Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

2

The Crown of Creation

Monologue on the old prophecies

My daughter. She’s different from other kids. She’ll grow up and ask me, ‘Why am I different?’

When she was born … It wasn’t a child, but a little living sack, stitched up on all sides, without a single slit, only the eyes were open. Her medical record said: ‘Girl born with complex multiple pathologies: anal aplasia, vaginal aplasia and left renal aplasia.’ That’s what they call it in scientific language, but in plain words: she has no private parts, no bum, and just the one kidney. On day two, the second day of her life, I took her to be operated on. She opened her eyes like she was smiling, and at first I thought she wanted to cry. Oh my God, she smiled! Other babies like her don’t live, they die straight away. What kept her from dying was my love for her. She’s had four operations in four years. This is the only child in Belarus to survive with such complex pathologies. I love her so much. (She pauses.) I can’t give birth ever again. I wouldn’t dare. I got back from the maternity ward: my husband would kiss me at night, and I’d tremble all over – but we can’t. It would be a sin. I’d be scared to. I overheard the doctors saying, ‘That girl wasn’t born in a caul, she was born in a shell. If they showed her on TV, not one mother would ever give birth again.’ That’s what they said about our little girl. How could we love each other again after that?

I went to church, told the priest. He said we needed to pray for our sins. But none of our family has ever murdered anyone. What is it I’m guilty of? At first, they wanted to evacuate our village, but then they crossed us off the list: the authorities didn’t have the money. And that’s when I fell in love. Got married. I didn’t know that we couldn’t love each other here. Many years ago, my grandmother read in the Bible that there would come a time on earth when everything would be lush, everything would blossom and bear fruit, the rivers would be teeming with fish, the forests full of animals, but man wouldn’t be able to use any of it. And we wouldn’t be able to produce our own kind, prolong our immortality. I listened to those old prophecies like they were scary tales. Didn’t believe them. Please tell everyone about my little girl. Write about her. At four years old, she can sing and dance, knows poems by heart. She has normal intelligence, she’s no different from other kids, it’s just that she plays different games. She won’t play at shopping or schools, she’ll play at hospitals with her dolls: give them jabs, take their temperature, put them on drips. If the doll dies, she covers it up with a white sheet. For four years, we’ve been living with her in the hospital; she can’t be left on her own there, and she doesn’t know that people are actually meant to live at home. When I take her home for a month or two, she asks, ‘Are we going back to the hospital soon?’ Her friends are there, it’s where they live and grow up. They’ve made her a bum, they’re forming the vagina. After the last operation, she completely stopped passing water, they didn’t manage to insert the catheter – she’ll need more operations. But they’re recommending that we continue with the surgery abroad. And where are we going to find tens of thousands of dollars, when my husband is on 120 dollars a month? One professor secretly suggested, ‘With those pathologies, your child should be of real interest to science. Write to some foreign clinics. They ought to be interested.’ And so I’m writing … (Fighting back the tears.) I’m writing that every half hour she has to have her urine pressed out by hand; the urine comes out through these little holes around the vagina. If it isn’t done, her single kidney will fail. Where else in the world can you find a child who needs to have their urine pressed out every half hour by hand? And how much longer can we take this? (She cries.) I don’t allow myself to cry. I mustn’t cry. I’m trying all the doors, writing letters. Please take my little girl, even if it’s for experiments, for research. I’d agree to her becoming a guinea pig, a lab rat, if only they could save her. (Crying.) I’ve written dozens of letters. Dear God!

So far, she hasn’t understood, but one day she’ll ask us why she’s different from others. Why no man will be able to love her. Why she won’t be able to have a baby. Why she’ll never be able to do what the butterflies do, what the birds do, what everyone but her can do. I wanted … I needed to prove … that … I wanted to get documents … so she’d grow up and find out it wasn’t me and my husband to blame. It wasn’t our love. (Fighting back the tears again.) For four years, I’ve been at war. With the doctors and officials. Trying to get an audience with people in high places. It took me four years to get a medical certificate making the link between low-level ionizing radiation and her dreadful pathologies. For four years, they’ve refused to, kept repeating, ‘Your little girl is classed as “disabled from childhood”.’ What do they mean, ‘disabled from childhood’? She’s disabled from Chernobyl. I’ve studied my family tree: there hasn’t been a case like this, they’ve all lived till eighty or ninety, my grandfather lived to ninety-four. The doctors came up with excuses. ‘We need to follow protocol. We still have to treat it as due to natural causes. Only in twenty or thirty years’ time, when we’ve built up a data bank, can we link these diseases to low-level ionizing radiation. And to what we’re eating and drinking on our land. But, for the moment, too little is known by medicine and science.’ Well, I can’t wait twenty or thirty years. That’s half a lifetime! I wanted to take them to court, take the state itself to court. They’ve called me crazy, laughed at me. They said children like that were born even in ancient Greece, ancient China. One official shouted, ‘You’re after Chernobyl benefits! Chernobyl money!’ I’m amazed I didn’t faint in his office, die of a heart attack. But I mustn’t allow that.

There was one thing they just couldn’t, and wouldn’t, understand: I had to know that I and my husband weren’t to blame. That it wasn’t our love. (She faces the window and cries quietly.)

This is a little girl growing up. No matter what, she’s a little girl. I don’t want you using our surname. Even the neighbours on our landing don’t know the whole story. I’ll put her in a dress, plait her hair. ‘Your little Katya is so pretty,’ they tell me. I look at pregnant women in such a funny way now. Like I’m seeing them from a distance, from round a corner. I don’t look so much as peep at them. Inside, there’s a mess of emotions: surprise and horror, envy and joy, there’s even some vindictiveness. Once I caught myself looking with the same emotion at our neighbour’s pregnant dog. At a mother stork in her nest …

My little girl …

Larisa Z., mother

Monologue on a moonscape

All of a sudden, I’ve started wondering whether it’s better to remember or forget.

I’ve asked my friends. Some have forgotten, others don’t want to remember, because there’s nothing we can change, we can’t even move out of this place. Can’t even do that.

Here are my memories. In the days straight after the accident, all the books on radiation – on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even on X-rays – vanished from the library. There was a rumour going around that it was on orders from the authorities, to keep people from panicking. For our own peace of mind. There was even a joke that, if Chernobyl had exploded on Papua New Guinea, everyone but the Papuans would be shaking with fear. There was no medical advice, no information. Whoever could, got their hands on potassium iodide tablets (the pharmacies in our town didn’t stock it, you had to know people in the right places). Some people took a handful of the pills and swallowed them down with a glass of pure alcohol. The paramedics saved their lives.

The first foreign journalists came; the first film crew. They were all in plastic boiler suits, helmets, rubber overshoes, gloves – even the camera was in a special case. And accompanying them was one of our Soviet girls, interpreting. In a summer dress and sandals.

People believed every word in print, although no one was printing the truth. They weren’t speaking the truth. While it’s true they were hiding things, at the same time there was plenty they just didn’t understand. From the general secretary of the Party down to the road sweepers. Later came the signs, everyone was following them closely. So long as the town or village has sparrows and pigeons, it’s safe for people to live there. If the bees are busy, it’s still clean. I was in a taxi, and the driver was puzzling over why the birds were acting as though they were blind, dropping down on his windscreen, crashing into it. Like they’d gone daft and dozy. They seemed suicidal. After his shift, to blank it all out, he used to sit drinking with his friends.

I have memories of coming back from a trip for work. On both sides of the road there was a genuine moonscape: fields covered in white dolomite, stretching out to the horizon. The top layer of contaminated soil had been removed and buried, with this dolomite sand poured in its place. As if it wasn’t earth; like we weren’t on earth. I was haunted by that vision for a long time and tried writing a story. I imagined what it would look like in a hundred years’ time: a creature, maybe human, maybe something else, hopping on four legs, jerking its long hind legs back with its knees, who sees by night with its third eye, and with its one ear on the top of its head it can hear even an ant running. Ants are all that’s left, everything else on earth and in the sky has died out.

I sent the story off to a magazine. They wrote back saying it wasn’t a work of literature, it was a description of horror. Of course, I didn’t have the talent. But on this occasion, I suspected another reason was at play. I began wondering why so little has been written on Chernobyl. Our writers keep on writing about the war, about Stalin’s camps, but they’re silent on Chernobyl. There are almost no books on it. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? It’s an episode still outside our culture. Too traumatic for our culture. And our only answer is silence. We just close our eyes, like little children, and think we can hide. Something from the future is peeking out and it’s just too big for our minds. Too huge for us to handle. If you get chatting with somebody, he’ll start telling his story, and he’ll thank you for listening to him. You may not have understood, but at least you listened. Because he didn’t understand it either. Just like you. I’ve gone off reading science fiction.

So which is better: remembering or forgetting?

Yevgeny Alexandrovich Brovkin, lecturer at Gomel State University

Monologue of a witness who had toothache when he saw Christ fall and cry out

At the time, I had other things on my mind. It might sound strange to you. This was when I was getting a divorce from my wife.

They suddenly turned up, handed me a call-up notice and said there was a van waiting downstairs. A special ‘meat wagon’. Just like in 1937. They came for us by night; took us warm from our beds. Then later this set-up stopped working: the wives wouldn’t open the door, or they’d fib about their husbands being off on a business trip, away on holiday, visiting their parents in the countryside. They tried to hand over the call-up notices, but the wives wouldn’t take them. So they started seizing people at work, in the streets, during their lunch break in the factory canteens. Just like in 1937. And at the time, I was on the verge of going crazy. My wife had been unfaithful, everything else seemed like no big deal. I got into the meat wagon. Two men led me to it – in plain clothes, though they carried themselves like soldiers – they walked on either side of me, obviously worried I’d run for it. When I got in the van, for some reason I thought of the American astronauts who flew to the moon, and one of them later became a priest, while the other, I think he went mad? I read about their visions. They were meant to have seen these remains of cities, with human traces. These press clippings flashed through my mind: our nuclear power plants are completely safe, you could build one right in Red Square. Next to the Kremlin. Safer than a samovar. They were like the stars, and we would sprinkle them all over the land. But my wife had left me. That was all I was capable of thinking about. I tried killing myself a few times, swallowed pills, wishing never to wake up. We were at the same kindergarten, went to the same school. Studied at the same college. (He lights a cigarette and stops speaking.)

I warned you. Nothing heroic here for the writer’s pen. Had thoughts about how this wasn’t wartime, why I should put myself at risk while someone else was sleeping with my wife. Why me and not him? To be honest, I didn’t see any heroes there. I saw madmen who couldn’t give a damn about their own lives; saw enough bravado, but there was no need for it. I also have the certificates of merit and commendation. But that’s because I wasn’t afraid to die; couldn’t give a damn! Even saw it as a way out. They would have buried me with honours. And at public expense.

Out there, you were thrown into this dreamlike world where the End of Time met the Stone Age. On the inside, it all still felt raw and intense. We were living in the forest, in tents. Twenty kilometres from the reactor. We were being ‘partisans’. ‘Partisans’ means the reservists called up for training. Our ages ranged from twenty-five to forty, many of us were university educated or vocationally trained. Myself, I’m a history teacher. Instead of assault rifles they gave us spades. We dug up refuse dumps and vegetable plots. The women in the villages looked at us and crossed themselves. We were in gloves, respirators and camouflage suits. The sun was baking down. We’d turn up at someone’s vegetable plot like some kind of devils, looking like aliens. They didn’t understand why we were digging up their beds, ripping out their garlic and cabbage, when it was just your ordinary garlic, ordinary cabbage. The old women crossed themselves and wailed: ‘What is it, soldiers, the end of the world?’

Inside a house, they’d have the stove lit and pork fat frying. You’d bring the dosimeter up close: that stove was a mini nuclear reactor. ‘Sit down, lads, join us at the table,’ they’d say. They were welcoming us into their home. We turned them down. They said, ‘We’ll find you a hundred mils of vodka. Sit down. Tell us about it all.’ What could we tell them? At the reactor itself, the firemen had been trampling soft fuel, which was glowing, but they hadn’t known what it was. So how were we going to know anything?

Our squad would set out. We had just the one dosimeter for all of us. But you’d get a different reading in each place: one guy would be working where it was two roentgens, another where it was ten. We felt as powerless as prisoners, and at the same time there was fear. And mystery. But I didn’t experience any fear; I was looking at everything from the outside.

A group of scientists flew in by helicopter. They were wearing rubber suits, high boots, safety glasses. Proper astronauts. An old woman went up to one of them: ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m a scientist.’ ‘Oh, so you’re a scientist! Look at him, in that get-up. You’ve camouflaged yourself. And what about us?’ She chased him with her stick. The thought occurred to me a few times that some day they’ll start hunting down scientists the way they caught and drowned doctors in the Middle Ages, burned them at the stake.

I saw a man watching as they buried his home. (He gets up and walks over to the window.) There was just a freshly dug grave left. A large rectangle. They buried the well, the orchard. (He falls silent.) We were burying earth. We would carve it out and coil it into big rolls. I warned you. There was nothing heroic.

We used to get back late in the evening because we were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The only time off was at night. One time, we were driving in an armoured personnel carrier. Somebody was walking through the empty village. We got closer: it was a young fellow carrying a carpet on his shoulders. Not far off was a Lada. We stopped the vehicle. The car boot was chock-full of TVs and telephones with the cords cut off. We turned around and rammed the APC into the Lada, which crumpled like an accordion, as if it was a tin can. No one said a word.

We were burying the forest. We sawed up trees into one-and-a-half-metre lengths, packed them in plastic and dumped them in the burial site. At night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d shut my eyes, and there’d be something black wriggling and twisting. Like it was alive; living rolls of earth. Full of beetles, spiders and worms. I didn’t know what any of them were, didn’t know their names. They were just beetles, spiders. Ants. But there were little and large ones, some were yellow, some were black. They were all different colours. There was a poet who wrote that the animals are a separate nation. I was killing them by the tens, hundreds, thousands, without even knowing their names. I was smashing their homes, their secrets. Burying and burying them.

Leonid Andreyev, a writer I particularly love, wrote a parable about Lazarus, who had seen beyond what’s allowed. He turned into an outsider, could never again be like everyone else, even though he’d been raised from the dead by Christ.

Maybe that’s enough, now? You’re curious, I get that. They’re always curious, the people who weren’t there. There’s a Chernobyl in Minsk and another one in the actual Zone. Somewhere in Europe you’ll find a third one. In the Zone itself I was struck by the indifference with which people talked about the disaster. In one dead village, we met an old man. He was living all alone. We asked him, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ And he answered, ‘Of what?’ You can’t be frightened the whole time, a person can’t do that; some time goes by, and ordinary human life starts up again. Everyday human life. Our men were drinking vodka, playing cards, chatting up women. They talked a lot about money, but they weren’t working for the money. Very few people were only after the money. They worked because they had to. They were told to, and didn’t ask questions. They dreamed of promotions, they schemed and stole things. They hoped for the promised benefits: jumping the queue for a flat so they could move out of their factory barracks, getting their kids a kindergarten place, buying a car. One of the guys wimped out, got all frightened of leaving the tent, slept in a homemade rubber suit. The coward! They expelled him from the Party. He used to shout, ‘I want to live!’ Everything was all mixed up. I met women out there who’d volunteered and were raring to go. The authorities had turned them down, explained they needed drivers, mechanics and firemen, but the women came anyway. Everything was all mixed up. There were thousands of volunteers. You had the volunteer student teams, and then the special meat wagons stalking reservists by night. The charity collections, the money transfers to the relief fund, the hundreds of people selflessly donating their blood and bone marrow. And at the same time, there was nothing you couldn’t buy for a bottle of vodka. You could buy home leave, a certificate of merit. One collective-farm chairman would bring a crate of vodka for the radiation monitoring technicians to keep his village off the evacuation list, while another brought a crate of vodka so his collective farm would be resettled. The fellow had been promised a two-bedroom apartment in Minsk. Nobody was checking the radiation readings given. It was the usual Russian chaos. That’s how our life is. Things got struck off the inventories and sold. It was a case of: sure, it’s sickening, but to hell with you all!

Students were sent to join us. They pulled up orache from the fields and raked the hay. There were some really young couples, husband and wife. They even walked about holding hands. It was unbearable to look at. But all these places were so beautiful! Such grandeur. The horror was made all the worse by that beauty. And human beings just had to get out of there. They had to flee like villains, or criminals.

Every day, they brought the papers. I read just the headlines: ‘Chernobyl, Site of Heroic Deeds’, ‘Reactor Is Vanquished’, ‘Life Goes On’, We had political officers. They put on political sessions, told us we had to emerge victorious. Over what? The atom? Physics? The cosmos? Our nation treats victory not as an event but a process. Life is a battle. That’s where our great love of floods, fires and earthquakes comes from. We need a stage for our ‘displays of courage and heroism’. Somewhere to hoist the flag. The political officer read us news items on the ‘high level of political awareness and efficient organization’, on how, within a few days of the accident, the red flag was flying over Reactor No. 4. There it proudly fluttered, until a few months later it was ravaged by the tremendous radiation. So they raised a new flag. And another. The old one was kept as a souvenir. They ripped it into shreds and shoved it under their jackets next to their hearts. Then they took the rags back home, showed them off proudly to their children. They preserved them. Heroic lunacy! But I was just the same, no better. I tried to imagine the soldiers climbing on to the roof. Sheer suicide. But they were brimming with emotions. First, their sense of duty and, second, passion for the Motherland. You’ll tell me it was Soviet paganism? But the thing is, if they’d handed the flag to me, I would have climbed up there too. Why? I can’t really answer that. Of course, the fact that I didn’t care if I died played a role. My wife didn’t even send me letters. In six months I didn’t get one. (He stops.)

Want to hear a joke? A prisoner breaks out of jail. He hides in the thirty-kilometre zone. They catch him and take him to the radiation monitoring technicians. He’s glowing so much they can’t throw him back in jail, put him in hospital or leave him anywhere near people. (He laughs.) We loved jokes out there. Black humour.

I arrived there when the birds were sitting in their nests, and left when the apples were lying on the snow. There was a lot we didn’t manage to bury. We buried earth in the earth. Along with the beetles, spiders and maggots, that whole separate nation. We buried a world. That was the deepest impression I came away with. Those creatures.

I haven’t told you anything, really. Just some fragments. Leonid Andreyev had another story. There was a man who lived in Jerusalem, and Christ was led past his house. He saw and heard everything, but at the time he was suffering from toothache. Right before his eyes, Christ stumbled and fell as He carried the Cross, and He began crying out. The man saw everything, but he had toothache and didn’t run out into the street. A couple of days later, when his tooth had stopped hurting, he was told how Christ had been raised from the dead. That’s when he realized, ‘I could have been a witness, but I had toothache.’

Is that how it always has to be? People will never prove equal to a great event; they’re always out of their depth. My father defended Moscow in ’42. The fact that he was taking part in history only sunk in decades later. He realized it from the books and films. All he told us was, ‘I sat firing from a trench. Got buried by a blast. The medics dragged me out half-dead.’ That was it.

And at the time, my wife had left me.

Arkady Filin, clean-up worker

Three monologues on the ‘walking ashes’ and the ‘talking dust’

Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovsky, chairman of the

Khoyniki Hunters and Anglers Society, and two hunters, Andrey and Vladimir, who declined to give their surnames.

I was a child the first time I killed a fox. The second time it was a cow elk. I vowed never to kill one again. They have such expressive eyes.

It’s us humans who understand things, the animals just live. And the birds too.

