Chapter 9

We arrived in Biała Podlaska soon after we set off in the morning. It was another confusing place, and it took us a while to find the road going south. A flooded area ran east-west through the middle of the town, but the road crossed it above the water level on a causeway, so presumably it had always been liable to flooding, if not actually permanently flooded, but mud on the road indicated that it had sometimes been flooded more deeply.

A few kilometres south of the town we reached another flood, and this time the road was completely submerged. Granny Persie detached the trailer from Lieđđi’s Bandvagn, and she and Lieđđi went to explore, to see whether it would be possible to get through. They were back very quickly.

‘Can’t see where the road is, it’s buried in mud. The water’s not very deep, but we could be in real trouble if we put a wheel off the road with any of the trucks, or if there’s a bridge missing somewhere in the middle.’

We had to go back to Biała Podlaska and keep going towards Warsaw another twenty-five kilometres before we reached the next road south that showed on our map.

I remember Biała Podlaska particularly because Laima told me about the aunt and uncle and cousins of one of Ivan’s colleagues, who had lived there and were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. At least, they had lived there and never reappeared after the war, and Laima says everyone knew that the Nazis murdered lots of Jews from there.

I still don’t really understand all about that. Who killed nearly everybody in the great cull? Was that the Nazis, too? Nobody knows who it was.

Someone decided to send Grandad and the Grannies into the shelter, and someone told Laima and Ivan and Nikolai to go into the shelter that they never did go to. Whoever they were must have known who was going to do the killing in the great cull. Where are those people?

I do know who the Jews were. Grandad says that one of his grannies was Jewish – the one who married his Jamaican grandad. So I’m one eighth Jewish. And one eighth Jamaican. And I know where Jamaica is. And I know where Israel is, but that isn’t where my Jewish great-great-granny came from. She came from Whitechapel in London. She was still alive just before the great cull, but Grandad says it’s very unlikely she’d still be alive by now, even if she survived the great cull. Which it’s very unlikely she did anyway.

Grandad doesn’t get all upset when he talks about his own granny, but he still gets upset when he thinks about his friends in Burnfield. Or about Granny Merly.

I still get upset when I think about Granny Merly. I wonder if I still will when I’m Grandad’s age?

The next turn south was supposed to be at a place called Międzyrzec. Well, we found it easily enough, and were pretty sure it really was Międzyrzec, but finding the right road out of it was impossible. We ended up on a much smaller road than we thought it ought to be, heading consistently pretty much due south, when the road on the map was south-west. It was a narrow road, so we split up the convoy again, as we had all across Finland – except that now we had just the tanker on its own out in front, because everything else had a trailer and would have been difficult to turn or reverse.

Fortunately we didn’t have to. The road kept on going, on and on. Sometimes it was several kilometres between places where turning would have been possible, so we were often that far ahead of the main convoy before they could catch up. Eventually we reached a bigger road running east-west, and we turned west, hoping to hit the road we should have come down in the first place. If we were on the road we thought we might be on, that would be at Radzyń Podlaski – but we were beginning to be very unsure that we really knew where we were at all.

‘If this is the road that’s marked in the atlas, and we really have been coming due south, Radzyń Podlaski should be about ten kilometres.’

Well, we reached a town after about twelve kilometres, so maybe Granny and Laima did know where we were after all. We found the road we wanted from there okay, or at least we think we did. It was heading in the right direction. Granny reckoned that we’d met the road we would have come down if it hadn’t been flooded, in just the right place, and turned onto the road heading for Lublin – and reached another flooded section.

‘Well, there is a river marked here. But we’ve crossed quite a few rivers, some marked on our map and some not. But whatever, there’s no way we can get through here. We’re just going to have to go back to Radzyń Podlaski and try the next road west.’

Granny had hoped to make it at least to Lublin by nightfall, but we stopped near Radzyń Podlaski. Granny checked the radiation levels, and decided it would be okay to put the chickens and goats out to grass for a while. Grandad and Mum and Aunty Anna went for a walk, and were thinking to take the guns and hope to shoot some rabbits or a deer – we’d seen quite a few during the day – but Granny said, ‘No, it’s one thing letting the goats and chickens eat here for the odd day, it’d be quite another for us to eat an animal that’s lived in a contaminated area like this all its life.’

Laima emphatically agreed.

‘If other animals can live in this contaminated area all their lives, why can’t we? They’re not getting food from somewhere else. Are humans more susceptible to radiation than other animals?’

Granny laughed for a moment, then stopped herself.

‘That’s a good question, Mikey. No, humans aren’t more susceptible, and we could live here for a while. We might even live out a normal lifespan, although we’d probably die sooner than we otherwise might, quite likely a lot sooner. Other animals die sooner in a place like this than they would somewhere else, too.’

