Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

3

Admiring Disaster

Monologue on something we did not know: death can look so pretty

In the early days, the main question was: who is to blame? We needed a culprit …

Later, as we found out more, we began to wonder what we should do. How to get out of this mess. Now, though, when we are resigned to the thought that this is not going to be over in a year or two, but will last for many generations, we have started rethinking the past, turning back the pages one by one.

It happened on a Friday night. The next morning, no one had any suspicions. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber’s. I was making lunch. My husband came back very soon, to tell me, ‘There’s been a fire at the atomic plant. We’ve been ordered not to turn the radio off.’ I forgot to say we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. To this day, I can see the bright, raspberry red glow. The reactor seemed lit up from inside. It was an incredible colour. Not an ordinary fire, but a kind of shining. Very pretty. If you forget all the rest, it was very pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies, there was just nothing comparable. In the evening, everyone came out on to their balconies; if they didn’t have one, they went to their friends and neighbours. We were on the eighth floor and had a great view. About three kilometres as the crow flies. People brought out their children and lifted them up. ‘Look! Don’t forget this!’ And these were people who worked at the reactor: engineers, workmen. There were even physics teachers, standing in that black dust, chatting away. Breathing it in. Admiring the sight. Some people drove dozens of kilometres or cycled to see it. We had no idea death could look so pretty. Not that there was no smell; it was not a springtime or an autumn smell. Quite different. Not the smell of soil either. No, it gave you a tickle in your throat and made your eyes water. I couldn’t sleep all night, and heard the neighbours stamping about upstairs. They were awake too, hauling something about, banging, maybe packing things up, maybe sealing the windows. I took citramonum for a headache. In the morning, when dawn broke, I looked around. I’m not making this up now. It’s not something I thought afterwards, but at that moment I sensed something was not right, something had changed. For good. By eight in the morning, there were soldiers with gas masks in the streets. When we saw them and the army vehicles there, we were not afraid. Quite the opposite, we were reassured. Now the army was here to help, everything would be fine. We had no idea the peaceful atom could kill, that the whole town might never have woken again after that night. Beneath our windows, someone was laughing, and music was playing.

After lunch, there were announcements on the radio that we should start preparing to evacuate. We would be moved away for three days, washed down and checked. I can still hear the announcer saying, ‘evacuation to nearby villages’, ‘do not take pets with you’, ‘assemble downstairs by your apartment block entrance’. They said children must be sure to take their schoolbooks. My husband, nonetheless, put our identity documents and wedding photos in a briefcase. The only thing I picked up was a gauze headscarf in case of bad weather.

From the very beginning, we had a sense that we people from Chernobyl were now outcasts. Other people were afraid of us. The bus we were travelling in stopped for the night at a village. Evacuees were sleeping on the floor in a school or at a club and there wasn’t an inch of spare space. One woman invited us to stay with her. ‘Come, I’ll make up a bed for you. I feel sorry for that son of yours.’ Another woman nearby pulled her away from us. ‘You’re crazy!’ she said. ‘They’re infectious.’ After we had been resettled in Mogilyov, my son went to school. He burst into the house after his first day, crying. He had been sat next to a girl, and she complained she didn’t want to sit there because he was ‘radiated’ and if she sat next to him she might die. My son was in fourth grade and, unluckily, he was the only person from Chernobyl in the class. They were all afraid of him. They called him the ‘Glow-worm’, or the ‘Chernobyl Hedgehog’. It frightened me that his childhood came to an end so abruptly.

When we were leaving Pripyat, we found army convoys coming the other way. Armoured vehicles. That really was frightening, bewildering and frightening. But I somehow had the feeling that all this was happening, not to me, but to someone else. It was a very odd feeling. I was crying, searching for food and somewhere to stay, hugging and comforting my son, but inside I had this – it wasn’t even a thought, just a constant feeling – that I was a spectator. I was looking through a window and watching someone else. It was only after we got to Kiev that we were given money, but there was nothing to buy with it. Hundreds of thousands of people had been moved from their homes. Everything had been bought up, eaten. Many people had heart attacks or strokes right there, at railway stations or on the bus, My mother was the saving of me. In the course of a long life, she had been deprived of her home and everything she had earned. The first time was when she was purged in the 1930s. They confiscated everything: her cow, her horse, her house. The second time it was a fire, and all she was able to save was me, her little daughter, plucked from the flames. ‘You just have to get through it,’ she comforted me. ‘The main thing is, we’re still alive.’

I’ve remembered something else. We were on the bus, crying. A man on the front seat was roundly cursing his wife: ‘You’re such a fool! Everybody else has brought at least a few things with them, but we’re carting three-litre jars around.’ His wife had decided that, as they were going on the bus, she would drop off the empty preserving jars for her mother along the way. They had these huge bulging string bags next to them, and we were all tripping over them throughout the journey. They travelled with them all the way to Kiev.

I sing in a church choir. I read the Gospel. I go to church, because it is the only place you hear talk of eternal life. That comforts people. Nowhere else will you hear words like these, and I so want to. When we were being evacuated, if we came to a church, everybody entered. It was almost impossible to get in. Atheists and Communists, they all went.

I often dream I am walking with my son through a sunlit Pripyat, although now, of course, it is a ghost town. We are strolling along, admiring the roses. There were lots of roses in Pripyat, big flower beds full of them. It’s a dream. All that life of ours is a dream now. I was so young then. My son was little. I was in love.

Time has passed, everything is just a memory now. Again, I feel I’m a spectator.

Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya, resettled from Pripyat

Monologue on how easy it is to return to dust

I kept a diary …

I tried to keep those days in my memory. A lot of new sensations. Fear too, of course. We were barging into something as alien as Mars. I come from Kursk. In 1969, an atomic power station was built near us, in Kurchatov. People went there from Kursk to shop for food, for sausage. People in the nuclear industry were provided with the top category of goods. I remember there was a big pond where anglers fished, near the reactor. After Chernobyl, I often thought about that. It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays.

Right. So I was handed a conscription notice and, as an obedient citizen, reported the same day to the army enlistment office. The commissar leafed through my file: ‘I see you haven’t attended any of our training camps. Well, we need chemists. How do you fancy twenty-five days in camp near Minsk?’ I thought, ‘Well, why not take a break from work and the family? Do some marching around in the fresh air.’ On 22 June 1986, armed with my belongings, a mess tin and toothbrush, I showed up at 11:00 hours at the muster point. It struck me there were just too many of us for peacetime. Memories flashed through my mind from war movies. And what a day to choose: 22 June, the anniversary of the German invasion in 1941! We were ordered to fall in, then to stand down, and so on until evening. They boarded us on to buses as darkness was falling. We were ordered, ‘Anyone who’s brought alcohol, drink it. We’ll get on the train tonight and be at the unit in the morning. I want you all as fresh as cucumbers and without a lot of baggage.’ That was clear enough. We whooped it up all night.

In the morning, we found our unit in the forest. They lined us up again and did a roll-call, issuing protective clothing. One set, a second, a third. ‘Uh-oh,’ I thought. ‘This looks serious.’ They also issued us with a greatcoat, cap, mattress, pillow – all winter kit. But it was summer, and we had been promised we would be released after twenty-five days. ‘Oh, come on, guys,’ the captain transporting us laughed. ‘Twenty-five days? You’re on your way to Chernobyl for six months.’ Bewilderment. Anger. Then they started talking us round: anyone inside the twenty-kilometre limit gets double pay, inside ten kilometres, triple pay, and at the reactor itself, multiply by six. One guy started calculating that in six months’ time he would be able to drive home in his own car. Another just wanted to get out, but that would be desertion. What was radiation? None of them had heard of it.

As it happened, I had shortly before taken a course in civil defence. All the information dated from thirty years earlier: fifty roentgens was a fatal dose. They taught us how to hit the ground so the shock wave from the atomic bomb passed over without touching us. We heard about irradiation and thermal heating. There was never a word about the fact that radioactive contamination of the locality is the most damaging factor. The regular army officers taking us to Chernobyl knew precious little about it, but one thing they did know was that you should drink as much vodka as possible, because that had some effect against radiation. We were stationed near Minsk for six days, and for six days we drank. I made a collection of the labels from the bottles. First we drank vodka, but then there were some odd beverages: Nitkhinol and various other window-cleaning fluids. As a chemist, I took a professional interest. After imbibing Nitkhinol, your legs were like jelly but your head was clear. You could order yourself, ‘Stand up!’ but you’d then fall over.

So there I was, a chemical engineer with a candidate of sciences degree, called away from my job as the laboratory manager of a large corporation, and what use was made of me? I was handed a shovel and that was virtually my only tool. A slogan was promptly born: ‘Shovels against the atom!’ Our protective equipment was respirators and gas masks, but nobody used them, because in heat of up to thirty degrees you would croak almost immediately. We signed for them as ‘spare ammunition’ and forgot about them.

Another detail. Our transport: we transferred from the buses to the train. There were forty-five seats in the carriage, and seventy of us. We took it in turns to sleep. I just remembered that. Well, anyway, what was Chernobyl like? Army equipment and soldiers. Field showers. A military environment. We were accommodated in tents for ten people. Some of the men had left children behind at home, one lad’s wife was having a baby, another didn’t even have a home. There was no whingeing. If this job had to be done, someone had to do it. The Motherland had called, commanded. That’s the way we are.

Outside the tents, there were mountains of empty tin cans. Veritable Mont Blancs! Emergency supplies that had been stored somewhere in army depots. Judging by the labels, they had been stored for twenty or thirty years. In case of war. Tins that had contained stew, barley porridge or sprats. There were herds of cats. They were like flies. The villages had been evacuated, no people around. You would hear a garden gate creak and you’d turn round, expecting to see a person, but instead there would be a cat.

Contaminated topsoil was removed, loaded on to trucks and taken away to the burial sites. I imagined a burial site for contaminated materials would be some complicated technical structure, but it was an ordinary barrow-like mound. We lifted the surface soil and rolled it up, like a carpet. It was green turf with grass, flowers and roots, worms and spiders. What we were doing was insane. You can’t strip away all the earth, taking out of it everything that is alive. If we had not got diabolically drunk every night, I doubt we could have kept going. The human mind just isn’t that resilient. Hundreds of square metres of flayed, barren land. Houses, barns, trees, major roads, kindergartens, wells were left naked. In the middle of a desert, filled up with sand. When it was time to shave in the morning, you were afraid to look at your own face in the mirror, because all sorts of thoughts came to you, all sorts. It’s hard to believe people have gone back there and that life has started up again. But we were changing slates, washing roofs. Everybody knew it was completely pointless. Thousands of people. But every morning, we got up and got on with it. Totally absurd! An illiterate old grandad came up to us: ‘Forget it, young fellows, that’s no work to be doing. Come home and have dinner with us.’ The wind was blowing, dark clouds sailing in the sky. The reactor was not sealed. We would take off a layer, come back a week later, and we might as well have started all over again. There was nothing left to strip. The radioactive sand was drifting down. Only once did I see something that made sense, and that was when helicopters were spraying the ground with a special solution that formed a polymer membrane and stopped the loose soil from blowing about. I could see the point of that. But we just kept on digging.

The locals had been evacuated, but there were still a few old people in some villages. And then, just to be able to go into an ordinary cottage and sit down for a meal – the ritual of it – for even half an hour of normal human company … Although you mustn’t eat anything: that was strictly prohibited. But you so wanted to sit down at that table, in an old cottage.

By the time we had finished, all that was left was burial mounds. They were supposed then to be faced with concrete slabs and fenced in behind barbed wire. They left behind the tipper trucks, jeeps and cranes that had been used, because metal absorbs and accumulates radiation. I heard, though, that it all subsequently disappeared off somewhere. Looted. I can believe it, because in our country anything is possible. There was an alarm one time: the radiation technicians checked out where the canteen was built and found the radiation there was higher than at the sites where we were working. By then, we’d been living there for two months. That’s the kind of people we are. There were poles with planks nailed on to them at chest-height, and that was what they called a canteen. We ate standing up, washed out of a barrel, and the toilet was a long trench in an open field. We were battling an atomic reactor, armed with shovels.

After two months, we were beginning to think we were being had for suckers. We decided to protest. ‘We’re not kamikazes. We’ve spent two months here and that’s enough. It’s time we were relieved.’ Major-General Antoshkin gave us a pep talk and was entirely frank: ‘It’s not in our interests to relieve you. We’ve given you one set of clothing, another, a third. You’ve learned how to do the work. It would be an expensive business, relieving you, and a lot of bother.’ He put great emphasis on what heroes we were. Once a week, whoever had really excelled at dirt-digging was presented with a certificate of merit in front of all of us, on parade. Top Radioactive Earth-Shoveller of the USSR. How mad was that?

Empty villages with only cats and chickens living there. You go into a barn and it’s full of eggs. They used to fry them. Soldiers are reckless. They’d catch a chicken, make a fire, get a bottle of moonshine … Every day, they got through a three-litre jar of vodka in our tent. Some would be battling it out at chess, someone would be strumming a guitar. People get used to anything. One would get drunk and go to bed, another might like to shout and yell. And fight. Two got drunk, drove off and crashed a vehicle. Had to be cut out of a tangle of iron with an oxyacetylene torch. I stayed sane by writing long letters home and keeping a diary. The head of the political section spotted me and started snooping, trying to find out where I kept it and what I was writing. He told one of the others in my tent to spy on me. The lad inquired, ‘What are you scribbling?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got my candidate’s degree and now I’m working on a PhD.’ He laughed and said, ‘I’ll tell the colonel that, but you’d better hide it somewhere.’ They were good lads. I’ve already said there were no whingers, not one coward. Believe me: no one will ever beat us. Not ever! The officers never came out of their tents. Slobbing about in slippers. Getting drunk. To hell with the lot of them! We did the digging. Let them get new stars on their epaulettes. Good luck to them! That’s the kind of people we are.

The radiation monitoring technicians were gods. Old people were always pestering them. ‘Tell me, sonny, what’s my radiation like?’ One enterprising soldier had a bright idea. He took an ordinary stick and wrapped some wire round it. He knocked at one cottage and ran his stick over the wall. An old woman was soon after him: ‘Sonny, what’s that thing saying about my home?’ ‘Military secret, Granny.’ ‘You can tell me, sonny. I’ll pour you a glass of moonshine.’ ‘Oh, okay!’ He drank it and said, ‘Everything’s fine, Granny’, and on he went.

Finally, about halfway through our time, we were issued dosimeters, little boxes with a crystal inside. Some of the soldiers worked out that it would be a good idea to take it away in the morning, leave it by a burial site, and pick it up again at the end of the day. The higher the radiation reading, the sooner they should be discharged. Or paid more. Some put it on their boot. There was a strap there you could hang it on, so it was close to the ground. Talk about theatre of the absurd! It was crazy! The sensors were not electrically charged, which was essential if they were to start measuring. In other words, those little packs of nonsense, those baubles were issued purely to con us. As psychotherapy. It turned out these silicon gadgets had been lying around in storage for fifty years or so. At the end of our stint, we had a notional number entered in everybody’s army record book: the average dose of radiation multiplied by the number of days on site. The ‘average dose’ was measured at the tents we were living in, not where we were working.

Was it a story or was it true? A soldier rang his girlfriend. She was worried: ‘What are you doing there?’ He decided to boast: ‘I’ve just come out from very near the reactor and washed my hands.’ Immediately, the dialling tone. Conversation terminated. The KGB eavesdropping.

Two hours’ rest. You lie down under a bush. The cherries are ripe, and so big and sweet … You give them a quick wipe and pop them in your mouth. Mulberries. I saw a mulberry bush for the first time.

When there was no work to do, they would march us about. Over the contaminated ground. Absurd! In the evening we watched movies, Indian ones, about love. Until three or four o’clock in the morning. If the cook overslept, our breakfast porridge was underdone. They brought newspapers. They were writing in them about what heroes we were. Volunteers! Heirs of Pavel Korchagin! They printed photos. If we had met up with that photographer …

There were international units stationed nearby. Tatars from Kazan. I saw their kangaroo court. One lad ran the gauntlet. If he stopped or tried to run to one side, they gave him a kicking. He had been climbing up on the roofs of houses to clean them, and they found a bag of stuff he had looted. The Lithuanians were in a separate camp. After a month, they mutinied and demanded to be sent home.

One time, we got an order to go immediately and wash down a house in an empty village. Absurd! ‘Whatever for?’ ‘There’s going to be a wedding there tomorrow.’ The roof was hosed down, and the trees, and the ground was scraped off. The potato haulms in the garden and the grass in the yard were scythed down. There was a complete wasteland all around. The next day, the bride and groom were brought in, together with a busload of guests. Live music. They were a real bride and groom, not actors. They had been resettled and were now living somewhere else, but were persuaded to come here and be filmed for the historical record. The propaganda machine was working, the dream factory, preserving our myths: we can survive anywhere, even in a dead land.

Just before I was demobbed, I was called in by the commander: ‘What have you been writing?’ ‘Letters to my young wife,’ I replied. ‘You just watch it’, was his final order.

