turned about in the seat to look out the rear window. His arm was around the seat back and, as I glanced toward him, he seemed to cradle the seat's headrest in his hand as if it were not a seat but a woman.
I wondered how the meeting between Mariska and Bela would go. Long ago in Kiev, before the fall of the Soviet Union, before Chernobyl blew up, it could have been either of us who had received the visa. But I had gotten the visa. And I had won Mariska, snatching her from Bela's arms on the train platform in Kiev, ending the triangle that had lasted since our youth. Now we were all three middle-aged.
"Is the hospital in there among those buildings?" asked Bela.
"Yes."
"It must be a world's record for piss to travel. I let go of it in Kiev and it lands here in New York before I do."
"Very funny, Bela. Is that what you thought about on the plane? That you were following your piss across the ocean?"
We were waiting in line to pay the bridge toll. Bela stared at me with sad brown eyes that looked like my eyes in the morning mirror.
"No," said Bela. "On the plane I thought about other things. First I thought about the plane being hijacked and flown into a building. Then, when it seemed the plane would actually make it to the airport, I thought about another explosion in the past. I thought about the poor timing of my visit to Uncle Pista's farm and the fact that the farm, on that particular day, was downwind of the power plant. I thought about how Uncle Pista and I should have gone to the wine cellar instead of standing in the road like everyone else wondering what the hell all the smoke was about. Of course, since so many years have passed and governments have gone the way of lost children, not many ears are willing to listen to the lament of the Chernobyl victim. The Chernobyl victim is even made to feel guilty when daring to have a seat in a clinic waiting room."
"Why guilty?" I asked.
"Because having to deal with illness caused long ago is tedious when everyone is concerned with the future."
I paid the toll and accelerated slowly. "We never really had a chance to talk about the incident, Bela. When did they finally come and tell you it was the Chernobyl reactor?"
"It wasn't until Saturday night, twenty hours after the explosion. By the time the trucks driven by masked soldiers arrived to take us away, everyone on Uncle Pista's collective had gotten their quota of radiation. But I don't want to talk about that now. Right now I want to bathe in freedom."
As Bela stared up through the windshield at the bridge, sunlight strobed him so that each small change in his countenance was frozen on his face making him look, from second to second, like first one corpse than another sitting in the bucket seat next to me. It was a frightful vision because we looked so much alike and I, too, could feel the flash of sun coming through the windshield.
***
The researchers at NYU School of Medicine, which sponsored Bela's trip for the long-term Chernobyl twins research project, performed identical tests on us for several days. Much of the time was spent in a waiting room where Bela and I sat in our hospital gowns resting between bouts of blood draws and enemas and x‑rays.
For many hours we spoke of the past, of our boyhood together on the farm north of Kiev, of our parents who worked all day in the fields and then worked evenings in the private plot so there would be vegetables to preserve for the entire year. We wept as we recounted the death of our father and, a year later, our mother. But mostly we spoke of Mariska.
She lived with her parents and seven brothers and sisters on the northern edge of the collective. Until we were fourteen she was simply one of a swarm of children taken by bus to the Pripyat school each day. But everything changed during the summer of our fourteenth year. During that summer Bela and I became infatuated with Mariska, creating the triangle and the memories that continue to haunt me.
One of my most vivid recollections is of a sunny afternoon in a barley field. A picnic lunch on a blanket. A bottle of wine smuggled from Uncle Pista's wine cellar. A pair of kisses, the first on my lips, the second on Bela's lips. And, finally, a promise that whatever happened, the three of us would remain together forever. But the passage of time chiseled away at our promise and the triangle was broken when Mariska and I left Bela behind on the platform at Central Station in Kiev.
To this day I am still not certain how I won Mariska away from Bela. There seems to be no answer in the past because it is clouded with the memory of a juvenile conversation in Ukrainian, roughly translated as follows:
"You two are going to pull me apart someday."
"I wouldn't want you pulled apart."
"Neither would I."
"I know. You each want me whole. You each want me all to yourself. But it's impossible. You'll have to share me. Just like now, you each get a kiss. Nothing could be more fair."
"Why can't Andras and I each have an arm and a hand? You've got two of them."
"You're right, Bela. We can each have a leg, and each an eye. Anything Mariska has two of we can share equally."
