Chernobyl: First Love

Chapter 1

The town and the lake were inseparable.

They could have been Siamese twins or suicidal lovers dreaming amphibian dreams.

The town was small and vibrant. Amid clamorous bingo venues and vociferous sellers of lottery tickets, amid shoppers of life and car thieves, there was a boy called Rob, a boy whose heart knew only hatred and rejection.

The town was now in the grip of fear.

The boy was now in the grip of love.

Chapter 2

WAS THE LAKE BY the Home or the Home by the lake?

The children fought over it as they dived into its crystal waters, bouncing off the clean sanded bottom. Rob, Fatzy Dembo, Sali and Gosho the Poet. Sometimes Lala, the cross-eyed beauty, would come too with Byron running behind her, jumping, wagging his tail. Sali’s father had stolen the dog and given it to them for the Birthday.

Since no one knew the real date of their birthdays they shared a Birthday once a year, changing its timing and choosing their own age since no one knew their real age.

Lala, whose thick red hair cascaded down to her waist, had decided to be six although she looked sixteen while Tettie declared she took two years in one and wondered why she always remained small. For the Birthday feast they had puree of wild fruit they collected in the wild: blackened pears, squashed over ripe plums, small hard apples. There were rumours that wolves and bears sometimes came down from the mountain so Fatzy Dembo carried raw nettle in his pockets to protect himself and his friends.

They all insisted to eat the dessert first. For second they had chicken heads soup with the feathers. Last on the Birthday menu were the bones, tendons and ligaments hanging, scarce meat remnants like lichen. Last year the bones seemed to be from bison, even Byron didn’t succeed in gnawing into them, not to mention Child Harold, the cat, whose laziness rivalled Sali’s.

With a gentle motherly caress the sun stroked the surface of the lake and the wet heads of these juvenile inhabitants of the suburbs of civilisation as they, being overtaken by a prenatal memory and a vague yearning for love, screamed chasing each other and jostled in a fit of unspent emotions.

Nine-year old Rob was tall and rail thin. The freckles covering his face made him look, as a random volunteer worker noted, like a study to a pointillism painting technique. Rob’s eyes were small and malicious. His trade mark superior look achieved by a smirk and squinting made them look even smaller, two grown out of proportion freckles. He was rude and quick to act with his fists and held to authority with the determination of a born bully which together with his surprising charisma had put him on the top of the pecking order in the Home. Somehow the children not only accepted him the way he was, but fought for his attention. Even the redheaded Lala would accept a slap on the cheek from him, wipe her nose and continue to look at him in awe. Rob didn’t need admiration. Rob didn’t do admiration and friendships. His life of an orphaned child, short but eventful, had taught him that the world was hostile, people were evil breeders and one must strike the first blow.

Chapter 3

ROB LOVED TO GO to the lake alone.

He entered into it and swam fully dressed. He had seen Byron swimming and swam doggie-paddle like him. Coming out onto the shore he lay on the sand to dry: this way he and his clothes got washed at the same time. He only took his shoes off; or rather what had once been shoes many, many years ago when they were given to the Home by a charity.

Since then the feet of some twenty children had inhabited the shoes and each of the children had left a smell and a history of impairment. One might say that the shoes were boats, full of memories, although as they stood lonely on the shore, waiting for him to come back, they rather resembled burrows in which little goblins lurked. The laces long gone, one tongue torn off and the holed soles letting gravel in they let water in even in on a dry day.

Sometimes he took his shoes off put them on his hands and used them for boxing gloves. They were ideal for the purpose and even Fatzy Dembo was careful to protect himself from the parched leather; or was it Rob’s knuckled fist?

Often Rob lied on his back, the water under him like a bed all for himself, which he never had, thinking about what it was to drown. A year ago one of the boys from the Home drowned and police officer Boyd came to ask questions as the father of the child was seen hanging around the Home and the lake. Yes, the Home was a shelter and the lake was a hiding place from the hostility of this world which didn’t want them and had banished them. In the small town sprawled not far away with its lights twinkling at night there was a different life, there were streets, a school, ice-cream and balloon sellers, there was an amusement park and other children, much smarter because they had arranged for themselves to have not only mothers but to look nice.

Aunty Dobreva used to say that the children at the Home were there because the stork that had delivered them was old and forgetful. The stork couldn’t find their parents’ address but Rob knew the truth. They were called Chernobyl children and they didn’t look nice but like broken toys piled away so the people didn’t got scare or feel guilty and embarrassed.

The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe had not only wiped away lives; its radioactive rain had travelled across other countries and doomed young innocent lives to horrible physical and mental damage. Misshaped misfits called them the town mayor Damien who wanted them out, evacuated somewhere else so the town could develop recreational tourism around their beautiful lake, he himself being an ardent fisherman.