In the autumn the female roe deer is very sensitive. If, on top of that, she is downwind of you, you’ve had it. She won’t let you near. But a fox is a sly old thing.

There’s one guy kicking about here. Once he’s had a few, he’ll start making speeches to everyone. He studied philosophy at university, then did time in prison. When you meet people in the Zone, they never tell you the truth about themselves. Or rarely. But this one has his head screwed on right. ‘Chernobyl,’ he’ll say, ‘happened so as to give us philosophers.’ He called animals ‘walking ashes’, and people were ‘talking dust’. ‘Talking dust’ because dust we are, and to dust we shall return.

The Zone pulls you in. Like a magnet, I’m telling you. Saints preserve us! Once you’ve been there … Your heart is drawn to it.

I read this book. There were saints who talked with the birds and the beasts. And we think they can’t understand humans.

Well, lads, we need to start at the beginning.

Go ahead, chairman, and meantime we’ll light up.

So then, here’s how it went. I got called to the District Executive Committee. ‘Look here, chief hunter: we have a lot of pets left behind in the Zone, cats and dogs, they need to be shot in the interests of disease prevention. Go to work!’ The next day, I called everyone over, all the hunters. I announced that blah-di-blah. Nobody wanted to go, because they weren’t issuing any protective equipment. I tried civil defence – they didn’t have anything. Not a single respirator. I ended up going to the cement plant and getting masks there. Made with a very fine weave, for cement dust. But they didn’t have respirators for us.

We ran into soldiers there. They were in masks and gloves, in armoured personnel carriers, while we were in our shirts, with gauze masks tied round our noses. We went back home in those shirts and boots. Back to our families.

I cobbled together two teams. Some volunteers signed up too. Two teams, twenty people in each. Each team was allocated a vet and someone from health and disease control. We also had a tractor with an excavator bucket and a tipper truck. It was wrong they didn’t give us protective equipment. They didn’t spare a thought for the people.

But they did give us bonuses: thirty roubles each. A bottle of vodka in those days cost you three roubles. We decontaminated ourselves. Recipes sprang up from nowhere: put one spoonful of goose droppings in a bottle of vodka, let it stand for two days and drink it. To keep our, you know, family jewels safe and sound. Remember all those folk ditties? Heaps of them.

A Trabant is a heap of junk.

A man from Kiev has no spunk.

If you want to shine in bed,

Better wrap your balls in lead.

Ha ha.

We drove around the Zone for two months. In our district, half the villages had been evacuated. There were dozens of them: Babchin, Tulgovichi … The first time we went, dogs were running about near their houses. Guarding them, waiting for people to come back. They were excited to see us, came running to a human voice. They welcomed us. We shot them in the houses, the barns, the vegetable plots. Then we dragged them out and loaded them on to the tipper trucks. Not pleasant, of course. They couldn’t understand why we were killing them. They were easy to kill. These are pets: they don’t fear guns, don’t fear man, come running to a human voice.

There was a tortoise crawling along. Good Lord! Past an empty house. The apartments had aquariums in them, with fish.

We didn’t kill the tortoises. You can run the front wheel of a jeep over a tortoise shell and it will take it, won’t crack. Only if you were drunk, of course, running over it. In the yards, there were cages wide open, rabbits running about. The coypus were locked up, we let them out; if there was any water nearby, a lake or river, they swam away. Everything had been left in a hurry. Thought they’d soon be back. After all, how had it gone? An evacuation order ‘for three days’. Women bawling, children crying, cows bellowing. The little ones were tricked: ‘We’re going to the circus.’ People thought they would be back. Nobody said this was forever. Ah, saints preserve us! I’m telling you, it was a war zone. Cats looking into people’s eyes, their dogs howling, trying to get on the buses. Mongrels, Alsatians. The soldiers were pushing them out again, kicking them. They ran after the buses for ages. Evacuation … God forbid we ever have another!

So then, here’s how it works. The Japanese had their Hiroshima, and now look at them: ahead of the pack. Number one in the whole world. So then …

We were given the chance to go shooting and, what’s more, with live, running prey. The thrill of the chase. We’d down some drinks and off we’d go. At my workplace, they counted it as a day’s work, paying me for it. They could, of course, have topped it up, considering the nature of the job. The bonus was thirty roubles, but the money wasn’t worth as much as under the Communists. Everything had changed already.

Here’s how it worked. At first, the houses were all sealed up. We didn’t rip off the seals. Through the window, you’d see a cat sitting inside. How could you get at it? We left them alone. Later, the looters started breaking in – they kicked the doors in, smashed the windows and gutted the place. The first things to go would be tape recorders and TVs. All the furs. Then, later, they stripped everything clean. Just some aluminium spoons left lying on the floor. And the surviving dogs moved into the houses. If you went in, they’d go for you. They’d stopped trusting humans. I went in one place, and there was a bitch lying in the middle of the room with her puppies. Did I feel sorry for them? Not pleasant, of course. I thought about it. We were basically acting like a death squad. Like in wartime, following the same plan. A military operation. We too would arrive, seal off a village, and as soon as they heard the first shot, the dogs would scram. Run for the forest. The cats were smarter, better at hiding. A kitten hid in a clay pot. I shook it out. Pulled them out from under the stove. Not a pleasant feeling. You go in the house and the cat darts past your boots like a bullet, you run after it with your rifle. They’re all skinny and dirty. Patchy fur. At first, there were heaps of eggs, lots of hens had been left behind. The dogs and cats were eating the eggs, and when those ran out, they ate the hens. The foxes were eating the hens too. By now, foxes were living in the village alongside the dogs. So, when those ran out of hens, the dogs began eating the cats. Sometimes we came across pigs in the barns. We let them out. In the cellars, there were all sorts of jars: gherkins, tomatoes. We’d open some and throw them in the trough. We didn’t kill the pigs.

We found an old woman. She locked herself in her cottage: had five cats and three dogs. ‘Don’t hurt the dog: once she was human too.’ She wouldn’t hand them over. Cursed us. We took them by force, but left her one cat and one dog. She called us names: ‘You bandits! You jailers!’

Ha ha.

By the hill there ploughs a tractor,

Up the hill burns a reactor.

Had not the Swedes made us aware,

We would still be ploughing there.

Ha ha.

Empty villages. Just the stoves left. It’s what the Nazis did to Khatyn all over again! There’s an old man and old woman living there, like something out of a fairy tale. They aren’t afraid, but anyone else would have lost their minds! By night, they burn old tree stumps. The wolves are frightened of the fire.

So then, here’s how it was. The smells. I just couldn’t work out where that smell in the village was coming from. Six kilometres from the reactor. The village of Masaly, it smelled like an X-ray room. Reeked of iodine, some kind of acid. But they say radiation has no smell: I don’t know. We had to shoot at point-blank. So this bitch was in the middle of the room with her puppies. She went for me – I put a bullet in her. The puppies were licking my arms, being all sweet and playful. We had to shoot at point-blank. Saints preserve us! There was this one dog, a little black poodle. I still feel sorry for it. We heaped the tipper full of them. Taking them to the burial site. To tell the truth, it was just a plain old deep pit, though you’re meant to dig it taking care not to reach the ground water, and line the bottom with plastic. You’re meant to find some spot fairly high up, but you know how it is. The rules were broken all the time: we had no plastic, and we didn’t spend long looking for the right spot. If you wound them rather than killing them, they’ll squeal and cry. They were tipping them out of the truck into the pit, and this little poodle began scrabbling about. It climbed out. Nobody had any cartridges left. Had nothing to finish it off with, not a single cartridge. They shoved it back into the pit and covered them all up with earth. Still feel sorry for it.

There weren’t nearly as many cats, though. Maybe they’d left in search of people? Or were they hiding? A poodle is an indoor, pampered little thing.

It’s better to kill from a distance, so your eyes don’t meet.

Make sure you learn to shoot straight, so you won’t have to finish them off.

It’s us humans who understand things, while they just live. ‘Walking ashes.’

The horses … They were being taken to slaughter. They were crying.

And I’ll add this. Every living creature has a soul. From boyhood, my father trained me to hunt. When a doe is lying there wounded, she wants to be pitied, but you’re trying to finish her off. In her last moment, she has a completely conscious, almost human look in her eyes. She hates you. Or she’s pleading: ‘Let me live! I want to live too!’

Learn to shoot straight! I’m telling you, having to finish them off is a lot more unpleasant than a clean kill. Hunting is a sport, a form of sport. Why does nobody go on at the anglers, while the hunters get all the abuse. It’s not fair!

Hunting and war have always been the most important pursuits of men. Ever since time began.

I couldn’t admit to my son, my little boy, where I had been, what I was doing. To this day, he thinks his daddy was defending someone. Standing guard somewhere! On the television, they were showing all the military hardware, the soldiers. A lot of soldiers. My son asked, ‘Daddy, were you a soldier there?’

A TV cameraman came out with us. Remember? He had a movie camera. It made him cry. He was a bloke, but he cried. He was hoping to see a three-headed boar or something.

Ha ha. Fox spies Little Round Bun rolling through the forest. ‘Little Round Bun, where are you rolling to?’ ‘I’m not Little Round Bun, I’m a Chernobyl hedgehog.’ Ha ha. And as they say: ‘Atoms for peace: every home should have one!’

Man dies like an animal, I’m telling you. I’ve seen it, many times. In Afghanistan. I was wounded in the stomach, lay there in the sun. The heat was unbearable. Oh, for a sip of water! ‘So,’ I think, ‘I’m going to die here like a dog.’ I’m telling you, our blood flows just the same as theirs. And pain is the same.

The policeman we had with us, you know … went cuckoo. Ended up in hospital. He was always feeling sorry for the Siamese cats, saying how much they cost at the market, and how beautiful they were. Wasn’t quite right in the head.

A cow was walking with her calf. We didn’t shoot them. Nor did we shoot the horses. They were frightened of the wolves, but not of human beings. But horses are better at defending themselves. It was the cows that the wolves got first. That’s the law of the jungle.

They transported cattle from Belarus and sold them to Russia. The heifers had leukaemia, so they flogged them off cheap.

More than anything, I felt sorry for the old men. They’d come up to our vehicles. ‘Look in on my house, lad.’ They’d put the keys in your hand. ‘You can bring me my suit, and my hat.’ They’d give you some cash. ‘See how my dog’s doing.’ The dog had been shot and the house looted. But the old guys would never be going back, anyway. How could you break it to them? I wouldn’t take their keys, didn’t want to cheat them. Others did. ‘Where’s your moonshine kept? Where do you hide it?’ The old grandad would tell them and they’d find whole churns of the stuff, big milk churns.

They asked us to shoot a wild boar for a wedding. Placed an order! The liver was like jelly in your hands, but they wanted it anyway. For weddings and christenings.

We also go shooting for science. Once a quarter, we catch two rabbits, two foxes and two deer. Contaminated, all of them. But we hunt and eat them anyway. At first, we were worried, but now we’re used to it. We’ve got to eat something, can’t all move to the moon or some other planet.

One chap bought a fox-fur hat at the market: he went bald. An Armenian bought a dirt-cheap assault rifle from a burial site: he died. We used to spook each other out.

My heart and head were unaffected there. Moggies and doggies. Saints preserve us! I shot them. That was my job.

I was talking to this driver who was bringing out houses from there. The Zone is being stripped down and sold. Though they aren’t schools, houses and kindergartens any more: they’re inventorized items for decontamination. They’re being carted away! We met him maybe in the bathhouse or near a beer stand, I don’t remember exactly. What he said was, they drive out there in KamAZ trucks, dismantle a house in three hours, and near the town they are stopped by buyers. Those dacha parts, they sell like hot cakes. The Zone has been sold off for dachas.

There are predators among us. Hunter predators. Other people just enjoy walking through the forest, hunting small game and birds.

I’m telling you. So many people suffered, and nobody has answered for it. They flung the management of the atomic power station in prison, and that was all. Under that system, it was very hard to say who was to blame. When you got orders from above, what could you do? Only one thing: carry them out. They were testing something there. I read in the papers that the military were stockpiling plutonium. For atomic bombs. That’s why it all came crashing down. To put it crudely, the question is: why Chernobyl? Why did it happen to us, and not to the French or the Germans?

It’s lodged in my memory. That’s how it was. A pity nobody had a single cartridge left, nothing to shoot it with. That poodle. There were twenty of us. Not a single cartridge by the end of the day.

Monologue on how we can’t live without Tolstoy and Chekhov

What do I pray for? If you were to ask me what I pray for … I say my prayers at home, not in church. In the morning or evening, when everyone is asleep.

I want to feel love. I do feel love! And I pray for that love. But should I … (She trails off mid-sentence. I can see she is reluctant to go on.) … remember? Maybe, at any rate I need to shed it all, put it aside. I’ve never read about this in any books, never seen anything like it in films. The films just showed war. My grandparents used to say they had no childhood, just war. Their childhood was the war, and mine was Chernobyl. That’s where I’m from. Look, you’re writing this, but not one book has ever helped me, they’ve never explained it. Nor did the theatre or films. I’ve worked it all out for myself, without their help. We’re living through all this ourselves, and we don’t know what to do. I can’t get my head round it. My mother was completely at sea: she teaches language and literature in a school. Always taught me to live life by books. Then suddenly there are no books to guide you. Mum was lost, she couldn’t live without her books. Without Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Memories? I both want to remember and don’t. (She appears to be listening to an inner voice, or debating with herself.) If the scientists don’t know anything, if the writers don’t either, then we can help them with our own lives and deaths. That’s what my mother reckons. But I’d rather not think about it. I’d like to be happy. Why can’t I be happy?

We lived in Pripyat, near the atomic power station. It’s where I was born and raised. In a big prefab apartment block, up on the fourth floor. The windows looked out on the power plant. On 26 April … Many people told me later they definitely heard the explosion. I don’t know; in our family, no one noticed it. I woke up in the morning as usual, to go to school. I heard a rumbling. Through the window, I saw a helicopter hovering over the roof of our building. ‘Blimey!’ I thought. ‘This’ll give me something to tell the kids about at school!’ How was I to know we only had two days left? Of our old life. There were two more days, our last days in the town. The town is gone now. What’s left isn’t our town any more. I remember our neighbour sitting on the balcony with binoculars, watching the fire. It was about three kilometres away as the crow flies. And in the afternoon, I cycled over with the girls and boys to the power station. The kids who didn’t have bikes were jealous of us. Nobody told us off, nobody! Not our parents, not our teachers. By lunchtime, no anglers were left on the river: they came home brown. Even a month in Sochi wouldn’t get you that colour. A nuclear tan! The smoke hanging over the power plant wasn’t black or yellow, it was blue, it had this blue tinge. But nobody told us off. Must’ve been our upbringing. We’d grown used to the idea that danger could only come from war, with explosions left, right and centre. But here we had an ordinary fire being put out by ordinary firemen. The boys were cracking jokes: ‘Line up in long ranks towards the cemetery. Whoever’s tallest will be the first to die.’ I was small, myself. I don’t recall any fear, but I remember a lot of things that were strange, unusual. A friend told me how she and her mum buried money and gold jewellery in the yard at night, and they worried about forgetting the spot. My grandma had been given a Tula samovar for her retirement, and for some reason that samovar and Grandpa’s medals were what bothered her most. And her old Singer sewing machine. She was wondering where to hide them. Soon we were being evacuated. It was a word Dad brought home from work: ‘We’re leaving with the evacuation.’ Just like in war novels. When we were on board the bus, Dad remembered something he’d forgotten to bring. He ran home. He returned with two of his new shirts, still on their hangers. It was odd, not like him. Inside the bus, we all sat in silence, staring out the window. The soldiers looked unearthly, they were walking about the streets in white snow suits and face masks. People would go up to them and ask, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ ‘Why ask us?’ they’d say stroppily. ‘Ask those guys over there in the white Volgas, they’re in command.’

We were leaving. The sky was as blue as can be. Where were we going? People had Easter cakes and painted eggs in their bags and string shoppers. If this was war, then from the books I’d imagined it differently. With explosions left, right and centre, and air raids. We moved slowly, held up by cattle. Cows and horses were being herded along the roads. There was a smell of dust and milk. The drivers swore and shouted at the herdsmen: ‘What the Devil are you doing, driving your herd down the road, you mother-effers! You’re stirring up radioactive dust! Couldn’t you have gone through the field or the meadow?’ The herdsmen responded in kind, making excuses, saying it would be a shame to trample the young wheat and grass. No one believed we wouldn’t be returning. For people not to go back home – that had never happened before. I felt a bit dizzy and my throat was tickling. The older women didn’t cry, but the young ones did. My mother was crying.

We made our way to Minsk. We bought train tickets from the conductor for three times the price. She brought in tea for everyone, but to us she said, ‘Use your own mugs and glasses.’ It took a while for us to cotton on. First we wondered if they were short of glasses. No, that wasn’t it! They were frightened of us. We’d get asked, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Chernobyl.’ And they would sidle away from our compartment, not let their children run past us. We arrived in Minsk, got to my mother’s friend’s place. My mum to this day feels ashamed that we piled into someone else’s apartment in our ‘dirty’ clothes and shoes that night. But they welcomed us and fed us. Felt sorry for us. Although their neighbours popped round: ‘You’ve got guests? Where are they from?’ ‘Chernobyl.’ And they sidled away too.

A month later, they allowed my parents to go back and check on the apartment. They brought back a warm blanket, my autumn coat and Chekhov’s Collected Letters, my mum’s favourite. I think it was seven volumes. Grandma, though … Our grandma couldn’t understand why Mum hadn’t picked up a couple of jars of the strawberry jam that I loved. It was sealed up in jars, with the lids closed. Metal lids. On the blanket we found a ‘spot’. Mum tried washing it, vacuuming it, but nothing helped. We took it to the dry cleaners. But it carried on glowing, this spot, until we cut it out with scissors. Here were our old familiar things: a blanket, a coat. But I couldn’t sleep under the blanket any more, couldn’t wear the coat. We didn’t have the money to buy a new coat for me, but I couldn’t use that one. I hated those things, that coat! It wasn’t that I was afraid, you know, I really did hate them. Those things could kill me! And they could kill my mother! That feeling of hatred … I couldn’t get my head round any of it. They were talking everywhere about the disaster: at home, in school, on the bus, in the streets. They were comparing it with Hiroshima, but no one believed that. How can you believe anything if it’s baffling? No matter how hard you strain and try, it doesn’t get any clearer. I remember when we drove out of our town – the sky was as blue as can be.

Grandma … She didn’t take to the new place. She was homesick. Just before she died, she told us: ‘I want sorrel!’ For years they wouldn’t let us eat sorrel, it’s worse than anything for soaking up radiation. We took her back to be buried in her native village of Dubrovniki. By then, it was inside the Zone, fenced off by barbed wire. There were soldiers with Kalashnikovs standing guard. They only let adults beyond the barbed wire: Mum and Dad and our relatives. But I wasn’t allowed in: ‘No children.’ I realized I would never be able to visit my grandmother. It sank in. Who ever heard of anything like that? Where else has it ever happened? Mum confessed, ‘You know, I hate flowers and trees now.’ She came out with that and shocked herself, because she’d grown up in a village, and knew them all and loved them. That was before. When we went out for country walks, she could name every flower, every grass and herb: coltsfoot, sweetgrass … At the cemetery, they laid a tablecloth on the grass and put out snacks and vodka, but the soldiers checked it with the dosimeter and threw it all away. Buried the lot. The herbs and flowers all set the dosimeters clicking. Where had we taken our grandmother?

