Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (16 page)

To write about that now, when only ten years have gone by. Write about it? I think it's senseless. You can't explain it, you can't understand it. We’ll still try to imagine something that looks like our own lives now. I've tried it and it doesn’t work. The Chernobyl explosion gave us the mythology of Chernobyl. The papers and magazines compete to see who can write the most frightening article. People who weren't there love to be frightened. Everyone read about mushrooms the size of human heads, but no one actually found them. So instead of writing, you should record. Document. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl—there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

I keep a separate notebook. I write down conversations, rumors, anecdotes. It’s the most interesting thing, and it's outside of time. What remains of ancient Greece? The myths of ancient Greece.

Here's my notebook.

“For three months now the radio has been saying: the situation is stabilizing, the situation is stabilizing, the situation is stab . . .”

“Stalin's old vocabulary has sprung up again: ‘agents of the Western secret services,' ‘the cursed enemies of socialism,' ‘an undermining of the indestructible union of the Soviet peoples.' Everyone talks about the spies and provocateurs sent here, and no one talks about iodine protection. Any unofficial information is considered foreign ideology.''

“Yesterday my editor cut the story about the mother of one of the firemen who went to the station the night of the nuclear fire. He died of acute radiation poisoning. After burying their son in Moscow, the parents returned to their village, which was soon evacuated. In the fall they secretly made their way through the forest back to their garden and collected a bag of tomatoes and cucumbers. The mother is satisfied: ‘we filled twenty cans.' Faith in the land, in their ancient peasant experience—even the death of their son can't overturn the order of things."

“‘You listen to Radio Free Europe?' my editor asks me. I don't say anything. ‘I don’t need alarmists on this paper. Write me up something about heroes.' ”

“But hasn't the old notion of the enemy been destroyed? The enemy is invisible, and he’s everywhere. This is evil in a new guise."

“Some instructors came from the Central Committee. Their route: hotel to regional Party headquarters in a car, and back, also in a car. They study the situation by reading the headlines of the local papers. They bring whole cases of sandwiches from Minsk. They boil their tea from mineral water. They brought that, too. The woman on duty at the hotel told me. People don't believe the papers, television, or radio—they look for information in the behavior of the bosses, that's more reliable.”

“The most popular fable in the Zone is that Stolichnaya Vodka is the best protection against strontium and cesium.’'

“What should I do with my kid? I want to put him under my arm and get the hell out. But I have a Party card in my pocket. I can't do it."

“The village stores have suddenly filled up with deficit items. I heard the secretary of the regional Party give his speech: ‘We'll create paradise for you on earth. Just stay and keep working. You’ll be up to your neck in salami and buckwheat. You'll have everything they have in the top specialty stores.' That is, in the regional Party's buffet. Their attitude toward the people is: vodka and salami is enough for them. But, I'll be damned, I've never seen so many kinds of salami in a village store! I bought some imported panty hose for my wife."

“There was a month when you could buy dosimeters, and then they disappeared. You can't write about it. You also can't write about how much radioactive fallout there is. Nor can you write about the fact that only men are left in the villages, the women and children have been evacuated. All summer the men did the laundry, milked the cows, worked on the plots. And drank, of course. And fought. A world without women . . . They crossed that out. ‘Don't forget, we have enemies. We have many enemies across the ocean,' my editor told me again, threateningly. And that's why we only have good things, nothing bad. But somewhere special food is prepared, and someone saw the bosses with their suitcases . . .”

“An old lady stopped me near a police block-post: ‘Will you look in on my hut? It's time to dig up the potatoes, but the soldiers won’t let me through.’ They were transferred. A person in a vacuum, a person with nothing. They sneak into their villages through a military blockade. Through snowy forests, through swamps, at night. They get chased, caught, by helicopters, cars. ‘It’s like when the Germans were here,' the old-timers say.’'

