Chapter 12

Laima was too tired in the morning to feel up to driving, but Granny was the navigator, so there was a bit of a swap around. Grandad drove the tanker.

Granny and Laima got on really well, and had a lot to talk about – I learnt a tremendous lot just listening to them – but I think Grandad and Granny were glad to be together a bit more again. I know they were both missing Granny Merly and Mum dreadfully. We all were, of course, but Grandad and the Grannies had been together an awful long time. And Mum was their baby.

I noticed that whenever Grandad didn’t need his right hand on the controls, it was either on Granny’s knee under the atlas, or holding her hand. And when she wasn’t too busy studying the atlas or the surroundings, her head was resting against his shoulder.

Holding the atlas on her knees all the time, she didn’t have an arm free to put around me, but I understood that and didn’t mind.

Laima and Granny always talked almost non-stop, but with Granny and Grandad it was different. Most of the time we drove in silence. Mostly the only time anyone said anything was when Granny pointed something interesting out to me – some particular plant growing in the road ahead, a tractor standing half-submerged in the marsh half a kilometre away, the remains of a house, or a patch of dead trees.

‘They’ve drowned. They only lived here because people had drained the land, and now it’s too wet for them again.’

At one point we got onto a minor road by mistake. It wasn’t obvious which way was the main road in the middle of a village, but as soon as we got out of the village it was obvious we weren’t on the main road. We could see where the road went, but the surface was below water. Not far below, but the main road had been above water level everywhere, and anyway, this road just didn’t look the same. For one thing, it was narrower; for another, the surface was different. The whole convoy had to reverse about three hundred metres. Granny cursed herself for a fool, for not keeping the tanker a good distance ahead.

‘Why do I have to learn the same lesson again and again?’

I knew why, but I didn’t say anything. I’m sure Grandad knew too, and he didn’t say anything either. We knew it wasn’t only Granny who wasn’t her normal self.

We found the junction, and Grandad drove the tanker to the edge of the village and made sure we were on the main road before calling the rest of the convoy.

Granny was sure we really were on the main road, but even the main road began to have standing water on it in a few places.

‘I hope it doesn’t get any deeper than this. We could drive through water a good deal deeper, but we might not be able to see the road, and it would be hell if we had to reverse out. It’ll be a relief when we get into the hills again.’

‘Pun intended?’

‘Pete! You have to ask? How long have you known me?’

I know Granny too – have done all my life – but I had to have that one explained.

Happily the water never got very deep, and at no point were we unable to see a dry stretch of road beyond. Granny’s biggest worry was that there’d be a collapsed culvert or something in the middle, but she thought it unlikely as the only water courses we crossed seemed to be those with levees and proper bridges.

It was another big relief to find a street map in Beregovo! We found a place to top up the bowser, too, and a road map that showed the route as far as the Romanian border.

Shortly after Beregovo the intercom came to life, but all we could hear was deep snoring and the noise of another truck’s engine.

‘That sounds like Nikolai to me.’

The gentle laughter sounded like either one of the twins, but we knew it was Aunty Dot. The intercom clicked off again.

We reached a little place called Vilok just before noon, where there was a bridge over the river Tissa. It was a steel braced girder bridge, and it was incredibly rusty, with holes right through the webs of the girders in places. But the road surface didn’t look that bad to me, and it wasn’t actually collapsing anywhere. Granny was a bit worried about it though, and the river was definitely too deep to ford.

‘According to this map, there’s another crossing at Vinogradov. It’s twenty kilometres away, but I really don’t trust this bridge.’

The road bridge at Vinogradov was even worse, but we could see a railway bridge just a couple of hundred metres upstream, and getting onto the railway was easy at a station we’d seen not long before we arrived at the bridges.

Getting back to the road the other side wasn’t quite so easy, but Granny found a route in the end.

For the first time, we had trouble at the border crossing. There wasn’t anyone there – no-one alive, that is, there were several skeletons – and it wasn’t booby trapped or anything. The road was completely blocked with rusting trucks. We couldn’t bypass them across the fields, because the border was a tangle of barbed wire. There was a railway line crossing the border parallel with the road, but that was blocked with a train.

We could, and did, bypass the queue to get to the actual crossing, but then we had to drag several trucks out of the way before we could get through. Granny tried to do it with the winch on the tanker at first, but didn’t have enough traction to pull one end of a truck sideways, and Aunty Dot brought up one of the other trucks to help pull.

