Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (13 page)

Hunting and war—these are the main activities for a man. For a real man.

I couldn’t tell my son about it. He’s a kid. Where was I? What was I doing? He still thinks his father was over there defending someone or something. That he was at his battle station! They showed it on television: military equipment, lots of soldiers.

There were a lot of soldiers. My son asks me: “Papa, you were like a soldier?”

This cameraman came with us from the television. Remember? He cried. He was a man but he cried. He kept wanting to see a three-headed boar.

Yeah, ha. The fox sees how a gingerbread man is rolling through the forest. “Gingerbread man, where are you rolling to?” “I'm not a gingerbread man, I'm a hedgehog from Chernobyl.” Ha-ha. Like they say, let's put the peaceful atom into every home!

I’ll tell you, every person dies just like an animal. I saw this many times in Afghanistan. I, myself, I was wounded there in the stomach, and I was lying in the sun. The heat was unbearable. I was thirsty! “Well,” I thought, ‘‘I'm going to die here, like a dog.” I'll tell you, the blood flows the same way, just like theirs does, and the pain is the same.

The police officer that was with us—he went crazy. He felt sorry for the Siamese cats, they were so expensive on the market, he said. They were pretty. And he was a man . . .

I feel worst for the old men. They’d come up to our cars: “Son, will you have a look at my house?” Giving me the keys. “Could you grab my suit? And my hat.” Giving me a few coins. “How is my dog doing?” The dog's been shot, the house has been looted. And they'll never return there. How do you tell them? I didn’t take the keys. I didn't want to trick anyone. Others took them. “Where’d you put the vodka? Where’d you hide it?” And the old man would tell them. They’d find whole milk cans full of the stuff.

We shoot for science, too. One time we shot two rabbits, two foxes, two wild goats. They’re all sick, but we still tenderize them and eat. At first we were afraid to, but now we’re used to it. You have to eat something, and we can’t all move to the moon, to another planet.

As for me, nothing happened there to my soul or my mind. That’s all a lot of nonsense.

This one thing stuck in my memory. That one thing. No one had a single bullet, there was nothing to shoot that little poodle with. Twenty guys. Not a single bullet at the end of the day. Not a single one.

___

What do I pray for? Ask me: what do I pray for? I don’t pray in church. I pray to myself. I want to love! I do love. I pray for my love! But for me—
[Stops short. I can see she doesn’t want to talk]
Am I supposed to remember? Maybe I should push it away instead, just in case? I never read such books. I never saw such movies. At the movies I saw the war. My grandmother and grandfather remember that they never had a childhood, they had the war. Their childhood is the war, and mine is Chernobyl. That’s where I’m from. You’re a writer, but no book has helped me to understand. And the theater hasn’t, and the movies haven’t. I understand it without them, though. By myself. We all live through it by ourselves, we don’t know what else to do. I can’t understand it with my mind. My mother especially has felt confused. She teaches Russian literature, and she always taught me to live with books. But there are no books about this. She became confused. She doesn’t know how to do without books. Without Chekhov and Tolstoy. Am I supposed to remember? I want to remember, and also I don’t want to.
[Either she’s listening to herself. or arguing with herself]
If scientists don’t know anything, if writers don’t know anything, then we’ll help them with our own lives and our deaths. That's what my mom chinks. But I don’t want to think about this, I want to be happy. Why can’t I be happy?

We lived in Pripyat, near the nuclear station, that’s where I was born and grew up. In a big pre-fab building, on the fifth floor. The windows looked out onto the station. On April 26—there were two days—those were the last two days in our town. Now it's not there anymore. What’s left there isn’t our town. That day a neighbor was sitting on the balcony, watching the fire through binoculars. Whereas we—the girls and boys—we raced to the station on our bikes, and those who didn't have bikes were jealous. No one yelled at us not to go. No one! Not our parents, not our teachers. By lunch time there weren’t any fishermen at the river, they’d come back black, you can’t get that black in a month at Sochi. It was a nuclear tan! The smoke over the station wasn’t black or yellow, it was blue. But no one yelled at us. People were used to military dangers: an explosion over here, an explosion over there. Whereas here you had an ordinary fire, being put out by ordinary firemen. The boys were joking around: “Get in a row at the cemetery, whoever's tallest dies first." I was little. I don’t remember the fear, but I remember lots of weird things. My friend told me that she and her mother spent the night burying their money and gold things, and were worried they'd forget the spot. My grandmother, when she’d retired, had been given a samovar from Tula, and for some reason the thing she worried about most was the samovar, and also about Grandpa's medals. And about the old Singer sewing machine. We were “evacuated.” My father brought that word home from work. It was like in the war books. We were already on the bus when my father remembered he'd left something. He runs home, comes back with two of his new shirts still on their hangers. That was strange. The soldiers were sort of like aliens, they walk through the streets in their protective gear and masks. “What’s going to happen to us?” people were asking them. “Why are you asking us?” they'd snap back. “The white Volgas are over there, that’s where the bosses are, ask them.”