What has stayed in my memory from that time? Us digging and digging. I noted somewhere in the diary what I understood while I was there. In the very first days. I realized how easy it is to return to dust.

Ivan Nikolaevich Zhmykhov, chemical engineer

Monologue on the symbols and secrets of a great country

I remember it as a war …

By the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving produce from the thirty-kilometre zone to test. Our institute was working round the clock, like in wartime. At that period, we were the only place in the republic with the professional staff and specialized equipment. They brought us the innards of domestic and wild animals. We tested milk. After the first tests, it became clear that what we were dealing with was not meat but radioactive waste. Herds in the Zone were being tended in shifts. The cowherds were brought in and then left. Milkmaids were brought in only for the duration of the milking. The dairy factories were fulfilling their Plans. We tested what they were producing. It was not milk, it was radioactive waste. For years afterwards, we used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and evaporated milk from the Rogachev Dairy in our lectures as a benchmark. At that time, though, it was all on sale in the shops, on all the food stalls.

When people read on the labels that milk was from Rogachev, they rejected it and the stocks piled up. Then jars suddenly started appearing without labels. I don’t think the reason for that was any shortage of paper – people were being deceived deliberately. Deceived by the state. Every piece of information had become a secret, at precisely the time when short-lived elements were emitting maximum radiation and everything was ‘glowing’. We were continually writing internal memoranda. Continually. But to say anything publicly about the results would see you stripped of your academic degree, and even your Party card. (Becoming nervous.) But it was not fear. Not because of fear, although we were fearful, of course … But because we were people of that time, citizens of our Soviet land. We believed in it. It was all to do with faith. Our faith … (Lights a cigarette in his agitation.) Believe me, it was not from fear … or not only from fear. I’m answering you honestly. For my own self-respect, I need to be honest now. I want …

That first trip to the Zone: in the forest, the background radiation was five or six times higher than in the open countryside or on the road. Everywhere, the readings were high. Tractors were being used. The peasants were digging their plots. In several villages, we checked the thyroid readings of adults and children: in 100 of them, the radiation was 200 or 300 times above the acceptable level. We had a woman in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw children sitting in the sand, playing. Sailing their little boats in puddles of water. The shops were open and, as usual in our villages, clothing and food were alongside each other: suits, dresses, and next to them, sausage and margarine. They were lying there openly, not even covered with plastic sheeting. We took sausage and eggs and sampled them: they were not food, they were radioactive waste. A young woman was sitting on a bench by her house, breastfeeding. We tested her breast milk and it was radioactive. The Madonna of Chernobyl.

We asked, ‘What are we to do about this?’ We were told, ‘Carry on testing and watch the television.’ On television, Gorbachev was being reassuring. ‘Emergency measures have been taken.’ I believed him. I – an engineer with twenty years’ experience, someone who knew the laws of physics. I knew every living thing needed to be evacuated from that area, at least temporarily. But we conscientiously carried on, making our measurements and watching the television. We were accustomed to believing. I belong to the post-war generation that grew up with that faith. Where did it come from? We had been victorious in a dreadful war. At that time, the whole world admired and respected us. That was really true! In the Cordilleras, the name of Stalin was carved into the rocks. What did that mean? It was a symbol! It meant we were a great country.

So there’s the answer to your question of why we knew and said nothing. Why didn’t we shout it from the rooftops? We reported the situation. I told you, we wrote internal reports. And we stayed silent and obeyed orders implicitly, because we were under Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don’t remember any of our staff being afraid for their own skin and refusing to travel to the Zone. And that was not because they were afraid of losing their Party card, but because of their faith. Above all, a belief that we were living in a fine and just society that put people first. Man was the measure of all things. For many people, the collapse of that faith ended in a heart attack or suicide. A bullet in the heart, as with Academician Legasov. Because when you lose that faith, when you are marooned without faith, you are no longer part of something, but complicit in it, and you no longer have any justification. That is how I understand what he did.

A significant detail: every nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union had a contingency plan in the safe for dealing with an accident. There was one standard plan. Secret. Without such a plan, permission would not be granted for the station to begin operating. It was devised, many years before the accident, on the basis of the Chernobyl power station: what was to be done and how. Who was responsible for what. Where they were to be. Everything down to the last detail. And then suddenly, at that very power station, there is a disaster. What are you to make of that? Was it coincidence? Mystical forces? If I was a believer … When you need to find meaning, you do get a religious feeling. I’m an engineer and I subscribe to a different faith. I defer to other symbols …

But what am I do now with my faith? What now? …

Marat Filippovich Kokhanov, former chief engineer

of the Institute of Atomic Energy, Belarus Academy of Sciences

Monologue on the fact that terrible things in life happen unspectacularly and naturally

From the very beginning …

Somewhere something had happened. I didn’t even catch the name, but it was somewhere far away from our Mogilyov. My brother came running from his school and told me all the children were being issued pills of some sort. Evidently something really had happened. Oh dear, oh dear! But that was all. We had a wonderful time on May Day. Out in the countryside, naturally. We came home late at night. The wind had blown the window in my room wide open. I remembered that later.

I worked at the Nature Conservation Inspectorate. We were expecting to receive instructions, but none came. We waited. There were almost no professionally trained people among the inspectorate’s staff, especially among the top management: retired colonels, former Party workers, pensioners or officials who were under a cloud. If they slipped up somewhere else, they were exiled to our inspectorate. They sat there, shuffling papers. They woke up and started speaking out after our Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich really sounded the alarm in Moscow. How they hated him! It was unreal. This was where their children and grandchildren were living, but it was a writer, not them, who cried out to the world for help! You would have thought, if nothing else, the instinct for self-preservation would have kicked in; but at Party meetings and in the smoking rooms they were all ranting on about this wretched pen-pusher. Why couldn’t people mind their own business? He had slipped the leash! There were orders from above! What about subordination! What did he know? He wasn’t a physicist! We had a Central Committee! We had a general secretary! That was probably the first time I realized what the purges in 1937 were like. How it must have been.

At that period, my idea of a nuclear power station was quite idyllic. At school and in college, we were taught that these were fairy-tale ‘factories making energy out of nothing’, in which people in white coats sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl exploded in minds which were completely unprepared, which had complete faith in technology. That was made worse by the total lack of information. There were mountains of papers stamped ‘top secret’, ‘Classify information about the accident as secret’, ‘Information on outcomes of medical treatment to be classified’, ‘Information on extent of radiation poisoning of personnel involved in the clean-up to be classified’. Rumour was rife: someone had read in the newspapers, someone had heard somewhere, someone had been told … Libraries were stripped of everything that had been published on civil defence, which all turned out to have been complete garbage anyway. Some people listened to the ‘voices’ broadcast by the West, which were the only source of information at the time on which pills to take and how to optimize their effectiveness. More often, however, the reaction was that the enemy was gloating, but actually we were just fine. On 9 May, Victory Day, the ex-servicemen and women would parade, there would be a brass band playing. Even those trying to extinguish the reactor, it turned out, were dependent on rumours. Apparently picking up graphite with your bare hands was dangerous … apparently.

From somewhere, a madwoman appeared in the city. She went round the market saying, ‘I’ve seen this radiation. It’s as blue as blue can be, glistening …’ People stopped buying milk and curd cheese. An old lady was standing there trying to sell milk, but nobody wanted it. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she wheedled, ‘I don’t take my cow out in the open, I bring her the grass myself.’ If you drove out into the countryside, you would find models of animals sticking up along the roadside: a cow covered in plastic, grazing, and beside it a village woman, also wrapped in plastic. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had started sending us out into the field for monitoring. I was sent to a timber camp. There had been no reduction in the quantity of timber coming in for processing. The Plan remained unaltered. We switched on our equipment at the depot and the radiation was sky-high. Next to the planks seemed more or less all right; but next to the finished brooms, it was off the scale. ‘Where have these brooms come from?’ ‘Krasnopolye’ (subsequently found to be the most contaminated area in the whole of our Mogilyov Province). ‘That’s the last batch left. All the rest have been sent out.’ How could we track them down now they were all over the place?

There was something else I really didn’t want to forget. Something very striking … Ah, yes. Chernobyl … Suddenly, we had this new, unfamiliar awareness that each of us had his or her own life. Until then, that hadn’t seemed to matter. Now, though, people began thinking about what they were eating, and what they were feeding to their children. What was bad for your health, and what was safe. Should you move away or stay? Everybody had to decide for themselves. But how were we used to living? As part of the village, the commune, the factory or collective farm. We were Soviet people. I, for one, was entirely Soviet. When I was studying at college, I went off every summer with a Communist Detachment. There was a youth movement at the time called Student Communist Detachments. We worked, but our pay was transferred to some Latin American Communist party. Our detachment was supporting Uruguay.

We had changed. Everything had changed. It needs a very great effort to understand, to break away from what you are used to. I’m a biologist. My thesis was on the behaviour of wasps. I spent two months on an uninhabited island. I had my own personal wasps’ nest there. They accepted me as a member of their family after a week of sizing me up. They didn’t allow anyone closer than three metres, but within a week I was allowed to within ten centimetres. I fed them jam from a matchstick right in their nest. ‘Do not destroy an anthill: it is a splendid alien life form’, was a favourite saying of our lecturer. A wasps’ nest is linked with everything in the forest, and I too gradually became part of the environment. A baby mouse would run up and sit on the edge of my trainers. He was wild, a forest animal, but he already saw me as part of the landscape. I had been sitting here yesterday, I was sitting here today and I would be sitting here again tomorrow.

After Chernobyl … In an exhibition of children’s drawings, a stork walks over a black field in springtime. The caption: ‘Nobody told the stork anything.’ That was my feeling at the time. And I had work to do. Every day. We travelled round the province, collecting samples of water, samples of soil, and taking them to Minsk. Our girls grumbled, ‘These are really hot cakes we are carrying.’ There was no protection, no specialist clothing. You sat in the front, and behind you were ‘glowing’ samples. We wrote up instructions on how to dispose of radioactive soil. Burying soil in the soil, that’s a new occupation for the human race. Nobody could understand what they were supposed to be doing. In our manual, the dumping of waste was supposed to follow a geological survey to ensure that the ground water was no less than four to six metres down, and that the disposal pit was shallow. Its sides and base were to be lined with plastic sheeting. But that was only what it said in the instructions. The reality was different. No geological survey. They stabbed a finger in the map and said, ‘Dig there.’ The operator digs. ‘So how far down did you go?’ ‘The Devil only knows! When I saw water, I stopped.’ They dumped it straight into the ground water.

They say we are God’s people with a criminal government. I’ll tell you afterwards what I think about our people, and about myself.

My most important assignment was in Krasnopolye District. As I mentioned, that was absolutely the worst affected area. To prevent radionuclides getting from the fields into the rivers, there were things that needed to be done in accordance with instructions: to plough double furrows, then leave a space, then again plough double furrows, and so on in the same pattern. I needed to drive along all the minor rivers, monitoring. I took the bus to the district centre; from there, of course, I needed transport. I went to see the chairman of the executive committee. He sat in his office, clutching his head in his hands: nobody had cancelled the Plan, nobody had changed the crop rotation. If this was the year for sowing peas, then peas they would sow, even though they knew peas, like all legumes, absorbed maximum amounts of radiation. For heaven’s sake, in places there were readings of forty curies or more! He had no time to listen to me. The cooks and nurses had fled the kindergartens and the children were hungry. If anybody needed an operation, they had to be taken by ambulance to the neighbouring district, sixty kilometres away, and the road was as bumpy as a washboard. All the surgeons had fled. What transport was I imagining? What double furrows was I talking about? He had no time to listen. I headed to the army. Young lads working a six-month stint there. Now they’re desperately ill. They assigned me an armoured personnel carrier and crew. In fact, not just that but a reconnaissance vehicle with a machine gun. I was very sad not to be photographed riding on the armour. More romanticism! The corporal in command kept in constant touch with his base: ‘Falcon! Falcon! Mission proceeding.’ On we drove, our roads, our forest, and us in this combat vehicle. Women were standing by their fences, crying. The last time they had seen this kind of armour was during the Second World War. They were afraid this was a new war.

The instructions specified that the tractors used for ploughing these furrows must have radiation shielding and a hermetically sealed cabin. I did see such a tractor. It actually did have an airtight cabin. There it stood, with the tractor driver lying on the grass taking a nap. ‘Are you crazy? Has nobody warned you?’ ‘It’s okay. I’ve covered my head with my jacket,’ he replied. People had no understanding. They had been constantly readied to expect a nuclear war, but not a Chernobyl.

It was such a beautiful area. The trees were not recent plantings but the original, ancient forest. Meandering streams, their water tea-coloured but so, so limpid. Green grass. People calling to each other in the forest. But I knew it had all been poisoned, the mushrooms, the berries, the squirrels scampering among the nut bushes.

We met an old lady: ‘My dears, is it safe for me to drink the milk from my cow?’

Our eyes downcast. We have orders to collect data and avoid talking to the local population. The corporal came to his senses first: ‘Grandma, how old would you be?’

‘Oh, already past eighty, maybe more. My papers all got burned during the war.’

‘Well, go ahead. Drink it.’

I feel most sorry for the country people. They were the real victims, as innocent as children. Chernobyl was not something any peasant had invented. They had their own relationship with nature, a trusting, not predatory, attitude. Just like a hundred years ago, or a thousand, in accordance with God’s providence. They couldn’t understand what had happened. They wanted to have the same faith in scientists, in anyone who could read and write, as they had in the priest. And they were constantly being told: ‘Everything is fine. No cause for alarm. Just remember to wash your hands before meals.’ I came to see, not then but some years later, that we had all been complicit. In a crime. (Falls silent.)

Goods were pilfered from the Zone by the truckload. Everything that was sent there as aid, as gifts to the people living there: coffee, tinned stew, ham, oranges. Crates of the stuff, vanloads. At that time, food like that was simply not available elsewhere. The local traders did very nicely, as did every inspector, all those petty and mid-level bureaucrats. Human beings proved more despicable than I had realized. That was true of me too. I was despicable too. That’s something I know now about myself. (Becomes pensive.) Of course, I have to admit this. It’s important for me. One more example. In one collective farm, for instance, there might be five villages: three ‘clean’, two ‘dirty’. They were all two to three kilometres apart. Two would be getting compensation, three wouldn’t. In a ‘clean’ village, they would build an animal-breeding centre. ‘We’ll bring in clean fodder.’ Well, where was that supposed to come from? The wind carries dust from one field to another. It’s all just one farm. To build the centre requires permits and a commission to authorize them. I am a member of that commission, even though everyone knows we ought not to sign this project off … It’s a crime! In the end, I found myself an excuse: the problem of uncontaminated fodder is no concern of a nature conservation inspector. I’m only a small person. What can I do about it?

Everybody found an excuse, an explanation. That is an experiment I have conducted on myself. I realize now that terrible things in life happen unspectacularly and naturally.

Zoya Danilovna Bruk, nature conservation inspector

Monologue on the observation that a Russian always wants to believe in something

Have you really not noticed that we don’t talk about this even among ourselves? In several decades’, several centuries’ time, these years will be seen in terms of myth, the landscape peopled with folk tales and legends.

I’m afraid of rain. That’s what Chernobyl means. I’m afraid of snow, of forests, of clouds. Of the wind … Yes! Where’s it blowing from? What’s it bringing? That’s not an abstraction, not a rational consideration, but my personal feeling. Chernobyl is in my own home. It’s in the being I most cherish: my son. He was born in spring 1986, and he is ill. Animals, even cockroaches, know when to give birth and to how many progeny. Human beings can’t do that. Their Creator hasn’t bestowed on them the gift of premonition. It was in the newspapers recently that in 1993, here in Belarus alone, women had 200,000 abortions. The main cause was Chernobyl. We are living with that fear. Nature has, as it were, pulled back, waiting. ‘Woe is me! Whither has time gone?’ Zarathustra might exclaim.

I’ve thought a lot about these things. Searching for meaning, an answer. Chernobyl was a disaster of the Russian mentality. Has that not struck you? I agree, of course, when people write that it wasn’t just a reactor that exploded but the entire old system of values. But to me this can’t be the full explanation.

I would like to talk about something first discussed by Pyotr Chaadayev in the late 1820s: our hostility to progress, our opposition to technology, our instinctive distrust of tools and instruments. Look at Europe. Since the Renaissance, it has professed an instrumental approach to the world. Intelligent, rational. Respect for the craftsman, the tools in his hands. There’s a splendid story by Nikolai Leskov, ‘Iron Will’. What is it about? The Russian character is all about hoping for the best and muddling through. That’s the epitome of Russianness. The German character puts its trust in tools and machines. What about ours? On the one hand, there’s an attempt to rein in and overcome chaos; on the other, there’s our much-loved impulsiveness. Go anywhere you like, to Kizhi in the north of Russia, for example, and what will you hear, what will the guide proudly be boasting about? That the famous wooden church there was built using only an axe and that it doesn’t have a single nail in it! Rather than build good roads, we want to put a horseshoe on a flea. The cartwheel may sink in the mud, but we get to hold the Firebird in our hands.

