Chapter 8

The morning we left, I noticed tears in Laima’s eyes, and remembered how we’d all been like that when we left our own farm. I put my arms round her and looked up at her, and Little Liz came to her as well. Laima picked her up and gave her a big kiss, and then Emma and Dang wanted a cuddle and a kiss too. Laima laughed, but the tears kept on coming.

Nikolai wasn’t crying, but you could see his feelings in his face. He busied himself loading the goats and chickens. He drove the big billy goat up the ramp, and then shut it. He lifted the other goats over it, but the younger billy jumped out while he was putting the last nanny in. Eventually he managed to get all the goats in and shut the top doors.

Then he put the chickens in one at a time, opening one of the top doors just a crack for each one.

‘That’s going to be even more of a palaver every time we stop. We’ll have to let the goats out sometimes, and put them on tethers, to let them get some exercise and some grass. And we need a chicken run we can put down when we stop, too. At least a small one.’

Laima had to translate for the rest of us. Nikolai didn’t say very much in English at first – especially when his mother was around to translate.

He found some strips of wood and cut some of the wire fencing from their old chicken run. Then he very rapidly put together four side panels and a roof that he could tie together to make a small chicken run, but which laid flat on top of the tarpaulin on the tyre trailer.

At that point, he realized that the box he’d made on the front of the trailer would make an ideal nesting box for the chickens. He got Uncle Sid and Aunty Anna to find somewhere else to put the things that had been secreted away in there, then dug out a drill and a padsaw from one of the boxes of tools, and cut a hole in the end panel of the trailer, through from the back of the box. Laima went and got some straw to put in the bottom.

Nikolai and Laima said that they’d like to do their share of driving eventually, but they’d rather just observe for a while first. Laima said she’d never driven anything bigger than a car, and that not for over twenty years – and that in those days the roads had still been in relatively good condition. Nikolai had only driven their small tractor, just a few times when he was in his teens.

We changed the order of the convoy around, putting the tanker right behind the Unimog at the front. That way, the people in the tanker could keep an eye on the trailer with the goats and chickens in it, and communicate if necessary with Granny Persie and Laima and me in the Unimog.

Granny Persie and Laima had worked out the route they wanted to take – subject to amendment in the light of road conditions, and possibly radiation measurements.

Laima had been rather concerned that the levels at their farm were significantly higher than they’d been a dozen years earlier. She said Ivan’s measurements had shown the levels rising after they first came out of their shelter, peaking after a year or so, and then declining in much the way he’d expected based on what he knew about the most likely mix of isotopes involved. At first Laima wondered whether we’d picked up a significant quantity of contamination from Loviisa – the Finnish nuclear power station we’d come past – and brought it with us on the vehicles, but the readings were no higher near our vehicles than anywhere else.

‘So Loviisa isn’t responsible. Either it’s a much more distant one that made a real mess that’s only reached here in the last decade, or it’s one that’s started to leak much worse than it did originally – possibly even corrosion at Ignalina.’

‘We should take readings once every ten or fifteen kilometres, to see whether we’re moving into worse contaminated areas, or moving away from them. Then we can guess where the sources are, and avoid them.’

We headed away from Ignalina anyway, into Byelorussia, and the readings did indeed go down, so Granny Persie and Laima thought Ignalina was probably responsible. Then, once in Byelorussia, we headed south. Readings remained low, and roughly constant.

‘I don’t know what natural background levels are in this area. Ivan would have done. A fair bit lower than this, I’m pretty sure, but this level is certainly nothing to worry about. Ivan would have wanted to know what the particular isotopes producing the radiation were, because they have different probabilities of entering the body, and different pathways and residence times in the body once they get there, but I don’t know enough about it – and I don’t think we’ve got the means of finding out what they are anyway, have we, Persie?’

