She sits upright in bed, clutching the covers to her instinctively and says, “Yes, Comrade Khomyuk is speaking. Proceed.” Vitaly, she thinks. Please let it not be anything to do with Vitaly.

“Ulana Yuiyvna this is Valery Alekseyevich. I should never have presumed, I’m so---”

“Valera?” she blurts out. Oh thank Christ. “It’s alright. I’m always happy to hear from you.”

“I would not normally call so late. And I shouldn’t put this on you at a time like this. You have enough to cope with. It is just that I have no one else to turn to.”

Is it possible that Valera really doesn’t know about the late night phone calls? Or is he playing a trick now, that she would have thought beyond him, to smoke her out. Of course, from what Boris told her, in a late night call that spared no details, Valera was not all that he seemed. He had managed to deceive the world at the Vienna conference and later, fake his own death. Since then, she did not fully trust him. They had spoken only a handful of times, during respectable daylight hours and she’d addressed him as if he were a cousin, asking polite questions and getting polite answers before moving on to work topics.

“Is everything alright, Valera. Boria isn’t ill is he?”

“Yes and no. It’s what I have to talk to you about. But first I should ask how you are doing?”

“Well enough, given the circumstances,” she says. Yes. You fucking well should ask me how I’m doing, she thinks, twisting the phone cord around her wrist, to try to mute the anger seeping into her voice... “Thank you for the card, by the way. It was lovely.” The card was sitting unopened, with a stack of similar cards, on her desk.

“It was nothing. I wish there was more we could do.”

“It was kind.”

“And Vitaly? How is he faring?”

“He is back at school. I think it hasn’t hit him yet, not fully.” The same could be said for her, of course, but she does not say it.

“And he is doing well in Moscow? At University?”

“Yes, thanks to you and Boria, he is.” Vitaly’s name had come up on a list when he turned 18, to report for liquidation work. Boris had made it disappear. And then a few months later his name had failed to turn up on a list of entrants to Moscow State University, and Valera, in one of his last actions before his official “suicide” had pulled strings to make sure it did appear.

“It was nothing. We must do what we can to help our friends.”

Ulana thought, with an internal sigh, that it was far from nothing. Without their influence, she would have gone and spread her legs for someone--the party chairman from the shoe factory, if she had not burned her bridges with him already-- to make either of those things happen. But then, perhaps she already had: the late night fumble with Valera, the night with Boria when they thought Valera was dead. Of course it had been different then. Circumstantial, not mercenary. It had been a kind of gift with nothing expected in return. She hoped they had seen it that way.

“Yes, we must. And so, Valery Alekseyevich,” she says adopting a lighter tone, “tell me what has happened with our friend that is so terrible you can not talk with him about it.”

“We are just back from the clinic in Switzerland,” Valera says, drawing breath as one about to plunge in cold water, “They have refused him as a patient.”

Shit. Fucking. Shit. She wraps the cord tighter around her wrist as a kind of penance for her momentary lack of seriousness.

“Is it the money?” She asks. Boria had mentioned that with no insurance beyond that of the Austrian government, they were worried about the cost of the Swiss clinic.

“Well, that is part of it, because we will be paying for their assessment for years to come, for the rest of our lives, probably...but mainly it is that his heart is not strong enough. They feel he would not survive the operation.”

“I am sorry, Valera” Ulana says and she means it. “Is there nothing to be done?”

“Oh they sold it to us in a pleasant way. ‘Go home for now. Take your medication as directed. Eat right. Get moderate exercise. Quit smoking and drinking. Pray for a miracle. Take another angiogram in six months’.”

“How did he take the news?”

“That’s just it. I can’t tell. He won’t talk about it. That’s why I was hoping you… with your influence…”

Ulana wants to laugh, but does not. Her influence. “I can try to talk to him, of course, but if he won’t talk to you, I don’t see what use I can be.”

“He respects your opinion. He always has.”

Now Ulana does laugh.

“It’s true. And so do I. Always,” Valera’s voice gets soft. She has forgotten his soft voice. It has always had power over her since that first drink they shared in Pripyat. His soft voice begging her to go now while they’re still alive.

“Alright, Valery Alekseyevich, no need to get soppy. We’ll leave it at that. I will call him.”

“I don’t think a phone call will do it,” he says, sounding almost apologetic.

“What then? A letter?”

“No. Do you still have that exit visa? For the fellowship in Germany?”

“Yes, but I put the trip on hold when Sergei got sick,” she says automatically, before realizing what he is asking. “Oh. No. Oh, fuck, no, Valera. I have just buried my husband. I’m supposed to be grieving. Not parading around Europe.”

“It’s not parading. You could visit the IAEA for legitimate work purposes. If you happen to stay with a colleague then who is to say anything is wrong in that?”

Her mother-in-law for starters, she thinks but she holds her tongue, releasing her hand from the cord, wiggling her fingers to work the blood back into them.

“Ulana, are you there?”

“Yes, Valera, I’m here.”

“I am sorry. It is too much to ask I know,” his voice breaks, but carries on rasping,”I am overstepping my remit. But I would not ask if I didn’t think it was the only way.”

She is far from convinced by his words, but his voice...so full of love and urgency and not just for Boris, but--and she might be mad to think it, but for her as well. She was unable to refuse him before and she knows, with a sinking feeling, that she will give in inevitably. And maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe a change of scene is what she needs. She has always wanted to go to the West and ever since Boria and Valera moved in together in Vienna, they have invited her to visit. She already owns the maps, has already planned the route in her mind, figured where to break the journey, what to pack.