“Saw my first looter. He was a young guy wearing two fur coats. He was proving to a military patrol that this is how he’s curing his radiation sickness. When they broke him down, he finally admitted: ‘The first time, it’s a little scary, but after that you get used to it. Just take a shot of vodka, and off you go.' You can't let self-preservation get in the way of your instinct to take what’s lying there. Under normal circumstances you’d be afraid. But that’s how our kind of person gets impressive things done. Including crimes.''

“I went back to the village after a year. The dogs have gone wild. I found our Rex, called him, he won't come. Did he not recognize me? Or does he not want to? He's angry at us.”

“During the first weeks and months everyone went quiet. There was silence. Prostration. You need to leave, but until the last day, you think, No. Your mind is incapable of understanding what's happening. I don't remember any serious conversations, but I do remember jokes. ‘Now all the stores have radio-products.' ‘Impotents are divided into the radioactive and the radiopassive.' And then suddenly the jokes disappeared.”

Overheard in the hospital:

“This boy died. Yesterday he gave me some candy.''

In line at the market:

“Oh, good people, there are so many mushrooms this year.”

“They're poisoned.”

“Oh, strange person. No one's forcing you to eat them. Buy them, dry them up, and take them to the market in Minsk. You'll become a millionaire.”

“They picked out spots for the churches literally from heaven. The church fathers had visions. Secret rites were performed before they built the churches. But they built the nuclear power plant like a factory. Like a pigsty. They poured asphalt on for the roof. And it was melting.”

“Did you read this? They caught a soldier who’d gone AWOL right near Chernobyl. He'd dug a hole for himself and lived next to the reactor. He’d eat by going to the abandoned houses— some places he'd find lard, other places some canned pickles. He laid traps for animals. He went AWOL because the older soldiers were beating the younger ones ‘to death.' He saved himself—at Chernobyl."

“Some day they'll find the remains of some very strange burials. Graveyards for animals are called bio-cemeteries by scientists. These are modern-day temples. There lie thousands of dogs, cats, horses, that were shot. And not a single name.

“Yesterday my father turned eighty. The whole family gathered around the table. I looked at him and thought about how much his life had seen: the Gulag, Auschwitz, Chernobyl. One generation saw it all. But he loves to fish. When he was younger, my mother used to get mad, she'd say, ‘He hasn't missed a single skirt in the entire administrative region.’ And now I notice how he lowers his gaze when there’s a young, pretty woman walking toward us.”

Rumors:

There are camps behind Chernobyl where they're going to place those who received heavy doses of radiation. They’ll keep them there a while, observe them, then bury them.

They’re taking the dead out of the nearby villages in buses and straight to the graveyards, burying thousands in mass graves. Like during the Leningrad Blockade.

Several people supposedly saw a strange light in the sky above the station on the night before the explosion. Someone even photographed it. On the film it turned out to be the steam from an extraterrestrial object.

In Minsk they’ve washed the trains and the inventories. They’re going to transfer the whole population to Siberia. They’re already fixing up the old barracks left over from Stalin's camps. They'll start with the women and children. The Ukrainians are already being shipped.

It wasn’t an accident, it was an earthquake. Something happened to the earth’s core. A geological explosion. Geophysical and cosmophysical forces were at work. The military knew about it beforehand, they could have warned people, but it's all very strictly kept secret there.

There are now pike in the lakes and rivers without heads or tails. Just the bodies floating around.

Something similar is going to start happening soon to humans. The Belarussians will turn into humanoids.

The forest animals have radiation sickness. They wander around sadly, they have sad eyes. The hunters are afraid and feel too sorry for them to shoot. And the animals have stopped being afraid of the humans. Foxes and wolves go into the villages and play with the children.

The Chernobylites are giving birth to children who have an unknown yellow fluid instead of blood. There are scientists who insist that monkeys became intelligent because they lived near radiation. Children born in three or four generations will be Einsteins. It's a cosmic experiment being performed on us ...

Anatoly Shimanskiy, journalist

___

They've written dozens of books. Fat volumes, with commentaries. But the event is still beyond any philosophical description. Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of selfunderstanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me. The way they enlighten me about Stalin, Lenin, Bolshevism. Or the way they keep hammering away at their “Market! Market! Free market!" But we—we who were raised in a world without Chernobyl, now live with Chernobyl.

