Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

Like during the war. What else can you compare it to?

A meeting at the Provincial Executive Committee. A war footing …

Everyone was waiting for the civil defence director to speak, because if anyone did know anything about radiation, it was only the fragments they remembered from the tenth-grade physics textbook. He came on to the stage and started telling us what was written in books and manuals about nuclear war: if a soldier is exposed to fifty roentgens of radiation he should be withdrawn from combat … He talked about how to build shelters, how to use a gas mask, the radius of the shock wave. But this was not Hiroshima or Nagasaki, everything was different. We were already into guesswork.

We flew a helicopter into the contaminated zone. The instruction manual specified: no underwear, cotton overalls like a chef (but with a protective film), mitts, a gauze mask. Festooned with all sorts of appliances, we descended out of the sky near a village, and there little children were splashing about in the sand like sparrows. Pebbles or twigs in their mouths. Little kids with no trousers, bare bottomed. And our orders were not to talk to people at all, so as not to cause panic.

Now I have to live with that.

Suddenly, there were television broadcasts …

One of the narrative tropes: a village woman has milked a cow. She pours milk into a jar, a reporter with a military radiation meter comes and sweeps it over the jar. There, see? Absolutely normal, and the reactor is only ten kilometres away. Footage of the River Pripyat, people swimming, sunbathing. In the distance, we can see the reactor with smoke above it. Commentary: ‘Voices in the West are trying to sow panic, spreading outright slander about the accident.’ Again the radiation counter is brought out, held over a bowl of fish soup, then over a bar of chocolate, then over doughnuts on sale at an outdoor kiosk. This was deliberate deception. The radiation meters our army had at that time were not designed for testing food. All they measured was background radiation.

The sheer volume of lies in our minds associated with Chernobyl bears comparison only with the situation at the outbreak of war in 1941 under Stalin.

I wanted the baby to be a token of our love …

We were expecting our first baby. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors urged me to have an abortion. ‘Your husband was in Chernobyl for a long time.’ He’s a truck driver, and he was called up to go there in the early days. He was transporting sand and concrete. I wouldn’t believe them. I didn’t want to. I had read in books that love conquers all. Even death.

My little baby was stillborn, and lacking two fingers. A girl. I cried. ‘If she could at least have had all her pretty little fingers. She was a girl after all.’

Nobody understood what had happened …

I rang the enlistment office. We medics are all army reservists. I offered my help. I don’t remember the man’s name, but he was a major. He told me, ‘We only need young people.’ I tried to change his mind. ‘In the first place, young doctors are not trained, and in the second, they are more at risk. A young body is more sensitive to the effects of radiation.’ His response was, ‘We have orders to enlist young people.’

I remember patients’ wounds began to heal poorly. Also that first radioactive rain, after which the puddles turned yellow. They turn yellow in the sun. I always find that colour unsettling now. On the one hand, the mind was simply not prepared for anything like that; on the other, we had always been told we were the best, the most amazing, and we were living in the world’s greatest country. My husband is an engineer, he has a degree; but he seriously tried to persuade me it was an act of terrorism. Enemy sabotage. That’s the way we thought, that’s how we had been brought up. But I remembered travelling on the train with a technician who told me about the construction of the Smolensk atomic power station: how much cement and sand, how many planks and nails, found their way from the building site to nearby villages. In return for a bribe or a bottle of vodka.

In the villages and factories, people from the district committees of the Communist Party travelled around, meeting people. Yet not one of them was capable of giving an answer if they were asked what decontamination was, how children could be protected, or what the coefficients were for radionuclides finding their way into the food chain. Neither could they if asked about alpha, beta and gamma particles, nor about radiobiology, ionizing radiation, let alone isotopes. For them, that was all something from another planet. They gave lectures about the heroism of Soviet people, symbols of military courage, and the wiles of Western intelligence services.

I took the floor at a Party meeting and asked: ‘Where are the professionals? The physicists? The radiologists?’ They threatened to expel me from the Party.

There were a lot of inexplicable deaths … unexpected …

My sister had heart trouble. When she heard about Chernobyl, she had a premonition: ‘You will survive this, but I won’t.’ She died a few months later. The doctors offered no explanation; and yet, with her diagnosis, she should have had many more years to live.

People talked about milk appearing in the breasts of old women, as if they had just had a baby. The medical term for it is ‘relactation’, but for peasants it was a punishment from God. This happened to an old lady who lived alone, without a husband or children. She went mad, ‘lost her link to God’, as they say there. She would wander through the village, rocking something in her arms. She would pick up a piece of wood or a children’s ball, wrap her shawl round it, and sing it lullabies.

I’m frightened of living on this land …

They gave me a radiation meter, but what am I supposed to do with it? I wash the linen, I get it really clean, and the meter goes off. I make meals, bake a cake, it goes off. I make a bed, it goes off. What use is it to me? I feed the children and weep. ‘Why are you crying, Mum?’