I pray for love. But I’m afraid of it, afraid of loving. I have a fiancé, we’ve handed in our forms at the registry office. Ever heard anything about the Hiroshima hibakusha? The people who survived Hiroshima? They can only count on marrying each other. It doesn’t get written about or discussed here, but we exist. The Chernobyl hibakusha. He took me home, introduced me to his mother. She is a good mum. She works at a factory as a financial manager. A community activist. Goes on all the anti-Communist demos, reads Solzhenitsyn. And this good mother, when she found out I was from a Chernobyl family, one of the evacuees, she asked in surprise, ‘But surely you can’t have children, my dear?’ We’d already handed in our forms at the registry office. He pleaded with me, ‘I’ll move out of home, we can rent a flat.’ But the words rang in my ears: ‘My dear, for some people procreation would be a sin.’ The sin of loving.

Before him, I had another boyfriend. An artist. We wanted to get married too. It was all going well, until one incident. I went round to his studio and heard him on the phone, shouting, ‘What a stroke of luck! You’ve no idea how lucky you are!’ Normally he was so calm, stolid, even; he didn’t speak with exclamation marks. Then all of a sudden! What had happened? His friend lived in a student hostel. He’d looked into the room next to his and found a girl hanging. She was strung up by a stocking from the top window. His friend took her down and phoned for an ambulance. But my boyfriend was trembling and spluttering. ‘You just can’t imagine what he saw, what he’s experienced! He carried her in his arms. She had white foam on her lips.’ He didn’t speak about the girl who had died, didn’t feel sorry for her. All he wanted was to see her and memorize it, and then to draw the image. It all came flooding back: how he’d asked me about the colour of the fire at the atomic power station, whether I’d seen cats and dogs being shot, how they were lying in the streets. Had people cried? Did I watch them die?

After that incident, I couldn’t stay with him any longer, couldn’t answer his questions. (After a moment of silence.) I don’t know whether I want to meet you again. It feels as though you are looking at me the way he did. Just observing me, memorizing me. Some kind of experiment is being done on us. Everybody is taking an interest. I can’t shake off that feeling. Have you any idea why we’ve had this sin visited on us? The sin of procreation? It’s not as though I’m guilty of anything.

Is it my fault if I want to be happy?

Katya P.

Monologue on what St Francis preached to the birds

This is my secret. No one else knows about it. I’ve only spoken about it to my friend.

I am a cameraman. I went out there, my head filled with what they’d taught us: you only become a real author in war, and all that. My favourite writer was Hemingway, my favourite book A Farewell to Arms. I arrived, and people were digging in their plots, there were tractors and seed drills out in the fields. It wasn’t obvious what to film. Nothing was blowing up anywhere.

The first shoot was in the village hall. They’d put a television on the stage and brought in the local people. They all listened to Gorbachev saying everything was fine, it was all under control. The village where we were filming was undergoing decontamination. They were washing the roofs, trucking in clean soil. But how do you wash an old woman’s roof if it’s leaking into her house? The soil had to be stripped off to a spade’s depth, meaning the whole fertile layer. Underneath, we just have yellow sand. So this old woman was following the village soviet’s instructions, shovelling away the soil, but raking off the manure to keep. Pity I didn’t film that. Wherever you went, you’d hear, ‘Hey, the movie makers are here. We’ll find you some heroes to film.’ Heroes like the old man and his grandson who spent two days herding the collective-farm cows from Chernobyl itself. When we’d finished filming, the livestock manager took me to this giant trench where they were burying those same cows with a bulldozer. It never occurred to me to film it. I stood with my back to the trench and shot an episode in the finest Soviet documentary tradition: bulldozer drivers reading their copy of Pravda, with the banner headline: ‘The Country Stands with You’. Oh, and I got lucky: I looked and there was this stork landing on a field. A symbol! No matter what disaster struck, we would triumph! Life would go on …

The country lanes. They’re full of dust. By now, I’ve realized that it isn’t just dust: it’s radioactive dust. I put the camera away to protect the lens. It was a horribly dry May. How much of that dust we swallowed, I really can’t say. A week later, my lymph nodes swelled up. But we scrimped on film, which was as precious as bullets, because First Secretary of the Central Committee Slyunkov was due to arrive. Nobody announced in advance where he was turning up, but we could guess. One day, for example, we drove down the road through clouds of dust, then the next day they were busy laying tarmac, and a good two or three layers thick! So it was easy to tell that was where the Party bigwigs were expected! Later, I filmed them walking terribly carefully across the fresh tarmac. Slap bang down the middle! I caught that on film too, but didn’t use it.

No one realized what was going on, that was the most terrifying thing. The radiation technicians were providing one set of figures, while the papers were printing another. Aha … that’s when the penny began to drop. Nooo! I had a small child, a wife I loved … What an idiot I’d been to come here! So they’d give me a medal, but my wife would leave me … It was humour that saved us. We went overboard with the jokes. A tramp moves into an abandoned village, where just four old women are left. Someone asks them, ‘How is your old fellow?’ ‘Ah, what a stud! He even goes running off to the other village.’ You can’t be too deep about it all. This is where we all are. Yes, you’ve got it: Chernobyl. Though there’s a road sweeping ahead, a stream flowing, running its course … But it happened! Butterflies fluttering about, a pretty woman standing at the riverside … But it happened! I felt a bit like that when someone close to me died. There’s the sun. You can hear music drifting over a wall, swallows flitting about under the eaves … But he’s dead! The rain’s falling … But he’s dead! Do you see? I want to capture my feelings in words, convey what it felt like inside me at the time. Slip into another dimension …

I saw an apple tree in blossom and started filming it: the bumblebees buzzing, the bridal white colour. And there were people working, the orchards were blossoming. I held the camera, but couldn’t understand. Something was wrong! The exposure was correct, the picture was beautiful, but there was something not right. Then suddenly it hit me: I couldn’t smell a thing. The orchard was in blossom, but there was no smell. It was only later I learned that the body reacts to high radiation levels by blocking certain senses. My mum was seventy-four and, now I thought about it, she complained of losing her sense of smell. So then, I thought, now it’s happening to me. I asked the others in my group, there were three of us, ‘Does the apple blossom smell?’ ‘You’re right, it doesn’t smell of anything.’ Something had happened to us. The lilac didn’t smell either. Even the lilac! And this sensation came over me that everything around was fake. I was in the middle of a stage set. And my mind wasn’t in a fit state to get to grips with this, it had nothing to fall back on. There was no map.

Something from my childhood. My neighbour, a former partisan, described how during the war their unit broke out of an encirclement. She was carrying her little baby in her arms, just one month old, as they went through a swamp with enemy forces all around. The baby was crying. He could give them away, then they’d all be found, the whole unit. So she smothered him. She spoke about it with this odd detachment, as though it had been some other person that did it, and the baby hadn’t been hers. I can’t remember any more why she brought it up. But I remember very clearly something else, my own horror. What had she done? How could she? I’d thought that the entire partisan unit was breaking out of the encirclement for the sake of the baby, to save it. But here they were smothering an infant to keep those strong and healthy men alive. So what is the meaning of life, then? I didn’t want to carry on living after that. It made me – I was just a boy at the time – feel awkward looking at that woman, because of the shocking truth I’d learned about her. And I’d found out something terrible about human beings in general. So how did she feel whenever she looked at me? (He falls silent for a while.) See, that’s why I don’t want to remember it. Those days in the Zone. I’ll think up all these different excuses for myself. I don’t want to open that door. While I was there, I wanted to understand where I was real and where I was a sham. I’d already had children. My first was a son. When my son was born, I stopped fearing death. The meaning of my life was revealed.

At night, I woke up in the hotel: there was a humming outside the window, these mysterious blue flashes. I pulled back the curtains: dozens of jeeps with red crosses and lights flashing were moving down the street. In total silence. I experienced something like trauma. These scenes from a film popped up in my memory. I was taken straight back to my childhood. We post-war children loved watching war films. We loved scenes just like this, that childish feeling of dread. All of your side has fled town, and you are left alone, with some decision you have to make. What’s the right thing to do? Play dead? Or what? And if there’s something you have to do, then what is it?

In the centre of Khoyniki, there was a board of honour displaying the top workers. The finest people in the district. But it was a drunkard truck driver who went into the contaminated zone and rescued the children from the kindergarten, not some guy with his photo on the board of honour. Everyone showed their true colours. And then there was the evacuation. First they brought out the children. They loaded them into big Ikarus buses. I caught myself filming things exactly how I had seen them in the war films. And just then, I noticed I wasn’t alone: the other people involved in all this activity were behaving the same way. They were acting as if they were in everyone’s favourite movie, you know the one, The Cranes Are Flying: the odd tear in the eye, a few words of farewell. A wave of the hand. It turned out we were all searching for some form of behaviour that we were already familiar with. We were trying to conform to something. A girl was waving to her mum as if to tell her everything was all right, she’d be brave. We would be victorious! We … Because that’s what we were like.

I thought: what if I went back to Minsk and everyone was being evacuated there too? How would I say goodbye to my loved ones – my wife and son? I imagined myself, among other things, offering this gesture: ‘We’ll be victorious! We are fighters.’ From as far back as I remember, my father wore army clothes, though he wasn’t in the military. Thinking about money was petty and bourgeois, and thinking about your own life was unpatriotic. Hunger was the normal state of things. Our parents’ generation had survived the ravages of war, and that’s what we needed to do. Otherwise, you’d never become a real man. We were taught to fight and survive in any conditions. As for me, after doing my compulsory service in the army, civilian life seemed bland. At night, a whole band of us used to roam the streets in search of kicks. As a boy, I read a marvellous book called The Cleaners – I’ve forgotten who wrote it – where they went off catching saboteurs and spies. Thrills and chases! That’s how we’re wired. If you plod off to work and eat well every day, you’ll get bored and restless!

We were living in the hostel for some vocational college along with the clean-up workers. They were young guys. We were issued a suitcase of vodka, to draw out the radiation. Suddenly, it turned out we had a medical service team in the same hostel. Made up entirely of girls. ‘Right, let’s have some fun!’ the lads said. Two of them headed off and came straight back with their eyes on stalks! They called us over to take a look. What an eyeful: the girls were walking down the corridor. To go with their tunics, they’d been issued trousers and long johns with these cords dragging along the floor, hanging all loose, and none of them showed the slightest embarrassment. All of it was old, well-worn, and far too baggy. Hanging on them like sacks. Some were in slippers, some in misshapen boots. And over their tunics, they had on these rubber boiler suits impregnated with some chemical coating. Ugh, the smell! Some of them even slept all night in that get-up. Dreadful! And they weren’t nurses at all, they were students taken from the college’s military training department. They’d been promised it was for two days, but when we arrived, they’d already been there for a month. They told us that they were taken to the reactor, where they’d seen a lot of people with burns, but I only heard about those burns from them. I can still see them in front of me: drifting around the hostel in a trance.

The newspapers wrote that we were lucky the wind hadn’t blown the wrong way. Meaning towards the city, towards Kiev. No one knew at the time, no one guessed that it had blown over Belarus. Over me and my little son, Yura. That day I’d gone for a walk with him in the forest. We were picking wood sorrel. My God, why did nobody warn me?

After the trip, I returned to Minsk. I was on a trolleybus, travelling in to work, when I heard snatches of a conversation: some people had been filming in Chernobyl, and their cameraman had died out there. He’d been fried. So I began wondering, ‘Who could that be?’ I carried on listening: he was a young guy with two kids. They mentioned his name: Viktor Gurevich. There was a cameraman with that name, a very young guy. So he had two children, did he? Why on earth had he never told us? We were approaching the film studio, when somebody corrected them: no, it hadn’t been Gurevich, it was Gurin, Sergey Gurin. My God, that was me! It seems funny now, but at the time, I walked from the metro station to the film studio, and was frightened of opening the door and finding … I had the ridiculous thought: ‘So where did they get a photo of me? The personnel department?’ Where had this rumour sprung from? There was a discrepancy between the scale of what was happening and the death toll. If you take the Battle of Kursk, there were thousands of victims. That makes sense. But here, in the first days of the disaster, it was supposedly just seven firemen. Later, a few more people. And then the terms became too abstract for our minds: ‘in a few generations’, ‘eternity’, ‘nothing’. Rumours began of three-headed birds flying around, hens that were pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs.

What came next? They needed to send someone to the Zone again. One cameraman brought in a certificate saying he had a stomach ulcer, another cleared off on holiday. They called me in: ‘You have to do it!’ ‘But I’ve just got back.’ ‘Yes, but you’ve already been out there. So it won’t really matter. And, see, you’ve already got children. The other guys are still young.’ Damn it, maybe I’d like a few more, maybe I want five or six kids! They began piling on the pressure, told me there was a pay review coming up and I’d have a trump card to play. They’d raise my salary. It’s a sad, ridiculous story. I pushed it into some dark recess of my mind.

Once I filmed some concentration-camp victims. Those people generally try to avoid each other. There’s something unnatural about getting together and remembering the war. Dragging up memories of how they killed and were killed, people who had known humiliation or experienced it together. Those people run away from each other. They’re running away from themselves. They’re running from what they’ve discovered about human beings: from the things that surfaced there, that burst out of their skin. Right. And here’s why. Something was going on there in Chernobyl. I too discovered things, felt things that I don’t want to talk about. For instance, the fact that all our humanist views are relative. Under extreme conditions, a person essentially shows himself to be nothing like the characters they write about in books. I’ve never actually found a person like those literary characters, never run into one. It’s the opposite. Man is no hero. We are all peddling the apocalypse. Some in a bigger way, some in a smaller way. There are memories and images that flash through my mind. The chairman of the collective farm wanted two trucks to evacuate his family and all their things, their furniture. The Party organizer asked for one for himself, demanding fair play. Meanwhile, for many days – and I was a witness to this – they were unable to evacuate small children, a nursery group, because of the shortage of transport. And here’s this man who can’t cram all his household junk into two trucks: his three-litre jars of jams and pickles, even. I saw them loading it up the next day. I didn’t film that either. (Suddenly, he starts laughing.) We bought sausage and tins of food in a shop out there and were too scared to eat it. We carried it with us in our string shoppers, couldn’t bring ourselves to throw it away. (Becoming serious.) The wheels of evil will keep turning even during the apocalypse. That’s what I’ve realized. People will keep gossiping, kowtowing to their bosses, rescuing their TV sets and astrakhan coats. Just before the world ends, human beings will be exactly the same as they are now. The same as always.

I feel awkward that I never managed to secure any benefits for my film crew. One of our guys needed an apartment, so I went to the trade union committee. ‘Help us out, we spent six months in the Zone. We’re supposed to be entitled to benefits.’ ‘Okay,’ they told me. ‘Bring your certificates. We need stamped certificates from you.’ But while we were out there, we drove to the District Committee, and all we found was a woman called Nastya mopping the corridors. Everyone else had fled. We have one director here who has a whole stack of certificates proving where he was and what he filmed. What a hero!

In my mind I have a great long film that never got shot. It’s a whole series. (He is silent.) We are all peddling the apocalypse.

We entered a cottage with some soldiers. An old woman lived there alone.

‘Well, let’s get moving, Granny.’

‘Let’s go, then, lads.’

‘You get yourself ready now, Granny.’

We waited in the street, had a smoke. And then the old woman came out holding an icon, a cat and a tied-up bundle. That was all she was taking.

‘You can’t take the cat, Granny. It’s not allowed. His fur is radioactive.’

‘No, lads, I won’t go without the cat. How can I leave him behind? He’d be all alone. He’s family to me.’

That’s where it all began, with that old woman, and the apple tree in blossom. These days, I only film animals. Like I said, the meaning of my life was revealed.

Once I showed my Chernobyl work to some children. I got told off for that, asked why I was doing it. They said that you couldn’t do that, it was better not to. So you had these kids living in a state of fear, with all these conversations going on over their heads, with their abnormal blood tests, their immune systems all messed up. I was hoping I might get an audience of five or ten. It was a full house. They asked all sorts of questions, but one in particular remains engraved in my memory. This boy, who was stammering and blushing, obviously a shy character, not a talkative type, asked: ‘Why couldn’t you help the animals that were left behind?’ Well, why indeed? It was a question that simply hadn’t occurred to me. And I couldn’t answer him. Our art is only about human suffering and love, not about everything living. It’s only about the human dimension! We don’t want to lower ourselves to the level of the animals, the plants, to that other world. But at the same time, man has the capacity to destroy just about everything. We can kill every living thing. It isn’t a fantasy any more. I was told that, in the initial months after the accident, when they were discussing the idea of resettling people, they considered a project for evacuating the animals too. But how? How could you move them all out? You might be able to herd out all the animals on the land, but what about those inside the earth: the beetles and worms? And the ones up above us, in the sky? How do you evacuate a sparrow or a pigeon? What do you do with them? We wouldn’t have the means to convey the information they’d need.

I want to make a film. It’ll be called Hostages. It’ll be about the animals. Remember that song, ‘A russet island sailing in the sea’. When the ship was sinking, people climbed into the lifeboats. But the horses didn’t know that there was no space in the boats for them.

My film’s a modern parable. The action takes place on a distant planet. An astronaut is in his spacesuit. Some noise is coming through his headphones. He sees something vast moving towards him. It’s immense. A dinosaur? Without understanding what it is, he shoots it. A moment later, again there’s something coming towards him. He destroys that too. Then, an instant later, there’s a whole herd. He causes a bloodbath. But he discovers a fire had broken out, and the animals were just fleeing along the path where the astronaut was standing. Human beings!

And what happened to me … I’ll tell you about it. Something unusual. I began seeing animals with new eyes, the trees, the birds. I’ve been travelling into the Zone all these years. From some abandoned, derelict human house this wild boar will leap out, or an elk. That’s what I have filmed. That’s what I’m looking for. I want to make a new film, looking at everything through the eyes of the animals. People ask me, ‘Why are you filming that? Look about you, there’s a war raging in Chechnya.’ But St Francis used to preach to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if it was the birds that were speaking to him in their bird language, rather than him condescending to their level. What if he knew their secret language?

Remember, in Dostoevsky, a man lashing a horse ‘on its meek eyes’. A madman! Not on its rump, ‘on its meek eyes’.

Sergey Gurin, cameraman

Monologue without a title: a scream

Good people, leave us be! Back off! You want to have a talk and then go; but we’re the ones that have to live here.

I’ve got these medical records. Every day, I pick them up and read them.

Anya Budai. Year of birth: 1985. 380 rem.

Vitya Grinkevich. Year of birth: 1986. 785 rem.

Nastya Shablovskaya. Year of birth: 1986. 570 rem.

Alyosha Plenin. Year of birth: 1985. 570 rem.

Andrey Kotchenko. Year of birth: 1987. 450 rem.

A mum brought in one such girl today for her appointment.

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘I’m aching all over, just like my granny: my heart, my back, I feel dizzy.’

Since they were little, they’ve known the word ‘alopecia’, because a lot of them are bald. They don’t have hair: they’ve got no eyebrows or eyelashes. They’re all used to it. But in our village, there’s only a junior school. Once they reach fifth grade they get bussed ten kilometres away. They cry, they don’t want to go. The other children will laugh at them there.

You’ve seen it for yourself. I’ve got a corridor full of patients. They’re all waiting. Every day, I hear things that make a nonsense of all your scary films on television. So you can pass that on to the authorities in the capital. A nonsense!

