Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2 page)

—“Chernobyl."
Belaruskaya entsiklopedia

On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May I and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world.

—“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus."

Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology

The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it.

The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . .

Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it's still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986.

—
Ogonyok
magazine, No. 17, April 1996

WORLD BRIEFINGS, BELARUS: PARLIAMENT

Parliament approved legislation to make it a crime to organize protests, join banned organizations, or speak against the national interest. President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who is running for a third term next year, submitted the legislation last week, calling for its urgent passage in the wake of popular uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The legislation would impose prison sentences of up to three years for anyone convicted of advocating the overthrow of the government and up to two years for “discrediting the country." An opposition leader, Anatoly V. Lebedko, compared the legislation to repressive Soviet-era laws. “These actions show that Lukashenko knows he cannot win the election honestly," he said in an interview. The European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe denounced the legislation as a threat to political opposition and civil society.

—The
New York Times
, December 3, 2005

We are air, we are not earth . . .
—Mesab Mamardashvili

I don't know what I should talk about—about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn't know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire house where he worked. On the second floor. There were three other young couples, we all shared a kitchen. On the first floor they kept the trucks. The red fire trucks. That was his job. So I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon."

I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he's still not back.

The smoke was from the burning bitumen, which had covered the roof. He said later it was like walking on tar. They tried to beat down the flames. They kicked at the burning graphite with their feet. . . . They weren't wearing their canvas gear. They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves. No one told them. They had been called for a fire, that was it.

Four o’clock. Five. Six. At six we were supposed to go to his parents’ house. To plant potatoes. It’s forty kilometers from Pripyat to Sperizhye, where his parents live. Sowing, plowing—he loved doing that. His mother always told me they didn't want him to move to the city, they’d even built a new house for him. He was drafted into the army. He served in the fire brigade in Moscow and when he came out, he wanted to be a fireman. And nothing else!
[Silence.]

Sometimes it’s as though I hear his voice. Alive. Even photographs don’t have the same effect on me as that voice. But he never calls out to me . . . not even in my dreams. I’m the one who calls to him.

Seven o’clock. At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran there, but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: the ambulances are radioactive, stay away! I wasn’t the only one there, all the wives whose husbands were at the reactor that night had come. I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. “Get me inside!” “I can’t. He’s bad. They all are.” I held on to her. “Just to see him!” “All right,” she said. “Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.

“He needs milk, lots of milk,” my friend said. “They should drink at least three liters each." “But he doesn’t like milk." “He’ll drink it now.” Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital, and especially the orderlies, later got sick themselves and died. But we didn’t know that then.

At ten in the morning, the cameraman Shishenok died. He was the first. On the first day. We learned that another one was left under the debris—Valera Khodemchuk. They never did reach him. They buried him under the concrete. And we didn’t know then that they were just the first ones.

I said, “Vasya, what should I do?” “Get out of here! Go! You have our child.” But how can I leave him? He’s telling me: “Go! Leave! Save the baby.” “First I need to bring you some milk, then we'll decide what to do.” My friend Tanya Kibenok comes running in—her husband's in the same room. Her father’s with her, he has a car. We get in and drive to the nearest village for some milk. It's about three kilometers from town. We buy a bunch of three-liter bottles, six, so it's enough for everyone. But they started throwing up from the milk. They kept passing out, they got put on IVs. The doctors kept telling them they'd been poisoned by gas. No one said anything about radiation. And the town was inundated right away with military vehicles, they closed off all the roads. The trolleys stopped running, and the trains. They were washing the streets with some white powder. I worried about getting to the village the next day to buy some more fresh milk. No one talked about the radiation. Only the military people wore surgical masks. The people in town were carrying bread from the stores, just open sacks with the loaves in them. People were eating cupcakes on plates.

I couldn't get into the hospital that evening. There was a sea of people. I stood under his window, he came over and yelled something to me. It was all so desperate! Someone in the crowd heard him—they were being taken to Moscow that night. All the wives got together in one group. We decided we’d go with them. Let us go with our husbands! You have no right! We punched and clawed. The soldiers—there were already soldiers—pushed us back. Then the doctor came out and said, Yes, they were flying to Moscow, but we needed to bring them their clothes. The clothes they’d worn at the station had been burned. The buses had stopped running already and we ran across the city. We came running back with their bags, but the plane was already gone. They tricked us. So that we wouldn't be there yelling and crying.

It’s night. On one side of the street there are buses, hundreds of buses, they’re already preparing the town for evacuation, and on the other side, hundreds of fire trucks. They came from all over. And the whole street is covered in white foam. We’re walking on it, just cursing and crying. Over the radio they tell us they might evacuate the city for three to five days, take your warm clothes with you, you’ll be living in the forest. In tents. People were even glad—a camping trip! We’ll celebrate May Day like that, a break from routine. People got barbeques ready. They took their guitars with them, their radios. Only the women whose husbands had been at the reactor were crying.