I have two children, both boys. I’m in and out of hospitals with them all the time, seeing doctors. You wouldn’t know if the older one was a boy or a girl. His little head is quite bald. I’ve taken him to professors, and to the wise women too. Whisperers, witches. He’s the littlest in his class. Can’t run or play. If somebody hit him by accident, he would bleed. He could die. He’s got a blood disease. I won’t even name it. I stay in the hospital with him and think, ‘He’s going to die.’ But then I see I mustn’t think like that or death might hear. I cry in the toilet. All the mothers do. Not in the wards, but in the toilets or the bathroom. I come back all cheerful:

‘Your cheeks are rosy pink. You’re getting better.’

‘Mum, take me away from the hospital. I’ll die here. Everybody here dies.’

Where am I to cry? In the toilet? There’s a queue. Everyone is just like me.

For Radunitsa, the Day of Remembrance of the Departed …

We were allowed to visit the graveyard, the graves … But the police ordered us not to go back to our houses. They were flying above us in their helicopters. We managed at least to glimpse our homes from far away, and make the sign of the Cross over them.

I brought back a sprig of lilac from my village. I’ve had it here for a year now.

Let me tell you what our people, Soviet people, are like …

In the early years, the shops in the polluted districts were overflowing with buckwheat, and Chinese stewed meat, and people were so pleased. They boasted, ‘There’s no way anyone will get us to move out now. We’re on to a good thing here!’ Contamination of the soil was uneven; the same collective farm could have ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ fields. You got paid more for working on the polluted soil and everyone wanted to work there. They would refuse to work in the clean fields.

Recently, I had a visit from my brother who lives in the far east of Russia. He said, ‘They’re using you here as “black boxes”. The people here are black boxes like the ones they have on aircraft. They record all the information about the flight, and if a plane crashes they look for its black box.’

We think we are living life like everyone else. We walk around, go to work, fall in love … But no! Actually, we are recording data for the future.

I’m a paediatrician …

Children are completely different from adults. For instance, they’re not afraid of death. It’s a concept they don’t have. They know everything about themselves: the diagnosis, the names of all the procedures and drugs. They know more than their mothers. And their games? They chase each other through the wards shouting, ‘I’m radiation, I’m radiation!’ When they die, it seems to me they look surprised. Baffled.

They lie there looking so surprised.

The doctors have warned me my husband is going to die. He has leukaemia …

He fell ill after coming back from the Chernobyl Zone. Two months later. He had been sent there by his factory. He came in from the night shift and said:

‘I leave in the morning.’

‘What are you going to be doing there?’

‘Working on the collective farm.’

They were raking hay in the fifteen-kilometre zone, harvesting the beetroots, digging up potatoes.

He came home, went to see his parents. He was helping his father plaster around a stove and fell over. We called for an ambulance and he was taken to hospital. He had a lethally low level of white blood cells. They sent him to Moscow.

He came home with one thought in his mind: ‘I am going to die.’ Most of the time he just said nothing. I tried to change his mind, begged him, but he didn’t believe a word. Then I gave birth to his daughter, to make him believe. I don’t try to interpret my dreams. In one, I’m being taken to the scaffold; in another, I’m dressed all in white. I don’t read those books telling you what dreams mean. I wake up in the morning, look at him and wonder how I could live without him. I want our little girl to grow up a bit so she’ll remember him. She’s so small. She’s just started walking. She runs to him and says, ‘Pa-pa.’ I force myself not to think about it.

If I had known what was going to happen, I would have shut the doors, stood blocking the front entrance, locked them all ten times over …

I’ve been living at the hospital with my son for two years now …

Little girls play with dolls in the hospital wards. The dolls can close their eyes, and that’s how you know a doll is dead.

‘Why do the dolls die?’

‘Because they’re our children, and our children aren’t going to live. They’ll be born and just die.’

My Artyom is seven, but he looks five.

When he shuts his eyes, I think he’s fallen asleep. That’s when I can cry. When he won’t see.

But he reacts:

‘Mum, am I dying now?’

He falls asleep and he’s barely breathing. I get down on my knees before him, in front of his little bed.

‘Artyom, little one, open your eyes. Say something.’

I think to myself: ‘You’re still warm, my sweet one.’

He opens his eyes. He falls asleep again. He’s so still. As if he’s died.

‘Artyom, dearest, open your eyes …’

I’m trying not to let him die.

We recently celebrated New Year …

We prepared a wonderful meal, everything homemade: smoked sausage, pork fat, meat, pickled cucumber. We only bought the bread from the shop. We even had our own home-distilled vodka. Our very own, as people joke, Chernobyl-style, with added caesium and strontium to spice it up. Where else would we get it from? The shelves in the village shops are empty, and if anything does appear, it’s beyond our wages and pensions to buy it.

Our visitors arrived. Our lovely neighbours. Young people. One’s a teacher, the other a mechanic on the collective farm, with his wife. We drank. We ate. We sang. Without anyone organizing it, we started singing revolutionary songs. Songs about the war. ‘A red dawn bathes in tender sunshine all the ancient Kremlin walls’, my favourite. We had a wonderful evening. Just like old times.

I wrote about it to my son. He’s studying in the capital, a student. I got his reply: ‘Mum, I could just imagine this picture on the soil of Chernobyl. Our house. The New Year tree sparkling, and everybody at the table singing songs about the revolution and the war, as if there had never been a Gulag, never been a Chernobyl disaster …’

I felt so afraid. Not for myself, but for my son. He has nowhere to come home to now.