Hero of Electrification - Chris Cottom

I argue with the guards on the gate. Balakovo is a nuclear plant and I need an appointment. It makes no difference how far I’ve travelled.

‘I wanted to see the memorial. I served nearly forty years in places like this.’

The older one regards me more carefully. ‘Here?’

‘No, my supervisor was transferred here.’

‘You were good friends with him?’

‘Her, actually.’

~

The day after graduating from Leningrad Polytechnical Institute I kissed my girlfriend Taziana goodbye. Three trains carried me south-east for nineteen hours, to the Uglich Hydroelectric Station on the Volga, and my new position as Engineer Third Class. I thought proudly of the inspiring words of Comrade Lenin: Communism is Soviet power plus electrification for the whole country.

I worked eleven-hour shifts under the direction of Comrade Engineer First Class Yerina Orlova, a woman with formidable technical qualifications and an inky-black braid. It shone under the sodium lights, which blazed night and day.

In my rest time I’d lie on my narrow bed in my lodgings, thankful for the darkness but with nothing to do except dream of Taziana, her flaxen hair brushing my face. On that last Sunday afternoon at her parents’ wooden dacha on Lake Ladoga, she’d led me deep into the birch trees and slipped off her dress, trembling as she insisted she was ready. Afterwards she sobbed in my arms over everything she was sacrificing for Mother Russia, since I’d be ineligible for leave for six long months.

Volunteering for extra shifts of our vital work, I spent many hours with Comrade Orlova. We talked of flows and cavitation, tailraces and headwater, and she coaxed and coached me as I struggled to calculate conversion efficiencies in the way the director insisted. 

We were on a meal break, late one night in the otherwise empty canteen, when she said, ‘Do you have a girlfriend or someone at home, Comrade?’ 

‘Um …’

Her eyes were teasing, and I knew I was blushing. 

‘A girlfriend, yes,’ I said.

‘A serious one?’

‘Sort of fiancée, really.’

‘Sort of?’

‘Well, yes, she’s my fiancée. Taziana.’ 

‘And how old is your Taziana?

‘Eighteen. And a half.’

‘Not much older than my daughter.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Natalya’s sixteen. Sixteen and difficult.’

‘And … um, your–’

Her eyes snapped to her watch. ‘Time we got back, Comrade.’ 

Over weeks of dry sandwiches and endless cups of tea, I learned only that my supervisor’s husband was a master sergeant, serving in Afghanistan. 

~

I’d been at Uglich three months when Comrade Orlova invited me on an outing along the reservoir. The sun was already hot when she tooted the horn of her dusty black Lada outside my lodgings. She’d put her hair in a ponytail and wore a light-blue skirt and sleeveless white blouse, its neckline embroidered with tiny red and blue flowers. 

She laughed. ‘Did you think I’d wear overalls on my day off?’

‘You look very … summery, Comrade.’ 

‘Thank you, but today you have to call me Yerina.’

An hour along the reservoir, we stopped outside Kalyazin. Rising out of the water, four tiers of an ornate bell tower stood maybe seventy metres high.

‘The Monastery of Saint Nicholas,’ she said. ‘They had to flood part of the old town. And hundreds of villages.’

Leaning on the parapet, I thought of the thousands of prisoners scurrying like ants as they built the dam; the farmhouses and cottages rotting beneath the water; people closing their doors for the last time, or perhaps leaving them open. I pictured them touching their fingertips to the flowers they’d tended, and saying goodbye at the graves of their loved ones.

‘There’s another down there as well,’ she said. ‘The Intercession Monastery, fifteenth century. The march of progress, yes?’

I straightened up. ‘Indeed, Comrade.’

‘Yerina.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Are you hungry? I made a picnic.’ 

We drove up through the trees to a sun-soaked clearing where I spread out the blanket. Yerina unfastened her ponytail and held my gaze as she raked her fingers through her hair. We drank the kvass she’d brought, and ate smoked salo on black bread with Tashkent salad. Below us, the reservoir glinted.

‘Its maximum depth is twenty-three metres,’ I said.

Yerina smiled. ‘Very good, engineering boy.’ 

After insisting I have a second slice of semolina cake, she recounted happy summers at her grandparents’ dacha in the Caucasus. ‘Very rustic. We’d all get up early to forage for mushrooms. My mother would sauté them in butter and we’d have them for breakfast with sour cream. We’d spend hours on this big raft at the lake, chatting or practising acrobatics, like standing on the boys’ shoulders and jumping in.’

Her voice wobbled when she talked about her father, an academic physicist. She’d been only nine the night two men came for him, but didn’t know she wouldn’t see him again and never kissed him goodbye. 

She was quiet as we drove back.

‘How long have you been an engineer?’ I said.

‘I’m forty-one, Stepan, if that’s what you’re really asking.’ 

That night I couldn’t settle, even after picturing my far-away Taziana, naked in the woods, her shoulders shaking. 

~

Five nights after our picnic, Yerina and I were completing our wiring inspection deep in the turbine hall. The lights tripped out.

It was darker than Vepsky Forest at midnight, but I sensed her stepping closer.