‘Not really, although we could theoretically get some hints by comparing readings with different windows on the meter. But again, I don’t know enough about it to interpret the results in detail. It’s all there in Ivan’s books, I saw them, but it would take me an age to get on top of it – and I’d need a lot of your help, because although a lot of it is language-independent, a lot of it isn’t, too. But just trying to avoid areas where the readings are high should be good enough anyway.’

‘True. Ivan was especially interested because he wanted to try to work out whether there’d been deliberate releases of short half-life materials as part of the war. He thought it was as much a deliberate cull as a war really...’

‘Interesting. We’d wondered about that, too. In fact, we’re pretty sure it was more like a cull, because of what the newspapers were saying after we went into the shelter.’

‘You got newspapers in the shelter? That’s really odd. I’d have been less surprised by television reception.’

‘No, we found the papers after we came out, and not until after we escaped from the camp. I can see why they didn’t want any televisions in the shelter either, whether it was war or a cull. The people who designed the shelter and the way it worked might not even have known it was going to be a cull rather than a real war.’

‘What were the papers saying?’

‘It’s a bit hard for us to be sure, because we only ever saw Norwegian ones, and none of us know Norwegian. But we’re pretty sure no war was ever mentioned, and that the deaths were being put down to a pandemic.’

It was quite late in the morning by the time we actually got going. There were nineteen of us now!

Late in the afternoon, Laima suggested we should stop for the night soon, because if we kept on going we’d reach Polotsk just about at dusk, and she wanted to be sure there was a good place for the goats and the chickens to get out onto the grass for at least an hour or two. ‘We’ll have to put them back in the trailer overnight, or the goats will chew through their tethers and get away, and a fox will very likely get the chickens.’

Laima and Suonjar milked the three nannies who were in milk. I watched, absolutely fascinated. Suonjar fed the three littlies straight from the goat’s teat, which they seemed perfectly happy about. I thought that was funny, after the way they turned their noses up at goat’s milk in a cup, but I didn’t say anything.

There was an egg in the nesting box on the front of the trailer, too. Laima was disappointed. ‘We’ve been getting two or three a day recently. Bumping about in the trailer with the goats must be upsetting them.’

I watched the chickens scratting about in their little run for a while, pecking up little titbits of something, but I couldn’t see what. Then Nikolai took me to a patch of dandelions. We picked lots of leaves and took them back to the chicken run and poked them through the netting. The chickens came over to us and nibbled bits off the leaves. Nikolai was pleased. ‘Good yellow egg yolks now!’

He got a small spade out of one of the trailers, and dug over a patch of grass. ‘Not real work, no planting today. But chickens like these,’ he said, and picked out several worms and grubs and threw them into the chicken run. The chickens almost fought over them.

Granny Merly seemed to be a lot better, pottering about and playing with the littlies pretty much like she always used to, but I could see that Grandad and Granny Persie were watching her worriedly all the time. She seemed paler and frailer and somehow old, older than Laima or Grandad or Granny Persie, who were all actually older than she was – thirteen years older in Laima’s case.

I didn’t know why we were divided between the two sleeping trucks the particular way we were that night, and I didn’t think about it at the time. I was in one truck with Mum and Uncle Sid and Uncle Jake and all the littlies and Nikolai and Lieđđi and Gealbu; Grandad, the Grannies, Laima, Dad, Aunty Anna, the twins and Suonjar were in the other truck. I should have realized something was odd, with so many couples separated, but I didn’t think about it. It was the first night we’d had Nikolai with us, so it was bound to be different.

None of us in our truck woke up during the night, or if anyone did, I never knew. But we all knew something was wrong in the morning. Everyone was very quiet, and there was no sign of Granny Merly. Nobody said anything at first, not in my hearing anyway, but I knew. I didn’t say anything.

It was Little Liz who broke the silence. ‘Where’s G’anny?’

That’s when I saw the tears in everybody’s eyes. Laima spoke first, ‘She’s gone to Heaven, sweetheart. No more pain and troubles for Merly.’

‘Where’s heaven? Will she be back soon?’

