Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (15 page)

I wonder about this—when death's around it forces you to think. I teach Russian literature to kids who are not like the kids I taught ten years ago. They are constantly seeing someone or something get buried, get placed underground. Houses and trees, everything gets buried. If they stand in line for fifteen, twenty minutes, some of them start fainting, their noses bleed. You can't surprise them with anything and you can't make them happy. They're always tired and sleepy. Their faces are pale and gray. They don't play and they don’t fool around. If they fight or accidentally break a window, the teachers are pleased. We don’t yell at them, because they're not like kids. And they're growing so slowly. You ask them to repeat something during a lesson, and the child can’t, it gets to the point where you simply ask him to repeat a sentence, and he can't. You want to ask him, “Where are you? Where?"

I think about it a lot. It's like I’m painting with water on a wall, no one knows what I’m painting, no one can guess, no one has any idea. Our life revolves around Chernobyl. Where were you when it happened, how far from the reactor did you live? What did you see? Who died? Who left? Where did they go? I remember in the first months the night life started buzzing again—“you only live once," “if we're going to die, let's do it to music." The soldiers came and the officers came. But now Chernobyl is with us every day. A young pregnant woman died suddenly, without any diagnosis, the pathologist didn't give a diagnosis. A little girl hanged herself, she was in fifth grade. Just ... for no reason. A little girl. There’s one diagnosis for everything—Chernobyl. No matter what happens, everyone says: Chernobyl. People get mad at us: “You’re sick because you're afraid. You're sick from fear. Radiophobia." But then why do little kids get sick and die? They don't know fear, they don't understand it yet.

I remember those days. My throat burned, there was a heaviness in my whole body. “You're hypochondriacs,” the doctor told me. “Everyone's that way now because of Chernobyl." “What hypochondria? Everything hurts, I feel weak." My husband and I were too shy to admit it to one another, but our legs were beginning to go numb. Everyone complained, our friends, everyone, that you'd be walking down the street and you’d just want to lie down right there. Students would lie down on their desks and lose consciousness in the middle of class. And everyone became unhappy, gloomy, not a single kind face all day, no one smiling, nothing. From eight in the morning to nine at night the kids had to stay in the school building, they were strictly forbidden to go outside and run around.

They were given clothes: the girls got skins and blouses, the boys got suits. But then they went home in these clothes, and what happened after that we had no idea. According to the instructions, mothers were supposed to launder the clothes every day, so the kids could come to school in clean things. But first of all, they were only given one outfit, one skin and one blouse, and second of all, mothers were already loaded down with housework—chickens, cows, pigs, and finally they don't understand why they should launder the things every day. Din for them is ink, or earth, or oil stains, not isotopes with short half-lives. When I tried to explain any of this to the parents, I don't think they understood it any better than if I'd been a shaman from an African tribe. “And what is this radiation? You can’t hear it and you can’t see it . . . Okay, I'll tell you about radiation: I don't have enough money paycheck to paycheck. The last three days we live on milk and potatoes. Okay?” And the mother says forget it. Because you’re not supposed to drink milk. And you're not supposed to eat potatoes. The government brought some Chinese stir-fry and buckwheat into the stores, but where are these people supposed to get the money for it? We get some compensation for living here—death compensation—but it's nothing, enough for two cans of food. The laundry instructions are for a certain kind of person, for a certain kind of domestic situation. But we don't have that situation! We don't have that kind of person! And then, it’s not that easy to explain the difference between bees and roentgen.

From my point of view—I think of it as fatalism, as a slight fatalism. For example, you weren't allowed to use anything from your garden in the first year, but people ate it anyway, cooked it and everything. They'd planted everything so well! Try telling people that they can’t eat cucumbers and tomatoes. What do you mean, “can’t”? They taste fine. You eat them, and your stomach doesn't hurt. And nothing “shines” in the dark. Our neighbors put down a new floor that year from the local forest, and then they measured it, its background radiation was a hundred times over the limit. No one took that floor apart, they just kept living there, figuring everything would turn out fine, somehow, without their help, without their participation. In the beginning people would bring some products over to the dosimetrist, to check them—they were way over the threshold, and eventually people stopped checking. “See no evil, hear no evil. Who knows what those scientists will think up!” Everything went on its way: they turned over the soil, planted, harvested. The unthinkable happened, but people lived as they'd lived. And cucumbers from their own garden were more important than Chernobyl. The kids were kept in school all summer, the soldiers washed it with a special powder, they took off a layer of soil around the school. And in the fall? In the fall they sent the students to gather the beet-roots. Students were brought in, tech-voc types, to work the fields. Everyone was chased off. Chernobyl isn’t as bad as leaving potatoes in the field.

Who's to blame? Well, who but us?

Before, we didn’t notice this world around us. It was there, like the sky, like the air, as if someone had given it to us forever, and it didn't depend on us. It'll always be there. I used to lie in the forest and stare up at the sky, I'd feel so good I’d forget my own name. And now? The forest is still pretty, there’re plenty of blueberries, but no one picks them anymore. In autumn, it's very seldom you hear a human voice in the forest. The fear is in our feelings, on a subconscious level. We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, whose appeal I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . .

He:

You know, we all had a military upbringing. We were trained to block and liquidate a nuclear attack. We needed to be ready for chemical, biological, and atomic warfare. But not to draw radionuclides out of our organisms.

