Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (14 page)

I started filming the apple trees in bloom. The bumblebees are buzzing, everything is bridal white. Again, people are working, the gardens are in bloom. I’m holding the camera in my hands, but I don't understand it. This isn't right! The exposure is normal, the picture is pretty, but something’s not right. And then it hits me: I don't smell anything. The garden is blooming, but there's no smell! I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can't smell, and I figured this had happened to me, too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don't smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn't smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake. That I was on a film set. And that I couldn’t understand it. I’d never even read about anything like it.

When I was a kid, the neighbor woman, she'd been a partisan during the war, she told me a story about how their unit was surrounded but they escaped. She had her little baby with her, he was one month old, they were moving along a swamp, and there were Germans everywhere. The baby was crying. He might have given them away, they would have been discovered, the entire unit. And she suffocated him. She talked about this distantly, as if it hadn’t been her, and the child wasn’t hers. I can’t remember now why she told me this. What I remember very clearly is my horror. What had she done? How could she? I thought the whole unit was getting out from the encirclement for that little baby, to save him. Whereas here, in order to save the life of strong healthy men, they choked this child. Then what's the point of life? I didn’t want to live after that. I was a boy but I felt uncomfortable looking at this woman after I’d found this out about her.

And how did she see me?
[Silent for a while]
Here’s. why I don’t want to remember those days I spent in the Zone. I invent various explanations, but I don’t want to open that door. I wanted to understand there what about me was real and what about me was unreal.

One night in my hotel, I wake up to this monotonous sound out my window, and strange blue lights. I pull open the curtains: dozens of trucks with red crosses and sirens are moving down the street in complete silence. I experienced something like shock. I remembered snippets from a film from my childhood. Growing up after the war we loved the war films, and I remembered the feeling, where if everyone’s left town, and you’re the only good one left, what do you do? What’s the right thing? Do you pretend you're dead? Or what?

In Khoyniki, there was a “plaque of achievement" in the center of town. The best people in the region had their names on it. But the real hero was the alcoholic cab driver who went into the radioactive zone to pick up the kids from kindergarten, not any of the people on the plaque. Everyone became what he really was. And that's another thing: the evacuation. They moved the children out first, loaded them onto these big buses. And suddenly I catch myself filming everything just the way I saw it filmed in the war movies. And then I notice that the people are behaving the same way. They're all carrying themselves just like in that scene from everyone's favorite movie, The
Cranes Are Flying
—a lone tear, short words of farewell. It turned out we were all looking for a form of behavior that was familiar to us. We wanted to live up to the moment, and this is what we remembered. The girl is waving to her mom in a way that says, “Everything's fine, I'm brave. We'll win!”

I thought that I'd get back to Minsk and they'd be evacuating there, too. How will I say goodbye to my wife and son? And I imagined myself making that same gesture: we'll win! We're warriors. As far back as I can remember, my father wore military clothing, though he wasn't in the military. Thinking about money was bourgeois, thinking about your own life was unpatriotic. The normal state of life was hunger. They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we'd never become real people.

That's how we're made. If we just work each day and eat well—that would be strange and intolerable!

We lived in the dormitory of some technical institute with the liquidators. They were young guys. They gave us a suitcase of vodka. It helps get rid of the radiation. Suddenly one day we learn that there's a crew of nurses in the dormitory. All girls. “Ah, now we'll have some fun,” the guys say. Two of them go over and come back with eyes like this popping out of their heads. These girls are walking along the hallways. Under their pajamas they have pants and long johns with strings, they drag on the floor behind them, they’re just loose, no one cares. Everything’s old, used, nothing fits. It hangs on them like on hangers. Some of them are in slippers, some are in old boots that are falling apart. And on top of all this they’re wearing these half-rubber outfits that have been treated by chemicals somehow, and some of them don’t take these off even at night. It’s a horrible sight. And they’re not nurses, either, they just pulled them out of the institute, from the military studies department. They were told it was for the weekend, but when we got there they’d already been in the Zone a month. They told us that they’d been taken to the reactor and had looked at burns, but they were the only ones who talked to us about burns. I can still picture them, going through the dormitory like sleepwalkers.

In the papers they wrote that luckily the wind was blowing in the other direction, not toward the city, not toward Kiev. All right. But it was blowing toward Belarus, toward me and my Yurik. We were walking through the forest that day, picking at some cabbage. God, how could no one warn me? We came back from the forest to Minsk. I’m riding to work on the bus, and I overhear snatches of conversation: they were filming in Chernobyl, and one cameraman died right there. He burned up. I’m wondering who it was and whether I know him. Then I hear: a young guy, two kids. They say his name: Vitya Gurevich. We do have a cameraman by that name, a real young guy. But two kids? Why didn’t he tell us? We get closer to the studio, and someone corrects the information: it’s not Gurevich, it’s Gurin, Sergei. God, but that’s me! It’s funny now, but I walked to the studio worrying that I was going to open the door and see a memorial to me with my photo on it. And then this absurd thought: “Where would they get my photograph? In the human resources department?