The second feature, I think … Yes! This is the price we’ve paid for our rapid industrialization after the October Revolution, for that leap forward. Again, in the West, there was a century of spinning and manufacturing. Man and machine moved forward and changed in tandem. There was time for a technological awareness, a technological way of thinking to develop. But in Russia? What does our peasant have in his farmyard, other than his own hands? To this day! An axe, a scythe, a knife – and that’s all. That’s what holds his world together. Oh, and a shovel. How does a Russian interact with a machine? By cursing it. Or taking a sledgehammer to it. Or giving it a kick. He doesn’t like the machine; in fact, he hates and despises it. The truth is that he has no idea at all of the power he has in his hands.

I read somewhere that the operators of atomic power stations would often call the reactor the ‘cooking pot’, the ‘samovar’, the ‘paraffin stove’, the ‘hob’. There’s a certain jejune arrogance here: we’ll fry eggs on the sun! There were a lot of village people among those working at the Chernobyl plant, a lot of rustics. During the day they were at an atomic reactor, and in the evening they were working their vegetable plots or visiting their parents in the next village, where they still plant potatoes with a spade and spread manure with a pitchfork. They bring in the harvest by hand too. Their thinking was switching between two eras, the Nuclear Age and the Stone Age. A person was constantly swinging like a pendulum. Imagine a railway laid by brilliant track engineers, and a train hurtling along it; but instead of train drivers in the cab, you have the drivers of horse-drawn carriages from yesteryear. Coachmen. Russia is fated to travel simultaneously in two cultures. Between the atom and the shovel. As for technological discipline … For Russians, discipline has always been associated with coercion: the stocks, chains. The people wanted to be spontaneous, liberated. The dream was not of freedom but of liberty. For us, discipline was a means of repression. Our ignorance has a peculiar quality, something close to oriental barbarism.

I’m a historian. Previously, though, I was very interested in linguistics, the philosophy of language. It’s not simply a matter of us thinking language; language also thinks us. When I was eighteen, and perhaps even a little earlier, when I began reading samizdat and discovered Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, I suddenly realized that my entire childhood, and the childhood of everyone in my street – and I grew up in an educated family (my grandfather was a priest, my father a professor at St Petersburg University) – had been suffused with a prison-camp mentality. All the vocabulary of my childhood was the language of those prisoners, the zeks. For us boys, that was entirely natural. You called your father ‘the boss’, your mother ‘the momma’. ‘For smartasses, there’s a screw-action dick.’ I learned that expression at the age of nine. Yes! Not a single civil word. Even our games, sayings and riddles came from the camps. Because the zeks didn’t inhabit a separate world of prisons that were far away. It was all around us. ‘Half the country imprisoning, half the country imprisoned,’ as Anna Akhmatova said. I believe it was inevitable that this prison camp mindset was predestined to collide with culture, with civilization, with the Dubna synchrophasotron.

Of course, it’s just a fact … We were brought up in a particular kind of Soviet paganism. Man was almighty, the crown of creation. He had the right to do whatever he pleased with the world. Ivan Michurin’s phrase was much quoted: ‘We cannot wait for the favours of nature; our mission is to take them from her.’ The attempt to inculcate in the people qualities and attributes they did not possess. The dream of global revolution was an aspiration to remake human beings and the world around us. Remake everything! Yes! There’s that renowned Bolshevik slogan: ‘With an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness.’ The psychology of a rapist. The materialism of a caveman. Defying history, defying nature. And it’s still going on. One utopia collapses and another comes to take its place. Everyone has suddenly started talking about God. God and the market, in the same breath. Why didn’t they go looking for him in the Gulag, in the dungeons of the Purges in 1937, at the Party meetings in 1948 which set out to smash ‘cosmopolitanism’, under Khrushchev when they were destroying churches? The present-day subtext of Russian God-seeking is evil and deceitful. They bomb the homes of the civilian population in Chechnya, trying to wipe out a small, proud nation, and then stand in a church holding candles. We can do nothing except by the sword. We use the Kalashnikov instead of words. They scrape the charred remains of Russian crews out of tanks in Grozny using shovels and pitchforks, whatever’s left of them. And at the same time, we have the president and his generals praying. Russia watches all that on television.

What do we need? An answer to the question whether the Russian nation is capable of a wholesale review of its past in the same way that the Japanese managed after the Second World War. And the Germans. Do we have enough intellectual courage? They’re saying nothing about that. All the talk is about the market, privatization vouchers and pay cheques. We are back once again at just trying to survive. All our energy goes on that. The soul is cast aside. The individual is isolated again. But in that case, what’s the point of it all – of your book, of my sleepless nights – if our life is like the momentary flaring of a match? There can be different answers to that. One is primitive fatalism. But there can also be magnificent answers. A Russian always wants to believe in something: in the railway, in dissecting frogs (like Turgenev’s Bazarov), in Byzantinism, in the atom … And now, in the market.

In Bulgakov’s Molière, one of the characters says, ‘All my life I have sinned. I was an actress.’ This belief that art is sinful, that it is fundamentally depraved, peeping into someone else’s life. And yet, like a serum from someone who is ill, it can vaccinate you with other people’s experiences. Chernobyl is a subject for Dostoevsky. An attempt to justify the existence of man. Or perhaps everything’s much simpler than that, and instead we should approach the world on tiptoe and stop at the doorway!

Contemplate this divine world with awe … and live our lives like that.

Alexander Revalsky, historian

Monologue about how defenceless a small life is in a time of greatness

Don’t ask. I won’t do it. I don’t want to talk about it … (Aloof silence.)

No, I will talk to you, I want to understand. If you’ll help me. Only don’t feel sorry for me, don’t try to console me. Please! Don’t do that! No – to go through such suffering without there being any meaning to it, to have to rethink so much, is wrong. Impossible! (Starts shouting.) We’re back again on the same old reservation, back again living in one big prison camp. The Chernobyl prison camp. They rant at their rallies, carry their slogans, write in their newspapers …

Chernobyl brought down an empire. It cured us of Communism. It cured us of feats of heroism no better than suicide, of terrifying ideas. I understand now. Those ‘feats of heroism’ are a concept the state invented. For people like me. But I’ve nothing more than that left, nothing else. I grew up surrounded by words like that and people like that. Everything has gone, that life has gone. What is there to hold on to? What can rescue me? To go through such suffering without there being any meaning to it is wrong! (Silence.) One thing I do know is that I’ll never be happy again …

He came back from there. For a few years, he seemed to be living in a delirium. He told me all about it, everything. I remembered it all.

There was a red puddle in the middle of the village. The geese and ducks walked round it.

Soldiers, just boys, with their boots off, their clothes off, lying on the grass, sunbathing. ‘Get up, you morons, or you’ll die!’ They laughed: ‘Ha ha ha!’

Many people wanted to drive away from the villages in their cars. The cars were contaminated. They were ordered, ‘Everybody out!’ and their car was dumped in a special pit. People were standing there, crying. They would come back at night and secretly dig it out.

‘Nina, I’m so glad we have two children.’

The doctors told me his heart was half as big again as it should be, and his kidneys, and his liver.

One night, he asked, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ He had started being afraid of intimacy. I didn’t ask him about it. I understood him, with my heart. I wanted to ask you … I wanted to say … I often think … I sometimes feel so bad I don’t want to know the answer. I hate remembering! I hate it! (Starts shouting again.) At one time … At one time, I envied heroes. Those people who had a part in great events, when everything was in the balance, conquering great summits. That was how we talked then, what we sang about. Such splendid songs. (Sings.) ‘Little eagle, little eagle …’ I can’t even remember the words now. ‘Fly higher than the sun …’ Is that right? What wonderful words our songs had. I used to dream! I felt sad I wasn’t born in 1917 or 1941. I think differently now. I don’t want to live history, in historic times, where my short life is just so defenceless. Great events trample it underfoot without even noticing, without pausing. (Pensive.) After us, history is all that will be left. Chernobyl will be left … But my life? My love?

He told me all about it, everything. I remembered it all.

The pigeons, the sparrows … The storks. A stork would run and run across the field, trying to take off but not able to. A sparrow would scuttle over the ground, jumping and jumping, but not able to fly, not able to fly over the fence.

The people had gone and only their photos went on living in their homes.

They were driving through an abandoned village and saw a fairy-tale picture: an old man and woman sitting together on their porch with hedgehogs running around them. There were so many of them, like little chicks. It was quiet in the village with no people, as if in the depths of the forest. The hedgehogs were no longer afraid to come and ask for milk. The foxes would come, the old couple told them, and elk. One of the lads couldn’t keep his mouth shut and said, ‘Me, I’m a hunter!’ ‘No, no, young fellow!’ the old people chided him. ‘You mustn’t hurt the animals! We are related to them now. All one big family.’

He knew he would die, that he was dying, and promised himself he would live only for love and friendship. I had two jobs because his pension was not enough to keep us, but he said, ‘Let’s sell the car. It’s not new, but all the same we should be able to get something for it. Stay at home. I’ll just look at you.’ He invited friends. His parents came and lived with us for a long time. He had understood something. He had discovered something there about life which he hadn’t known before. The words he spoke were different.

‘Nina, I’m so glad we have two children. A boy and a girl.’

I would ask him, ‘Did you think about me and the children? What did you think about while you were there?’

‘I saw a little boy there. He was born two months after the explosion. His name was Anton, but everybody called him Atom.’

‘Did you think …’

‘You felt sorry for everyone and everything there. Even for a gnat or a sparrow. Let everything live. Let the flies fly, the wasps sting, the cockroaches scuttle …’

‘Did …’

‘Children draw pictures of Chernobyl. The trees in the pictures grow with their roots in the air. The water in the rivers is red or yellow. They cry while they are doing their drawings.’

His friend … His friend told me it was incredibly interesting there, a lot of fun. They recited poetry, sang songs with someone playing a guitar. The best engineers and scientists came. The elite of Moscow and Leningrad. Philosophizing. Alla Pugacheva came and sang for them, in the open air. ‘If you don’t fall asleep, boys, I’ll sing for you till morning.’ Heroes, she called them. His friend … was the first to die. He was dancing at his daughter’s wedding, making everyone laugh with his stories. He lifted a glass to propose a toast and collapsed. Our men, all dying as if there was a war on, but this is peacetime. I don’t want to go on! I don’t want to remember … (Closes her eyes, rocking gently to and fro.) I don’t want to talk. He died, and it was so dreadful, such a dark forest …

‘Nina, I’m so glad we have two children. A boy and a girl. They will live on.’

(She continues.) What is it I want to understand? I don’t know that myself … (A barely perceptible smile.) Another of his friends proposed to me. When we were at college, when we were students, he courted me, then married my friend, but they soon divorced. Something didn’t work out between them.

He brought me a bunch of flowers: ‘You will live like a queen.’ He owns a shop, a fashionable apartment in town, a dacha in the country … I turned him down. He was offended. ‘It’s been five years now … Can you really not forget your hero? Ha ha … You’re living with a monument …’ (She shouts.) I kicked him out! I kicked him out! ‘You’re a silly fool! Go on, then, live on your teacher’s salary, your hundred dollars.’ And so I do. (Calming down.) Chernobyl filled my life and my heart grew bigger … but it aches. It’s like a secret key. After suffering great pain, you talk, you find you speak well. I did … I only found that language when I really loved. And now. If I didn’t believe he’s in heaven, how could I have survived that?

He told me. I remembered it all … (She speaks as if in a trance.)

Clouds of dust … Tractors in the fields. Women with pitchforks. The radiation meter clicking away …

No people, and time moves differently … A long, long day, like when you were a child …

You weren’t allowed to burn leaves. They had to be buried.

To go through such suffering without there being any meaning is wrong. (Crying.) Without those wonderful words we knew so well. Even without that medal they gave him. We’ve got it in the cupboard at home … Something he left us.

But one thing I do know is that I’ll never be happy again.

Nina Prokhorovna Litvina, wife of a clean-up worker

Monologue on physics, with which we were all once in love

I’m just the man you need. You’ve come to the right place …

Since I was in my teens, I’ve made a habit of writing everything down. For example, when Stalin died, what was happening on the streets, what was reported in the newspapers. As for Chernobyl, I was keeping a record from the first day. I knew that, as time passed, much would be forgotten and lost forever. That’s exactly what has happened. My friends, nuclear physicists who were in the centre of all the activity, have forgotten what they felt at the time, what they talked to me about; but I have it all written down.

That day, I came to work – I’m the laboratory director at the Institute of Atomic Energy of the Belarus Academy of Sciences. Our institute is in the countryside, in woodland. Wonderful weather! Spring. I opened the window. The air was clean and fresh. I was puzzled that none of the tits appeared that I had been feeding all through the winter. I would hang out pieces of sausage for them. Where had they gone?

Meanwhile, panic had broken out at our institute’s reactor. The radiation measuring equipment was indicating increased radioactivity; on the air purifying filters, it had increased 200-fold. The dose rate by the institute’s entrance was about three milliroentgens per hour. That was very serious. That level was the maximum permissible for working in hazardous areas for not more than six hours. Our first hypothesis was that the shell of one of the fuel rods in the core was leaking. We checked and found no abnormality. Alternatively, we thought that while the container was being transported from the radiochemical laboratory it had been struck so hard that the inner shell had been damaged and our territory contaminated. It would be quite some job to clean that mark off the tarmac! So what could it be? At this point, there was an announcement over the internal radio that staff were advised not to go outside the building. Suddenly, the area between the buildings was empty. Not one person to be seen. Very odd. Eerie.

The radiation monitoring technicians checked out my office and found the table, my clothes and the walls all ‘glowing’. I stood up; I’d no desire to sit down on a chair. I washed my head over the sink and checked the meter again: that had had a beneficial effect. So was the problem with our institute? Was there a leak? How could we decontaminate the buses that transported us around the city? How could we decontaminate our staff? I needed to rack my brains. I was very proud of our reactor. I had studied it down to the last millimetre.

We phoned the nearby Ignalina atomic power station in Lithuania. Their instruments too were shrieking. They too were in a panic. We tried to call Chernobyl, but could get no reply from any telephone. By lunchtime the picture was becoming clearer. There was a radioactive cloud over the whole of Minsk. We identified it as iodine radioactivity, which indicated an accident at a reactor.

My first reaction was to phone home to warn my wife, but all our phones at the institute were tapped. Oh, this eternal fear hammered into us for decades! But they knew nothing about what was happening. After lessons at the Conservatory, my daughter would be walking about the city with her friends. Eating ice cream. Should I phone? But I could get in trouble. I might be banned from classified work. I decided I couldn’t just do nothing. I picked up the phone.

‘Listen carefully.’

‘What are you on about?’ my wife asked loudly.

‘Speak softly. Close the windows, put all the food in plastic bags. Put on rubber gloves and wipe everything you can with a damp cloth. Put the cloth in a bag too and put it well out of the way. Put any laundry drying on the balcony back in the washing machine. Don’t buy any bread, and under no circumstances buy cakes in the street.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Shhh! Dissolve two drops of iodine in a glass of water. Wash your head …’

‘What …’ But I did not let my wife finish and hung up. I thought she would understand. She worked at the institute herself. And if some KGB operator was listening, he had probably written the life-saving recommendations down on a piece of paper for himself and his family.

At 15:30 hours, we established that there had been an accident at the Chernobyl reactor.

That evening, we returned to Minsk in the institute’s bus. For that half hour, we said nothing, or talked about other matters. We were afraid to speak to each other about what had happened. Each of us had a Party card in his or her pocket.

There was a wet cloth lying outside my apartment door. My wife had understood. I went into the hallway, took off my suit and shirt and stripped to my underpants. I suddenly felt so angry. To hell with all this secretiveness! This fear! I took the city telephone directory, the address books of my daughter and wife, and began phoning everyone in turn. ‘I work at the Institute of Atomic Energy. There’s a radioactive cloud over Minsk.’ I listed all the precautions they needed to take: wash your hair with household soap; close all your windows; wipe the floor every three or four hours with a wet cloth; clothes off the balcony, back in the wash. Take iodine. How to do that correctly. People’s reaction was just to thank me. No questioning, no fear. I suspect they either didn’t believe me, or were unable to grasp the scale of the incident. No one was afraid. An amazing reaction. Mind-boggling!

That evening, my friend phoned. A nuclear physicist, doctor of sciences. How carefree, how trusting we were! It’s only now you see that. He called to say, among other things, that he was planning to go for the May Day holiday to his wife’s parents in Gomel Province. That was a stone’s throw from Chernobyl. He would be taking small children. ‘What a brilliant decision!’ I shouted. ‘You’re mad!’ That was our sense of professionalism, and our sense of trust. I yelled at him. He probably doesn’t remember now I saved his children’s lives.

(After a pause.) We – I’m talking about all of us – haven’t forgotten Chernobyl, we just haven’t understood it. What do savages understand about lightning?