We're riding on the bus, the sky is blue as blue. Where are we going? We have Easter cakes and colored eggs in our bags and baskets. If this is war, it’s not how I imagined it from the books I’d read. There should have been explosions over here, over there, bombing. We were moving slowly, the livestock was in the way. People were chasing cows and horses down the roads. It smelled of dust and milk. The drivers were cursing and yelling at the shepherds: “Why are you on the road with those, you this-and-that?? You're kicking up radioactive dust! Why don't you take them through the fields?” And those cursed back that it’d be a shame to trample all the rye and grass. No one thought we'd never come back. Nothing like this had ever happened. My head was spinning a little and my throat tickled. The old women weren’t crying, but the young ones were. My mother was crying.

We got to Minsk. But we had to buy our seats on the train at triple the usual price. The conductor brought everyone tea, but to us she says, “Let me have your cups.” We didn’t get it right away—did they run out of cups? No! They were afraid of us. “Where are you from?” “Chernobyl.” And then they shy off. In a month my parents were allowed to go to the apartment.

They got a warm blanket, my fall coat and the collected letters of Chekhov, my mom's favorite. Grandma—our grandma—she couldn't understand why they didn't take the cans of strawberry jam she'd made—they were in cans, after all, they were sealed up. They found a “stain" on the blanket. My mother washed it, vacuumed it, nothing helped. They gave it to the dry-cleaners, it turned out the spot “glowed." They cut it out with their scissors. It was the same blanket, and my same coat, but I couldn't sleep under the blanket anymore, or wear that coat. It wasn’t that I was afraid of those things—I hated them! Those things could have killed me! I felt this animosity—I don't really understand it myself.

Everyone was talking about the accident: at home, in school, on the bus, in the street. People compared it to Hiroshima. But no one believed it. How can you believe in something incomprehensible? No matter how hard you try, it still doesn't make sense. I remember—we're leaving, the sky is blue as blue. And Grandma—she couldn’t get used to the new place. She missed our old home. Just before she died she said, “I want some sorrel!" We weren't allowed to eat that for several years, it was the thing that absorbed the most radiation.

We buried her in her old village of Dubrovniki. It was in the Zone, so there was barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns guarding it. They only let the adults through—my parents and relatives. But they wouldn't let me. “Kids aren’t allowed." I understood then that I would never be able to visit my grandmother. I understood. Where can you read about that? Where has that ever happened? My mom admitted: “You know, I hate flowers and trees." She became afraid of herself. At the cemetery, on the grass, they put down a tablecloth and placed some food and vodka on it, for the wake. The soldiers brought over the dosimeter and threw everything out. The grass, the flowers, everything was “clicking.” Where did we take our grandma?

I’m afraid. I'm afraid to love. I have a fiance, we already registered at the house of deeds. Have you ever heard of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima? The ones who survived after the bomb? They can only marry each other. No one writes about it here, no one talks about it, but we exist. The Chernobyl Hibakusha. He brought me home to his mom, she’s a very nice mom. She works at a factory as an economist, and she’s very active, she goes to all the anti-Communist meetings. So this very nice mom, when she found out that I’m from a Chernobyl family, a refugee, asked: “But, my dear, will you be able to have children?” And we’ve already registered! He pleads with me: *TU leave home. We’ll rent an apartment.” But all I can hear is: “My dear, for some people it’s a sin to give birth.” It’s a sin to love.