I can't remember the trip out to my parents’ village. It was like I woke up when I saw my mother. “Mama. Vasya’s in Moscow. They flew him out on a special plane!" But we finished planting the garden.
[A week later the village was evacuated.]
Who knew? Who knew that then? Later in the day I started throwing up. I was six months pregnant. I felt awful. That night I dreamed he was calling out to me in his sleep: “Lyusya! Lyusenka!” But after he died, he didn’t call out in my dreams anymore. Not once.
[She starts crying.]
I got up in the morning thinking I have to get to Moscow. By myself. My mother’s crying: “Where are you going, the way you are?" So I took my father with me. He went to the bank and took out all the money they had.

I can't remember the trip. The trip just isn’t in my memory.

In Moscow we asked the first police officer we saw, Where did they put the Chernobyl firemen, and he told us. We were surprised, too, everyone was scaring us that it was top secret. “Hospital number 6. At the Shchukinskaya stop."

It was a special hospital, for radiology, and you couldn't get in without a pass. I gave some money to the woman at the door, and she said, “Go ahead." Then I had to ask someone else, beg. Finally I’m sitting in the office of the head radiologist, Angelina Vasilyevna Guskova. But I didn’t know that yet, what her name was, I didn't remember anything. I just knew I had to see him. Right away she asked: “Do you have kids?”

What should I tell her? I can see already I need to hide that I'm pregnant. They won't let me see him! It's good I'm thin, you can't really tell.

“Yes," I say.

“How many?"

I'm thinking, “I need to tell her two. If it's just one, she won’t let me in."

“A boy and a girl."

“So you don't need to have anymore. All right, listen: his central nervous system is completely compromised, his skull is completely compromised."

Okay, I'm thinking, so he’ll be a little fidgety.

“And listen: if you start crying, I'll kick you out right away. No hugging or kissing. Don’t even get near him. You have half an hour."

But I knew already that I wasn't leaving.
If I leave, then it'll be with him
, I swore to myself! I come in, they're sitting on the bed, playing cards and laughing.

“Vasya!" they call out.

He turns around:

“Oh, now it's over! Even here she found me!"

He looks so funny, he's got pajamas on for a size 48, and he’s a size 52. The sleeves are too short, the pants are too short. But his face isn't swollen anymore. They were given some sort of fluid.

I say, “Where’d you run off to?"

He wants to hug me, the doctor won’t let him. “Sit, sit," she says. “No hugging in here."

We turned it into a joke somehow. And then everyone comes over, from the other rooms too, everyone from Pripyat. There were twenty-eight of them on the plane. What’s going on? How are things in town? I tell them they've begun evacuating everyone, the whole town is being cleared out for three or five days. None of the guys says anything, and then one of the women, there were two women, she was on duty at the factory the day of the accident, she starts crying.

“Oh God! My kids are there. What's happening with them?"

I wanted to be with him alone, if only for a minute. The guys felt it, and each of them thought of some excuse, and they all went out into the hall. Then I hugged and kissed him. He moved away.

“Don’t sit near me. Get a chair."

“That’s just silly," I said, waving it away. “Did you see the explosion? Did you see what happened? You were the first ones there."

“It was probably sabotage. Someone set it up. All the guys think so.”

That’s what people were saying then. That's what they thought.

The next day, they were lying by themselves, each in his own room. They were banned from going in the hallway, from talking to each other. They knocked on the walls with their knuckles. Dash-dot, dash-dot. The doctors explained that everyone's body reacts differently to radiation, one person can handle what another can't. They even measured the radiation of the walls where they had them. To the right, left, and the floor beneath. They moved out all the sick people from the floor below and the floor above. There was no one left in the place.

For three days I lived with my friends in Moscow. They kept saying: Take the pot, take the plate, take whatever you need. I made turkey soup for six. For six of our boys. Firemen. From the same shift. They were all on duty that night: Bashuk, Kibenok, Titenok, Pravik, Tischura. I went to the store and bought them toothpaste and toothbrushes and soap. They didn’t have any of that at the hospital. I bought them little towels. Looking back, I'm surprised by my friends: they were afraid, of course, how could they not be, there were rumors already, but still they kept saying: Take whatever you need, take it! How is he? How are they all? Will they live? Live. [She
is silent
.] I met a lot of good people then, I don't remember all of them. I remember an old woman janitor, who taught me: “There are sicknesses that can’t be cured. You just have to sit and watch them.”