Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (21 page)

So then I go to the military people. They were young guys, spending six months there. Now they're all very sick. They gave me an armored personnel carrier with a crew—no, wait, it was even better, it was an armored exploratory vehicle with a machine gun mounted on it. It's too bad I didn't get any photos of myself in it, on the armor. So, like I say, it was romantic. The ensign, who commanded the vehicle, was constantly radioing the base: “Eagle! Eagle! We're continuing our work." We're riding along, and these are our forests, our roads, but we’re in an armored vehicle. The women are standing at their fences and crying—they haven’t seen anything like this since the war. They're afraid another war has started.

According to the instructions, the tractors laying down the furrows were supposed to have drivers’ cabins that were hermetically sealed and protected. I saw the tractor, and the cabin was indeed hermetically sealed. But the tractor was sitting there and the driver was lying on the grass, taking a break. “Are you crazy? Haven’t you been warned?" “But I put my sweatshirt over my head," he says. People didn’t understand. They'd been frightened over and over again about a nuclear war, but not about Chernobyl.

It's such beautiful land out there. The old forests are still there, ancient forests. The winding little streams, the color of tea and clear as day. Green grass. People calling to each other through the forest. For them it was so natural, like waking up in the morning and walking out into your garden. And you’re standing there knowing that it’s all been poisoned.

We ran into an old lady.

“Children, tell me, can I drink milk from my cow?"

We look down at the ground, we have our orders—collect data, but don't interact with the locals.

Finally the driver speaks up.

“Grandma, how old are you?"

“Oh, more than eighty. Maybe more than that, my documents got burned during the war."

“Then drink all the milk you want."

I feel worst of all for the people in the villages—they were innocent, like children, and they suffered. Farmers didn't invent Chernobyl, they had their own relations with nature, trusting relations, not predatory ones, just like they had a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago. And they couldn't understand what had happened, they wanted to believe scientists, or any educated person, like they would a priest. But they were told: “Everything's fine. There’s nothing to fear. Just wash your hands before eating." I understood, not right away, but after a few years, that we all took part in that crime, in that conspiracy. [She
is silent
.]

You have no idea how much of what was sent into the Zone as aid came out of it as contraband: coffee, canned beef, ham, oranges. It was taken out in crates, in vans. Because no one had those products anywhere. The local produce salesmen, the inspectors, all the minor and medium bureaucrats lived off this. People turned out to be worse than I thought. And me, too. I’m also worse. Now I know this about myself.
[Stops.]
Of course, I admit this, and for me that's already important. But, again, an example. In one collective farm there are, say, five villages. Three are “clean," two are “dirty." Between them there are maybe two or three kilometers. Two of them get “graveyard” money, the other three don't. Now, the “clean” village is building a livestock complex, and they need to get some clean feed. Where do they get it? The wind blows the dust from one field to the next, it’s all one land. In order to build the complex, though, they need some papers signed, and the commission that signs them, I’m on the commission. Everyone knows we can’t sign those papers. It's a crime. But in the end I found a justification for myself, just like everyone else. I thought: The problem of clean feed is not a problem for an environmental inspector.

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

Zoya Bruk, environmental inspector

___

But haven’t you noticed that we don’t even talk about it among ourselves? In a few decades, in a hundred years, these will be mythic years.

I'm afraid of the rain. That’s what Chernobyl is. I'm afraid of snow, of the forest. This isn’t an abstraction, a mind game, but an actual human feeling. Chernobyl is in my home. It's in the most precious thing: my son, who was born in the spring of 1986. Now he’s sick. Animals, even cockroaches, they know how much and when they should give birth. But people don’t know how to do that, God didn’t give us the power of foresight. A while ago in the papers it said that in Belarus alone, in 1993 there were 200,000 abortions. Because of Chernobyl. We all live with that fear now. Nature has sort of rolled up, waiting.

Zarathustra would have said: “Oh, my sorrow! Where has the time gone?"

