Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

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Land of the Dead

Monologue on why people remember

I’ve got a question too. Something I can’t really answer myself.

You’ve decided to write about it. And I don’t really want people to know all those things about me, what I went through there. See, I feel the urge to open up, to unburden myself, but then I feel like I’m baring my soul, and that’s something I don’t want to do.

Remember War and Peace? After the war, Pierre Bezukhov is so shaken that he feels he and the whole world can never be the same. But, soon enough, he catches himself slipping back into his old ways: having a go at the coachman, grumbling and growling. So why do people remember things? Is it to get at the truth? For the sake of justice? To let go and forget? Because they realize they were part of some monumental event? Or are they taking refuge in the past? And then there’s the fact that memory is fragile, fleeting, it isn’t precise facts, it’s your conjecture about your own self. It’s just emotions, not proper knowledge.

I got all worked up, rummaged through my memory and it came back.

For me, my most terrible time was in childhood. It was the war.

I remember us boys playing ‘Mummies and Daddies’: we used to undress the tiny children and lay them on top of each other. They were the first children born after the war. The whole village knew what their first words were, which of them had started walking, because children got forgotten in the war. We were waiting for new life to appear. ‘Mummies and Daddies’ we called that game. We wanted to see new life appearing. We were only eight or ten years old ourselves.

In the bushes by the river, I saw a woman killing herself. She took a brick and was bashing herself on the head. She was pregnant by a Nazi collaborator the whole village hated. When I was still a boy, I saw kittens being born, helped my mother pull the calf out of a cow, took our sow for mating with a boar. I remember … remember when they brought my father home dead. He had a sweater on that Mother had knitted him. He must have been shot by a machine gun or assault rifle and some bloody lumps were bulging out from the sweater. He lay on our only bed, we had nowhere else to put him. Then we buried him in front of the house. The earth in his grave wasn’t light and soft, it was heavy clay from the beetroot patch. There was fighting all around us. Dead horses and people lying in the streets.

For me, those memories are so off limits that I’ve never spoken aloud about them.

Back then, I looked at death the same way I looked at birth. It brought up pretty much the same feelings as when the calf came out of the cow. Or the kittens were being born. Or when the woman was killing herself in the bushes. Somehow it all seemed the same thing, no different. Birth and death.

I remember from my childhood the smell in the house when a pig was slaughtered. You’ve barely nudged me, but I’m sliding back into that nightmare, that horror. Falling headlong …

Something else I remember is the women taking us little ones to the bathhouse. Many of them, my mother too, had their wombs slipping out of place (we knew all about it), and they trussed themselves up with rags. I saw it. Their wombs were slipping out from all the hard labour. There were no men: they were all being wiped out at the front or in partisan fighting. There were no horses either, so the women drew the ploughs themselves. They ploughed the vegetable plots and the collective-farm fields. When I grew up and had intercourse with women, I remembered what I saw in the bathhouse.

I wanted to forget. Forget everything. And I was forgetting. I thought the worst was behind me, the war years, and that now I was safe. Protected by my knowledge, by what I’d gone through there. But …

I went into the Chernobyl Zone. Been there many times now. It was there I realized I was helpless. And I’m falling apart because of this helplessness. Because I can no longer recognize the world. Everything has changed. Even evil is different. The past can’t protect me any more. It can’t comfort me, can’t offer me any answers. It used to have answers. (He becomes pensive.)

Why do people remember the past? Well, I’ve spoken to you now, put it into words, made sense of something. I don’t feel quite so isolated now. But how is it for other people?

Pyotr S., psychologist

Monologue on how we can talk with both the living and the dead

A wolf came into the yard in the night. I looked out the window and it was standing there, eyes blazing. Like headlamps.

I’ve grown used to it all. Seven years I’ve been living alone. It’s seven years since everybody left. At night, sometimes I’ll sit till dawn, just thinking and thinking. Spent the whole of last night hunched up on the bed, then went out to see the sun. What can I tell you? The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that’s all the justice you’ll find in this world. I’ve slogged my guts out honestly all my life, lived with a clear conscience, but not much justice has come my way. God must have been doling out everyone’s share, and when my turn came the pot was empty. For the young, there’s a chance death might come knocking, but for us old ones it’s a sure thing. We’re none of us immortal, not even the tsars or merchants. At first, I was waiting for everyone, thinking they’d all be back. They weren’t leaving forever, it was just for a while. But now I’m waiting for death. Dying might not be difficult, but it’s scary. There’s no church, and the priest doesn’t come to these parts. There’s nowhere to take my sins.

The first time they told us we’d got radiation, we thought it was some sort of disease, anyone who caught it would drop dead. No, they said, it’s something that lies on the ground and gets right inside the ground, but can’t be seen. The animals can probably see it and hear it, but people can’t. But that’s not true! I saw it. This caesium was lying in my vegetable plot until it got wet in the rain. Sort of inky blue, it was. It lay there shimmering in these little lumps. I’d just run back from the collective-farm field and gone to my vegetable plot. And there it was, this blue lump, and a couple of hundred metres away, there was another, as big as the scarf on my head. I yelled to my neighbour and the other women and we all ran around looking for them. Checked all the vegetable plots and the nearby field, a good two hectares. We found maybe four large pieces. One was red. The next day, it was pouring with rain, right from early in the morning. By lunchtime, they were gone. The police came, and there was nothing to show them. We could only describe it all. This big, they were. (She measures with her hands.) Like my headscarf. Dark blue and red ones.

We weren’t all that scared of the radiation. If we hadn’t seen it or known about it, maybe we’d have been frightened, but once we’d had a look, it wasn’t really so scary. The police and soldiers stencilled some numbers. By one of the houses, somewhere in the street, they wrote, ‘70 curies’, ‘60 curies’. We’d been living on our potatoes, our spuds, forever, and here they were saying we couldn’t eat them! And they wouldn’t let us have onions or carrots, either. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. They told us to work on the vegetable plots in gauze masks and rubber gloves. And to bury the ashes from the stove in the ground. Well I never! And then we had some big scientist come to speak at the village club, says we should wash all the firewood. Come off it! Ordered us to launder all the bed linen and curtains. But they’re inside the house! In the wardrobes and linen chests. How could radiation get inside the house? What, past the windows? Past the doors? Barmy! Go and find it in the forests and fields. They locked all the wells shut, covered them in plastic sheeting. The water’s ‘dirty’, they tell us. What do they mean, ‘dirty’? It’s as clean as clean can be! They came out with some right rubbish. ‘You’re all going to die.’ ‘You have to leave.’ ‘We’ve got to evacuate you.’

People were scared. Had one heck of a fright. Some folks began burying their valuables in the night. I stashed away my clothes, my certificates of merit for my hard work, and the savings I was keeping for a rainy day. It was so sad! My heart was bursting with sadness! Swear on my life I’m telling you the truth! Then I heard how in one village the soldiers evacuated the people, but an old couple managed to stay behind. The day before they rounded people up and brought the buses over, that couple got their cow and took to the forest. Sat it out, there. Just like in the war, when the Germans burned the villages down. Where’s it come from, all this misery? (Crying.) It’s fragile, our life. I’d rather not cry, but I can’t help it.

Hey! Look out the window: a magpie’s come. I don’t shoo them away. Though sometimes I get the magpies thieving eggs from the barn. All the same, I don’t shoo them away. We’re all suffering from the same trouble these days. I don’t shoo anybody away! Yesterday, I had a hare run in here.

Now if only I had folks in the house every day. There’s a woman lives not far from here, in the other village, all alone like me. Told her to move over here, I did. She could help me with things, maybe not with everything, but at least there’d be someone to talk to. To invite in. During the night, I’m aching all over. Get these twisty pains in my legs, like a tingly feeling, it’s the nerve shifting about. So I grab something. A fistful of grain. Crunch, crunch … and the nerve calms down. I’ve worked myself to the bone over the years, had my fill of sorrows. Seen enough, I have, don’t need anything more. If I died, it would come as a rest. There’s no telling how my soul would take it, but my body would be at peace. I’ve got daughters, I have, and sons. They’re all in the town. But I’m not budging from this place! God has granted me long years, though He didn’t give me a good lot in life. I know us old ones are a right bother, the children put up with it for a while, then they snap and blurt out something hurtful. Your children only bring you joy while they’re little. Our women who moved to the town, they’re all in tears. One day they’re upset by their daughter-in-law, the next day by their daughter. They want to move back. My good husband, he’s lying in the graveyard. If he wasn’t lying there, he’d be somewhere else. And I’d be there with him. (Suddenly, she livens up.) But why leave? Everything’s fine here! It’s all lush and blooming. From the gnats to the beasts – everyone’s alive and well.

I’ll remember it all for you. There were aeroplanes flying non-stop. Every day. They were flying really low over our heads. Flying to the plant, they were. The nuclear reactor. One after the other. And we had the evacuation, they were doing the resettlement. Storming the houses. People were locking themselves in, hiding away. There were cattle mooing and children crying. Like in the war! And the sun kept shining. I plonked myself down and wouldn’t go out of the house, though I didn’t lock the door. The soldiers knocked: ‘Ready to go, missus?’ I ask, ‘You going to tie up my hands and feet, take me by force?’ They were silent for a bit and then left. So young, just children, really! The old women were crawling in front of their houses on their knees. Praying. The soldiers grabbed them by the armpits, lifted them up, one by one, and hauled them into the bus. But I warned them, touch me or use force and I’ll clobber you with my cane. Oh, I had a right go at them! Swore at them! I didn’t cry. Didn’t shed one teardrop that day.

So I sat indoors. There was screaming. Screaming! And then it went quiet. All died down. That first day, I didn’t leave the house.

They say that people were marched off in file. And the cattle were marched off too. Like in the war!

My good husband liked to say that man pulls the trigger, but God carries the bullet. We all get our different fates. Some of the youngsters who left have already died in their new place. But here I am, walking with my cane. Still on my feet. When it all gets too dreary, I’ll have a cry. The village is empty, but there are all kinds of birds flying here. And the elk wander about calm as anything. (She cries.)

I’ll remember it all for you. People moved out, but the cats and dogs stayed behind. The first few days, I went and poured them milk, gave each dog a piece of bread. They were standing out in their yards, waiting for their owners. They waited so long. The hungry cats were eating cucumbers and tomatoes. Before the autumn, I mowed the neighbour’s grass in front of her gate. Her fence fell down, I nailed it back up. I was waiting for everyone. My neighbour had a little dog; Beetle, he was called. ‘Beetle,’ I said, ‘if you see people first, give me a shout.’

At night, I dreamed I was being evacuated. This officer was shouting, ‘Hey, missus, any moment now we’re going to burn your place down and bury it. Come on out!’ And they took me away to some strange place. I couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t the town or the village. And it wasn’t on earth.

Here’s something that happened. I had a good little cat; Vaska was his name. In the winter, these hungry rats invaded, there was no hiding from them. They got under the blankets, gnawed a hole through a barrel of grain. And Vaska came to the rescue. Without Vaska, I’d have died. We used to chat, have our lunch together. And then Vaska disappeared. Maybe he was attacked and eaten by the hungry dogs? They were all running around famished till they dropped dead; the cats were so hungry they were eating their own kittens, not in the summer, but they did in the winter. Lord, have mercy! And one woman was gnawed to death by rats. In her own house. Ginger rats, they were. I’m not saying it’s true or not, but that’s what they say. The tramps come and snoop around here. In the early years, there was good stuff for the taking: shirts, cardigans, fur coats. Could help yourself and off to the flea market. The tramps liked a good drink and sing-song. They’d swear their heads off. One came off a bicycle and fell asleep in the street. In the morning, they found a couple of bones and the bike. True or not? Who knows, but that’s what they say.

You get everything living here. The lot! There are lizards, the frogs croaking. Worms wriggling. And there are mice. Everything! It’s good in the spring. I love it when the lilac is in flower. The smell of the bird-cherry blossom. While I was firm on my legs, I used to go out for bread, fifteen kilometres each way. When I was a young thing, I’d have flown it. I was used to long walks. After the war, we used to trudge to the Ukraine for seeds. A good thirty or fifty kilometres. People would take sixteen-kilo sacks, while I carried three times that. But these days, I sometimes have trouble crossing the room. Even lying on the stove in summer won’t warm an old woman. The police drive over and check up on the village, and they bring me bread. Only what’s there to check up on? Just me and the cat here. A new cat. The police toot their horn, me and the cat are so happy. We’ll run over. They’ll bring him some bones. And they’ll ask me, ‘What if you’re attacked by bandits?’ ‘Hardly rich pickings for them here, eh? What will they take? My soul? That’s all I’ve got, my soul.’ They’re good lads. They like to laugh. Brought me some batteries for the radio. I listen to the radio now. I love Lyudmila Zykina, but these days she doesn’t sing much. She must have grown old, like me. My good husband liked to say, ‘The ball is over, put the violins away!’

