Maxim: A Child of Chernobyl

Maxim

By Elaine Oelker

Copyright 2015 Elaine Oelker

Smashword edition

Cover by Rita Toews at http://www.yourbookcover.com

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Chapter 1

Erin first saw him as he rose and crouched to get out of the van. He was all skinny white legs and long thin arms, one of which ended in a pale hand gripping a cotton canvas satchel. The satchel looked to be all he brought with him for the ten thousand mile trip. Erin had taken more than that to spend a night at Grandma’s.

Hanging back concealed by the elm branches that sprouted from the wounds left when a storm had torn part of the tree asunder, Erin would bide her time until her mother spotted her. The boy was listening to her mother talk as she unloaded the armful of groceries picked up in town where she had also met the plane that morning. His attention was divided for his eyes furtively glanced up at the tall tree shaded farmhouse and its surroundings of sheds and barns and green fields.

Such a nice looking face, fair and broad with a perfectly formed nose and neatly styled and clipped hair. His eyes slanted downward slightly toward the outside above the high planes of his cheekbones.

Nobody wears such short shorts, she thought. The white shorts and the white sleeveless tank top made him look anemic like the pale and coddled Colin in The Secret Garden.

We’re home! Erin. Пойди сюда. Come here and meet Maxim. Her mother freely mixed Russian with her English. She studied Russian years ago when she was in college. With her mother’s aid Erin was learning the language, too, but Erin was impatient. She wanted to learn it all each time she lifted a grammar book. However, grammar did not yield to her as she wanted it to.

Erin walked swiftly over the lawn to the van to try using speed to mask her fears. She would spread a smile over her face. Perhaps he would not know the uncertainty she felt. Silhouetted against the gray van and looking even paler at close range, he switched the satchel to his left hand and reached to greet her with his right. Kids rarely are taught to shake hands around here, she thought reaching out her hand. At least he’s civilized.

Erin, познакомитесъ. Это моя дочъ. This is my daughter, Erin. Erin. Это Максим.

Привет! Erin managed this word with perfection she felt. Я рада. I’m glad, was all she could give." The ‘r’ did not roll on her tongue as she had practiced.

Her mother smiled warmly, Come I’ll give you a short tour. The groceries were placed on a lawn chair. Erin trailed along as her mother switched to Russian and pointed out the barns and cattle and distant creeks. She briefly showed him machinery buildings, the milk house, the silo, and briefly explained that concrete stored feed structure and how it was unloaded into fifty foot feed bunks for the dairy herd.

Erin wondered at his footwear. Any self-respecting kid would wear sneakers with shorts. Maxim’s shoes were thin leather loafers, well broken in at that. He still remained tall and straight at her mom’s side, but turned his head to size up the bikes that were parked in one of the sheds. The Franklin kids had all manner of bikes picked up cheaply at garage sales. You could see that Maxim was curious about the bikes.

У вас велосипед? Erin knew her mother had asked about his bicycle. Maxim began a whole stream of conversation, and Erin could not even catch a simple да, for yes or нет for no. Impatiently Erin shuffled her feet in the gravel, and her mother turned to her.

He and his four brothers and one sister share one bicycle.

Erin nodded once and began to imagine all the fighting that would go on between herself and her ten year old sister, Amanda and her eleven year old brother, Zachary if they had but one bike. Bikes were your life. The bikes were used to do some of the chores you needed to do on the farm. They were used just to help you cool off or allow you to day dream. Erin could get a new perspective on her stories if she hopped on her bike and rode the gravel drives through and around the buildings. And they were used to get away from the farm and head out on adventures.

Slowly she turned on the dusty drive to follow her mom and Maxim back to the house. Her mother had strange ideas of what to do with a summer. There were no cottages at the lake for the Franklin family, only rarely a camping trip. The Franklin family was starting rent-a-kid summers she thought ruefully, and this summer Maxim was it, a skinny ten year old weakling on a farm that took hard work. Erin knew more of the story, though, and more of the reasons.

Erin knew that everyone in this Ohio farm country would view Chernobyl as an unlikely place from which to borrow a child. Folk around here were unconcerned about where Chernobyl was and sadly even less about what it was. Her neighbors had other concerns and Erin had tried to understand what they were really saying when her parents talked to people in the community. That was a part of being a writer of stories. Though Erin’s stories were science fiction she needed to know what being a human was all about. She couldn’t let aliens be just like humans. There needed to be differences and she was still figuring out what humans were.

Setting aside her classmates who were not always so nice she focused on grownups around her. They came from a variety of paths. Industrial cities here were in decline and jobs were fewer it appeared. But city people were foaming out into the farm lands. Rich people came to put up large houses and poor people came to try to live off the land by growing food and hunting. Farmland was paved over to make a space for stores and gas stations. There were power plants to the east that snaked their wires from tower to tower straddling westward across the land to drop power at regional substations from which pole supported power lines edged every road and reached every house.

