Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen). (2/2)
Title: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.
Author: Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen).
Genre: Non-fiction, man-made disasters, politics, social criticism, conspiracy.
Country: Belarus.
Language: Russian.
Publication Date: 1997.
Summary: On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. This book is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. The author interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown-from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster-and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised on interviews in monologue form, the book is crucially important and unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty. (Only Part 2 in this post, refer to PART 1 for the rest of the quotes.)
My rating: 10/10.
My review:
♥ Who's to blame? Well, who but us?
♥ The fear is in our feelings, on a subconscious level. We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, whose appeal I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love...
~~Nina Konstantinovna, labor studies teacher.
♥ Who's to blame? In order to answer the question of how to live, we need to know who's to blame. Well, who? The scientists or the personnel at the station? The director? The operators on duty? Tell me, why do we not do battle with automobiles as the workings of the mind of man, but instead do battle with the reactor? We demand that all atomic stations be closed, and the nuclear scientists be put in jail? Scientists today are also victims of Chernobyl. I want to live after Chernobyl, not die after Chernobyl. I want to understand.
♥ Why don't we talk about Chernobyl? In school, for example? With our students? They talk about it with them in Austria, France, Germany, when they go there for medical care. I ask the kids, what did people talk about with you, what interested them? They often don't remember the cities or villages, or the last names of the people they stayed with, but they remember the presents they got and the delicious foods. Someone got a cassette player, someone else didn't. They come back in clothes that they didn't earn and their parents didn't earn, either. It's like they've been exhibited. They keep waiting or someone to take them there again. They'll show them off again, then give them presents. They get used to it. It's already a way of living, a way of seeing the world. After that big experience "abroad," after this expensive exhibit they have to go to school. Sit in class. I can already see that these are observers.
♥ We're often silent. We don't tell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We call call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.
~~Nikolai Zharkov, literature teacher.
-Monologue About A New Nation.
♥ 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.
♥ "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."
♥ "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."
♥ "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."
♥ "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."
-Monologue About Writing Chernobyl by Anatoly Shimanskiy, journalist.
♥ 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!
♥ 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.
♥ 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 form 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.
..Three thousand six hundred soldiers worked on the roof of the ruined reactor. They slept on the ground, they all tell of how in the beginning they were throwing straw on the ground in the tents-and the straw was coming from stacks near the reactor.
They were young guys. They're dying now, too, but they understand that if it wasn't for them... These are people who came from a certain culture, the culture of the great achievement. They were a sacrifice. There was a moment when there existed the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it-with the water they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe. So here was the task: who would dive in there and open the bolt on the safety valve? They promised them a car, an apartment, a dacha, aid for their families until the end of time. They searched for volunteers. And they found them! The boys dove, many times, and they opened that bolt, and the unit was given 7000 rubles. They forgot about the cars and apartments they promised-but that's not why they dove! Not for the material, least of all for the material promises. [Becomes upset.] Those people don't exist anymore, just the documents in our museum, with their names. But what if they hadn't done it? In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals.
♥ It required a lot of courage to tell the truth about Chernobyl. It still does, believe me! But you need to see this footage: the blackened faces of the firemen, like graphite. And their eyes? These are the eyes of people who already know that they're leaving us. There's one fragment showing the legs of a woman who the morning after the catastrophe went to work on her plot of land next to the atomic station. She's walking on grass covered with dew. Her legs remind you of a grate, everything's filled with holes up to the knees. You need to see this if you're writing this book.
♥ There was no other way. At the meetings of government commissions, every day it was stated very simply: "We'll need to put down two to three lives for this. And for this, one life." Simply, and every day.
♥ And the four hundred miners who worked round the clock to blast a tunnel under the reactor? They needed a tunnel into which to pour liquid nitrogen and freeze the earthen pillow, as the engineers call it. Otherwise the reactor would have gone into the groundwater. So there were miners from Moscow, Kiev, Dniepropetrovsk. I didn't read about them anywhere. But they were down there naked, with temperatures reaching fifty degrees Celsius, rolling little cars before them while crouching down on all fours. There were hundreds of roentgen. Now they're dying. But if they hadn't done this? I consider them heroes, not victims, of a war, which supposedly never happened. They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war. The Chernobyl monuments look like war monuments.