I’ll tell you how I found the cat. My Vaska was gone. I waited a day, a second day, a month. So I really was left all alone. No one to speak to at all. I walked about the village, through other people’s gardens, calling: ‘Vaska, Murka, Vaska! Murka!’ At first, there were lots of them running about, but then they disappeared. They died out. Death isn’t fussy, the earth will take anyone. So I walked and walked. Two days I was calling and calling. On the third day, I find this one, sitting just outside the shop. We look at each other. He’s happy, I’m happy. Only he didn’t say a word. ‘Come on, then,’ I tell him, ‘let’s go home.’ He just sits there. ‘Meow.’ I start coaxing him, ‘You want to stay here all on your own? The wolves will get you. They’ll rip you to pieces. Come on, I’ve got eggs and pork fat.’ Now how are you to get it across? The cat doesn’t understand people’s language, so how could he know what I was saying? I walk ahead, and he’s running behind me. ‘Meow.’ ‘I’ll cut you some fat.’ ‘Meow.’ ‘You and I, we’ll live together.’ ‘Meow.’ ‘I’ll call you Vaska.’ ‘Meow.’ And we’ve already seen through two winters together.

At night, I had this dream someone was calling me. It was the neighbour’s voice. ‘Zina!’ There’s silence. And again, ‘Zina!’

When it all gets too dreary, I’ll have a cry.

I go to the graveyard. My mum is there. My little daughter. She died of typhus in the war. We brought her to the graveyard, buried her, and just then the sun came out from behind the clouds. It was shining so brightly I felt like going back and unburying her. My good husband is there, Fyodya. I’ll sit with them all and sigh. You can talk with both the living and the dead. Makes no difference to me, I hear them all. When you’re alone. And when you’re sad. Terribly sad.

The teacher, Ivan Gavrilenko, lived right by the graveyard. He left to join his son in Crimea. Behind him was Pyotr Miussky’s place, the tractor driver. A Stakhanovite model worker. They all used to dream of being Stakhanovite workers. Was a wizard with his hands, could whittle down wood into lace. The finest house in the village, a real beauty! Oh, it was such a shame, made my blood rise when they brought it down. They buried it. The officer shouted, ‘Don’t grieve, mother. The house is on a hotspot.’ He was drunk. I went up, and he was crying. ‘Go away, mother! Go!’ Chased me away. And past there, it was Misha Mikhalyov’s place, he stoked the boilers on the farm. Misha didn’t last long. Straight after he left, he died. Behind him was the house of the livestock specialist, Stepan Bykhov. Burned down! At night, some wicked people set fire to it. Outsiders, they were. And Stepan didn’t live long either. He’s buried near Mogilyov, where his children live. It’s a second war. The number of people we’ve lost! Vasily Kovalyov, Anna Kotsura, Maxim Nikiforenko. We had good fun in the old days. Singing and dancing in the holidays, accordion music. And now it’s like a prison. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and walk through the village. How can we have radiation here, I tell them, when there’s this butterfly flying, that bumblebee buzzing? And my Vaska catching the mice. (She cries.)

So, my love, have you understood my sadness? Pass it on to the people, though I might not be around by then. They’ll find me in the earth. Under the roots.

Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenka, returnee

Monologue on a whole life written on a door

I want to testify.

It happened ten years ago, and every day it’s still happening to me now. Right now. It’s always with me.

We lived in Pripyat. That same town the whole world knows about now. I’m not a writer, but I am a witness. Here’s how it was, from the very beginning.

You’re living your life. An ordinary fellow. A little man. Just like everyone else around you – going to work, coming home from work. On an average salary. Once a year, you go on holiday. You’ve got a wife, children. A normal sort of guy. And then, just like that, you’ve turned into a Chernobyl person. A curiosity! Some person that everyone shows interest in, but nobody knows much about. You want to be the same as anyone else, but it’s no longer possible. You can’t do it, there’s no going back to the old world. People look at you through different eyes. They ask you questions. Was it terrifying? Tell us about when the reactor was on fire. What did you see? Can you still, you know, have children? So your wife hasn’t left you? In the beginning, we all turned into some kind of rare exhibits. Just the word ‘Chernobyl’ still acts like an alarm. They all turn their heads to look at you. ‘Oh, from that place!’

That’s what it felt like in the first days. We lost not just a town but a whole life.

On the third day, we left our home. The power plant was on fire. Something one of my friends said stuck in my mind: ‘You can smell the reactor.’ The smell was indescribable. But everyone has read about that in the papers. They turned Chernobyl into a factory of horror stories or, rather, cartoons. But it needs to be understood, because we have to live with it. I’ll tell you just my own story.

This is what happened. They announced on the radio: you can’t bring any cats with you! My daughter was in tears; she was so afraid of losing her beloved cat that she began stammering. Right, let’s put the cat in a suitcase! But the cat wouldn’t go in, she was struggling to get out. She gave us all a good scratch. We weren’t allowed to take any belongings. Right, I won’t, but there’s just one thing I will take. Just one! I needed to remove the door to our apartment and take it with us, I couldn’t leave the door behind. I would board up the entrance.

That door was our talisman. An heirloom! My father lay on that door. I’m not sure where the custom comes from – they don’t do it everywhere – but in our parts, according to my mother, the dead have to be laid on the door from their home. They lie on it until the coffin is brought. I sat the whole night with my father, and he lay on that door. The house was open all night. And that same door is covered in notches, right to the top. It was marked as I grew: a notch for first grade, second grade, seventh grade. One from just before I left for the army. And next to that, you can see my son growing up. And my daughter. Our whole life is written on that door, like on an ancient papyrus. How could I leave it behind?

I asked our neighbour for help; he had a car. He tapped his finger on the side of his head, indicating, ‘You have a screw loose, my friend’, but I took it. The door. One night. On a motorbike, along the forest road. I took it two years later, when our apartment had already been looted. Picked clean. The police were chasing after me: ‘Stop or we’ll fire! Stop or we’ll fire!’ They took me for a looter, of course. It’s like I was stealing my own front door.

I sent my wife and daughter to the hospital. They had black spots spreading all over their bodies. They’d spring up and then fade away. The size of an old five-kopeck piece. But nothing was hurting. They were checked. I asked, ‘What’s the result then?’ ‘That’s not your concern.’ ‘So whose concern is it, then?’

At the time, everyone around was saying we were all going to die. By the year 2000, the Belarusians will have died out. My daughter had turned six. On the very day of the accident. When I put her to bed, she’d whisper in my ear, ‘Daddy, I want to live, I’m only little.’ I didn’t think she’d understand anything. Whenever she saw a nurse in a white coat at the kindergarten or a cook in the canteen, she’d go crazy. ‘I don’t want to go to hospital, I don’t want to die!’ She couldn’t stand anything white. We even changed the white curtains in our new place.

Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling … Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony. My wife came back from the hospital. Her nerves snapped: ‘If only she’d die, rather than going through this torture. If only I could die, so I wouldn’t have to see this.’ No, that’s it! I can’t go on! It’s too much. No! …

We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.

I want to testify: my daughter died from Chernobyl. But they want us to keep quiet. ‘It hasn’t been scientifically proved,’ they say. ‘There isn’t enough data. We’ll need to wait hundreds of years.’ But my human life, it’s too short. I can’t wait that long. Write it down. You record it at least. My daughter’s name was Katya. My little Katya. She was seven years old when she died.’

Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father

Monologue of a village on how they call the souls from heaven to weep and eat with them

Village of Bely Bereg, Narovlya District, Gomel Province.

Speakers: Anna Pavlovna Artyushenko, Yeva Adamovna

Artyushenko, Vasily Nikolaevich Artyushenko, Sofia Nikolaevna

Moroz, Nadezhda Borisovna Nikolaenko, Alexander

Fyodorovich Nikolaenko and Mikhail Martynovich Lis.

Ah, we’ve got guests. Good people. Didn’t have a hunch about a meeting, didn’t see no signs. Sometimes my palms will itch, and then somebody will turn up. But today, didn’t get a hunch at all. Only sign was the nightingale singing all night, meaning a sunny day ahead. Oh, all the women will be here in a trice. There’s Nadya, already hurrying over.

We survived everything, pulled through it all.

Oh, I don’t want to remember it. Dreadful. They turned us out, the soldiers did. We were swamped by army vehicles and self-propelled guns. One old man had already taken to his bed. He was dying. Where was he meant to go? ‘I’ll just get up,’ he says, crying, ‘and walk over to the graveyard. On my own two legs.’ What did they pay us for the houses? How much? See how gorgeous it is here! Who’s going to pay us for all that beauty? It’s a holiday spot here!

The place was buzzing with aeroplanes and helicopters. There were KamAZ trucks with trailers, soldiers. Aha, I thought, we must be at war. With the Chinese or the Americans.

My good husband got home from the collective-farm meeting and says, ‘Tomorrow we’re being evacuated.’ And I say, ‘But what about the potatoes? We haven’t dug them up.’ The neighbour knocked on the door and joined my husband for a drink. They had a few and started cursing the chairman: ‘We won’t go, and that’s that. We survived the war, and here we’ve just got some silly radiation.’ We’d rather crawl into the ground. We’re not going!

At first, we thought we’d all die in two or three months. They were frightening us, urging us to go. Thank God, we’re still alive!

Thank God! Thank God!

No one knows what the next world will be like. It’s better in this one. Everything is familiar here. As my mum always said, ‘Smarten yourself up, enjoy yourself and do as you please.’

We would go to church and say our prayers.

We were leaving. I took some earth from Mum’s grave in a little pouch. Knelt there for a bit. ‘Forgive us for leaving you.’ At night, I went to her and didn’t feel afraid. People were writing their surnames on the houses. On the logs, the fences, the tarmac.

The soldiers killed the dogs. They shot them. Bang, bang! Ever since, I can’t bear the sound of animals howling.

I used to be a foreman. Worked here forty-five years. I felt sorry for the people. We took our flax to the show in Moscow, the collective farm sent us. I came back with a badge and a certificate of merit. They treated me with respect here, it was all ‘Vasily Nikolaevich, our dear Nikolaevich’. And who would I be in the new place? Just some old grandad. This is where I’ll lay down and die, the women will fetch me water, warm up the house. I felt sorry for the people. In the evenings, the women used to sing on their way back from the fields, and I knew they weren’t getting paid a penny. Just some ticks in their workbooks. And they were singing away.

In our village, the people live together. As one community.

I had this dream when I was already living in the town with my son. This dream that I was waiting for death, waiting for the end. I was instructing my sons: ‘When you carry me to our graveyard, I want you to stand with my coffin by the family house, if only for five minutes.’ And I was watching from above as my sons carried me there.

It may be poisoned with radiation, but this is my home. There’s nowhere else we’re needed. Even a bird loves its nest.

I’ll finish the story. I was living with my son up on the sixth floor. I’d walk over to the window, look down and cross myself. Thought I could hear a horse. Or a cockerel. And I felt so sad. Sometimes I’ll dream of our yard: tethering the cow, and milking her, milking her. Then I wake up, and don’t want to get out of bed; I’m still back there. Some of the time I’m here, some of the time there.

By day we lived in the new place, but at night we went back home. In our dreams.

In the winter, when the nights are long, sometimes we sit counting everyone who’s died. In the town, there are lots who died of nerves and grief at just forty or fifty – is that the right age to go? But we’re still living. Every day, we pray to God, ask Him for just one thing: health.

As they say, the place you were born is where you belong.

My good husband was laid up for two months. He wasn’t speaking, wouldn’t answer me. Like he was upset. I’d potter about the yard, pop back indoors. ‘How are you feeling, husband?’ He’d look up at the sound of my voice, and I’d feel better. So he might be lying there in silence, but at least he was with me in the house. When someone is dying, you mustn’t cry. You’ll disrupt their death, make it harder for them. I got a candle from the cupboard and put it in his hands. He took it and was breathing. I saw his eyes misting over. I didn’t cry. Just asked for one thing: ‘Say hello over there to our little daughter and my precious mum.’ I prayed to be together with him. Some people’s prayers are answered, but He hasn’t granted me death. I’m still here.

I’m not afraid of dying. Nobody gets to live twice. Look how the leaves blow away, the trees topple down.