"Shame on you two!"
"What's wrong?"
"I see where you're looking!"
Mariska and I were married in New York shortly after our arrival. During our first year in New York we went to classes and spoke only English to one another. We took citizenship classes and soon the only connection to our homeland was Bela who wrote monthly in Ukrainian. At the end of each letter Bela would ask the same question. "Will I be an uncle soon?" After several years, when Mariska and I still hadn't had a child, Bela stopped asking and instead wrote every month that he was studying for the day he would also come to America.
"I never dreamed I'd be treated like this in America," said Bela after we completed a lower G‑I series.
We were in the waiting room. It was afternoon and, because of the test, we had been forced to fast since the previous evening. On other days, which involved simple blood tests and interviews, Mariska had arrived at the hospital at noon to lunch with us in the hospital cafeteria. That morning, as we left for the hospital saying we were both starved because of our fasting, Mariska had promised a dinner feast of Hungarian goulash.
"We'll make up for it tonight," I said. "Mariska is probably at work in the kitchen right now with neighbors on the phone inquiring about the wonderful odors seeping into their apartments."
"Stop," said Bela, holding up his hand. "I'm hungry enough already. When I open my mouth tonight I'll suck the food in like a vacuum cleaner."
At that point I asked the question that began the conversation Bela must have been planning for a long time. "Tell me, Bela. Do you think Mariska is as good a cook as Mama always was?"
"Certainly she is," said Bela. "How can you think otherwise?"
"Because years have passed and it's hard to make an accurate comparison."
"Time flavors the past," said Bela. "But still, everyone enjoys bringing back pleasant memories."
"Yes," I said, "especially these days. I remember specific scenes of our boyhood very fondly, very vividly."
"How old are we in these scenes, Andras?"
"I don't know, various ages."
"Infancy?"
"Not that young."
"Six or seven?"
"Older, during our adolescence."
"We were very close," said Bela, touching my hand.
"Yes, we were."
"And when we grew older Mariska became very close to both of us."
A nurse came in and drew blood from us. When she was gone Bela stared at me for several seconds before speaking.
"Did you notice whose blood she took first?"
"What?"
"The nurse. She took blood from you before she took it from me."
"What difference does that make?"
"It's symbolic, Andras. You were born first."
"We were born together, Bela. I just happened to be first at the gate."
"You didn't plan it?" asked Bela.
I laughed, then stopped laughing when I saw the look on Bela's face. When I placed my hand on his shoulder he stood and walked to a window that overlooked nothing but a section of graveled roof with exhaust vents sticking out. He spoke without turning around.
"You were always first through the gate, Andras. You surpassed me in school. You rode Papa's stallion better than me. You climbed higher in trees. You found work in Kiev and moved away from the farm before I did. And when I arrived in Kiev you had already mastered the swim to Trukhanov Island."
"But Bela, none of that makes any difference. It was simple fate. We were young and that's just how things turned out. The tragedy of it all, indeed the thing that really makes me unhappy, is the fact that you were left behind and the fact that you happened to be at the farm when Chernobyl blew up. It would have been so much simpler if the Union had fallen apart before Chernobyl blew up. Then you would have been here with us in New York instead of on Uncle Pista's farm."
Bela continued staring out the window, watching as a wisp of steam from a vent blew past. "No, if I had been here in New York in 1986, somehow fate would have intervened years later and placed me in The World Trade Center. I would have been in one of the towers. Chernobyl would have been denied me, but not the terrorists. That is the way fate works. I thought I'd never say these things. I thought I'd hold them inside until my death. Everything has gone your way, Andras. You were first to obtain a visa. And when you left you took Mariska with you."
"Fate could have turned it the other way, Bela. She was torn between us and has never forgotten you. That's something I've had to live with."
Bela turned and glared at me. "How hard it must have been for you, Andras. Was it difficult in bed? Did Mariska's thoughts of me interrupt your lovemaking? How sorry I am to have inconvenienced you!"
