Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (5 page)

I remember everything. Everyone up and left, but they left their dogs and cats. The first few days I went around pouring milk for all the cats, and I’d give the dogs a piece of bread. They were standing in their yards waiting for their masters. They waited for them a long time. The hungry cats ate cucumbers. They ate tomatoes. Until autumn I took care of my neighbor’s lawn, up to the fence. Her fence fell down, I hammered it back up again. I waited for the people. My neighbor had a dog named Zhuchok. “Zhuchok," I’d say, “if you see the people first, give me a shout."

One night I dreamt I was getting evacuated. The officer yells, “Lady! We’re going to burn everything down and bury it. Come out!" And they drive me somewhere, to some unknown place. Not clear where. It’s not the town, it's not the village. It's not even Earth.

One time—I had a nice little kitty. Vaska. One winter the rats were really hungry and they were attacking. There was nowhere to go. They'd crawl under the covers. I had some grain in a barrel, they put a hole in the barrel. But Vaska saved me. I'd have died without him. We'd talk, me and him, and eat dinner. Then Vaska disappeared. The hungry dogs ate him, maybe, I don't know. They were always running around hungry, until they died. The cats were so hungry they ate their kittens. Not during the summer, bur during the winter they would. God, forgive me!

Sometimes now I can't even make it all the way through the house. For an old woman even the stove is cold during the summer. The police come here sometimes, check things out, they bring me bread. But what are they checking for?

It's me and the cat. This is a different cat. When we hear the police, we're happy. We run over. They bring him a bone. Me they'll ask: “What if the bandits come?" “What'll they get off me? What'll they take? My soul? Because that's all I have." They’re good boys. They laugh. They brought me some batteries for my radio, now I listen to it. I like Lyudmilla Zykina, but she's not singing as much anymore. Maybe she's old now, like me. My man used to say—he used to say, “The dance is over, put the violin back in the case."

I'll tell you how I found my kitty. I lost my Vaska. I waited a day, two days, then a month. So that was that. I was all alone. No one even to talk to. I walked around the village, going into other people's yards, calling out: Vaska. Murka. Vaska! Murka! At first there were a lot of them running around, and then they disappeared somewhere. Death doesn't care. The earth takes everyone. So I’m walking, and walking. For two days. On the third day I see him under the store. We exchange glances. He's happy, I’m happy. But he doesn’t say anything. “All right," I say, “let’s go home." But he sits there, meowing. So then I say: “What'll you do here by yourself? The wolves will eat you.

They'll tear you apart. Let’s go. I have eggs, I have some lard.” But how do I explain it to him? Cats don’t understand human language, then how come he understood me? I walk ahead, and he runs behind me. Meowing. ‘I'll cut you off some lard." Meow. “We’ll live together the two of us.” Meow. ‘I'll call you Vaska, too." Meow. And we've been living together two winters now.

I get bored sometimes, and then I cry.

I go to the cemetery. My mom's there. My little daughter. She burned up with typhus during the war. Right after we took her to the cemetery, buried her, the sun came out from the clouds. And shone and shone. Like: You should go and dig her up. My husband is there. Fedya. I sit with them all. I sigh a little. You can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you're alone . . . And when you're sad. When you're very sad.

Ivan Gavrilenko, he was a teacher, he lived right next to the cemetery. He moved to the Crimea, his son was there. Next to him was Pyotr Miusskiy. He drove a tractor. He was a Stakhanovite, back then everyone was aching to be a Stakhanovite. He had magic hands. He could make lace out of wood. His house, it was the size of the whole village. Oh, I felt so bad, and my blood boiled, when they tore it down. They buried it. The officer was yelling: “Don't think of it, grandma! It’s on a hot-spot!" Meanwhile he's drunk. I come over—Pyotr's crying. “Go on, grandma, it's all right." He told me to go. And the next house is Misha Mikhalev's, he heated the kettles on the farm. He died fast. Left here, and died right away. Next to his house was Stepa Bykhov's, he was a zoologist. It burned down! Bad people burned it down at night. Stepa didn't live long. He’s buried somewhere in the Mogilev region. During the war—we lost so many people! Vassily Kovalev. Maksim Nikoforenko. They used to live, they were happy. On holidays they'd sing, dance. Play the harmonica.