Don’t cry, old girls! We were star workers for all those years, Stakhanovite workers. We survived Stalin, survived the war! If we hadn’t laughed and had fun, we’d have hanged ourselves ages ago. Two Chernobyl women are chatting. One says, ‘Have you heard, everyone’s got the white blood cancer now?’ The other says, ‘Rubbish! Yesterday, I cut my finger and the blood was red.’

Home is where the heart is. The sunshine isn’t the same anywhere else.

My mother once told me: take an icon, turn it back to front, then leave it like that for three days. No matter where you are, you’ll find your way home. I had two cows and two heifers, five pigs, some geese and chickens. And a dog. I clasped my head in my hands and paced about the orchard. There were so many apples! Everything’s lost. Damn, it’s all gone!

I washed the house, whitewashed the stove. You have to leave bread on the table and salt, a bowl and three spoons. As many spoons as there are souls in the house. To be sure you’ll return.

All the hens’ combs were black, not red: that was the radiation. And we couldn’t make cheese. We went a month without soft cheese or hard. The milk wouldn’t sour, it curdled into lumps, these white lumps. It was the radiation.

Had that radiation stuff in my vegetable plot. The whole plot went white, completely white, like it was dusted with something. With some little specks. I thought maybe something had been carried from the forests. The wind had sprinkled it.

We didn’t want to leave. No, we didn’t! The men were drunk, throwing themselves in front of the cars. The officials were going from house to house, trying to persuade people. The orders were, ‘Leave all your belongings behind!’

The cattle went three whole days without water and food. Took them to be slaughtered! A newspaper journalist arrived: ‘How are you feeling? How are things going?’ The drunken milkmaids nearly murdered the fellow.

The chairman and some soldiers were hovering round my house. They tried frightening me: ‘Come out or we’ll set fire to the place! Hey, pass us the petrol can!’ I started running about – grabbed a towel, a pillow …

Now you tell me how that radiation works, according to science. Tell us the truth, because we’ll be dying soon in any case.

And you reckon they don’t have it in Minsk, seeing as it’s invisible?

My grandson brought me a dog. Called it Radium, because we’re living in this radiation. So where did my Radium get to? Always at my feet. I’m frightened he’ll run out of the village and the wolves will get him. I’ll be left all alone.

In the war years, all through the night, the guns would thud and chatter away. We built dugouts in the forest. They kept on bombing. They burned down everything, not just the cottages, but even the vegetable plot and the cherry trees.

So long as there’s no war … I’m terrified of war!

On Radio Yerevan, a caller asks: ‘Is it okay to eat Chernobyl apples?’ The answer: ‘Yes, but bury the cores deep in the ground.’ A second caller asks: ‘What is seven times seven?’ The answer: ‘Ask a Chernobyl survivor, they’ll count it on their fingers.’ Ha ha.

They gave us a new little house. Made of stone. You know what, in seven years, we haven’t hammered in a single nail. It’s a foreign land! Everything’s foreign. My good husband cried and cried. He would work all week, driving the tractor on the collective farm, waiting for Sunday; and when Sunday came, he’d lie there facing the wall and crying.

Nobody can trick us again, we’re not budging from this place. We’ve got no shop, no hospital. There’s no light. We sit around paraffin lamps and rushlights. But we’re happy! We’re home.

In the town, my daughter-in-law followed me round the apartment with a cloth, wiping the doorknobs, the chairs. And everything was bought with my money, all the furniture, the Lada. When the cash runs out, nobody needs you.

Our children took the money, and inflation ate up the rest. The money they gave us for the smallholding, for the cottages, the apple trees.

On Radio Yerevan, a caller asks: ‘What is a Radio Nanny?’* ‘A grandmother from Chernobyl.’ Ha ha.

I was walking for two weeks. With my cow. People wouldn’t let me into their houses. I had to sleep in the forest.

They’re frightened of us. We’re infectious, they say. What is God punishing us for? He’s angry? We’re not living like humans, not living by God’s laws. We’re killing each other. That’s why He’s angry.

My grandchildren came in the summer. The first few years they didn’t come; like everyone else, they were scared. But now they visit, and they take produce home, they’ll pack whatever you give them. ‘Grandma,’ they said. ‘Have you read a book about Robinson Crusoe?’ He lived alone, just like us. Without anyone. I brought half a sack of matches with me, an axe and a spade. And now I have pork fat, eggs, milk – all my own produce. Just one thing you can’t plant, and that’s sugar. Here you’ve got all the land you could want! Plough a hundred hectares if you like. And there’s no authorities. Nobody bothering you here. No higher-ups. We’re free.

We returned along with our cats. And dogs. We came back together. The soldiers and riot police wouldn’t let us in, so we came by night. Took the forest footpaths. The partisan paths.

There’s nothing we need from the state. We grow everything ourselves. All we ask is to be left alone! We don’t need any shops or buses. We go twenty kilometres on foot for our bread and salt. We can fend for ourselves.

A whole band of us returned. Three families. But the place was gutted: they’d smashed the stove, taken the doors and windows. The floors. The bulbs, switches, sockets – they’d unscrewed the lot. Not a living thing left. I fixed it all up again with my own hands. Oh yes!

The wild geese are screeching: spring is here. It’s time to sow. And here we are in our empty houses. Only the roofs are sound.

The police used to shout at us. They’d drive over, and we’d hide in the forest. Like hiding from the Germans. Once they turned up with the prosecutor. He was threatening to take us to court. I said, ‘They can throw me in jail for a year, but the moment I’m out, I’ll be straight back.’ Their job was to yell, ours was to keep quiet. I have a medal for being one of the top combine drivers, and here he was threatening me. Said I’d get sent down for Article 10. As if I’m a criminal.

Every day, I dreamed about my house. I was returning home: one time I’d be digging in the vegetable plot, another time making the bed. And I’d always find something: a shoe, or some chicks. All good omens, signs of happiness to come. Of a homecoming.

At night, we plead with God, by day we plead with the police. You ask me why I’m crying. I don’t know why. I’m happy to be living in my own dear home.

We survived everything, pulled through it all.

I’ll tell you a joke. The government issues an edict about benefits for Chernobyl victims. Anyone living within twenty kilometres will be addressed as ‘O Beaming One’. Anyone within ten kilometres will be addressed as ‘O Radiant One’. And anyone right near the plant who survived, ‘O Luminous One’. See, O Radiant One, we’re alive. Ha ha.

I finally reached the doctor. ‘My legs won’t carry me, love. And my joints are aching.’ ‘Get rid of the cow, old girl. The milk is poisoned.’ ‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ I said, crying. ‘What with my legs aching and my knees hurting, I’m not giving the cow away. She keeps me fed.’

I’ve got seven children, all of them living in the town. I’m here on my own. Whenever I start missing them, I’ll sit next to their photos, have a chat. I do everything alone. Painted the house on my own, laid on six tins of paint. That’s how I live. Raised four sons and three daughters. And my husband died early. I’m on my own.

I ran into a wolf: he was standing bang in front of me. We stared at each other, and he leapt off to the side. Darted away. My hair went stiff with fear.

All wild animals are afraid of man. Leave the animals alone and they’ll steer clear of you. Before, if you were walking in the forest and heard voices, you’d run over to them, but now people will hide from each other. Heaven forbid you ever meet a man in the forest!

What’s written in the Bible is all coming true. In the Bible it says about our collective farm. And about Gorbachev. It says there’ll be a big leader with a mark on his forehead, and a great power will crumble to dust. And then the Day of Judgement will come. Those in the towns will all die, and just one man will be left in the villages. People will be happy to find a human footprint! Not a human being, just a footprint.

We use lamps for light. Paraffin ones. Ah, the women have already told you. When we kill a pig, we’ll carry it down to the cellar or bury it in the ground. The meat will last three days in the ground. We make moonshine from our own grain. From jam.

I’ve got two sacks of salt. We’ll be all right without the state! Got plenty of firewood – surrounded by forest. The house is warm. The lamps are lit. All good! I keep a nanny goat, a billy goat, three pigs and fourteen hens. There’s land and grass to your heart’s content. Water in the well. Freedom! We like it! What we have here is no collective farm, it’s a commune. Communism! We’ll buy another horse. And then we won’t need anyone. Just one horse.

We didn’t just move home, as one shocked journalist put it, we moved a hundred years back in time. Reaping by sickle, mowing by scythe. We thresh the grain with a flail right here on the tarmac. My good husband makes baskets. And in the winter, I do embroidery and weaving.

In the war, our family lost seventeen members. Two of my brothers were killed. Mum cried and cried. An old woman was going begging from village to village. ‘You’re in mourning?’ she asked Mother. ‘Don’t grieve. The one who lays down his life for others is a holy man.’ I’d do anything for the Motherland. The only thing I couldn’t do is kill. I’m a teacher, and I taught that we should love one another. Good will always triumph. Children are just little, their hearts are pure.

Chernobyl. The war to end all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not on land, in water or in the skies.

First, the radio was turned off. We don’t know any of the news, but it’s a quiet life. We don’t get upset. People come here and tell us there are wars everywhere. And they say Socialism is finished, we’re living under capitalism. And the tsar will return. Is it really true?

Sometimes a boar will come into the orchard from the forest, sometimes an elk. People come rarely, though. Just the police.

Come and visit my home.

And mine. It’s so long since I had guests in the house.

Dear Lord, I cross myself and pray! Twice the police smashed up my stove with an axe. They took me away on a tractor. But I came back! If they’d let people in, everyone would come crawling home on their knees. The news of our troubles has spread across the world. Only the dead are allowed back. They are brought here. But the living come in the night. Through the forest.

They’re all longing to come here for Radunitsa. To the last man. Everyone wants to pray for their dead. The police will let in those who are on their lists, but no children under eighteen. People get here, and they’re so happy to stand near their house, near an apple tree in the orchard. First they cry at the graves, then they go to their old houses. And there they cry some more and pray. Light some candles. They lean against their fences as if they were graves. They might put a wreath by the house, hang a white towel over the gate. The priest will read a prayer: ‘Brothers and sisters! Have patience!’

They take white loaves and eggs to the cemetery, many bring pancakes instead of bread. Whatever they’ve got to hand. Everyone sits at their loved ones’ graves. They call out, ‘Sister, we’re here to visit you. Come and eat with us.’ Or, ‘Dearest Mum, dearest Dad.’ They call the souls down from heaven. People whose loved ones have died during the year will cry, while those who lost them earlier won’t. They have a chat, bring up memories. Everyone prays. Even those who don’t know how to pray join in.

You mustn’t weep for the dead at night. Once the sun’s gone down – you mustn’t. May the Lord rest their souls. Grant them the kingdom of heaven!

Laugh and the world laughs with you. There’s a Ukrainian woman sells big red apples at the market. She was touting her wares: ‘Come and get them! Apples from Chernobyl!’ Someone told her, ‘Don’t advertise the fact they’re from Chernobyl, love. No one will buy them.’ ‘Don’t you believe it! They’re selling well! People buy them for their mother-in-law or their boss!’

One of the locals got back from jail. It was under a prisoner amnesty. He lived in the next village. His mum died, and they buried the house. He washed up on our shores. ‘Give us a hunk of bread and some pork fat, missus. I’ll chop your firewood for you.’ He goes begging.

The country’s a mess – and people are coming here to escape. Some folks are fleeing from people, others from the law. And they live here on their own. They’re not from these parts. They’re grim, no light in their eyes. They get drunk and set fire to the houses. At night, we sleep with pitchforks and axes under the bed. In the kitchen, there’s a hammer by the door.

In the spring, a fox with rabies was running about. When they have rabies, they’re gentle as can be. They can’t stand the sight of water. Put a pail of water out in the yard – and fear not! It will run away.

They’ve started coming here. Making movies about us, though we never get to see the films. We’ve got no TV or electricity. All we’ve got is the window to look through. And prayer, of course. We used to have Communists instead of God, but now there’s just God left.

We were honoured citizens. I was a partisan, spent a year with the resistance. And when our side pushed back the Germans, I found myself on the front line. Wrote my surname on the Reichstag: Artyushenko. Hung up my army coat and built Communism. And where is it now, our Communism?

We’ve got Communism here. We live as brothers and sisters.

When the war broke out, there were no mushrooms or berries that year. Would you believe it? The earth itself could feel trouble brewing. 1941. How I remember it! Oh, I haven’t forgotten the war. A rumour went round that our prisoners had been brought here, and if you found a relative, you could take him home. Our women upped and ran off to meet them! That evening, some brought home their loved ones while others brought unknown men. But there was a bastard in our midst. Lived just like the rest of us, married with two kids. He went to the commandant’s office and informed them that some of the men we’d taken were Ukrainians. We had Vasko, Sashko … The next day, the Germans came on their motorbikes. We fell on our knees and begged them. But they led them out of the village and gunned them down with their rifles. Nine men. So young, such lovely guys! Vasko, Sashko …

So long as there’s no war … I’m terrified of war!