Modern, postmodern … In the night, I was called out on an urgent case. I got there … The mother was kneeling by the bed: her child was dying. I could hear her wailing: ‘If it was going to happen, my little one, I wanted it to be in the summer. It’s warm in summer, there are flowers, the ground is all soft. But it’s winter now. Try and hold on at least till the spring.’ Can you write that sort of thing?

I don’t want to trade in their misery, to philosophize. For that, I’d need to stand back, and that’s something I just can’t do. Every day, I get to hear what they say. Hear them complaining and crying. Good people, do you want to know the truth? Then sit here by my side, writing it all down. But nobody would read a book like that …

Better just to leave us be. We’re the ones who have to live here.

Arkady Pavlovich Bogdankevich, rural medical assistant

Monologue in two voices: male and female

Teachers Nina Konstantinovna Zharkova and Nikolai

Prokhorovich Zharkov, husband and wife. Nikolai teaches design

and technology and Nina teaches language and literature.

Her voice:

I spend so much time thinking about death that I don’t like going and looking at it. Have you ever heard children talking about death?

You get it in my class. Fourteen-year-olds are already debating and discussing whether dying is scary or not. Not so long ago, little children would have been wondering where they came from, where babies came from. Now they’re worried about what might happen after a nuclear war. They’ve lost their love of the classics. I recite Pushkin to them: their eyes are cold and detached. There’s an emptiness … It’s already a different world around them. They read science fiction, it captivates them. There you’ll get a man hopping off the earth, operating in cosmic time, in other worlds. They aren’t able to fear death the way adults fear it, people like me, for instance; they’re excited by it as something fantastical. A shift to a new place …

It’s something I ponder. Having death around makes you do a lot of thinking. I teach Russian literature to children who aren’t like children used to be ten years ago. Right before their eyes, there’s always someone or something being buried. Being laid to rest in the ground … People they knew. Houses and trees, everything is being buried. In assembly, the children faint if they remain standing for fifteen or twenty minutes, their noses start bleeding. There’s nothing that can surprise them, and nothing that can cheer them up. They’re always sleepy and tired, their faces are all pale and grey. They don’t play or muck around. And if a fight breaks out, or they smash a window by accident, the teachers are actually rather delighted. They won’t tell those kids off, because they aren’t like proper children. And they develop so slowly. If you ask one of them to repeat something in class, the child won’t be able to do it – to the point where you’ll say a sentence, and ask them to repeat it straight after you, and they just can’t do it. ‘Hey, is anybody home? Hello?’ you say, giving them a little shake. I think about things. Do a lot of thinking. It feels like painting on glass with water, I’m the only one who knows what I’m drawing, nobody else sees it, nobody can guess what it is. Nobody can imagine it …

Our life revolves around one thing: Chernobyl. Where were you at the time, how far from the reactor did you live? What did you see? Who died? Who’s left? Where did they move to? In the first months, I remember the restaurants coming back to life, parties starting up again: ‘You only live once’, ‘May as well go out with a bang’. Soldiers and officers poured into the place. We’ll never be rid of Chernobyl now. A pregnant young woman all of a sudden died. No diagnosis; even the pathologist couldn’t establish the cause. One little girl hanged herself. She was twelve. Completely out of the blue. Her parents are going crazy. There’s a single diagnosis for everything: Chernobyl. No matter what it is that’s happened, everyone will say: ‘Chernobyl’. People criticize us. ‘Your illnesses are all because you’re frightened. They come from fear. It’s radiophobia.’ Then why are little children getting sick and dying? They don’t know what fear is, they’re too young to understand it.

I remember those early days. The burning throat, the heaviness, my whole body felt heavy. ‘You’re imagining things,’ the doctor said. ‘Everyone has started imagining things because of Chernobyl.’ This isn’t imaginary! My body is aching all over, I have no strength. My husband and I feel uncomfortable about admitting it to each other, but our legs have started going numb. Everyone else was complaining about it too, all sorts of people. You’re walking along the road and suddenly feel like you could just lie down right there. Lie down and go to sleep. Our pupils would put their heads down on the desks, they were falling asleep during lessons. And everyone became terribly cheerless and gloomy; you could go the whole day without seeing a single kindly face, nobody smiling. From eight in the morning until nine at night, the children were in school. Playing outdoors and running around were strictly forbidden. They were issued clothing: the girls were given skirts and blouses, the boys had jackets and trousers, but they went home in those clothes and who knows where else. According to the instructions, their mums should have been washing the clothes at home each day, so that the children would come to school in clean things. First, they only gave them one of each item: one blouse, say, and one skirt, and they didn’t give them a change of clothing. And second, their mums were overworked with domestic chores – their hens, a cow, a pig – and they didn’t understand, in any case, that those things needed to be washed each day. Dirt to them meant ink stains, soil or grease marks, not the effects of some short-lived isotopes. When I tried to explain certain things to the parents of our pupils, my impression was that they could understand me about as well as if some witch doctor from an African tribe had suddenly turned up. ‘So what is it, this radiation stuff? I can’t hear it, can’t see it. I’m struggling to make ends meet from one payday to the next. By the last three days, we’re always down to milk and potatoes.’ The mum will pooh-pooh it. But milk isn’t allowed, potatoes aren’t either. They delivered Chinese tins of stew and buckwheat to the shop, but what can you buy them with? They gave out compensation; it’s to compensate us for living here, but it’s peanuts. Enough for just two tins. Their safety instructions were designed for someone educated, for a certain lifestyle. But we don’t have that here! We don’t have the sort of people those instructions were written for. What’s more, it isn’t all that easy to explain to everyone the difference between rems and roentgens. Or the theory of low doses.

From my own point of view … What I’d bring up is our fatalism, a certain tendency towards fatalism. For instance, in the first year, you couldn’t use anything from the vegetable plots, but they ate it anyway, bottled it up for the winter. And it was such a marvellous harvest! You try telling people that they can’t eat the cucumbers and tomatoes! Can’t eat them? What do you mean? They taste normal enough. And they eat them, and don’t get a tummy ache. Nobody starts glowing in the dark. Our neighbours laid a new floor that year from the local forest, they tested it: the background radiation level was a hundred times over the safety limit. Nobody tore up those floorboards, they just carried on living there. Everything will sort itself out, they reckon. It will all come good, all by itself, without any help from them, without their need to get involved. At first, some foodstuffs were taken to the radiation monitoring technicians and tested: they were dozens of times higher than the safe levels, but then they stopped doing it. ‘I can’t hear it, can’t see it. Oh, these scientists, they’re making it all up!’ It all carried on as usual: they ploughed and planted and picked things. The unthinkable happened, and people went on living as they had before. And scrapping the cucumbers from your own vegetable plot was a bigger deal than Chernobyl. Children were kept in school all summer long; the soldiers washed the building with laundry powder, they removed a layer of the surrounding soil. But what about autumn? When autumn came, they sent the pupils to pick the beetroots. And they brought students to the fields, kids from the vocational college. They brought in everyone. Chernobyl wasn’t as terrible as the thought of leaving undug potatoes in the fields.

Who is to blame? Well, who can we blame other than ourselves?

Before, we never noticed the world around us. It was like the sky, like the air. As if someone had handed it to us forever and it wasn’t dependent on us, it would always be there. Back then, I used to love lying down on the grass in the forest and admiring the sky. It felt so good that I could forget my own name. But now? The forest is beautiful, teeming with bilberries, but nobody ever picks them. In the autumn forest, you rarely hear a human voice. Our sensations are tinged with fear, on a subconscious level. All we’ve got left is the television, our books. Our imaginations … Children are growing up inside their homes. Without the forest and rivers. Looking out of their windows. And they are completely different children. I come to class: ‘A doleful time of year the eye yet finds enchanting.’ It’s always Pushkin, who to my mind is eternal. Sometimes I have a blasphemous thought: what if our entire culture is nothing but a chest full of old manuscripts? Everything that I love …

His voice:

A new enemy has appeared. An enemy that stands before us in a new guise.

But we were brought up in a spirit of war. With a military mindset. We were focused on deflecting and recovering from a nuclear attack. We were going to be countering chemical, biological and nuclear war, not trying to rid the body of radionuclides. Not measuring their build-up, monitoring caesium and strontium levels. It can’t be compared with a war, that just isn’t accurate, but that is the comparison everyone makes. As a child, I lived through the Siege of Leningrad. It can’t be compared. In Leningrad, we were living on the front line, under constant bombardment. And the hunger, the long years of hunger, when people were reduced to their animal instincts, their inner beast. But here you merely have to go outside to find everything growing in the vegetable plot! Nothing has changed in the fields or the forest. It just doesn’t compare. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I’ve lost my thread. It’s gone now … Ah, yes. When the shelling started, God forbid! Your death wasn’t something in the distant future, it was right here and now, that very minute. In the winter, we had the hunger. We burned the furniture, burned everything wooden in our flat, all our books, I think even some old rags went into the stove. Some man would be going along the street and sit down, and the next day you’d walk past and find him sitting there, he’d frozen to the spot, stayed sitting there for a week, or till the spring came. Till it warmed up. Nobody had the strength to cut him out of the ice. If someone fell in the street, it was rare for people to come over and help them up. Everybody would creep on by. I remember how people weren’t walking; they were creeping, moving like snails. It just can’t be compared with anything!

My mum was still living with us when the reactor blew up, and she used to say, ‘We’ve already survived the worst, my son. We survived the Siege. Nothing can be more horrific.’ That’s what she thought.

We were preparing for war, nuclear war, building nuclear shelters. We wanted to hide from the fallout as if it was shrapnel from a shell. But it’s everywhere. In the bread, the salt … We breathe radiation, we eat radiation. The idea of having no bread or salt, of having to eat anything there was – to the point where you’d boil your leather belt in water, just for the smell, so you could eat the smell – that I could understand. But not this. Everything has been contaminated. Now we’re faced with working out how on earth we should live here. In the first months, there was fear, particularly among the doctors and teachers, the intelligentsia; basically, the more educated people. They just dropped everything and left. Although they were intimidated and weren’t allowed to go. It was military discipline. Hand over your Party card. But what I want to understand is, who was to blame? To answer the question of how we should live here, we need to know who was to blame. Who was it? The scientists, the staff at the power plant? Or was it us, our whole way of seeing the world? We are unstoppable in our desire for more. Our need to consume. They found the guilty parties: the director, the operators on duty. Science. But answer me this: why are we not battling the automobile as the work of the human mind, yet we’re battling the atomic reactor? We’re demanding that all atomic power stations should be closed and the nuclear scientists put on trial. We curse them! I worship human knowledge. And everything that’s created by man. Knowledge … Just knowledge in itself cannot be criminal. The scientists these days are victims of Chernobyl too. I want to live after Chernobyl, not to die after it. I want to know what I can cling to in my faith, what will give me strength.

It’s on all our minds here. People’s reactions are different now. It happened ten years ago, after all, but they still measure it against the war. The Second World War on the Eastern Front lasted four years. You can think of this as already two of those wars. I can list all the different reactions for you: ‘Everything is already over.’ ‘We’ll manage one way or another.’ ‘It all happened ten years ago: we aren’t scared any more.’ ‘We’re all going to die! All of us are going to die!’ ‘I want to emigrate.’ ‘They have to help us.’ ‘Oh, what the hell! We need to get on with life.’ I don’t think I’ve left anything out. Those are the things we hear day in, day out, what gets said over and over again. The way I see it, we’re just research specimens. An international laboratory in the middle of Europe. There are ten million Belarusians, and more than two million of us are living on contaminated land. Nature’s laboratory. Come, record the data, do your experiments. They come here from everywhere, from all over the world. They write theses and monographs on us. From Moscow and St Petersburg; from Japan, Germany, Austria. They come here because they’re afraid of the future … (There is a long pause in the conversation.)

What was I thinking? I was drawing comparisons again. I was thinking about how I can talk about Chernobyl, but not about the Siege. I got a letter from Leningrad. Sorry, but the name ‘St Petersburg’ just won’t stick in my mind, because Leningrad was the city where death came close. Right, then … This letter was an invitation to a gathering of children of the Siege of Leningrad. I went along to it, but I couldn’t get out a word about myself. Should I have just talked about fear? It wouldn’t have been enough. Just about fear … What did it do to me, that fear? I still don’t know … At home, we never really talked about the time of the Siege. My mother didn’t want us to bring it up. But we do talk about Chernobyl. No. (He stops speaking.) We don’t talk about it among ourselves, but the topic comes up when someone visits us: foreigners, journalists, relatives, people who don’t live here. Why don’t we talk about Chernobyl among ourselves? It isn’t an issue for us. Not with the pupils at school, not at home. We block it out, the subject’s closed. People talk about it with the kids while they’re in Austria, France, Germany for their treatment. I ask the children what the people there want to know about, what they’re interested in. But often they can’t even remember the city or village, or the surnames of the people who hosted them. They’ll list the presents, the nice food they ate; someone got a tape recorder, someone didn’t. They’ll come back in new clothes they didn’t work for and their parents didn’t either. It’s a bit like they’ve been at an exhibition, visited some big department store, a luxury supermarket. They can’t wait to be taken back, to be shown more things and given more gifts. They get used to it. They’re already used to it. This is the way they live, their vision of life. After their big shopping expedition that goes by the name of ‘abroad’, after their lavish exhibition, I have to go and face them in the classroom for lessons. I go in, and I can see they’ve become spectators. They just look, instead of living. I’ve got to help them. I’ve got to explain to them that the world isn’t one big supermarket. It’s something else, much harder work and more beautiful. I take them to my studio, where I have my wooden sculptures. They like them. I tell them, ‘You can create all of that from an ordinary piece of wood. Have a go for yourselves.’ Come on, wake up! It helped me to get myself out of the Siege; it took me years.

The world has split in two: there is us, the people of Chernobyl, and you, everyone else. Have you noticed? We don’t make a point of this ‘I’m Belarusian’, ‘I’m Ukrainian’, ‘I’m Russian’. Everyone just calls themselves Chernobyl people. ‘We’re from Chernobyl.’ ‘I’m a Chernobyl person.’ As if we’re some sort of separate people. A new nation …

Monologue on how some completely unknown thing can worm its way into you

Ants … Tiny ants crawling along a tree trunk.

You have these army vehicles rumbling all around. Soldiers. Shouting, squabbling, cursing. Helicopters whirring. And there they are, crawling along. I was returning from the Zone and, of all the things I saw that day, that image was the one clear memory I was left with. That moment … We had stopped in the forest, I got up to have a smoke near a birch tree. I stood there, leaning against it. Right up close to my face were those ants crawling on the trunk, deaf to our presence, not paying us the slightest attention. Stubbornly following their path. We could vanish and they wouldn’t notice. Something along those lines flashed through my mind, among my random thoughts. I was so overloaded with impressions that I couldn’t think. I was watching them. I had never really noticed them before. Not close up …

At first, everyone called it a ‘disaster’, then ‘nuclear war’. I’d read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seen the documentary footage. It was horrific, but everything made sense: a nuclear war, a blast radius. I could imagine all that. But what had happened to us … It was simply beyond me. Beyond my knowledge, beyond all the books I’d read in a lifetime. I came back from the trip, and in my bewilderment I scoured the bookshelves in my study. I began reading. But I might as well have not bothered. Some completely unfathomable thing was destroying the whole of my previous world. Here it was, creeping and worming its way into you, and there was nothing you could do … I remember having a conversation with a scientist. ‘This will be for thousands of years to come,’ he was telling me. ‘Uranium decays at 238 half lives. Translated into time that means one billion years. And thorium is fourteen billion years.’ Fifty years, 100 … 200 … But after that? After that it’s a blank wall, a shock! I lost all sense of what time means, of where I was.

To write about it when just ten years have passed … a mere blink of an eye … Writing now? I think it’s risky! Too unreliable. In any case, we’ll just be inventing some vague semblance of our lives. Tracing out a copy. I tried, and it didn’t work. After Chernobyl we were left with the whole mythology of Chernobyl. Newspapers and magazines compete to write the most terrifying stories. People who weren’t there particularly love the hair-raising stuff. We’ve all read about the mushrooms the size of a human head, but nobody has ever found one. Or the birds with two beaks. That’s why what we need isn’t to write, but to record. To document it all. Give me a sci-fi novel about Chernobyl. They don’t exist! And no one will write one, you can be sure of that. No one.

I have a special notebook, I started keeping notes in it from the early days. I recorded conversations, rumours, jokes in it. That’s the most interesting and authentic thing of all. An accurate impression. What do we have left of the ancient Greeks? The myths.

I’ll give you that notebook. It’ll just end up lying among my papers. Well, maybe I’ll show it to my children when they grow up. It is history, after all.

From conversations

For a third month they are telling us on the radio, ‘The situation is stabilizing … The situation is stabilizing … The situation is stabilizing …’

They instantly revived the forgotten vocabulary of Stalinism: ‘Western intelligence agents’, ‘arch enemies of Socialism’, ‘spying forays’, ‘sabotage’, ‘a stab in the back’, ‘subverting the inviolable union of Soviet peoples’. Everybody is harping on about undercover spies and saboteurs, rather than iodine prophylaxis. Any unofficial information is treated as enemy ideology.

In my news report yesterday, the editor cut the story about the mother of one of the firemen who put out the nuclear fire on the first night. He died of acute radiation sickness. After burying their son in Moscow, the parents came back to their village, which had already been evacuated. They secretly made their way home through the forest and picked a sackful of tomatoes and cucumbers. The mother was happy: ‘We bottled up twenty jars’ worth.’ Their trust in the land, in the age-old peasant experience … Even the death of their son could not shake their familiar world.

My editor called me in. ‘Been listening to Radio Liberty?’ I said nothing. ‘I don’t need panic-mongers in my newspaper. Go and write about heroes. The soldiers who climbed on the roof of the reactor.’

The hero. Heroes … Who are they today? To my mind, they are the doctors who defy orders from above and tell people the truth. And the journalists and scientists. But, as one editor at our editorial meeting said, ‘Remember! We have no doctors, teachers, scientists or journalists. We all have one profession now: that of being a Soviet citizen.’

Did he believe his own words? How can he not be scared? My faith is being sapped by the day.

Some political supervisors from the Central Committee turned up. Their itinerary: travel by car from the hotel to the Provincial Party Committee and back to the hotel, again by car. They read up on the situation from files of the local newspapers. Their travel bags are stuffed with sandwiches from Minsk. They brew their tea with bottled water. They brought that along too. I was told that by the receptionist of the hotel where they’re staying. People don’t believe the newspapers, television or radio: they look for clues in the behaviour of their bosses. That is their most reliable source.

What should you do if you’ve got a child? I feel like just grabbing mine and running. But I’ve got a Party card in my pocket. I can’t do that!

The fairy tale most popular in the Zone is that Stolichnaya vodka is the best antidote to strontium and caesium.

But suddenly the village shops have filled up with all sorts of goods in short supply. I heard the secretary of the Provincial Party Committee giving a speech: ‘We’ll create a heaven on earth for you. Just stay here and work. We’ll swamp you with sausage and buckwheat. You’ll have everything there is to be found in the best restricted-access shops.’ (By which he meant the delicacies sold in their own Committee’s canteens.) The attitude towards ordinary people is: keep them happy with vodka and sausage.

But damn it, I’ve never seen three varieties of sausage on sale in a village shop before! I bought some imported tights there for my wife.