Where did that rumor come from? I think from the incongruity of the scale of the event with the number of victims. For example, the Battle of Kursk—thousands dead, that was something you could understand. But here, in the first few days it was something like seven firemen. Later, a few more. But after that, the definitions were too abstract for us to understand: “in several generations, forever, nothing. So there were rumors: three-headed birds, chickens pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs. Well, and so on. Then they needed someone else to go to the Zone. One cameraman brings in a certificate saying he has an ulcer, another is on vacation. They call me in. “You have to go again.” “But I just got back.” “That's the thing, you were already there, so it doesn't matter to you. Besides, you already have kids. Whereas the other guys are still young.” Ah, Christ, maybe I want to have five or six kids! But they start to pressure me, you know, soon we reevaluate the salaries, you’ll have this under your belt, you'll get a raise. It’s a sad and funny story. I've already pretty much put it away in a corner of my mind.

One time I filmed people who’d been in concentration camps. They try to avoid meeting one another. I understand that. There’s something unnatural about getting together and remembering the war. People who've been through that kind of humiliation together, or who've seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don't really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren't heroes.

We're all—peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. I have these images in my mind, these pictures. The chairman of the collective farm wants two cars so that he can transport his family with all its clothes and furniture, and so the Party organization wants a car, too, it demands fairness. Meanwhile, I’ve seen that for several days they don't have enough vehicles to transport kids to nursery school. And here two cars aren’t enough to pack up all their things, including the three-liter cans of jam and pickled vegetables. I saw how they packed them up the next day. I didn't shoot that, either.
[Laughs suddenly
.] We bought some salami, some canned food, in the store, but we were afraid to eat it. We drove it around with us, though, because we didn’t want to throw it out.
[Serious now.]
The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That’s what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.

I feel bad that I wasn't able to get our filming group any benefits afterward. One of our guys needed an apartment, so I went to the union committee. “Help us out, we were in the Zone for six months. We should receive some benefits." “All right," they said, “bring us your certificates. You need certificates, with seals." But we'd gone to the regional committee in the Zone and there was just one lady there, Nastya, going around with a mop. Everyone had run off. There was a director here, he had a whole stack of certificates: where he was, what he'd filmed. A hero!

I have this big, long film in my memory, the one I didn't make. It's got many episodes.
[Silent.]
We’re all peddlers of the apocalypse.

One time we went with the soldiers into a hut, and there was an old lady living there.

“All right, grandma, let's go.”

“Sure, boys."

“Then get your things together, grandma."

We wait outside, smoking. And then this old lady comes out: she's carrying an icon, a cat, and a little bundle in a knot. That's all she's bringing.

“Grandma, you can’t bring the cat. It’s not allowed. His fur is radioactive."

“No, boys, I won't go without the cat. How can I leave him? I won't leave him by himself. He’s my family."

Well, with that old lady, and with that apple tree that had no smell, that's when I started. Now I only film animals. I once showed my Chernobyl films to children, and people were mad at me: why'd you do it? They don't need to see that. And so the children live in this fear, amid all this talk, their blood is changing, their immune systems are disrupted. I was hoping five or ten people would come; we filled the whole theater. They asked all sorts of questions, but one really cut into my memory. This boy, stammering and blushing, you could tell he was one of the quiet ones, asked: “Why couldn't anyone help the animals?" This was already a person from the future. I couldn't answer that question. Our art is all about the sufferings and loves of people, but not of everything living. Only humans. We don't descend to their level: animals, plants, that other world. And with Chernobyl man just waved his hand at everything.

I searched, I asked around, I was told that in the first months after the accident, someone came up with a project for evacuating the animals along with the people. But how? How do you resettle them? Okay, maybe you could move the ones that were above the earth, but what about the ones who were
in
the earth—the bugs and worms? And the ones in the sky? How

do you evacuate a pigeon or a sparrow? What do- you do with them? We don't have any way of giving them the necessary information. It’s also a philosophical dilemma. A perestroika of our feelings is happening here.

I want to make a film called “Hostages," about animals. A strange thing happened to me. I became closer to animals. And trees, and birds. They’re closer to me than they were, the distance between us has narrowed. I go to the Zone now, all these years, I see a wild boar jumping out of an abandoned human house, and then an elk. That’s what I shoot. I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. “What are you shooting?" people say to me. “Look around you. There’s a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn’t he who condescended to them?

Sergei Gurin, cameraman

___

Stop, good people! We have to live here! You talk and leave, but we have to live here!

Here, I have the medical cards right in front of me. Every day I have them. I take them into my hands—every day!

Anya Budai—born 1985—380 becquerels.

Vitya Grinkevich—born 1986—785 bees.

Nastya Shablovskaya—born 1986—570 bees.

Alyosha Plenin—born 1985—570 bees.

Andrei Kotchenko—born 1987—450 bees.

They say this is impossible? And how can they live with this in their thyroids? But has anyone ever run this sort of experiment before? I read and I see, every day. Can you help? No! Then why did you come here? To ask questions? To touch us? I refuse to trade on their tragedy. To philosophize. Leave us alone, please. We need to live here.

Arkady Bogdankevich, rural medical attendant

___

Speakers: Nina Konstantinovna and Nikolai Zharkov, both teachers. He teaches labor studies, she teaches literature.

She:

I hear about death so often that I don’t even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they’re worried about what’ II happen after the nuclear war. They don’t like the classics anymore, I read them Pushkin from memory and all I see are cold, distant stares. There's a different world around them now. They read fantasy books, this is fun for them, people leaving the earth, possessing cosmic time, different worlds. They can't be afraid of death in the way that adults are afraid of death, but death interests them as something fantastical.