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06/1/19 COMMITTING A CHERNOBYL HBO FIC

6:33pm
18 notes all the necessary dead-dove-do-not-eat caveats: I’m not
sure if I’ll finish this, because work deadlines are a
#pottedmusic writes bitch (but writing fix-it fics counts as self-care and
#valoris ! " # $ + &
hence should be factored into the schedule!, she said
totally reasonably); Boris doesn’t even feature in ch1, so
if you are here for the shippy stuff, wait for if/when I
update; it’s unbetaed and possibly one of the worst of my
fics style-wise and everything-wise; but that said, I just
really, really, really needed a fix-it to fortify myself
for ep05, and to distract myself from the deadlines, so
here we are.

oh, and if you are not here for Chernobyl (HBO) fics, press
J to skip / block me to avoid the issue altogether. this
isn’t in the main tag, you were properly warned, let’s all
act like civilized adults responsible for our own media
consumption, ta.

Okay, still here?

they that do not deserve the light, ch.1 (a fix-it of

sorts, 2,500 words so far, eventually heading towards
Shcherbina/Legasov, gen for now)

OCTOBER 1988

The bus spits him out on a small square, hemmed in by the

village council building, a school that looks like a
shoebox someone has stepped on with intent and malice, and
a small grocery store. He pauses in front of the monument
to the unknown hero of WW II. The chicken perched on the
soldier's head clucks and eyes him with alien avian menace.
“We be one blood, thou and I,” he thinks with sudden
sympathy for the granite soldier. He always thought these
hulking figures, chins thrust out and one leg frozen
forever in eternal march, thousands upon thousands of near
identical effigies scattered across villages throughout the
country, made a mockery of scared, underfed, ill-equipped,
broken boys they were supposed to represent. Funny how his
optics changed now that he himself was being whittled down
to an image that could be consumed by the country that
never learned to grieve, and was taught to eschew doubt.

(<i>“We’d have avoided so much trouble if you were dead and

quiet, you know,” said the director of his institute
matter-of-factly. “Like those three that dived under the
reactor. You don’t hear them mouthing off about what they
saw, now do you?”

“But they are alive. It’s all rumours, right? Or rumours

and propaganda, anyway. Never was a story better than of
heroic self-sacrifice, and all that.”

“Exactly.”</i>)

The country feeds on dead heroes; it’s the uncomfortable

reality of doubting, ailing, failing bodies of the living
that it doesn’t know how to deal with. Irreverently,
Valera’s stomach chooses this moment to give a low
rumble. It’s getting late in the day. He finally tears his
gaze away from the monument, picks up his briefcase, and
strolls over to the grocery store. He still has a couple of
hardboiled eggs and a can of sprats left from the journey,
but he’d better buy something more substantial to eat
before looking for the new home assigned to him.

He rattles at the store’s door. It remains obstinately

closed.

“The bread is brought on Monday and Thursday,” says the

voice right behind him. He jumps. He could swear that the
square was empty not a moment earlier, and the tone is so
uncompromising that its harsh disembodied quality makes it
sound like a divine commandment: thou shalt be given thy
daily bread (Monday and Thursday only). Turning around and
almost toppling down the short flight of stairs leading to
the grocery’s door, he finds himself facing a tiny old
woman with a toddler in tow.

“It’s Friday,” he says helplessly.

“You’ll buy what you need on Monday then.”

He cannot fault her logic, even if her tone could be

friendlier.

“Thank you,” he says, and adds, “I’m sorry.”

He’s not sure what he’s apologizing for: for the

inconvenient shop hours, or for his intrusion into this
somnolent space, or for everything that led to him landing
here. Whatever the case, the old lady takes the apology for
a sign of weakness, and, letting go of the toddler’s hand,
plants her hands on her hips, and narrows her eyes.

“What brings you here?” she asks suspiciously, as if he was

a small boy she caught climbing her apple tree.