‘The standby generator will start automatically in five minutes, Comrade,’ I said. ‘I tested it last week.’

Against my cheek, her hair was softer than I’d imagined.

‘I altered the timing yesterday,’ she said, sliding her arms around my neck. ‘We have ten minutes, Comrade Engineer.’

~

The Uglich Hydroelectric Station became the stage on which we acted out our professional lives, unfailingly polite and never using one another’s first names.

My landlady wouldn’t have countenanced me bringing anyone home, and Yerina wouldn’t take me to hers, citing her nosey daughter. And Uglich was a small town, so we’d leave it behind and drive into the woods. As summer’s colours rusted into autumn, the days we could use the picnic blanket grew fewer and fewer.

One evening after one such trip, she pulled in as usual at the end of my road. 

‘I have something for you,’ I said. ‘Can you wait here?’

I ran to my lodgings, collected my bunch of pink roses and rushed back, water dripping along my arm. I got back in the car and closed the door.

‘Oh, you sweet man.’ She counted them. ‘Thirteen, very good. Only use even numbers for funerals.’

‘I know. I know about flowers.’

‘Of course you do. You have a fiancée. Lucky Tatiana.’

‘Taziana.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yerina, can’t we spend a whole night together?’

She sighed. ‘I want that too. But …’

‘Doesn’t Natalya ever stay at a friend’s?’

‘She’d guess. You don’t know what she’s like.’

‘Another outing? Along the reservoir again?’

‘Another outing, yes.’

I lent over to kiss her but she held the roses up between us.

‘You want someone to see us?’

I reached for the door handle. ‘Tomorrow, then? After work?’

‘Not tomorrow, no.’

‘Wednesday?’

‘Stepan, listen. My husband’s coming home. He has a week’s leave.’

My stomach twisted and I felt sick.

‘Family time. He hasn’t seen Natalya for five months. Or me.’

I struggled to get the words out. ‘And I suppose you’ll …’

She reached across and squeezed my hand. 

‘He’s my husband.’ 

‘Yerina, I–’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, passing the flowers back and starting the engine.

~

Yerina’s husband had been gone a week, and we’d resumed our trips to the woods in the Lada, when, without requesting it, I was given four days’ leave.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ I hissed to Yerina in the canteen, our ankles touching under the table. ‘Can’t you get leave too, or say you’re sick? We could go away, we could go to the Caucasus, we could find the raft, you could stand on my shoulders …’

She slid her hand towards me across the sticky tabletop, her eyes closed.

‘Don’t …’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t.’

She took several deep breaths through her nose, her eyes still closed. 

‘Listen,’ she said quietly, leaning forwards, her hands gripping the sides of the table, ‘I don’t want you to go. But I’m eighteen years older than–’

‘I don’t care about–’

‘Stepan, I have a family. And you’re engaged to be married.’

~

I spent two miserable days with Taziana at the lake, while she grew more and more anxious about what might be wrong. When I returned, I was summoned to the director’s office and informed that Comrade Orlova had transferred to Balakovo.

‘But,’ I said, ‘that’s twelve hundred kilometres away … Comrade.’

The director said nothing.

‘And … her daughter? Natalya. She’s gone with her?’

He twisted his thin lips into a nasty little smile. 

‘Comrade Orlova’s family is no concern of yours … Comrade.’

~

All I could do was write to Yerina at the Balakovo plant, but with little confidence that my carefully coded letters would even reach her. 

I was on leave in Leningrad eighteen months later when the news started coming through. I’d spent the morning trailing round the shops as Taziana and her mother wittered over bridesmaid dresses and dinner services. Back at her parents’ apartment, her father was watching Spartak Moscow on the television. A line of news flashed across the bottom of the screen. 

Incident at a power station. 

‘Not yours, I hope,’ he said.

A nuclear plant.

‘Good thing you’re hydroelectric.’

Balakovo.

‘That’s a long way away, isn’t it?’

Several workers killed.

I waited until the football finished but there was no further information, no news of the dead. Just a stock photo of the proud new plant.

Taziana and her mother were busy cooking.

‘I have to go,’ I lied. ‘Leave for all power station engineers is cancelled.’

Back at Uglich, I gleaned little about what had happened. It was weeks before we learned that, during the start-up of the first reactor, a pressurizer relief valve had been opened, filling the staff work area with steam at three hundred degrees. It was months before it was confirmed that Comrade Orlova was one of the fourteen to have perished. It was years before the authorities attributed the accident to human error.

~

The older guard gives me directions and I leave the power plant behind. It’s still early as I drive up to the cemetery. I park outside the gates and walk past line after line of quiet graves in the thin morning sunlight, admiring the gentle snowdrops under the occasional tree. There’s hardly a soul around.

One by one, I place my twelve burgundy roses on the chilly grey chippings before putting my index finger to my lips and tracing it around the inscription: 

Yerina Orlova

19 September 1940 – 27 June 1985

Hero of Electrification

Originally published, in print only, in Swan Song by Retreat West Books, July 2023

Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Leon Literary Review, NFFD UK, NFFD NZ, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien. Find him at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chrisc