♥ The Englishman asks them questions: how is it now with your families, with your young wives? The helicopter pilots are silent, they came to tell about their five flights a say, and he's asking about their wives? About that? So he starts asking them one by one, and they all answer the same: We're healthy, the government values us, and in out families all is love. Not one, not a single one of them opened up to him. They leave, and I feel that he's just crushed. "Now you understand," he says to me, "why no one believes you? You lie to yourselves." The meeting had taken place in a café, and we were being served by two pretty waitresses, and he says to them: "Could you answer a few questions for me?" And they explain everything. He says, "Do you want to get married?" "Yes, but not here. We all dream of marrying a foreigner, so we can have healthy kids." And he gets braver: "Well, and do you have partners? How are they? Do they satisfy you? You understand, right, what I mean?" "You saw those guys," the waitresses say, laughing, "the helicopter pilots? Six feet tall. With their shiny medals. They're nice for meetings of the presidium, but not for bed." The Englishman photographed the waitresses and to me he repeated the same thing: "Now you understand why no one believes you? You lie to yourselves."
♥ I've often asked foreign journalists, some of whom have been here many times, why they come, why they ask to get into the Zone? It would be silly to think it was just for money or for their careers. "We like it here," they say, "we get a real burst of life-energy here." It's an unexpected answer, no? For them, I think the sort of person we have here, his feelings, his world, are something undiscovered and hypnotic. But I didn't ask them to clarify whether they like us ourselves, or what they can write about us, what they can understand through us.
Why do we keep hovering around death?
Chernobyl-we won't have another world now. At first, it tore the ground from under our feet, and it flung pain at us for real, but now we realize that there won't be another world, and there's nowhere to turn to. The sense of having settled, tragically, on this land-it's a completely different worldview. People returning from the war were called a "lost" generation. We're also lost. The only thing that hasn't changed is human suffering. It's our only capital. It's valuable!
I come home after everything-my wife listens to me-and then she says quietly: "I love you, but I won't let you have my son. I won't let anyone have him. Not Chernobyl, not Chechnya. Not anyone!" The fear has already settled into her.
-Monologue About Lies and Truth by Sergei Sobolev, deputy head of the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association.
♥ "Take your shovels and dig." Only two young teachers refused, the rest went out and shoveled. A feeling of oppression but also of carrying out a necessary task-that lives within us, the need to be where it's difficult and dangerous, to defend the motherland. Did I teach my students anything but that? To go, throw yourself on the fire, defend, sacrifice. The literature I taught wasn't about life, it was about war: Sholokhov, Serafimovich, Furmanov, Fadeev, Boris Polevoy. Only two young teachers refused. But they're from the new generation. These are already different people.
♥ Although all around life was going on as before, the television was showing comedies. But we always lived in terror, we know how to live in terror, it's out natural habitat.
♥ It was constantly being compared to the war. But this was bigger. War you can understand. But this? People fell silent.
♥ 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 wit 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, ere 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.
♥ 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 radiobilogy, 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.
♥ 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!
♥ 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 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."
-People's Chorus by Klavdia Barsuk, wife of a liquidator; Tamara Belookaya, doctor; Yekaterina Bobrova, transferred resident from the town of Prepyat; Andrei Burtys, journalist; Ivan Vergychik, pediatrician; Yelena Voronko, resident of the settlement of Bragin; Svetlana Govor, wife of a liquidator; Natalya Goncharenko, transferred resident; Tamara Dubikovskaya, resident of the settlemt of Narovlya; Albert Zaritskiy, doctor; Aleksandra Kravtsova, doctor; Eleonora Ladutenko, radiologist; Irina Lukashevich, midwife; Antonina Larivonchik, transferred resident; Anatoly Polishuk, hydro-meteorologist; Maria Saveleyeva; and Nina Khantsevich, wife of a liquidator.
PART THREE
AMAZED BY SADNESS
♥ I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn't any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn't have them went to friends' houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, "Look! Remember!" And these were people who worked at the reactor-engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around in their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn't say that it had no smell-it wasn't a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn't the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and my eyes watered.
♥ At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military vehicles, we didn't grow frightened-on the contrary, it calmed us. The army is here, everything will be fine. We didn't understand then that the "peaceful atom" could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics.
All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they'd take us away for three days, wash everything, check things out.