And now, it’s like a prison. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and go through the village—well, I say to them, what radiation? There’s a butterfly flying, and bees are buzzing. And my Vaska’s catching mice.
[Starts crying.]

Oh Lyubochka, do you understand what I’m telling you, my sorrow? You’ll carry it to people, maybe I won’t be here anymore. I’ll be in the ground. Under the roots . . .

Zinaida Kovalenko, re-settler

___

I want to bear witness . . .

It happened ten years ago, and it happens to me again every day.

We lived in the town of Pripyat. In that town.

I’m not a writer. I won’t be able to describe it. My mind is not enough to understand it. And neither is my university degree. There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re turned into a Chernobyl person, an animal that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can't. People look at you differently. They ask you: Was it scary? How did the station burn? What did you see? And, you know, can you have children? Did your wife leave you? At first we were all turned into animals. The very word “Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look. He’s from there!

That’s how it was in the beginning. We didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole lives. We left on the third day. The reactor was on fire. I remember one of my friends saying, “It smells of reactor.” It was an indescribable smell. But the papers were already writing about that. They turned Chernobyl into a house of horrors, although actually they just turned it into a cartoon. I’m only going to tell about what’s really mine. My own truth.

It was like this: They announced over the radio that you couldn’t take your cats. So we put her in the suitcase. But she didn’t want to go, she climbed out. Scratched everyone. You can’t take your belongings! All right, I won’t take all my belongings, I’ll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can’t leave the door. I’ll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door—it's our talisman, it’s a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don’t know whose tradition this is, it’s not like that everywhere, bur my mother told me that the deceased must be placed on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That’s me growing up. It’s marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my son grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?

I asked my neighbor, he had a car: “Help me.” He gestured toward his head, like, You’re not quite right, are you? But I took it with me, that door. At night. On a motorcycle. Through the woods. It was two years later, when our apartment had already been looted and emptied. The police were chasing me. “We'll shoot! We’ll shoot!” They thought I was a thief. That’s how I stole the door from my own home.

I took my daughter and my wife to the hospital. They had black spots all over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear. About the size of a five-kopek coin. But nothing hurt. They did some tests on them. I asked for the results. “It’s not for you," they said. I said, “Then who’s it for?”

Back then everyone was saying: “We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By the year 2000, there won’t be any Belarussians left.” My daughter was six years old. I’m putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: “Daddy, I want to live, I’m still little." And I had thought she didn’t understand anything.

Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room . . . But enough! That's it! When I talk about it, I have this feeling, my heart tells me—you’re betraying them. Because I need to describe it like I’m a stranger. My wife came home from the hospital. She couldn’t take it. “It’d be better for her to die than to suffer like this. Or for me to die, so that I don’t have to watch anymore." No, enough! That’s it! I’m not in any condition. No.

We put her on the door ... on the door that my father lay on. Until they brought a little coffin. It was small, like the box for a large doll.

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.

Nikolai Kalugin, father

___

Artyom Bakhtiyarov, private; Oleg Vorobey, liquidator; Vasily Gusinovich, driver and scout; Gennady Demenev, police officer; Vitaly Karbalevich, liquidator; Valentin Kmkov, driver and pri-vote; Eduard Korotkov, helicopter pilot; Igor Litvin, liquidator; Ivan Lukashuk, private; Aleksandr Mikhalevich, Geiger operator; Major Oleg Pavlov, helicopter pilot; Anatoly Rybak, commander of a guard regiment; Viktor Sanko, private; Grigory Khvorost, liquidator; Aleksandr Shinkevich, police officer; Vladimir Shved, captain; Aleksandr Yasinskiy, police officer.

