Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (23 page)

We're not rational. That’s the Slavic mind-set. I believed in my fate! Ha ha! Now I’m an invalid of the second category. I got sick right away. Radiation poisoning. I didn't even have a medical card at the polyclinic before I went. Ah, the hell with them. I’m not the only one. It was a mind-set.

I was a soldier, I closed other people's homes, went into them. It's a certain feeling . . . Land that you can't plant on—the cow butts its head against the gate, but it's closed and the house is locked. Its milk drips to the ground. There's a feeling you get! In the villages that hadn't been evacuated yet, the farmers made vodka, they'd sell it to us. And we had lots of money: three times our salary from work, plus three times the normal daily military allowance. Later on we got an order: Whoever drinks can stay a second term. So does vodka help or not? Well, at least psychologically it does. We believed that as much as we believed anything.

And the farmer's life flowed along very smoothly: they plant something, it grows, they harvest it, and the rest goes on without them. They don't have anything to do with the tsar, with the government—with space ships and nuclear power plants, with meetings in the capital. And they couldn't believe that they were now living in a different world, the world of Chernobyl. They hadn't gone anywhere. People died of shock. They took seeds with them, quietly, they took green tomatoes, wrapped them up. Glass cans would blow up, they'd put another back on the stove. What do you mean destroy, bury, turn everything into trash? But that's exactly what we did. We annulled their labor, the ancient meaning of their lives. We were their enemies.

I wanted to go to the reactor. “Don't worry,” the others told me, “in your last month before demobilization they’ll put you all on the roof." We were there six months. And, right on schedule, after five months of evacuating people, we were sent to the reactor. There were jokes, and also serious conversations, that we'd be sent to the roof. Well, after that maybe we’d live another five years. Seven. Maybe ten. But “five” is what people said most often, for some reason. Where'd they get that? And they said it quietly, without panicking. “Volunteers, forward march!” Our whole squadron—we stepped forward. Our commander had a monitor, he turned it on and it showed the roof of the reactor: pieces of graphite, melted bitumen. “See, boys, see those pieces there? You need to clean those up. And here, in this quadrant, is where you make the hole.” You were supposed to be up there forty, fifty seconds, according to the instructions. But that was impossible. You needed a few minutes at the least. You had to get there and back, you had to run up and throw the stuff down—one guy would load the wheelbarrow, the others would throw the stuff into the hole there. You threw it, and went back, you didn’t look down, that wasn’t allowed. But guys looked down.

The papers wrote: “The air around the reactor is clean." We'd read it and laugh, then curse a little. The air was clean, but we got some serious dosage up there. They gave us dosimeters. One was for five roentgen, and it went to the max right away. The other one was bigger, it was for 200 roentgen, and that too went off. Five years, they said, and you can't have kids. If you don't die after five years . . .
[Laughs
.] There were all kinds of jokes. But quietly, without panic. Five years . . . I’ve already lived ten. There! [
Laughs
.] They gave us decorations. I have two. With all the pictures: Marx, Engels, Lenin. Red flags.

One guy disappeared. We figured he’d run off. but then two days later we find him in the bushes, he'd hung himself. Everyone had this feeling, you understand . . . but then our political officer spoke, he said the guy had received a letter, his wife was cheating on him. Who knows? A week later we were demobilized. Bur we found him in the bushes.

We had a cook, he was so afraid, he didn't even live in the tent, he lived at the warehouse, he dug himself a little niche under the crates of butter and canned meat. He brought his mattress there and his pillow and lived underground. Then we got an order: Gather a new crew and everyone to the roof. But everyone had already been. And they needed men! So they picked him up. He only went up on the roof once. He’s a second-group invalid now. He calls me a lot. We keep in touch, we hold onto one another, to our memories, they'll live as long as we do. That’s what you should write.