‘But they still live here, because they don’t know any better. I see.’

‘Yes, that’s right. It doesn’t stop them breeding, either, although they might not produce as many young in their shorter lifetime. Some species might gradually die out here because of that, but others might do better because of reduced competition. It’s quite likely worse for carnivores, or omnivores like humans, than it is for herbivores, because there’s an extra stage of concentration. But that depends what the particular radioactive materials are, whether it ends up in the meat when a herbivore eats it, or in the poo. I don’t know what the particular materials are here. Even if I did, I don’t know which ones are concentrated in the food chain and which aren’t.’

Whether anything uncomfortable had gone on between Nikolai and Lieđđi I don’t know, but whatever the reason, the next morning Nikolai was driving the Unimog with Aunty Dot, and Lieđđi had Mum as her co-driver in the first Bandvagn. Maybe it was just to help Lieđđi and Nikolai with their English, but I had a funny feeling there was more to it than that. But what did I know? I was still only six.

Just a few kilometres down the next road we reached an impassable flood again.

‘I can see us having to go back to the main road and go all the way into Warsaw, and then take the main road south from there!’

‘There’d be no harm in that. In fact, we’ve probably already spent more time than that would have taken us. But the next road, via Łuków, only crosses one river that shows on the map, and that near its source where with any luck it’ll be quite small. Let’s hope.’

Laima’s optimism was justified at last, and the road was quite straightforward. For a stretch the land was flooded each side of the road, but the road itself was on a good causeway and in relatively good condition. We reached the main Warsaw to Lublin road by midday.

Radiation levels were well down on what they’d been at Radzyń Podlaski, but still too high for Granny to let Grandad try shooting anything. They hadn’t diminished any further when we reached Lublin late that afternoon – which Granny said wasn’t surprising, since we weren’t any further away from Brest than we’d been when we first reached the main road.

The goats and chickens got out onto the grass again that evening, but Granny and Laima hoped that we’d reach a less contaminated area soon.

‘At least the different readings are in about the same ratios as they’ve been ever since Brest, which means it’s probably all the same isotopes, so probably from the same place.’

‘Well, mostly anyway. There’s probably small contributions from all sorts of places.’

‘Hmm. I suppose so. Just have to keep checking, that’s all there is for it. I’m glad Ivan had rigged all these to work off twelve volts, so we don’t have to start up the generator every time.’

The next morning we went right into Lublin, in the hope of finding some better maps of the area, and topping up the fuel. We weren’t running low, but we never knew when we’d be able to find any.

We did find fuel and maps, and the maps were more detailed than our big atlas, and a bit easier to use in the cab – but they were just road maps, with no contours or anything. Granny decided she needed the atlas as well. ‘These will help, but they’re not a complete substitute.’

We also found a lot of jars of pickles – and jam. Grandad laughed, and sang, ‘Little bit of jam but NO bread!’ I wondered why those particular words had a little tune, but I’ve never found out. Spoonfuls of jam became a regular feature of our breakfasts for quite a while after that. I remember how sad Little Liz was the day we ran out, but that day was still a long way off then.

There were more clothed skeletons lying around in the street in Lublin that we’d seen anywhere else, but we didn’t see any sign of there having been any violence, vandalism or arson. There were saplings growing out of buildings everywhere, and in many places the streets were carpeted with grass and weeds with small trees here and there in a way I’d not seen before. Granny noticed the difference too, and thought it must be to do with the climate. ‘Leningrad had plenty of trees, but most of them were conifers, and their needles don’t get everywhere like the leaves of these deciduous trees. They were probably just heaped up under the trees, but I didn’t take any notice. It’s the leaves that have given all this vegetation a foothold, I’m sure.’

I found it all rather pretty and interesting, but Grandad and Granny and Laima found it a bit depressing, and wanted to get moving again. The real clincher was that the radiation levels were higher in the city than they’d been just outside it. Granny and Laima couldn’t work out why that might be.

‘It seems to be the same cocktail of isotopes, whatever it is – still the same ratio of all the various readings.’

It was only the vegetation that had high levels. Rain-washed surfaces and the interior of buildings were fine.

Our turning was actually a couple of kilometres before the middle of Lublin, so we went back to find it. The Lublin street map was really useful, and we got on the right road without difficulty. Happily we seemed to have got out of the area that was susceptible to flooding, and made good progress.

Using the big atlas and the road maps together, Granny’s navigation improved a lot. The absence of floods undoubtedly helped, too! But we got the junctions at Kraśnik and Janów Lubelski right first time, which must mean something. And we were sure that’s where we were.

Looking back, I wished that I’d been as conscious of our route in Sweden and Finland, and realized that my awareness of navigation had changed out of all recognition. Looking back again from much later, I realize that that’s what being six is all about...becoming conscious of more and more things. Reading my diaries again now, I can see the changes in my six-year-old self.