The officials would come, they’d shout their heads off, but we acted deaf and dumb. And we survived everything, pulled through it all.

And I’m lost in my own thoughts. Thinking and thinking. At the graveyard. Some of them are wailing loudly, some softly. Others might be chanting, ‘Open up, yellow sands. Open up, dark night.’ Well, you can call people back from the forest, but not from the yellow sand. I’ll talk to him lovingly: ‘Ivan, Ivan. What am I to do with my life?’ But he doesn’t say a thing, whether kind or harsh.

As for me, I’m not frightened of anyone: not the dead, not the wild animals, nobody. My son comes from the town and pesters me. ‘You’re all on your own here. What if someone comes and strangles you?’ And what would he take from me? There’s just my pillows. In my little hovel, pillows are all the finery you’ll get. The moment the bandit climbs in, he’ll stick his head through the window, and I’ll lop it off with an axe. Maybe there is no God, maybe it’s somebody else, but up above us, there’s someone there. And I am alive.

In the winter, an old man hung up a calf’s carcase he’d cut up in the yard. Just then, they came along with some foreigners. ‘What are you doing, old man?’ ‘Letting the radiation out.’

It really happened, people told us about it. One man buried his wife and he was left all alone with their baby boy. Took to drink from grief. He used to take the wet things off the tot and put them under the pillow. And the wife – it could have been her, could just have been her soul – would come at night and she’d wash, dry and fold the things up. Once he caught sight of her. Called out – but she just vanished. Into thin air. Then the neighbours told him: the moment you spot so much as a shadow, lock the door with the key, then maybe she won’t run away so fast. But she didn’t come back again. Now what was that all about? Who was it that was coming?

Don’t you believe me? Then tell me, where do these tales come from? Maybe it really happened? Oh, you educated types …

Why did that Chernobyl blow up? Some say it’s the scientists to blame. Trying to catch God by the beard, and He had the last laugh. And it’s us that suffer!

We’ve never had it easy. It’s never been calm. Right on the eve of the war, they were taking people in. Capturing them. Took three of our men. Came in their black cars and took them out of the fields and we never saw them again. We’ve always lived in fear.

I don’t like crying. I like hearing new jokes. They grew some tobacco in the Chernobyl Zone. In the factory, they made it into cigarettes. Each pack had a message: ‘Ministry of Health: smoking is bad for you. This is your last warning.’ Ha ha. But our old fellows are all smokers.

The one thing I’ve got left is my cow. I’d happily give her away if it would mean there was no war. I’m terrified of war!

The cuckoos are calling, the magpies chattering. Roe deer are running about. But nobody can say if they’ll carry on multiplying. One morning, I looked into the orchard and there were boars grubbing about. Wild boars. You can resettle people, but not the elk and the boars. And the water takes no notice of boundaries, it flows where it will, over the ground, under the ground.

A house can’t exist without people. Wild animals need people too. Everybody is looking for people. A stork came. A beetle climbed out. It all brings me joy.

Everything’s hurting, old girls. Oh, how it hurts! You have to be gentle. You carry a coffin gently. Carefully. No banging it against the door or the bed, no touching it against anything or knocking it. Or you’ll bring bad luck – you can expect another death. May the Lord rest their souls. Grant them the kingdom of heaven! And the spot where you’re buried, that’s where they’ll wail. Here we’ve got nothing but graveyards. Graves all around. Tipper trucks droning, and bulldozers. The houses are falling down, the gravediggers never stop work. They’ve buried the school, the village soviet, the bathhouse. Our whole world, and the people aren’t the same. There’s one thing I don’t know: does a person have a soul? What’s it like? And how do all of them fit into the world to come?

For two days, my grandad was dying. I hid behind the stove, watching to see how it would fly out of him. I went to milk the cow. Ran back indoors and called him. He was lying there, with his eyes open. Had his soul flown away? Or was there nothing? And if not, how will we ever meet up again?

The priest says we’re immortal. We say our prayers. O Lord, give us the strength to bear the trials of our lives.

Monologue on how happy a chicken would be to find a worm. And what is bubbling in the pot is also not forever

My first fear …

The first fear fell from the sky. It floated down with the water. But some people, and there were quite a few, were as cool as stone. I swear on the Cross! When they’d had a few drinks, the older guys liked to say, ‘We marched to Berlin and won the war.’ They said it like they had you pressed up against the wall. They were the victors! They had the medals to prove it.

My first fear came in the morning when we found suffocated moles in the orchard and vegetable plot. Who had choked them? They don’t usually come above ground. Something must have driven them out. I swear on the Cross!

My son rang from Gomel. ‘Do you have any cockchafers flying about?’

‘No cockchafers here, not even the grubs. They’ve gone into hiding.’

‘What about earthworms?’

‘It only takes an earthworm to make a chicken happy. They’ve all gone too.’

‘No beetles or worms is the first sign of high radiation.’

‘What’s radiation?’

‘Mum, it’s a kind of death. Talk Dad into leaving. You can stay with us for a bit.’

‘But we haven’t planted the vegetable plot …’

If everyone was smart, where could we find a fool? Okay, so it was on fire. Fires don’t last long. No one was frightened at the time. We didn’t know about all that atomic stuff. I swear on the Cross! We were living right beside an atomic power station, thirty kilometres as the crow flies, or forty by road. We were very pleased. You could buy a bus ticket and just go there. The town had shopping as good as Moscow’s – there was cheap sausage, always meat in the shops. You could choose. Good times!

But now there’s nothing but fear. Folks say the frogs and midges will live on, but not the humans. Life will go on without humans. They tell all these tall tales. Anyone fond of them tales is a fool! But there’s no smoke without fire. We’ve been hearing it for a long time now.

I’ll turn on the radio. They keep on and on about radiation. But we’re better off with radiation. I swear on the Cross! Just look: they’ve brought in oranges, three sorts of sausage, there you go! In our little village! My grandchildren have travelled half the planet. The youngest girl came back from France, that’s where Napoleon once marched from. ‘Granny, I saw a pineapple!’ The second grandchild, her little brother, was taken to Berlin for treatment. That’s where Hitler came barging in from. In their tanks. It’s a new world now. Everything is different. Is it the radiation to blame, or who is it? And what’s that stuff like? Maybe they’ve shown it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, what does it look like? What colour? Some say it’s got no colour or smell, but others say it’s black. Like the earth! If it’s no colour, then it’s like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him. They’re trying to frighten us! But we’ve got apples hanging in the orchard, and leaves on the trees, potatoes in the field. I don’t believe there ever was any Chernobyl, they made it all up. Tricked people. My sister and her man left. Didn’t move far, just twenty kilometres away. They’d been there two months, when a neighbour comes running: ‘Your cow’s radiation has got on to ours. The cow keeps falling down.’ ‘And how did it get on to her?’ ‘It flies around in the air, like dust. It can fly.’ Stuff and nonsense! But here’s something true. My grandad had bees, he had five hives. Well, for three days they wouldn’t fly out, not one bee. They were sitting in the hives. Waiting it out. My grandad was running about the yard: what kind of disaster was this? What the Devil was up? Something had gone wrong with nature. And as our neighbour, who’s a teacher, explained to us, their system is cleverer than ours, because they could feel it right away. The radio and the papers still weren’t saying anything, but the bees knew. They only flew out on the fourth day. The wasps … We had wasps, a nest of them over the porch, nobody touched them; then suddenly the next morning they were gone, no sign of them dead or alive. They came back six years later. Radiation. It frightens people and animals alike. And birds too. And even the trees are scared, but they can’t talk. They can’t tell you. But the Colorado beetles carry on crawling, same as before, eating our spuds, gobbling up every last leaf. They are used to poison. Just like us.

Come to think of it, in every house someone has died. The street across the river, all the women there live without menfolk; there are no men, the men have died. On our street, my grandad lives here, and one other man. God takes the men first. Why’s that? Nobody can decipher that for us, nobody knows that secret. But think about it: if only the men were left, and no women, it wouldn’t be much better. They drink, my love, they drink. The sadness drives them to it. Who feels happy about dying? When a person dies, they get so sad! There’s no comforting them. Nobody can make them feel better, there’s nothing you can do. They drink and natter. Talk about things. They get drunk, make merry and poof! – they’re gone. Everyone dreams of an easy death. But how can you earn it? The soul is the only living matter. My dear girl. And our women are all barren, their women’s parts have been cut out, a good one in three. Young and old alike. Not all of them had managed to have children in time. When I think of it, it’s all just flown past.

What can I add? You just need to live. That’s all.

And another thing. Before, we used to churn our own butter, sour our own cream, make soft cheese, hard cheese. We cooked milk soup with dumplings. Do they eat that in the towns? You pour water into some flour and mix it up into these ragged pieces of dough, then drop them in a pot of boiling water. You boil them a bit and add some milk. Our mum explained it to us, showed us how. ‘Learn how to make this, children. It’s what I learned from my mother.’ We drank birch drink and maple drink. We steamed runner beans in iron pots in the big oven. Made kissel from the cranberries. And in the war, we picked nettles, orache and other wild greens. Swelled up from hunger, but we didn’t die. Had berries and mushrooms in the forest. But now we’ve got a life where that’s all ruined. We thought it would last and last, things would carry on the way they’d always been. And what was bubbling in the pot would be there forever. Never would have believed it could all change. But that’s what’s happened. You’re not allowed milk, not allowed beans. No mushrooms, no berries. They tell you to soak the meat for three hours. And you have to drain off the water twice when you boil potatoes. But you can’t fight against God. You just need to live.

They frighten us that our water can’t be drunk. But how can you go without water? Everyone has water inside. There’s nobody without water in them. You even find water in stones. Well, this is water we’re talking about, maybe it’s eternal? The whole of life comes from it. Who can you ask? No one will tell you. And you pray to God, you don’t ask Him things. You just need to live.

And now the wheat’s coming up. It’s good wheat.

Anna Petrovna Badaeva, returnee

Monologue on a song without words

I’m on my knees, begging you.

Find Anna Sushko for us. She used to live in our village, in Kozhushki. Her name is Anna Sushko. I’ll give you her description, and you print it. She’s got a hump, been mute since childhood. Lived alone. She was sixty. In the resettlement, they put her in an ambulance and took her away to an unknown destination. She never learned to read or write, so we’ve never had a letter from her. They carted off people living on their own and the disabled to homes. Hid them away. Nobody knows the addresses. You please print it all.

The whole village cared about her. We looked after her like she was a little child. Someone would chop her firewood, someone else would bring her milk. Someone would sit with her in the evenings, light the stove. It’s been two years since we stopped drifting about those strange places and came back home. And tell her that her house is sound. The roof is still there, and the windows. We’ll help her fix what was smashed up and looted. Just give us the address where she’s living in her misery, we’ll go and fetch her. Bring her back. Before she dies of sadness. I’m begging you, on my knees. There’s an innocent soul suffering out in that strangers’ world.

There’s another detail. I forgot. When something hurts, she’ll start warbling this song. No words, just her voice. She can’t talk. When she’s in pain, she’ll sing it: ‘Ah-ah-ah.’ Whimpering.

‘Ah-ah-ah …’

Maria Volchok, neighbour

Three monologues on ancient fear, and on why one man stayed silent while the women spoke

The K. family. Mother and daughter, and a man

(the daughter’s husband) who did not say a word.

Daughter:

At first, I cried night and day. All I wanted was to cry and speak. We are from Tajikistan, from Dushanbe. There’s a war there.

I shouldn’t really talk about it. I’m expecting, pregnant. But I’ll tell you. In the daytime, they’ll come on the buses, checking passports. Ordinary men, but with guns. They look at the passports and throw some men off the bus. And right by the doors, they’ll shoot them. They don’t even bother taking them aside. I would never have believed it, but I saw it. I saw them taking two men, one was so young, good-looking, he was shouting something to them. Both in Tajik and in Russian. He was saying that his wife had just had a baby, and he had three small children at home. And they just laughed, they were young as well, really young. Ordinary men, but with guns. He fell to the ground, he was kissing their trainers. Everyone was silent, the whole bus. The moment we drove off: ‘Rat-a-tat.’ I was afraid to look back. (She cries.)