“Chernobyl. Doctors said I needed fresh-”

Before he has a chance to finish the sentence, the old lady

yanks the toddler back and whispers something furiously in
a language he barely understands. The word “Chernobyl” is
repeated several times. Fair enough, he thinks. At least
someone’s taking radiation seriously.

As she hurries angrily off, he calls after her,

“Wait, how do I get to 12 Komsomol Street?”

Wordlessly, she waves at the other side of the river, where

the wooded mountains loom over a row of houses. Slung
across the river is a swaying suspension bridge with flimsy
rope handholds. And here he was thinking that his day
couldn’t get any worse.

Stopping in front of the bridge, he eyes the drop. The

river’s shallow yet fast, whispering over boulders three
meters below. He puts one foot on the bridge to check if
it’s stable, and the whole structure starts moving. He’s
old, is Valera. Not if you go by the passport, but his body
has grown brittle and overcautious. He scares easily, and
he fears pain, even though he knows that there’s no
escaping it.

Swallowing hard, he takes a decisive step onto the bridge,

clutching at the handhold with all he has. His hand, which
hasn’t worked properly in a while, slips a bit as the
monkey bridge sways under him. The ropes dance, tugging at
unpleasant memories.

(<i>They let him choose his own legend, the story that will
pass into urban folklore. The guilt-ridden hero- no, that’s
not right, that’s too romantic. A man plagued by radiation
sickness, sparing himself the inevitable suffering, hangs
himself? That’ll do nicely. No, let’s spare himself the
indignity of a swollen tongue and all the other
unpleasantness that comes with the hanging: he shoots
himself with his service revolver. Clean, one bullet
through the heart. That sounds just about right.

Choosing the story sometimes feels too close to choosing

the real thing. He quickens his pace every time he walks
past his desk where the revolver lies tempting. He doesn’t
know, not for a fact, that he won’t do it, not till the
very last moment when he’s shuffled off to a secret
apartment. Then the wait, then an endless train ride, third
class; then a bus, then this.</i>)

The ropes of the suspension bridge dance, and dance, and

dance.

His new house is quite old. It’s tucked away from the road,
right next to the forest, sticking out of tall grasses with
a bunch of outhouses – a toilet, a woodshed, a chicken
coop, who the hell knows – like weird overgrown mushrooms.
It takes some fumbling before he manages to open the door
with the keys he was given, and then the house opens its
maw and breathes out the damp air of a place long abandoned
right into his face. After a moment’s hesitation, he
decides against kicking off his shoes, and walks in.

Throughout his journey here, he tried very carefully not to

imagine his new circumstances, and he still is
disappointed. There’s a bed with a sagging metal frame, a
dining table covered with fading cellophane, a small gas
stove and a red gas tank (he turns the vent and takes a
sniff: there’s still some gas left; <i>don’t think, don’t
think</i>). In the corner, there’s a huge oven, hunched
like an animal that crawled into a hole to die, all broken
angles and ribs sticking out. On the wall, a tear-off
calendar with anecdotes and agricultural advice, torn open
on March 2, 1987: probably marking the date of death of the
house’s previous inhabitant. That’s it for printed
materials: so much for spiritual nourishment. He wonders,
briefly, who got to inherit his well-loved library; grieves
his neat selection of books with a pain that’s almost
physical. Well, there’s no going back now, so he might as
well get on with his new life.

His knowledge of what village life might entail is largely

academic: vaguely remembered Tolstoy rather than vacations
with the grandparents. Well, since he got a stove, he might
as well use it, unless he wants to freeze to death after
all this trouble, he thinks, and gets down to business.
After some undignified shuffling on his knees, he finds
kindling under the stove and tries to make a fire. The
hinges of the oven’s door are almost rusted shut, and when
he finally manages to pry them open, the first several
matches die ineffectually, the flames barely licking the
kindling.

It’s only after he shreds several days’ worth of the

calendar, making the time frozen still in this desolate
place move again, and throws it on top of the kindling,
that the fire takes. He shakes his fists victoriously
(Boris’s gesture, he remembers with a pang of regret), but
before he has time to get on with unpacking his meager
possessions, the house begins to fill with bitter smoke.