At Lublin, Granny had thought that maybe we’d get to a place called Nisko that day. We actually got very close not long after midday – but then we reached the river San. Granny took one look at the bridge and decided that she needed to investig­ate it more closely. The more she looked at it the less she wanted to trust it with the weight of even one truck at a time.

We followed the river as close as we could, heading north-west, hoping for a reasonable bridge. This was the opposite direction from the one we eventually wanted to head, on the other side of the river, but it looked from the map as though we were more likely to find a bridge in that direction. We were on really minor roads now, little more than farm tracks in places, but Granny wasn’t worried.

‘We’re close to the river, and it’s quite a long way below us. The water table will be well below the surface. We shouldn’t get anywhere flooded or boggy. If we have to, we can go straight across fields around here.’

It wasn’t very far before a bridge came into sight. Granny thought it looked like a railway bridge, and that’s what it turned out to be. We soon arrived at the railway, which was on an embankment. Our track went underneath, but Granny thought we’d be able to get up onto the embankment with the trucks without much difficulty.

‘The question is whether the bridge has a proper track bed, or whether it’s just an open structure supporting the rails.’

We got down out of the tanker, climbed up onto the embankment, and walked along until we could see the bridge properly. Granny was satisfied: we’d be able to get the trucks across this bridge quite safely.

‘It’s quite rusty, but this one was designed for trains, not just for lorries. The weight of our trucks is no more than a fleabite to it.’

Getting up onto the embankment was quite exciting. The front of the tanker seemed to be pointing right up into the sky, and Granny had to lean forward over the steering wheel to see where she was going as we reached the top of the slope. We stopped at the top. Grandad was shouting out of the intercom, but we hadn’t heard him as we were climbing, because of the roar of the engine.

‘It’s all very well for you, in that tanker! Have you thought what’s going to happen to all the stuff in the back of the trucks, and in the trailers? Will the Bandvagns and the Unimog be able to get up there at all, with undriven trailers hanging on their tails?’

Neither Granny nor Laima had thought about that at all. Neither had I, but I think I had a bit of an excuse.

So, to tell the truth, did Granny. She definitely was still not her normal self. I’m not sure what excuse Laima had, but obviously she’d not done anything wrong on purpose. Grandad reached the same conclusion very quickly, too.

‘Okay, Persie, you’re forgiven. What should we do now, though?’

‘The bridge is a good one, and this is a big river with not many crossings marked on the map. How many of the bridges might be rusty wrecks like that last one, who knows? I think we should explore along the track and try to find a gentler way up onto the embankment for the rest of you.’

‘We’ll do it along the bottom with the Unimog. Leave the tanker where it is. You three might as well come down here with the rest of us while we explore.’

It was actually Granny and Grandad and Laima who took the Unimog. They were only gone a few minutes when they called the rest of us to follow them.

‘The railway’s level with the fields here. It’s a bit bumpy through the ditch to get onto the track, but it’s no trouble. Just follow the track along the side of the railway and you’ll catch up with us in no time.’

Driving along the railway was no trouble in the trucks or the Bandvagns, but we could see from the truck behind that it was a bit awkward for the Unimog. Our wheels straddled the track nicely, but the Unimog’s wheels were just a little too close together to do that. Granny was managing to keep the wheels on one side running along the top of a rail most of the time, but every now and then they’d slip off and the wheels the other side would ride up onto the other rail. It must have been horribly uncomfortable in the cab.

The trailer was a little wider and just straddled the rails, but was being jerked this way and that every time the Unimog slipped off a rail. The goats were sensibly lying down, but the chickens were flapping about in a bit of a tizzy.

Uncle Sid, driving the truck I was in, was watching the tyres of the trailer, scuffing against the rail but not riding up onto it. ‘I hope we don’t end up with wrecked tyres on that trailer. We’ve only got one spare that size.’

When we reached the bridge, Laima got out of the Unimog and went to drive the tanker.

I could see it was easier for the Unimog on the bridge itself. There was a check rail on each side, obviously to reduce the risk of a derailment, and with a pair of rails to run on, Granny managed to keep the left side wheels up the whole way.

The other side of the bridge it was again a couple of kilometres before the track was level with the fields. Nisko was just another couple of kilometres across a field and down a farm track. By this time it was late afternoon, and we stopped there for the night.

The scuffing on the tyres was noticeable, but everyone reckoned they’d probably be okay.

Granny and Laima checked the radiation levels, going through all the window changing and waist-high and down-near-the-ground rigmarole again.

‘That’s a lot better. Another factor of thirty down from levels at Lublin. I feel a lot happier about letting the chickens and goats out to grass here.’

