We Are Not in Pakistan Read Free

brighter.
    How kindly she greets Olena! She even shows Olena her office.
    Such a big newspaper with such a big sign is published from only a few rooms. But it’s a new city, a new newspaper.
    Rivka shows Olena into her director’s office and introduces her. The director says to Olena, “Your husband is working at the power station? Tell him a fourth unit is unnecessary, and so are the fifth and sixth. Just hook all the pylons to Rivka and her energy will fuel the country.”
    Rivka laughs, and a spark flies between her and the director like a little of the current that flows between Viktor and Olena at night. In her own office, Rivka shows Olena a poem she wrote to commemorate International Women’s Day. Olena has never met anyone who writes poetry. Rivka asks what Olena thinks of her poem.
    â€œIt is beautiful,” says Olena immediately. “Believe me, beautiful!”
    Without checking with her director, Rivka tells Olena she can start working with her the day after May Day.
    Olena feels she has been given a great gift. But then she is not sure … how will she tell Viktor?
    Back in the square, Olena adds carrots from the babushka to her shopping bag. Then the joke strikes her and she laughs. Rivka asked what Olena thought of her poem — as if what Olena thinks mattered!
    Viktor is picking at his food, though Olena has served one of his favourites, fish kotlety. She wants to tell him about Rivka, about Rivka’s poem, about her new job. She will tell him that Laima is working too, and Anatoli doesn’t object. She is waiting for the right moment.
    â€œOur power station has been ordered to produce consumer goods,” says Viktor, washing his breaded fish down with vodka. “Because of Gorbachev and his glasnost.” His eyebrows knot and rise. “What can a reactor make but electricity? Personal nuclear bombs and batteries, maybe?”
    This is not the right moment.
    Viktor tosses and turns all night, worrying, worrying, till Olena rises, fetches oil and massages him. “You’ll think of something,” she assures him as he falls asleep.
    And the next day, over breakfast, he does think of a good suggestion: meat-mincing machines. He leaves for a meeting with his director and Plant Director Burkhanov. But that evening, he tells her they rejected his suggestion. They decided to propose hay storage facilities to Party leaders in Moscow.
    â€œImagine how that will look: horse-drawn carts delivering hay to the Lenin reactor,” he says with a hurt laugh.
    Olena will tell Viktor about her job when he is more calm. Maybe on the weekend before May Day, when they are going to Sochi on the Black Sea.
    Olena packs a picnic basket with three matzoh in a napkin, a bottle of Georgian wine, and horseradish. She adds a few sweet prune-stuffed pampushky and a lokshyna noodle ring filled with creamed vegetables. No salo, no sausage.
    With Galina, she rides an accordion bus that stops at a village with no name. Her grandfather is lean and bright-eyed, and these days he’s more hopeful, he says because of the new man Gorbachev and his glasnost, but Olena knows it’s because she is closer. Who else will remember to bring him Passover foods he cannot find in old Chernobyl, the nearest town?
    Outside Dedushka’s wooden farmhouse, the scent of blackearth surrounds Olena as if she were a child again. Dedushka has a Passover present for Galina — a mink purse that belonged to her great-grandmother. He brings out photo albums and gives her a black and white snapshot of Olena’s mother. The little girl balances her plate on her knees and chews solemnly as she listens to a story about the night Olena was born. Later, Dedushka goes inside and returns triumphant, the tarnished rattle that once cheered baby Olena clutched in his hand. “I remember things your mother cannot,” he says, laughing as he gives it to Galina.
    Friends stop to greet him, linger to exclaim