Dosimeters were on sale for a month but then disappeared. We are not allowed to write about that. The kinds and quantities of radionuclide in the fallout are also off limits. We aren’t allowed to report that only men now live in the villages: the women and children have been evacuated. All summer long, the men have been washing their own laundry, milking the cows, digging in the plots. And, of course, getting drunk and fighting. A world without women? Pity I’m not a scriptwriter: it would make a great film. Where is Spielberg when you need him? Or my favourite director, Alexey German? I wrote about all that, but again the merciless editorial red pencil struck it out. ‘Don’t forget we have enemies. Many enemies across the ocean.’ And that’s why only good things can happen in the USSR. Nothing bad, or beyond comprehension.

All the same, special trains have been arriving at certain platforms. Officials have been spotted with their luggage packed.

An old woman stopped me as I was passing a police checkpoint: ‘Look in on my cottage over there, will you? It’s time to be digging up the spuds, but the soldiers won’t let me through.’ They’ve been resettled. They were lied to and told it was only for three days, otherwise they would never have gone. People who are in limbo, with nothing to their name. They make their way back to the villages across army barriers, along forest trails, through the swamps. At night. The authorities hunt them in trucks and helicopters, try to catch them. ‘Like when the Germans were here,’ the old people say. ‘During the war.’

I saw my first looter. A young lad dressed in two sheepskin jackets. He tried to persuade the army patrol it was his way of treating back pain. He cracked under interrogation. ‘It’s a bit scary the first time, but you soon get used to it. Just down a vodka and in you go.’ Overriding the survival instinct. Sober, you could never do it; but this is how we pluck up courage for our daring deeds. And misdeeds.

We went into an empty cottage and found an icon laid on a white tablecloth. ‘For God,’ someone remarked.

In another, the table had only the white tablecloth. ‘For people,’ someone said.

Went back to my family village a year later. The dogs had gone wild. Found our Rex and called him, but he didn’t come. Didn’t recognize me? Or didn’t want to? He was sulking.

Those first weeks and months, everybody was very quiet. Nobody spoke. They were in a stupor. They had to leave, but wouldn’t face it until the last day. Their brains were switched off. I don’t remember anyone talking seriously, only joking. ‘Now all the shops have radio-goods’; or, ‘Men who can’t get it up are either radioactive or radiopassive’. Then suddenly the jokes stopped.

At the hospital, a little girl tells her mother, ‘That boy’s died, but yesterday he was giving me sweets.’

In the sugar queue: ‘Hey, people, I’m telling you, there are so many mushrooms this year! Mushrooms and berries, like they’ve been planted specially.’

‘But they’re contaminated.’

‘Don’t be daft, you don’t have to eat them! Pick them, dry them and take them to market in Minsk. You’ll make a fortune.’

Can we be helped? And how? Maybe transplanting our people to Australia or Canada? That’s what is reportedly being discussed from time to time at the highest levels.

They used to choose the site for a church by watching the skies. The church people saw signs. Before construction began, they’d perform rites. But an atomic power station got built like a factory, or your average pig farm. The roof was coated in asphalt. Bitumen. It melted when the plant caught fire.

Did you read about it? They caught a runaway soldier outside Chernobyl. He had made himself a dugout and was living near the reactor. He made the rounds of abandoned houses, surviving on pork fat and pickled cucumbers, trapping wild animals. He had deserted when the elder soldiers beat him to a pulp. Chernobyl offered him refuge.

We are fatalists. We don’t embark on action, because we believe whatever will be, will be. We believe in destiny; that is our history. Every generation’s been plagued with war and bloodshed. How could we be any different? Fatalists.

The first wolf-dogs have appeared, born to she-wolves from dogs that took to the forest. They are larger than wolves, cannot be hunted with flags, are unafraid of light and humans, do not respond to wolf decoys. And the wild cats are already roaming in packs, with no fear of people. Their memory of how they were obedient to man has faded. There is a blurring of the boundaries between the real and unreal.

Yesterday, my father turned eighty. The whole family gathered around the table. I looked at him and thought about how much had been crammed into his life: Stalin’s Gulags, the war and now Chernobyl. It all fell in the era of his generation. That one generation. He loves fishing, digging in the garden. As a young man, to Mother’s dismay, he was a skirt-chaser: ‘There wasn’t a woman he didn’t run after.’ These days, I’ve noticed he’ll lower his eyes whenever a beautiful young woman walks his way.

What do we know about man? About what he is capable of? … About what he has in him? …

From the grapevine

They’re building camps outside Chernobyl to hold all the people who were exposed to radiation. They’ll hold them there, watch them and bury them.

They are already bussing the dead from villages near the power station straight to the cemetery, burying thousands in mass graves. Like in the Siege of Leningrad.

Some people supposedly saw a mysterious glow in the sky above the power station the day before the explosion. Somebody even took a photo. The negative revealed a sort of hovering extraterrestrial object.

In Minsk, they’ve washed down the passenger and goods trains. They’re going to move the entire capital out to Siberia. The old barracks from Stalin’s Gulags are being fixed up. They’ll start with the women and children. The Ukrainians are on their way there already.

Anglers are finding more and more amphibious fish that can live in water and on land. On the land, they walk on their fin-paws. They’ve begun catching headless and finless pike: just a swimming belly.

Something of the kind will start happening to people soon. The Belarusians will morph into humanoids.

It wasn’t an accident: it was an earthquake. Something took place in the subterranean crust. A geological explosion. Geophysical and cosmophysical forces were at work. The military knew in advance and could have warned us, but it was all strictly classified.

The forest animals have radiation sickness. They wander around dejectedly, with sadness in their eyes. The hunters feel too scared and sorry to shoot them. And the animals have lost their fear of humans. Foxes and wolves come into the village and nuzzle up to children.

Chernobyl people can bear children, but they’ll have an unknown yellow fluid pulsing through them instead of blood. There are scientists who argue that the monkeys became so clever because they lived in radiation hotspots. Children born in three or four generations will all be Einsteins. A cosmic experiment is being conducted on us.

Anatoly Shimansky, journalist

Monologue on Cartesian philosophy and on eating a radioactive sandwich with someone so as not to be ashamed

I lived among books. For twenty years, I lectured at a university …

I am an academic. A man who picked out his favourite period in history and resides there. Totally preoccupied with it, immersed in his own space. In a perfect world … That was how it would have been ideally, of course. Because, at that time, the philosophy we had was Marxist-Leninist, and the topics on offer for a thesis were the role of Marxism-Leninism in the development of agriculture or in clearing virgin lands. Or the role of the leader of the world proletariat … All in all, they had no time for Cartesian thought. But I was in luck. My undergraduate dissertation was entered into a competition in Moscow, and somebody made a phone call from there, saying: ‘Don’t touch this fellow. Let him write.’ I was working on the French religious philosopher Malebranche, who undertook to interpret the Bible from the perspective of the rational mind. The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment. Faith in reason, the idea that we are capable of explaining the world. As I now realize, I was lucky. I was saved from the mincer. Saved from a lot of aggravation. A miracle! Before that, I was warned more than once that the choice of Malebranche for my dissertation could be seen as interesting, but for my thesis I would have to think carefully about the topic. That was a serious matter. Here they were, they said, allowing me to stay on to do postgraduate work in the department of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and I was proposing to emigrate to the past … Surely I could see the problem …

Gorbachev’s perestroika began. We had waited so long for this moment. The first thing I noticed was how people’s expressions immediately began to change, all of a sudden their faces were different. They even began to walk differently. Life was subtly altering the way they moved. They were smiling at each other more. I picked up on a different energy in everything. Something had changed. Completely. To this day, I am amazed at how quickly it happened, and as for me … I was pulled abruptly out of that Cartesian idyll. Instead of books on philosophy, I now read the latest papers and magazines, eagerly awaiting each new perestroika-inspired issue of Ogonyok. In the morning, there were queues at the news-stands; never before – or after – had people read the papers with such relish. They would never again believe them so unquestioningly. There was an avalanche of information. Lenin’s political testament was published, which had been locked away for half a century in some special archive. The bookshops began stocking Solzhenitsyn, then Shalamov, Bukharin. It wasn’t so long ago that you could have been arrested for possessing those books. You could have earned yourself a prison sentence. Andrey Sakharov was brought back from exile. For the first time, they broadcast sessions of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet on television. The whole country sat glued to their screens. We talked and talked. You could say out loud things which until recently would only be discussed in the privacy of your kitchen. For so many generations, we had been whispering in our kitchens. So many people went to waste, whiling away their time in dreams, throughout our seventy-odd years of Soviet history. Now, though, everybody was going to rallies and demonstrations. Signing something, voting against something. I remember one historian appearing on television. He brought a map of Stalin’s camps to the studio. The whole of Siberia was dotted with red flags. We discovered the truth about Kurapaty … What a shock! Society was left reeling! Belarusian Kurapaty was the site of a mass grave in 1937. Belarusians, Russians, Poles and Lithuanians were buried there together, in their tens of thousands. The NKVD’s ditches were dug two metres deep, and people were stacked in two or three layers. Once that place had been a long way outside Minsk, but later it fell within the city limits. It became part of the city, you could catch a tram there. In the 1950s, the area was planted with young trees, the pines grew taller, and the city people suspected nothing. They had picnics there at the weekends. In winter, they skied there. People began excavations. The authorities – the Communist authorities – had lied. They tried to wriggle out of it. By night, the police filled the graves back in, but in the daytime people dug them open again. I saw documentary footage: rows of skulls cleaned of soil. And each one had a hole in the back of the head …

Of course, we lived with the feeling that we were taking part in a revolution. In a new phase of history.

Don’t worry, I haven’t digressed from the topic. I want to remember the general mood at the time Chernobyl happened. Because they will always go together in history: the downfall of Socialism and the Chernobyl disaster. They coincided. Chernobyl hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. It blew the empire apart.

And it made me into a politician.

It was 4 May, day nine after the accident, when Gorbachev made his appearance; it was cowardice, of course. Befuddlement. Like in the early days of the war, in 1941. The newspapers were writing about enemy ploys and Western hysteria, about the anti-Soviet commotion and damaging rumours spread by our overseas opponents. I remember how I felt in those days. The fear didn’t set in for a long time: for almost a month everyone was on tenterhooks, waiting for them to announce that, under the leadership of the Communist Party, our scientists, our heroic firemen, our soldiers have once again conquered the elements. They have won an unprecedented victory, they have driven the cosmic fire back into a test tube. The fear took a while to set in. For a long time, we kept it out. Yes, that was it. Absolutely! As I now realize, we could not make the mental connection between fear and peaceful nuclear energy. From all the textbooks and other books we’d read, in our minds we pictured the world as follows: military nuclear power was a sinister mushroom cloud billowing up into the sky, like at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating people instantly; whereas peaceful nuclear energy was a harmless light bulb. We had a childish image of the world; we were living life as depicted in children’s stories. It wasn’t just us; the whole of mankind wised up after Chernobyl. We all grew up, became more mature.

A few conversations from the early days:

‘There’s some nuclear power plant on fire. But it’s happening a long way away, in the Ukraine.’

‘I read in the papers that we’re sending combat vehicles there. The army. We’ll overcome it!’

‘In Belarus, we don’t have a single atomic power station. We aren’t worried.’

My first trip into the Zone.

I went there thinking it would all be covered in grey ash, in black soot, like in Bryullov’s painting The Last Day of Pompeii. But I got there and everything was beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful! Meadows in flower, the gentle spring green of the forests. I love that time of year. Everything is coming to life. Flourishing, singing … What struck me most was the combination of beauty and fear. Fear could no longer be separated from beauty or beauty from fear. Everything was turned on its head, topsy-turvy. I realize that now. There was a strange sensation of death …

We arrived as a group. Nobody sent us there. A group of Belarusian deputies from the opposition. What times they were! What times! The Communist authorities were backing down. They were weakening, losing confidence. Everything was fragile, but the local authorities treated us with hostility: ‘Do you have permission? What gives you the right to stir up the people? To ask questions? Who gave you this assignment?’ They alluded to instructions received from above: ‘Do not give in to panic. Await orders.’ As if to say, ‘Don’t you go scaring people when we need to fulfil our quotas, our grain and meat quotas.’ What worried them was not people’s health, but hitting their targets. The quotas for the republic and the quotas for the nation … They were afraid of their bosses. And their bosses were afraid of those above them, and so on up the chain, all the way to the general secretary. One man decided everything from his celestial heights. That was how the pyramid of power was built. It was headed by a tsar. At that time, a Communist tsar. ‘Everything here is contaminated,’ we told them. ‘None of the food you’ve produced can be eaten.’ ‘You are rabble rousers. Stop your enemy agitation. We’ll make phone calls. We’ll report this.’ And they made their phone calls. They reported it to ‘the appropriate authorities’.

The village of Malinovka. Fifty-nine curies per square metre.

We went into the school. ‘So how are you doing?’

‘We’re all scared, of course. But we’ve been reassured: all we need to do is wash the roof, close off the wells with plastic, and tarmac the country lanes. Then we can go on living here. Though the cats keep scratching for some reason, and the horses’ noses are dribbling mucus on to the ground.’

The head teacher invited me to her home, for lunch. It was a new house. She’d held a housewarming there two months earlier. In Belarusian, it’s called ‘vkhodiny’: when people have only just moved into a house. Near the house, they had a sturdy barn and a root cellar. What was once known as a kulak farmstead. These were the kind of people dispossessed under Stalin’s dekulakization. Enough to make you stop, stare and envy.

‘But soon you’ll have to leave.’

‘Out of the question! We’ve put so much work into this place.’

‘Take a look at the dosimeter.’

‘They’ve been coming here, those bloody scientists! They won’t let people live in peace!’ The husband waved his hand and went off to the meadow to fetch his horse without saying goodbye to me.

The village of Chudyany. One hundred and fifty curies per square metre.

Women were digging in their vegetable plots, children running about the streets. At the end of the village, the men were hewing timber for a new log house. Our car stopped near them. They clustered round, asked for a smoke.

‘How are things in the capital? Are you getting vodka? We keep running dry here. A good job we’re brewing our own. Gorbachev doesn’t touch a drop himself and he won’t let us drink either.’

‘Aha, so you’re deputies. The tobacco situation is pretty lousy around these parts too.’

‘Listen, guys,’ we began explaining to them. ‘You’re going to have to leave here soon. See this dosimeter? The radiation where we’re standing is a hundred times over the limit.’

‘Oh, come on, don’t give us that crap. Hell, what do we want with your dosimeter! You won’t be hanging around here long, but we’ve got to live in this place. You can stick that dosimeter of yours where the sun don’t shine!’

I’ve watched the film about the Titanic a few times, and it reminded me of what I saw with my own eyes. I experienced it myself, in the early days of Chernobyl. Everything was just like on the Titanic. People were behaving in exactly the same way. The psychology was the same. I recognized it. I even made the comparison at the time. You had the bottom of the ship already pierced, this tremendous surge of water was flooding the lower holds, overturning barrels and crates. It’s creeping forward, breaking through all obstacles. While up above, the lights are bright, music is playing, champagne is being served. Families carry on squabbling, love affairs are being kindled. And the water is gushing up the staircases, into the cabins …

The lights are bright, music is playing; champagne is being served …

Our mentality is a separate topic. For us, everything revolves around feeling. That is what gives us our grandness, elevates our lives, and is, at the same time, so disastrous. The rational choice for us is never enough. We gauge our actions with our hearts, not our minds. The moment you wander into someone’s yard in the village, you are their guest. They are so pleased. Then they are upset. They will anxiously shake their heads. ‘Oh dear, we’ve no fresh fish, nothing to offer.’ ‘Perhaps you’d like some milk? I’ll pour you a mugful.’ They won’t just let you go on your way. They’ll beckon you into their cottage. Some of the others were afraid, but I was willing. I went in, sat at their table, ate radioactive sandwiches because that was what they were all eating. I downed a drink with them and it gave me a sense of pride to know I had that in me. I had it in me! Yes, that’s right! I told myself, ‘Okay, so maybe I can’t change a thing in this man’s life, but what I can do is eat a radioactive sandwich alongside him, so I won’t be ashamed. Share his fate.’ That is the attitude we take to our own lives. And yet I had a wife and two children. I was responsible for them. I had a dosimeter in my pocket. I realize now, this is just our world, it’s who we are. Ten years ago, I felt proud of being the way I was, while today I’m ashamed of it. All the same, I would still sit with him and eat that wretched sandwich again. I’ve thought about it, thought about what kind of people we are. I couldn’t get that damned sandwich out of my mind. You had to eat it as an act of the heart, not the mind.

A writer put it well when he observed that in the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first, we are living, as we were taught to, by the precepts of nineteenth-century literature. Lord knows, I’m often plagued by doubts. I’ve discussed this with many people. Who on earth are we?

I had an interesting conversation with the wife, now the widow, of a helicopter pilot. She was an intelligent woman. I sat talking to her for a long time. She wanted to understand too, to understand and find meaning in her husband’s death in order to be able to accept it. She just couldn’t.

I read many times in the newspapers about the helicopter pilots working above the reactor. At first, they were dropping lead panels into it, but they vanished down the hole without trace. Then someone remembered that lead vaporizes at 700 degrees Celsius and the temperature down there was 2,000 degrees. After that, sacks of dolomite and sand were dropped down. Up where the pilots were was as dark as night from the dust that raised. Pillars of dust. In order to drop their ‘bombs’ accurately, they opened the cabin windows and aimed by eye to get the correct banking of the helicopter, left–right, up–down. The radiation doses were ridiculous! I remember the headlines of the newspaper stories: ‘Heroes of the Sky’, ‘Falcons of Chernobyl’. And then there was this woman. She admitted her doubts to me. ‘Now they write that my husband is a hero. Yes, he is, but what does that mean? I know he was an honest, dutiful officer. Disciplined. He came back from Chernobyl and was ill within a few months. They presented him with an award in the Kremlin, and he saw his comrades there. They were ill too, but glad to have met up again. He came home happy, with his medal. I asked him then, ‘Could you not have avoided being so severely affected? Protected your health better?’ ‘I probably could, if I’d thought more about it,’ he said. ‘We needed proper protective clothing, special goggles, a face mask. We had none of that. We didn’t follow standard safety procedures ourselves. We weren’t thinking about that at the time.’ Actually, none of us were. What a pity that, in the past, we did so little thinking! From the viewpoint of our culture, thinking about yourself was selfish. It showed a lack of spirit. There was always something more important than you and your life.

1989. The third anniversary of 26 April. Three years had passed since the disaster. Everyone had been evacuated from a thirty-kilometre zone, but over two million Belarusians were still living in contaminated areas. Forgotten. The Belarusian opposition planned a protest for that day, and the authorities responded by declaring a ‘volunteer Saturday’ to clean up Minsk. They put up red flags, brought out mobile food stalls with delicacies in short supply at the time (fresh smoked sausage, chocolates, jars of instant coffee …). Police cars were on the prowl, heavies in plain clothes snooping about taking photos, but – a sign of new times! – people just ignored all that. They were no longer afraid of them. They began assembling at Chelyuskin Heroes Park, more and more of them. By ten o’clock, there were already 20,000–30,000 (I’ve taken that from police estimates later reported on television), and the crowd was growing by the minute. We hadn’t expected that ourselves. Everything was just getting bigger and bigger. Who could stem this tide of people? At precisely ten o’clock, as we’d planned, the march moved off along Lenin Prospect towards the city centre, where the rally was to be held. All along the way, new groups were joining us, waiting for the march on parallel streets, in side streets, in gateways. A rumour spread that the police and army patrols had blocked the roads into the city; they were stopping buses and cars with protesters from other places and turning them back, but no one panicked. People got out and walked on to join up with us. That was announced over a megaphone and a great ‘Hurrah!’ swept over the march. Balconies were thronged, windows thrown open, people stood on windowsills to wave to us. They were waving shawls and children’s flags. Then I noticed, and everybody around started talking about it: the police had melted away – and the boys in plain clothes – taking their cameras with them. I understand now that they were given new orders; they retreated into courtyards, and locked themselves in cars concealed under tarpaulins. The authorities had taken cover and were waiting to see what would happen. They were scared. People marched on in tears, everybody holding hands. They were crying because they were overcoming their fear. They were liberating themselves from the intimidation.