I shouldn’t really talk about it. I’m expecting. But I’ll tell you. Just one thing: please don’t use my surname, my first name is Svetlana. We still have family there. They’ll kill them. I used to think we’d never have another war again. It was our huge country, we loved it. The strongest! Before, they used to tell us that our life in the Soviet Union was poor and modest because we’d been through a great war, the people had suffered, but now we had a powerful army, no one could touch us. No one could conquer us! But then we started shooting each other. It’s a different kind of war from before. Our grandfather told us about the old war. He reached Germany, got to Berlin. Now it’s neighbour shooting neighbour, boys who went to school together, and now they’re killing each other, raping the girls they sat next to at school. Everyone has gone crazy.

Our husbands won’t speak. The men are just silent, they won’t say a word to you. People shouted to their backs that they’re running away like women. Cowards! Betraying the Motherland. But what have they done wrong? Is it your fault if you can’t shoot? Or you don’t want to? My husband is Tajik, he was supposed to join the war and kill. But he said, ‘Come on, we’re leaving. I don’t want a war. Don’t need a gun.’ He loves carpentry, caring for horses. He doesn’t want to shoot. That’s just what his heart is like. He doesn’t like hunting either. It’s his land, they speak in his language, but he left. Because he didn’t want to kill other Tajiks just like him. Some person who he doesn’t know and who’s done nothing against him. He wouldn’t even watch TV there, covered up his ears. But he’s lonely here. Over there, his brothers are fighting, one has been killed. His mother’s still over there, and his sisters. We travelled here on the Dushanbe train, there was barely a window with glass in it, it was freezing, no heating, there wasn’t any shooting, but along the way they threw stones at the windows, smashed the glass: ‘Russians out! End the occupation! No more robbing us!’ And he’s a Tajik, and he heard all this. And our children did too. Our little girl had just started school, she was in love with a boy. A Tajik. Comes home from school: ‘Mummy, what am I, Tajik or Russian?’ You can’t explain it to her.

I shouldn’t really talk about it, but I’ll tell you. The Pamiri Tajiks are fighting the Kulobi Tajiks. They are all Tajiks, they’ve got the one Koran, the one faith, but Kulobis are killing Pamiris, and Pamiris killing Kulobis. First, they got together in the square, shouting and praying. I wanted to understand it, so I went there too. Asked the elderly men: ‘Who are you coming out against?’ They answered, ‘Against Parliament. We’ve been told this Parliament is a very bad man.’ Then the square emptied, and the shooting started. It suddenly became a different country, one we didn’t know. The East! Before, it had felt like we were living in our own land. Under Soviet law. There were so many Russian graves left behind, and no one to weep at them. They were taking cows to graze in the Russian cemeteries. Goats too. Russian old men were wandering about the dumps, picking through the rubbish.

I worked in a maternity hospital. I was a nurse, doing night duty. A woman was giving birth, she was having a hard time and screaming. An orderly came rushing in, wearing unsterile gloves and gown. What had happened? Why was she in the delivery room like that? ‘Girls, we’ve got bandits!’ They were in black masks and armed. They ran straight over to us. ‘Give us drugs! Surgical alcohol!’ ‘There’s no drugs, no alcohol here!’ They got the doctor up against the wall: ‘Give it!’ And then the woman giving birth shouted in relief. A happy shout. And a tiny baby began crying, it had just been born. I leant over it, don’t even remember if it was a boy or girl. It still had no name, nothing. And the bandits asked us: ‘Is it Kulobi or Pamiri?’ Not ‘boy or girl’, but ‘Kulobi or Pamiri’. We stayed silent. And they yelled, ‘Who is it?’ We said nothing. Then they grabbed the tiny baby, it had only been in the world maybe five or ten minutes, and hurled it out the window. I’m a nurse, I’ve seen children die. But this … My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I shouldn’t really remember it. (She begins crying again.)

After that incident … I had eczema come up on my arms. My veins were bulging. And I felt so numbed, I could hardly crawl out of bed. I’d go towards the hospital and turn back again. And I was expecting a baby myself. How could life go on? How could I give birth there? So we came over here. To Belarus. Narovlya is a small town, it’s quiet. Now don’t ask me any more. Leave me alone. (She stops speaking.) Wait … I want you to know. I’m not frightened of God. It’s man I’m frightened of. When we first got here, we asked, ‘Where’s this radiation of yours?’ ‘It’s right where you’re standing.’ But that’s the whole land itself! (She wipes away tears.) People left. They were scared.

I don’t find it as scary here as it was back there. We’re left without a homeland, we don’t belong anywhere. The Germans left for Germany, the Tatars went to Crimea when they got permission, but nobody needed the Russians. What was there to hope for? What could we expect? Russia never saved her own people, because the country’s too big, too endless. To be honest, I don’t actually feel that Russia is my Motherland; we were brought up with a different idea: that our Motherland was the Soviet Union. So you don’t know any more what’s right. Nobody cocking guns here – that’s already a good thing. We were allocated a house, my husband was given a job. I wrote to my friends, they got here yesterday. Came for good. They arrived in the evening and were too frightened to leave the station, wouldn’t let their children out, just sat on their suitcases. They waited till morning. And then they saw that people were walking about the streets, laughing, smoking. They were shown where our street was and brought to our place. They still weren’t themselves, because we’d all forgotten what normal, peaceful life was like. That you can walk down the streets in the evenings. That you can laugh. The next morning, they went to the grocery shop, saw all the butter and cream, and right there in the shop – they described it to us – they bought five bottles of cream and drank them on the spot. People looked at them like they were mad. But they hadn’t seen cream or butter in two years. Over there, you couldn’t buy bread. It was war. You can’t explain it to someone who doesn’t know what war is, only knows it from the movies.

My soul was dead there. Who would I give birth to, with my soul dead? There aren’t many people here. The houses are empty. We live near the forest. I get frightened when there are too many people. Like at the station, in the war … (She begins sobbing frantically and then becomes quiet.)

Mother:

The war. It’s all I can talk about. Why did we come here? To the Chernobyl Zone? Because no one will kick us out. From this land. It’s nobody’s, God has taken it over. People have deserted it.

In Dushanbe, I worked as the deputy chief of the railway station, and there was another deputy who was Tajik. Our children grew up together, went to school together, we always sat at the same table for holidays: New Year, May Day, Victory Day. We drank wine and ate pilaff together. He used to call me ‘little sister, my Russian sister’. And suddenly he walks over – we shared an office – stops in front of my desk and shouts: ‘When are you going back home to Russia? This is our land!’

Just then I thought my head would explode. I jumped up: ‘Where’s your jacket from?’

‘Leningrad,’ he said, taken aback.

‘Take off your Russian jacket, you bastard!’ I said, yanking his jacket off. ‘Where’s the fur hat from? You were bragging about how it was sent from Siberia! Take off your hat, bastard! And your shirt! Your trousers! They were made in a Moscow factory! They’re Russian too!’

I would have stripped him to his underpants. A big hefty guy. I came up to his shoulder, but suddenly – where on earth did I get the strength from? – I would have yanked the lot off him. A crowd had already collected round us. He yelled, ‘Get away from me, you madwoman!’

‘No, hand over all your Russian stuff! Give it back to me!’ I nearly went nuts. ‘Take off your socks! Your shoes!’

We were working night and day. The carriages were jammed with people fleeing. Lots of Russians on the move. Thousands! Tens of thousands! Hundreds of thousands! It was like a second Russia. I’d sent out the 2 a.m. train to Moscow, and some children from the town of Kurgan-Tyube were left in the waiting hall, they’d missed the Moscow train. I shut them away, hid them. These two guys come up to me. They’ve got guns.

‘Hey, guys, what are you doing here?’ My heart was racing.

‘It’s your fault, you left all the doors open.’

‘I was sending the train off. Didn’t have time to close them.’

‘Who are those children?’

‘They’re our local kids, from Dushanbe.’

‘Ah, but maybe they’re from Kurgan? They’re Kulobi?’

‘No, no. They’re local.’

They left. But what if they’d gone into the waiting hall? They would have killed the lot of us. Including me: a bullet to the forehead! Only one thing rules there: a man with a gun. The next morning, I put the children on the train to Astrakhan, ordered them to be shipped like watermelons, not to open the doors. (At first, she is silent, then cries for a long time.) Is there anything more terrifying than man? (She is silent again.)

When I was already living here, I’d look over my shoulder every couple of minutes; it felt like someone was behind me, at the ready. Waiting. Back there, not a day went by without me thinking about death. I always left the house in clean clothes: a freshly washed blouse and skirt, clean underwear. Any moment, I could be killed! But now I can walk through the forest alone, I’m not frightened of anyone. There’s nobody in the forest, not a soul. I’ll walk and think back: did it really all happen to me, or did I dream it? Another time, I’ll run into some hunters: they’ve got a rifle, a dog and a dosimeter for the radiation. Men with guns again, but this time they aren’t chasing after humans. If I hear a shot, I’ll know they’re shooting the crows or chasing a rabbit. (She is silent.) So I’m not scared here. I can’t feel afraid of the earth, the water. It’s man I’m afraid of. Back there, he can buy an assault rifle in the market for a hundred dollars.

I remember one guy. A Tajik. He was chasing another guy. Hunting a human! The way he was running, the way he was breathing, I knew instantly that he wanted to kill him. But the other guy hid. He escaped. And the man comes back, he’s passing me and he says, ‘Excuse me, where can I get a drink of water here?’ Just asked casually, as if nothing had happened. We had a tank of water at the station, I showed him where. And then I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Why are you hunting each other down? Why are you killing?’ And he even looked a bit sheepish. ‘Hey, lady, don’t make trouble.’ But when you get them together, they’re different. If there were two or three of them, they’d have me up against the wall. When it’s one, you can talk to him.

From Dushanbe we got to Tashkent, but we needed to go further: to Minsk. There were no tickets – and nothing you could do! They’d set things up very neatly. You couldn’t get a seat on the plane unless you slipped someone a bribe: you’d have endless problems – with the weight, the size; you couldn’t take this, had to get rid of that. They sent us twice to the scales, and I still didn’t twig. Then I slipped them some cash. ‘Now you’re talking; see, why make things hard for yourself?’ It was that simple! Whereas before, they made us unload our two-tonne container. ‘You’re from a war zone. You carrying weapons? Hashish?’ I went to the head of the airport, and in the waiting room met a good woman. She explained what was what: ‘You won’t get far here. No point demanding justice, you’ll end up with your container dumped in a field and all your stuff looted.’ What could we do? We didn’t sleep all night, unloading our possessions: clothes, mattresses, old furniture, an old fridge and two sacks of books. ‘Valuable books, are they?’ We had a look: What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky, Virgin Soil Upturned by Sholokhov. We laughed. ‘And how many fridges?’ ‘Just the one, and it’s already been bashed up.’ ‘Why didn’t you bring the right paperwork?’ ‘Well, how were we to know? It’s our first time fleeing a war.’ We lost two motherlands at once: our Tajikistan and the Soviet Union.

I go off on walks in the forest, think about things. The others all crowd round the TV: they want to know what’s happening back there. But I don’t.

Those were the days. A different life. I was an important person then, with a military rank: lieutenant-colonel of the railway forces. Here, though, I was out of work until the town council took me on as a cleaner. I wash floors. One life is over, and I don’t have the strength for another one. Some of the locals feel sorry for us, others resent us. ‘Those refugees are stealing our potatoes. They dig them up at night.’ My mother used to look back on the war years and say people felt more pity for each other. The other day, they found an abandoned horse in the forest. It was dead. And a dead hare in another spot. They weren’t even killed, just dead. Everybody was bothered about it. But when they found a dead tramp, that somehow got ignored.

People have grown used to the human dead everywhere.

*

Lena M. is from Kirghizia. Sitting with her on the doorstep

of the house, as though posing for a photo, were her five children and

their cat, Blizzard, whom they had brought with them.

We left like we were fleeing a war.

We grabbed our belongings, and the cat followed right behind us, all the way to the station, so we took the cat too. The train trip took twelve days; for the last two days, all we had left were some jars of sauerkraut and boiling water from the urn. We took turns guarding the doors, some guys with a crowbar, some with an axe or hammer. Let me tell you about it. One night, we were attacked by bandits. We were almost killed. These days, people will kill you for your TV set or fridge. We left like we were fleeing a war, though where we lived in Kirghizia, they weren’t fighting yet. There’d been a massacre in the city of Osh. Kirghiz and Uzbeks. It all died down quickly, seemed to go quiet. But there was something in the wind, something brewing in the streets. I’m telling you. It wasn’t just us Russians, like you’d think, even the Kirghiz were afraid. There were queues for bread, and they’d shout: ‘Russians, go home! Kirghizia is for the Kirghiz!’ And then shove us out of the queue. They’d add something in Kirghiz, like, there wasn’t enough bread for them, let alone to feed us. I didn’t really understand their language, just learned some words for haggling in the market.

