Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (28 page)

So I brought him the mirror, the smallest one. He looked, and then he grabbed his head and he rocked, rocked back and forth on the bed. I start pleading with him—“As soon as you get a little better, we'll go off to a village together, an abandoned village. We’ll buy a house and we’ll live there, if you don’t want to live in a big town with a lot of people. We'll live by ourselves.” And I wasn’t kidding, I would have gone with him anywhere, just so he'd be there, anywhere. He was all that mattered. I wasn’t kidding.

I won't talk about anything I wouldn't want to remember. But everything happened. I looked very far, maybe further than death. [
Stops
.]

I was sixteen when we met, he was older than me by seven years. We dated for two years. I love that neighborhood in Minsk near the main post office, Volodarkovo Street, we'd meet there under the big clock. I lived near the worst industrial complex and I’d take bus #5, which didn’t stop near the main post office but went a little further, to the children’s clothing store. I’d always be just a tiny bit late so I could go by on the bus and see him there and think: oh, what a handsome man is waiting for me! I didn't notice anything for two years, not the winter, not the summer. He took me to concerts, to Edith Piekha, my favorite. We didn't go dancing, he didn't know how. We kissed, we just kissed. He called me “my little one." My birthday, it was always my birthday, it's strange but the most important things happened to me on my birthday, and after that try not believing in fate. I was waiting for him under the clock, we were supposed to meet at five but he wasn't there. At six I'm upset, I wander over to my stop in tears, cross the street, then I look around because I feel something—and there he is running after me, against the light, in his work clothes, in his boots. That's how I liked him best, in his hunter’s jacket, a sailor's shirt—everything looked good on him. We went to his house, he changed and we decided to celebrate my birthday in a restaurant. But we couldn't get in, it was evening and slipping the maitre d' a five or a ten, like other people, neither of us knew how to do that. “Okay," he said, his eyes shining, “let's buy some champagne and some cake and go to the park, that's where we'll celebrate." Under the stars, under the sky! That's how he was. We sat on a bench in Gorky Park until morning. I never had another birthday like that, and that's when I said to him: “Marry me. I love you so much!” He laughed, “But you're still little." But the next day we went to register.

I was so happy! I wouldn't change anything in my life, even if someone had told me, from above . . . On the day we got married he couldn't find his passport, we turned the whole house over. They wrote us down at the registry on a piece of paper, temporarily. “Daughter, it's a bad sign," my mom cried. We found the passport later in some old pants of his in the attic. Love! It wasn't even love, it was a long falling in love. I used to dance in front of the mirror in the mornings—I’m young, I’m pretty, he loves me! Now I forget that face—the face I had then, with him. I don’t see that face anymore in the mirror.

Is this something I can talk about? Give it words? There are secrets—I still don’t understand what that was. Even in our last month, he’d still call for me at night. He felt desire. He loved me more than he did before. During the day, I’d look at him, and I couldn’t believe what had happened at night. We didn't want to part. I caressed him, I petted him. In those minutes I remembered the happiest times, the light. Like when he came back from Kamchatka with a beard, he’d grown a beard there. My birthday in the park on the bench. “Marry me.” Do I need to talk about it? Can I? I myself went to him the way a man goes to a woman. What could I give him aside from medicine? What hope? He didn’t want to die.

But I didn’t tell my mother anything. She wouldn’t have understood me. She would have judged me, cursed us. Because this wasn’t just an ordinary cancer, which everyone is already afraid of, but Chernobyl cancer, even worse. The doctors told me: if the tumors had metastasized within his body, he’d have died quickly, but instead they crawled upward, along the body, to the face. Something black grew on him. His chin went somewhere, his neck disappeared, his tongue fell out. His veins popped, he began to bleed. From his neck, his cheeks, his ears. To all sides. I’d bring cold water, put wet rags against him, nothing helped. It was something awful, the whole pillow would be covered in it. I’d bring a washbowl from the bathroom, and the streams would hit it, like into a milk pail. That sound, it was so peaceful and rural. Even now I hear it at night. While he was still conscious, if he started clapping, that was our sign: Call the ambulance. He didn’t want to die. He was forty-five years old. I’d call the ambulance, and they know us, they don’t want to come: “There's nothing we can do for your husband." Just give him a shot! Some narcotic. I learned how to do it myself, but the shot leaves a bruise under the skin, and it doesn't go away.