Some smoke, Valera supposes, must be expected under the

circumstances, but not whole acrid clouds of the stuff. The
stove belches smoke as if it was taking meticulous revenge
for all the fires they have managed to put out in
Chernobyl. He casts about, but there’s no water he could
throw on the fire; besides, soaking the stove he’ll rely on
for warmth doesn’t seem like a smart idea. He clangs the
stove’s door shut, but smoke keeps pouring out through the
cracks. He doubles over in a cough, his eyes begin to tear:
with the lack of oxygen, with the smoke, with anger at the
futility of it all. Sand, he thinks; if the damn fire
doesn’t die in the next couple of minutes, he’ll have to
throw sand at it, history repeating itself as a farce.

He gets up, leaning heavily on his knees, and stumbles,

still coughing, towards the door, where he almost knocks
into a man with an axe slung casually over his shoulder,
and his chest defiantly bare despite the autumn chill.

“Who the fuck are you?” says the man, baring a mouthful of
golden teeth.

To survive Chernobyl, fake his own death and hide in a

village deep in the Carpathians, too small to feature on
any but the most detailed maps, only to be felled by an
axe-wielding maniac, seems a fittingly absurd coda to his
altogether absurd life, but Valera still raises his hands
in an appeasing gesture.

“I live here now.”

“Yeah?” the man drawls, spitting through a hole where his

front teeth once were. “You a relative of Old Pavlykha?”

“No, you could say I was given this as a reward.”

“Some reward,” the man says, and kicks at a wooden fence

around what once was a flowerbed, which groans and leans
perilously to the side.

“Befits what I did,” Valera says with a shrug.

“What, you killed somebody?”

He did, if not in the way the man might think of, so Valera
just shrugs again, and gestures towards the door. “I think
the stove is broken.”

In agreement, tendrils of smoke start seeping out of the

door, coiling towards his feet.

“No shit,” the man nods sagely. “I thought you were trying
to burn the house down. Have you removed the chimney
damper?”

Valera might have, if he knew what a chimney damper was. He

invites the man in with a gesture, and the man carefully
removes his muddy rubber boots before walking in.

“Do people often break into houses and burn them down
around here?” Valera asks, watching the man remove a thin
steel plate that blocked the chimney, and start fanning the
dying flames.

“Not recently, no,” the man says, finally closing the

stove’s door. “The store’s closed today. Got food?”

“Some.”

“Don’t go anywhere.”

This is the end of the earth, or as good as; where else

could he go? Before Valera’s done walking around the
garden, trying to guess which trees are dead, and which
have merely shed their foliage for the winter, the man
comes back with a quarter loaf of rye bread, three large
onions, a bottle of vodka, and a sack. The sack moves and
squirms in his arms.

Valera laughs nervously. “A pig in a poke?”

“It’s a hen,” the man says, tipping the sack over to reveal
a disgruntled red hen. “For eggs.”

Valera doesn’t have the first idea how much a live hen
might cost, but when he reaches for his wallet, the man
merely shakes his head.

“Let’s drink to our meeting.”

The man unceremoniously rifles through kitchen cabinets,

wiping the objects he finds on his trousers, which is
unlikely to make them any cleaner. After the vodka is
poured and the onions are cut into thin slices, they fall
silent, the odd visitor proving himself a man of few teeth
and even fewer words.

“I’m sorry,” Valera says, wiping away tears, “it’s the

onions.”

They clink their glasses. Then again, and again, biting

into onion sandwiches after each shot.

The man sniffs at the last hints of smoke in the air.

“You’ll need firewood. Lemme see what I can do. If you need
anything, ask for Vasyl. Vasyl- that’s me. Every last dog
knows me here, I’m the district policeman. Captain
Kobylchuk at your service. May I take a look at your
passport, now that I’m here, so that I won’t have to walk
up here twice?”