We used to have a Motherland. It’s gone now. Who am I? Got a Ukrainian mother, my dad’s Russian. I was born and raised in Kirghizia, then married a Tatar. Who are my children? What’s their ethnicity? We’re all mixed up, our blood is mixed. In our passports, for me and my children it says ‘Russian’; but we’re not Russian. We’re Soviet! But the country I was born in doesn’t exist. The place that we called home and the times which were also our home don’t exist now. We’ve become as homeless as bats. I’ve got five children: my eldest boy is in the eighth grade at school, the youngest girl is in kindergarten. I brought them here. Our country doesn’t exist, but we still exist.

I was born and grew up there. Built a factory, worked in a factory. ‘Go back to your own land, everything here is ours.’ They didn’t let us take anything but the children: ‘Everything here is ours.’ And where’s it all mine? People are fleeing, they’re leaving. All the Russian people. The Soviet people. Nobody needs them, there’s nobody waiting for them.

I used to be happy once. All my children were born from love. I had them in this order: boy, boy, boy, then girl, girl. I’m not going to say anything else. I’ll start crying … (But she adds a few more words.) This is where we’re going to live. It’s our home now. Chernobyl is our home. Our Motherland. (She suddenly smiles.) The birds here are the same as we had back there. And there’s a statue of Lenin … (Standing at the gate, as she says goodbye.) Early one morning, in the house next door, they were banging away with hammers, taking the boards off the windows. I met the woman. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Chechnya.’ She never says anything. She walks about wearing a black headscarf.

I meet people, they’re amazed, can’t understand it. ‘What are you doing to your children, you’re killing them. You’re committing suicide.’ I’m not killing them, I’m saving them. Look, forty years old and I’m completely grey. At forty! Once they brought a German journalist to the house, and he asked: ‘Would you take your children somewhere there was plague or cholera?’ But the plague and cholera are different. This threat here, I don’t feel it. I don’t see it. It’s nowhere in my memory.

It’s men I’m afraid of. Men with guns.

Monologue on how man is crafty only in evil, but simple and open in his words of love

I was running. Running from the world. First I hung out at the railway stations. I liked the stations because there were loads of people, yet you were alone. Then I read about it in the newspapers – and came here. There’s total freedom here. I’d say it’s heaven. There is nobody here, just wild animals wandering around. I live among the animals and the birds. Who can say I’m alone?

I’ve forgotten my own life. Don’t ask me about it. I remember what I read in books and the things other people told me, but I’ve forgotten my own life. I was a young man. Fell into sin. But there’s no sin that the Lord won’t forgive if your repentance is sincere. That’s it. Men are unjust, but the Lord is infinitely patient and merciful.

Why? There’s no answer. Man cannot be happy. He shouldn’t be happy. The Lord saw that Adam was lonely and He gave him Eve. So he could be happy, not so he could sin. But man is no good at happiness. I don’t like the twilight; that in-between time, like it is now. Going from light to night. If I start thinking, I can’t really see where I was before. Where was my life? That’s it. I don’t really care whether I live or not. Human life is like the grass, it flowers, withers and gets tossed in the fire. I’ve grown fond of thinking. Here you could just as easily be killed by wild animals as die of the cold. Or die from thinking. There isn’t a soul here for dozens of kilometres. You can drive out the demons with fasting and prayer. Fasting for the flesh, and prayer for the soul. But I’m never lonely, a believer can never be lonely. Right. I visit the villages. I used to find macaroni and flour. Sunflower oil and tinned food. But now I go scavenging at the cemetery. They leave out food and drink for the dead, but the dead don’t need it, and they won’t take offence. In the field, there’s wild wheat. Mushrooms and berries in the forest. There is total freedom. I do a lot of reading.

If we turn to the holy pages, the Book of Revelation: ‘And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.’ I’m trying to fathom that prophecy. Everything has been predicted, it’s all written in the holy books, but we don’t know how to read. We aren’t bright enough. The Ukrainian word for ‘wormwood’ is ‘Chernobyl’. There was a sign for us in those words. But man is too restless. Too vain and petty.

I found this, by Father Sergey Bulgakov: ‘as God most certainly created the world, the world cannot altogether fail.’ And so we must ‘valiantly endure history to the end’. Right. And someone else wrote, I don’t remember who, but I remember their idea: ‘Evil of itself is not an essence, but the privation of good, just as darkness is no more than the lack of light.’ It’s easy to come by books here. You won’t pick up so much as an empty clay pitcher, no spoons or forks, but there are plenty of books. Recently I found a volume of Pushkin. ‘The thought of death delights my very soul.’ I remembered that line. That’s it. ‘The thought of death.’ I’m here all alone. Sometimes I think of death, I’ve grown fond of thinking. The silence helps you prepare yourself. Man lives in the midst of death, but he doesn’t understand what death is. I’m here all alone. Yesterday I chased a she-wolf and her cubs out of the school building, that’s where they were living.

Here’s a question: can the world be captured genuinely in words? It’s the word that comes between man and his soul. That’s it.

And another thing: the birds, the trees, the ants – they’ve all become close to me. Before, I didn’t have those feelings. Didn’t have an inkling of them. Something else I read somewhere: ‘The universe above us and the universe below us.’ I think about them all. Man is horrifying. And peculiar. But here you don’t feel like killing anyone. I go fishing, I’ve got a rod. That’s it. But I don’t shoot animals, don’t set traps. My favourite literary character, Prince Myshkin, said, ‘How can you look at a tree and not be happy?’ That’s it. I love thinking. But people spend too much time complaining, instead of thinking.

Why look too closely at evil? It’s troubling, of course. Sin is not really rocket science. It’s important to acknowledge the imaginary. It says in the Bible there’s one meaning for the initiates, for the rest there are parables. Take a bird, or some other living creature. We can never understand them, because they live for themselves, not for others. That’s it. In short, everything around us is flowing.

All creatures are four-legged, looking down at the earth, drawn towards the earth. Man alone stands up on the earth, and raises his hands and head to the sky. To prayer. To God. The old woman in the church prays: ‘Each of us shall reap according to his sins.’ But neither the scientists nor the engineers nor the soldiers will admit it. They think, ‘I’ve got nothing to repent of. Why should I repent?’ That’s it.

My prayer is simple. I say it silently. ‘Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!’ Man is crafty only in evil, but he’s so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what’s in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. ‘Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!’

And man too.

Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That’s it. The only people living here, though, are bandits in hiding and people like me. Suffering souls.

My surname? I haven’t got a passport. The police took it. They beat me up. ‘What are you bumming about here for?’ ‘I’m not bumming about, I’m repenting my sins.’ They beat me even harder. Punched me in the head. So you can write: Nikolai, a servant of God.

And now a free man.

The Soldiers’ Choir

Artyom Bakhtiyarov, private; Oleg Leontyevich Vorobey, clean-up

worker; Vasily Iosifovich Gusinovich, reconnaissance driver; Gennady

Viktorovich Demenev, policeman; Vitaly Borisovich Karbalevich,

clean-up worker; Valentin Komkov, driver, private; Eduard Borisovich

Korotkov, helicopter pilot; Igor Litvin, clean-up worker; Ivan Alexandrovich

Lukashuk, private; Alexander Ivanovich Mikhalevich, radiation

monitoring technician; Oleg Leonidovich Pavlov, helicopter pilot, major;

Anatoly Borisovich Rybak, commander of a security platoon; Viktor

Sanko, private; Grigory Nikolaevich Khvorost, clean-up worker;

Alexander Vasilyevich Shinkevich, policeman; Vladimir Petrovich

Shved, captain; Alexander Mikhailovich Yasinsky, policeman.

Our regiment was alerted for duty. We travelled a long time. No one was saying anything concrete; they only told us where we were going once we were at Belorussky station in Moscow. One guy, I think he was from Leningrad, was protesting: ‘I don’t want to die.’ They threatened him with a court martial. The commander told him in front of the whole unit: ‘You’ll go to prison or face a firing squad.’ My feelings were different, quite the opposite. I wanted to do something heroic, put my character to the test. Maybe it was just a boyish impulse? There were guys from the entire Soviet Union serving with us: Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Armenians. It was unsettling, and yet oddly fun.

So they took us there, right up to the power plant. Gave us white coats and white caps; gauze face masks. We cleaned the grounds. It was one day shovelling and scraping below, one day up on the roof of the reactor. Did all the work by spade. The guys up on the roof were called ‘storks’. The robots couldn’t take it, the equipment was going crazy. But we did our work. We sometimes got blood coming out of our ears, our noses. A tickling in the throat, your eyes stinging. There was this constant drone in your ears. You felt thirsty, but lost all appetite. We weren’t allowed to do our morning exercises, to keep us from breathing in extra radiation. Though we travelled to work in open-top trucks.

But we did our work well. And we’re very proud of that.

We drove inside. There was a sign saying ‘Prohibited Zone’. I’ve never been at war, but it was sort of a familiar feeling. Like I had it somewhere in my memory. Where from? Something to do with death.

Along the way, we saw dogs and cats that had gone wild. Sometimes they behaved oddly, wouldn’t recognize people, ran away from us. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with them, until we got the order to shoot them. The houses had been sealed off, the farm machinery was lying there abandoned. It was interesting to look at. No one was there, just us and the police patrolling. You’d go into a house and there would be pictures hanging, but no one inside. There were documents lying around: Young Communist League membership cards, people’s ID, certificates of merit. In one house, a TV set was taken – just borrowed for a bit – but I didn’t notice anyone taking stuff home. For starters, it felt as though people were about to come back any moment. And also, it was like … Something to do with death.

The guys went into the unit, right up to the reactor. To take photos, so they could show off back home. There was fear, but at the same time this overwhelming fascination: we wanted to see what it was like. Me, I refused. I had a young wife, didn’t want to risk it, but the others downed 200 mils of vodka each and off they went. Yeah … (After a pause.) They came back alive, meaning everything was okay.

Then we were out patrolling on night duty. There was a bright moon, like a hanging lamp.

The village street, not a soul … At first, there were lights still on in the houses, but then they switched off the electricity. We’d be driving along, and a wild boar would shoot across our path out of the doors of a school. Or a fox. Wild animals were living in the houses, schools and village halls. And there were the posters: ‘Our goal is happiness for all mankind’, ‘The world proletariat will be victorious’, ‘Lenin’s ideas live forever’. There were red flags in the collective-farm offices, all these brand-new pennants, piles of certificates embossed with the profiles of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Portraits of our leaders on the walls, plaster busts of them on the desks. There were war memorials everywhere. I didn’t see any other monuments. Just these hastily erected houses, grey concrete cowsheds, rusting hay towers. And then more Mound of Glory war memorials, big and small. ‘So that’s our life?’ I asked myself, looking at everything through fresh eyes. ‘That’s how we live?’ Like some warrior tribe had moved on from its makeshift camp. Hurried off somewhere.

Chernobyl blew my mind. I began thinking.

An abandoned house. All shut up. There was a kitten in the window. I thought it was pottery. I went up: it was alive. It had eaten all the flowers in the pots, the geraniums. How had it got in there? Or had it been forgotten?

A note on the door: ‘Dear stranger, do not look for valuables. We never had any. Use whatever you need, but please don’t loot. We’re coming back.’ On other houses, I saw signs in all different colours: ‘Forgive us, dear family home!’ They had said goodbye to their homes as if they were parting from a person. They wrote, ‘We’re leaving this morning’, or ‘Leaving this evening’. They put the date, even the hour and the minute. Notes scrawled in children’s handwriting on pages torn from exercise books: ‘Don’t beat the cat, or the rats will eat everything up.’ ‘Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.’ (He closes his eyes.) I’ve forgotten it all. I remember that I went, but nothing else. I’ve forgotten it all. Two years after I was demobbed, something happened to my memory. Even the doctors don’t understand it. I can’t count out money, I get all mixed up. I’m sent from one hospital to the next.

Have I told you this already? You’d walk over, thinking a house was empty, open the door, and there’d be a cat sitting there. Yeah, and those children’s notes.

I got called up for service.