..From the very first I felt that we were Chernobylites, that we were already a separate people. ..When we settled in Mogilev and our son started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to a girl who said she didn't want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him "Shiny." His childhood ended so early.
♥ I often dream that I'm riding through sunny Pripyat with my son. It's a ghost town now. But we're riding through and looking at the roses, there were many roses in Pripyat, large bushes with roses. I was young. My son was little. I loved him. And in the dream I've forgotten all the fears, as if I were just a spectator the whole time.
-Monologue About What We Didn't Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful by Nadezhda Vygovskaya, evacuee from the town of Pripyat.
♥ So what is Chernobyl? A lot of military hardware and soldiers. Wash posts. A real military situation. They placed us in tents, ten men to a tent. Some of us had kids at home, some had pregnant wives, others were in between apartments. But nobody complained. If we had to do it, we had to do it. The motherland called and we went. That's just how we are.
♥ One time we had a scare: the dosimetrists discovered that our cafeteria had been put in a spot where the radiation was higher than where we went to work. We'd already been there two months. That's just how we are. The cafeteria was just a bunch of posts and these had boards nailed to them at chest height. We are standing up. We washed ourselves from barrels filled with water. Our toilet wad a long pit in a clear field. We had shovels in our hands, and not far off was the reactor.
After two months we began to understand things a little. People started saying: "This isn't a suicide mission. We've been here two months-that's enough. They should bring in others now." Major-General Antoshkin had a talk with us. He was very honest. "It's not advantageous for us to bring in a new shift. We've already given you three sets of clothing. And you're used to the place. To bring in new men would be expensive and complicated." With an emphasis on our being heroes. Once a week someone who was digging really well would receive a certificate of merit before all the other men. The Soviet Union's best grave digger. It was crazy.
♥ They were good guys. I already said, there wasn't a single whiner in the bunch. Not a single coward. Believe me: no one will ever defeat us. Ever! The officers never left their tents. They'd walk around in slippers all day, drinking. Who cares? We did our digging. Let the officers get another star on their shoulder. Who cares? That's the sort of people we have in this country.
♥ In the middle of our time there they finally gave us dosimeters. These little boxes, with a crystal inside. Some of the guys started figuring, they should take them over to the burial site in the morning and let them catch radiation all day, that way they'll get released sooner. Or maybe they'll pay them more. So you had guys attaching them to their boots, there was a loop there, so that they'd be closer to the ground. It was theater of the absurd. These counters weren't even going, they needed to be set in motion by an initial dose of radiation. In other words, these were little toys they'd picked out of the warehouse from fifty years ago. It was just psychotherapy for us. At the end of our time there we all got the same thing written on our medical cards: they multiplied the average radiation by the number of days we were there. And they got that initial average from our tents, not from where we worked.
♥ What do I remember from those days? A shadow of madness. How we dug. And dug.
-Monologue About the Shovel and the Atom by Ivan Zhykhov, chemical engineer.
♥ We checked the milk. It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive by-product.
For a long time after that we used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk from the Rogachev milk factory in our lectures as examples of a standard radiation source. And in the meantime, they were being sold in the stores. When people saw that the milk was from Rogachev and stopped buying it, there suddenly appeared cans of milk without labels. I don't think it was because they ran out of paper.
♥ We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child-her milk has cesium in it-she's the Chernobyl Madonna.
We asked our supervisors, What do we do? How should we be? They said: "Take your measurements. Watch television." On television Gorbachev was calming the people: "We've taken immediate measures." I believed it. I'd worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well acquainted with the law of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only or a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing. I'm from the postwar generation, I grew up with this belief, this faith. Where did it come from? We'd won that terrible war. The whole world was grateful to us them.
-Monologue About Taking Measurements by Marat Kokhanov, former chief engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences.
♥ People stopped buying milk and cottage cheese at the market. An old lady would be standing with her milk, no one's buying it. "Don't worry," she'd say, "I don't let my cow out into the field, I bring her her grass myself." If you drove out of town you'd see these scarecrows: a cow all wrapped in cellophane, and then an old farmer woman next to her, also wrapped in cellophane. You could cry, you could laugh.
♥ They're always saying: It's a holy people, and a criminal government. Well I'll tell you a bit later what I think about that, about our people, and about myself.
♥ 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 reactor, 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.
♥ 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.]
♥ 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.
-Monologue About How the Frightening Things in Life Happen Quietly and Naturally by Zoya Bruk, environmental inspector.