You can't compare it to a war, not exactly, but everyone compares it anyway. I lived through the Leningrad Blockade as a kid, and you can't compare them. We lived there like it was the from, we were constantly being shot at. And there was hunger, several years of hunger, when people were reduced to their animal instincts. Whereas here, why, please, go outside to your garden and everything's blooming! These are incomparable things. But I wanted to say something else—I lost track—it slipped away. A-ah. When the shooting starts, God help everyone! You might die this very second, not some day in the future, but right now. In the winter there is hunger. In Leningrad people burned furniture, everything wooden in our apartment we burned, all the books, I think, we even used some old rags for the stove. A person is walking down the street, he sits down, and the next day you walk by and he's still sitting there, that is to say he froze, and he might sit there like that another week, or he might sit until the spring. Until it warms up. No one has the strength to break him out of the ice. Sometimes if someone fell on the ice someone would come up and help him. But usually they'd walk past. Or crawl past. I remember people didn't walk, they crawled, that's how slowly they were going. You can't compare that with anything!

My mother still lived with us when the reactor blew up, and she kept saying: “We’ve already lived through the worst thing, son. We lived through the Blockade. There can't be anything worse than that."

We were preparing for war, for nuclear war, we built nuclear shelters. We wanted to hide from the atom as if we were hiding from shrapnel. But the atom is everywhere. In the bread, in the salt. We breathe radiation, we eat it. That you might not have bread or salt, and that you might get to the point where you'll eat anything, you'll boil a leather belt so that you can feed on the smell—that I could understand. But this I can’t. Everything's poisoned? Then how can we live? In the first few months there was fear. The doctors, teachers, in short, the intelligentsia, they all dropped everything and left. They just hightailed it out of here. But military discipline—give up your Party card—they weren't letting anyone out. Who's to blame? In order to answer the question of how to live, we need to know who’s to blame. Well, who? The scientists or the personnel at the station? The director? The operators on duty? Tell me, why do we not do battle with automobiles as the workings of the mind of man, but instead do battle with the reactor? We demand that all atomic stations be closed, and the nuclear scientists be put in jail? We curse them! But knowledge, knowledge by itself, can't be criminal. Scientists today are also victims of Chernobyl. I want to live after Chernobyl, not die after Chernobyl. I want to understand.

People have a different reaction now. Ten years have gone by, and people measure things in terms of the war. The war lasted four years. So it's like we've gone through two wars. I'll tell you what kind of reactions people have: “Everything's passed.” “Everything will turn out all right.” “Ten years have gone by. We're not scared anymore.” “We’re all going to die! We're all going to die soon!” “I want to leave the country.” “They need to help us.” “Aw, to hell with it. We need to live.” I think I’ve covered all of them. That's what we hear every day. In my opinion—we're the raw materials for a scientific experiment, for an international laboratory. There are ten million Belarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It's a huge devil's laboratory. Write down the data, experiment all you want. People come to us from everywhere, they write dissertations, from Moscow and Petersburg, from Japan and Germany and Austria. They’re preparing for the future. [
There's a long pause in the conversation
.]

What was I thinking about just now? I was drawing out the comparison again. I was thinking that I can talk about Chernobyl, and I can't talk about the Blockade. They sent an invitation for a meeting of “The Children of Blockaded Leningrad,” and I went, but I couldn't squeeze a single word out of myself while I was there. Just tell about the fear? That's not enough. Just about the fear—at home we never talked about the Blockade, my mother didn't want us to remember it. But we talk about Chernobyl. No.
[Stops.]
We don't talk about it with each other, it's a conversation we have when someone comes here: foreigners, journalists, relatives who don't live here. Why don't we talk about Chernobyl? In school, for example? With our students? They talk about it with them in Austria, France, Germany, when they go there for medical care. I ask the kids, what did people talk about with you, what interested them? They often don't remember the cities or villages, or the last names of the people they stayed with, but they remember the presents they got and the delicious foods. Someone got a cassette player, someone else didn't. They come back in clothes that they didn't earn and their parents didn't earn, either. It's like they've been exhibited. They keep waiting for someone to take them there again. They'll show them off again, then give them presents. They get used to it. It's already a way of living, a way of seeing the world. After that big experience “abroad," after this expensive exhibit they have to go to school. Sit in class. I can already see that these are observers. I bring them to my studio, my wooden sculptures are there. The kids like them. I say: “You can make something like this out of a simple piece of tree. Try it yourself." Wake up! It helped me get out of the Blockade, it took me years to get out.

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We’re patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don’t know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there’s you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they’re Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. “We're from Chernobyl." ‘‘I’m a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

___

The ants are crawling along the tree branch. There’s military equipment everywhere. Soldiers, cries, curses, swearing, helicopters rattling. But they're crawling.

I was coming back from the Zone and, of all the things I saw that day, the only one that remained clear in my memory was the image of those ants. We'd stopped in the forest and I stood smoking next to a birch. I stood very close, leaning on it. Right in front of my face the ants were crawling on the branch, not paying us any mind. We’ll be gone, and they won't notice. And me? I'd never looked at them so closely before.

At first everyone said, “It's a catastrophe," and then everyone said, “It's nuclear war." I'd read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I'd seen documentary footage. It's frightening, but understandable: atomic warfare, the explosion’s radius. I could even imagine it. But what happened to us didn’t fit into my consciousness.

You feel how some completely unseen thing can enter and then destroy the whole world, can crawl into you. I remember a conversation with this scientist: “This is for thousands of years," he explained. “The decomposition of uranium: that's 238 half-lives. Translated into time: that’s a billion years. And for thorium: it's fourteen billion years." Fifty, one hundred, two hundred. But beyond that? Beyond that my consciousness couldn’t go. I couldn't even understand anymore: what is time? Where am I?