In a collection of essays by Ales Adamovich, there’s his conversation with Academician Andrey Sakharov about the atomic bomb. ‘Do you know what a marvellous smell of ozone there is after a nuclear explosion?’ the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb exclaimed. There’s a romanticism in these words. My romanticism, the romanticism of my generation. Forgive me. I see the reaction on your face. You think this is delight at a global nightmare rather than at human genius. But it is only today that atomic energy has been humiliated and disgraced. My generation … In 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated, I was seventeen. I loved science fiction. I dreamed of flying to other planets and believed atomic energy would lift us into space. I enrolled at the Moscow Energy Institute, and learned that there was a top-secret department of high-energy physics. The 1950s, the 1960s … Nuclear physicists were the elite. Everybody was wildly excited about the future. Those studying humanities were pushed aside. In a three-kopeck piece, our school teacher had told us, there is enough energy to operate a power station. It took your breath away! I couldn’t read enough of what Cyril Stanley Smith wrote about the invention of the atomic bomb, the conducting of tests and details of the first explosion. In the USSR, all this was kept secret. I read, I imagined. In 1962, Nine Days in One Year, a film featuring Soviet atomic scientists, was released. It was very popular. They earned large salaries and the secrecy added to the romanticism. The cult of physics! The golden age of physics! Even after it imploded at Chernobyl, how slow we were to part with that cult! Scientists were summoned. They arrived on a special flight, but many didn’t even take razors with them, supposing they would be away for only a few hours. They were informed that there had been an explosion at an atomic power station, but all had faith in their physics. They were from the generation which shared that belief. The Age of Physics ended at Chernobyl.

You already have a different view of the world. I recently found in my favourite philosopher, Konstantin Leontyev, the idea that the results of the depraving of physics and chemistry would sooner or later oblige the cosmic intelligence to intervene in our earthly affairs. Those of us brought up in Stalin’s time could not countenance the notion that any supernatural powers might exist. Or parallel worlds. I read the Bible later, and married the same woman twice. I left and then came back. We met again. Who is going to explain that miracle to me? Life is the most amazing thing! Enigmatic! Now I believe … in what? That the three-dimensional world is no longer big enough for modern man … Why is there so much interest nowadays in an alternative reality? In new knowledge? Man is breaking away from the ground … He is operating with different categories of time, and not just with the earth, but with different worlds. Apocalypse. The Nuclear Winter. This has all been described in Western art already. Depicted. Filmed. They’ve prepared themselves for the future. The explosion of a large number of nuclear weapons will cause an enormous conflagration. The atmosphere will be saturated with smoke. The sun’s rays will be unable to reach the ground and that will set off a chain reaction of cold, colder, colder still. This secular vision of the end of the world has been around since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, but the atomic bomb won’t disappear even when the last warhead has been decommissioned. The knowledge will remain.

You’re not saying anything. And yet I am arguing with you the whole time. We have an argument going on between generations. Have you noticed? The story of the atom is not just about state secrets, a mystery or a curse. It is also the story of our youth, our future. Our religion … But now? Now I also believe that the world has another ruler, and that we, with our guns and spaceships, are like children. I’m not sure of that yet. Not convinced. Life is the most amazing thing! I loved physics and thought I would never be interested in anything else, but now I want to write. For example, about the fact that man, hot-blooded man, is not right for science. He’s a hindrance to it. Tiny man with his tiny problems. Or about how a few physicists could change the entire world. A new dictatorship. A dictatorship of physics and mathematics. A new career has opened up for me.

Before my operation – I knew I had cancer – I thought I only had days, a very few days, left to live, and I desperately wanted not to die. I was suddenly seeing every leaf, bright colours, a bright sky, the vivid grey of tarmac, the cracks in it with ants clambering about in them. ‘No,’ I thought to myself, ‘I need to walk round them.’ I pitied them. I did not want them to die. The aroma of the forest made me feel dizzy. I perceived smell more vividly than colour. Light birch trees, ponderous firs. Was I never to see this any more? I wanted to live a second, a minute longer! Why had I spent so much time, so many hours and days, sitting in front of the television surrounded by piles of newspapers? What matters most is life and death. Nothing else exists. Nothing to throw on the scales.

I have understood that only the time you are living has any meaning. The time of our lives.

Valentin Alexeyevich Borisevich, former laboratory director of the

Institute of Atomic Energy, Belarus Academy of Sciences

Monologue on something more remote than Kolyma, Auschwitz and the Holocaust

There are things I have to say … My emotions are overwhelming …

During the first days, my feelings were mixed. I remember the two most powerful were fear and resentment. Everything had happened, and no one was telling us anything: the authorities were silent, the doctors were saying nothing. There were no answers. At district level they were awaiting instructions from the provincial level, at that level they were awaiting instructions from Minsk, and in Minsk from Moscow. A long, long chain … which meant that in effect we had no protection. That was the main feeling during those days. Somewhere, far away, there was Gorbachev and a few others. Two or three people deciding our fate. The fate of millions of people. And just a few people could kill us. Not maniacs and criminals with a terrorist plan in their heads, just ordinary operators on duty that day at an atomic power station. They were probably quite decent men. When I thought that, it came as such a shock. This was something I discovered for myself. I realized that Chernobyl was more remote than Kolyma, Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Am I making sense? Someone with an axe, or a bow and arrow, or a man with a grenade launcher or gas chamber, could not kill everyone, but a man with the atom … That means the whole world is in danger.

I’m not a philosopher so I won’t try philosophizing. I’ll share what I remember.

The panic during those first days: some rushed to the pharmacy and bought up stocks of iodine. Some people stopped visiting the market to buy milk and meat, especially beef. In our family, we stopped trying to be economical and bought more expensive sausage, hoping that meant it was made from safe meat. We soon found out, though, that they were deliberately adding contaminated meat to expensive sausage. Their logic was that, as it was expensive, people would buy only a little of it and eat less. We had no protection. But of course you must already know all this. I want to tell you about something else. The fact that we were the Soviet generation.

My friends were doctors and teachers, the local intelligentsia. We had our own circle, gathered at my house, drank coffee. Two bosom friends are sitting there, one a doctor. Both have small children.

The first: ‘I’m going tomorrow to stay with my parents. I’m getting the children out. If they suddenly became ill I would never forgive myself.’

The second: ‘The newspapers are saying the situation will be back to normal in a few days. We’ve got the army there, helicopters, armoured vehicles. It was announced on the radio that …’

The first: ‘I would advise you to do the same. Get your children. Take them away! Hide them! Something more terrible than war has happened. We can’t even imagine what.’

They suddenly became shrill and ended up quarrelling, flinging accusations at each other:

‘Where’s your maternal instinct? You’re a mindless fanatic!’

‘You’re a shameless traitor! Where would we be if everyone behaved like that? Would we have won the war?’

A quarrel between two beautiful young women who passionately loved their children. It all seemed so familiar.

Everybody there, including me, felt she was spreading panic, rocking the boat, undermining our confidence in everything we were accustomed to trust. We should wait to be told. They would announce what was to be done. She was a doctor, though, and knew more than we did. ‘You’re incapable of protecting even your own children! If there’s no threat, why are you so scared!’

How we despised, even hated, her at that moment! She had spoiled our evening. Am I making this clear? It was not only the authorities who were deceiving us: we ourselves didn’t want to know the truth, somewhere deep down, at a subconscious level. Now, of course, we don’t want to admit that to ourselves. We prefer to curse Gorbachev, to curse the Communists … It was all their fault. We were blameless. We were victims.

The next day, she left, and we dressed our children up and took them to the May Day Parade. We didn’t have to go. We had a choice. We were not forced, nobody required our attendance. But we considered it was our duty. What? At a time like this, on a day like this? We should all be together. We ran down into the street and joined the throng.

On the podium, there were all the secretaries of district Party committees, standing shoulder to shoulder with the first secretary and his little daughter. She was standing somewhere she could be seen. She was wearing a coat and hat, even though the sun was shining, and he was wearing a military waterproof cape. But there they were. I do remember that. The contamination was not only in our land but in our minds. That had been going on, and would continue, for years.

During that period, I changed more than during all the previous forty years of my life. We are locked in a zone. The resettlement programme has been discontinued and it’s as if we are living in a Gulag. The Chernobyl Gulag. I work as a children’s librarian. Children want to talk. Chernobyl is everywhere, all around us. We have no choice but to learn to live with it. Especially the children in the senior classes. They have questions. What can they do? How can they find things out? Read? There are no books. Watch movies? There are none. There aren’t even fairy tales or myths.

I teach through love. I want to conquer fear through love. There I am, standing in front of the children: I love our village, our little river, our forests; they are just the best! I know nothing better. I am not deceiving them. I teach with love. Am I making this clear?

I have a problem because of my years of teaching. I always speak and write a bit loftily, more emotionally than is fashionable nowadays, but I want to answer your question of why we feel powerless. I do feel powerless … There is our pre-Chernobyl culture, but we do not have a post-Chernobyl culture. We live surrounded by thoughts of war, the collapse of Socialism and an uncertain future. There is a lack of new ideas, of new goals and ideas. Where are our writers and philosophers? I will say nothing about the fact that our intelligentsia, who more than anybody longed for and paved the way for freedom, are now elbowed aside, impoverished and humiliated. Nobody has a use for us. We’re simply not needed. I can’t afford to buy even essential books, and books are my life. I … we … More than ever we need new books, because all around us there is a new life. We are not part of it, and can’t reconcile ourselves to that. I keep asking myself: why? Who is going to do our work? Television does not teach children, that’s something you need teachers for. But that is a separate subject.

I’ve recalled all this in the interests of knowing the truth about those days and about our feelings. So as not to forget how much we have changed. And how much our life has changed …

Lyudmila Dmitrievna Polyanskaya, village schoolteacher

Monologue on freedom and the wish to die an ordinary death

It was freedom. I felt myself a free man there …

Are you surprised? I can see you are. It’s something you can understand only if you were in the war. They get drunk, men who fought in the war, and start reminiscing. I’ve listened to them and know they still look back nostalgically to those years. To the freedom, to the elation. ‘Not one step back!’ Stalin’s order. The NKVD detachments who shot anyone who tried to retreat. We know the story. It’s all history now. But you shoot, survive, get your authorized hundred mils of vodka, your tobacco ration. There are a thousand times you might be killed, blown to pieces, but if you make the effort, if you outwit the Devil, the sergeant, the battalion commander, the man wearing an odd helmet and wielding a different-looking bayonet, if you talk your way out of trouble with the Almighty Himself, you can survive!

I was at the reactor. I was there, like a soldier in a trench right on the front line. Terror and freedom! Living life at full throttle. You can’t imagine that in ordinary life, can’t feel what it’s like. I remember we were constantly being readied for war, but when the call came we were not prepared. I was not ready. That day, I was planning to take my wife to the cinema in the evening. Two army types turned up at the factory and called me out. ‘Can you tell the difference between diesel and petrol?’ ‘Where are you sending me?’ I asked. ‘Where do you think? To Chernobyl, as a volunteer.’ My military profession was as an expert in rocket fuel. A classified speciality. They took me straight from the factory, in a vest and T-shirt, didn’t let me look in at home. I asked them to let me warn my wife. ‘We’ll take care of that.’ There were about fifteen of us in the bus, reserve officers. I liked the look of them. Their attitude was, ‘If we’re called, we go; if it’s needed, we do the job.’ If they took us to the reactor, we’d go up on the roof.

Watchtowers at the evacuated villages, armed soldiers up there. Assault rifles with live ammunition. Road barriers. Notices: ‘Verge contaminated. Entry or stopping strictly prohibited.’ Trees a grey-white colour from the decontaminant spray, which was as white as snow. Your brain out of kilter straight away! For the first few days, we were afraid to sit on the ground or the grass, ran everywhere instead of walking, pulled on respirators the minute a vehicle passed by. After the shift, we sat in our tents. Ha ha! Within a couple of months, it all seemed normal, it was just your life. We picked plums, trawled for fish. What amazing pike there were! And bream. We dried the bream to go with our beer. You’ve probably heard all this before. We played football. Went swimming! Ha ha … Believed in fate; deep down we were all fatalists, not chemists. Not rationalists. The Slav mentality. I believed in my lucky star! Ha ha! Now I’m second category disabled. I fell ill immediately. Damned X-rays. Clear enough. I didn’t even have a medical record at the clinic before that. Damn it! I’m not the only one. It’s the mentality …

I’m a soldier. I sealed other people’s houses, went into other people’s homes. It’s a peculiar feeling, like you’re prying … Or there’s the land no one can sow on, a cow butting at a closed gate. The house is padlocked and the cow’s milk is dripping on the ground. A peculiar feeling. In the villages not yet evacuated, peasants were busy distilling moonshine. That was their livelihood now. They sold it to us, and we had so much money: triple time at work, and triple living expenses. Then there was an order that anyone who was drinking would be kept on for a second term. So was vodka good for you or not? Psychologically at least? The men there certainly believed it was. It seemed obvious.

The peasant’s life was very straightforward: you sowed something, it grew, you harvested it, and everything else was someone else’s concern. They had no interest whatever in tsars or regimes, in whether they were being ruled by a general secretary of the Central Committee or a president, or in spacecraft or atomic power stations, or protest rallies in the capital. They couldn’t believe their world had been turned upside down in a single day and that now they were living in a different world: the world of Chernobyl. They had no intention of going anywhere else. Some of them became ill just from the shock. They didn’t resign themselves to it, they wanted to live as they always had. They secretly brought firewood back; they picked green tomatoes and pickled them. If the jars exploded, they boiled them again. How could you destroy that, bury it, turn it into garbage? But that was precisely what we were doing. Nullifying their work and the time-honoured meaning of their lives. For them, we were the enemy.

I couldn’t wait to get to the reactor itself. ‘No need to hurry,’ I was warned. ‘In the last month before demob, they have everyone up there on the roof.’ We were serving for six months. Sure enough, after five months we were redeployed, right up to the reactor. There were various jokes, and serious talk that we would have to pass the test of walking across the roof. We thought we might last five years after that. Seven? Ten? Fair enough. For some reason, mostly they reckoned it was five. Where did that come from? There was no fuss, no panic. ‘Volunteers, one step forward!’ The whole company took a step forward. There was a television monitor in front of the commander. He turned it on. The screen showed the roof of the reactor: lumps of graphite, melted bitumen. ‘Right, lads, you can see this debris lying around. Clear it away. And here, in this square, you need to break a hole through.’ The permissible time to be exposed was forty or fifty seconds. That was according to the instruction book, but it was impossible. It required at least several minutes. You had to get there and back, make a run and tip the stuff down. One loaded the litter, the others emptied it out, down there, into the ruins, into the hole. You had to tip it in but not look down. People did, of course.

They wrote in the newspapers, ‘The air above the reactor is clean.’ We read that and laughed, and swore with gusto. The air might be clean, but what kind of dose were we being exposed to? They issued radiation meters. One was calibrated up to five roentgens. That was off the scale in the first minute. Another was like a fountain pen and went up to a hundred roentgens. In certain places, even that one went off the scale. For five years, they said, you won’t be able to have children. That seemed to assume we wouldn’t die within five years. Ha ha! … There were various jokes, but no fuss, no panic. Five years. I’ve already lived for ten … Ha ha! … They presented us with certificates. I have two … With all those pictures of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Red flags.

One lad disappeared. We thought he’d done a runner. Two days later, he was found in the bushes. He’d hanged himself. We were all feeling down, you can imagine. Then the deputy political officer gave a speech and claimed the boy had had a letter from home saying his wife had been unfaithful. Who knows? We were due to be demobbed a week later, and they found him in the bushes. We had a cook. He was so scared he didn’t live in a tent but in the stores. He dug himself a niche under boxes of butter and tinned stew, moved his mattress in there, a pillow, and lived underground. An instruction arrived to put together a new team to go up on the roof. We had all been up there already. Just find people! So they put him down on the list. He only went up there once, but now he’s second category disabled too. Often phones me. We keep in touch, support each other, to keep the memory alive. It will last for just as long as we stay alive. Write that down.

What the newspapers print is a pack of lies. Lies from start to finish. I’ve never read anywhere about how we made ourselves chain mail, lead shirts and pants. We were issued rubber gowns impregnated with lead, but we fashioned lead trunks for ourselves. We tried to protect ourselves. Of course we did. In one village, we were shown two secret brothels. Everybody went there. Men taken away from home, six months without a woman … Emergency! The local girls were up for it too. ‘We’re going to die soon anyway,’ they said, crying. You wore your lead trunks over your underpants. Write that. We told all these jokes. Here’s one. They send an American robot up to work on the roof. It operates for five minutes, then breaks down. Then a Japanese robot lasts nine minutes before it breaks down too. The Russian robot works for two hours, then, over the walkie-talkie, ‘Okay, Private Ivanov, you can come down now for a cigarette break.’ Ha ha!