Granny Persie didn’t believe in beating about the bush. ‘She died last night, darling. She won’t be coming back. At least she died quietly in her sleep, cuddled up between me and Grandad the way she always liked to be.’

That was a lie of kindness, but none of us littlies knew that until years later. Granny Merly had in fact been horribly aware that she was dying, wide awake and in excruciating pain. Laima and Suonjar had tried their damnedest to save her, but couldn’t.

Actually, it was only since her first heart attack that Granny Merly had slept in the middle; before that it had always been Grandad between the Grannies. Granny Merly had often had Grandad on one side and a huddle of littlies on the other.

Nikolai and Uncle Sid dug a grave in an open space in the woods a hundred metres or so away from the trucks, and buried Granny Merly’s body there, but I didn’t know that for years. I also didn’t know then that Grandad and Dad and Nikolai spent several hours chiselling an epitaph into a substantial slab of concrete that they dug out of the road and placed on the grave. Laima drew a picture of the scene in her notebook, which I saw years later. The epitaph, clearly legible in Laima’s picture, reads thus:

Will anyone ever find it? If they do, what they will make of it? Grandad says it must be the roughest carving anyone’s ever seen on a tombstone, but they did their best.

Some of the rest of us spent a lot of time fishing during the two days we spent at that spot, and caught quite a lot of fish. We feasted well, and Laima showed everybody how to prepare fish for drying. She rigged up a drying rack in the back of one of the trailers, in the clear space under the canvas and over the load. She was doing her best to keep people busy, but I knew that everyone was in a very sombre mood and I think the fishing suited them better.

The goats and chickens were happy, spending all day on the grass after a day in the trailer. Little Liz and I fed them dandelion leaves. At first we were just feeding the chickens, but the goats decided they wanted to be fed as well, even though the patch they were tethered in contained plenty of dandelions, as well as lots of other things they seemed to like. I’m sure that really they just liked attention. You could even say they were jealous of the attention the chickens had been getting.

All the goats and chickens went back into their trailer at dusk without any complaint.

‘We should have loaded them in the evening before we left, rather than trying to load them in the morning.’

‘Easy to be wise after the event, and it doesn’t matter now anyway.’

‘I wonder how they’ll react when we don’t let them out in the morning, and start bumping them around again?’

‘They’ll get used to it.’

There were four eggs both days, so us four littlies each had one.

We were still all very subdued when we eventually set off again.

Laima told Granny Persie that there was a military airfield a few kilometres before Polotsk, and Granny Persie thought we ought to visit it and see whether it was worth raiding.

‘Assuming it’s not become a camp of survivors like our old one.’

‘I don’t think that’s particularly likely. Why there rather than anywhere else?’

Laima didn’t actually know exactly where the airfield was, and we uncoupled the trailer from the Unimog to go scouting around for it. It didn’t take long to find. Granny Persie was disappointed to discover it didn’t actually have any aeroplanes – just a lot of helicopters.

‘I was hoping to cut some aluminium panels off a plane. No, I’d no particular plans for anything to do with them, I just thought they’d be jolly useful material to have. I don’t think there’s anything useful here – apart from some fuel. We might as well top that up while we’re here.’

But when we discovered the fuel tanks, Granny Persie wasn’t sure it was really exactly the right fuel. ‘We’ll find some more somewhere else. I don’t want to wreck any of our engines. I’m sure they’d run on this stuff, but they might overheat or burn the exhaust valves if it’s not quite right.’

The only things we took from the airfield were a couple of paraffin stoves. ‘We’ve got plenty of gas bottles for the gas stoves for the moment, but they won’t last forever. We’re much more likely to be able to get paraffin – or diesel, which will probably work in these almost equally well.’

I don’t remember much else about Polotsk, apart from crossing a big river by a bridge that Granny Persie said didn’t seem to have suffered the ravages of time at all. I remember that particularly because I had to get Grandad to explain to me what the ‘ravages of time’ were, and how to spell ‘ravages’ so I could write it in my diary.