Before him I had another boyfriend. He was an artist. We also wanted to get married. Everything was fine until this one thing happened. I came into his studio and heard him yelling into the phone: “You’re lucky! You have no idea how lucky you are!” He’s usually so calm, even phlegmatic, not a single exclamation point in his speech. And then this! So what is it? Turns out his friend lives in a student dormitory, and he looked into the next room, and there’s a girl hanging there. She strung herself up with some panty hose. He takes her down. And my boyfriend was just beside himself, shivering: “You have no idea what he’s seen! What he’s just been through! He carried her in his arms—he touched her face. She had white foam on her lips. Maybe if we hurry we can make it.” He didn’t mention the dead girl, didn’t feel sorry for her for a second. He just wanted to see it and remember it, so he could draw it later on. And I started remembering how he used to ask me what color the fire at the station was, and whether I’d seen cats and dogs that had been shot, were they lying on the street? Were people crying? Did I see how they died? After that ... I couldn't be with him anymore. I couldn't answer him. [
After a pause.]
I don't know if I'd want to meet with you again. I think you look at me the same way he did. Just observing me and remembering. Like there's an experiment going on. I can't rid myself of that feeling. I'll never rid myself of it.

Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before.

Katya P.

___

This is my secret. No one else knows about this. I've only talked about this with one friend.

I’m a cameraman. I went there with everything we’d been taught: at war, you become a real writer. A
Farewell to Arms
was my favorite book. So I got there. People are digging in their gardens, there are tractors and seed drills in the fields. What do I film? Nothing's blowing up.

My first shoot was in an agricultural club. They put a television on the stage and gathered everyone together. They listened to Gorbachev—everything's fine, everything’s under control. In the village where we were shooting they were doing a “deactivation." They were washing roofs. But how do you wash an old lady’s roof if it leaks? As for the soil, you had to cut off the entire fertile layer of it. After that there's yellow sand. One old lady was following orders and throwing the earth out, but then scraping the manure off to use later. It's too bad I didn't shoot that.

Everywhere you went, people would say, “Ah, movie people. Hold on, we’ll find you some heroes.” And they'd produce an old man and his grandson who spent two days chasing cows off from right near Chernobyl. After the shoot the livestock specialist calls me over to a giant pit, where they’re burying the cows with a bulldozer. But it didn't even occur to me to shoot that. I turned my back on the pit and shot the scene in the great tradition of our patriotic documentaries: the bulldozer drivers are reading
Pravda,
the headline in huge block letters: “The nation will not abandon those in trouble!” I even got lucky: A stork landed in a field across from me one day. A symbol! No matter what catastrophes befall us, we will triumph! Life goes on!

The country roads. Dust. I already knew this wasn't just dust, but radioactive dust. I hid the camera so as to protect the optical machinery. It was a very dry May. I don’t know how much we swallowed. A week in, my lymph nodes swelled up. But we were conserving film like it was ammunition, because the First Secretary of the Central Committee of Belarus, Slyunkov, was supposed to come. No one would tell us where exactly he'd be arriving, but we figured it out. One day I'm driving down the road, the dust is so thick it's like driving through a wall, and then the next day they’re paving that very road, and really paving it, with two or three layers. So: that’s where they’re waiting for the big bosses. Later on I filmed them, walking very nice and straight on that fresh asphalt. Not a centimeter off course. I had that on film, too, but I didn't put it in the script.

No one could understand anything, that was the scariest thing. The dosimetrists gave one set of figures, the newspapers gave another. So gradually I begin to understand something myself: I have a little kid at home, and my dear wife . . . what kind of idiot am I to be here? Maybe they’ll give me a medal. But my wife will leave me. The only salvation was in humor. There were all sorts of jokes. In one village the only people left were a bum and four women. “So, how’s your husband?" they'd say to each other. “Oh, that scoundrel runs over to the other village, too." If you tried to be serious about it all the time—Chernobyl— they're paving the road for Slyunkov, the stream is still running by the field, just running, and meanwhile this
thing
has happened. I’ve felt something like this when someone close to me died. The sun is out, and the birds are flying, and the swallows, it starts raining—but he’s dead. Do you understand? I want to explain this whole other dimension in a few words, explain how it was for me then.