The papers are all lies. I didn’t read anywhere about how we sewed ourselves protective gear, lead shirts, underwear. We had rubber robes with some lead in them. But we made lead underwear for ourselves. We made sure of that. In one village they showed us the two whorehouses. We were men who'd been torn away from our homes for six months, six months without women, it was an emergency situation. We all went there. The local girls would walk around anyway, even though they were crying, saying they’d all die soon. We had lead underwear, we wore it over our pants. Write that. We had good jokes, too. Here’s one: An American robot is on the roof for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, and then—breaks down. The Russian robot is up there two hours! Then a command comes in over the loudspeaker: “Private Ivanov! In two hours you're welcome to come down and have a cigarette break.” Ha-ha!
[Laughs.]

Before we went up on the roof, the commander gave us instructions, we were all standing as a unit, and a few of the guys protested: “We already went, we should have been sent home already." And as for me, my specialty was fuel, and they were sending me on the roof, too. But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go. I didn’t protest. The commander says: “Only volunteers go up on the roof. The rest can step aside, you'll have a talk with the military prosecutor.” Well, those guys stood around, talked about it a little, and then agreed. If you took the oath, then you should do what you have to. I don't think any of us doubted that they’d put us in jail for insubordination. They’d put out a rumor that it would be two to three years. Meanwhile if a soldier got more than 25 roentgen, his superiors could be put in jail for poisoning their men. So no one got more than 25 roentgen. Everyone got less. You understand? But they were good kids. Two of them got sick, and this other one, he said, “I'll go." And he’d already been on the roof once that day. People respected him for it. And he got a reward: 500 rubles. Another guy was making a hole up top, and then it was time for him to stop. We're all waving at him: “Come down." But he’s on his knees up there and he's whacking away. He needed to make a hole in that spot, so we could throw the debris down. He didn't get off until he’d made the hole. He got a reward—1,000 rubles. You could buy two motorcycles for that back then. Now he’s a first-group invalid. But for being afraid, you paid right away.

Demobilization. We got in cars. The whole way through the Zone we kept our sirens on. I look back on those days. I was close to something then. Something fantastical. I don't have the words to describe it. And the words, “gigantic," “fantastic," they just don’t do it. I had this feeling . .. What? I haven’t had that feeling again even in love.

Aleksandr Kudryagin, liquidator

___

You need facts and details about those days? Or just my story? For example, I was never a photographer, and there I started taking photographs, I happened to have a camera with me. I thought I was just doing it for myself. But now it's my profession. I couldn’t rid myself of the new feeling that I had there. Does that make sense?
[As he talks he spreads photographs on the table, chair, windowsills: giant sunflowers the size of carriage wheels, a sparrow's nest in an empty village, a lonely village cemetery with a sign that says, “High radiation. Do not enter. "A baby carriage in the yard of an abandoned house, the windows are boarded up, and in the carriage sits a crow, as if it's guarding its nest. The ancient sight of cranes over a field that's gone wild.]

People ask me: “Why don't you take photos in color? In color!" But Chernobyl: literally it means
black event.
There are no other colors there. But my story? It’s just commentaries to these
[points to the photographs].
But all right. I'll try. Although it's all in here.
[Points again to the photographs.]

At the time I was working at a factory, and also finishing my degree in history at the university by correspondence. At the factory I was a plumber, second class. They got us into a group and sent us off at emergency speed, like we were going to the front.

“Where are we going?"

“Where they tell you to go."

“What are we going to do ?"

“What they tell you to do.”

“But we're builders."

“Then you’ll build. You’ll build around."

We built support structures: laundries, warehouses, tents. I was assigned to unload cement. What sort of cement, and where from—no one checked that. They loaded it, we unloaded it. You spend a day shoveling that stuff and by the end only your teeth are showing. You're made of cement, of gray cement, and your special protective gear is, too. You shake it off in the evening, and the next day you put it on again.

They held political discussions with us—they explained that we were heroes, accomplishing things on the front lines. It was all military language. Bur what’s a bee? A curie? What's a milliroentgen? We ask our commander, he can't answer that, they didn’t teach it at the military academy. Milli, micro, it’s all Chinese to him. “What do you need to know for? Just do what you're ordered. Here you're soldiers.” Yes, soldiers—bur not convicts.

A commission came to visit. “Well," they told us, “everything here's fine. The background radiation is fine. Now, about four kilometers from here, that's bad, they're going to evacuate the people out of there. But here it’s normal.” They have a dosimetrist with them, he turns on the little box hanging over his shoulder and waves that long rod over our boots. And then he jumps to the side—it’s an involuntary reaction, he can't help it.