And our duty was not letting the local people back into evacuated villages. We stood in lines near the roads, we built dugouts and look-out towers. For some reason, the locals called us ‘partisans’. This was peacetime, but there we stood, decked out in our army gear. The peasants couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed, say, to fetch a bucket from their yard, a jug, a saw, an axe. Or get the crops in. How could you explain it? Well, actually, you had soldiers standing on one side of the road not letting anyone in, while on the other side cows were grazing, combine harvesters were whirring away and they were threshing the grain. The women all crowded together and wept. ‘Lads, come on, let us in! That’s our land, our homes.’ They brought us eggs and pork fat, moonshine. ‘Let us in …’ They were crying for their poisoned land, their furniture, all their belongings.

Our duty was to keep them out. An old woman came, carrying a basket of eggs; we had to confiscate and bury them. She’d milked a cow and was carrying a pail of milk. A soldier was with her; the milk had to be buried. If they secretly dug up their spuds, you confiscated them. And the beetroots, the onions, pumpkins: they all had to be buried. Those were the instructions. The harvest was glorious, enviable. And such beauty all around. It was a golden autumn. We all had the faces of madmen, both them and us.

Meanwhile, the papers were trumpeting our heroism. What heroic guys we were, Young Communist League volunteers!

Who were we really? What were we doing there? I’d like to know that, read it. Though I was there myself.

I’m a military man, my duty is to do what I’m ordered. I took an oath.

But that’s not all, there was also the heroic urge. They’d nurtured it, sown it in our minds at school, at home. And then the political instructors set to work on us. The radio, the television. Different people reacted differently: some liked the idea of being interviewed, getting a mention in the papers, others looked on it as a job, and there was also a third type. I met them, they lived with the feeling they were doing something heroic, taking part in history. We were paid well, but the question of money didn’t really come into it. My salary was 400 roubles, but out there I was on 1,000 roubles in old money. In those days, that was a lot. We were criticized later for raking in the money and returning with hopes of jumping the queue for cars and furniture. That was hurtful, of course. Because there was also that heroic spirit.

Just before we went out there, this fear sprang up. For a short time. But once we got there, it disappeared. If only I could have seen it, that fear. Out there, we just had orders, assignments, work. I was interested in viewing the reactor from above, from a helicopter: I wanted to see what had happened, what it looked like. But that was forbidden. On my card, they wrote, ‘21 roentgens’, but I’m not sure that was really the right figure. The idea was simple enough: you flew to Chernobyl (which, by the way, was a little district town, not something grander, like I’d imagined), there you had a monitoring technician, ten or fifteen kilometres from the station, taking the background radiation readings. Those readings were then multiplied by the number of hours we flew in a day. As for me, I went up in the helicopter and flew to the reactor: there and back, both ways. One day it was 80 roentgens, the next it would be 120. At night, I circled over the reactor for two hours. We were shooting in infrared; on the film, the pieces of graphite looked sort of ‘overexposed’. By day, though, you couldn’t see them.

I spoke with some of the scientists. One told me, ‘I could lick your helicopter with my tongue and nothing would happen to me.’ Another said, ‘Guys, what are you doing, flying without protection? You want to shorten your lives? You need to clad your helicopter! Plate it!’ Well, if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself. We lined the seats with lead, cut chest protectors for ourselves from thin lead sheeting. Though it turned out lead protects you from one kind of ray, but not the other. Everyone’s faces went red and burned, we couldn’t shave. We were flying from morning till night. There was nothing spectacular, just work. Hard work. At night, we sat in front of the TV, the World Cup was on. All the talk revolved around football, of course.

We began thinking more deeply … Oh, it would have been maybe three or four years later. When the first man fell ill, then the second. Someone died, another man went mad, another killed himself. That’s when we began thinking more deeply. And we’ll understand at least something, I reckon, in another twenty or thirty years. I was in Afghanistan (for two years) and in Chernobyl (for three months) – the most vivid moments of my life.

I didn’t tell my parents we’d been sent to Chernobyl. My brother just happened to buy a copy of Izvestia and saw my picture. He showed it to Mother: ‘There, see: a hero!’ Mother burst into tears.

We were on our way to the power plant.

These columns of evacuees were moving towards us. They were driving trucks and tractors, herding cattle. Night and day. All this in peacetime.

We were driving along, and do you know what I saw? On the roadsides, in the sunlight, this barely visible sparkling. Some sort of tiny crystal particles glinting. We were driving towards Kalinkovichi, via Mozyr. Something was shimmering in different colours. We all talked about it, we were amazed. In the villages where we were working, we immediately noticed holes burned through the leaves, especially the cherry trees. We picked tomatoes and cucumbers, and there were tiny black holes in the leaves. It was autumn. The redcurrant bushes were bright red with berries, the branches were sagging to the ground with apples – and of course we couldn’t resist. We ate them. They’d warned us not to, but we decided to hell with it and ate them.

I went out there. Although I didn’t have to. I volunteered. In the early days, I didn’t meet anyone half-hearted. It was later they got that blank look in their eyes, once they’d grown used to things. Were we after medals? Special benefits? Rubbish! I personally didn’t need anything. An apartment, a car, what else? Ah, yes, a dacha. I had all that. It was the male lust for adventure that kicked in. Real men were going on a real mission. And the others? They could hide behind their mothers’ skirts. One guy brought a certificate saying his wife was giving birth, another had a small child. Sure, it was risky; sure, it was dangerous – radiation. But somebody had to do it. And what about our fathers in the war?

We got home. I took everything off, all the stuff I’d been wearing there, and threw the lot down the rubbish chute. I gave the cap to my little son as a present. He kept asking for it. He wore it non-stop. Two years later, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

You can write the rest yourself. I don’t want to say any more.

I’d just got back from Afghanistan. I wanted to live, get married. Wanted to marry right away.

But suddenly I had a call-up notice, with a red band headed ‘Reservist Mobilization’: I needed to turn up within the hour at the address given. My mother started crying at once. She decided they were sending me back to war.

Where were we going, and why? The information was hazy. A reactor had blown up. And what of it? In Slutsk they got us changed, handed out uniforms, and revealed that we were on our way to Khoyniki, the district centre. We got to Khoyniki, where the people still knew nothing. Like us, they were seeing dosimeters for the very first time. We were taken further, to a village. They were celebrating a wedding: the young couple were kissing, they were playing music and drinking moonshine. Just your usual wedding. And our orders were to dig out the soil to a spade’s depth and chop down trees.

At first, we were issued weapons: assault rifles. In case the Americans attacked. In our political sessions, they lectured us on sabotage operations by Western intelligence, on their covert work. In the evenings, we’d leave our weapons in a separate tent in the middle of the camp. A month later, they took them away. There were no saboteurs: just roentgens and curies.

For 9 May, Victory Day, a general arrived. They lined us up and wished us a happy holiday. One of the men plucked up courage and asked, ‘Why are you hiding the background radiation levels from us? What doses are we getting?’ There’s always one wise guy. So, once the general had left, the commanding officer summoned the guy and gave him an earful. ‘Stirring up trouble! You panic-monger!’ A couple of days later, we were issued gas masks, but nobody used them. Twice they showed us dosimeters, but they wouldn’t let us touch them. Every three months, we could go home for a couple of days. There was one instruction: buy vodka. I came back hauling two rucksacks stuffed with bottles. The guys swung me up into the air.

Before going home, we were all called to see a KGB officer, who strongly advised us never to speak to anyone anywhere about what we’d seen. When I got back from Afghanistan, I knew I’d live! After Chernobyl, the opposite was true: it was when you were back home that it would kill you.

I’m home now. And it is all just beginning.

What stands out, what’s burned in my memory?

We spent the whole day running around between villages. With radiation monitoring technicians. And not one woman offered us an apple. The men were less frightened, they brought out the moonshine and the pork fat. ‘Come and have lunch.’ You felt bad about refusing, but the idea of dining on pure caesium didn’t exactly fill you with joy. So you’d down a drink, but no nibbles.

Penny bun mushrooms crunched under the wheels of our trucks. Call that normal? These fat, lazy catfish, six or seven times bigger than usual, were swimming in the river. Call that normal?

In one village, we did sit down for a meal. Of roast lamb … The host got drunk and admitted, ‘It was a young little lamb. Slaughtered it because I couldn’t bear the sight of it. Ugh, what a monstrosity! Puts me off eating it.’ I downed a glass of moonshine, after those words. Our host laughed. ‘We’ve adapted here like Colorado beetles.’

We brought the dosimeter up to the house: it was off the scale.

Ten years have passed. It already feels like it never happened; if I hadn’t fallen sick, I’d have forgotten it all.

You have to serve the Motherland! Serving the Motherland is our sacred duty. I received: underwear, foot cloths, boots, epaulettes, cap, trousers, tunic, belt and rucksack. And I was off! They gave me a tipper truck; I was shifting concrete. I sat in the cab and believed the steel and glass were shielding me. Just get on with it! It’ll be all right. We were young guys, unmarried. We didn’t take respirators with us. No, actually there was one guy. An older driver. He was always in his mask. But we didn’t wear ours. The traffic cops didn’t use masks. We were inside our cabs, but they were standing in radioactive dust for eight hours at a time. We all got paid well: three times the usual salary plus a travel allowance. We drank. We knew that vodka helped. It was a first-rate method for restoring the immune system after exposure to radiation. And it helped with the stress. They knew what they were doing with the famous hundred mils of vodka per soldier during the war. It was the usual picture: drunken policemen fining drunken drivers.

Don’t write about the miracles of Soviet heroism. They happened, those miracles! But first it was incompetence, sloppiness, and only then came the miracles. Throwing yourselves on to pillboxes, flinging your chests against machine guns. But nobody writes about the fact they should never have issued those orders in the first place. They slung us in like they dumped the sand on the reactor. Like we were sandbags. Every day, they hung up a new soldiers’ bulletin: ‘Their brave and selfless work …’ ‘We shall stand firm and triumph.’ They came up with a lovely name for us: ‘Soldiers of the Fire.’

For my heroism, I got a certificate of merit and 1,000 roubles.

At first, it was baffling. It all felt like an exercise, a game.

But it was genuine war. Nuclear war. A war that was a mystery to us; where there was no telling what was dangerous and what wasn’t, what to fear and what not to fear. No one knew. And there was no one to ask. There was a genuine evacuation. The stations … Oh, the scenes at the stations! We helped shove kids through the windows of carriages; got the queues under control. There was queuing for tickets at the ticket office, queuing for iodine at the pharmacies. People cursed and fought in the queues. They kicked in the doors of the booze shops and kiosks; they smashed the windows and prised out the metal grilles. There were thousands of evacuees. They were living in the village halls, schools, kindergartens. They wandered around half-starved. All their money had run out, and the shops had been picked clean.

I’ll never forget the women who laundered our underwear. There weren’t any washing machines. No one had thought of that, they hadn’t brought any. So they were washing by hand. All the women were elderly. Their arms were blistered and crusting over. Our underwear wasn’t just ‘dirty’, it’d had dozens of roentgens. ‘Have some food, lads.’ ‘Get some sleep, lads.’ ‘You’re only young, lads. Take care of yourselves.’ They felt sorry for us and were crying.

Are they alive today?

Every year, on 26 April, we get together, those of us who were there. Those who are still left. We look back on those days. You were a soldier in that war, you were indispensable. All the bad stuff gets forgotten, and that is what stays. What lingers is the fact they couldn’t cope without you. You were essential. Our system, our military, operates pretty much superbly in an emergency. Out there, you were finally free and needed. Freedom! At moments like that, the Russian people show how great they are. How special! We’ll never be like the Dutch or Germans. And we’ll never have good roads or groomed lawns. But we’ll always have heroes!

Here’s my story.

The call went out, and I answered it. Had to be done. I was a Party member. Communists, forward! Was just the way things were. I was in the police force, senior sergeant. They promised me a new star on my epaulettes. It was June of ’87. There was a mandatory medical you had to pass, but I was sent without a check-up. Someone somewhere copped out, as they say, brought a certificate saying he had a stomach ulcer, so I took his place. Urgently. Just the way things were. (He laughs.) By that time, the jokes had sprung up. Overnight. A guy comes home from work and complains to his wife, ‘They say tomorrow it’s off to Chernobyl or hand in my Party card.’ ‘But you aren’t in the Party!’ ‘That’s why I’m trying to get hold of a Party card by the morning.’

We went there as soldiers, but at first they organized us into a brick-laying crew. We were building a pharmacy. I came straight down with this weakness, this sort of drowsiness. At night, I was coughing. I went to the doctor. ‘Everything’s fine. It’s the heat.’ They brought meat, milk and soured cream from the collective farm to the canteen, and we ate it. The doctor wouldn’t touch a thing. They’d cook the food, and he’d log in his journal that everything was within the limits, but he wouldn’t try it himself. We noticed that. Just the way things were. We lads were fearless. The strawberries were ripening, the hives were dripping with honey.

