Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (12 page)

Maybe that’s enough? I know you’re curious, people who weren’t there are always curious. But it was still a world of people, the same one. It's impossible to live constantly in fear, a person can’t do it, so a little time goes by and normal human life resumes. [
Continues
.] The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls, had kids. They talked a lot about money. But it wasn’t for money that we went there. Or most people didn’t. Men worked because you have to work. They told us to work. You don’t ask questions. Some hoped for better careers out of it. Some robbed and stole. People hoped for the privileges that had been promised: an apartment without waiting and moving out of the barracks, getting their kid into a kindergarten, a car. One guy got scared, refused to leave the tent, slept in his plastic suit. Coward! He got kicked out of the Party. He’d yell, “I want to live!” There were all kinds of people. I met women there who’d volunteered to come, who’d demanded to come. They were told, No, we need chauffeurs, plumbers, firemen, but they came anyway. All kinds of people. Thousands of volunteers guarding the storehouses at night. There were student units, and wire transfers to the fund for victims. Hundreds of people who donated blood and bone marrow.

And at the same time you could buy anything for a bottle of vodka. A medal, or sick leave. One collective farm chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialists so they’d cross his village off the lists for evacuation; another would bring the same case so that they’d put his village
on
the list—he's already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk. No one checked the radiation reports. It was just your average Russian chaos. That's how we live. Some things were written off and sold. On the one hand, it’s disgusting, and on the other hand—why don't you all go fuck yourselves?

They sent students. They pulled the goose-foot out in the fields. Collected straw. A few couples were really young, a husband and wife. They were still walking around holding hands. That was impossible to watch. And the place was so beautiful! Really incredible. The horror was more horrible because it was so pretty. And people had to leave here. They had to run away, like evildoers, like criminals.

Every day they brought the paper. I’d just read the headlines: “Chernobyl—A Place of Achievement.” “The Reactor Has Been Defeated!” “Life Goes On.” We had political officers, they'd hold political discussions with us. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That's why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our “courage and heroism.”

Our political officer read notices in the paper about our “high political consciousness and meticulous organization,” about the fact that just four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they'd given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can't say. I wasn’t afraid to die, then. My wife didn't even send a letter. In six months, not a single letter. [
Stops
.] Want to hear a joke? This prisoner escapes from jail, and runs to the thirty-kilometer Zone at Chernobyl. They catch him, bring him to the dosimeters. He’s “glowing” so much, they can’t possibly put him back in prison, can't take him to the hospital. can't put him around people.

Why aren’t you laughing?

[Laughs.]

When I got there, the birds were in their nests, and when I left the apples were lying on the snow. We didn’t get a chance to bury all of them. We buried earth in the earth. With the bugs, spiders, leeches. With that separate people. That world. That’s my most powerful impression of that place—those bugs.

I haven’t told you anything, really. Just snippets. The same Leonid Andreev has a parable about a man who lived in Jerusalem, past whose house Christ was taken, and he saw and heard everything, but his tooth hurt. He watched Christ fall while carrying the cross, watched him fall and cry out. He saw all of this, but his tooth hurt, so he didn’t run outside. Two days later, when his tooth stopped hurting, people told him that Christ had risen, and he thought: “I could have been a witness to it. But my tooth hurt.”

Is that how it always is? My father defended Moscow in 1942. He only learned that he'd been part of a great event many years later, from books and films. His own memory of it was: “I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive.” That’s it.

And back then, my wife left me.

Arkady Filin, liquidator

___

Speakers: Viktor Verzhikovskiy, chairman of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen, and two hunters, Andrei and Vladimir, who did not want their full names used.

The first time I killed a fox, I was a kid. The next rime I killed a doe, and then I swore never to kill another one. They have such expressive eyes.

It’s us, people, who understand things. Animals just live. So do birds.

During the fall the wild goat is very sharp. If there's the slightest wind from humans, that’s it, she won't let you near. Whereas the fox is very clever . . .

They say there used to be this guy, he’d walk around. If he got drunk, he'd start reading everyone lectures. He’d studied philosophy at the university, then he’d been in prison. You meet someone in the Zone, they’ll never tell you the truth about themselves. Or very rarely. But this one was intelligent. “Chernobyl,” he’d say, “happened so that philosophers could be made.” He called animals “walking ashes," and people, “talking earth." The earth talked because we consume earth, that is, we are made from earth.

The Zone pulls you in. You miss it, I tell you. Once you've been there, you'll miss it.

All right, boys, but let's do this in order.

Right, right, chairman. You tell it, we’ll smoke a bit.

So, it was like this. They call me into the regional executive. “Listen, chairman hunter. There are still many household pets in the Zone—cats, dogs. In order to avoid an epidemic, we need to exterminate them. Go to it!” On the next day I called everyone together, all the hunters. I explained the situation.

No one wants to go because they haven't given us any protective gear. I asked the civil defense people, and they didn't have anything. Not a single respirator. I ended up having to go to the cement factory and get masks from them. Just a thin little bit of film, to protect against cement dust. But no respirators.

We met soldiers there. They had masks, gloves, they had armored personnel carriers. And we're in shirts, and a handkerchief over our noses. And we came home in those shirts and those boots, to our families.

I got together two brigades, twenty men each. Each brigade had a veterinarian with it and someone from the epidemic center. We also had a tractor with a scooper and a dump truck. It's too bad they didn't give us any protection, didn't think about the people.

On the other hand they gave us rewards—thirty rubles apiece. A bottle of vodka cost three rubles then. And when we got deactivated, people came up with these recipes: a spoonful of goose shit onto a bottle of vodka. Drink this for two days. So that, you know—so that you could, as a man . . . We had that little chastushka, remember? There were tons of them. “The Zaporozhets can’t keep it up; the man from Kiev can't get it up. If you want to be a father, wrap your nuts in a lead nut-warmer.” Ha-ha.