Chapter 4

ONLY ONCE DID THEY take them to the cinema in the town, and it never happened again because Fatzy Dembo pissed in the auditorium, Gosho the Poet inscribed one of his verses on the leather seat with Rob’s spring folding knife and Sali picked the purse of the director of the cinema, who herself had personally arranged the free show. They couldn’t get him because Sali knew the town like the back of his hand, every corner of it. He boasted that he could manage even if they let him out blindfolded at night. It was no surprise because everyone knew that Sali often ran away from the Home at night, helped by his father, who needed him, being smaller, to steal without being noticed and he had a good alibi available. Yes, his father would use him like some kind of stainless tool and in the morning return him to the Home like to a toolbox.

Everyone envied Sali for his father’s strong attachment to him; he would come to see him even when drunk and Sali’s boasting of his father’s love might have been the reason for that boy drowning. His name was Tisho and he was a bit older than them. He had run away from the Home twice, to go to his parents, he knew them, unlike Rob, who for a long time didn’t know from what he’d come from: a tree, a bird, the lake, Aunty Dobreva or Uncle Mito. Tisho knew also his parents’ house and was first to voice his suspicion about Aunty Dobreva’s theory about an old presumably demented postman of a stork misplacing them around. The parents would inevitably return the boy back to the Home, but he went mad and ran off again and again.

Then he drowned. Sali swore that he had seen Tisho and the boy’s father together by the lake that same day, but who would believe Sali?

The waters were cool, calming. Rob dived with his eyes open; he watched the fish and the little crustaceans running nervously on the clean sandy bottom. He watched the stems and the leaves of the reeds that grew under water near the shore and he thought life was better down there because there were no people.

Chapter 5

ROB ENDED UP WITH Aunty Dobreva and her children after they threw him out of that other previous home which was only for motherless children. Here, at the Home for Chernobyls, as that same arsehole of a mayor Damien referred to them, it was different.

Strange, scary, different.

The boy Sassi was born only with legs. That’s what the Chernobyl nuclear explosion had decided for him. His arms the size of his feet were growing nowhere. Sassi was seven years old. Rob didn’t know that his mother had been in the third month of pregnancy when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor had blown up and the cloud had let its deadly shower over her and the April green salads which she hungrily ate to provide her unborn with vitamins. There was also a boy of the same age who was born with arms but with only one leg. They had made him an artificial leg, but the boy had outgrown it and now he limped.

Artificial limbs didn’t grow.

The artificial limbs of the other children weren’t growing either, some refused to leave the building. They stayed in day and night. They would fill their potties and once a day one of the older girls would take them out to empty them. That was usually Lala’s job. In fact they all used potties in the winter. For there was no toilet in the Home and the path to the one outside would be so icy that Aunty Dobreva wouldn’t let them go out telling them frightening stories about a girl found torn in pieces by hungry wild animals.

Listening to this talk Sali would get particularly nervous and look at Lala.

Please don’t go out no matter how desperately you want to pee, hold it in; only don’t go out at night. Or if you’re so desperate, you wake me up, promise?

The beauty Lala would leave Sali’s pleas unanswered, but in return she smiled. The smile revealed a cave like an abyss. Lala had no teeth as she had no gums either. Her long eyelashes would flutter and cast long shadows on her blushed cheeks.

Summertime those of the children who refused to go out cried ceaselessly. They scratched their faces or beat themselves with sticks and ladles. Aunty Dobreva asked Lala to watch over them but Lala would fall asleep and the children also scratched her face. Lala continued to sleep blissfully, as if someone caressed her. Maybe it was the only touch of human hand she knew, this and the one of Sali’s hands, who was trying to feel the juiciness of her chest.

Tettie was the smallest. She was six but she looked barely three. Aunty Dobreva was very happy with her.

Tettie, she would say, If everyone was like you, it would be much easier for me. You don’t eat much, you wear small clothes, not much water is wasted on your washing.

But Aunty, what’s so nice about her, she can’t even chew on a bone. Fatzy Dembo was aware of the superiority of his massive frame.

The bones, the bones. The feast. Uncle Mito would bring them in a big sack balancing over the saddle of his donkey. He bought them from the butcher in the town, telling him that they were for his dogs. Do you have a whole pack of them; the butcher asked and put some off cuts of meat with the bones. Before taking the bones to the Home, Uncle Mito carefully picked out the off cuts for himself.

As soon as he arrived the children surrounded him but Aunty Dobreva would come out with the ladle and chase them off like a swarm of flies. Uncle Mito then would take the