Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (11 page)

The ones like her don’t live, they die right away. But she didn’t die, because I loved her.

In four years she’s had four operations. She’s the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies. I love her so much. [
Stops
.] I won’t be able to give birth again. I wouldn’t dare. I came back from the maternity ward, my husband would start kissing me at night, I would lie there and tremble: we can’t, it’s a sin, I'm scared. I heard the doctors talking: “That girl wasn’t born in a shirt, she was born

in a suit of armor. If we showed it on television, not a single mother would give birth.” That was about our daughter. How are we supposed to love each other after that?

I went to church and told the minister. He said I needed to pray for my sins. But no one in my family ever killed anyone. What am I guilty of? First they wanted to evacuate our village, and then they crossed it off their lists—the government didn’t have enough money. And right around then I fell in love. I got married. I didn't know that we weren’t allowed to love here. Many years ago, my grandmother read in the Bible that there will be a time when everything is thriving, everything blossoming and fruitful, and there will be many fish in the rivers and animals in the forest, but man won’t be able to use any of it. And he won’t be able to propagate himself in his likeness, to continue his line. I listened to the old prophecies like they were scary fairy tales. I didn’t believe them.

Tell everyone about my daughter. Write it down. She’s four years old and she can sing, dance, she knows poetry by heart. Her mental development is normal, she isn't any different from the other kids, only her games are different. She doesn’t play “store,” or “school”—she plays “hospital." She gives her dolls shots, takes their temperature, puts them on IV. If a doll dies, she covers it with a white sheet. We've been living in the hospital with her for four years, we can’t leave her there alone, and she doesn’t even know that you’re supposed to live at home. When we go home for a month or two, she asks me, “When are we going back to the hospital?” That’s where her friends are, that's where they’re growing up.

They made an anus for her. And they’re forming a vagina. After the last operation her urinary functioning completely broke down, and they were unable to insert a catheter—they’ll need more operations for that. But from here on out they've advised us to seek medical help abroad. Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: “With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They would be interested." So I write.
[Tries not to cry.]
I write that every half hour we have to squeeze out her urine manually, it comes out through artificial openings in the area of her vagina. Where else is there a child in the world who has to have her urine squeezed out of her every half hour? And how much longer can it go on? No one knows the effect of small doses of radiation on the organism of a child. Take my girl, even if it's to experiment. I don't want her to die. I'm all right with her becoming a lab frog, a lab rabbit, just as long as she lives.
[Cries.]
I’ve written dozens of letters. Oh, God!

She doesn’t understand yet, but someday she'll ask us: why isn't she like everyone else? Why can’t she love a man? Why can’t she have babies? Why won't what happens to butterflies ever happen to her? What happens to birds? To everyone but her? I wanted—I should have been able to prove—so that—I wanted to get papers—so that she’d know—when she grew up—it wasn’t our fault, my husband and I, it wasn’t our love that was at fault.
[Tries again not to cry.]
I fought for four years—with the doctors, the bureaucrats—I knocked on the doors of important people. It took me four years to finally get a paper from the doctors that confirmed the connection between ionized radiation (in small doses) and her terrible condition. They refused me for four years, they kept telling me: “Your child is a victim of a congenital handicap." What congenital handicap? She’s a victim of Chernobyl! I studied my family tree—nothing like this has ever happened in our family. Everyone lived until they were eighty or ninety. My grandfather lived until he was 94. The doctors said: “We have instructions. We are supposed to call incidents of this type general sicknesses. In twenty or thirty years, when we have a database about Chernobyl, we'll begin connecting these to ionized radiation. But for the moment science doesn't know enough about it.” But I can't wait twenty or thirty years. I wanted to sue them. Sue the government. They called me crazy, laughed at me, like, There were children like these in ancient Greece, too. One bureaucrat yelled at me: “You want Chernobyl privileges! Chernobyl victim funds!” How I didn't faint in his office, I'll never know.

There was one thing they didn't understand—didn't want to understand—I needed to know that it wasn't our fault. It wasn't our love.
[Breaks down. Cries.]
This girl is growing up—she's still a girl—I don't want you to print our name—even our neighbors—even other people on our floor don't know. I'll put a dress on her, and a handkerchief, and they say, “Your Katya is so pretty.” Meanwhile I give pregnant women the strangest looks. I don't look at them, I kind of glance at them real quick. I have all these mixed feelings: surprise and horror, jealousy and joy, even this feeling of vengeance. One time I caught myself thinking that I look the same way at the neighbors' pregnant dog—at the bird in its nest . . .

My girl . . .

Larisa Z., mother

___

I suddenly started wondering what's better—to remember or to forget? I asked my friends. Some have forgotten, others don't want to remember, because we can't change anything anyway, we can't even leave here.

Here's what I remember. In the first days after the accident, all the books at the library about radiation, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even about X-rays, disappeared. Some people said it was an order from above, so that people wouldn’t panic. There was even a joke that if Chernobyl had blown up near the Papuans, the whole world would be frightened, but not the Papuans. There were no medical bulletins, no information. Those who could, got potassium iodide (you couldn’t get it at the pharmacy in our town, you had to really know someone). Some people took a whole bunch of these tablets and washed them down with liquor. Then they had to get their stomachs pumped at the hospital. Then we discovered a sign, which all of us followed: as long as there were sparrows and pigeons in town, humans could live there, too. I was in a taxi one time, the driver couldn't understand why the birds were all crashing into his window, like they were blind. They’d gone crazy, or like they were committing suicide.