One time I managed to get an ambulance. It arrives with a young doctor. He comes over and right away staggers back. “Excuse me, he's not from Chernobyl, is he? One of the ones who went there?" I say, “Yes." And he, I'm not exaggerating, he cries out: “Oh, dear woman, then let this end quickly! Quickly! I’ve seen how the ones from Chernobyl die." Meanwhile my husband is conscious, he hears this. At least he doesn't know, he hasn't guessed, that he's the last one from his brigade still alive.

Another time the nurse from the nearby clinic comes, she just stands in the hallway and refuses to come in. “Oh, I can't!" she says. And I can? I can do anything. What can I think of? How can I save him? He’s yelling, he’s in pain, all day he's yelling. Finally I found a way: I filled a syringe with vodka and put that in him. He'd turn off, forget the pain. I didn't think of it myself, some other women told me, they’d been through the same thing.

His mom used to come: “Why’d you let him go to Chernobyl? How could you?" It didn't even occur to me then that I could keep him from going, and as for him, he probably didn't think it was possible to refuse. That was a different time, a military time. I asked him once: “Are you sorry now that you went there?" He shakes his head no. He writes in his notebook: “When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don't marry Tolik.” That was his brother, Tolik. He liked me.

There are things—I'm sitting next to him, he's asleep, and he has such pretty hair. I took some scissors and quietly cut off a lock of it. He opened his eyes and looked and saw what I had in my hand, he smiled. I still have his watch, his military ID, and his medal from Chernobyl. [She
is silent
.] I was so happy! I’d spend hours in the maternity ward, I remember, sitting at the window, waiting for him and looking out. I didn’t really understand what was happening: What’s wrong with me? I couldn’t get enough of looking at him. I figured it would end at some point. I’d make him some food in the morning and then wonder at him eating it. And him shaving, him walking down the street. I’m a good librarian, but I don’t understand how you can love your job. I loved only him. Him alone. And I can’t be without him. I yell at night. I yell into the pillow, so that my kids don’t hear.

It never occurred to me that he’d leave the house, that we’d be apart for the end. My mom, his brother, they started telling me, hinting, that the doctors, like, were advising, you know, in short, there was a place near Minsk, a special hospital, where hopeless cases like this used to die—they used to be the soldiers from Afghanistan, without arms, without legs—now they sent the ones from Chernobyl there. They're begging me: It’ll be better there, there are always doctors around. I didn’t want to, I didn’t even want to hear about it. Then they convinced him, and he started asking me. “Take me there. Stop torturing yourself.” Meanwhile I’m asking for sick leave, or just for personal leave, on my own account, because you’re only supposed to take sick leave in order to care for a sick child, and personal leave isn’t supposed to be longer than a month. But he wrote all over his notebook, made me promise that I’d take him there. Finally I go in a car with his brother. It’s at the edge of a village, it’s called Grebenka, a big wooden house, a broken well next to it. The toilet is outside. Some old ladies in black—religious women. I didn’t even get out of the car. I didn’t get up. That night I kissed him: “How could you ask me for that? I’ll never let it happen! Never!” I kissed him all over.