The road from Polotsk to Minsk was in worse condition, and in two places we had to put down timbers to get through washouts. Oh, what a palaver! Each time, all the goats and chickens had to be taken out of the trailer to get at the timbers, and tethered or put in their run while all the vehicles got past the boggy bit, and then reloaded after as many timbers as could be rescued had been reloaded. Granny Persie wondered whether we should have come via Vitebsk and Orsha. The roads looked bigger in the atlas – the only map we’d got of the area – but it would have been a lot further. Laima wasn’t sure the roads would really have been any better. ‘And it’s too late now. No point going back all that way.’

Three days to do just two hundred and forty kilometres.

We went right through the middle of Minsk. After our experiences in Helsinki and Leningrad, we weren’t worried about cities any more. Minsk was in worse shape than Helsinki, but not as bad as Leningrad. Following our noses, the road went straight through the middle of the city, and we found ourselves at the airport.

Aeroplanes! I’d never seen an aeroplane before. I’d never seen helicopters until the airfield at Polotsk, either, but I’d not taken much notice of them. We were all still much too preoccupied after Granny Merly’s death. But aeroplanes...a piece of family history.

And for Granny Persie, a source of aluminium sheet.

But for once in her life, Granny Persie was defeated. She found a set of moveable stairs that she could move up alongside a plane, got the little generator going, and found as she’d expected that she could cut aluminium easily with the circular saw. But she could only get quite small pieces of sheet out, because it was riveted to frames at frequent intervals.

She and Nikolai tried ripping a sheet off the rivets, but it just tore along the line of the rivets when they eventually managed to exert enough force using a chunk of timber as a lever. Nikolai hacksawed through a frame in a couple of places, and then tried to hacksaw the frame off the back of the panel. They tried all sorts of methods, but nothing worked, even after they got right inside the plane through an opening that the designers had never intended. Granny Persie managed to cut her hand quite badly, and at that point they gave up. Suonjar got out a first aid kit and bandaged her up.

I think Granny must have still been in a bad mental state. She’s never as easily defeated as that – or maybe she normally works out more quickly what is and what isn’t a feasible project. And she never normally hurts herself much.

Nikolai suggested that what they needed was a factory that made aeroplanes. ‘They’d have big sheets in one piece with no holes in there.’

‘Yes, but where are the aeroplane factories? I don’t know. We just have to find what we find. We’re out of reach of anywhere any of us know anything about now. All the information we’ve got is what’s in the old atlas. Even if we find a bookshop, I don’t suppose we’d find a book listing where all the different sorts of factories are.’

‘Minsk is a big industrial town. We could spend some time just taking a look what factories there are here.’

‘We could, but I think it would be better just to press on. We’ve got everything we need for the moment, and we’ll have plenty of time to explore the area we eventually settle in and find whatever there is to find there.’

We found a Byelorussian-style filling station and filled up the tanker and the bowser. We’d probably never have noticed it without Laima’s help. The jerry cans, which had been full of diesel for the trip to Gatchina, were at last full of petrol again. Granny rinsed each of them out with a bit of petrol before filling them.

‘I’m pretty sure the amount of diesel there was left in them wouldn’t matter in the petrol, but better safe than sorry.’

Finding our way out of Minsk was as bad as it had been getting out of Gatchina. There was a road to the west of the airport that seemed to head in the right direction at first, but very soon swung around to the south. We followed it a little way hoping it would swing west again, but it didn’t and eventually we turned round and went back. Finally we got onto what seemed to be, and turned out to be, the right road.

Our next target was Brest, on the Polish border. Laima wanted to get to the west of a reactor at Rovno in the Ukraine before heading south in Poland. Radiation readings were fairly constant at a level that Laima and Granny were pretty sure was well above natural but not really worrying. ‘Whether that’s Ignalina still, or Rovno, or a bit of both, or somewhere else altogether, who knows?’