Then just the other side of the border, the train was blocking a level crossing. That didn’t bother Granny much: she said we weren’t far from Halmeu, and we’d be able to rejoin the road if we just followed the railway to Halmeu station. The going wasn’t very good at first, with some rather soft ground alongside the track, and quite a lot of fairly stout trees, but we got through okay and very soon reached some sidings parallel to the main track, with firmer ground, and soon thereafter the station that Granny had promised us.

We were off the edge of the road map we’d found in Beregovo and wholly dependent on the big atlas again, but we reached the main road at Livada, and thought we were doing well. What the big atlas didn’t reveal was that the route crosses the river Someşul by ferry.

‘Maybe twice. It crosses the river again in about ten kilo­metres. We’ll have to detour via Baia Mare. But I think this is a good spot to stop for the night. Good fishing and good grass.’

A few minutes after starting fishing, Grandad crept quietly back to the trucks, and took the gun. We heard a shot, then Grandad came back.

‘Suonjar, bring the Bandvagn and come across the river. I got a deer on the other side.’

But Nikolai said, ‘No, I’ll swim over and get it. I was thinking of going for a swim anyway.’

Grandad thought it looked cold, but Nikolai laughed. ‘Compared with the river back in Latvia? I don’t think so!’

Suonjar and Gealbu didn’t think so, either, and joined Nikolai in the river. Nikolai brought the deer over, and then the three of them stayed in the water for an hour or more. Gealbu’s ungainliness on land didn’t show in the water at all. I remembered what Lieđđi had said about him skiing, and wished I could have seen that too.

Uncle Jake, Aunty Dot and Grandad gave up trying to fish, and sat and watched them playing. We’d got plenty of fish drying in the trailer, and now we’d got fresh venison, too. Lieđđi and I sat with them.

‘Come and join us in the water!’

‘Can’t swim. Never learned.’

That was Uncle Jake. Grandad could swim, but hadn’t, not in the last thirty-five years. He was astonished that Gealbu and Suonjar could swim, but when he asked them later that evening, they laughed. ‘Obviously we wouldn’t go in the water in winter back home, but in summer it’s warmer than the river here was just now.’

Lieđđi would have loved to go swimming, but her burns hadn’t healed enough for her to feel comfortable with the idea.

Grandad had hit the deer in the head, which pleased both Granny and Laima, albeit for different reasons. Laima was quite happy that Nikolai was playing in the river, because Dad was keen to learn how to butcher the deer Laima’s way, so that what wasn’t eaten immediately could be conveniently dried. Nikolai tended to demonstrate things, but Laima wanted to instruct and supervise, so that Dad would actually learn.

They began by skinning and gutting it, and Laima said she’d teach Granny how to cure the skin later.

‘We’ll run out of reindeer skins eventually. I ought to find out how they cured them. I’m sure they can’t have used alum, and I’ll run out of that too in the end. It’s not the kind of stuff you can find easily when raiding, I suspect.’

I could see Lieđđi squirming a little and not saying anything as Laima was talking, and wondered why. I think Laima was watching for her reaction out of the corner of her eye. She smiled at Lieđđi, and Lieđđi seemed to relax. She grinned back. It was a long time before I found out what that was all about. The other method of curing reindeer skins uses wee and poo...

Nikolai and Suonjar and Gealbu came up out of the river as the sun went down.

‘This is a good spot. We could stay here. Why do we have to move on any further at all?’

‘You’re not thinking, my son. It’s lovely just now, but what’s it going to be like in winter?’

‘True. Continental climate. We want to be on the coast. And further south, why not?’

‘Short of going west – and you know why that’s not such a great idea – the coast IS south. And there’s nothing here at all, anyway. Fish, and deer while our ammunition lasts. Then what? And no buildings, and a hell of a distance to anywhere to find anything we might need. Not too bad while the trucks last, but after that?’

‘There’s coast to the east, too. Not many nuclear sites there, easily avoided.’

‘True. But the Aegean is probably a better place to be than the Black Sea for other reasons. Not least that there’s likely to be better pickings for raiding.’

The next day we backtracked and found what we hoped was the road to Baia Mare – it was in a village about the right distance back from the river, and was heading in roughly the right direction. The road was in better condition than most, and we arrived in the town in under an hour. Granny was desperate to find maps, and we spent a while finding some.