They checked the milk and the eggs, too, and pronounced them fit for human consumption.

‘We’ll check them every day for a while, even if levels in the environment remain good. We don’t know how long things take to work their way through a goat or a chicken!’

The next day we reached Jarosław around midday, and found a street map of the town inside a little roadside kiosk, which was fortunate because otherwise we’d probably have ended up coming out on the wrong road. There were various other things in the kiosk, some of which caused some hilarity amongst the oldies. They explained what cigarettes were, but they never explained what prezerwatywy were. Laima said it was roughly the same in Latvian, and that although it sounded like the English word preservatives it didn’t have the same meaning, but that made me none the wiser.

The other thing I remember about Jarosław was squirrels. I’d never seen a squirrel before, although I’d heard of them in Grandad’s stories, and seen the pictures he’d drawn of them. Grandad’s drawings aren’t bad, actually.

Grandad and Granny and Laima were a bit surprised by the squirrels.

‘I wonder if they survived near here, or whether they’ve spread from a population that survived somewhere else? We used to have them in Latvia, but they’ve not returned there yet. I wonder if they ever will?’

‘Who knows? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know about what’s happening anywhere except wherever we are ourselves. That’s what life’s like now.’

I’d never known it any different, so that comment stuck in my mind.

The only trouble we had anywhere on the road that day was at a place called Radymno, not long after we left Jarosław. Not one of the usual sorts of trouble at all – there was a train blocking a level crossing. We’d crossed level crossings here and there all the way, and we’d seen trains sitting abandoned on the track in a couple of places, but never a train blocking our way before. Half the train was in the station close to the crossing, but the line of wagons stretched right across the road. We eventually found a route across the line at the other end of the station, and then across a few fields and back onto the road. As usual, there were trees growing amongst the weeds in the fields, but most of them were small enough that we could simply push through them.

As we crossed the track, I looked towards the front of the train, which was in the middle of the station. The engine’s windows were smashed. I pointed it out to Granny Persie, and she shook her head.

‘I bet that happened while the driver was still in the train. Poor devil.’

Laima was driving, but she took a look as well.

‘Poor devils whoever did it, too. Imagine how desperate they must have been. They probably wanted to stop the train to look to see what there was in the wagons. A lot of good it did them, any of them.’

‘They could have stopped the train without hurting the driver. But you’re right, poor devils all of them, and it all comes to the same thing in the end anyway.’

We were all so used to this kind of observation that we didn’t dwell on it long, and curiosity got the better of Grandad. He climbed the footbridge in the station and looked down into the wagons. He didn’t take long.

‘Well, I’ve no idea what was in those wagons thirty four years ago, but whatever it was, grass and weeds grow in it quite nicely! But no trees. I wonder why that is?’

Granny and Laima wondered about that, too – trees seemed to be taking over every nook and corner elsewhere – but they didn’t want to investigate any further.

At Przemyśl, Granny took radiation readings again. They were below those at Laima’s old farm, and much to everyone’s relief neither the milk nor the eggs showed any detectable sign of contamination. Granny and Laima reckoned that whatever the alpha emitter was, it was in the soil and not being taken up to a huge extent by the vegetation that the goats and chickens had been eating.

‘You probably wouldn’t want them to be out to grass there every day, but it’s obvious that the odd occasion didn’t do any harm.’

Going south from Przemyśl we were back on a fairly minor road, but there didn’t seem to be any choice, as far as we could see from the atlas – and we’d run off the edge of our road maps again. The main road east didn’t reach a major southbound route until it was uncomfortably close to a nuclear power station in the Ukraine, and to the west, there was one in Czechoslovakia, and one in Hungary.

A few kilometres south of Przemyśl there was a light barrier across the road, and a little blockhouse by the side.

‘That’ll have been the border post between Poland and the Ukraine – what a contrast between that and the one at the Finnish-Russian border!’

Laima was interested to hear about that, as she’d never been to Finland. Granny described the place in detail, and told her how we’d been nervous that there might have been a booby trap there.

‘No, I don’t think so. That’s not the Russian style. Armed guards, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. It’ll have been the same here, although very likely they were asleep half the time. They’d have woken up if anyone crashed through the barriers like this,’ – exactly at the moment she did just that – ‘but you could have slipped through quietly on foot without being noticed. Probably, but a bit risky – far safer to cross somewhere in the forest. Then if you do get spotted, you can just say you got lost. I doubt if the border’s marked at all there.’

We stopped for the night immediately after a village just south of the border. Radiation levels were the lowest we’d seen, and the chickens and goats had a happy time out to grass. Little Liz and I had a happy time finding treats for the chickens, but the goats had plenty of interesting things within the limits imposed by their tethers, and seemed to have got over their jealousy.

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