The last few weeks were the scariest. We spent half an hour peeing into a half-liter can. He kept his eyes down the whole time, he was ashamed. “Oh, how can you think like that?!” I said. I kissed him. On the last day, there was this moment, he opened his eyes, sat up, smiled and said: “Valyushka!” That's me. He died alone. As everyone dies alone. They called me from work. “We’ll bring his red certificate of achievement.” I ask him: “Your boys want to come, they want to bring your certificate.” He shakes his head: no. But they came by anyway. They brought some money, and the certificate in a red folder with a photo of Lenin on the front. I took it and thought: “So is this what he's dying for? The papers are saying that it’s not just Chernobyl, all of Communism is blowing up. But the picture is the same.” The guys wanted to say something nice to him, but he just covered himself with the blanket so that only his hair was sticking out. They stood there awhile and then they left. He was already afraid of people. I was the only one he wasn’t afraid of. When we buried him, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If someone asked me to, I lifted them up. One woman fainted. And she used to be in love with him, I was jealous of her once. “Let me look at him one last time.” “All right.” I didn’t tell her that when he died no one wanted to come near him, everyone was afraid. According to our customs you're not supposed to wash and clothe your relatives. Two orderlies came from the morgue and asked for vodka. “We've seen everything,” they told me, “people who’ve been smashed up, cut up, the corpses of children caught in fires. But nothing like this. The way the Chernobylites die is the most frightening of all.”
[Quietly.]
He died and he lay there, he was so hot. You couldn’t touch him. I stopped the clocks in the house when he died. It was seven in the morning.

Those first days without him, I slept for two days straight, no one could wake me, I'd get up, drink some water, not eat anything, and fall back down on the pillow. Now I find it odd, inexplicable: how could I go to sleep? When my friend’s husband was dying, he threw dishes at her: why was she so pretty and young? But mine just looked at me and looked. He wrote in his notebook: “When I die, burn the remains. I don’t want you to be afraid.” There'd been rumors that even after dying the men from Chernobyl are radioactive. I read that the graves of the Chernobyl firefighters who died in the Moscow hospitals and were buried near Moscow at Mitino are still considered radioactive, people walk around them and don't bury their relatives nearby. Even the dead fear these dead. Because no one knows what Chernobyl is. People have guesses and feelings. He brought back from Chernobyl the white costume he worked in. The pants, the special protection. And that suit stayed up in our storage space right up until he died. Then my mother decided, “We need to throw out all his things.” She was afraid. But I wanted to keep even that suit. Which was criminal—I had children at home. So we took all the things outside of town and buried them. I've read a lot of books, I live among books, but nothing can explain this. They brought me the urn. I wasn't afraid, I felt around with my hand, and there was something tiny, like seashells in the sand, those were his hip bones. Before that I'd touched his things but never heard him or felt him, but here I did. I remember the night, after he died, I sat next to him—and suddenly I saw this little puff of smoke—I saw it again at the crematorium—it was his soul. No one saw it except me. And I felt like we'd seen each other one more time.

I was so happy! He'd be off on a work trip, I'd count the days and hours until he came back. I, physically, can’t be without him. We'd go visit his sister in the country, in the evening she'd say, “I put the bedding down for you in that room, and for you in the ocher room." We’d look at each other and laugh—we couldn’t imagine sleeping in different rooms. I can’t be without him. We eloped. His brother, too. They're so alike. But if anyone touched me now, I think, I’d cry and cry.

Who took him away from me? By what right? They brought a notice with a red banner across the top on October 19, 1986, like they were calling him up for the war.

[We drink tea and she shows me the family photographs, the wedding photographs. And then, as I’m getting up to go, she stops me.]

How am I going to live now? I haven't told you everything, not to the end. I was very happy, insanely happy. Maybe you shouldn’t write my name? There are secrets—people pray in secret, in a whisper just to themselves.
[Stops.]
No, write down my name, let God know. I want to understand. And I want to understand why we need to suffer. What for? At first I thought that I’d have something new in my vision, something dark and not-mine. What saved me? What pushed me back out into life? My son did. I have another son, our son, he's been sick for a long time. He grew up but he sees the world with the eyes of a child, a five-year-old. I want to be with him. I'm hoping to trade my apartment for one closer to Novinki, that’s where we have the mental hospital. He's there. The doctors ordered it: if he's to live, he needs to live there. I go there on the weekends. He greets me: “Where’s Papa Misha? When will he come?” Who else is going to ask me about that? He’s waiting for him.

We'll wait for him together. I’ll read my Chernobyl prayer in a whisper. You see, he looks at the world with the eyes of a child.

Valentina Panasevich, wifi of a liquidator

___