♥ 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 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
..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...
-Monologue About Answers by Aleksandr Revalskiy, historian.
♥ No one knows that this is a war, and that it's called Chernobyl.
-Monologue About Memories by Nina Kovaleva, wife of a liquidator.
♥ That evening on the way back to Minsk on the institute bus we rode for half an hour in silence, or talking of other things. Everyone was afraid to talk about what happened. Everyone had his Party card in his pocket.
♥ I read the American, Smith, who described how they invented the atomic bomb, tested it, what the explosions were like. In our world everything was a secret. The physicists got the high salaries, and the secrecy added to the romance. It was the cult of physics, the era of physics! Even when Chernobyl blew up, it took a long time to part with that cult. They'd call up scientists, scientists would fly into Chernobyl on a special charter, but many of then didn't even bring their shaving kits, they thought they'd be there just a few hours. Just a few hours, even though they knew a reactor had blown up. They believed in their physics, they were of the generation that believed in it. But the era of physics ended at Chernobyl.
♥ Life is such a surprising thing! I love physics and thought that I wouldn't ever do anything but physics. But now I want to write. I want to write, for example, about how man does not actually accommodate science very much-he gets in the way of it. Or about how a few physicists could change the world. About a new dictatorship of physics and math. A whole new life has opened up for me.
-Monologue About Loving Physics by Valentin Borisevich, former head of the Laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences.
♥ In those first days, there were mixed feelings. I remember two: fear and insult. Everything had happened and there was no information: the government was silent, the doctors were silent. The regions waited for directions from the oblast, the oblast from Minsk, and Minsk from Moscow. It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. A few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.
At the same time, a few people could kill us all. They weren't maniacs, and they weren't criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. When I understood that, I experienced a very strong shock. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an ax and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can't kill everyone. But with an atom...
♥ Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat. Then we found out that it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it. We turned out to be defenseless. But you know that already. I want to tell about something else, about how we were a Soviet generation.
♥ It's not just the land that's contaminated, but our minds. And for many years, too.
-Monologue About Expensive Salami from a letter from Lyudmila Polenkaya, village teacher, evacuated from the Chernobyl Zone.
♥ There is a loneliness to freedom. I know it, all the ones who were at the reactor know it. Like in a trench at the very front. Fear and freedom! You live for everything. That's not something you who live an ordinary life can understand. Remember how they were always preparing us for war? But it turns out our minds weren't ready. I wasn't ready.
♥ Those first few days we were afraid to sit on the ground, on the grass; we didn't walk anywhere, we ran; if a cat passed us, we'd put on a gas mask right away for the dust. After our shifts we'd sit in the tents. Ha! After a few months, it all seemed normal. It was just where you lived. We tore plums off the trees, caught fish, the pike there is incredible. And breams-we dried them to eat with beer. People probably told you about this already? We played soccer. We went swimming! Ha. [Laughs again.] We believed in fate, at bottom we're all fatalists, not pharmacists. We're not rational. That's the Slavic mind-set. I believed in my fate! Ha ha! Mow 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.
♥ And the farmer's life flowed along very smoothly: 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
-Monologue About Freedom and the Dream of an Ordinary Death by Aleksandr Kudryagin, liquidator.
♥ 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.] Not all right. I'll try. Although it's all in here. [Points again at the photographs.]
♥ 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 talked about was the fate of the country and the design of the universe. Gorbachev and Ligachev, Stalin. Are we a great empire, or not, will we defeat the Americans, or not? 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 sort 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, that's just how we're built!
♥ 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 down a match or a fuse, but this wasn't like anything else.
♥ 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 bee 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 feeling. 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.
♥ We're metaphysicians. We don't live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it. Even when you're near death.
-Monologue About the Shadow of Death by Viktor Latun, photographer.
♥ We could have left, but my husband and I thought about it and decided not to. We were afraid. Here, we're all Chernobylites. We don't scare one another, and if someone gives you an apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don't hide it shamefully in your purse, and then throw it out. We all share the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we're foreign, we're lepers. Everyone is used to the words, "Chernobylites," "Chernobyl children," "Chernobyl refugees." But you don't know anything about us. You're afraid of us. You probably wouldn't let us out of here if you had your way, you'd put up a police cordon, that would calm you down. [Stops.] Don't try to tell me it's not like that. I lived through it.
