Ice-Cream

By Yurii Tokar

A touching anecdote about young victims of the Chernobyl disaster

In the summer of 1986, after the Chernobyl accident, I worked as a camp counselor with children who lived not far from the nuclear plant. The camp was situated in Evpatoria, a city on the coast of the Black Sea. My classmates, students at the university, also worked as camp counselors. Schoolchildren evacuated from villages and towns that faced a radioactive disaster were housed there. Kids from rural areas were different from their city peers; they were more naïve, and many rarely visited the city. It was during these days that a scene occurred which struck me with its unintentional brutality.

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Every morning, camp counselors took their groups of boys and girls to the beach by the sea. After two to three dips in the water, we had to go back to camp. The walk from the beach to the children's dormitory took about fifteen minutes. One day, while walking with the kids from the beach to the camp, I noticed that in some places, even the asphalt was sagging under the weight of the people walking by. The heat was the reason for this.

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On the corner, there was a stall selling cheap ice cream. 

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The camp's director, a powerful and self-confident fifty-year-old woman, had forbidden the children from buying ice cream before lunch. However, in the eyes of the little girls and boys, they were pleading for the possibility of buying ice cream, so I broke this ban imposed by the director.

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A queue of children formed at the stall instantly. First in line were the skinny, eight-year-old, short-haired blonde twin sisters, Anya and Nastya. They bought ice cream and walked away from the stall into the shade of a huge, old maple tree to enjoy the sweet, cool taste.

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A man and a woman, either husband and wife or brother and sister, about sixty years old, with a very prim appearance, walked past them leisurely, holding each other's arms. They stopped near Anya and Nastya. The lady looked sympathetically at the girls, who were dressed in modest cotton country dresses, and asked, 

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"Where are you from, kids?" 

 "We are from the Chernobyl region." 

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Then the woman jerked her companion by the hand, shouting loudly, "Let's get out of here quickly! These children are radioactive; you can't stand near them. They emit radiation, which means death."

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The strangers quickly walked away along the hot street. Nastya and Anya suddenly began to cry quietly, awkwardly holding their barely started servings of ice cream in their hands. I didn't know how I could calm the girls down, so I simply walked up to them, silently stroked each one on the head, and said the first phrase that came to my mind from a children's cartoon about the heroes Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena: "But Cheburashka would first finish his ice cream and only then would he cry." After that, the sisters, previously frightened by the words of the stranger woman, smiled through the tears that were rolling down their cheeks in large drops...

Yurii Tokar was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1988 and began teaching mathematics and physics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Yuri Tokar's stories, essays, and poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in several countries, including Ukraine, Germany, and America.