I remember coming back one time from a business trip. There was a moonlit landscape. On both sides of the road, to the very horizon, stretched these fields covered in white dolomite. The poisoned topsoil had been removed and buried, and in its place they brought white dolomite sand. It was like not-earth. This vision tortured me for a long time and I tried to write a story. I imagined what would be here in a hundred years: a person, or something else, would be galloping along on all fours, throwing out its long back legs, knees bent. At night it could see with a third eye, and its only ear, on the crown of its head, could even hear how ants run. Ants would be the only thing left, everything else in heaven and earth would have died.

I sent the story to a journal. They wrote back saying that this wasn’t a work of literature, but the description of a nightmare. Of course I lacked the talent. But there was another reason they didn’t take it, I think.

I've wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren’t writing much about it—they write about the war, or the camps, but here they're silent. Why? Do you think it's an accident? If we'd beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we'd understood Chernobyl. But we don't know how to capture any meaning from it. We're not capable of it. We can't place it in our human experience or our human time-frame.

So what's better, to remember or to forget?

Yevgeniy Brovkin, instructor at Comel State University

___

I was thinking about something else then. You'll find this strange, but I was splitting up with my wife.

They came suddenly, gave me a notice, and said, There's a car waiting downstairs. It was like 1937
[the year of Stalin's Great Terror].
They came at night to take you out of your warm bed. Then that stopped working: people’s wives would refuse to answer the door, or they’d lie, say their husbands were away on business, or vacation, or at the dacha with their parents. The soldiers would try to give them the notice, the wives would refuse to take it. So they started grabbing people at work, on the street, during a lunch break at the factory cafeteria. It was just like 1937.

But I was almost crazy by then. My wife had cheated on me, nothing else mattered. I got in their car. The guys who came for me were in street clothes, but they had a military bearing, and they walked on both sides of me, they were clearly worried I’d run off. When I got in the car, I remembered for some reason the American astronauts who’d flown to the moon, and one of them later became a priest, and the other apparently went crazy. I read that they thought they'd seen cities, some kind of human remnants there. I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll “light” the whole earth with them. But my wife had left me, and I could only think about that. I’d tried to kill myself a few times. We went to the same kindergarten, the same school, the same college.
[Silent. Smokes
.]

I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen. I had thoughts like, It’s not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn’t care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn’t necessary.

I have medals and awards—but that’s because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors, and the government would have paid for it.

You immediately found yourself in this fantastic world, where the Apocalypse met the Stone Age. And for me it was sharper, barer. We lived in the forest, in tents, twenty kilometers from the reactor, like partisans. We were between twenty-five and forty, some of us had university degrees, or vocational-technical degrees. I'm a history teacher, for example. Instead of machine guns they gave us shovels. We buried trash heaps and gardens. The women in the villages watched us and crossed themselves. We had gloves, respirators, and surgical robes. The sun beat down on us. We showed up in their yards like demons. They didn't understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say, “Boys, what is this—is it the end of the world?”

In the house the stove’s on, the lard is frying. You put a dosimeter to it, and you find it’s not a stove, it’s a little nuclear reactor. “Boys," the men say, “have a seat at the table." They want to be friendly. We say no. They say, “Come, we’ll drink a hundred grams. Have a seat. Tell us what’s going on." What do we tell them? At the reactor the firefighters were stomping on burning fuel, and it was glowing, but they didn’t know what it was. What’s to know? We go in units, and each unit has one dosimeter. Different places have different levels of radiation. One of us is working where there are two roentgen, but another guy is working where there are ten. On the one hand, we have no rights, like prisoners, and on the other hand, we’re frightened. But I wasn’t frightened. I was watching everything from the side.

A group of scientists flew in on a helicopter. In special rubber suits, tall boots, protective goggles. Like they were going to the moon. This old woman comes up to one of them and says, “Who are you?" ‘‘I’m a scientist." “Oh, a scientist. Look how he’s dressed up! Look at that mask! And what about us?" And she goes after him with a stick. I’ve thought a few times that someday they’re going to start hunting the scientists the way they used to hunt the doctors and drown them in the Middle Ages.

I saw a man who watched his house get buried. [Stops.] We buried houses, wells, trees. We buried the earth. We'd cut things down, roll them up into big plastic sheets ... I told you, nothing heroic here.

One time we’re coming back late at night—we worked twelve-hour shifts, without any holidays, so the only time we could rest was at night. So we’re in the APC and we see a person walking through this abandoned village. We come a little closer and it’s a young guy with a rug on his back.

There’s a Zhiguli nearby. We stop, have a look: the trunk is stuffed with televisions and telephones. The APC turns around and wham: the Zhiguli just collapses, like a soda can. No one says a word.

We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over—as if it were alive—live tracts of land—with bugs, spiders, worms—I didn't know any of them, what they were called, just bugs, spiders, ants. And they were small and big, yellow and black, all different colors. One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them.

Leonid Andreev, whom I love very much, has this parable about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss. And now he’s alien, he’ll never be the same as other people, even though Christ resurrected him.