Looters began raiding the place. They were hauling everything off. We boarded up the doors and windows. Sealed up the safes in the collective-farm offices, the village libraries. Then we cut off all the utilities, severed the electricity to the buildings in case of fire.

They ransacked the shops, tore the grilles off the windows. There was flour, sugar, sweets all trodden into the floor. Broken jars. They’d move people out of one village, while five or ten kilometres away people were still living there. Belongings from the deserted village would drift over to them. Just the way things were. We used to keep guard. Along would come the former chairman of the collective farm, with locals who’d been resettled some place, but were returning to harvest the wheat and sow the fields. They were carting off hay bales. Inside the bales, we found they’d hidden sewing machines, motorbikes, TV sets. And the radiation was so strong that the TVs wouldn’t work. It was barter: they gave you a bottle of vodka, and you gave them permission to carry away a pram. They sold the stuff, exchanged the tractors and seed drills. One bottle, ten bottles – nobody was interested in money. (He laughs.) Proper Communism. Everything had its price: a can of petrol would be half a litre of moonshine, an astrakhan coat was two litres, a motorbike was whatever you could agree on. I did my six months. According to the schedule, we were meant to serve there for six months, then they’d send replacements. We were held back a bit, because the soldiers from the Baltics refused to go. Just the way things were. But I know the place was cleaned out, they made off with everything that could be lifted. They took the test tubes from the school chemistry labs. They brought the Zone back here. You can go look for it in the markets, the second-hand shops, the dachas.

All that remained behind barbed wire was the land. And the graves. Our past, our great country.

We got to our destination. Changed uniforms.

The question was: what were we in for? ‘An accident, it happened a while back,’ our captain reassured us. ‘Three months ago. Nothing to worry about now.’ The sergeant said: ‘Everything’s fine, just wash your hands before eating.’

I served as a radiation monitoring technician. The moment it was dark, these guys would drive over in their cars to our mobile unit. We were offered money, cigarettes, vodka to let them rummage through the confiscated items. They stuffed their bags. Where was it taken? Maybe to Kiev, to Minsk. The flea markets. We buried what was left. Dresses, boots, chairs, accordions, sewing machines. Buried it all in pits, which we called ‘communal graves’.

I got home. Went to a dance. There was a girl I liked. ‘Let’s go out together.’

‘What for? You’re a Chernobyl guy now. Who’d want to marry you?’

I met another girl. We were kissing and cuddling, things were getting serious. ‘Let’s get married,’ I said. And she asked something like: ‘You mean you can do that? It’s all in working order?’

I wouldn’t mind leaving here. That’s probably what I’ll do. I just worry about my parents.

I have my own memories of it.

Officially, my post there was commander of the security platoon. Something like ‘director of the apocalypse zone’. (He laughs.) You can write that.

We stopped a truck coming from Pripyat. The town was already evacuated, there were no people left. ‘Let’s see your documents.’ They didn’t have any. The back of the truck was covered with a tarpaulin. We lifted it up: there were twenty tea sets, as I recall, a shelving unit, kitchen seating, a TV, carpets and bicycles.

I filed a report.

They brought meat for disposal in the burial sites. The hips were missing from the beef carcases. The fillet.

I filed a report.

We had a tip-off that a house in an abandoned village was being dismantled. They were numbering and placing the logs on to a tractor with a trailer. We headed straight out to the address given. The raiders were arrested. They were hoping to remove the building and sell it as a dacha. They’d already received advance payment from the future owners.

I filed a report.

Pigs that had gone wild were running about the empty villages. And dogs and cats were waiting by their gates for their owners, keeping watch over the empty houses.

You’d be standing by a communal grave. A cracked stone lists the surnames: Captain Borodin, Senior Lieutenant … Long columns, like poetry, with the names of privates. Nettles and burdock …

Suddenly, in one of the previously checked vegetable plots, there was a man walking behind a plough. He spotted us. ‘Okay, lads, no need to shout. We’ve already signed our papers. We’re leaving in the spring.’

‘Then why are you ploughing the plot?’

‘Oh, that’s an autumn job.’

I understood, but I had to file a report.

Oh, you can bugger off, the lot of you.

My wife took the kid and left, the bitch! But I’m not going to hang myself like Vanya Kotov did. I’m not jumping from the sixth floor. The bitch! When I came back from there with a suitcase full of money – bought a car, gave her a mink coat – she lived with me then, the bitch. Wasn’t afraid then. (He sings.)

A zillion gamma rays won’t zap

The hard-on of a Russian chap.

Good little jingle. It’s from back there. Want to hear a joke? (He launches into it.) A man comes home from the reactor. His wife asks the doctor, ‘What should I do with my husband?’ ‘Give him a wash, a hug and a decontamination.’ The bitch! She’s afraid of me. Took the kid. (Suddenly becoming serious.) The soldiers were working near the reactor. I took them to and from their shifts. ‘Okay, lads, I’m going to count to a hundred. That’s it! Off you go!’ Like everyone else, I had a personal exposure monitor hung round my neck. After the shift, I had to collect them and hand them over to the KGB. To their secretive First Department. There they took readings, wrote something down on our cards, but the amount of roentgens each person got was a military secret. Bastards! Sons of bitches! Some time goes by, then they tell you: ‘Stop! You can’t do any more!’ All that medical information … Even when you were leaving, they wouldn’t tell you how much you’d had. Bastards! Sons of bitches! Now they’re all fighting for power. Fighting for office, holding elections. Want to hear another joke? After the Chernobyl accident, you can eat whatever you like, but make sure you bury your crap in lead. Ha ha. Life is sweet, sucker, but so short.

How can the doctors treat us now? We didn’t bring any documents back. Though I tried. Made requests through the appropriate channels. I got three answers, which I’ve kept. First answer: the documents were destroyed upon expiry of the three-year statutory storage period. Second answer: the documents were destroyed during the post-perestroika downsizing of the army when units were disbanded. Third answer: the documents were destroyed because they were radioactive. Or maybe they were destroyed so nobody would ever know the truth? We were witnesses. But we’re going to die soon. How can we help our doctors? I’d like a certificate right now: how much did I get? What did it amount to? I’d show it to my bitch. Prove to her we can survive under any conditions, still marry and have kids.

Here you go. A clean-up worker’s prayer: ‘Lord, if it be Your will that I can’t do it any more, let it be Your will that I don’t still feel randy.’ Oh, just go fuck yourselves, all of you!

It started out … It all started like a crime novel.

At lunchtime, a phone call came through to the factory: Reservist Private So-and-So to report to the municipal army enlistment office to clear up some details in his documentation. As a matter of urgency. Lots of other men like me turned up at the enlistment office. We were greeted by a captain, who told each of us, ‘Tomorrow, you’re going to Krasnoe village for reservist training.’ The next morning, we all turned up at the enlistment building. They took away our passports and military ID, put us on a bus and took us off to an unknown destination. Not a murmur about reservist training. The officers accompanying us met all our questions with silence. ‘Hey, brothers! What if we’re off to Chernobyl?’ someone guessed. An order: ‘Silence! Anyone spreading panic will be court-martialled.’ After a bit, an explanation: ‘We are under martial law now. No idle chatter! Anyone who abandons the Motherland in her hour of need is a traitor.’

On the first day, we saw the nuclear power plant from a distance. On the second, we were already clearing the rubbish around it. Lugging buckets back and forth. We were shovelling with ordinary spades, sweeping with the kind of brooms street cleaners use, cleaning with scrapers. But those spades were clearly for sand and gravel. Not for litter that had bits of everything in it: plastic sheeting, metal fittings, wood, concrete. As we said, battling the atom with spades! In the twentieth century. The tractors and bulldozers used there were driverless, radio-controlled, and we were following them about and sweeping up the debris. We breathed in that dust. In just one shift we’d change the filter in our radiation masks, popularly known as ‘muzzles’, up to thirty times. They were awkward things, impractical. The guys often tore them off. It was impossible to breathe in them, especially in the heat, if you were in the sun.

When it was over, we spent another three months in reservist training. Did target practice. They taught us to use a new assault rifle. (Wryly.) In case of nuclear war, no doubt. We didn’t even get a change of clothing: we were in the same tunics and boots as we wore at the reactor.

Then, of course, they got us to sign some form. A non-disclosure agreement. I kept mum. And if they’d let us speak, who could I have told? Very soon after leaving the army, I became second category disabled. At twenty-two years of age. I was working in a factory. The head of the workshop said, ‘Stop falling sick, or we’ll make you redundant.’ And they did. I went to the director. ‘You’ve got no right. I’m a Chernobyl worker. I saved you all, protected you!’ ‘It wasn’t us who sent you out there.’

At night, I wake up to hear my mum’s voice. ‘My son, why won’t you say anything? You aren’t asleep, you’re lying there with your eyes open. And your light is on.’ I don’t say anything. Who’s willing to listen to me? Or to talk with me in a way that might encourage me to answer. In my language.

I’m lonely.

I’m not afraid of death any more. Not of death as such.

The mystery, though, is how it will happen. My friend died. He puffed right up, till he was like a barrel. And a neighbour was out there too, he was a crane operator. He went coal black, shrivelled up till he was the size of a child. The mystery is how I’ll die. If I could choose, I’d want an ordinary death. Not a Chernobyl death. Just one thing that’s certain: with my diagnosis, it won’t drag out for long. Sense the moment, and put a bullet in your brain. I was in Afghanistan. Things were easier there. With the bullets …

I volunteered for Afghanistan. And for Chernobyl too. I asked to go. We were working in Pripyat. The whole town was surrounded by two rows of barbed wire, like a national border. It had these nice clean high-rise blocks, while the streets were covered with a thick layer of sand, chopped down trees. Looked like shots from a science-fiction movie. We were following orders: ‘laundering’ the town and replacing the top twenty centimetres of soil with a layer of sand. There were no days off. It was like wartime. I still have a newspaper clipping. About the nuclear operator Leonid Toptunov, he was the one on duty that night at the power plant, pressed the red emergency shutdown button a few minutes before the explosion. It didn’t work. He was treated in Moscow. ‘To save someone, there has to be a body to start with,’ the doctors said, throwing up their hands in despair. He only had one little patch on his back that was still clean, that hadn’t been zapped. They buried him in Mitino Cemetery, in a coffin lined with foil. There’s one and a half metres of concrete slab layered with lead on top of him. His father visits him, he stands there crying. People walk past and say, ‘It’s your bloody son blew it all up!’ He was just the operator, but he’s been buried like an alien from outer space.

It would be better if I’d died in Afghanistan! To tell the truth, those are the thoughts I get racked with. Out there, death was an everyday reality. It was no mystery.

From the helicopter …

I was flying close to the ground, observing. There were roe deer, wild boars. All scrawny and sleepy, moving in slow motion. They were feeding on the grass that grew there, drinking the water. They didn’t realize they needed to leave too. Along with the humans.

To go out there or not to go? To fly or not? I was a Communist, how could I refuse to fly? Two navigators refused, said they had young wives, hadn’t had kids yet. How they were humiliated! That was the end of their careers! There was another court too: the court of manliness. The court of honour! You see, there’s a buzz, knowing the other guy couldn’t do it, but you can. Now I look at things differently. After my nine operations and two heart attacks, I don’t judge anyone any more. I can understand them. They were young lads. But I’d still do it all again. That’s a fact. The other guy couldn’t do it, but I could. A job for real men!

From the sky, what struck you was the massive amount of equipment: heavy helicopters, medium helicopters. The Mi-24 is a helicopter gunship. What could you do in Chernobyl in a gunship? Or in a Mi-2? The pilots, just young guys, were based in the forest near the reactor, soaking up the roentgens. Those were the orders. Military orders! But why send such large numbers of people to be irradiated? What for? (Raising his voice to a shout.) What they needed were specialists, not human fodder.

From up above, you could see everything. The ruined reactor, the mounds of building debris. And a gigantic number of tiny human figures. There was a West German crane, but it was dead; it had moved a little along the roof and then died. The robots were dying. Our Soviet robots, created by our Academician Lukachev for exploring Mars. And the Japanese robot that looked like a human. But it was clear their insides had been fried by the high doses of radiation. The little soldiers were running around in their rubber suits and rubber gloves. They looked so small, seen from the sky.

I fixed it all in my memory. Thought I’d tell my son. But when I got back: ‘Daddy, what did you see?’ ‘A war.’ I had no other words for it.