A large area of the town seemed to have been destroyed by a catastrophic flood, which Granny and Laima guessed had probably been caused by the collapse of a dam further up the valley. The river was little more than a trickle through the debris, and it didn’t look as though it had ever been much more than that since the big flood, quite a few years earlier. Trees were colonizing the wreckage almost to the water’s edge.

There was no hope of tracing the roads amongst the confus­ion and there were no surviving bridges as far as we could see, but the river bed was all stones and we found a route through the mess as best we could. There was enough of the town left on the other side for Granny to work out how it related to the map, and she found the right road south without any trouble.

We really did get into the hills for a while, but how much of a relief it was I’m not sure. The road didn’t disappear under water here and there, but it did disappear under debris in some places, and in others it was washed away. But the washouts were stony not muddy, and none of them were at all problematic. Then there was a steep winding descent, and we were back on the plains beside the river. Granny said it was the same river, the Someşul. Now and then we saw it, then it would swing away from us in a great curve, or disappear behind a wall of trees.

The road surface was badly broken up, with weeds everywhere and small trees here and there, but none of it caused us any difficulty. We arrived at a bridge over the river late in the afternoon, and Granny said that according to the map there was a town, Dej, the other side.

We stopped for the night just before the bridge, where there was a grassy area by the river to put the goats and chickens out. We were so well stocked with drying venison and fish that Uncle Jake, Aunty Dot and Grandad gave up fishing once they’d got enough fresh for the evening meal and breakfast. Nikolai, Gealbu and Suonjar had another dip, but came out much more quickly than the day before.

‘It’s not as warm here!’

‘No, but it was good. We don’t know when we’ll next get a chance.’

At Dej the next morning we found another military base. There were diesel and petrol tanks and we filled up, but nobody felt the need for any more vehicles and we didn’t even investigate to see whether any of them were in a reasonable state of preservation. Dad and Uncle Jake did have a look for wheels, since we’d lost all our spares apart from one on each truck, but they didn’t find any that would fit.

There was a trailer that looked a bit tougher than the Unimog’s, but it would have needed a lot of work to make it suitable for the goats and chickens and Granny reckoned the one we’d got would probably make it to Greece all right.

Arriving at Cluj-Napoca later in the day, we found increased radioactive contamination again. It wasn’t bad, but it was a bit worrying because we were a long way from any source marked on Ivan’s map, or anything else Laima was aware of. It was a bit different from the contamination at Brest, too: Granny said that here it was mostly beta emitters rather than alpha. With the equipment she had, she couldn’t identify specific isotopes, but the range of the radiation in air told her it was mostly beta.

‘That means it’s most likely from a reactor fire or nuclear waste, rather than nuclear materials in transit like it must have been at Brest. Most likely from Paks in Hungary, considering the prevailing winds. It’s four hundred kilometres away, but there’s nothing else marked any closer.’

‘There’s one on the Bulgarian border.’

‘Kozloduy. It’s just as far, and the prevailing wind isn’t in this direction.’

‘Winds don’t blow in the prevailing direction all the time.’

‘True. It could be from anywhere. We’ll just have to keep monitoring. As we would anyway. We don’t have to go close to either of them, so with luck it won’t get much worse than this. And this is nothing to worry about for a few days, even for the animals.’

‘Good that we’ve got plenty of fresh food at the moment, though. We shouldn’t do any fishing or shooting or digging up vegetables around here.’

As at Brest, the contamination was in the soil or the vegetation, and had largely washed off the tarmac and concrete – where the tarmac and concrete wasn’t buried in organic debris from the trees.

What was the determinant underlying which places burned during the cull, and which just calmly lay down and died? We couldn’t figure it out. Cluj-Napoca, smaller than Lublin which seemed to have mostly stayed calm, had burned like Leningrad.

Maybe it was a matter of the local concentration of the lethal agent, and hence how long the process took? Or even possibly different lethal agents in different places, or differences between local cultures, or differing reactions of the local authorities. We’d no way of knowing.

South of Cluj-Napoca the road climbed into the hills again. Halfway up one hill, we had to detour completely off the road for a short way to get past the rusting remains of several vehicles that seem to have been involved in a major pile-up. Two of them looked as though they might have been army trucks, but it was hard to tell. All the tyres had disappeared, and Granny said they’d obviously all burned at the time of the accident. That was why the vehicles were all so completely rusty, even more so than most of the vehicles we saw littered around the place.

‘Granny...’

‘What is it, Mikey?’

‘I’ve been looking at the maps, and the atlas, and Laima’s reactor map...’

