Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (18 page)

*

The soldiers would enter a village and evacuate the people. The village streets filled up with military hardware: APCs, large trucks with green canvas tarps, even tanks. People left their homes in the presence of soldiers, which is an oppressive situation, especially for those who'd been through the war. At first they blamed the Russians—it's their fault, it was their station. Then: “The Communists are to blame."

It was constantly being compared to the war. But this was bigger. War you can understand. But this? People fell silent.

*

It was as if I'd never gone anywhere. I walk through my memories each day. Along the same streets, past the same houses. It was such a quiet town.

It was a Sunday, I was lying out, getting a tan. My mother came running: “My child, Chernobyl blew up, people are hiding in their homes, and you're lying here in the sun!" I laughed: it's forty kilometers from Chernobyl to Narovlya.

That evening a Zhiguli stops in from of our house and my friend and her husband come in. She's wearing a bathrobe and he's in an athletic suit and some old slippers. They went through the forest, along some tiny village roads, from Pripyat. The roads were being patrolled by police, military block-posts, they weren’t letting anyone out. The first thing she yelled was: “We need to find milk and vodka! Hurry!" She was yelling and yelling. “We just bought new furniture, a new refrigerator. I sewed myself a fur. I left everything, I wrapped it in cellophane. We didn't sleep all night. What's going to happen? What's going to happen?" Her husband tried to calm her down. We sat in from of the television for days, waiting for Gorbachev to speak. The authorities didn't say anything. Only after the big holiday did Gorbachev come on and say: Don't worry, comrades, the situation is under control. It’s nothing bad. People are still there, living, working.

*

They herded all the livestock from the evacuated villages into designated points in our regional center. These cows, calves, pigs, they were going crazy, they would run around the streets—whoever wanted to catch them could catch them. The cars with the canned meat went from the meat combine to the station at Kalinovich, and from there to Moscow. Moscow wouldn't accept the cargo. So these train cars, which were by now graveyards, came back to us. Whole echelons of them, and we buried them here. The smell of rotten meat followed me around at night. “Can it be that this is what an atomic war smells like?” The war I remembered smelled of smoke.

At first, they bused the children out at night. They were trying to hide the catastrophe. But people found out anyway. They'd bring milk cans out to our buses, they baked pies. It was just like during the war. There's nothing else to compare it to.

There was a meeting at the regional executive's office. It felt like a military situation. Everyone was waiting for the head of the civil defense to speak, because no one remembered anything about radiation aside from some passages from their tenth-grade physics textbook. He goes out on stage and begins to tell us what's written in the books about nuclear warfare: that once a soldier has taken 50 roentgen, he must leave the field; how to build a shelter; how to put on a gas mask; facts about the radius of the explosion.

We went into the contaminated zone on a helicopter. We were all properly equipped—no undergarments, a raincoat out of cheap cotton, like a cook's, covered with a protective material, then mittens, and a gauze surgical mask. We have all sorts of instruments hanging off us. We come out of the sky near a village and we see that there are boys playing in the sand, like nothing’s happened. One has a rock in his mouth, another a tree branch. They're not wearing pants, they're naked. But we have orders, not to stir up the population.

And now I live with this.

*

They suddenly started having these segments on television, like: an old lady milks her cow, pours the milk into a can, the reporter comes over with a military dosimeter, measures it. And the commentator says, See, everything’s fine, and the reactor is just ten kilometers away. They show the Pripyat River, there are people swimming in it, tanning themselves. In the distance you see the reactor and plumes of smoke above it. The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products.

This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

*

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: “You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn’t believe anyone.

The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. “She should at least have fingers," I thought. “She’s a girl."

No one could understand what had happened. I called military headquarters—all medical personnel have military obligations— and volunteered to help. I can't remember his name, but he was a major, and he told me, “We need young people." I tried to convince him: “Young doctors aren’t ready, first of all, and second of all, they will be in greater danger because young people are more susceptible to radiation." His answer: “We have our orders, we’re to take young people."

Patients’ wounds began to heal more slowly. I remember that first radioactive rain—“black rain," people called it later. First off, you’re just not ready for it, and second, we're the best, most extraordinary, most powerful country on Earth. My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I’d once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka.

People from the Party would come to the villages and the factories to speak with the populace, but not one of them could say what deactivation was, how to protect children, what the coefficient was for the leakage of radionuclides into the food supply. They didn't know anything about alpha- or beta- or gamma-rays, about radiobiology, ionizing radiation, not to mention about isotopes. For them, these were things from another world. They gave talks about the heroism of the Soviet people, told stories about military bravery, about the machinations of Western spy agencies. When I even mentioned this briefly in a Party meeting, when I doubted this, I was told that they’d kick me out of the Party.