Bela turned back to the window and spoke more calmly. "Yes, I suppose fate could have turned it another way. Mariska could have failed to get a visa and stayed behind with me. Perhaps we would have both been at the farm and been irradiated together. Or perhaps she would have had to stay behind in Kiev, busy at her job while I paid my fatal visit to Uncle Pista. Or perhaps the chain of events would have progressed differently. The explosion occurs. I hear it in the middle of the night and I am worried about Mariska in Kiev. After all, none of us knew at first where the explosion came from. I leave immediately for Kiev and in so doing I pass through the greatest radiation. I am hospitalized in Kiev and in a few weeks I die. And then what would have happened, Andras?"
"I don't know."
"I'll tell you. It's in the Bible."
"Bela, this is idiotic. I don't know what you're talking about."
Bela came toward me. He stopped in front of me, his hands on his hips, his elbows out making the hospital gown look like wings.
"Onan!" he shouted.
"Onan?"
"Yes. You would have come back then, Andras. You would have come back to Kiev to do your brotherly duty after I died."
"Onan spilled his seed on the ground, Bela."
"I know! Spilled on the ground the way a hypocritical zealot would do! Spilled on the ground like so much radiation! Spilled on the ground as you must have done all these years so that I'll not even have the privilege of being an uncle!"
Bela smiled a strange smile, like putting on a smile in the mirror to see how it looks.
An orderly came to take us for another test. Later that day, when I tried to get Bela to speak freely again, he waved his hand, said he had acted foolishly and that I was to forget what he had said.
***
Several weeks after our tests winter set in. On a snowy evening with dinner late because of traffic, Bela announced he had leukemia. The three of us clung to one another that evening and, instead of retiring to our two separate bedrooms, sat up the entire night talking about the days of our youth in the old country. At one point, after several shots of brandy, Bela stood at the window looking down at the snow‑covered streets and exclaimed that the weather was appropriate because he had now entered his nuclear winter.
"Just as the eastern bloc and the union came apart, just as those planes flew into the Twin Towers, my own blood tears me apart. I am the fish that rots from the head first. And I prove it by making insane statements. Fraternal twins do not share insanity the way identical twins do. Therefore you are safe, Andras. That's one good thing we learned during the experiments. Andras is safe from my weaknesses. It's a good thing you didn't marry me, Mariska. No one wants to be married to a madman being eaten by cancer. When I die and they cut me open for the sake of research, be sure you aren't downwind!"
Neither Mariska nor I commented on the statements Bela made that night. I think we didn't answer because we felt Bela wanted us to disagree with him so he could start an argument, then accuse us of ganging up on him. He had made the mistake of staying behind in a melancholy and morose land where a reactor could be allowed to blow up and officials could deny-deny-deny. He had made the mistake of leaving only after it had become easy to leave. His leaving had not resulted in headlines about a defecting ballet dancer or violinist. He had no sponsors in the U.S. except Mariska and me and the researchers at NYU who were more interested in comparing his body chemistry and mental state to that of his twin brother than in his physical or emotional survival.
After the radiation and chemotherapy treatments, Bela refused to leave the apartment except for visits to the hospital, this despite the wig Mariska had purchased to cover his bald head. In spring, when sounds of children came in through the open windows, Bela remained in his room all day while Mariska and I were at work. And he stayed there in the evening so that we had to take food to him and encourage him to eat.
In June Bela's hair and his spirits grew back. He'd gotten a part-time job before being diagnosed with leukemia and now spoke of getting a full-time job, earning enough to buy a Mustang of his own and travel throughout the U.S. He bought new clothes to fit his thinner physique and spent his evenings, as he put it, "Using my accent to attract shameless American girls."
The relapse came in July. And by August, after a brief hospital stay, Bela was back in the spare bedroom day and night.
***
In September, on the Saturday following the anniversary of the September 11 attack, I sat alone on a bench along a walkway. Although people strolled by and I heard voices, I did not hear words or sentences. In the distance I heard the roar of a tiger or lion and I imagined the beast standing guard over its battered and bloody prey.
I could have been in any city zoo on a warm afternoon. I could have been in the Kiev Zoo, the zoo Bela and Mariska and I visited so long ago. Perhaps the same monkeys that Bela and I made faces at were here, or perhaps the children of those monkeys. Perhaps Bela and Mariska are gone to America leaving me here to visit the Kiev Zoo alone where the monkeys make faces at me. I've been left behind and now the monkeys perform backflips and scratch their genitalia and make faces at me causing great laughter at my expense. That is what Bela told me, that the monkeys made faces at him during a visit to the Kiev zoo just before he left for the U.S.
