his hand over his shoulder as he walked to the elevator.
The elevator was slow and sometimes balky, a Russian feature more common than the reliable computer equipment. Only yesterday he had been trapped in the stalled cab for ten minutes. His alternative was to climb the back stairs to his office on the 4th floor, but he wanted to warn the operator in the Security Control Centre that he was in the building, so he waited to ride up.
So there is a sticky lock and the unreliable elevator – both essential repairs.
He left his coat and package in his office. He poured himself a mug of coffee. On his way back to the desk, he glanced out the window and saw Pavel, the gatehouse guard, arrive at the plant on his motorcycle. He watched absently as Kushi hurried out to him, gave him a hug and climbed on the back of the bike huddling down behind him in her parka.
Well, so they are a couple, he thought, with a pinch in his heart.
He sat down at the desk, took a cigar out of the humidor and struck a match. He could have used his lighter, but the cigar tradition called for a solid wooden match. The flame of the match went up and down as he sucked in to get the cigar lit.
Then he sat back to check to read his messages, the security reports, and the operations reports.
During the week when he had checked out the mine administration building that contained maintenance and repair workshops, equipment and material storage rooms, crew rooms and a large assembly foyer, and his own office, he had chosen times when the operation activities were done or during lunch breaks and he had run into few workers. He had spoken to Pavel in the guardhouse, however, and he enjoyed greeting Kushi, but he didn’t want the imposition of socializing to interfere with his focus. Remembering the details always mattered.
Inside the cave beyond the administration building were four reactor rooms lined up side by side like loaves of bread on a shelf. They were joined across the front by a reactor control room and across the back by a plutonium processing room. The plutonium produced in the reactors was molded into pitts; grapefruit-sized spheres destined to be the cores of nuclear bombs.
The remainder of the huge cave was a secure plutonium storage vault where fortified steel canisters containing the plutonium pitts were arranged in grid patterns. They stood on end like welding tanks, each one separated from its neighbour, rank after rank. An overhead crane, remotely controlled, placed and retrieved the canisters as demanded by the operator. The crane extended across the entire grid of canisters to a railway loading dock at one end and to a vehicle interlock port at the other. A battery-powered tractor was equipped with hydraulic arms and hand-like grippers for loading the canisters onto railway boxcars or heavy trucks.
He remembered running his fingers over the plutonium storage vault – not a spot of dust.
“Your mother would be keen to see it all so clean...” he sang to himself. Yet there felt like there was something dark hiding under this bland surface, like the frozen mud under the permafrost.
He looked at the walls in his office. They still had the former director Tarasov’s framed certificates on the wall, his graduation from the technical institute, the winner of the 1986 fishing derby, even his school award for allround athlete. Sergey used to think it was narcissism to surround yourself with reminders of your success in your office, but now he was thinking that, generally, people’s failures loom much larger in their memories than their successes, and this is one way to keep one’s self-esteem: by looking at your wins could counteract the overpowering interior focus on your losses.
Well Tarasov’s successes aren’t going to boost Sergey’s sense of himself, so he removed them and put them on a chair. His family may want to keep them. As he stacked them up, he noticed a family photo that must have been of his parents and siblings. Tarasov would have been about 10. Sergey’s family, when he was 10, didn’t have so many kids – just his brother. Otherwise, they could have been neighbours. You can’t see the person in the photos really. You can’t even see who you are in your own photos. Was Tarasov’s dad a patriot like his own dad had been and like Tolstoy had been in his early years? Had his mother been a pacifist like Sergey’s mom, like Tolstoy had become in his later years?
His mother was all about the later Tolstoy, the critic of the state, the critic of the orthodox religion, the critic of the culture. “It’s not real, these institutions,” she told the family, “They are all pretense; games with their little rules.” They listened, but they each had their own take on the ideas; they would learn their own lessons.
Looking closely at the picture stopped Sergey’s tune in his head – the man was not just a name with a title, “Director”; he had been the man running the plant from this office, sitting at this desk, the man who made the decisions, the man who had died, and died recently. Sergey put the picture down inside the stack of pictures.
He sat down to read the reports from the previous day. As he read, he started to hum again to activate his memory. He had photographic recall connected to the songs he hummed or sang or whistled. It had been a huge help in his student days.
So here they were up the hill from the Yakutya Plains below where much of the industry that had formerly relied on electrical power from the Seytchan plant had ceased to function. Factories had closed and the labour market had dried up. Apart from electricians who serviced the high-tension power lines on the mountain, most of whom had long since moved away from the region, nobody really knew or cared where their electricity came from. They only grumbled if it was interrupted.
The village became even more isolated than it had been under the Soviets. Their whole world changed on December 25, 1991, three days after Belarus, Russia and Ukraine met and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union was no more. Russia and the other fourteen newly independent states scrambled to fill the political void with some form of their own government and authority. Farms, factories, and plants, formerly under the control of the central Soviet government drifted in limbo like ghost ships becalmed on a dark ocean.
Suddenly, there was no clear leadership; nobody knew who was in charge of what. The KGB was disbanded and nothing had clearly taken its place, the FSB partially in control under Yeltsin. So the people obeyed an order if it was to their personal advantage; otherwise, they ignored it. Without the structure of Soviet communism, the country was in near anarchy, many determined to get their expectations of a new regime met no matter how unreasonable those expectations might be.
If they saw someone else get ahead or they weren’t getting the promotion or the “break” they expected, the jealousy was often violent, unleashing their well-developed paranoid emotions in gangster style. How much of the sabotage here at the plant was the work of disgruntled workers who felt cheated out of their chance to make it big? The rat race brought out the rat in people, willing to chew their way through the floorboards holding them down.
People who could were becoming entrepreneurs, both big and small. And since not all the rats had two legs, those little four legged rats being ubiquitous around the world and always a problem, Yuri’s sister had figured out a better mousetrap – literally – and started making them in her husband’s workshop. She now operated a small factory turning out mousetraps and rat-traps that she was selling to a wider and wider market. Her husband was finding his niche in logging trucks, taking out the precious Siberian spruce that was so highly valued for bicycling velodromes around the world. For some, the new order was a good thing.
For the unemployed, those without the stronger survival instincts, and the elderly, however, who lost their social benefits in the breakdown of the bureaucracy, all of them unused to the capitalist competition, their focus was down to putting bread on the table and scrambling for the basic necessities of life.
The black market flourished. Former state assets were suddenly looked upon as ownerless and theirs for the taking. Pilfering of equipment and material for sale on the black market was thought by many of the people as only selling what was already theirs.
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