“I do have three more weeks leave. I suppose I could drive.”

Valera breaths an audible sigh of relief. “When can you be here?”

She runs a mental checklist. If she starts the paperwork by this afternoon, and everything is re-approved with maximum speed and no hold-ups by the Triangle, then she could be on the road in four or five days. “A week from today, perhaps, give or take.. I’ll keep in touch. I will need you to get the IAEA to fax an invitation, as soon as possible. Something about ‘scientific collaboration and study’.”

“I’ll get on it first thing,” he says, and she can picture him jotting down notes, placing the tip of the eraser to his tongue while he listens.

“Thank you, Ulana,” he says, voice cracking. And in a whisper: “You have saved me. I have hope again.”

Her heart lurches. He should not have this power over her. It’s not fair.

“Valera, listen to me. You put too much faith in my ‘influence’ as you call it. But I will do my best. I must go now. There is much to prepare..”

“Yes, of course. Thank you again and again.” He sounds truly happy, almost giddy. She pictures his abominable toothy grin and can't help but smile herself.

“Enough. I’ll see you in a week. You can thank me then.”

“Yes, right. See you soon.”

They say their goodbyes and hang up. Ulana tries to go back to sleep, but it is no use. She is awake now and her brain is already running through tasks. She gets up and makes herself breakfast, looking around at the remnants of Sergei’s last weeks at home. A “normal illness, not related to radiation,” the doctor’s report read. People get cancer all the time of course, even if their wives have not brought home radioactive files from the exclusion zone; have not selfishly refused to shave their heads.

She sits, hands folded on the table before her, her breakfast growing cold, under the buzzing fluorescence of the kitchen lamp, which gives everything and everyone a sickly green, almost underwater look. It is not attractive but it is comforting somehow. She wonders if she should turn out the light and sit in the dark. It might be easier in the dark. Now would be a good time, she thinks. But nothing comes. She switches off the light, and without its familiar hum there is no sound but her own breath: there are no birds yet, the drunks have gone to bed. No baby cries anywhere within her hearing--a rarity indeed. Almost worth getting up for it. There are no mice scratching in the walls, no couples fighting or fucking. Even the grannies are snoring softly for a change. Still nothing comes. She longs for catharsis, for relief, but nothing comes.

She wishes she could pray. It seems like an active thing to do. She remembers her Polish granny, her mother’s mother, down on her knees, praying to an icon of the Black Madonna that she kept hidden in her room. It would be better than sitting and waiting for tears.

At the funeral, there had been arrangements, and people to see and her mother-in-law to be strong for. The mother crying for her son. The worst noise imaginable. The thought burns at her eyes faintly, but slips away before it’s productive. After the funeral, at the burial, she had stood with Vitaly’s protective arm slung over her shoulder and felt his body shaking with sobs. All she could think of was that she was grateful he could feel something, grateful that his relationship with Sergei had been a good one and that he’d been home in time to say his goodbyes. These thoughts had been mingled with her realization that Vitaly was grown now and that she and Sergei had done one thing right at least. Where were her tears of motherly pride at this thought, her parental sentiment?

Nowhere. She and Vitaly had gone back inside and eaten Olivier salad with friends.

Perhaps it is her guilt that will not let her cry? But she knows, intellectually at least, that this is not true either. She knows that she did not kill Sergei, no matter how many files she brought home. He was as likely killed by the system as anything. After all had they been able to get divorced as she wished, he might be alive today. Had he not smoked for twenty-five years he might be alive today. Had he not lived in Minsk where the wind often blew from the south, from Chernobyl, he might be alive today.

Her eyes are adjusted to the dark and she yawns. She switches on the light again, trying to view the scene anew, to remember the last weeks. All she feels is anger at the unfairness of it all. Sergei was not an old man.She had not loved him as well as she should, but he had not deserved to come home from work one day with a minor complaint of numbness in his right hand, only to find out a week later that he had cancer; that it had metastasized; that he was beyond help. She feels a rising sense of panic. Her face twists into a frozen mask of terror. It passes without tears.

She looks around the kitchen, and the apartment beyond, with disgust at the dust piling up and the clutter that is everywhere. With a shudder, she imagines coming back to this place in three weeks time. She scrapes her plate of untouched food into the garbage and washes the dishes. She keeps her rubber gloves on and handles the apartment like a liquidator removing contamination. She clears out dead flowers, throws out the spoiled funeral leftovers from the fridge. She begins to fill bags, too numerous and overstuffed for the trash chute in the hallway: his suits, his underwear, his handkerchiefs, his pajamas, his reading glasses, his toothbrush, the jar in which he soaked his dentures. She sets his watch and tie clip aside for Vitaly. With one satisfying sweep of her arm, she rakes the pile of medication on the counter into a bag. She takes off her gloves with a snap and puts them across the edge of the sink to dry.

She opens a stack of bills and arranges them in order with the most urgent on top, the way Sergei used to do. She opens a pile of sympathy cards and sets them aside to be read later when she can give them her full attention. Three weeks from now should be about right. She methodically shakes out each card, looking for money. In the end there is just enough to cover the bills and pay for her first few tanks of gas for her trip.