Before we were to go up on to the reactor, the commander was giving us our orders. We were lined up. Several of the lads rebelled: ‘We’ve already been up there, you’re supposed to send us home now.’ My job was supposed to be looking after the fuel, petrol, but I got sent to the roof too. I didn’t complain. I wanted to go there myself, to take a look. Anyway, they rebelled. The commander says, ‘We will be sending volunteers on to the roof. Others step out of the line. The prosecutor will be having a word with you.’ Well, these lads stood there, talked among themselves, and consented. If you’ve taken the oath, kissed the flag, gone down on your knee before the banner … I don’t think any of us were in any doubt they were well capable of court-martialling us and putting us in prison. They put the word round that you would get two or three years. If a soldier was subjected to more than twenty-five roentgens, the commander could be court-martialled for exposing his men to excessive radiation. Of course, nobody ever went over twenty-five roentgens. Everybody had less. You get my drift? But I really liked the lads. Two were sick, but one of them said, ‘I’ll go.’ He’d already been up on the roof once that day. They recognized that. He got a bonus: 500 roubles. Another was hammering away up there. It was time to go, but he carried right on hammering. We waved to him to come off, but he got down on his knees and finished the job. The roof had to be broken through at that point to insert a chute for the rubbish to go down. He wouldn’t get up until he had broken through. He got a thousand-rouble bonus. For that money, you could buy two motorbikes at the time. He’s now a category one invalid. No arguing with that. They paid you for fear immediately. Now he’s dying. He’s in terrible pain. I went to see him this weekend. ‘Ask me what I really want?’ ‘What?’ ‘An ordinary death.’ He’s forty. Loved women. Has a beautiful wife.

Demob. We all piled into the vehicles. For as long as we were driving through the exclusion zone, we kept honking the horns. When I look back on those days … I was there, next to something big, something unimaginable. Words like ‘gigantic’, ‘unimaginable’ don’t convey it. It felt like – what? (Ponders.)

I’ve never experienced anything like it, even in love.

Alexander Kudryagin, clean-up worker

Monologue on a freak who is going to be loved anyway

Don’t be embarrassed. Ask away. We’ve already had so much written about us, we’re quite used to it. Sometimes they remember to send us the newspaper, but I don’t read it. Who’s going to understand? You need to live here …

My daughter said recently, ‘Mum, if I give birth to a freak, I’ll love it anyway.’ Can you imagine? She’s in tenth grade at school and already thinking things like that. Her friends, they’re all thinking the same way. Some friends of ours had a baby boy. They were so looking forward to him, their first child. A lovely young couple. But their boy has a mouth from ear to ear, or would have, only one ear is entirely missing. I don’t visit them as much as I used to. I can’t bear it. But my daughter goes to see them occasionally. She’s drawn there. I don’t know whether she’s trying to get used to the idea, or trying to see whether she’ll measure up to the challenge. But I can’t cope.

We had the choice of moving away, but my husband and I thought it over and turned it down. We’re afraid of other people; whereas here, we’re all just the people of Chernobyl, together. We’re not afraid of each other. If someone offers you apples or cucumbers from their plot, you accept them and eat them. We don’t politely put them away in a pocket or bag and throw them away afterwards. We have a shared memory, the same fate. And anywhere else we’re regarded as outsiders. People look askance at us, fearfully. Everybody is so used to the words ‘Chernobyl’, ‘Chernobyl children’, ‘Chernobyl evacuees’. ‘Chernobyl’: now that gets prefixed to everything about us. But you don’t know the first thing about us. You’re afraid of us. You run away. If we weren’t allowed out of here, if they put a police cordon round us, many of you would probably be relieved. (Stops.)

Don’t try to change my mind about anything, don’t try to talk me round! I learned and experienced all that at the very beginning. I seized my daughter and fled to Minsk, to my sister. My own sister wouldn’t let us in the door because she had a baby she was breastfeeding. I could never have imagined that in my worst nightmare! I couldn’t have made it up. We spent the night at the railway station. All sorts of crazy ideas came into my mind. Where could we go? Perhaps it would be better to end it all, rather than live a life of suffering. Those were the first days. Everybody was picturing some sort of dreadful illness. Unimaginable sicknesses. And I’m a doctor. You can only try to guess at what must have been passing through other people’s minds. Rumours are always worse than accurate information, however little. I look at our children: wherever they go, they feel like outcasts. Something out of a horror story, a target for jibes. In a Young Pioneers’ camp where my daughter went on holiday one year, the other children were afraid to touch her: ‘Chernobyl Glow-worm!’ ‘She glows in the dark.’ They called her outside one evening to check. They wanted to see if she had a halo over her head.

They say it’s like the war. The war generation. That’s who they compare us with. But they were lucky. For them, it ended with victory. They won! That fired them up, to use today’s way of speaking. A tremendously strong determination to survive. They had nothing to fear. They wanted to live, and study, and have babies. But what about us? We’re afraid of everything, afraid for our children, afraid for our unborn grandchildren. They haven’t even been born, but already we’re frightened. People smile less now, don’t sing the way they used to at holiday time. It’s not only the landscape that changes when forests and scrub spring up where fields used to be: the national character changes. Everybody suffers from depression, a sense of doom. For some people, Chernobyl is a metaphor, or a slogan. But that is where we live. It’s just where we live.

At times, I think it would be better if you didn’t write about us at all. Didn’t view us from the sidelines, didn’t try to diagnose us with radiophobia or whatever, didn’t separate us out from everybody else. Then people wouldn’t be so afraid of us. After all, you don’t talk about a cancer patient’s dreadful disease in his own home. And you don’t mention someone’s sentence in their cell, when they’re in prison for life. (Silence.)

I’ve talked so much. I don’t know whether you need that or not. Shall I lay the table? Shall we have lunch, or are you afraid? Tell me straight out. We don’t get offended any more. We’ve seen it all! A reporter came to interview me. I could see he was thirsty. I brought him a mug of water, but he took his own water out of a bag. Mineral water. He was embarrassed, started making excuses. Needless to say, our interview went nowhere. I couldn’t be open with him. I’m not a robot or a computer, or a lump of metal! He thought he could sit there drinking his mineral water, being afraid even to touch my mug, and I was supposed to pour out my heart to him, let him into my soul.

(Now we are sitting at the table, having lunch.) I cried all night yesterday. My husband recalled, ‘You used to be so pretty.’ I know what he was on about. I see myself in the mirror. Every morning. People age prematurely here. I’m forty, and you would think I was sixty. That’s why the young girls are in such a hurry to get married. They’re sad about their youth being so brief. (Breaks down.) Well, what do you know about Chernobyl? What can you write down? Forgive me. (Silence.)

How can you write down my soul? I can’t always make sense of it myself …

Nadezhda Afanasyevna Burakova, resident of Khoyniki

Monologue on the need to add something to everyday life in order to understand it

Do you need facts, details of those days? Or my story? It was there I became a photographer …

Until then, I’d never had any interest in photography, but there I suddenly began taking pictures. I happened to have a camera with me. Thought I would just take some photos for my own satisfaction, but now it’s my profession. I couldn’t rid myself of the new feelings I experienced. These were not fleeting experiences, but the whole story of my soul. I changed … I saw a different world. Know what I mean?

(While he is speaking, he is laying photographs out on the table, on chairs, on the windowsill: a gigantic sunflower the size of a cartwheel; a stork’s nest in a deserted village; a lonely village graveyard with a sign on the gate, ‘High radiation levels. Entry by vehicle or on foot prohibited’; a pram in the yard of a house with boarded-up windows, with a crow sitting on it as if this was its nest; an aeons-old formation of cranes flying over neglected fields.)

People ask why I don’t use colour film, but Chernobyl in Russian means ‘a black story’. The other colours don’t exist there. My story? It’s a commentary to go with this … (Points to the photos.) Okay, I’ll try. Although, you know, it’s all here … (Again points to the photographs.) At the time, I was working in a factory, and studying history externally at university. I was a metal-worker, second class. We were formed into a group and sent off urgently. As if we were going to the front.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Where you’re ordered to go.’

‘What are we going to be doing.’

‘What you’re ordered to do.’

‘But we’re construction workers.’

‘And that is what you’ll be doing. Constructing.’

We built outbuildings: laundries, storehouses, sheds. I was detailed to unload cement. What cement, or where it came from, no one checked. We loaded it and unloaded it. I spent the day shovelling it, and by evening only my teeth were white. A cement man. Grey. My body and my boiler suit, all through them. In the evening, I shook them out, you know, and in the morning I put them back on. We were treated to indoctrination talks. Heroes, feats of heroism, on the front line. All that military language. But as for what a rem, or a curie, or a milliroentgen might be? We asked the commander, but he couldn’t explain. They hadn’t taught him that at his military college. Milli-, micro-, it was all Chinese to him. ‘What do you want to know that for? Carry out orders. You’re soldiers here.’ Yes, soldiers, but not zeks in a prison camp.

A commission arrived to inspect us. ‘Don’t worry,’ they assured us, ‘everything is fine here. Background radiation is normal. Just four kilometres from here is not habitable, the people will be evacuated. But here there’s nothing to worry about.’ They had a radiation monitoring technician with them. He went and switched on a box slung over his shoulder and ran a long rod over our boots. He jumped back. An involuntary reflex.

This is where it starts getting interesting, especially for you as a writer. How long do you think we remembered that incident? Barely a few days. After all, we Russians are incapable of thinking only about ourselves and our own lives, of not looking beyond that sort of thing. Our politicians are incapable of thinking about the value of a life, but that goes for us as individuals too. Know what I mean? We just don’t think that way. We’re made of different stuff. Of course, we all got drunk there, seriously drunk. By night, no one was sober; we drank, though not to get drunk, but to get talking. After the first couple of shots, someone would get sentimental and start remembering his wife and children, talk about his job and curse those in charge of us. But then, after a bottle or two, all the talk was about the country’s future and the nature of the universe. We argued about the merits of Gorbachev against Ligachov. About Stalin. About whether or not we were a great power, and whether we would overtake the Americans or not. It was 1986. Whose planes were better, whose spacecraft were more reliable? Okay, so Chernobyl had blown up, but our Gagarin was the first man to fly in space! Know what I mean? Until we were hoarse, until it was morning. Why we hadn’t been issued radiation meters or anti-radiation pills just in case, or why there were no washing machines to clean our boiler suits every day rather than twice a month – those were the least of our concerns. Just mentioned in passing. Hell, that’s the kind of people we are!

Vodka was worth more than gold. It was impossible to buy. We’d drunk everything we could get in the villages round about: vodka, moonshine, aftershave. We even went as far as varnishes and aerosols. There would be a three-litre jar of moonshine on the table, or a string bag full of bottles of chypre cologne. And there was talk, talk without end. Our team included teachers and engineers, a complete Communist International: Russians and Belarusians, Kazakhs and Ukrainians. There were philosophical conversations about how we were enslaved by materialism, which confined us to the material world, while Chernobyl was a path to infinity. I remember us debating the course of Russian culture with its penchant for tragedy. Without the overhanging shadow of death, nothing would be understood. It would be possible to come to terms with the disaster only by building on the foundation provided by Russian culture. Only it was up to the job, had been full of premonitions of this. We had been afraid of the atomic bomb and mushroom clouds, but what had happened? … Hiroshima had been terrifying, but at least it was comprehensible. But this … We know how a house can be set alight by a match or an exploding shell, but this was like nothing we knew. We heard rumours that the fire was unearthly, not even fire but light. A glimmering. A radiance. Not blue, but a translucent azure. And without smoke. If scientists had been sitting on the throne of the gods, now they were fallen angels, demons! Human nature had remained as much of a mystery to them as ever. I am Russian, from Bryansk. We had an old man there, sitting outside his door. The house was leaning to one side and about to collapse, but there he sat, philosophizing, putting the world to rights. Know what I mean? You can guarantee every factory smoking room will have its Aristotle. Every bar. And there we were, a stone’s throw away from a damaged atomic reactor …

Newspaper reporters flocked to us, took photographs with cheap effects. The window of an abandoned home: they would put a violin on the sill and call it Chernobyl Symphony. There was no need to invent anything. I wanted everything to be remembered: the globe of the earth in a school yard, crushed by a tractor; blackened washing which had been hanging for several years on a balcony to dry; dolls which had grown old in the rain. Neglected mass graves from the war, the grass on them as tall as the plaster soldiers, birds nesting on their plaster rifles. A door smashed in, the house ransacked by looters, with the curtains drawn across its windows. People had gone, leaving only their photographs living on in their homes, as if they were their souls. Nothing was insignificant or trivial. Everything needed to be remembered, accurately, in detail: the time of day when I saw it, the colour of the sky, the sensations. Know what I mean? Someone had left this place behind forever. What did that mean? We are the first people to have experienced that ‘forever’. We can’t allow ourselves to miss a single detail. The faces of old peasants like the faces in icons … They, least of all, knew the meaning of what had happened. They had never left their farm, their land. They came into the world, loved, ate bread earned by the sweat of their brow, and procreated. They hoped to live to see grandchildren and, when life was over, meekly departed this earth, returned to the soil, became part of it. The Belarusian cottage! To us town-dwellers, a house is a machine for living in. For them, though, it’s their whole world. A cosmos. You travel through the empty villages and so want to meet a human being. A plundered church … We went in, and it smelled of wax. You wanted to pray …

I needed to remember all this. I started taking pictures. That’s my story.

I went recently to the funeral of a friend I had been there with. He died of leukaemia. The wake. Following Slavic custom, we drank and ate, know what I mean? And talked until midnight. At first, about him, the departed. But then? Once again about Russia’s destiny and the state of the universe. Would Russian troops be withdrawn from Chechnya? Would there be a second Caucasian War? Had it begun already? What were the chances of far-right Zhirinovsky becoming president? What were the odds on Yeltsin? We talked about the British monarchy and Princess Diana. About Russian monarchy. About Chernobyl. That led us off into speculation. One theory was that extraterrestrials knew about the disaster and were helping us out; another was that this had been a cosmic experiment, and that eventually genius children with extraordinary abilities would start to be born. Alternatively, that the Belarusians would disappear, as other peoples had: the Scythians, Khazars, Sarmatians, Cimmerians and Huastecs.

We are adepts of metaphysics. We live not on the ground but in the realm of dreams, of talk, of words. We need to add something to everyday life in order to understand it. Even when we are living next to death. That’s my story. Now I have told it. Why did I take up photography? Because words were not enough …

Viktor Latun, photographer

Monologue on a mute soldier

I won’t be going back into the Zone itself, although in the past I was drawn to it. If I see it and think about it, I will become ill and die. My imaginings will die with me.

Do you remember a war film called Come and See? It came out in 1985, and I couldn’t watch it through to the end. I fainted. They killed a cow in it. The pupil of its eye filled the screen. Just the pupil. I didn’t last to see people being killed. No! Art is love. I’m totally convinced of that! I’m reluctant to turn on the television or read the newspapers today. It’s all about killing, killing, killing. In Chechnya, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan. I’m losing my mind. My eyesight is deteriorating. Horror has become commonplace, even banal. And how we’ve changed, so that today’s horror on the screen has to be more dreadful than yesterday’s. Otherwise we don’t find it frightening. We’ve gone too far.

Yesterday, I was on a trolleybus. There was a little incident: a boy wouldn’t give up his seat to an old man, who was telling him off: ‘When you’re old, you will find nobody stands up for you.’

‘I’m never going to be old,’ the boy retorts.

‘How so?’

‘We’re all going to die soon.’

All around you, people are talking about death. Children are thinking about it. But that’s something you should contemplate at the end of life, not when it’s just beginning.

I see the world as made up of incidents. For me, the street is theatre, home is theatre. Man is theatre. I never remember an event in its entirety. Only details, gestures … Everything is muddled, mixed up in my mind. I’m not sure if I saw something in a film or read it in the newspapers. Or whether I saw or heard it somewhere myself, glimpsed it. I see a mad fox walking down an abandoned village street. It’s gentle and kind, like a child. It rubs up against feral cats, and chickens.

Silence. There’s such a stillness there! Completely different from what we have here. And then suddenly it’s broken by a strange human voice: ‘Gosha’s a pretty boy, Gosha’s a pretty boy.’ A rusty cage with the door open is swinging on an old apple tree. A pet parrot is talking to itself.

The evacuation is beginning. The school has been closed and sealed, the collective-farm office, the village soviet. During the day, soldiers took away safes and documents, and at night the villagers come to help themselves to whatever has been left. They pilfer books from the library, mirrors, chairs, sanitary fittings, a heavy globe. Some latecomer rushes in next morning, but everything has already gone. He purloins empty test tubes from the chemistry laboratory. Although they all know they’re being evacuated themselves in three days’ time and that they will have to leave everything behind.

Why am I gathering, collecting all this? I’m never going to direct a play about Chernobyl, just as I’ve never staged a single play about war. I’m never going to show a dead person on the stage. Not even a dead bird or animal. In the forest, I came upon a pine tree. There was something white. I thought it was mushrooms, but it was dead sparrows with their little breasts facing upwards. There, in the Zone … I don’t understand death. I don’t look at it, in order not to go crazy. So as not to cross over, into that other side of life. War should be depicted so horribly it makes you sick, so it makes you ill. It’s not something to be watched …

In those first days … They hadn’t yet let us see a single picture, but I was already imagining: collapsed roofs, shattered walls, smoke, broken windows. Hushed children being taken away. Queues of vehicles. The adults crying, but not the children. They hadn’t yet printed a single photograph … Probably, if you were to ask people, that’s the only image of terror we have: an explosion, a fire, dead bodies, panic. I remember all that from my childhood. (Trails off.) We can talk about that later, on another occasion. But here, what had happened was something we didn’t know about. A different kind of fear. This was something you couldn’t hear or see. It had no smell, no colour, and it changed us physically and mentally. The composition of our blood changes, our genetic code changes, the natural scenery around us changes. And it makes no difference what we think or do. Here we are: I get up in the morning, have a mug of tea and go to a rehearsal with my students. And all the time, I have this hanging over me. Like a portent. Like a question. I have nothing to compare it to. What I remember from my childhood is quite different.