The bench on which I sat that September Saturday was at the Bronx Zoo. As the three of us agreed the previous evening, Mariska and Bela were spending the day alone in the apartment. It was his final wish before his entrance into the hospital Monday for what he insisted would be the dose of radiation and chemicals that kill him.
On the path before me a young couple pushed a double stroller with twins aboard. The bridge between the connected seats was narrow and one of the twins poked the other in the eye causing tears. At this young age‑‑still so close to that fetal similarity all mammals possess‑‑I could not tell whether they were girls or boys or one of each.
The poked twin glanced back toward its parents, and apparently unsatisfied with their reaction, let out a scream that stopped passersby in their tracks. The mother lifted the screaming twin from the stroller, the father smiled at me and shook his head, the twin still in the stroller sucked its thumb.
A siren blared outside the zoo and I saw the reaction of others to it. Since the previous year sirens had meant much more than in the past. Visitors to the zoo turned and stared toward the siren the way animals sometimes do when an unknown danger presents itself. I stood and walked toward the siren. By the time I reached the zoo exit the siren was ear-shattering and I found myself running. A fire truck sped past and I ran after it. In my head I replayed the video of the Twin Towers being hit again. But then I put the towers back in their cubbyhole in my head and instead imagined my apartment building ablaze. Mariska and Bela there and the apartment on fire!
Although gasping for breath when I reached the apartment I somehow managed to run up the stairs. Of course the apartment building was not on fire, but I still ran. By the time I made it to the landing on my floor I was dizzy, the landing tipping backward. I stumbled down a step, spun around, almost went down face first but managed to hang onto the railings on both sides. Just as I envisioned myself lying on the landing below, the EMT from the floor below, who works second shift and knew two coworkers who died on September 11, peeked out of her apartment in full uniform.
"Are you okay up there?" She crooned it like an EMT on an emergency show where some poor slob is obviously dying. "Take it easy, okay?"
"Mind your own business!"
"Well shit, okay," she said, and went back into her apartment.
Back on my landing I hung on, catching my breath. I dropped my keys twice and finally pushed the correct key into the lock. I shoved inward expecting the security chain to slam against the door edge. But the door flew open, pivoted against Bela's suitcase, which had been stored behind the door since his arrival in the U.S., and bounced back, slamming in my face.
I pushed the door open again and this time ran through. Mariska let out a screech before I got to the bedroom. The bedroom door was closed and I choked the knob in my grasp, flinging the door open.
They were naked. Of course they were naked, what did I expect? Bela looked like a toppled tower lying atop Mariska. He was so skinny some of his bones seemed to be lost inside her. They both stared at me, animals caught in the headlights. Mariska had her hands on Bela's ribbed sides and in one quick movement lifted his weight off, causing Bela to tumble to the floor between the bed and the wall.
Then, with Bela on the floor, I could see only Mariska. She pulled the blanket about her. My own wife covering herself, covering her thighs and belly and breasts as she sat up in bed!
"Andras!"
I fell across the bed, snatching at the blanket as if it were an animal let loose in the bed.
"Andras! Stop!"
Bela lay in the narrow space between bed and wall. When I looked down at him he stared not at me but at the ceiling, his hands folded across his chest.
"What--what are you doing?" I asked.
"Practicing my coffin pose," answered Bela.
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"Yes. Northern Ukraine humor is very dark."
***
After I calmed down and we were all three in the kitchen sipping tea, Bela told us about the day after the explosion at Chernobyl. He'd put on jeans and a loose tee shirt so we didn't have to look at his bones. Mariska had put on her robe cinched up tight, the folds of the collar gathered close to her neck like a noose.
Bela treated his cup of tea with respect, looking into it occasionally to make certain it heard what he said. He spoke about Chernobyl as though telling the story to strangers. He revealed details he had not spoken when he first arrived in New York.