Power was rarely a concern here. Ohio’s high sulfur coal burning in the power plants initiated periods of acid rain in the Northeast. Erin wrote a report on the subject in fifth grade for Mrs. Epcot’s class. Then Ohio plants installed scrubbers and switched to low sulfur coal. Ohio had nuclear power plants also. One was in the next state but along the Ohio River not far away. It was efficient, burned clean, and it was downwind. Erin followed news articles about the plant. There had been no accidents and no worries around here.

Farmers were more concerned about the land being used up. Yet millions of acres, flat low farm land north by Lake Erie became gently rolling to the south and were used to raise dairy and beef cattle, tons of corn, wheat, and soybeans, and huge numbers of chickens and turkeys.

Erin’s home was one of thousands of small family farms not yet assimilated into a larger farm. Their land was bordered by overgrown fence rows and tree lines and divided into sections by a wide meandering creek that was a refuge for bird and animal life. The soil itself was fertile and well maintained by tons of manure from the dairy herd and additional lime and fertilizer carefully applied each year. Erin herself was impressed by the corn that grew into thick expanses reaching twelve feet by the first September frosts.

In her fourteenth year, Erin did not miss the triumph of productive land that provided for her family. She was a part of it. And she loved the beauty of lush growth and colorful varieties of wild flowers and the whole array of bird song that saturated her senses as did the low lying mists along the creek and the endless variations of field waving breezes.

Erin wasn’t all poet, she had a fascination with the orderliness of math, codes, and graphs. She loved reading anything, fact or fiction, and most especially science fiction. But after her daydreaming moods lifted, she would feel too much caught up in the thriving beauty of this rural land, and then instead would turn her focus to the knowledge necessary to the scientist she wanted to become.

She had collected many articles about Chernobyl, newspaper and magazine clippings all stuffed into a plastic report cover. It fascinated her. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant in a sparsely populated area of the Ukraine at the time a republic that was part of the Soviet Union. One reactor, despite all safety features and because of human error, had gone into an uncontrollable burn, heated water to an explosive capability, and blown apart the building designed to contain the reactor.

Highly radioactive contaminants were sent far into the air for days and deposited on people, buildings, water, and land hundreds of miles away, including the Byelorussian Republic immediately north of Chernobyl.

The disaster occurred in April of 1986 when the promise of spring was heard in the trickle of water melting beneath the snow, when Russian south facing window sills were packed with fragile tomato and cucumber seedlings gaining a small advance on the sun’s energy. In a few days the disaster was over for the media, and the major unreported disaster only beginning for the millions of people downwind in the area contaminated by radioactive fallout. Soil, water, animals, homes, and people were contaminated for years, hundred of years, eons. To Erin this was more the stuff of science fiction than fact

In talks with her mother she learned that the people themselves were contaminated with alarm, nagging worries, outrageous gossip, depression, and hypochondria. Every sick child, each sharp headache, every miscarriage would be blamed on the catastrophe. No one could know for sure whether the increased radiation was to blame. And so a program was founded to ship kids to areas in Europe and America where the air was clean and fresh fruits and vegetables were available. Rest and exercise in pure air and a healthful diet might work wonders for the children of Chernobyl. Her mother had laid this all out for her to pave the way to accept a stranger in their midst.

In theory Erin thought it a great idea that people would reach out and help those in need, but why did it have to be her family? Just imagining an outsider in the house all summer made her uneasy. She’d have to be polite and helpful, never whining or licking her fingers while she cooked. She could not even sit outside in her night clothes on hot nights waiting for the upstairs to cool. She supposed she brought it on herself. Her mother looked on everything as learning experiences. Erin just wanted to learn what she wanted to learn not what someone else wanted for her. Resigned to her fate she followed her mom and the boy up to the house.

Guys, this is Maxim Nikolaevich from Cherikov, Belarus. The friendliness almost squeaked in her voice as she willed each to accept this kid as family. Through the gray screen of the back door the scene would freeze in Erin’s memory: blond haired Zack and golden curled Amanda with decks of cards in their hands and her Dad scraping back his chair to rise and come around to shake Maxim’s hand. Dad’s face was a study of encouragement as Maxim’s long thin arm reached forward to shake hands.

Это мой муж, my husband, James and это мой сынъ, my son Zack. And это моя дочъ, my daughter Amanda. Mrs. Franklin paused to give Maxim time.

Hhhallo. Maxim’s greeting came out in a long aspirated consonant that he was unable to do