Our regiment was given the alarm. It was only when we got to the Belorusskaya train station in Moscow that they told us where we were going. One guy, I think he was from Leningrad, began to protest. They told him they'd drag him before a military tribunal. The commander said exactly that before the troops: “You’ll go to jail or be shot." I felt the complete opposite of that guy. I wanted to do something heroic. Maybe it was kid's stuff. But there were others like me. We had guys from all over the Soviet Union. Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Armenians ... It was scary but also exciting, for some reason.

So they brought us in, and they took us right to the power station. They gave us white robes and white caps. And gauze surgical masks. We cleaned the territory. We spent a day cleaning down below, and then a day above, on the roof of the reactor. Everywhere we used shovels. The guys who went up, we called them the storks. The robots couldn't do it, their systems got all crazy. But we worked. And we were proud of it.

*

We rode in—there was a sign that said, Zone Off Limits. I’d never been to war, but I got a familiar feeling. I remembered it from somewhere. From where? I connected it to death, for some reason . .

We met these crazed dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: they didn't recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn't understand what was wrong with them until they told us to start shooting at them . . . The houses were all sealed up, the farm machinery was abandoned. It was interesting to see. There was no one, just us and the police on their patrols. You'd walk into a house—there were photographs on the wall, but no people. There’d be documents lying around: people's Komsomol
[Communist Youth League]
IDs, other forms of identification, awards. At one place we took a television for a while—we borrowed it, say—but as far as anyone actually taking something home with them, I didn’t see that. First of all, because you sensed that these people would be back any minute. And second, these things were connected somehow with death.

People drove to the block, the actual reactor. They wanted to photograph themselves there, to show the people at home. They were scared, but also really curious: what was this thing? I didn't go, myself, I have a young wife, I didn't want to risk it, but the boys downed a few shots and went over. So ...
[Silent.]

*

The village street, the field, the highway—all of it without any people. A highway to nowhere. Electrical wires on the posts to nowhere. At first there were still lights on in the houses, but then they turned those off. We'd be driving around, and a wild boar would jump out of a school building at us. Or else a rabbit. Everywhere, animals instead of people: in the houses, the schools, the clubs. There are still posters: “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind." “The world proletariat will triumph.” “The ideas of Lenin are immortal." You go back to the past. The collective farm offices have red flags, brand-new wimples, neat piles of printed banners with profiles of the great leaders. On the walls—pictures of the leaders; on the desks—busts of the leaders. A war memorial. A village churchyard. Houses that were shut up in a hurry, gray cement cow-pens, tractor mechanic’s shops. Cemeteries and victims. As if a warring tribe had left some base in a hurry and then gone into hiding.

We’d ask each other: is this what our life is like? It was the first time we saw it from the outside. The very first time. It made a real impression. Like a smack to the head. . . . There’s a good joke: the nuclear half-life of a Kiev cake is thirty-six hours. So ... And for me? It took me three years. Three years later I turned in my Party card. My little Red book. I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.

*

There’s this abandoned house. It's closed. There's a cat on the windowsill. I think—must be a clay cat. I come over, and it’s a real cat. He ate all the flowers in the house. Geraniums. How'd he get in? Or did they leave him there?

There’s a note on the door: “Dear Kind Person, Please don't look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don’t trash the place. We’ll be back." I saw signs on other houses in different colors—“Dear house, forgive us!" People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they’d written: “we’re leaving in the morning," or, “we’re leaving at night,” and they’d put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: “Don’t beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything." And then in a child’s handwriting: “Don't kill our Zhulka. She’s a good cat.”
[Closes his eyes.]
I've forgotten everything. I only remember that I went there, and after that I don't remember anything. I forgot all of it. I can’t count money. My memory’s not right. The doctors can't understand it. I go from hospital to hospital. But this sticks in my head: you're walking up to the house, thinking the house is empty, and you open the door and there’s this cat. That, and those kids' notes.