We rode around the Zone for two months. Half the villages m our region were evacuated, dozens of them: Babchin, Tulgovichi . . . The first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them. Waiting for the people to come back. They were happy to see us, they ran toward our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards. We’d drag them out onto the street and load them onto the dump truck. It wasn't very nice. They couldn't understand: why are we killing them? They were easy to kill. They were household pets. They didn't fear guns or people. They ran toward our voices.

There was this turtle crawling . . . God! Past an empty house. There were aquariums in the houses, with fish in them.

We didn't kill the turtles. If you ran over a turtle with your jeep, the shell held up. It didn't crack. Of course we only did this when we were drunk. There were cages open in the yards. Rabbits running around. The otters were shut in, we let them out, if there was water nearby, a lake or a river, they'd swim away. Everything was abandoned. For a time. Because what was the order? “Three days." They'd trick the little kids: “We're going to the circus.” They’d cry. And people thought they'd come back. I'll tell you, it was a war zone. The cats looked people in the eye, the dogs howled, trying to get on the buses. The mutts and the shepherds both. The soldiers pushed them out. Kicked them. They ran a long way after the cars. An evacuation—it's a terrible thing.

So here's how it is. The Japanese had Hiroshima, and now they're ahead of everyone. They're at the top. So that means . . .

It's a chance to shoot at something, and it's moving and alive. It's an instinct. It's fun. We'd drink, and then go. We were getting paid at work, which is fair considering what we were doing. And then thirty rubles—back then—under the Communists— you could . . .

It was like this. At first the houses were sealed. We didn't tear the seals off. If you could see a cat through the window, how were you going to get at it? We didn't touch them. Then the robbers started coming through, breaking down the doors, windows, the window-guards. They stole everything. First they took the record players and televisions, the fur clothing. Then they took everything else. The floor would be littered with just aluminum spoons. And then the dogs that were still alive would move into the house. You come in, the dog comes at you. At this point they’d stopped trusting humans. I came in one time, and there’s a bitch lying in the middle of the room with her little puppies around her. Did I feel sorry for her? Sure, it wasn’t pleasant. But I compared it. In effect it was like we were at war, we were punishers. It was a military operation. We came, surrounded the village, and the dogs, once they hear the first shot, run away. Into the forest. The cats are smarter, and it’s easier for them to hide. One cat got into a clay pot. I shook him out of there. We pulled them out from beneath stoves. You got an unpleasant feeling. You walk into the house, and the cat zips by like a bullet past your foot, you run after it with your rifle. They’re thin, dirty. Their fur’s all in clumps. At first there were a lot of eggs, the chickens were still there hatching them. So the dogs and cats ate the eggs, and when the eggs were finished they ate the chickens. And the foxes also ate the chickens, the foxes were already living in the villages with the dogs. So then there were no more chickens and the dogs started eating the cats. There were times we’d find some pigs in a barn, and we’d let them out, and then in the cellars there’s all sorts of things: cucumbers, tomatoes. We open them up and throw them in the trough. We didn’t kill the pigs.

There was this old lady, in one of the villages, she shut herself up in her house. She had five cats and three dogs. She wouldn’t give them up. Cursed us. We took them by force. We left her one cat and one dog. She cursed. She called at us: “Bandits! Jailers!"

The empty villages, just the stoves. Then there's Khatyni. In the middle of Khatyni there are these two old ladies. And they're not afraid. Anyone else would have gone crazy.

Yeah, ha. “Next to the hill you're on your tractor, across the way there's the reactor. If the Swedes hadn't’ve told, we'd be on the tractor, getting old." Ha-ha.

So it was like this. The smells—I couldn't understand where this smell was coming from in the village. Six kilometers from the reactor. The village of Masaly. It was, like, Roentgen Central. It smelled of iodine. Some kind of sourness. You had to shoot them point blank. This bitch is on the floor with her pups, she jumps right at me. I shoot her quick. The puppies lick their paws, fawning, playing around. I had to shoot them point blank. One dog—he was a little black poodle. I still feel sorry for him. We loaded a whole dump truck with them, even filled the top. We drive them over to our “cemetery." To be honest it was just a deep hole in the ground, even though you’re supposed to dig it in such a way that you can’t reach any ground water, and you're supposed to insulate it. You're supposed to find an elevated area. But of course those instructions were violated everywhere. There wasn't any insulation, and we didn't spend a lot of time looking for the right spot. If they weren’t dead, if they were just wounded, they'd start howling, crying. We're dumping them from the dump truck into the hole, and this one little poodle is trying to climb back out. No one has any bullets left. There's nothing to finish him with. Not a single bullet. We pushed him back into the hole and just buried him like that. I still feel sorry for him.

But there were a lot fewer cats than dogs. Maybe they left after the people? Or they hid? It was a little household poodle, a spoiled poodle.

It’s better to kill from far away, so your eyes don’t meet.

You have to learn to shoot accurately, so you don’t have to finish them off later.

It’s us, people, who understand things, but they just live. “Walking ashes.”

Horses—when you took them to be shot, they’d cry.

And I’ll add this—any living creature has a soul, even insects. This wounded doe—she’s lying there. She wants you to feel sorry for her, but instead you finish her off. At the last moment she has an understanding, almost human look. She hates you. Or it’s a plea: I also want to live! I want to live!

Learn to shoot, I tell you! Beating them is much worse than killing them. Hunting is a sport, a kind of sport. For some reason no one bothers the fishermen, but everyone bothers the hunters. It’s unfair!