I’ve seen only one good film about the war. I can’t remember the title. It was about a mute soldier. He didn’t speak a word throughout the film. He was transporting a pregnant German woman, pregnant by a Russian soldier. The baby was born, born on their journey, in their cart. He lifts it up in his arms and holds it, and the baby pees on his rifle. The man laughs. It’s as if that’s the way he speaks, through that laughter. He looks at the baby, he looks at the rifle, and he laughs. The end.

In that film, no one’s a Russian, no one’s a German. There’s a monster: war; and there’s a miracle: life. Now, though, after Chernobyl, everything has changed. The world has changed too. It no longer seems eternal. The earth seems to have shrunk: it’s small now. Our immortality has been taken away from us. That is what has happened. We’ve lost our sense of eternity. Meanwhile, what I see on television is people killing, every day. Shooting. One person kills another. After the Chernobyl disaster.

Something very blurred, as if seen from a great distance … I was three when I and my mother were taken to Germany. To a concentration camp. I remember everything that was pretty. Perhaps that’s just the way I see. A high mountain. Rain falling, or perhaps it was snow. People standing in an enormous black semicircle, all of them with numbers. Numbers on their shoes. So precise, such bright yellow paint on their shoes. And on their backs. Numbers everywhere, numbers. And barbed wire. A man wearing a helmet up in a watchtower. Dogs running about, barking very, very loudly. But there is no fear. Two Germans. One is a big fat man dressed in black, the other one is small – in a brown costume. The one in black indicates somewhere with his hand. A black shadow comes out from the dark semicircle and turns into a person. The German in black starts hitting him. Rain is falling, or perhaps it’s snow. Falling …

I remember a tall, handsome Italian man. He was singing all the time. It made my mum cry. Other people too. I couldn’t understand why everyone was crying when he sang so beautifully.

I wrote some short pieces about the war. Tried to. They didn’t amount to anything. I’ll never stage a play about war. It just wouldn’t work.

We took a cheery play called Give Us Water, Well into the Chernobyl Zone. A folk tale. We arrived at Khotimsk, the district centre. They have a children’s home there for orphans. Nobody thought to evacuate them.

End of part one. They didn’t clap. They didn’t stand up. Silence. Part two. End of the play. Again, no clapping, and they didn’t stand up. Silence.

My students were in tears. They gathered behind the scenes. What was wrong? Then it dawned on us: they believed everything that was happening on the stage was real. All through the play, they were waiting for a miracle to happen. Ordinary children, well brought up children, would have known they were only watching a play. But these children were waiting for a miracle.

We Belarusians have never had anything permanent. Even land was not permanent: it was constantly being seized by somebody who erased all trace of us. It meant that we ourselves had no permanence to live in, the way it’s written in the Old Testament that this one begat that one, and that one begat someone else. A chain, links. We don’t know how to handle permanence. We can’t live with it, can’t make sense of it. But now, finally, it has been bestowed upon us. Our permanence is – Chernobyl. Here we have it. And what do we do? We laugh about it, like in the old parable. People are commiserating with someone whose house and barn have burned down. Everything has gone up in flames, but he answers, ‘Then again, think how many mice it exterminated!’ and cheerily swipes the floor with his hat. That’s the archetypal Belarusian for you! Laughter through tears.

But our gods don’t laugh. They are martyrs. It was the ancient Greeks had gods who laughed and made merry. But what if fantasies, dreams and jokes are also texts, about who we are? Only we’re no good at reading them? There’s one melody I hear, always and everywhere. It goes on and on. It’s not really a tune or a song, but a keening. It is a pre-programmed aptitude of our people to attract misfortune, a never-failing expectation of woe. Happiness? Happiness is temporary, accidental. We have folk sayings: ‘One disaster doesn’t count’, ‘A stick is no defence against disaster’, ‘You’ll lose the race from a punch in the face’, ‘Forget Christmas cheer if disaster is here’. Other than suffering, we have nothing. No other history, no other culture.

But still my students fall in love and have babies. Only their babies are quiet and puny. After the war, I came back from that concentration camp … I’m alive! All we needed at that time was to survive. My generation is still surprised that it did. If there was no water, I could eat snow. In the summer, I was never out of the river: I would dive in a hundred times. Their children will never be able to eat snow. Even the purest-looking, whitest snow … (She is lost in thought.)

How do I imagine the play? I am thinking about it, you know, all the time.

From the Zone they brought me one plotline. A modern folk tale.

An old man and an old woman stayed behind in their village. In winter, the old man dies. The old lady is the only person at his funeral. For a week, she hacks out a pit among the graves. She wraps her husband in a warm shroud against the frost, lays him on a children’s sledge and pulls him along. All the way, she talks to him, recalling their life together. She roasts their last chicken for the wake. A hungry puppy homes in on the smell and joins her, so she has someone to talk to and cry with.

I once even dreamed about my future play.

I saw an empty village, the apple trees in blossom, the cherries flowering. So luxuriant, so bright and cheerful. The wild pear blooming in the graveyard … Cats are running through the overgrown streets with their tails held high. There is nobody here. They mate. Everything is flowering. Such beauty and stillness. Then the cats run into the street, expecting someone. They probably still remember human beings …

We Belarusians have no Tolstoy, no Pushkin. What we have is Yanka Kupala, Yakub Kolas. They wrote about the land. We are people of the earth, not heaven. Our monoculture is the potato. We dig it, plant it, and all the time look down towards the ground. If anyone does throw back their head, it is to look no higher than a stork’s nest. As far as they are concerned, that is high enough. For them, that counts as the sky. A sky called the ‘cosmos’ is something we don’t have, it’s absent from our thinking. When we need that, we get it from Russian literature, or Polish. Just as the Norwegians needed Grieg, and the Jews Sholem Aleichem, as a crystal around which they could grow and become conscious of themselves, now we have – Chernobyl! It’s sculpting something out of us. Creating. Now we have become a people. The people of Chernobyl. Not just a stretch of the road from Russia to Europe or from Europe to Russia. Only now …

Art is remembrance. Remembrance of our having existed. I am afraid, afraid of one thing: that in our lives fear is replacing love …

Lilia Mikhailovna Kuzmenkova, lecturer at

Mogilyov College of Culture and Enlightenment, theatre director

Monologue on the eternal, accursed questions: ‘What is to be done?’ and ‘Who is to blame?’

I’m a man of my time. A committed Communist …

Nobody lets us speak. That’s today’s fashion. Today, it’s fashionable to blame everything on the Communists. Now we’re the Enemies of the People, criminals all of us. Now we carry the can for everything, even the laws of physics. At that time, I was first secretary of the District Party Committee. The newspapers write now that the Communists are to blame for building inferior, cheap atomic power stations with no concern for human life. They ignored human beings. For them, people were just sand, the manure of history. To hell with them! Damn them! It’s those accursed questions: ‘What is to be done?’ and ‘Who is to blame?’ Eternal, unchanging throughout our history. People can hardly wait. They’re thirsting for revenge and blood. To hell with the Communists! Damn them! These people are just lusting for severed heads … Bread and circuses …

Others are saying nothing, but I’ll speak out. You write – well, not you specifically, but the newspapers – that the Communists lied to the people; they hid the truth. But we had to. There were telegrams from the Central Committee, from the Provincial Party Committee. We were given the task of avoiding panic. Panic really is a terrible thing. It was only during the war that people were following reports from the front as closely as they were the bulletins from Chernobyl. Fear and rumours. People were killed not by radiation but by an incident. We had to … our duty …

It’s not true to say we were hiding everything from the outset. At first, no one recognized the scale of what was happening. Priority was given to higher political considerations. But if you disregard emotions, disregard politics … We have to admit that no one believed what had happened. The scientists themselves couldn’t believe it! It was completely unprecedented. Not only in the USSR, but anywhere in the world. The experts at the power station studied the situation, and took decisions on the spot. I recently watched a programme, Moment of Truth, which featured Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo, the Party’s chief ideologist at the time, the man next to Gorbachev. What does he remember? Up there, on the summit, they themselves had no understanding of the whole picture. At a meeting of the Politburo, one of the generals said to them: ‘Who cares about radiation? On the test site after an atomic explosion … that evening we all drank a bottle of red wine and that sorted it.’ They were talking about Chernobyl as if it was just another accident, nothing out of the ordinary.

If I’d said then it was wrong to bring the people out in the streets? ‘You want to sabotage the May Day Parade? That’s a political offence! Put your Party card on the table immediately!’ (Calms down a bit.) I’m not making that up, you know. It’s the truth. The fact of the matter. They say that Shcherbina, the chairman of the government commission, when he arrived at the station in the first days after the explosion, demanded to be taken to the scene immediately. They tried to explain to him: piles of graphite, ridiculous fields of radiation, high temperatures. You couldn’t go near it. ‘I don’t care about your physics. I have to see everything with my own eyes!’ he bawled at his subordinates. ‘I have a report to deliver this evening to the Politburo!’ Army behaviour patterns. That was all they knew. They didn’t understand that physics really exists. A chain reaction … and no amount of orders and government decrees would alter the laws of physics. That really is what explains the world, not the ideas of Karl Marx.

But if I’d said then … If I’d tried to cancel the May Day Parade … (Becoming agitated again.) The newspapers try to pretend we brought the people out into the streets while we were sitting safely in underground bunkers. I stood for two hours on that podium, in that sun, without a hat, without a coat. And on 9 May, Victory Day, I marched with the ex-servicemen and women. An accordion playing, people dancing, drinking. We were all part of that system. We believed in it. We believed in heroic ideals, in the Soviet victory. And that we would vanquish Chernobyl! We would all pile in and overwhelm it. We read avidly about the heroic struggle to tame the reactor, which had broken free of the power of humans. We conducted indoctrination sessions. What are we without ideas? Without some grand vision? That is no less frightening: look at what is going on now! Disintegration. Anarchy. Wild West capitalism … But, the past has been condemned … our entire lives. All they talk about is Stalin, the Gulag archipelago … but what films we had then! The joyful songs! Tell me why that was? Answer me … Think about it, and give me an answer! Why are there no films like that any more? No songs? People have to be motivated, inspired. They need ideals. Then you’ll have a strong state. Sausages cannot be an ideal, or a full fridge. A Mercedes is not an ideal. You need shining ideals! And that was what we had.

The newspapers … on the radio and television, they were yelling, ‘Give us the truth, the truth!’ At demonstrations what was demanded was: the truth! ‘The situation is bad, very bad, very, very bad! We’re all going to die! The nation will cease to exist!’ Who needs that sort of truth? When that mob broke into the Convention and demanded Robespierre’s execution, were they right? Submitting to the mob, becoming a mob … We had to prevent panic … My job … My duty … (He is silent.) If I’m a criminal, then why is my granddaughter … my child … She is ill too … My daughter had her in the spring, brought her to us in Slavgorod in nappies. In a pram. They came a few weeks after the explosion at the power station. Helicopters flying, army vehicles on the roads … My wife begged me: ‘We must send them to our relatives, get them away from here.’ I was the first secretary of the District Party Committee. I totally forbade it. ‘What will people think if I send my daughter and her baby elsewhere? When their own children have to stay here.’ Those who bolted for it, trying to save their own skin … I called them into the District Committee, to the office, ‘Are you a Communist or not?’ It was a test of integrity. If I’m a criminal, why did I not save my own child? (Becoming incoherent.) I did … she … in my own house … (Calms down after a while.)

Those first months … In the Ukraine there was panic, but here in Belarus everything was calm. The sowing season was in full swing. I didn’t hide, didn’t safely sit it out in an office. I was charging around the fields and meadows. We were ploughing, sowing. You’ve forgotten that, before Chernobyl, we called the atom ‘a peaceful labourer’. We were proud of living in the Atomic Age. I don’t recall anyone being fearful. At that time, we didn’t yet fear for the future … After all, what is a Communist Party first secretary? An ordinary person with an ordinary college degree, most often an engineer or an agronomist. Some had graduated from the Higher Party School. What I knew about radiation was what they’d managed to teach us on civil defence courses. I never heard a word there about caesium in milk, or strontium. We transported milk with caesium to the dairies, delivered meat, scythed grass contaminated with radiation at forty curies. Fulfilled the Plan absolutely conscientiously. I was making sure of that. Nobody had released us from our obligations under the Plan.

Here’s another telling detail. In those first days, people were experiencing not only fear, but also elation. I’m someone with absolutely no survival instinct. That’s only what you would expect, because I have a very strong sense of duty. There were a lot of us like that then. I certainly wasn’t the only one. I had dozens of letters from would-be volunteers on my desk, asking to be sent to Chernobyl. ‘At the bidding of their hearts!’ People were prepared to sacrifice themselves without a second thought, and without asking anything in return. You can write whatever you like, but the fact of the matter is, there was such a thing as Soviet character. There was such a thing as a Soviet person. It doesn’t matter what you write, or how emphatically you deny it … You will feel the lack of that kind of person yet, and think back to him nostalgically.

Experts were sent to us, and they got very heated, argued themselves hoarse. I asked one, ‘Are our children making sand pies with radioactive sand?’ And he came back at me: ‘Panic-mongers! Dilettantes! What do you know about radiation? I’m a nuclear expert. We carried out a nuclear explosion. An hour later, I went to the epicentre in a jeep. Over vitrified soil. Why are you spreading panic?’ I believed them. I called people to my office and said, ‘Comrades, if I run away, if you run away, what will people think of us? They will say the Communists deserted them!’ If I couldn’t persuade them with words and emotion, I took a different approach: ‘Are you a patriot or not? If not, put your Party card on the table. Throw it down!’ Some did.

I began to suspect something was wrong. I couldn’t help noticing … We signed an agreement with the Institute of Atomic Physics to survey our land. They would take samples of grass, layers of black earth back with them to Minsk, analyse it. Then they phoned me: ‘Please get some transport organized to take your soil back.’ ‘Are you joking? It’s 400 kilometres to Minsk. I practically dropped the receiver. You want us to cart the soil back?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we’re not joking. Our regulations require these samples to be buried in a safe place, in a reinforced concrete underground bunker. We’re having samples brought to us from all over Byelorussia. In a month, we’ve completely filled up the available capacity.’ Do you hear what I’m saying? Here we were, ploughing and sowing that soil. Our children were playing on that land. We were required to deliver milk and meat in accordance with the Plan. People were distilling alcohol from the grain. Apples, pears and cherries were being used for juice.

Evacuation … If anybody had looked down from above, they would have thought the Third World War had begun. One village was being moved out and another was warned they would be evacuated within a week. And for the whole of that week, they carried on stacking the hay, scything the grass, digging their vegetable plots, chopping firewood … Life went on as usual. People had no idea what was happening, and a week later they were taken away in army vehicles. Meetings, travelling, indoctrination sessions, sleepless nights. There was just so much going on. I remember a chap stood outside the Municipal Party Committee in Minsk with a placard which read, ‘Give the people iodine’. It was hot, but he was wearing a raincoat.