I’m actually a professional rocketeer, I specialize in rocket fuel. I served at Baikonur
[a space launch center].
The programs, Kosmos, Interkosmos, those took up a large part of my life. It was a miraculous time! You give people the sky, the Arctic, the whole thing! You give them space! Every person in the Soviet Union went into space with Yuri Gagarin, they tore away from the earth with him. We all did! I'm still in love with him—he was a wonderful Russian man, with that wonderful smile. Even his death seemed well-rehearsed.

It was a miraculous time! For family reasons I moved to Belarus, finished my career here. When I came, I immersed myself into this Chernobylized space, it was a corrective to my sense of things. It was impossible to imagine anything like it, even though I'd always dealt with the most advanced technologies, with outer space technologies. It's hard even to explain—it doesn’t fit into the imagination—it’s—[He
thinks
.] You know, a second ago I thought I’d caught it, a second ago—it makes you want to philosophize. No matter who you talk to about Chernobyl, they all want to philosophize. But I’d rather tell you about my own work. What don't we do! We’re building a church—a Chernobyl church, in honor of the Icon of the Mother of God, we're dedicating it to “Punishment.” We collect donations, visit the sick and dying. We write chronicles. We’re creating a museum. I used to think that I, with my heart in the condition it's in, wouldn’t be able to work at such a job. My first instructions were: “Here is money, divide it between thirty-five families, that is, between thirty-five widows." All the men had been liquidators. So you need to be fair. But how? One widow has a little girl who’s sick, another widow has two children, and a third is sick herself, and she's renting her apartment, and yet another has four children. At night I'd wake up thinking, “How do I not cheat anyone?” I thought and calculated, calculated and thought. And I couldn’t do it. We ended up just giving out the money equally, according to the list.

But my real child is the museum: the Chernobyl Museum. [He
is silent
.] Sometimes I think that we'll have a funeral parlor here, not a museum. I serve on the funeral committee. This morning I haven't even taken off my coat when a woman comes in, she’s crying, not even crying, screaming: “Take his medals and his certificates! Take all the benefits! Give me my husband!" She yelled a long time. And left his medals, his certificates. Well, they’ll be in the museum, on display. People can look at them. But her screams, no one heard them but me, and when I put these certificates on display that’s what I'll remember.

Colonel Yaroshuk is dying now. He’s a chemist-dosimetrist. He was healthy as a bull, now he's lying paralyzed. His wife turns him over like a pillow. She feeds him from a spoon. He has stones in his kidneys, they need to be shattered, but we don’t have the money to pay for that kind of operation. We're paupers, we survive on what people give us. And the government behaves like a money lender, it's forgotten these people. When he dies, they'll name a street after him, or a school, or a military unit, but that's only after he dies. Colonel Yaroshuk. He walked through the Zone and marked the points of maximum radiation—they exploited him in the fullest sense of the term, like he was a robot. And he understood this, but he went, he walked from the reactor itself and then out through all the sectors around the radius of radioactivity. On foot. With a dosimeter in his hand. He’d feel a “spot” and then walk around its borders, so he could put it on his map accurately.

And what about the soldiers who worked on the roof of the reactor? Two hundred and ten military units were thrown at the liquidation of the fallout of the catastrophe, which equals about 340,000 military personnel. The ones cleaning the roof got it the worst. They had lead vests, but the radiation was coming from below, and they weren't protected there. They were wearing ordinary cheap imitation-leather boots. They spent about a minute and a half, two minutes on the roof each day, and then they were discharged, given a certificate and an award—one hundred rubles. And then they disappeared to the vast peripheries of our motherland. On the roof they gathered fuel and graphite from the reactor, shards of concrete and metal. It took about twenty to thirty seconds to fill a wheelbarrow, and then another thirty seconds to throw the “garbage” off the roof. These special wheelbarrows weighed forty kilos just by themselves. So you can picture it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows, and insane speed.