The rally began, and although we’d been preparing for a long time, discussing the list of speakers, it was promptly ignored. People came to the hastily erected platform and spoke without notes, ordinary people from the area around Chernobyl. The list re-formed itself spontaneously. We were hearing witnesses, testimony. The only prominent figure to speak was Academician Velikhov, one of the former directors of the centre in charge of dealing with the accident, but his was not one of the speeches I remember. The ones I do remember are:

A mother with two children, a boy and a girl. She brought them up on to the platform with her. ‘My children have not laughed for a long time now. There is no naughtiness. They don’t run around in the courtyard. They have no strength. They are like a little old man and woman.’

A woman involved in the clean-up operation. When she pushed back the sleeves of her dress to show the crowd her arms, we saw her sores and scabs. ‘I washed clothes for our men working near the reactor,’ she said. ‘We did most of the laundry by hand because not enough washing machines were delivered, and they soon broke down because they were so overloaded.’

A young doctor. He began by reciting the Hippocratic oath. He talked about how all the data on radiation sickness were being stamped ‘secret’ or ‘top secret’. Medicine and science were being dragged into politics.

This was Chernobyl’s public inquiry.

I will not attempt to hide it. I openly admit that this was the most memorable day of my life. We were so happy.

The next day, those of us who had organized the demonstration were summoned by the police and convicted for the fact that a crowd thousands strong had blocked the avenue and obstructed the free movement of public transport. Unauthorized slogans had been displayed. Each of us was given fifteen days under the ‘aggravated hooliganism’ article of the penal code. The judge passing sentence and the policemen accompanying us to the detention centre were shame-faced. All of them. We were laughing. Yes, because we were so happy!

Now the question was: what more are we capable of? What should we do next?

In one of the Chernobyl-affected villages, a woman fell to her knees in front of us when she heard we were from Minsk. ‘Save my child! Take him with you! Our doctors can’t understand what’s wrong, and he’s suffocating, turning blue. He’s dying.’ (Falls silent.)

I went to the hospital. The boy was seven. Thyroid cancer. I wanted to take his mind off it and began joking. He turned to the wall and said, ‘Just don’t tell me I’m not going to die. I know I am.’

At the Academy of Sciences, I think it was, I was shown an X-ray of someone’s lungs that had been burned through by ‘hot particles’. They looked like the sky at night. The hot particles were microscopic pieces of radioactive material created when the burning reactor had lead and sand tipped into it. Atoms of lead, sand and graphite combined and were shot high up into the atmosphere. They were dispersed over great distances, hundreds of kilometres. Now they were entering people’s bodies via the respiratory tract. The highest mortality was among tractor and truck drivers, people who ploughed the land or drove along the dusty country roads. An organ in which these particles settle glows in X-rays. It is peppered with hundreds of tiny holes, like a fine sieve. The person affected dies, literally burns up; but whereas they are mortal, the hot particles live on. A person dies, and after a thousand years will have turned back into dust. The hot particles, though, are immortal, and their dust will be capable of killing again. (Falls silent.)

I came back from those trips … I was overwhelmed. I told people what I’d seen. My wife is a specialist in linguistics. She’d never taken an interest in politics before – any more than she had in sport – but now she kept asking me over and over again, ‘What can we do? What should we do now?’ And we set out on a course which common sense would have told us was impossible. It was the kind of thing a person could only countenance in a time of upheaval, of complete inner emancipation. That was such a time, a time when Gorbachev was making the running, a time of hopes, of faith! We decided to save the children. To reveal to the world the peril Belarusian children were living in. To ask, to shout for help. To raise the alarm. The authorities were silent. They had betrayed the people, but we would not be silent.

Very soon, a group of dedicated helpers and like-minded supporters came together. Our watchword was: ‘What are you reading? Solzhenitsyn, Platonov? Welcome!’ We were working twelve hours a day. We needed to think of a name for our organization. We went through dozens of possibilities before settling on the simplest: the Children of Chernobyl Foundation. Today, it’s impossible to explain or even imagine all our doubts at that time, the arguments, our fears … Today, there are countless funds like ours, but ten years ago we were the first: the first civil initiative, unsanctioned by anyone in authority. The response from all officials was identical: ‘Foundation? What foundation? We have the Ministry of Health for this sort of thing.’

I understand today: Chernobyl liberated us. We learned to be free.

I remember … (Laughs.) I can picture it right now! The first refrigerated lorries bringing humanitarian aid drove into the courtyard of our apartment block, to our home address. I looked out my window and saw them, and couldn’t imagine how we were going to unload and store it all. The trucks had come from Moldova, with seventeen to twenty tonnes of fruit juice, dried fruit and baby food. By then, there were already rumours that the best way to draw out radiation was to eat lots of fruit, have lots of fibre in your food. I telephoned friends, some at their dachas, others at work. I and my wife began unloading the trucks by ourselves but gradually, one by one, people came out of our block (which was, after all, nine storeys high), and passers-by stopped to ask, ‘What are these trucks doing here?’ ‘They’ve brought aid for the Chernobyl children.’ They dropped whatever they were doing and rolled up their sleeves. By evening, the trucks were unloaded. We packed the goods into cellars and garages, made arrangements with a school. We laughed at ourselves later, but when we brought these gifts to the contaminated areas, when we began distributing them … people usually assembled in the local school or at the House of Culture. Something’s just come back to me now. One time, in Vetka District … a young family. They, like everyone else, had been given little jars of baby food, cartons of fruit juice. The father sat down and wept. These jars and cartons were too late to save his children’s lives. They could make no difference, but he was crying because, after all, they had not been forgotten. Someone had remembered them. There was hope.

The whole world responded. People agreed to take our children for treatment in Italy, France, Germany … Lufthansa flew them to Germany at the airline’s expense. There was competition among the German pilots to come here. We got only the best! As the children were walking out to the aircraft, they all looked so pale, and they were so quiet. There were some odd moments. (Laughs.) The father of one boy burst into my office and demanded his son’s documentation back: ‘They’ll take our children’s blood! They’ll conduct experiments on them!’ Of course, the memory of that terrible war still festers. People have not forgotten. But there was something else at work: we had lived behind the barbed wire for such a long time, in the ‘Socialist Camp’. We were afraid of that other world. We knew nothing about it.

The Chernobyl mothers and fathers were a different problem. To continue the conversation about our mentality, the Soviet mentality. The Soviet Union had fallen, collapsed, but people were still expecting to be coddled by a great, powerful country, which no longer existed. My characterization, if you want it: a hybrid between a prison and a kindergarten, that’s what Socialism is, Soviet Socialism. A citizen surrendered his soul to the state, his conscience, his heart, and in return received his rations for the day. Beyond that, it was a matter of luck: one person got a bigger ration, another a small one. The only constant was that you got it in return for selling your soul. And the thing we most wanted to avoid now was our foundation turning into a distributor of that kind of ration: the Chernobyl ready-packed meal. People were used to waiting and complaining. ‘I am a Chernobyl victim. I am entitled, because I am one of the victims.’ As I see it today, Chernobyl was a major test of our spirit and our culture.

That first year, we sent 5,000 children abroad. The second year it was 10,000; and in the third, 15,000.

Have you talked to the children about Chernobyl? Not the adults, the children. They often have unexpected ideas. As a philosopher, I’m continually surprised. For example, one girl told me their class was sent out into the countryside in autumn 1986 to harvest the beetroots and carrots. They were constantly coming across dead mice, and they joked among themselves that the mice would die out, then the beetles and worms, then the hares and wolves, and then us. People would be the last to die out. They began imagining a world without animals and birds. Without mice. For a time, there would be only people alive, all alone. There would not even be flies buzzing around. Those children were aged between twelve and fifteen. That is how they saw their future.

I talked to another girl. She went to a Young Pioneers’ summer camp and made friends there with a boy. ‘He was so nice,’ she recalled. ‘We spent all our time together.’ But then his friends told him she was from Chernobyl, and he never came near her again. I even corresponded later with that young girl. ‘When I think about my future now,’ she wrote, ‘I dream of completing school and going to some faraway place, so nobody knows where I come from. Somebody will fall in love with me there, and I will forget everything.’ Yes, yes, write all this down, or it will slip people’s memory and be lost. I only regret not writing everything down myself.

Another story. We came to a contaminated village. The children were playing ball by the school. It rolled into one of the flower beds. They stood there, walked around it, but were afraid to go and retrieve the ball. At first, I couldn’t see the problem. I knew things theoretically, but I didn’t live there. I wasn’t constantly on the alert. I came from the normal world. I walked over to the flower bed and immediately all the children shouted, ‘No! No, mister. You mustn’t!’ In the past three years (this was in 1989), they had got used to the idea that you mustn’t sit on the grass, or pick flowers, or climb a tree. When we took them abroad and said, ‘Go for a walk in the forest. Go down to the river. Have a swim, sunbathe!’ you should have seen how hesitant they were to go into the water, to stroke the grass. But then, afterwards … there was so much joy! They could dive in the river again, they could lie on the sand. They were forever walking around carrying bunches of wild flowers, and weaving them into circlets. What am I thinking right now? I am thinking that of course we can take them abroad and get treatment for them, but how are we to give them back the world they knew? How can we give them back their past? Or their future?

There is a question we cannot escape: who are we Russians? Until we answer it, nothing will change. What does life mean to us? What does freedom mean to us? We seem capable only of dreaming of freedom. We could have become free, but it didn’t happen. We missed the boat again. For seventy years, we were building Communism, and today we are building capitalism. We used to worship Marx, and now we worship the dollar. History has passed us by. When you think about Chernobyl, you come back to the big question: who are we? What insights have we gained into ourselves? Into the world we inhabit? In our military museums, and we have more of those than we have museums of art, you find collections of old machine guns, bayonets, hand grenades, and out in the courtyard you see tanks and grenade launchers. Children are taken there on school trips and told: ‘This is war. This is what war is like.’ But actually, nowadays, it’s completely different. On 26 April 1986, we faced war again; and that war is not over.

As for us … Who are we?

Gennady Grushevoy, member of the Belarusian Parliament,

chairman of the Children of Chernobyl Foundation

Monologue on our having long ago come down from the trees but not yet having come up with a way of making them grow into wheels

‘Do sit down. A bit closer. But I’ll be perfectly frank, I don’t like journalists, and they give me a hard time.’

‘Really? Why is that?’

‘Haven’t you heard? Nobody got round to warning you? That explains why you’re here, in my office. I am deeply suspect. That seems to be the consensus among your journalist colleagues. Everybody is shouting that it’s not possible to live on that land, but I say it is. We need to learn how to live on it. We need to have courage. Should we seal off the contaminated area, put barbed wire round a third of our republic, abandon it, run away? After all, there’s plenty more land in Russia. No! On the one hand, our civilization is antibiological. Nature’s worst enemy may be man but, on the other, he is a creator. He can transform the world. You’ve only to look at the Eiffel Tower, or a spacecraft. But progress calls for sacrifices, and the more we progress, the more victims it calls for. No less than war. That’s clear now.

‘Pollution of the atmosphere, contamination of the soil, holes in the ozone layer … The earth’s climate is changing. We’re horrified, but we can’t blame knowledge as such – or consider it a crime. Who is to blame for Chernobyl, the reactor or man? There are no two ways about it: man. He serviced it incompetently. There were outrageous errors, and the disaster was the sum of those errors. We won’t delve into technical matters, but it’s a fact. That’s the conclusion reached by hundreds of commissions and experts. The largest man-made disaster in history. Our losses have been astronomical. The material losses we can more or less calculate, but what about the non-material damage? Chernobyl has blighted our imagination, our future. We are running scared of the future. But if that’s the best we can manage, why did we bother coming down from the trees? Or perhaps we should have come up with a way of making them grow into wheels by themselves and cut out the middleman? In terms of casualties, it isn’t the Chernobyl disaster that occupies the top spot in our world, but the motor car. Why is no one demanding a ban on the manufacture of cars? It’s far safer to ride a bicycle or a donkey. Or in a cart.

‘This is where they fall silent, my opponents.

‘They ask me, “How do you feel about the children there drinking radioactive milk and eating radioactive berries?” I feel bad about it. Awful, actually! But I don’t overlook the fact that those children have mummies and daddies, and that we have a government, and that it’s their job to think about this. One thing I do get angry about, is when people who have forgotten, or never knew, Mendeleyev’s periodic table try telling us how to live our lives. To intimidate us. Our Russian people have always lived in fear of war and revolution. That blood-drenched vampire, that Devil incarnate, Joseph Stalin … and now it’s Chernobyl. And we wonder why people here are the way they are. Why aren’t they free? Why are they so afraid of freedom? It’s just that they are more used to living under a tsar: a father of his people. It makes not the least difference whether he’s called the “general secretary” or the “president” …

‘But I’m not a politician, I’m a scientist. All my life, I have been thinking about land and studying soil. The soil is a substance as mysterious as blood. We think we know all there is to know about it, and yet there is still some mystery. We divide, not into those in favour of living in this region and those against, but into scientists and non-scientists. If you succumb to appendicitis and need an operation, who do you to turn to? A surgeon, of course, not enthusiastic political activists. You’ll take the advice of the expert. Well, I’m not a politician, but I ask myself, “What else do we have in Belarus besides soil, water and timber? Do we have an abundance of oil? Or diamonds?” We have nothing of that sort, so we should cherish what we have. Restore it. Yes, of course, other people sympathize. A lot of people in the world want to help us, but we can hardly live on Western handouts for the rest of time, relying on the contents of someone else’s wallet. Everyone who wanted to has already left, leaving behind only people who want to live, not die, after Chernobyl. This is where they belong.’

‘What are you proposing? How should people live here?’

‘We can treat sick human beings, and we can treat sick soil too. We need to work, and think. We need to aspire to climb, perhaps only a little way at a time, to move forward. But instead, what are we doing? With our monstrous Slavic indolence, we prefer to believe more in miracles than in the possibility of actually doing something creative with our own two hands. Look at nature. We have to learn from her. Nature is working, cleansing herself, helping us. She behaves more rationally than man. She is striving to restore the original balance, the eternal order of things.

‘I was summoned to the Communist Party’s Provincial Executive Committee.

‘ “It’s an uncommon situation. You will appreciate the problem, Slava Konstantinovna. We don’t know who to believe. Dozens of scientists are saying one thing, and you’re saying the opposite. Have you heard of this celebrated witch, Paraska? We decided to invite her here, and she has undertaken to lower the background gamma radiation over the course of the summer.”

‘You think that’s funny? But these were senior people I was talking to. This Paraska had already signed contracts with several farms and been paid a lot of money. It was one of the fads we went through. Total eclipse of common sense. Generalized hysteria. Do you remember? Thousands, millions of people glued to their television sets, and sorcerers (who called themselves “psychics”), Chumak and Kashpirovsky, “energizing” water. My colleagues, people with degrees in the sciences, were filling up three-litre jars of water and moving them close to their screens. They drank it, they washed with it. It was supposed to have healing properties. The sorcerers performed in stadiums and drew audiences a popular singer like Alla Pugacheva could only dream of. People walked there, went by bus, crawled on their hands and knees, with incredible faith! To be cured of all ills by the wave of a magic wand! What was it all about? It was the new Bolshevik utopia. The audience were wildly enthusiastic, their heads stuffed full of it. “Now,” I thought, “they think the wizards will save us from Chernobyl.”

‘He asked me directly: “What do you think? Of course, we’re all atheists, but people keep saying … And it’s in the newspapers. Should we arrange for you to meet her?”

‘So I met Paraska the witch. Where did she come from? Probably the Ukraine. For the past two years, she’d been travelling all over the place, lowering the background radiation level.

‘ “What is it you are planning to do?” I asked her.

‘ “I have these inner powers … I sense I can reduce the background gamma radiation …”

‘ “What do you need for that?”

‘ “A helicopter.”

‘I was hopping mad. Both with Paraska and with our officials, who were listening slack-jawed while she made complete fools of them.

‘ “Oh,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll need a helicopter just yet. We’ll bring some contaminated soil and scatter it on the ground. Say, half a cubic metre. And you can lower its background radiation.”

‘Which is precisely what we did. The soil was brought, and she commenced. She whispered something, spat. Drove away some evil spirits with her hands and … what? And nothing. Paraska is in jail now somewhere in Ukraine, for fraud. Another witch guaranteed to speed the decay of strontium and caesium over a hundred hectares of land. Where did these people come from? I believe they materialized out of our desperation for a miracle, our expectations. Their photographs, their interviews … Somebody, after all, was giving them entire columns in the newspapers, prime time on television. If you lose faith in reason, all sorts of fears take its place, like in the mind of a savage. It produces monsters.

‘This is where they fall silent, my opponents.

‘I remember only one top official phoning and saying, “I would like to come and see you at your institute, and for you to tell me what a curie is. What is a microroentgen? How does this microroentgen turn into a pulse, for example? I travel round the villages, get asked these questions and look a complete idiot. Like a backward schoolboy.” I met just one of our leaders like that. Alexey Shakhnov. Write his name down. Most of our leaders wanted to know nothing about physics or mathematics. The whole lot of them graduated from the Higher Party School, where they were properly taught just one thing: Marxism, inspiring and mobilizing the masses. It is the mentality of commissars and it hasn’t changed since the days of Budyonny’s cavalry army in the Civil War. I remember one of the favourite aphorisms of Stalin’s favourite commander: “I don’t care who I’m hacking at, I just like the swish of my sword.”

‘As for my recommendations on how we can live on this land? I’m afraid you’ll find this boring, like everybody else. No sensations, no fireworks. How many times have I given talks in front of reporters, said one thing and read something quite different the next day. Their readers must have been scared witless. One person claims to have seen poppy plantations in the Zone, and settlements of drug addicts; another has seen a cat with three tails; there was a portent in the heavens on the day of the disaster, etc., etc.

‘Here are the programmes our institute has developed. Printed checklists for collective farms and the public at large. I can give you this to keep. Spread the word. (Reads.)

‘ “Memorandum for Collective Farms. What do we recommend? Learn to treat radiation like electricity, directing it into channels where it harmlessly bypasses human beings. This means perestroika, restructuring and adapting the way we farm. In place of milk and meat farming, switch to industrial crops that do not enter the food chain. For example, rapeseed. It can be pressed to give oil, including motor oil. It can be used as fuel in engines. Seeds and seedlings can be grown. Seeds are actually subjected to radiation in the laboratory to maintain purity. It’s harmless to seeds. That’s one approach. There is a second. If we do, nevertheless, produce meat, we have no conventional way of decontaminating natural grain, but there is a way round this. It can be fed to cattle and, passing through them, is subjected to ‘biological decontamination’. Before slaughter, bull calves are moved for two to three months on to indoor feeding, with non-contaminated fodder. They are decontaminated.”

‘I think that’s probably enough. You won’t want me to give you a whole lecture. These are science-based ideas. I would even call it a survival philosophy.