"I was walking between rows of radish plants. Perhaps I was helping Uncle Pista cultivate, I'm not sure. I remember one of the collective's trucks speeding down the road. Uncle Pista said Vasily the joker was driving and I thought I'd hear some rural gossip about Gorbachev. Some jokes I could tell my friends back in Kiev. What happened instead was that we were told the cause of the explosion we'd heard during the night. Back then it wasn't at all like today where disasters are instantaneously on every television in the world. Back then we were in the dark.
"As you know, Uncle Pista's house was ten kilometers from the plant. Since many lived even closer, we assumed we were safe. Unfortunately we were unaware of the trick the wind was playing as we stood speculating like farmers in any remote district tend to do. I was like the rest of them. A farmer. It wasn't until late that night that masked soldiers herded us onto buses. I remember a guy they called Arkady the bean-eater saying during the long bus ride to Kiev in the dark that we'd been no better in protecting ourselves than cackling hens--"
***
A few weeks later, after Bela's final chemotherapy treatment, we both went back to the university hospital for a meeting about test results. Although I didn't understand the technical details, the results of the tests seemed to be that radiation did indeed change Bela's life expectancy. Something about late nervous system development curtailed by a certain percentage as a result of the radiation exposure. So much for science.
While we were at the hospital, Bela saw a notice on a bulletin board for a cancer survivor workshop. He didn't tell me about it until the night of the workshop. He said he wanted to attend the workshop alone.
The following weekend Mariska and I double-dated with Bela and a woman he'd met at the workshop. Her name was Susie. Bela pronounced her name Zuzie, as in, "I'd like you to meet Zuzie."
We were at an Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue. Bela and Susie had both gotten buzzed on Hungarian wine. Mariska and I were encouraged to see them smiling and having a good time. Susie and Bela hung onto each other as if they'd known one another a long time. I recall feeling a tinge of jealousy seeing my twin brother carry on so with a middle-aged woman he'd just met.
After three bottles of wine were exhausted Susie spoke of her bout with cervical cancer. Very little detail, just that she had an hysterectomy and chemotherapy. Not really much of a story at all, but I could tell by the way Bela watched her and encouraged her to go on that he wanted to hear the story even though he'd already heard it at the workshop. When Susie finished she wanted Bela to tell about Chernobyl. He told the story as he had told it to me and Mariska, the complete story with Uncle Pista and standing in the road instead of going to the wine cellar and Vasily the joker bringing news of the explosion and Arkady the bean-eater on the bus to Kiev. He even told the joke about the world record set by his piss traveling from Kiev and arriving in New York before he arrived.
During Bela's story the waiter interrupted to take our orders. We all chose the stuffed cabbage the place was known for. A sad Hungarian prima played on the restaurant sound system and all four of us were quiet for a while. Then, after the stuffed cabbage arrived and we'd all begun stuffing ourselves, Susie swallowed a mouthful and, waving her fork toward Bela, made the following statement.
"I've heard about you Chernobyl survivors. But I'm also a survivor. I was diagnosed with cancer before September 11 last year and I'm still alive."
***
Bela died before the year ended. His final words, those Mariska and I could understand, were spoken in English. As each of us held one of his hands, he said, "At last, I am first--"
While Mariska and I prepared dinner one night after a long work day and a terrible commute, we received a phone call from Susie's sister. Susie had died and had written in a final note that she wanted us to be notified. We'd never met any of Susie's family and we'd met Susie only that one time, but we decided to go to the funeral in Bela's memory.
It turned out Susie and Bela were buried in the same Bronx cemetery not far from one another. There is a mound in the new section of the cemetery. It seems they can get more bodies into the cemetery that way. Bela is buried on the north downslope of the mound while Susie is buried on the south downslope. When Mariska and I were picking out Bela's burial site, I asked the cemetery lady if the mound was an old trash heap. Mariska shushed me, the cemetery lady frowned, I responded with something to the effect that it was a question Bela would have asked. Actually the mound does look like a buried pile of rubble. It's shaped like a flattened cone with a wide base. Perhaps the Chernobyl sarcophagus is shaped this way, although I admit I've never gone back to the Ukraine to see it.
After Susie's funeral, Mariska put her arm around me in the car and we both wept. Then I started the Mustang's engine and sped out of the cemetery, the Mustang growling through its twin pipes as it carried us away, back to our apartment and our bedroom and our bed in our new land.
Copyright 2009 Michael Beres
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