They Sky Unwashed

By Irene Zabytko
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000
$22.95

By Tim W. Brown

Since 1991, when communism fell in the Soviet Union, much has been written of the difficult
transition of its constituent republics to Western-style capitalism. The news from nearly every
quarter is bleak: poverty, political cronyism, gangsterism and financial collapse dominate the
discussion. Two additional concerns often arise: the fate of the fallen country's minimally
guarded atomic arsenal, which is open to theft by terrorists and nuclear power wannabes, and its
nuclear power plants, which are crumbling from age and poor design.

Irene Zabytko's first novel, The Sky Unwashed, retells the story of the nuclear accident at
Chernobyl in 1986 and cautions of the dangers posed by nuclear energy even now in the post-
Cold War world. The Sky Unwashed is a moving and chilling book that humanizes the tragedy,
which mainly entered the West's consciousness from speculative news accounts about a disaster
in a distant land subject to routine news blackouts.

The story opens as preparations are under way for a wedding in tiny Starylis, a Ukrainian village
near the Chernobyl plant. Marusia, the seventy-year-old protagonist, struggles to keep her family
together both before and after the disaster. Her son, Yurko, is a weary forty-something plant
employee married to Zosia, a younger woman who constantly cheats on him, seeking emotional
comfort and material gain.

A curious juxtaposition of past and present prevails in Marusia's village as the people live
nineteenth-century lifestyles while they labor in a very twentieth century industry. Comforting
Marusia, who is exasperated by her family’s dysfunction, is the Orthodox Church, which the
Communist authorities tolerate because of the village's isolation. Also, the old ways offer her and
her neighbors consolation. This is most evident at the wedding: guests wear traditional Ukrainian
garb, they bring homemade breads, cakes and vodka to the celebration, and they cut loose at a
barn dance afterwards. The party breaks up late in the evening when a number of male guests,
including Yurko, must leave for their shifts at the nuclear plant.

However, nobody returns home when he is supposed to the next day, Sunday, April 25, 1986.
Further arousing the town's concern is a new and strange metallic taste in the air. After several
days of worry and confusion, the local commissars admit that there has been an accident at the
Chernobyl plant and everybody in the village must relocate to Kiev as a precaution. Marusia,
Zosia and her two children make the trek; Yurko is already there, hospitalized due to injuries
from the accident. With their fellow villagers, they arrive in a city up for grabs. Justifiably afraid
of fallout, most people in Kiev are themselves scrambling to leave for points further east. The
government compensates each family member five rubles (about seventeen cents) for his or her
troubles; Zosia pools the money to buy passage to Moscow for herself and her children. Marusia
stays behind to care for Yurko, who is too ill to travel.

1
After Yurko dies, Marusia has no place to go but home. She defies the ban on living in the
contaminated zone around Chernobyl and resettles back in her house, oblivious to the radiation
danger. She subsists on canned vegetables from her cellar. For several months, she is the only
resident of her village until a few of her neighbors return to the only place they have ever known.
Marusia and her companions struggle together to survive while they become progressively sicker
from the lingering radiation. Increasingly desperate, they pay a visit to the Chernobyl plant's
manager to demand a cow so they can have fresh milk. The plant manager grants their request,
but only after his assistant points out the propaganda value of announcing that people are living
on what was previously thought to be uninhabitable land.

This is the only acknowledgment that things are not what they seem, that an exhausted and
corrupt nation has neither the means nor the will to help its needy citizens. Elsewhere in the
novel, the author presents this unsaid truth more subtly. The characters, especially the young
adults, are extremely cynical about Soviet society--they bribe government officials and barter in
the black market, and they complain about living in rags and going without basic household
goods that Westerners take for granted. Yet they refuse to believe that their government would lie
about the extent of the danger presented by Chernobyl. The reader is left to wonder why, for the
Soviet population was lied to for over seventy years about the country’s supposed prosperity.
This irony is central to the tragedy of The Sky Unwashed and reveals the delusions under which
subjects of the former Soviet Union lived. Unhappily, Marusia never discovers the truth and
retains her faith in the system.

The odd credulity of Zabytoko’s characters feels exactly right. The accurate-seeming details of
rural people’s lives under Soviet rule no doubt are a result of the author’s visits to the Ukraine.
During a stint teaching English there, she interviewed a number of the disaster’s survivors and
even visited the doomed plant. One bit of local color stands out: the author uses Ukrainian
spellings for names that readers customarily see in Russian. Hence, Chernobyl is spelled
“Chornobyl” and Kiev is spelled “Kyiv.” A few reviewers have complained about this practice,
but in fact it reinforces the truth of the situation, which is much of the nation’s population was
not Russian and stubbornly clung to traditional languages, customs and beliefs despite state
efforts to stamp them out. Today’s commentators who emphasize the awfulness of life in the
republics that used to comprise the Soviet Union have only to read The Sky Unwashed to learn
that life was certainly more miserable before the fall.