♥ People talk about the war, the war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won the war! It gave them a very strong life-impulse, as we say now, it gave them a really strong motivation to survive and keep going. They weren't afraid of anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes, too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking.
Sometimes I think it'd be better if you didn't write about us. Then people wouldn't be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who's sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.
-Monologue About a Damaged Child by Nadezhda Burakova, resident of the village of Khoyniki.
♥ What if I'd declared then that people shouldn't go outside? They would have said: "You want to disrupt May Day?" It was a political matter. They'd have asked for my Party card!
♥ A Russian without a high ideal? Without a great dream? That's also scary.
But that's what's happening now. Everything's falling apart. No government. Stalin. Gulag Archipelago. They pronounced a verdict on the past, on our whole life. But think of the great films! The happy songs! Explain those to me.
♥ But people have a strong sense of duty. I had dozens of letters on my desk by people asking to be sent to Chernobyl. Volunteers. No matter what they write now, there was such a thing as a Soviet person, with a Soviet character. No matter what they write about it now.
♥ They answer: "No, we're not kidding. According to our instructions these samples are to be buried in special containers, in an underground concrete-and-metal bunker. But we get them from all lover Belarus. We filled up all the space we had in a month." Do you hear that? And we harvest and plant on this land. Our kids play on it. We're supposed to fulfill the plans for milk and meat. We make vodka out of the wheat. Then apples, pears, cherries go for juices.
♥ You forget-people used to think nuclear power plants were our future. I spoke many times, I propagandized. I went to one nuclear plant-it was quiet, very celebratory, clean. In the corner a red flag, the slogan, "Winner of the Socialist Competition." Our future.
I'm a product of our time. I'm not a criminal.
-Monologue About Political Strategy by Vladimir Ivanov, former First Secretary of the Stavgorod Regional Party Committee.
♥ But if I were to write honestly? [Thinks.] That warm, April rain. Seven years now I've thought about that rain. The raindrops rolled up like quicksilver. They say that radiation is colorless, but the puddles that day were green and bright yellow. My neighbor had reported an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I didn't pay her any mind. I was absolutely certain that if anything serious happened, they'd tell us. They have all kinds of special equipment-special warning signals, bombs shelters-they'll warn us. We were sure of it!
♥ "Are you crazy? You still have to get married, raise kids!" "Where else am I going to get fifty rubles for a single trip?" Fifty rubles back then could get you a nicer suit. And people talked more about the rubles than the radiation. They got these tiny bonuses. Or tiny anyway compared with the value of a human life.
It was funny and tragic at the same time.
-Monologue About Instructions by Irina Kiseleva, journalist.
♥ Someone's eventually going to have to answer for Chernobyl. The time will come when they'll have to answer for it, just like for 1937. It might be in fifty years, everyone might be old, they might be dead. They're criminals! [Quiet.] We need to leave facts behind us. They'll need them.
♥ I measure my son's thyroid-that was the ideal dosimeter then-it's an 180 micro-roentgen per hour. He needed potassium iodine. This was ordinary iodine. A child needed two to three drops in half a glass of solvent, an adult needed three to four. The reactor burned for ten days, and this should have been done for ten days. But no one listened to us! No none listened to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did! We shouldn't forget the background to this, what we were like then, what we were like ten years ago. The KGB was working, making secret searches. "Western voices" were being shut out. There were a thousand taboos, Party and military secrets. And in addition everyone was raised to think that the peaceful Soviet atom was as safe as peat or coal. We were people chained by fear and prejudice. We had the superstition of our faith.
♥ We already ad thousands of tons of cesium, iodine, lead, ciconium, cadmium, berillium, borium, an unknown amount of plutonium (the uranium-graphite reactors of the Chernobyl variety also produced weapons-grade plutonium, for nuclear bombs)-450 types of radionuclides in all. It was the equivalent of 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. They needed to talk about physics, about the laws of physics, but instead they talked about enemies, about looking for enemies.
Sooner or later, someone is going to have to answer for this.
♥ If we were still a closed system, behind the Iron Curtain, people would still be living next to the station. They'd have covered it up! Remember-Kyshtym Semipalatinsk [a city in the Southern Urals near the Mayak weapons facility, contaminated and largely evacuated after a nuclear waste tank exploded in 1957]-we're still Stalin's country, you know.