‘We also have a Memorandum for Private Farmers, but when I come to a village to read it to old people, they stamp their feet. They refuse to listen because they want to live the way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did, their ancestors. They want to drink fresh milk, but you mustn’t do that. You need to buy a separator and make curd cheese with it, or churn butter. Drain off the whey and bury it. They want to dry mushrooms. Fine, but steep them first. Submerge them in water in a trough overnight, and only then dry them. Although it’s safer still not to eat them at all. The whole of France is crazy about champignon mushrooms, but they don’t grow them outside; they grow them in greenhouses. Where are our greenhouses? The cottages in Belarus are made of wood. Since time immemorial, Belarusians have lived in the forest, but their homes need to be lined with brickwork. Brick screens effectively, it dissipates ionizing radiation twenty times better than wood. Every five years, it is essential to lime the vegetable plots around the house. Strontium and caesium are cunning. They bide their time. You mustn’t use the manure from your cow as fertilizer. You need to buy mineral fertilizers.’

‘To realize your plans, you are going to need a different country, different people and different officials. In Russia, old people’s pensions are barely enough for buying bread and sugar, and you are telling them to buy in fertilizers, a cream separator.’

‘I can answer that. What I’m doing at this moment is defending science. I’m arguing that it’s not science which is to blame for Chernobyl but people, not the reactor but people. Political matters aren’t my department. You’re talking to the wrong person there.

‘Oops! I nearly forgot … and I’d even made a note to remind myself to tell you … A young scientist came to us from Moscow. He really wanted to be part of the Chernobyl project. Yury Zhuchenko. He brought his pregnant wife with him, in her fifth month. Everybody raised an eyebrow. What was he doing that for? The local people were fleeing, but other people were coming in from outside. He was doing it because he is a true scientist. He wanted to prove that someone who knew what they were doing could perfectly well live here. Intelligent and disciplined, precisely the two qualities we least admire. We admire people who block the enemy machine-gun position with their bare chest, who impetuously rush headlong forward bearing the flaming torch. But as for steeping mushrooms, pouring off the first water when the potatoes boil, taking vitamins regularly, bringing berries to the laboratory for testing, burying ashes in the ground … I went to Germany and saw every German there carefully sorting out their waste: bottles of clear glass in this container, green glass in that one. The lid of a milk carton went into the container for plastic, while the carton itself went into the container for paper. Camera batteries had a place of their own, compostable waste another. They really focus on it. I can’t imagine a Russian behaving like that: white glass here, brown glass there. He would consider it too boring, simply beneath his dignity. God knows, his place is to make the rivers of Siberia run backwards, that sort of thing. The boundless Russian soul taking an axe to every problem … If we are to survive, we need to change.

‘But that is not my problem. It is for you to solve. A matter of cultural attitudes, mentality, our whole way of life.

‘This is where they fall silent, my opponents.’ (She is pensive.)

‘I would love to believe that soon the Chernobyl power station will be shut down, demolished, and that the area around it will be turned into a lush green lawn.’

Slava Konstantinovna Firsakova, doctor of agricultural sciences

Monologue by a capped well

The spring thaw meant I barely made it to the old farmstead. Our battered police jeep finally stalled, fortunately when we were already near the grand house, which was surrounded by spreading oaks and maples. I had come to see Maria Fedotovna Velichko, a singer and storyteller famed in the lowlands of Polesye.

I met her sons in the courtyard and we introduced ourselves. The elder was Matvey, a teacher, the younger, Andrey, was an engineer. They talked to me cheerfully, and everyone was clearly stirred up about their imminent move.

‘The guest arrives as the lady of the house departs. We’re taking my mother into town. We’re waiting for the car. What book are you writing?’

‘It’s about Chernobyl.’

‘It’s interesting to be remembering Chernobyl today. I keep an eye on what gets written in the papers. There haven’t been many books yet, though. As a teacher, I need to know about it. No one tells us how to discuss it with our children. I’m not that interested in physics – I teach literature – and the kinds of question I find fascinating are why Academician Legasov, who was one of those managing the aftermath of the accident, went back to Moscow and shot himself. Why the chief engineer of the atomic power station went out of his mind. Alpha particles, beta particles, caesium, strontium all decay, degrade, disperse … but what about human beings?’

‘Well, I’m for progress! For science! None of us would dream of giving up the electric light bulb. Fear has been commercialized. Fear of Chernobyl is on sale because that’s all we have to sell in the international markets. It’s our new product. We sell our suffering.’

‘They’ve evacuated hundreds of villages, tens of thousands of people. It’s the great Atlantis of the peasantry. It’s been scattered all over the former Soviet Union; it’ll be impossible ever to put it back together again. It can’t be saved. We’ve lost a whole world and there will never be another like it. Ask our mother.’

To my regret, this unexpected conversation, so earnestly begun, did not continue. There was urgent work to be done. I understood: these people were about to leave their family home forever.

But then the mistress of the house appeared in the doorway. She hugged and kissed me as if I were a member of the family.

‘Daughter! Two winters I spent here on my own, with no one able to get through to see me but the animals. A fox skipped in one time. So surprised he was to see me! In winter, the days are long, and the nights no less so, like life. I could sing my songs to you about that, and weave you fairy tales. Life is boring for the old, and talking is what we do best. Time was, the students would come to see me from the big city, and record me on their tape recorders, but that was long since … before Chernobyl.

‘What stories can I tell you? If there’s even time for that … The other day I told my fortune from the water, and it said I would take a journey. Our very roots are being torn from their native soil. Our grandfathers and their fathers before them lived in these parts. They appeared here in the forests and replaced each other, century after century, but now such times have come that cares drive us from this land of ours. Such misfortune I find in none of the old tales. Really I don’t know. Ah, but there …

‘I’ll remember for you, though, daughter, the way we told our fortunes when we were maids. I’ll remember the good times and the laughter, the way my life here began. Life with my mother and father was so light-hearted until I was seventeen, and then it was time to think of a swain for me, to conjure my intended, to gukat’, as we say in these parts. In the summer we told fortunes from the water, and in winter from the smoke, and which way the chimney smoke blew was the direction you would leave in when you married. I loved to foretell the future from the water, the river … Water is what there was first on the earth, the water knows everything and can give you guidance. We would float candles on it, and pour wax. If the candle floated, then love was close; if it sank, for this year you would stay a maid and love would not find you. What was your lot? Where would you find happiness? We had so many ways of fortune-telling … We would take a mirror and sit in the bathhouse at night, and if someone appeared in the mirror, you must put it on the table at once or the Devil would pop out. The Devil likes to come through a mirror, from that other place … We would tell the future from shadows, burning paper over a glass of water and reading the shadow on the wall. If a cross appeared, death would come, but the dome of a church portended a wedding. One person would cry and another laugh, whatever was fated.

‘At night, you would take off one of your shoes and put it under the pillow. In the night, your intended would come and take off the other one, and you needed to look at him and remember his face. Someone else came to me, though, not my Andrey, someone tall, his complexion fair, while my Andrey was short, his eyebrows black, and he was always laughing: “Oh, maiden mine, my lady be.” (Laughs) We lived sixty happy years together. Brought three children into the world. Now he’s no more. Our sons carried him to the grave. Before he died, he kissed me one last time: “Oh, lady mine, you’ll now be all alone …” What do I know? You live a long life, forget how you lived, and even forget love. Ah, but there … It’s all God’s will. And when I was a maid, we would slip a comb under the pillow, and loosen our hair and sleep like that. And your intended would come to you in a dream and ask you for water to drink or to give to his horse …

‘We would sprinkle poppy seeds around the well, in a circle, and in the evening gather round and shout down it, “Fortune, oo-oo-oo! Fortune, go-o-oh!” The echo would come back, and from the sound you would guess what was coming to whom. I wanted to go back just now to the well, to learn my future, although there is little enough left to me now. A few crumbs, a few dry grains. But the soldiers have sealed off all the wells. Hammered down planks over them, dead wells, capped. All that’s left is an iron pump column near the collective-farm office. There was a wise woman in the village. She told fortunes too. Anyway, she went off to her daughter in the city. Sacks, two potato sacks full of herbs she took with her. I suppose it’s God’s will. Ah, but there … Some old clay pots she used for making her infusions. White sackcloth … Who needs that in the city? They just sit there, watching a television set or reading books. It’s just us here, like birds, reading the land, the herbs and the trees. If the land in the spring took a long time to come through, if the snow didn’t melt, you could expect drought in the summer. If the moon was weak and dark, new animals would not be born. If the cranes left early, the frosts would be severe. (Swaying gently in time with her words.)

‘My sons are good men and their wives are loving. And my grandchildren. But who are you to talk to when you’re out in the city? The place is strange to me. Empty for the heart. How can you reminisce among strangers? I loved going into the forest, we lived off it, there was always a group of us. You were among people. You’re not allowed into it now. Police are there, keeping watch on the radiation.

‘Two years … God’s will! Two years, my boys have been urging me, “Ma, come and live with us in the city.” And finally they’ve got their way, in the end … But it is so lovely here, the forest all around, the lakes. The lakes so pure, with water nymphs. Old people told us that girls who died young lived on as water nymphs. Clothes were left for them, women’s shifts, on the bushes. On bushes and hung on lines in the spring corn. They would come out of the water and run through the corn. Do you believe me? There was a time people believed all this. They listened. There was no television then, nobody had thought of it. (Laughs.) Ah, but there … Such beauty in this land! We lived here, but that will not be the lot of our children. No … I love this season of the year. The sun has climbed high in the sky, the birds have returned. Winter’s tedium is over. There’s no going out of the house of an evening, wild boar charging through the village as if they’re in the forest. I sorted through the potatoes. Was going to plant up the onions. A body needs to be doing something, you can’t just sit back and wait for death. That way he’ll never come for you.

‘And I remember too, daughter, the house sprite. He’s been living in my house a long, long time, although I don’t know exactly where, but he comes out from under the stove. Dressed all in black and with his black cap, and the buttons on his suit shining bright. No body to him, but he walks. I thought one time it was my old gentleman come back to visit me. Ah, well … But no … It was my kindly house sprite. I live alone, no one to talk to, so at night I tell him all about my day: “I came out early, before the sun was up, and there I stood and marvelled at the land. Rejoicing. So happy in my heart.” But now we must be off, and I must forever part with my home. On Palm Sunday, I always picked the willow. We lacked a priest, so I would go down to the river and bless it there myself. I’d put it at the gate, bring it into the house and make it pretty. I’d stick it in the walls and doors, the ceiling, up under the roof. I’d say the words as I was going round: “Willow, willow take care of my cow. Make the corn grow strong and the apple trees fruit. May the chickens hatch and the geese lay well.” That’s how you have to go round and say the words, on and on.

‘In the old days, we greeted the spring so merrily, playing and singing. We began on the first day, when the women let the cows out into the meadow. You have to ward off the witches. So they don’t ruin the cows, don’t steal their milk, so that when the cows come back home they haven’t already been milked and have fear in their eyes. You need to remember all this, it may yet all come back again. It’s all written down in the church books. When we still had a priest serving, he used to read that. Life can come to an end and then start all over again. Listen some more. Not many people still remember this, there’s not so many left can tell it to you. Before the first herd goes out, you need to spread a white tablecloth on the road and let the herd run over it, and only then the herd-boys. And as they go, they should say these words: “Wicked witch, now gnaw at stones, now gnaw the earth … And you, my cows, pass safely over meadows and marshes, fearing none, unruly men or savage beasts.” In spring, it’s not only the grass comes out of the ground but everything else too. All sorts of evil. It hides away in dark places in your house, in the corners. In the cowshed, where it is warm. It’ll come creeping into the yard from the lake, spread itself over the morning dew. A body needs to find protection. It’s good to bury the soil from an anthill next to the gate, but the best thing is to bury an old lock by the gate. To lock the teeth of all the evil spirits, their lips. And the land? It needs not only to be worked by the plough and the harrow but also to be protected. From the evil spirits. You need to walk around your field twice and keep saying, “I sow the land, I scatter the seed, I wait for the harvest to be good, and may the mice not eat my wheat.”

‘What else can I give you to remember? In the spring, you also need to bow to pay respect to the stork, which we call the busel-busko. To thank it for flying back to its old nest. The busel protects you from fires and brings you babies. You call to it, “Klyo-klyo-klyo … Busko, come to us! Come to us!” And young people just married also call, “Klyo-klyo-klyo … May we love each other and be happy in love. And may our babies grow supple as the willow.”

‘At Easter, everybody painted eggs … Red eggs, blue, yellow … But if someone had died in your house, you painted just one black egg. In mourning. For sadness. But a red one was for love; a blue for long life. There now! Like me. I live and live. I know everything now: what will happen in spring and summer, autumn and winter. And for some reason, I am alive, looking at the world. Can’t say I’m unhappy, daughter. Oh, and here’s something else you should know. Put a red egg in water at Easter, let it lie there, and then wash your face. Your face will be pretty, pure. If you want to dream of someone dear who has died, go to their grave and roll an egg on the ground there: “Oh, mother dear, come to me. I need to share my unhappiness with you.” And you tell her everything. Your life. If your husband is being unkind, she will tell you what to do. Before you roll the egg, hold it in your hands. Close your eyes and think. Don’t be afraid of graves. It’s only frightening when a dead person is being taken there. Close the windows and doors so death cannot fly in. He always wears white and carries a scythe. I haven’t seen it myself, but people have told me, who have seen it. You mustn’t let it see you. (Laughs.)

‘If I’m going to a grave, I take two eggs, one red and one black. One in the colour of mourning. I’ll sit down near my husband; there’s a photograph of him on the monument, not young, not old, a nice photograph. “It’s me, Andrey. Let’s talk.” I tell him all the news, and somebody calls me. A voice comes to me from somewhere. “Hello there, lady mine.” After I’ve visited Andrey, I go to my poor daughter. She died when she was only forty, the cancer got her. It didn’t matter where we took her, nothing helped. She went young to her grave. So pretty … In the next world, they need all sorts too, old and young, pretty and ugly. Even little ones. But who’s calling them all to the other side? I mean, what tales can they tell about this world? I don’t understand, I just don’t understand. But then, even clever people don’t understand, professors in the city. Perhaps the priest in church knows the answer. When I see him, I’ll ask. Ah, but there … What I say to my daughter is this: “Oh, my little daughter, my pretty one! What little birds will you fly with when you come back to me from far away? Will you come with the nightingales, or the cuckoos? What direction will you come from?” And so I sing to her and wait. Perhaps she’ll appear to me, or give me a sign. Only you mustn’t stay at the graves after dusk. At five o’clock, it’s time to leave. The sun should still be high in the sky, and when it starts to move downwards, it’s time to say goodbye. They want to be alone there. Like us. Just the same. The dead have their own life, just as we do. I don’t know, but that’s what I believe. That’s what I think. Otherwise … Something else I ought to tell you: when a person is dying and suffering for a long time, and there are a lot of people in the house, everybody should go outside, to leave him on his own. Even his ma and pa should go out, and his children.

‘Since dawn today, I’ve been walking round the yard and the vegetable plot, reminiscing. Those sons of mine have grown up to be good men, sturdy as oak. I’ve known happiness, but not much. I’ve worked all my life. How many potatoes alone have passed through these hands? Lugging them around. Ploughing, sowing … (She repeats.) Ploughing, sowing … And now … I’ll bring out the garden sieve with all the seeds. I have seeds left – beans, sunflowers, beetroots – and I’ll just scatter them over the bare earth and hope they live. And I’ll shake the flowers over the yard … Kvetochki is our word for flowers … Do you know the scent of cosmos flowers on an autumn night? Especially before rain, they have such a fragrance. And sweet peas … But with the times as they are it’s very unwise to touch the seeds. Scatter them over the ground and they will grow, be vigorous, but it’s not for us humans. These times of ours … God has given us a sign … That day this damnable Chernobyl happened, I dreamed of bees, lots and lots of bees. Flying somewhere, flying. Swarm after swarm. Bees foretell fire. The earth will burn … God gave a sign to remind us: man is only a visitor on this earth, this is not his home, he is only visiting. We are visitors here …’ (She cries.)

‘Ma!’ one of her sons calls. ‘Ma! The truck’s here …’

Monologue about longing for a role and a narrative

Dozens of books have been written, films made, commentaries provided. Yet this event is bigger than us, bigger than any commentator …

I heard, or read somewhere, that the problem we face with Chernobyl is primarily a problem of self-knowledge. I agreed. That fitted in with how I felt. I’m still waiting for some clever person to explain everything to me, to lay it all out clearly, in the same way that I’m being enlightened about Stalin, Lenin and Bolshevism. Or hearing endless propaganda about the market. The free market! We were brought up in a world where no Chernobyls existed, but now we find ourselves living with it.

Really, I’m a professional rocket engineer, an expert on missile fuel. I worked for the government in Baikonur. The Cosmos and Intercosmos programmes were a major part of my life. Conquer the heavens! Conquer the Arctic! Conquer the virgin lands! Conquer space! The whole Soviet world broke free of the earth, flew into space with Gagarin. All of us! I’m still in love with him! A wonderful Russian man with a wonderful smile! Even his death seemed somehow orchestrated. Dreams of soaring, flying, freedom. The longing to break free. That was such a marvellous time! For family reasons, I had to get transferred to Belarus and finished my army service here. When I got here, I immersed myself in this whole Chernobyl business. It altered my emotions. It was impossible to imagine anything comparable, although I’d always been dealing with the latest technology, space technology … It’s difficult for the moment to find the words … It beggars the imagination. Something … (Becomes pensive.) A moment ago I thought I had caught the sense … a moment ago. You feel an urge to be philosophical. It doesn’t matter who you speak to about Chernobyl, everybody feels that urge to philosophize.

But I’d do better telling you about my work. We’re busy with so many things! We’re building a church, a Chernobyl Church of the Icon of the Mother of God, the Seeker of the Perishing. We collect donations and visit the sick and dying. We’re writing a chronicle, creating a museum. At one time, I thought I couldn’t do it, that it was not in my heart to work in a place like this. I was given my first assignment: ‘Here is a sum of money. Share it between thirty-five families, thirty-five widows whose husbands have died.’ All of the men had been involved in the clean-up operation. I needed to do this fairly, but how? One widow had a little girl who was ill; another widow had two children; another woman was ill herself and renting an apartment; yet another had four children. I woke up in the night, wondering how I could avoid short-changing anyone. I thought and counted, counted and thought. Imagine it. In the end, I couldn’t come up with anything, and we split the money equally among everyone on the list.

My real pet project is the museum. The Museum of Chernobyl. (Silence.) Only sometimes I get the feeling this is not a museum so much as a funeral director’s office. As if I’m serving in a burial detail! This morning, before I had time to take my coat off, the door opened and a woman was there, sobbing. Well, not so much sobbing as yelling: ‘Take his medal and all his certificates of merit! Take all his benefits – just give me back my husband!’ She carried on shouting for ages, then left me his medal and the certificates. So now they will be displayed in a case in the museum. People will look at them … but no one but me heard what she shouted. Only I, when I’m arranging these exhibits, will remember.

Right now, Colonel Yaroshuk is dying. He’s an expert in chemical dosimetry. He was a big, robust man, but now he lies paralysed. His wife has to turn him like a pillow, she feeds him with a spoon. He has kidney stones that need to be broken up, but we don’t have the money to pay for the operation. We’re beggars, existing on whatever people donate. The state, meanwhile, behaves like a conman. It has abandoned these people; but when he dies, they will name some street, or school, or military unit after him. But only after he is dead. Colonel Yaroshuk. A man who walked through the radiation zone mapping the contamination hotspots. He was literally used as a biological robot, but even though he was aware of this, he moved out from right next to the walls of the atomic power station itself. On foot, carrying his radiation measuring instruments. If he detected a hotspot, he went along its edge so it could be accurately mapped.