‘You mean Ivan’s map?’

‘Yes, Ivan’s map. You’re taking us halfway between that reactor in Hungary, and that one in Bulgaria, is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Very good, Mikey.’

‘What’s that funny Russian letter^* on Ivan’s map, right on our route, just before the border where we’ll go into Yugoslavia?’

‘I don’t know. Do you know, Laima?’

‘Let’s take a look.’

She glanced at where Granny was pointing on the map.

‘Oh, that’s a uranium mine. Ciudanoviţa, or something like that, I think it’s called. That won’t be a problem. We won’t want to shoot anything around there, or go fishing or digging vegetables, and we certainly wouldn’t want to live in the area, but just driving through is nothing. We’ll keep checking contamination levels, of course, but don’t worry about it.’

‘But people must have lived in the area in the old days!’

‘Yes, and some of them got sick. Some of them died.’

‘So why didn’t everyone move away?’

That got us into a long discussion about the old days, and how many people there were, and how important having a job was, and how difficult it was to find a place to live – unless you were rich, then you could live wherever you fancied. And what rich meant, and what poor meant, and what money was. I said it didn’t seem to make much sense, and Granny and Laima laughed.

‘It doesn’t seem to make much sense to me any more, but it did at the time. I remember how it just seemed the only possible way things could be. But I don’t remember why it seemed like that. It just did.’

Then we got back to talking about the uranium mine, and how although it was a bad place in the old days, it was actually much worse now, because all the old mine workings must have flooded, and the tailings ponds must have failed. How, with all the rocks broken up because of the mining, the uranium – and even more importantly, all the other radioactive stuff that the uranium turns into when it decays, in total nearly seven times as radioactive as the uranium itself – would get into the water that flooded the mine, and then into the streams and rivers in the area. How they used to store all the waste from the mining in tailings ponds – with all the radioactive daughter products of the uranium – and how when the tailings ponds eventually fail, everything from them gets into the streams and rivers, too.

‘And then, when the streams flood, into the soil in the area. There’s always some uranium – and its radioactive daughter products – in the soil, everywhere. Always has been. There’s an awful lot more near an abandoned uranium mine, especially downstream from it. But it’s nothing compared to what there is near an abandoned reactor, or even worse, an abandoned nuclear waste dump.’

Laima told me how they always said they planned to keep the water from the mines pumped out even after they’d finished mining, and keep maintaining the tailings ponds, too.

‘How long they’d really have done it for, who knows? You couldn’t keep doing it forever, and that’s really how long you’d have to do it. But obviously whatever their plans, the cull changed all that. No-one left to look after anything. But as Persie says, even an abandoned uranium mine is nothing compared to a reactor or a waste dump.’

‘Even while the mines were still working, they had accidents. Tailings dams burst, or parts of mines got flooded accidentally. These things happen. I don’t know whether they ever happened at Ciudanoviţa, but things like that can happen anywhere.’

I dozed for a bit after that, but I was vaguely conscious of Laima asking Granny how old I was.

‘He’s just turned six.’

‘Funny how different children are. Nikolai? Scientist parents – nuclear physicist Dad. Not interested in things like that at all. Anything mechanical, he’d have it to pieces, and back together again before his Dad found out he’d touched it. All working too, by the time he was about six. But intangibles? Forget it. Not until he was about fifteen.’

We stopped that night a couple of kilometres before Aiud. Radioactive contamination levels were down again. There was a lovely river and the fishing was good. On the other side of the river we saw deer coming down to drink again, but no-one felt like shooting one – Nikolai said it was too cold for swimming, and nobody mentioned crossing the river with the Bandvagn. We had plenty of meat anyway.

We saw swans on the river, too, and no-one felt like shooting one of them, either. I think Laima might have realized that Granny was more than a little reluctant to shoot a swan really.

I think it may have been at Aiud that Little Liz first recognized the remains of people. At any rate it was certainly there that she coined the phrase, ‘rag and bone man’. Grandad was somewhat taken aback when she said she’d seen one, until he realized what she meant. Then he had to explain to the rest of us what ‘rag and bone man’ used to mean in the old days. Nobody else knew – not even Granny.

That involved a lot of talk about horses, which got us onto cows and cats and dogs. I think that was probably when I first understood what the oldies meant when they talked about ‘draught animals’ – but for a long time after that I thought that horses were as big as tractors, and that the rag and bone man’s cart would have been as big as our trailers.

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