I wondered whether it was something left over from the cull, as we were all now calling it, rather than leaky nuclear reactors, but Laima said that it pretty certainly wasn’t.

‘If the cull involved radioactive materials, they were short half-life isotopes, pretty much all gone in just three months. There’d be none at all left by now, thirty-four years later. Of course they could have been contaminated with small quantities of longer half-life isotopes, not enough to be very serious in themselves, but still around for decades or longer. What we’re seeing could be partly that, but I’m pretty sure most of it must be from reactors.’

How much of that sort of thing I understood at the time, I’m not sure. Laima and Granny Persie both used to explain things to me very patiently and in enough detail to make sense, so it’s possible that I understood quite a bit even at six years old.

One of the consequences of Granny Merly’s death was that Lieđđi and Suonjar didn’t get conversations translated for them so much. It had nearly always been Granny Merly who did that. Laima knew English quite well, and some Swedish, but she found it difficult to translate between the two.

‘I can cope with having Russian and English both in my head at once, or Russian and Swedish. But I really can’t handle English and Swedish both at the same time.’

‘What about Latvian?’

‘Oh, that’s there all the time. But it’s so long since I used it that it’s not the language I think in any longer.’

Granny Persie made valiant efforts to remember to translate for Lieđđi and Suonjar, but it didn’t come as naturally to her as it had to Granny Merly – and really, in the long run, now they’d got the beginnings of a handle on the English language, they learnt more by just being immersed in the conversation without anyone translating for them. Gealbu was already understanding pretty much everything.

The funniest thing was hearing Nikolai and Lieđđi talking English together. Lieđđi was teaching him to drive a Bandvagn – or at least, she was driving and he was watching her. I was with them, instead of in my usual place with Granny Persie in the Unimog. Laima had insisted that she and Grandad should be in the Unimog with Granny Persie, and that we four littlies should be in the Bandvagns. I realized that Laima wanted to have a Serious Talk with our grown-ups, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to let them know that I understood, even though it seemed pretty obvious, with the intercoms in the Norwegian trucks and the Unimog not connecting with the ones in the Finnish Bandvagns.

I could tell that there was a lot going on between Nikolai and Lieđđi that they couldn’t have put into words even if they’d had a proper common language, and I was sure that all our grown-ups knew that too. But their talk was even funnier than that, because the way they each talked English was so very different. Nikolai had a huge vocabulary, much of it rather academic, that he built into ferociously complicated sentences, which he struggled to vocalize almost incomprehensibly. Lieđđi had a much smaller vocabulary, most of it words that we all used a lot, that tumbled out in short, haphazard utterances at considerable speed, with a strange but perfectly comprehensible accent.

Comprehensible to most of us, that is. I’m not sure how much Nikolai was understanding, and I’m pretty sure Lieđđi was missing an awful lot of what he was saying too. The conversation seemed to me to be two monologues, neatly interleaved with each other, but otherwise almost independent. But it didn’t matter, they were hearing each other between the lines loud and clear anyway.

Nikolai managed to drive the Bandvagn perfectly well as soon as they decided it was his turn.

Uncle Jake was the only one of our family grown-ups who wasn’t involved in the Serious Talk, whatever it was about. He was in the other Bandvagn with Suonjar, Gealbu, Emma and Dang. What was going on between him and Suonjar was no secret at all, not even officially.

Emma and Dang were learning Gealbu’s language of gestures, smiles and nods as fast as they were learning English.

Little Liz was sitting on the knee of Nikolai or Lieđđi, whoever wasn’t currently driving, soaking up the conversation like a sponge. Some of the things she comes out with are funny enough at the best of times, but her vocabulary of fancy words mispronounced in a strong Russian accent, all muddled up with ordinary words conventionally pronounced but in a Sami accent, had everyone in stitches when we stopped in the evening. Gales of laughter that stopped abruptly every time someone suddenly thought about Granny Merly.