(We return to the beginning of our conversation.) You forget … Back then, atomic power stations were the future. I gave talks, spread the word. I visited one. It was very quiet and imposing, clean. Red flags and pennants. In the corner: ‘Victor in Socialist Competition’. Our future. We lived in a fortunate country. We were told we were happy, and we were. I was a free man. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would consider my freedom was unfreedom. Now we’ve been written off by history, as if we don’t exist. I’m reading Solzhenitsyn now … I think … (Silence.) My granddaughter has leukaemia … I’ve paid for everything. A high price …

I’m a man of my time, not a criminal …

Vladimir Matveyevich Ivanov, former first secretary,

Slavgorod District Party Committee

Monologue of a defender of Soviet power

Hey, fuck off! Hey! (Air turns blue with swearing.) Stalin’s what you need! The iron fist …

What are you recording anyway? Who gave you permission? Photographing … Take that box of tricks of yours away. Or I’ll smash it. That’s enough, understand? We’re living here. Suffering, and you think you’ll just write stuff. Hacks! Destabilizing people. Causing rebellions. That’s enough, I said, understand? … You and your tape recorder …

Yes, I do defend it! I fucking do defend Soviet power. Our power. The people’s power! When we had Soviet power we were strong, everyone was afraid of us. The whole world was watching. Some folks shaking with fear and some folks jealous, dammit! And what’ve we got today? Now? Under democracy? Snickers, and rancid margarine they pass off on us, out-of-date medicines and worn jeans – treating us like fucking natives just climbed out of the trees. Fucking palm trees. Makes you ‘wince for our once great power’! Don’t you get it? We’re up shit creek … What a power we were, dammit! Till Gorbachev flew up to his perch, to his throne. The Devil with a birthmark! ‘Gorby’. Gorby acted out their plans, the CIA’s plans … What are you trying to tell me? Get it into your head … They blew up Chernobyl, the CIA lot and the democrats. I read it in the paper … If Chernobyl hadn’t exploded, our great power would never have collapsed. A great power, dammit! (More expletives.) Get it into your head … a loaf of bread under the Communists cost twenty kopecks, and now it’s 2,000 roubles. I could buy a bottle of vodka for three roubles and still have something for a bite … But under the democrats? I’ve been saving up for two months and still can’t afford a new pair of trousers. I’m walking about in a ragged sweater. They’ve sold everything off! Pawned it! Our grandchildren won’t be able to pay our debts …

I’m not drunk, I’m for the Communists! They were for us, for ordinary people. I don’t want any of your tales. Democracy! They did away with censorship. You can write anything you like. A free man … Dammit! Well if this free man dies, there’s no money for his funeral. An old woman died here. On her own, no children. Two days she was lying in her cottage, poor old thing, wearing her old cardigan, under the icons … They couldn’t buy her a coffin … A Stakhanov shock-worker she was at one time, a team leader. We didn’t go out to the fields for two days. We had a protest meeting, dammit! Until the collective-farm chairman came and talked to us, in front of the people, and promised that now, when someone dies, the farm will pay for a wooden coffin, and a truna – that’s our word for a calf or a piglet – and two crates of vodka for the wake. Under the democrats! Two crates of vodka … free! One bottle per man is a piss-up, half a bottle is medicine. For us, from the radiation …

Why aren’t you recording this? What I’m saying. You only record what’s going to make you money. Destabilizing people, rebelling … Need some political capital? So you can stuff your pockets full of dollars? We live here … suffering … And it’s nobody’s fault! Tell me whose fault it is! I’m for the Communists! They’ll be back, and then they’ll soon enough find the guilty ones. Dammit! Get it into your head, you people come here, recording …

Oh, fuck it all …

Declined to give his name

Monologue on how two angels took little Olenka

I’ve got material. All my bookshelves at home are full of large folders. I know so much I can’t write any more …

I’ve been collecting it for seven years: newspaper cuttings, secret instructions, leaflets, my own notes … I’ve got statistics. I’ll give you it all. I can fight: organize demonstrations, pickets, get hold of medicine, visit sick children; but I can’t write. You do it. I have so many emotions I can’t cope with them, they paralyse me, stop me from writing. Chernobyl already has enough guides, enough writers … and I don’t want to join those people milking the topic. You have to write honestly. Write about everything … (Becomes pensive.)

Warm April rain … For seven years, I’ve been remembering that rain. The raindrops rolled about like mercury. They say radiation is colourless, but the pools were green or bright yellow. A neighbour whispered to me there had been something on Radio Liberty about an accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station. I didn’t pay the slightest attention. I had absolute confidence that if there was anything serious there would be an announcement. We have special equipment, a special alarm system, there are air-raid shelters. We would be warned. We were certain of that! We had all been on civil defence courses. I had even taught on them, been an examiner. That evening, my neighbour brought pills of some sort. A relative had given her them and explained how to take them: he worked at the Institute of Atomic Physics, but made her promise not to tell anyone where they had come from. She was to be as mute as a fish! As a rock! He was particularly anxious about people talking or asking questions on the phone.

I had my little grandson living with me at the time. So what did I do? I still didn’t believe a word of it. I don’t think any of us took those pills. We were very trusting. Not only the older generation, young people too.

I remember my first impressions, the first rumours. I pass from one time to another, from one emotional state to another. From here back to there … As a writer, I’ve thought about these transitions. They interest me. It’s as if there are two people, the pre- and post-Chernobyl me. Only it’s difficult to reconstitute the pre-Chernobyl me convincingly. My outlook has changed …

I went into the Zone from the very beginning. I remember stopping in a village and being struck by the silence. No birds, nothing. You walk down a street … silence. Well, of course, I knew all the cottages were lifeless, that there were no people because they had all left, but everything around had fallen silent. Not a single bird. It was the first time I had ever seen a land without birds, without mosquitoes. Nothing flying in the air.

We went to a village called Chudyany. It registered 150 curies. In Malinovka, the reading was fifty-nine. The population had been exposed to doses hundreds of times greater than those of soldiers guarding the test sites for atomic weapons. Nuclear test sites. Hundreds of times more! The radiation meter would be clicking away, going off the scale, while in the collective-farm offices we found notices signed by the district radiologists saying it was fine to eat onions, lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. It all grew there, and everybody ate it.

What do those district radiologists have to say for themselves now? Those secretaries of district Communist Party committees? What excuses can they find?

In all the villages, we met a lot of drunk people. Even women were tipsy, especially the milkmaids and those who looked after the calves. They were singing a song from the movie The Diamond Arm, which was popular at the time: ‘We don’t care, we don’t care …’ In short, nothing really matters.

In Malinovka, in Cherikov District, we visited a kindergarten. The children were running around in the yard. The little ones were crawling about in the sandpit. The head told us the sand was changed every month. She didn’t know where it was brought from. You can imagine! The children were all sad. We tried joking with them, but they didn’t smile. Their carer was crying. She said, ‘Don’t. Our children never smile. They even cry in their sleep.’ We met a woman with a new baby in the street. ‘Who allowed you to give birth here? The radiation is fifty-nine curies.’ ‘The radiology doctor came,’ she said, ‘and advised me not to dry nappies outside.’ People were urged not to leave. A workforce was needed! Even when villages were evacuated permanently, they still brought people in to work the fields, to dig up the potatoes.

What have they to say now, those secretaries of district and provincial committees? What excuses do they have? Which of them were to blame?

I saved a lot of official instructions. ‘Top secret’. I’ll give you the lot. Instructions on processing contaminated chicken carcases. In the workshop processing them, you had to be dressed as if you were in contaminated territory and in contact with radioactive elements: rubber gloves, rubber coats, boots and so on. If there were so-and-so many curies, the carcases had to be boiled in salted water, the water drained into the sewer, and the meat could then be added to pâtés and sausage. If the contamination was so-and-so many curies, the meat could be added to bonemeal and used as feed for livestock. That is how they fulfilled the Plan for meat production. Calves from contaminated districts were sold cheaply in other, clean, places. The drivers who drove these calves around told me they looked funny. Their hair reached down to the ground, and they were so hungry they would eat anything, even rags and paper. It was very easy to feed them! They sold them to collective farms, but if anybody wanted to, they could take one home. To their own farm. Criminal goings-on! Criminal!

We came across a truck on the road. It was moving at a funereal pace. We stopped it. There was a young fellow at the wheel. I asked him: ‘Is it because you’re feeling ill that you’re driving so slowly?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a load of radioactive soil.’ On a hot day! With all that dust! ‘You must be crazy! You’ll want to get married and have children.’ ‘Well, where else am I going to earn fifty roubles for a single trip?’ At that time, fifty roubles would have bought him a good suit. People talked more about bonuses than radiation. Bonuses and various meagre allowances. Meagre in terms of the value of a life.

Tragedy and comedy went side by side.

Some old women were sitting on the benches outside a cottage. Children were running about. We measured seventy curies.

‘Where are the children from?’

‘They’ve come from Minsk for the summer.’

‘But you have very high radiation levels!’

‘Why do you make such a fuss and bother about Radiation! We’ve seen her.’

‘You can’t see it!’

‘Just you look over there, dearie, to where that cottage is standing half-built. The people upped and left. Got so fearful, they did. Anyway, we went there one evening to have a look. We look in through the window and there she is sitting under a beam, this Radiation of yours. Nasty bit of work, if you ask me, her eyes all shining. And as black as can be …’

‘That’s impossible!’

‘We’ll swear to it, dearie. Cross our hearts and hope to die!’

Which they did, with a lot of merriment. We weren’t sure if they were laughing at themselves or at us.

After our trips, we would meet up again at the editorial office. ‘How did you get on?’ we would ask each other. ‘Oh, fine!’ ‘Fine? Take a look at yourself in the mirror: your hair’s gone grey!’ There were jokes. Chernobyl jokes. The shortest one was, ‘A good people the Belarusians were.’

I was given an assignment to write about the evacuation. In Polesye, they have a belief that you should plant a tree before going on a long journey, if you want to be sure to return home. I arrived. Went into one yard, then another. Everyone was planting trees. I went into a third yard, sat down and cried. The lady who owned it pointed out to me: ‘My daughter and son-in-law planted a plum tree; my second daughter, a black rowan; my eldest son, a viburnum, and the youngest, a willow. I and my old gentleman planted one apple tree between us.’ When we parted, she said, ‘I have so many strawberry plants, the yard is full of them. Take some of my strawberry plants.’ She so wanted something to remain, some trace of her life.

I didn’t get round to writing much down. Kept putting things off, thinking I’d sit down sometime and recollect it all. Go off on a break.

Oh! Here’s something that’s just come back to me. A village graveyard, a sign on the gates saying: ‘High radiation levels. Entry by vehicle or on foot prohibited.’ You’re not even allowed through the Pearly Gates. (Laughs suddenly, for the first time in this long conversation.)

Have people told you that taking pictures anywhere near the reactor was strictly forbidden? You could only do it with a special permit. They confiscated cameras. Before they could leave, the soldiers who had served there were searched, just like in the Afghan War, to make sure they had no photos. God forbid! No evidence. They took the television crews’ footage off to the KGB. Returned it after they’d exposed it to light. The amount of information they destroyed! Testimony. All lost to science. To history. It would be good to find the people who ordered that …

How would they try to explain themselves? What could they come up with?

I will never forgive them. Never! Because of a little girl … She danced in the hospital, danced a polka for me. It was her ninth birthday. She danced so prettily. Two months later, her mother phoned to say, ‘Olenka is dying!’ I couldn’t bring myself to go to the hospital that day, and afterwards it was too late. Olenka had a younger sister. She woke up one morning and said, ‘Mummy, I had a dream and I saw two angels coming to take our Olenka. They said Olenka would be happy there. She wouldn’t have anything hurting. Mummy, two angels took Olenka …’

I can’t forgive any of them …

Irina Kiselyova, journalist

Monologue on the unaccountable power of one person over another

I am not an arts person, I am a physicist. So facts, just the facts …

Somebody will have to answer for Chernobyl. The time will come when people will have to answer for it, as they have been brought to book for the 1937 Purges. Even if it’s not for another fifty years! Even if they are very old, even if they are dead. They will answer for it, because they are criminals! (After a pause.) It’s important to preserve the facts, the facts! Because they will be needed.

On that day, 26 April 1986, I was in Moscow on business. That was where I heard about the accident.

I tried to phone Minsk, to Slyunkov, the first secretary of the Byelorussian Central Committee. I rang one, two, three times, but they wouldn’t put me through. I found his assistant (who knew me well): ‘I’m calling from Moscow. Put me through to Slyunkov, I have urgent information for him. About the accident!’

I was phoning on the government network, but they had already classified everything. The moment you started talking about the accident, the phone went dead. They had you under surveillance, of course they did! The phone was tapped. The ‘appropriate authorities’, the government within the government. And this despite the fact that I was phoning the first secretary of the Central Committee … And who was I? The director of the Institute of Atomic Energy of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences. A professor, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and this information was being kept secret from me.

It must have taken two hours before Slyunkov himself picked up the phone. I reported: ‘This accident is serious. According to my calculations’ (and I had already talked to some people in Moscow and worked one or two things out), ‘a column of radioactivity is moving towards us. Towards Byelorussia. It is essential to carry out urgent iodine prophylaxis for the population and to evacuate everybody living near the power station. People and animals must be moved 100 kilometres away.’

‘I’ve already received the report,’ Slyunkov replied. ‘There was a fire there, but it has been put out.’

I lost my temper. ‘They’re lying! They are manifestly lying! Any physicist will tell you that graphite burns at a rate of five tonnes an hour. Imagine how long it will continue burning!’

I took the first train to Minsk. A sleepless night. In the morning, I was home. I took a reading of my son’s thyroid gland: 180 microroentgens an hour! At that moment, the thyroid gland was a perfect radiation monitor. What was needed was potassium iodide, standard iodine. Two or three drops in half a glass of fruit jelly for children, and three or four drops for adults. The reactor was burning for ten days, and for ten days people should have been taking that. Nobody would listen to us scientists and doctors. Medicine and science were being dragged into politics. Of course they were! You mustn’t forget the intellectual context in which all this was happening, the kind of people we were at that time, ten years ago. The KGB were on the loose, the secret services. The Western radio broadcasts were being jammed. There were thousands of taboos, Party and military secrets. Secret guidelines. And to cap it all, we had been brought up to believe that the peaceful Soviet atom was as harmless as peat and coal. We were fettered by fear and prejudice. Misplaced faith. But facts, let’s just keep to the facts.

That same day, 27 April, I decided to go to Gomel Province, on the border with the Ukraine, to the district centres of Bragin, Khoyniki and Narovlya, which are only a few dozen kilometres away from the power station. I wanted the fullest possible information, needed to take instruments, to measure the background radiation. And the background radiation I found was: in Bragin, 30,000 milliroentgens per hour; in Narovlya, 28,000. People were sowing the fields, ploughing. They were preparing for Easter, painting eggs, baking Easter cakes. ‘Radiation? What’s that? We’ve had no orders.’ People were getting demands from their superiors for reports on how the spring sowing was going: was it proceeding at the required rate? They stared at me as if I were mad, ‘Where from? What are you talking about, professor?’ Roentgens, microroentgens? It was a language spoken on a different planet.

We returned to Minsk. On the Prospect, there was the usual brisk trade selling pies, ice cream, mince, buns. Under a radioactive cloud.

On 29 April – I remember everything exactly, all these dates – at eight in the morning, I was already sitting in Slyunkov’s waiting room. I tried and tried to get in, but nobody was letting me near him. This went on until half past five that evening. At half past five, one of our well-known poets with whom I was acquainted emerged from Slyunkov’s office.

‘I have been discussing some issues in Belarusian culture with Comrade Slyunkov.’

‘There soon won’t be anybody to carry it on,’ I exploded, ‘or to read your books if we don’t evacuate people from Chernobyl right now! We have to save them!’

‘Oh, come now … The fire there has already been extinguished.’

I finally forced my way through to Slyunkov. I described the situation I had found the day before. I told him it was essential to save people’s lives! In the Ukraine (I had already phoned there), they had organized an evacuation.

‘What are you doing, letting your radiation monitoring technicians’ (from my institute) ‘run all over the city spreading panic? I’ve consulted Moscow, spoken to Academician Ilyin. Everything here is fine. The army has been sent into the breach, military equipment … A government commission is working at the power station, the State Prosecutor’s Office. They’re investigating everything. We must not lose sight of the fact that there is a Cold War being waged. We are surrounded by enemies …’

Our land already had thousands of tonnes of caesium lying on it, iodine, lead, zirconium, cadmium, beryllium, boron, an unknown quantity of plutonium (the Chernobyl-style uranium-graphite high pressure tube reactors were used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, needed in the manufacture of atomic bombs). In all, 450 types of radionuclides. The quantity was equivalent to 350 bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima. The authorities needed to be talking about physics, the laws of physics, but they were talking about enemies. Looking for enemies.

Sooner or later, these people will have to answer for what they did. ‘At some future time, you will try to explain yourself on the grounds that you were only a tractor manufacturer,’ I told Slyunkov (who had previously been the director of a tractor factory, and didn’t know anything about radiation). ‘But I am a physicist, and I can picture the consequences of this.’ Well, whatever next? Some professor, some physicists were daring to lay down the law to the Central Committee? Actually, those people were not a gang of crooks. The best way to characterize it is as a conspiracy of ignorance and corporatism. Their guiding principle, their bureaucratic training, had taught them never to show initiative, to be obsequious. And sure enough, Slyunkov was promoted, moved to Moscow. How do you like that? I suppose there was a phone call from the Kremlin, from Gorbachev. ‘Now then, you people there in Byelorussia, let’s have no panic. The West is already making quite enough fuss.’ The rules they play by are that if you don’t do as your superiors want, you’ll get no promotion, you won’t get to the holiday resort you were hoping for, or get that nice dacha in the country. You have to make yourself liked. If we were still a closed system today, behind the Iron Curtain, people would be living right next to the reactor itself. It would all have been classified! Remember how they hushed up the contamination after an accident at the Kyshtym plutonium production plant in 1957, or the effects of the fallout after atomic tests at Semipalatinsk in 1949 and 1951? That was Stalinism. We still are a Stalinist country.