♥ But they're worried about their authority, not about the people. It was a country of authority, not people. The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero. Because they might have found ways-without any announcements, without any panic. They could simply have introduced iodine into the freshwater reservoirs, or added it to the milk. The city had 700 kilograms of iodine concentrate for that very purpose-but it just stayed where it was. People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom. Everyone waited for the order, for the call, but no one did anything himself.
♥ Meanwhile our man, Slyunkov, had taken fifteen minutes to lay out the situation. "Everything's fine. We'll handle it ourselves." They praised him: "That's how it's done, our Belarussian brothers!" How many lives did that bit of praise cost?
♥ This is already historyu-the history of a crime.
♥ "Don't you understand who you're going up against?"
Well, I have maps and figures. What do they have? They can put me in a mental hospital. They threatened to. And they could make sure I had a car accident-they warned me about that, also. They could drag me to court for anti-Soviet propaganda. Or for a box of nails missing from the Institute's inventory.
So they dragged me to court.
And they got what they wanted. I had a heart attack. [Silent.]
I wrote everything down. It's all in the folder. It's facts, only facts.
♥ "Does the tractor driver at least wear a gas mask?"
"No."
"What, you didn't get them?"
"Oh, we got plenty! We have enough to last until the year 2000. We just don't give them out, otherwise there'd be a panic. Everyone would run off, they'd leave."
"How can you do that?"
"Easy for you to say, Professor. If you lose your job, you'll find another one. Where am I going to go?"
What power! This limitless power that one person could have over another. This isn't a trick or lie any more, it's just a war against the innocent.
♥ What do we do with this truth now? How do we handle it? If it blows up again, the same thing will happen again. We're still Stalin's country. We're still Stalin's people.
-Monologue About the Facts by Vasily Nesterenko, former director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belarussian Academy of Sciences.
♥ And we became afraid. "Why are the radish leaves this year so much like beet leaves?" You turned on the television, they were saying, "Don't listen to the provocations of the West!" and that's when you knew for sure.
♥ I was an engineer at the Khimvolokno factory. There was a group of East German specialists there at the time, putting in new equipment. I saw how other people, from another culture, behaved. When they learned about the accident, they immediately demanded medical attention, dosimeters, and a controlled food supply. They listened to German radio and knew what to do. Of course, they were denied all their requests. So they immediately packed their bags and got ready to leave. Buy us tickets! Send us home! If you can't keep us safe, we're leaving. They protested, sent telegrams to their government. They were fighting for their wives, their kids, they had come there with their families, they were fighting for their lives! And us? How did we behave? Oh, those Germans, they're all so arrogant-they're hysterical! They're cowards! They're measuring the radiation in the borscht, in the ground meat. What a joke! Now, our men, they're real men. Real Russian men. Desperate men. They're fighting the reactor. They're not worried about their lives. They get up on that melting roof with their bare hands, in their canvas gloves (we'd already seen this on television.) And our kids go with their flags to the demonstrations. As do the war veterans, the old guard. [Thinks.] But that's also a form of barbarism, the absence of fear for oneself. We always say "we," and never "I." "We'll show them Soviet heroism," "we'll sow them what the Soviet character is made of." We'll show the whole world! But this is me, this is I. I don't want to die. I'm afraid.
It's interesting to watch oneself from here, watch one's feelings. How did they develop and change? I pay more attention to the world around me. After Chernobyl that's a natural reaction. We're beginning to learn to say "I." I don't want to die! I'm afraid.
♥ That great empire crumb;led and fell apart. First, Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When it fell apart, we found ourselves all alone. I'm afraidf to say it, but ee love Chernobyl. It's become the meaning of our lvies. The meaning of our suffering. Like a war. The world found out about our existence agter Cherrnobyl. It was our window to Eirope. We're its victims, but sldo its priests. I'm afraid to say it, but there it is.