The road from Minsk to Brest was in better shape, and we did it in two and a half days. Long stretches of it were incredibly straight and level, and for several kilometres we ran alongside an equally straight railway. The surface of the road was broken up and there were trees growing through it, but most of them were small enough that would could just drive through them, and it was no trouble to drive around the occasional stouter one. The road hadn’t actually washed away completely anywhere, and all the bridges were still usable, although most of them had very visibly begun to deteriorate.

Not long before Brest, a tyre burst on one of the big trailers. Lieđđi’s Bandvagn – I was back in my usual place with Granny Persie in the Unimog – was the next vehicle behind it and she saw it happen, but it seemed that Dad, driving the truck, hadn’t noticed, and was just carrying on. Lieđđi stopped and climbed down and went and told Aunty Anna in the truck behind. Aunty Anna called Dad on the intercom to get him to stop, but by that time he’d realized there was something wrong and had stopped. We had several spare wheels with tyres already fitted, but it’s still a big job. They’d driven so far on a completely flat tyre that the wheel itself was wrecked, but Granny Persie said that was a matter of no consequence: we’d got as many wheels as tyres, and whether we’d ever find any more tyres the right size was rather doubtful. The Soviet Union seemed to use different standards from Scandinavia.

‘I just hope our tyres aren’t reaching the end of their lives.’

The grown-ups inspected all the tyres carefully. Most of them weren’t badly worn at all, but two had low pressure, and were duly pumped up, which took quite a while.

‘We should have taken a decent size compressor from a garage in Norway, rather than this little motorist’s one. We’ve got the mains voltage electricity to run one.’

‘Yes, but a garage compressor’s not a small item. What would you have left behind? What’s an hour here or there to us?’

‘I’m more worried about whether this little thing will stay the course.’

Which was prophetic. Moments later there was a loud bang and the sound of escaping air. The compressor was still working, but the connecting tube had burst. Fortunately that wasn’t the kind of problem that held Granny Persie up for long. She cut the end of the longer piece of the tube off square, and reconnected everything a bit shorter. The clip that held the end of the tube onto the compressor wasn’t reusable, but a bit of wire wound tightly round the connection a few times and then twisted up tight was just as good.

‘The tube had overheated. It’s still warm now. We’ve got to do it in stages. We shouldn’t have been running it continuously for so long.’

‘If I’d known we were going to be stopped here for so long, I’d have put the goats and chickens out on the grass, but I expect it’s too late now.’

‘Yes, I think so. I think it’d be difficult putting up the chicken run here though, anyway.’

‘True. Mikey and Liz could find them some nice weeds though, anyway.’

We proceeded to do just that. Gealbu and Belle joined in. Liz was the right height to feed the chickens, while the rest of us fed the goats. I think one of the chickens ended up getting left out a bit, but I don’t suppose it mattered much really. Mum had probably made the suggestion as much to keep Liz and me busy as for any other reason, but I’m sure it was good for the goats and chickens anyway, and definitely good for our relationship with them.

While we were stopped, Laima checked the radiation readings – which were up. Still not at a worrying level, but quite noticeably higher. She and Granny decided they ought to check them more frequently for a while, in case they went up even more.

They took to checking every ten kilometres. By the time we got to Brest, they were beginning to wonder whether we should turn back and try a different route.

‘They’ve been rising more and more steeply as we approach Brest. There’s some source right there, I’m pretty sure, but Ivan’s map doesn’t show any reactor there. They can’t have put a waste repository or a reprocessing plant in a town, surely?’

‘Ivan would have marked those too. He might not have known where they all were outside the communist bloc, and he might not have known where some of the military facilities were inside it, either. But I’m sure he’d have known about everything in Byelorussia or Poland. One thing does occur to me, though. There’s a change of gauge on the railway here, and everything crossing the border in or out of Poland had to be unloaded and reloaded. I bet it’s old contamination from loading and unloading radioactive materials. It’ll be in the railway goods yards.’

