Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (9 page)

Lena M.—from Kyrgyzstan. She sits at the entrance to her home as if posing for a photograph. Her five children sit near her, as does their cat, Metelitsa, whom they brought with them:

We left like we were leaving a war. We grabbed everything, and the cat followed us to the train station, so we took him, too. We were on the train for twelve days. The last two days all we had left was some canned sauerkraut and boiled water. We guarded the door—with a crowbar, and an axe, and a hammer. I’ll put it this way—one night some looters attacked us. They almost killed us. They'll kill you now for a television or refrigerator. It was like we were leaving a war, although they're not shooting yet in Kyrgyzstan. There were massacres, even under Gorbachev, in Osh, the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks—but it settled down somehow. But we're Russian, though the Kyrgyz are afraid of it, too. You'd be in line for bread and they'd start yelling, “Russians, go home! Kyrgyzstan for the Kyrgyz!" And they’d push you out of line. And then they'd add something in Kyrgyz, like, Here we are, there's not even enough bread for us, and we have to feed them? I don’t really know their language very well, I just learned a few words so I could haggle at the market, buy something.

We had a motherland, and now it's gone. What am I? My mother’s Ukrainian, my father's Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We're all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says “Russian,” but we're not Russian. We’re Soviet! But that country—where I was born—no longer exists. The place we called our motherland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which was also our motherland. I have five children. The oldest is in eighth grade, and the youngest is in kindergarten. I brought them here. Our country no longer exists, but we do.

And I was happy once. All my children were born of love. I gave birth like this: boy, boy, boy, and then girl, girl. I don't want to talk anymore. I'll start crying.
[But she had a bit more.]
We'll wait in Chernobyl. This is our home now. Chernobyl is our home, our motherland.
[She smiles suddenly]
The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue.
[When we’re saying goodbye, she says some more.]
Early one morning the neighbors are hammering away on the house, taking the boards off the windows. I see a woman. I say, “Where are you from?” "From Chechnya." She doesn't say anything more, just starts crying ...

People don’t understand. “Why are you killing your children?" Oh, God, where do you find the strength to meet the things that the next day is going to bring? I’m not killing them, I’m saving them. Here I am, forty years old and completely gray. And they're surprised. They don’t understand. They say: “Would you bring your kids to a place where there was cholera or the plague?" But that's the plague and that’s cholera. This fear that they have here in Chernobyl, I don’t know about it. It's not part of my memory.

___

I was running away from the world. At first I hung around train stations, I liked it there, so many people and you're all by yourself. Then I came here. Freedom is here.

I've forgotten my own life. Don't ask me about it. I remember what I've read in books, and what other people have told me, but my own life I've forgotten. It was a long time ago. I did wrong. But there’s no sin that God won't forgive if the penance is sincere.

A man can’t possibly be happy. He’s not supposed to be. God saw that Adam was lonely and gave him Eve. For happiness, not for sin. But man isn't capable of happiness. Like me, for example, I don't like twilight. I don't like the dark. This corridor, like right now, between light and dark. I still don’t understand where I was—how it was—and it doesn’t matter. I can live or not live, it doesn't matter. The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire. I fell in love with contemplation. Here you can die equally well from an animal or from the cold. There's no one for tens of kilometers. You can chase off demons by fasting and praying. You fast for your flesh, and you pray for your soul. But I'm never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages—I used to find spaghetti, flour—even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries— people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don’t need it. They don't mind. In the fields there’s wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here.

I read in a book—it was by Father Sergei Bulgakov—“It's certain that God created the world, and therefore the world can't possibly fail," and so it's necessary to “endure history courageously and to the very end." Another thinker says, I don’t remember his name, but in effect he says: “Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light." It's easy to find books here. Now, an empty clay pitcher, or a spoon or fork, that you won’t find, but books are all over. The other day I found a volume of Pushkin. “And the thought of death is sweet to my soul." I remembered that. Yes: “The thought of death." I am here alone. I think about death. I’ve come to like thinking. And silence helps you to prepare yourself. Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is. But I’m here alone. Yesterday I chased a wolf and a she-wolf out of the school, they were living there.

Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.

And I’ll say this: birds, and trees, and ants, they’re closer to me now than they were. I think about them, too. Man is frightening. And strange. But I don’t want to kill anyone here. I fish here, I have a rod. Yes. But I don’t shoot animals. And I don't set traps. You don’t feel like killing anyone here.

Prince Myshkin said: “Is it possible to see a tree and not be happy?”

What’s the point of looking at evil? Evil is important, of course. Sin isn’t a matter of physics. You have to acknowledge the nonexistent. It says in the Bible: “For those who walk in light, it is one way; and for the rest, there is the teaching." If you take a bird—or any other living thing—we can’t understand them, because they live for themselves, and not for others. Yes. Everything around is fluid, to put it in just one word.

I pray simply. I pray for myself Oh Lord, call upon me! Hear me! Only in evil is a man clever and refined. But how simple and sympathetic he is when speaking the honest words of love. Even when the philosophers use words they are only approximations of the thoughts they have felt. The word corresponds exactly to what is in the soul only in prayer, in the thought of prayer. I feel that physically to be true. Oh, Lord, call upon me! Hear me!

And man, also.

I am afraid of man. And also I want to meet him. I want to meet a good person. Yes. Here it's either looters, who are hiding out, or people like me, martyrs.

What's my name? I don't have a passport. The police took it. They beat me. “What're you hanging around for?” ‘‘I'm not hanging around—I'm repenting.” They beat me harder after that. They beat me on the head. So you should write: “God's servant Nikolai. Now a free man.”

___

The village of Bely Bereg, in the Narovlyansk region, in the Gomel oblast, which was evacuated after the explosion.

Speaking: Anna Artyushenko, Eva Artyushenko, Vasily Artyushenko, Sofya Moroz, Nadezhda Nikolaenko, Aleksandr Nikolaenko, Mikhail Lis.

“And we lived through everything, survived everything . . .”

“Oh, I don't even want to remember it. It's scary. They chased us out, the soldiers chased us. The big military machines rolled in. The all-terrain ones. One old man—he was already on the ground. Dying. Where was he going to go? I'll just get up,' he was crying, ‘and walk to the cemetery. I’ll do it myself.' What'd they pay us for our homes? What? Look at how pretty it is here! Who's going to pay us for this beauty? It's a resort zone!"

“Planes, helicopters—there was so much noise. The trucks with trailers. Soldiers. Well, I thought, the war's begun. With the Chinese or the Americans.'’ “My husband came home from the collective farm meeting, he says, “Tomorrow we get evacuated.' And I say: ‘What about the potatoes? We didn't dig them out yet. We didn't get a chance.' Our neighbor knocks on the door, and we sit down for a drink. We have a drink and they start cursing the collective farm chairman. ‘We're not going, period. We lived through the war, now it's radiation.' Even if we have to bury ourselves, we’re not going!”

“At first we thought, we're all going to die in two to three months. That's what they told us. They propagandized us. Scared us. Thank God—we’re alive."

“Thank God! Thank God!"

“No one knows what’s in the other world. It's better here. More familiar.'’

“We were leaving—I took some earth from my mother's grave, put it in a little sack. Got down on my knees: ‘Forgive us for leaving you.' I went there at night and I wasn't scared. People were writing their names on the houses. On the wood. On the fences. On the asphalt.”

“The soldiers killed the dogs. Just shot them. Bakh-bakh! After that I can't listen to something that's alive and screaming."

“I was a brigade leader at the collective farm. Forty-five years old. I felt sorry for people. We took our deer to Moscow for an exhibition, the collective farm sent us. We brought a pin back and a red certificate. People spoke to me with respect. ‘Vasily Nikolaevich. Nikoleavich.’ And who am I now? Just an old man in a little house. I'll die here, the women will bring me water, they'll heat the house. I felt sorry for people. I saw women walking from the fields at night singing, and I knew they wouldn't get anything. Just some sticks on payday. But they're singing . . ."

“Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest . . ."

‘I'll say more: I lived at my son's on the seventh floor. I'd come up to the window, look down, and cross myself. I thought I heard a horse. A rooster. I felt terrible. Sometimes I'd dream about my yard: I'd tie the cow up and milk it and milk it. I wake up. I don't want to get up. I'm still there. Sometimes I'm here, sometimes there."

“During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home—in our dreams.”

“The nights are very long here in the winter. We'll sit, sometimes, and count: Who's died?”

“My husband was in bed for two months. He didn't say anything, didn't answer me. He was mad. I'd walk around the yard, come back: ‘Old man, how are you?' He looks up at my voice, and that's already better. As long as he was in the house. When a person's dying, you can't cry. You’ll interrupt his dying, he'll have to keep struggling. I took a candle from the closet and put it in his hand. He took it and he was breathing. I could see that his eyes had grown dull already. I didn't cry. I asked for just one thing: ‘Say hello to our daughter and to my dear mother.' I prayed that we’d go together. Some gods would have done it, but He didn't let me die. I'm alive . . .” “Girls! Don’t cry. We were always on the front lines. We were Stakhanovites. We lived through Stalin, through the war! If I didn’t laugh and comfort myself, I'd have hanged myself long ago.

“I washed the house, bleached the stove. You need to leave some bread on the table and some salt, a little plate and three spoons. As many spoons as there are souls in the house. All so we could come back.”

''And the chickens had black cockscombs, not red ones, because of the radiation. And you couldn’t make cheese. We lived a month without cheese and cottage cheese. The milk didn't go sour—it curdled into powder, white powder. Because of the radiation."

“I had that radiation in my garden. The whole garden went white, white as white can be, like it was covered with something. Chunks of something. I thought maybe someone brought it from the forest."
[This effect occurred throughout the region and was presumably caused by toxic radiation.]

“We didn’t want to leave. The men were all drunk, they were throwing themselves under cars. The big Party bosses were walking to all the houses and begging people to go. Orders: “Don’t take your belongings!"

“The cattle hadn’t had water in three days. No feed. That’s it! A reporter came from the paper. The drunken milkmaids almost killed him."

“The chief is walking around my house with the soldiers. Trying to scare me: ‘Come out or we’ll burn it down! Boys! Give me the gas can.’ I was running around—grabbing a blanket, grabbing a pillow.”

“During the war you hear the guns all night hammering, rattling. We dug a hole in the forest. They’d bomb and bomb. Burned everything—not just the houses, but the gardens, the cherry trees, everything. Just as long as there’s no war. That's what I’m scared of."

“They asked the Armenian broadcaster: ‘Maybe there are Chernobyl apples?’ ‘Sure, but you have to bury the core really deep.' "

“They gave us a new house. Made of stone. But, you know, we didn't hammer in a single nail in seven years. It wasn’t ours. It was foreign. My husband cried and cried. All week he works on the collective farm on the tractor, waits for Sunday, then on Sunday he lies against the wall and wails away . . .”

“No one's going to fool us anymore, we're not moving anywhere. There’s no store, no hospital. No electricity. We sit next to a kerosene lamp and under the moonlight. And we like it! Because we’re home.”

“In town my daughter-in-law followed me around the apartment and wiped down the door handle, the chair. And it was all bought with my money, all the furniture and the Zhiguli, too, with the money the government gave me for the house and the cow. As soon as the money's finished, Mom’s not needed anymore.’’

“Our kids took the money. Inflation took the rest. You can buy a kilo of nice candy with the money they gave us for our homes.’’ “I walked for two weeks. I had my cow with me. They wouldn't let me in the house. I slept in the forest.”

“They’re afraid of us. They say we're infectious. Why did God punish us? He’s mad? We don’t live like people, we don’t live according to His laws anymore. That’s why people are killing one another.”