And what about the soldiers working up on the reactor roof? In all, some 210 military units, about 340,000 troops, were brought in to clean up in the aftermath of the accident. The most lethal work was done by those cleaning the roof. They were issued lead aprons, but the radiation was coming up from below and they were not protected from that direction. They wore synthetic leather army boots and were exposed each day to intense radiation on the roof for one and a half to two minutes. Afterwards, they were discharged from the army with a certificate of commendation and a hundred-rouble bonus. They disappeared into the vast expanses of the Soviet homeland. On the roof, they were scraping up fuel and graphite from the reactor, lumps of concrete and reinforcing steel. They had twenty to thirty seconds to load a litter, and the same amount of time again to tip the waste down from the roof. These specialist litters weigh forty kilograms unloaded, so you can imagine the strain of wearing a lead apron, a mask, manoeuvring the litters and working at breakneck speed. A museum in Kiev has a mock-up of a piece of graphite the size of an army cap. The description states that, if it were real graphite, it would weigh sixteen kilos. That’s how heavy, how dense it is. Radio-controlled handling equipment often malfunctioned because its electronic circuitry was burned out by the radiation. The most serviceable robots were soldiers. They were nicknamed ‘green robots’, after the colour of their army uniforms. Three thousand six hundred soldiers crossed the roof of the wrecked reactor. They slept on the ground. They all relate that, in the early days, straw was spread on the ground in the tents. The straw was taken from hayricks beside the reactor.

They were young lads. They’re dying now too, but they know that, but for what they did … These are still people from a particular culture. A culture of superhuman feats and sacrificial victims.

There was a moment when there was a real risk of a nuclear explosion, and it was essential to drain the ground water beneath the reactor so it wouldn’t be reached by a molten mix of uranium and graphite which, coming in contact with the water, would achieve critical mass. The power of the resultant explosion would have been three to five megatons. Not only would Kiev and Minsk have been wiped out, but an enormous area of Europe would have been made uninhabitable. A catastrophe on a European scale. The situation required volunteers to dive into the water and open the latch on the drainage valve. They were promised a car, an apartment, a dacha, and a pension for their families to the end of their days. Volunteers came forward! The boys dived, repeatedly, and managed to open the latch. They were given 7,000 roubles to share between them, and the promised cars and apartments were quietly forgotten about. Needless to say, they hadn’t agreed to make those dives because of the promised rewards. That was the least part of their motivation. Our people are not that naive. They knew the value of those promises. (Very upset.)

Those people are no longer with us. There are only documents in our museum, names; but what if they hadn’t done that? Our readiness to sacrifice ourselves … No one else comes close.

I had an argument about this with someone. He was trying to persuade me this was because we put a very low value on life. A kind of Asiatic fatalism. The person who makes the sacrifice has no sense of himself as a unique, irreplaceable human being. It is a longing for a role to play. Until this moment, he has been an actor with no lines, an extra. He has had no role, been no more than part of the background. Suddenly, he is a star. A longing for meaning. What is all our propaganda about? Our ideology? You are offered the choice of dying and acquiring meaning. They raise you up. They give you a role! It is worth dying because, afterwards, you will be immortal. He tried to persuade me of that, and gave examples, but I disagreed. Categorically! We are brought up to be soldiers. That is what we are taught. Constantly mobilized, constantly ready to undertake the impossible. My father was shocked when I wanted to go to a non-military university after school. ‘I’m a career soldier, and you want to wear a civilian jacket? You need to defend the Fatherland!’ He wouldn’t speak to me for several months, until I applied to a military college. My father was a war veteran. He’s dead now. Had practically no property, like everyone else of his generation. Nothing to bequeath: no house, no car, no land. What did he leave me? An officer’s despatch case. He was given that just before the Finnish campaign, and now it holds his military awards. I also have a plastic bag containing 300 letters my father wrote from the front, beginning in 1941. My mother kept them. That is all he left, but I consider it a priceless legacy!

Now do you understand how I envisage our museum? Over there is a jar of Chernobyl soil, only a handful. Here is a miner’s helmet, also from there. Peasant tools from the Zone. We can’t let the radiation monitoring technicians in here. There’s background radiation all right! But everything here must be authentic. No replicas! People have to be able to trust us, and they will only trust what is genuine, because there is just too much deceit about Chernobyl. That’s how it was, and still is. You can use the atom not only for military and peaceful purposes, but also for selfish ones. Chernobyl has spawned countless charitable foundations and business interests.

Since you’re writing this book, you need to view our unique videos. We’re assembling them piece by piece. There is in effect no chronicle of Chernobyl; there was a ban on filming, everything was classified. If anybody did manage to record anything, the ‘appropriate authorities’ promptly confiscated the material and returned the tapes demagnetized. We have no documentary material about how people were evacuated or livestock was moved out. There must be no filming of a disaster, only of heroism! There have, nevertheless, been albums of Chernobyl photographs published; but how many times did film and television crews have their cameras smashed and how often were they dragged around various institutions to explain themselves? To talk honestly about Chernobyl took a lot of courage, and still does. Take it from me! But you need to see these images. The faces of the first firemen, as black as graphite. And their eyes, the eyes of people who already know they are not long for this world. One fragment shows the feet of a woman who went the morning after the accident to tend her vegetable plot next to the atomic power station. She walked on grass covered with dew. Her legs look like a sieve, peppered with holes right up to her knees. That is something you have to see if you are going to write such a book.

I come home and can’t lift up my young son. I need to drink fifty or, preferably, a hundred mils of vodka before I take my boy in my arms.

A whole section in the museum is devoted to the helicopter crews. Colonel Vodolazhsky, a Hero of Russia, is buried in the soil of Belarus, in the village of Zhukov Lug. When he was subjected to a grossly excessive dose of radiation, he should have left. He should have been evacuated immediately, but instead he stayed and trained thirty-three other crews. He himself made 120 sorties and dropped 200 to 300 tonnes of ballast. He was making four or five flights a day, at an altitude of 300 metres above the reactor. The cabin temperature could reach sixty degrees. And what happened down there when they did drop the sandbags? Can you imagine the furnace? The level of radioactivity reached 1,800 roentgens per hour. The pilots were sick while they were flying. In order to aim accurately and hit the target, which was a volcanic crater, they stuck their heads out of the cabin and looked down. There was no other way. At meetings of the government commission dealing with the disaster, they reported matter-of-factly, ‘We shall have to expend two or three lives on this … This operation will cost one life.’ Straightforward and factual.

Colonel Vodolazhsky died. In their records of the radiation to which individuals were exposed above the reactor, the doctors wrote that he had been subjected to seven rem. The true figure was 600!

And what of the 400 miners who day and night dug under the reactor? They needed to carve out a tunnel that could be filled with liquid nitrogen to freeze the ground. Otherwise, the reactor would have sunk down into the ground water. There were miners from Moscow, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk. I have never read a word about them and yet, naked, in temperatures of fifty degrees, they pushed mine carts in front of them on all fours. Down there, the radiation level was also in the hundreds of roentgens.

Today, they are dying; but what if they had not done what they did? I consider them the heroes, not the casualties of a war which supposedly never happened. They call it ‘an accident’, ‘a disaster’, but it was a war. Our Chernobyl monuments resemble war memorials.

There are things that we do not believe in talking about, but you need to know them because of the kind of book you are writing. For those who worked at the reactor or in close proximity to it, what was most seriously affected – and this is very similar to the problems of those who work with missiles – was the genito-urinary system. Their masculinity. But Slavs just do not talk about these things. It’s unacceptable. I once accompanied an English journalist who had prepared some interesting questions on this very topic. He wanted to investigate the human dimension of the problem. When it’s all over, what happens to the human being when he goes back home, to his everyday life, to his sex life? He could find no one prepared to talk openly about it. For instance, he asked to meet the helicopter crews, to talk man-to-man. They duly came, some already retired at thirty-five or forty. One was brought along who had a broken leg caused by senile osteoporosis, because exposure to radiation causes bones to become brittle. The Englishman asked them how they were getting on in their families, with their young wives? The helicopter crews fell silent. They had come to talk about how they had flown five sorties a day, and here someone was asking them about their wives? About … He decided to try talking to them individually, in private. They all replied that their health was fine, the state valued them, and they had loving families. Not one of them would speak frankly. They left, and I could see he was distraught. ‘Now you see,’ he said to me, ‘why nobody trusts you. You deceive even yourselves.’ The meeting had taken place in a café, and they had been served by two pretty waitresses who were now clearing the tables. He asked them, ‘Would you mind answering a few questions for me?’ Those two girls gave him all the information he needed to know.

Journalist: ‘Are you planning to get married?’

Waitress: ‘Yes, but not here. We all dream of marrying a foreigner, so as to have healthy babies.’

Then he asked more boldly: ‘Well, do you have a partner at present? How is everything? Do they satisfy you? You understand what I mean?’

Waitress: ‘Look, you’ve just been interviewing those lads. (They laughed.) Helicopter crews. They’re not far short of two metres tall, medals rattling on their chests. They’re great at speaking from platforms, just not for going to bed with.’

Can you imagine it? He photographed the girls, and repeated what he had said to me: ‘Now you see why nobody trusts you. You deceive even yourselves.’

I accompanied him into the Zone. It’s a well-known statistic that there are 800 burial sites around Chernobyl. He was expecting some sort of amazing engineering structures, but they were just ordinary pits. They were filled with trees from the ‘red forest’ that was cut down in a 150 hectare area around the reactor. In the first two days after the accident, pine trees turned red and then russet.

There were thousands of tonnes of iron and steel, pipes, work clothes, concrete structures. He showed me an illustration from an English magazine, panoramic, from the air. Thousands of tractors, aircraft, fire engines and ambulances. The largest burial site was said to be next to the reactor. He wanted to photograph it now, ten years on, and had been promised a lot of money for the image. So there we were, being sent from one senior official to another. One said they needed a location from us, another that we needed a permit. We were just getting the run-around, until it dawned on me that this burial site did not exist. There no longer was a site in reality, only in reports. The machinery had long ago been looted and taken off to markets, to collective farms or people’s homes for spare parts. It was all gone. The Englishman could not understand that. He could not believe it. When I told him the truth, he simply could not believe it! Now, when I’m reading even the most outspoken article, I don’t trust it. At the back of my mind, I always have the thought that this may all be a lie as well, or a lot of fairy tales. Recalling the tragedy has become routine, a cliché. (Hesitates.) A horror story! (Long pause.)

I bring everything here, cart it all to the museum, but sometimes I think I should just forget it. Run away! It’s too much.

I had a conversation with a young priest …

We were standing at the fresh grave of Sergeant Sasha Goncharov, one of the men who had been up on the reactor roof. Snow, strong winds, atrocious weather. The priest was conducting the funeral service, reciting the prayer, bareheaded. After the funeral, I said to him, ‘You seemed not to be feeling the cold?’ ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘At times like that, I feel all-powerful. None of the other church services give me the kind of energy I receive from funerals.’ I remembered that: the words of a man who is always in the vicinity of death.

I’ve often asked foreign journalists who come here – and many have come quite a few times – why they do it, why do they apply to enter the Zone. It would be foolish to imagine they are only in it for the money or to advance their careers. ‘We like being here with you,’ they admit. ‘It gives us a charge of energy.’ Imagine that. It is a surprising answer, isn’t it? For them, evidently, Slavs – the way we feel, the world we live in – are something they haven’t come across elsewhere. The enigmatic Russian soul … We ourselves enjoy arguing about this over a drink in the kitchen. A friend of mine once said, ‘Some day, we’ll have everything. We’ll have forgotten how to suffer. Then who will find us interesting?’ I can’t forget his words … but I’ve yet to work out what other people like about us. Is it ourselves, or that we are something to write about? That we help them to gain understanding?

Why are we always so fixated on death?

Chernobyl. There is not going to be a different world for us. At first, when they took the feet from us, we gave open expression to our pain; but now we live with the realization that there is no other world for us, and we have nowhere else to go. The sense that we are now forever fated to live on the soil of Chernobyl is something new. A lost generation returns from the war … Do you remember Remarque? But it is a perplexed generation that lives with Chernobyl. We are dismayed. The only thing that has not changed here is human suffering. That is our only currency – non-convertible, of course!

I come home after everything the day has thrown at me. My wife hears me out, but then quietly says: ‘I love you, but I will not give up my son to you. I won’t give him up to anyone, not to Chernobyl, not to Chechnya. Not to anyone!’ She is already living with that fear.

Sergey Vasilyevich Sobolev, vice-chairman of the

Chernobyl Shield Association of Belarus

The Folk Choir

Klavdia Grigoryevna Barsuk, wife of a clean-up worker; Tamara Vasilyevna Belookaya, doctor; Yekaterina Fyodorovna Bobrova, resettled from Pripyat; Andrey Burtys, journalist; Ivan Naumovich Vergeychik, paediatrician; Yelena Ilyinichna Voronko, resident of Bragin; Svetlana Govor, wife of a clean-up worker; Natalia Maximovna Goncharenko, resettled; Tamara Ilyinichna Dubikovskaya, resident of Narovlya; Albert Nikolaevich Zaritsky, doctor; Alexandra Ivanovna Kravtsova, doctor; Eleonora Ivanovna Ladutenko, radiologist; Irina Yuryevna Lukashevich, midwife; Antonina Maximovna Larivonchik, resettled; Anatoly Ivanovich Polishchuk, hydrometeorologist; Maria Yakovlevna Savelyeva, mother; Nina Khantsevich, wife of a clean-up worker.

It’s a long time since I saw a woman happy to be pregnant, or a happy mother …

A mother has just given birth. She comes to, and calls, ‘Doctor, show me it! Bring it!’ She touches the little head, the forehead, the little body. She counts the fingers and toes, checking. She wants to be quite sure: ‘Doctor, have I had a normal baby? Is everything all right?’ They bring him for her to feed. She is afraid. ‘I live quite near Chernobyl. I was out in the black rain when it fell …’

They tell me what they have dreamed: one gave birth to a baby calf with eight legs; another to a puppy with the head of a hedgehog. Such bizarre dreams. Women didn’t have dreams like these before. I never heard of it.

I’ve been a midwife for thirty years.

I’ve lived my whole life among words, and with words …

I teach language and literature in a school. I think it was in early June, when the exams were on. The headmistress suddenly assembled us and announced, ‘You must all bring spades tomorrow.’ We were given to understand we were to remove the top layer of contaminated soil around the school buildings, after which soldiers would come and cover everything with tarmac. Someone asked, ‘What protection is being provided? Will they be bringing special suits and respirators?’ We were told there would be nothing. ‘Just bring your spades and dig.’ Only two young teachers refused. The rest went and dug. People were not happy, but at the same time they had a sense of having done their duty. We have that in us: we ought to go where it is difficult and dangerous and be ready to defend our Motherland. What else have I been teaching the children? Precisely that. You have to go into battle, rush into the line of fire, defend, sacrifice. The literature I was teaching was not about life: it was about war and death: Sholokhov, Serafimovich, Furmanov, Fadeyev, Boris Polevoy … Only those two young teachers refused, but they belong to a new generation. They’re different people.

We dug out the soil from morning till evening. When we were going home, it seemed strange that the city shops were open: women were buying stockings and perfume. We were already attuned to military thinking. It all seemed much more natural when suddenly there were queues for bread, salt and matches. Everybody rushed to dry out bread for storing. We washed the floors five or six times a day, sealed up the windows. We listened constantly to the radio. This way of behaving seemed familiar to me, even though I was born after the war. I tried to analyse my feelings and was amazed how quickly I reoriented my whole way of thinking. In some unfathomable way, I found I was remembering the experience of the war. I could picture myself abandoning our home and going off with the children, deciding what things we would take, what I would write to my mother. Even though ordinary, peacetime life was continuing all around, and they were showing comedy films on television.

Our memory was prompting us. We have always lived in horror. We’re good at it. Horror is our natural habitat.

Our nation is unrivalled at that.

I wasn’t involved in the war, but this reminded me of it …

The soldiers came into the villages and evacuated people. The streets were clogged with military vehicles: armoured personnel carriers, trucks covered with green tarpaulins, even tanks. People had to leave their homes with soldiers present. It was very oppressive, especially for those who had been through the war. At first, as Belarusians, they blamed the Russians. It was all their fault: it was their atomic power station. Later, they blamed the Communists. My heart was pounding with an almost superstitious sense of dread.

They tricked us. They promised we would be back within three days. We left behind our home, our bathhouse, the carved wooden covering over our well, our old garden. The night before we left, I went out into the garden and saw the flowers had opened. In the morning, they had all wilted. My mother did not survive the upheaval. She died a year later. I have two dreams which recur. In the first, I see our empty house; in the second, there are red dahlias by our garden gate, and my mother is standing there, alive, and smiling.

People are always comparing it to the war. War, though, you can understand. My father told me about the war, and I’ve read books about it. But this? All that is left of our village is three graveyards: one has people lying in it, the old graveyard; the second has all the cats and dogs we left behind, which were shot; the third has our homes.

They buried even our houses.

I wander through my memories every day …

Through the same streets, past the same houses. Our little town was so peaceful. There were no big manufacturing works, only a factory making sweets. It was Sunday. I was lying sunbathing. My mother came running. ‘My dear, Chernobyl has blown up. People are hiding in their houses and you’re out here in the sun.’ I just laughed. Chernobyl is forty kilometres away from Narovlya.

In the evening, a Lada stopped outside our house. A girl I knew and her husband came in. She was wearing a housecoat, and he was in a tracksuit and some old trainers. They had sneaked out of Pripyat through the forest, down country lanes. They had escaped. There were police on duty on the roads, army checkpoints, and nobody was being allowed to leave. The first thing she shouted at me was, ‘We need to find milk and vodka, urgently!’ She was wailing and wailing. ‘We’d just bought new furniture and a new fridge. I’d made myself a fur coat. We left everything, just covered it in plastic sheeting. We haven’t slept all night. Oh, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?’ Her husband was trying to calm her down. He told us there were helicopters flying over the town, and army trucks driving through the streets, spraying some sort of foam. They were calling up men for the army for six months, as if there was a war. We sat for days watching the television and waiting for Gorbachev to speak. There was no word from the authorities.

It was only after the May Day celebrations were over that Gorbachev appeared and said there was nothing to worry about, comrades, everything was under control. There had been a fire, just an ordinary fire. Nothing that unusual. The people living there were getting on with their work.

And we believed him.

Such scenes. I was afraid to sleep at night, to close my eyes …

They drove all the cattle from the evacuated villages to us in the district centre, to collection points. Maddened cows, sheep and pigs were running through the streets. Anyone who felt like it could just catch them. Trucks from the meat processing works drove to Kalinovichi station with carcases to be loaded and sent to Moscow, but Moscow refused to accept them. The wagons were already crypts and were sent right back to us. Whole trains at a time. The carcases were buried here. At night the smell of rotten meat was everywhere. ‘Is this what nuclear war smells like?’ I wondered. I thought war should smell of smoke.

In those first days, they evacuated our children at night, so not too many people would see. They tried to conceal the disaster, to hide it away. But, of course, people found out what was happening. They brought churns of milk to our buses for the journey, and baked buns for us.