I’ve thought about this a lot. I've searched for meaning in it. Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set. Have you considered this? Of course I agree with those who write that it wasn't just the reactor that exploded, but an entire system of values. But this explanation isn't quite enough for me.

I'm a historian. I used to work on linguistics, the philosophy of language. We don't just think in language, but language thinks us. When I was eighteen, or maybe a little earlier, when I began to read samizdat and discovered Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, I suddenly understood that my entire childhood, the childhood of my street, even though I grew up in a family that was part of the intelligentsia (my grandfather was a minister, my father a professor at the university at St. Petersburg), all of it was shot through with the language of the camps. For us as teenagers it was perfectly natural to call our fathers
pakhan,
our mothers
makhan.
“For every uptight asshole there’s a dick with a screwdriver"—I learned that saying when I was nine years old. I didn't know a single civilized word. Even our games, our sayings, our riddles were from the camps. Because the camps weren’t a different world, which existed far away in the jails. It was right here. Akhmatova wrote, “Half the country was put away, half the country sits in jail." I think that this prison consciousness was inevitably going to collide with the larger culture—with civilization, with the particle accelerator.

And of course we were raised with a particular Soviet form of paganism, which said that man was the crown of all creation, that it was his right to do anything he wanted with the world. The Michurin formula: “We can't wait for favors from Mother Nature, we must take them from her ourselves." It was an attempt to teach people the qualities that they didn't naturally possess. We had the psychology of oppressors. Now everyone talks about God. But why didn’t they look for Him in the Gulag, or the jail cells of 1937, or at the Party meetings of 1948 when they started denouncing cosmopolitanism, or under Khrushchev when they were wrecking the old churches? The contemporary subtext of Russian religious belief is sly and false. They’re bombing peaceful homes in Chechnya, they’re destroying a small and proud people. That’s the only way we know how to do it, with the sword—the Kalashnikov instead of the word. And we scrape out the incinerated Russian tank drivers with shovels—what’s left of them. And nearby they’re standing with candles in the church. For Christmas.

What now? We need to find out whether we’re capable of the sort of total reconsideration of our entire history that the Germans and Japanese carried out after the war. Do we have enough intellectual courage? People hardly talk about this. They talk about the market, about vouchers, about checks. Once again, we’re just barely surviving. All our energy is directed toward that. But our souls have been abandoned.

So what is all this for? This book you’re writing? The nights when I don’t sleep? If our life is just a flick of the match? There might be a few answers to this. It’s a primitive sort of fatalism. And there might be great answers to it, too. The Russian always needs to believe in something: in the railroad, in the frog
[as does Bazarov in Turgenevs
Fathers and Sons], in Byzantium, in the atom. And now, in the market.

Bulgakov writes in
A Cabal of Hypocrites:
“I’ve sinned my whole life. I was an actor.” This is a consciousness of the sinfulness of art, of the amoral nature of looking into another person’s life. But maybe, like a small bit of disease, this could serve as inoculation against someone else's mistakes. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind.

Or maybe the moral is simpler than that: You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance? Into this miraculous world . . .

Aleksandr Revalskiy, historian

____

I don’t want to talk about this. I won’t. I know just one thing: that I'll never be happy again.

He came back from there. He was there for a few years, like in a nightmare. “Nina," he said, “it’s good we have two kids. They’ll remain.”

He told me stories. In the middle of a village there’s a red puddle. The geese and ducks walk around it. The soldiers, they’re just boys, are lying on the grass, their shirts off, their shoes off, tanning themselves. “Get up! Get up, you idiots, or you’ll all die!” They say: Ah, don’t worry about it.

Death is already everywhere, but no one takes it seriously.

The evacuation: this old woman is on her knees with an icon in front of her old house. She says, “Boys, boys, I won’t go. I won’t leave this. You can take the little bit of money they gave me. For my house, for my cow, they gave it. But who’ll pay me for my life? My life is a dark night. They killed my two sons during the war, they’re in a little grave here. You call this a war? This is a war? There are white clouds in the sky, the apple trees are blooming. No one attacked us. No one’s shooting. It’s just us here. This is a war?" And no one can answer her: the colonel is standing there, the one who’s running the evacuation, someone from the regional Party committee. The local bosses. No one knows that this is a war, and that it’s called Chernobyl.