Valera almost laughs with relief. Suddenly everything makes

sense. Was the policeman notified of the true identity of
the new resident? Or was he just told that a poorly
liquidator was granted this plot of land, and was now
trying to suss out the details on his own? He reaches into
the inner pocket of his coat, and slides the new passport,
with the last name he’ll probably never think of as his
own, across the table.

“We are all friends here, don’t you worry,” the policeman
says, leafing through the passport. “It gets dark here,
gotta look out for your neighbour.”

Spy on the neighbor might be a more fitting description,

Valera thinks, but doesn’t say. Instead he drinks, not with
the intensity he did when in Chernobyl, courting
unconsciousness and relying on Boris to get him to his room
by the end of the night, but with something much closer to
boredom. His life is already over and done with, and
there’s not much else he can do to fill these stretches of
time that hold no meaning.

It’s long past dark when Captain Kobylchuk finally leaves.

Swaying on his feet, Valera gets to the bed and sinks into
it without undressing, and lets out an involuntary yelp of
surprise. The bed’s metal springs sag almost to the floor
like a hammock, and creak whenever he makes the smallest
movement. Before long, he realizes that, no matter how
drunk he might be, sleep will not come.

The house is pitch-dark, with not a hint of light anywhere,

and smells of damp earth. Whenever his consciousness starts
to drift, he’s brought back by the deafening absence of
sounds, and by the smell of a fresh grave. It befits his
status as a man freshly dead, but he cannot stand it.
Suffocating, he scrambles outside, and freezes still on the
doorstep.

The entire sky is shining with stars. There is so little

light pollution in this tiny village up in the mountains
that familiar constellations are blurred with a fine
sprinkling of stars less familiar, weird and distant,
invisible to naked eye under normal circumstances. Mist is
seeping from the woods towards the house, soft and
painfully white in the light of faraway galaxies, the
surreal wave of earthly milk ready to sweep him up. In the
distance, the river sighs in its sleep. Nothing in the
landscape betrays the presence of human beings, and it
would lose not a whiff of its beauty if humankind
disappeared altogether.

He remembers watching the air shine with radiation, and

wishes Boris could see this instead.

He hugs his shoulders against the cold, and only then

notices that the familiar pain in his bones has subsided.
On the way back into the house, he steps into his hen’s
shit, and swears.

He switches on the light and gives the bed a once-over.

There’s no way he will fall asleep in this poky, creaky
metal hammock. Resigned, he drags the flat mattress onto
the ledge on top of the stove, and, huddled against its
warm clay back, sleeps better than he’s slept in two years.

chrispookypine reblogged this from pottedmusic

kiev4am liked this
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tsepesh liked this
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freelaura1201 liked this
davantagedenuit said: i loved this very much, and found the writing entirely
poignant. the contrast of despair in the old house and hope seeing the sky is
wonderful. valery’s nervousness and vague passivity about his own fate feel so
right. am very eager to read more, although do mind your deadlines, if not these
things eat you alive. thank you! :)
davantagedenuit liked this
mycravatundone said: this is wonderful - valera’s memories of boris, the
hard-boiled eggs with sprats, him only knowing about village life from tolstoy
(he’s such a privileged academic when having to deal with this new life), the
temptation of suicide, the sky. and him ending up on the stove! дякую &lt;3
 ironhammer liked this
mycravatundone liked this
shit-in-silk-stocking liked this
lafiametta said: So I’ve already read this twice because I love it so much (all
the details are fantastic… bread only on Mondays and Thursdays, the twinging
thoughts of suicide, Legasov the brilliant academician who doesn’t know about
chimney dampers) and I can’t wait to read the next update. What a wonderful
beginning!
zero3o liked this
chupacabrasmustdie liked this
gwinny3k liked this
gwinny3k said: This is a fantastic start! I can feel myself settling in (brilliant
detail, awesome scene-setting, you’ve put us inside Valery’s head so
completely). I want to know what happens next desperately. Are you sure your
deadlines are important. Couldn’t you… you know… write more now
immediately. :p
lafiametta liked this
pottedmusic posted this

Typewriter by Eric Hu