*

I’m afraid of staying on this land. They gave me a dosimeter, but what am I supposed to do with it? I do my laundry, it’s nice and white, but the dosimeter goes off. I make some food, bake a pie—it goes off. I make the bed—it goes off. What do I need it for? I feed my kids and cry. “Why are you crying, Mom?"

I have two boys. They don’t go to nursery school or kindergarten—they’re always in the hospital. The older one—he’s neither a boy nor a girl. He’s bald. I take him to the doctors, and also to the healers. He’s the littlest one in his grade. He can’t run, he can’t play, if someone hits him by accident and he starts bleeding, he might die. He has a blood disease, I can’t even pronounce the word for it. I’m lying with him in the hospital and thinking, “He’s going to die." I understood later on that you can’t think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: “Your cheeks are red. You’re getting better."

“Mom, take me out of the hospital. I’m going to die here. Everyone here dies."

Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There’s a line for the bathroom—everyone like me is in that line.

*

On May 1, on the day of memory, they let us into the cemetery. They let us go to the graves, but the police forbid us from going to our houses and our gardens. From the cemetery at least we looked at our homes from afar. We blessed them from where we were.

*

Let me tell you about the sort of people who live here. I'll give you one example. In the “dirty” areas, during the first few years, they were filling the stores with Chinese beef, and buckwheat, and everything, and people said, “Oh, it’s good here. You won't get us to leave here now.” The land became contaminated unevenly— one collective farm might have “clean” fields next to “dirty” ones. People who work on the “dirty” fields get paid more, and everyone’s raring to work there. And they refuse to work the “clean” fields.

Not long ago my brother visited me from the Far East. “You’re all like black boxes here,” he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we’re living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we’re just recording information!

*

I'm a pediatrician. It's different for children. For example, they don’t think that cancer means death—that connection hasn’t been made for them. And they know everything about themselves: their diagnosis, the medicines they’re taking, the names of the procedures. They know more than their mothers. When they die, they have these surprised looks on their faces. They lie there with these surprised faces.

*

The doctors warned me that my husband would die. He has leukemia—cancer of the blood. He got sick after he came back from the Chernobyl Zone, two months after. He was sent there from the factory. He came home one morning after the night shift:

‘‘I'm leaving tomorrow."

“What are you going to do there?”

“Work on the collective farm."

They raked the straw in the fifteen-kilometer zone, collected the beets, dug up the potatoes.

He came back. We went to visit his parents. He was spackling a wall with his father when he fell down. We called an ambulance, took him to the hospital—he'd received a fatal dose.

He returned with one thought in his mind: ‘‘I'm dying." He became quiet. I tried to convince him it wasn’t true. I begged him. He wouldn't believe me. Then I gave him a daughter, so he'd believe me. I'd wake up in the morning, look at him: How am I going to make it by myself? You shouldn’t think a lot about death. I chased the thoughts away. If I'd known he'd get sick I’d have closed all the doors, I'd have stood in the doorway. I'd have locked the doors with all the locks we had.

*

We've been going from hospital to hospital with my son for two years now. I don't want to hear anything, read anything about Chernobyl. I've seen it all.

The little girls in the hospitals play with their dolls. They close their eyes and the dolls die.

“Why do the dolls die?"

“Because they’re our children, and our children won't live. They’ll be born and then die."

My Artyom is seven, but he looks five. He’ll close his eyes, and I think he’s gone to sleep. I’ll start crying, since he can’t see me. But then he says, “Mom, am I dying already?"

He’ll go to sleep, and he’s almost not breathing. I’ll get on my knees before him, before his bed, “Artyom, open your eyes. Say something." And I’ll think to myself, “You’re still warm."

He opens his eyes, then goes back to sleep again, so quietly, as if he’s dying.

“Artyom, open your eyes."

I won’t let him die.

Not long ago we celebrated the New Year. We had everything, and it was all homemade: smoked goods, lard, meat, pickles. The only thing from the store was the bread. Even the vodka was ours. Of course “ours" meant that it was from Chernobyl. With cesium, and a strontium aftertaste. But where else are we going to get anything? The village stores are empty, and if something appears in them, we can’t buy it on our salaries and our pensions.

Some guests came over, our neighbors, very nice people, young; one is a teacher, the other is a mechanic on the collective farm who was there with his wife. We drank, had some food. And then we started singing. Spontaneously we sang all the old songs—the revolutionary songs, the war songs. “The morning sun colors the ancient Kremlin with its gentle light." And it was a nice evening. It was like before.

I wrote about it to my son. He’s a student, he lives in the capital. He writes me back: “Mom, I pictured the scene to myself. It’s crazy. That Chernobyl land, our house. The New Year's tree is sparkling. And the people at the table are singing revolutionary songs and military songs. As if they hadn’t gone through the Gulag, and through Chernobyl." I became frightened—not for myself, but for my son. He has nowhere to come back to.