But here’s where the interesting part starts for you, for a writer. How long do you think we remembered that moment? Maybe a few days, at most. Russians just aren’t about to start thinking only of themselves, of their own lives, to think that way. Our politicians are incapable of thinking about the value of an individual life, but then we’re not capable of it either. Does that make sense? We're just not built that way. We're made of different stuff. Of course we drank a lot in the Zone, we really drank. By nighttime there wasn’t a sober guy around. Now, after the first couple of glasses some guys would get lonely, remember their wives, or their kids, or talk about their jobs. Curse out their bosses. But then later, after a bottle or two—the only thing we calked about was the fate of the country and the design of the universe. Gorbachev and Ligachev, Stalin. Are we a great empire, or nor, will we defeat the Americans, or nor? It was 1986—whose airplanes are better, whose space ships are more reliable? Well, okay, Chernobyl blew up, but we put the first man in space! Do you understand, we'd go on like that until we were hoarse, until morning. The fact that we don’t have any dosimeters and they don’t give us some son of powder just in case? That we don't have washing machines so that we can launder our protective gear every day instead of twice a month? That was discussed last. In between. Damn it, chat’s just how we’re built!

Vodka was more valuable than gold. And it was impossible to buy. Everything in the villages around us had been consumed: the vodka, the moonshine, the lotion, the nail polish, the aerosols. So picture us, with a three-liter bottle of moonshine, or failing that a bottle of Shipr eau de cologne, and we’re having these endless conversations. There were teachers and engineers among us, and then the full international brigade: Russians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians. We had philosophical debates—about how we’re the prisoners of materialism, and that limits us to the objects of chis world, but Chernobyl is a portal to infinity. I remember discussions about the fate of Russian culture, its pull toward the tragic. You can’t understand anything without the shadow of death. And only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe. Only Russian culture was prepared for it. We’d been afraid of bombs, of mushroom clouds, but then it turned out like this; we know how a house burns from a match or a fuse, but this wasn’t like anything else. We heard rumors that the flame at Chernobyl was unearthly, it wasn’t even a flame, it was a light, a glow. Not blue, but more like the sky. And not smoke, either.

The scientists had been gods, now they were fallen angels, demons even. The secrets of nature were hidden from them, and still are. I'm a Russian, from Bryanschin. We used to have an old man who would sit on his stoop, the house is leaning over, it’s going to fall apart soon, but he’s talking about the fate of the world. Every little factory circle will have its Aristotle. And every beer stand. Meanwhile we’re sitting right under the reactor. You can imagine how much philosophy there was.

Newspaper crews came to us, took photos. They’d have these invented scenes: they’d want to photograph the window of an abandoned house, and they’d put a violin in front of it; then they'd call the photo, “Chernobyl Symphony." But you didn’t have to make anything up there. You wanted to just remember it: the globe in the schoolyard crushed by a tractor; laundry that's been hanging out on the balcony for a year and has turned black; abandoned military graves, the grass as tall as the soldier statue on it, and on the automatic weapon of the statue, a bird's nest. The door of a house has been broken down, everything has been looted, but the curtains are still pulled back. People have left, but their photographs are still in the houses, like their souls.

There was nothing unimportant, nothing too small. I wanted to remember everything exactly and in detail: the time of day when I saw this, the color of the sky, my own feelings. Does that make sense? Mankind had abandoned these places forever. And we were the first to experience this “forever.” You can't let go of a single tiny thing. The faces of the old farmers—they looked like icons. They were the ones who understood it least of all. They’d never left their yard, their land. They appeared on this earth, fell in love, raised bread with the sweat of their brow, continued their line. Waited for their grandchildren. And then, having lived this life, they left the land by going into the land, becoming the land. A Belarussian peasant hut! For us, city dwellers, the home is a machine for living in. For them it's an entire world, the cosmos. So you'd drive through these empty villages, and you so want to meet a human being. The churches have been looted—you walk in and it smells of wax. You feel like praying.