‘I don’t suppose you know where they are, do you? It’d be good to skirt round them as wide as we can.’

‘No, I’ve never been here. But we’re only here for a few hours at most. People used to work right in the goods yards, year after year. Their life expectancy might have been reduced a bit, but if they’d been dying like flies someone would have noticed.’

‘True. But unless we’re very close to the yards now, the levels there must be pretty high. Maybe there were radioactive materials in transit during the cull, and they got damaged. Possibly by someone raiding goods wagons?’

‘I doubt that. The containers would have been well marked up, and they wouldn’t have looked like anything of interest to raiders.’

‘Would they have been well marked up, though? Anything military might have been deliberately mis-labelled. Or some people might have been being destructive in sheer frustration.’

‘All possible, I suppose. I was thinking of stuff just corroding and leaking where it was sitting in wagons, or in piles between unloading and loading again.’

‘That could be, too. Whatever, if we don’t know where the yards are, all we can do is keep monitoring and be ready to turn back.’

At that point we must have been close to the source of the contamination, whatever it was, because the levels began to decline again steeply from there on. We didn’t do any raiding in Brest at all, we just got over the river Bug and into Poland and out of the area as quickly as we could.

We were really wanting to head south once we were in Poland, but for quite a way none of the roads southwards looked very promising. There was no road to the south marked on our map for about forty kilometres, and all the roads we saw looked as though they might not connect through. Even if they’d connected through before the cull, they looked like the kind of road that might have deteriorated to the point of impassibility by then. We stopped for the night rather late, having wanted to get as far away from Brest as possible before putting the goats and chickens out to grass, just before what we thought must be Biała Podlaska.

Radiation levels were well down again, but still a good bit higher than they’d been most of the way. Granny did some checks I’d not seen her do before. She changed the window on the meter, and put the meter down right close to the road, and again right close to the grass, then repeated it with yet a different window, and then did both measurements again close to the vehicle’s tyres and under the wheel arches.

‘There’s quite a lot of an energetic alpha emitter in the grass. We shouldn’t let the chickens and goats out tonight at all. The road surface and the tyres and wheel arches aren’t bad though, so it’s washed off the road long ago. It’s really lucky we met you, Laima. I’d never have thought about this issue without, and wouldn’t have known where to get the equipment, either.’

‘It’s lucky for us that you came by, too. Well, for Nikolai anyway. I’d have been okay, apart from worrying about his future.’

‘Hmm. I wonder how many people there are around, really? In five thousand kilometres, we’ve encountered five of you, in two groups, know of a few more Sami families and seen evidence of one organized camp in addition to the one we escaped from, which we presume is still going.’

‘We could have passed by a few others quite close without realizing. They might or might not have seen or at least heard us. Whether they’d have wanted to meet us, who knows? ‘

‘They could have been put off by your military appearance. We were decidedly nervous. It was only when we realized you weren’t Russian that we decided to risk meeting you.’

‘That’s something we’ve always been conscious of. But equally, we feel braver about coping with armed gangs or organized camps like this. And anyway, the expedition would have been impossible without these vehicles. But meeting a nuclear physicist’s family, if not the nuclear physicist himself, is a miracle.’

‘Probably not, really. You’d have thought it equally miraculous to meet a microbiologist or a chemical toxicologist, and I reckon those three types of people are the most likely people to have survived independently. Ivan reckoned that at least half the physicists at the Institute had probably made their own shelters, but obviously it wasn’t something any of them talked about. There wasn’t even any way of getting together afterwards. We wouldn’t have dared try to contact anyone by radio for fear of our transmissions being picked up by the authorities. Even trying to go visiting could have been risky, but we did try to find a couple of his closest colleagues. They’d either gone into the official shelter like good little sheep, or, as Ivan thought more likely, they’d felt safer some­where no-one would be likely to know about, like we did.’

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