I never asked him myself. I understood him with my soul, we felt each other on a much deeper level. Our knowledge and our loneliness. That loneliness . . .

He knew he would die. That he was dying. He gave himself his word that he would live only through kindness and love. I worked two jobs, just one salary and his pension weren't enough. He said, “Let’s sell the car. It’s not new, but we’ll get something from it. You’ll stay home more, I’ll look at you." He’d invite his friends over. His parents came to stay with us for a long time. He understood something. He understood something about life over there that he hadn’t understood before. He found a different language.

“Nina," he’d say, “it’s good that we have our two kids. They’ll remain here."

I’d ask him, “Did you think of us? What did you think of there?"

“I saw a boy—he'd been born two months after the explosion. They named him Anton, but everyone called him Atomchik."

“You thought . . ."

“You felt sorry for everyone there. Even the flies, even the pigeons. Everyone should be able to live. The flies should be able to fly, and the wasps, the cockroaches should be able to crawl. You don’t even want to hurt a cockroach."

“You . . .”

“The kids draw Chernobyl. The trees in the pictures grow upside-down. The water in the rivers is red or yellow. They’ll draw it and then cry."

I want to understand ... what? I don’t know myself.
[Smiles.]
His friend proposed to me. He’d been in love with me long ago, back when we were in school. Then he married my friend, and then they got divorced. He made me an offer, “You’ll live like a queen.” He owns a store, he has a huge apartment in the city, he has a dacha. I thought and thought about it. But then one day he came in drunk: “You’re not going to forget your hero, is that it? He went to Chernobyl, and I refused. I'm alive, and he’s a memorial."

Ha-ha. I threw him out! I threw him right out! Sometimes I get strange thoughts, sometimes I think Chernobyl saved me, forced me to think. My soul expanded.

He told me about it and told me, and I remembered.

The clouds of dust, the tractors in the fields, the women with their pitchforks, the dosimeter clicking. Everything behind barbed wire. The Zone: no people, but time moves on anyway. The days are so long. Just like when you're a kid.

Entertainers came to visit them. Poets read their poems. Alla Pugacheva gave a concert in a field. “If you don’t fall asleep, boys, I'll sing to you all night.” She called them heroes.

Everyone called them heroes.
[Cries.]
It's impossible to suffer like this without any meaning. Without any of the old words. Even without the medal that they gave him. It's there at home. He gave it to our son. I know just one thing: I'll never be happy again.

Nina Kovaleva, wife of a liquidator

___

Ever since I was a youth I always wrote things down. When Stalin died, I wrote down everything happening in the streets, what people were saying. And I wrote about Chernobyl from the very first day, I knew time would pass and a lot of it would be forgotten and disappear forever. And that's how it was in fact. My friends were in the center of everything, they were nuclear physicists, but they forgot how they felt and what they spoke to me about. But I wrote everything down.

On that day, I came into work at the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarus Academy of Sciences. I was the head of the laboratory there, the Institute was in the forest outside of town. The weather was wonderful! Spring. I opened the window. The air was fresh and clean, and I was surprised to see that for some reason the blue jays I’d been feeding all winter, hanging pieces of salami out the window for them, weren't around. Had they found a better meal somewhere else?

In the meantime there’s panic at the reactor at the Institute: the dosimeters are showing heightened activity, readings are up 200 times on the air-cleaning filters. The force of the dose near the entrance is almost three milliroentgen per hour. That’s very serious—that level is considered the highest allowable during work in radioactively dangerous zones for a maximum of six hours. The first theory was that a hermetic seal had broken on one of the heat-generating elements. We checked and it was fine. The second thought was that maybe the container from the radiochemical lab had been damaged in transit and had contaminated the whole territory? But that would be a spot on the sidewalk somewhere—try washing that out! So what’s going on?