♥ And it's like a game, like a show. I'm with a caravan of humanitarian aid and some foreigners who've brought it, whether in the name of Christ or something else. And outside, in the puddles and the mud in their coats and mittens is my tribe. In their cheap boots. "We don't need anything," their eyes seem to be saying, "it's all going to get stolen anyway." But also the wish to grab a bit of something, a box or crate, something from abroad. We know where all the old ladies live by now. And suddenly I have this outrageous, disgusting wish. "I'll show you something!" I say. "You'll never see this in Africa! You won't see it anywhere. 200 curie, 300 curie." I've noticed how the old ladies have changed, too-some of them are real actresses. They know their monologues by heart, and they cry in all the right spots. When the first foreigners came, the grandmas wouldn't say anything, they'd just stand there crying. Now they know how to talk. Maybe they'll get some extra gum for the kids, or a box of clothes. And this is right next to a profound philosophy-their relationship with death, with time. It's not for some gum and German chocolate that they refuse to leave these peasant huts they've been living in their whole lives.
On the way back, the sun is setting, I say, "Look at how beautiful this land is!" The sun is illuminating the forest and the fields, bidding us farewell. "Yes," one of the Germans who speaks Russian answers, "it's pretty, but it's contaminated." He has a dosimeter in his hand. And then I understand that the sunset is only for me. This is my land. I'm the one who lives here.
-Monologue About Why We Love Chernobyl by Natalya Roslova, head of the Mogilev Women's Committee for the Children of Chernobyl.
♥ I heard-the adults were talking-Grandma was crying-since the year I was born [1986], there haven't been any boys or girls born in our village. I'm the only one. The doctors said I couldn't be born. But my mom ran away from the hospital and hid at Grandma's. So I was born at Grandma's. I heard them talking about it.
I don't have a brother or sister. I want one.
Tell me, lady, how could it be that I wouldn't be born? Where would I be? High in the sky? On another planet?
♥ They wash the windows, the roof, the floor, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike.
♥ The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.
♥ I used to write poems. I was in love with a girl. In fifth grade. In seventh grade I found out about death.
I had a friend, Andrei. They did two operations on him and then sent him home. Six months later he was supposed to get a third operation. He hanged himself from his belt, in an empty classroom, when everyone else had gone to gym class. The doctors had said he wasn't allowed to run or jump.
Yulia, Katya, Vadim, Oksana, Oleg, and now Andrei. "We'll die, and then we'll become science," Andrei used to say. "We'll die and everyone will forget us," Katya said. "When I die, don't bury me at the cemetery, I'm afraid of the cemetery, there are only dead people and crows there," said Oksana. "Bury me in the field." Yulia used to just cry. The whole sky is alive for me now when I look at it, because they're all there.
-Children's Chorus by Alyosha Belskiy, 9; Anya Bogush, 10; Natasha Dvoretskaya, 16; Lena Zhudro, 15; Yura Shuk, 15; Olya Zvonak, 10; Snezhana Zinevich, 16; Ira Kidryacheva, 14; Ylya Kasko, 11; Vanya Kovarov, 12; Vadim Karsnosolnyshko, 9; Vasya Mikulich, 15; Anton Nashivankin, 15; and Boris Shkirmankov, 16.
♥ None of those boys is alive anymore. His whole brigade, seven men, they're all dead. They were young. One after the other. The first one died after three years. We thought: well, a coincidence. Fate. But then the second died and the third and the fourth. Then the others started waiting for their turn. That's how they lived. My husband died last. He worked high in the air. They'd turn the lights off in evacuated villages and climb on the light poles, over the dead houses, the dead streets, always high up in the air. He was almost two meters tall, he weighed ninety kilograms-who could kill him?
♥ We had one year left after that. He spent that whole year dying. He got worse with each day, but he didn't know that his boys were dying, too. That's what we lived with-with that thought. It's impossible to live with, too, because you don't know what it is. They say, "Chernobyl," and they write, "Chernobyl." But no one knows what it isl Something frightening opened up before us. Everything is different. We aren't born the same, we don't die the same.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
♥ He died alone. As erveryone dies alone.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
-A Solitary Human Voice by Valentina Panasevich, wife of a liquidator.
♥ There are over 25 million ethnic Russians outside of Russia-a whole country-and there's nowhere for some of them to go by Chernobyl. All the talk about how the land, the water, the air can kill them sounds like a fairy tale to them. They have their own tale, which is a very old one and they believed in it-it's about how people kill one an other with guns.
♥ But the Zone-it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world-and it's more powerful than anythingt literatyure has to say.
♥ They all had different fates and professions and temperaments. But Chernobyl was the main content of their world. They were ordinary people answering the most important questions.
I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts-they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.
These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future.
-In Place of an Epilogue by Svetlana Alexievich.