The secret instructions about what to do if there was a threat of nuclear war specified immediately carrying out the precautionary administration of iodine to the population. And that was just if there was a threat! But here we were looking at 3,000 microroentgens per hour. And all they cared about wasn’t people, but managing to hold on to power. A country where power matters and people do not. The primacy of the state is unchallengeable, and a human life is without any value at all. There were things that could be done! We suggested, with no announcements, no panic, just adding medicinal iodine to the reservoirs that provided drinking water, adding it to milk. Of course, people would detect an unusual taste in the water. The milk wouldn’t taste quite right. We had a reserve of 700 kilograms of medicine in Minsk. It stayed right where it was, in the depots. They were more afraid of the wrath of their superiors than of a nuclear disaster. Everyone was waiting for a phone call, for orders, and nobody did anything on their own initiative. They were terrified of taking personal responsibility. I carried a dosimeter in my briefcase. Why? They would not let me through to see the big bosses in their offices, they were fed up with me. So then I would take out the meter and apply it to the thyroids of their secretaries and personal drivers sitting there in the waiting rooms. That scared them and sometimes got me seen. ‘Look, what’s all this hysteria about, professor? Do you think you’re the only person with the best interests of the Belarusian people at heart? People are going to die of something anyway: from smoking, in car accidents, by committing suicide.’ They ridiculed the Ukrainians. They were crawling on their knees to the Kremlin, begging for money, medicine, radiation monitoring equipment (there was a shortage), but our people (i.e. Slyunkov) summarized the situation in fifteen minutes: ‘Everything is under control. We can cope on our own.’ He was praised for that: ‘Well done, brother Byelorussians!’

How many lives were paid for that praise?

I have information that they themselves, the bosses, were taking iodine. When the staff in our institute examined them, they all had normal thyroids. That’s impossible unless you are taking iodine. They were also quietly moving their children elsewhere, out of harm’s way. When they had to make trips to the Zone, they had respirators and special boiler suits. All the things other people didn’t have. And it’s been no secret for a long time that there was a special herd near Minsk where each cow had a number and was assigned to a particular individual. His personal cow. Special land, special greenhouses, special monitoring. The most disgusting thing … (Pauses.) … is that nobody has yet been called to account for that.

Officials stopped allowing me into their offices, stopped listening to me. I started bombarding them with letters and memoranda. I distributed maps, statistics, to every institution. They added up to four folders, each holding 250 sheets of paper. Facts, only facts. Just to be on the safe side, I always made two copies. One was kept in my office at work, and the second was hidden at home. My wife hid them. Why did I make copies? Because we needed to remember this. I know the kind of country we live in … I always locked up my office personally. I came back from one work trip to find the files had disappeared. All four thick folders … But I was born and bred in Ukraine, my grandparents were Cossacks. Cossack obstinacy. I carried on writing, giving talks. It’s our duty to save people’s lives! They must be evacuated as a matter of urgency! We were constantly travelling there. Our institute drew up the first map of contaminated areas. The whole of the south was coloured red. The south was ablaze.

Now that’s all history. The history of a crime.

All the institute’s equipment for monitoring radiation was removed. Confiscated. Without explanation. I received threatening phone calls at home: ‘Stop trying to scare people, professor! We’ll send you off somewhere you’d really rather not be. Don’t know where we mean? Have you forgotten? Don’t be in such a rush to forget!’ The institute’s staff were bullied. Intimidated.

I wrote to Moscow …

I was summoned by Platonov, the president of our Academy of Sciences:

‘Some day, the Belarusian people will remember you. You’ve done a lot for them, but it is a pity you wrote that letter to Moscow. A great pity! They’re demanding that I dismiss you. Why did you write it? Do you not know whom you are challenging?’

I had maps, statistics. What did they have? They could lock me up in a lunatic asylum. That was what they were threatening. I might die in a car accident. They warned me of that too. They might bring charges against me. For anti-Soviet activity. Or for taking a box of nails not recorded by the institute’s supplies manager.

They did bring criminal charges against me.

They got what they wanted. I suffered a heart attack … (He is silent.)

There is everything in those folders. Facts and figures. Criminal statistics.

In the first year after the disaster, millions of tonnes of contaminated grain were processed as animal feed, given to cattle, and the meat then found its way on to our tables. Poultry and pigs were fed bonemeal laced with strontium.

They evacuated villages, but carried on sowing the fields. Our institute’s data indicated that one third of the land of collective and state farms was contaminated with caesium-137, and frequently the level exceeded fifteen curies per square kilometre. There was no possibility that it could produce clean food: you couldn’t even stay on it for any length of time. Strontium-90 had settled on many fields.

In the villages, people were feeding themselves from their vegetable plots, and there was no monitoring. No one explained to them, or taught them the new ways in which we now needed to live. There was not even an attempt to do so. All that was monitored was what was being sent outside, the state procurement deliveries to Moscow, to Russia.

We did spot checks on children in the villages, several thousand boys and girls. They had readings of 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 microroentgens. Over 3,000. These girls are never going to have healthy babies. They have genetic markers.

So many years have passed, but sometimes I wake up and can’t get back sleep.

A tractor is ploughing … I ask the official from the District Party Committee who’s accompanying us, ‘Is that tractor driver protected? Does he at least have a respirator?’

‘No, they don’t wear respirators while they are working.’

‘What, have they not brought you any?’

‘Of course we have! We’ve got enough to see us through to the year 2000, but we don’t issue them. It would start a panic. They would all run away, go to other regions!’

‘What kind of way is that to treat people?’

‘It’s easy for you to talk like that, professor. If you get fired, you’ll just find another job. But I would be completely stuck.’

What sort of a regime is that? Unaccountable power of one person over another … This was not just deceit, this was a massacre of the innocents.

Along the River Pripyat, tents, people holidaying with their families. Swimming, sunbathing. They have no idea that for several weeks they’ve been swimming and sunbathing under a cloud of radioactivity. We’ve been strictly forbidden to talk to them, but I see these children … I go over and start explaining to them. Surprise. Bewilderment. ‘Why are they not saying anything about this on the radio and television?’ We have an escort. A representative of the local authority, somebody from the District Committee, usually accompanied us. That was the rule. He said nothing. I could tell from his face the conflict of emotions going on inside him: should he report it or not? He was, after all, sorry for these people! He was a normal human being. I didn’t know which of his emotions would win out when we returned. Would he denounce me? Everyone made their own choice at that time. (Says nothing for a while.)

We are still a Stalinist country … Stalin’s kind of person is still alive.

I remember, in Kiev, at the railway station. Trains, one after another, taking away thousands of frightened children. Men and women crying. For the first time, I thought, ‘Who needs this kind of physics, this kind of science, at such a high price?’ Now it’s all out in the open. They’ve written about the amazing shock-working tempos at which the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was built. It was built the Soviet way. The Japanese take twelve years to develop a facility like that, but we did it in just two or three. The quality and reliability of that highly complex facility was what you might expect in an animal-breeding complex, a chicken farm! If there was a shortage of something, they just ignored the plans and substituted whatever was to hand at the time. Thus the roof of the turbine hall was covered with bitumen. That’s what the firemen extinguished. And who was in charge of this atomic power station? There wasn’t a single nuclear physicist in the management team. They had power engineers, turbine specialists, political workers, but not a single expert. Not a single physicist.

Man has invented a technology for which he is not yet ready. He is not up to it. Can you put a pistol in the hands of a child? We are reckless children. But I’m being emotional, and that is something I forbid myself.

There are radionuclides on the land, in the ground, in the water. Dozens of radionuclides. We need radioecologists, but there are none in Belarus. They had to be called in from Moscow. At one time, we had a Professor Cherkasova working in our Academy of Sciences. Her research was into the effect of small doses, internal radiation. Five years before Chernobyl, her laboratory was closed. ‘We are never going to have disasters in the Soviet Union. What are you even suggesting? Soviet atomic power plants are advanced, the best in the world. What small doses are you talking about? What is internal radiation? Radioactive foodstuffs indeed!’ They wound down the laboratory and pensioned off the professor. She got a job as a cloakroom attendant somewhere, looking after people’s hats and coats.

And nobody has been called to account for anything.

Five years later, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children had increased thirty-fold. An increase was observed in congenital malformations, renal and cardiac disease, paediatric diabetes.

Ten years later, the life expectancy of Belarusians had fallen to sixty years.

I believe in history, the judgement of history … Chernobyl is not over. It has only just started.

Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko, former director of the Institute of Atomic

Energy, Belarus Academy of Sciences

Monologue on sacrificial victims and priests

A person gets up early in the morning, starts the day …

He’s not thinking about eternity; his thoughts are on earning his daily bread. But you humanists want to make people think about eternity. It’s a mistake you all make.

What is Chernobyl?

We drive into a village. We have a German minibus, donated to our foundation. Children throng around. ‘Miss! Sir! We’re Chernobyl children. What have you brought us? Give us something. Please!’

That is Chernobyl.

On the road to the Zone, we come across an old woman wearing an embroidered skirt and apron, our folk costume, with a bundle on her back.

‘Where are you going, Grandma? Visiting someone?’

‘I’m going to Marki, to my home.’

The radiation there is 140 curies! She has twenty-five kilometres to walk each way. It takes her one day there, and another day back. She may retrieve a three-litre jar that’s been hanging on her fence for two years, but at least she will have been back home.

That is Chernobyl.

What do I remember of those first days? What was it like? Well, for that we have to go back … If you’re going to tell the story of your life, you have to begin with childhood. It’s the same here. I have my own personal starting point. I start from what seems like a quite different story. I remember the fortieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War. That was the first time we had a fireworks display in Mogilyov. After the official celebrations, people didn’t disperse as usual but began singing songs. It was completely unexpected. I remember that shared feeling. After forty years, everybody started talking about the war and thinking about it properly. Before that, we had just been aiming to survive, rebuilding, having children. It will be the same with Chernobyl. We will come back to it later and understand it more deeply. It will become a place of pilgrimage, a Wailing Wall. For the present, though, we have no ritual, no ideas! Curies, rems, sieverts – that doesn’t add up to understanding. It’s not a philosophy, not an outlook. In this country, man comes either with a gun or with the Cross. That goes right through our history. There has been nothing else. There still isn’t.

My mother worked at the headquarters of the city’s civil defence team. She was one of the first to hear. All the alarms went off . The instructions they had hanging in every office required them to inform the population immediately, issue respirators, gas masks and so on. They opened up their secret stores, behind all the seals and sealing wax, and found everything in a terrible state. It had deteriorated and was quite useless. In schools, the gas masks were pre-war models, and in any case did not fit children. Their radiation meters were going off the scale, but nobody could understand what was happening. This was completely unprecedented. They simply turned their instruments off. Mother explained, ‘If it had been war, we would have known what to do. There were instructions. But here?’ Who was in charge of civil defence? Retired generals, colonels for whom a war began with government announcements on the radio, followed by air-raid warnings, bombs, incendiaries. It hadn’t dawned on them that these were different times. It needed a leap of the imagination, which did eventually happen. We know now that people will be sitting, drinking tea at the weekend … We will talk and laugh, and meanwhile a war will be going on. We won’t even notice when we disappear.

Civil defence was just a game played by grown men. Their responsibility was to hold parades and exercises. It cost millions of roubles. We were dragged away from work for three days, without any explanation, for military exercises. The game was called ‘In Case of Nuclear War’. The men played soldiers and firemen, and the women were nurses. We were issued with boiler suits, boots, first-aid kits, as well as a pack of bandages and medicines of some description. Everything was just as it should be. The Soviet people must face the enemy worthily. Secret maps and evacuation plans were stored away in fireproof safes with wax seals. According to these plans, the populace were to be organized and taken, within a matter of minutes after the alarm, into the forest to a place of safety. A siren wails. Attention, attention! We are at war …

Cups and banners were awarded, and there was a feast. The men drank to our coming victory and, of course, to the women!

Only the other day, the alarm was sounded in the city. Attention! Civil defence! That was a week ago. People were frightened, but it was a different kind of fear. This was not an attack by the Americans or Germans. Was something going on at Chernobyl? Had it really happened again?

1986. Who were we? What were we when this technological version of the end of the world came upon us? I? We? The local intelligentsia? We had our own circle. We lived separate lives, withdrawing from everything around us. It was our way of protesting. We had our own laws: we didn’t read Pravda. Instead Ogonyok was passed from hand to hand. The instant the reins were loosened, we revelled in the new freedom. We read samizdat, which finally reached us in our backwater. We read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, Venedikt Yerofeyev. We met at each other’s homes and had endless discussions in the kitchen. We had this great yearning. For what? Somewhere, we were sure, there was a world inhabited by actors and film stars. I so wanted to be Catherine Deneuve, to wear some ridiculous Greek mantle and curl my hair in an improbable manner. It was a yearning for freedom. There was a world out there about which we knew nothing, a foreign world, a manifestation of freedom. But this too was a game, a flight from reality. Some members of our circle gave in, became alcoholics, or joined the Party to crawl up the career ladder. Nobody believed it was possible to breach the Kremlin wall, to break through and make it collapse. Not in our lifetime, anyway, that was for sure. That being so, to hell with what they were getting up to in there. We would live our lives here, in our world of illusion.

Chernobyl. At first, we had the same reaction. What has it got to do with us? Let the regime worry about it. Chernobyl was all their doing and it was a long way away. We didn’t even bother to look it up on the map. Not interested. We no longer felt any need for the truth. It was when different labels appeared on the milk bottles: ‘Milk for children’ and ‘Milk for adults’, that we thought, ‘Hello! Something is coming too close to home.’ I was no Party member, but I was still Soviet. You began to feel alarmed: ‘The leaves on radishes this year look more like beetroot tops.’ But then, in the evening, you would turn on the television and hear, ‘Do not fall for Western provocation!’ and all your doubts were dispelled. The May Day Parade? Nobody forced us to turn out for it; nobody obliged me to. We could’ve decided not to go, but we didn’t. I don’t remember a more crowded, happy May Day Parade than the one that year. There were concerns, of course, but you wanted to run with the herd, to feel the sense of solidarity, to be in there together with everybody else. I wanted someone to blame. The bosses, the government, the Communists. Now I look back, trying to find the moment something broke. Where did it break? Well, actually, right at the beginning. Our lack of freedom … the height of dissidence was to question whether or not you could eat the radishes. The servility was inside us.

I was working as an engineer at the synthetic-fibre factory, and we had a group of German experts staying with us. They were installing new machinery. I saw the way other people behaved, a different nation, people from another world. When they heard about the accident, they immediately demanded doctors, radiation meters, and to have their food tested. They listened to their own radio broadcasts and knew what action needed to be taken. Of course, they weren’t issued a thing. Then they packed their bags and got ready to leave. ‘Buy tickets for us! Send us home! We’re leaving, since you’re incapable of ensuring our safety.’ They went on strike, they sent a telegram to their government, to their president. They fought for their wives and children, who were living here with them. For their lives! And how did we view their behaviour? Oh, just look at those Germans, they’re hysterical! Cowards! Measuring the radiation in their borscht, in their meatballs! Trying not to go outside more often than necessary. What clowns! Look at our men, they’re real men! That’s Russians for you! Daredevils! Battling the reactor! They’re not afraid for their own skin! Climbing up on to the molten roof with their bare hands or in canvas gloves (we’d seen them on television). And our children were out there with their flags at the May Day Parade! And the war veterans, the old guard! (Becomes pensive.) But that is a kind of barbarism too, the lack of a sense of self-preservation. We always say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. ‘We will show what Soviet heroism is!’ ‘We will show the character of the Soviet people.’ To the whole world! But then what about me? I don’t want to die either. I’m frightened.

It’s interesting today to look back at myself and my feelings, how they were changing. To analyse them. I long ago caught myself paying more attention to the world around. Around me and within me. After Chernobyl, that happened automatically. We began learning to say ‘I’. ‘I don’t want to die!’ ‘I’m afraid’ … And then? I turn the television up: a red banner is being presented to milkmaids who have been ‘victors in Socialist competition’. But that’s here! Near Mogilyov! In a village which is in the centre of a caesium hotspot! The people there are about to be resettled, any time now. The presenter intones, ‘People are working selflessly, no matter what … Miracles of courage and heroism.’ Never mind if it’s a new Flood! ‘Forward march, Children of the Revolution!’ You’re right, I’m not a member of the Party, but I am still a Soviet citizen. ‘Comrades, do not be fooled by provocateurs!’ the television booms night and day. Our doubts are dispelled. (A telephone call. Returns to the conversation half an hour later.)

I’m interested in every new person. Everyone who thinks about this …

Sometime in the future, we will understand Chernobyl as a philosophy. Two states divided by barbed wire: one, the Zone itself; the other, everywhere else. People have hung white towels on the rotting stakes around the Zone, as if they were crucifixes. It’s a custom here. People go there as if to a graveyard. A post-technological world. Time has gone backwards. What is buried there is not only their home but a whole epoch. An epoch of faith. In science! In an ideal of social justice! A great empire came apart at the seams, collapsed. First there was Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When the empire disintegrated, we were on our own. I hesitate to say it, but … we love Chernobyl. We have come to love it. It is the meaning of our lives, which we have found again, the meaning of our suffering. Like the war. The world heard about us Belarusians after Chernobyl. It was our introduction to Europe. We are simultaneously its sacrificial victims and its priests. That is a terrible thing to say. I realized it only recently.

In the Zone itself, even the sounds are different. You go into a house and expect to come across Sleeping Beauty. If it has not yet been looted, there are photographs, pots and pans, furniture … You feel the people who lived here must be somewhere nearby. Sometimes we do find them, but they don’t talk about Chernobyl. They tell you they have been cheated. Their big worry is whether they will get everything they are entitled to, and whether someone else might get more. Our people have always felt they were being cheated, at every stage of their history. On the one hand, there is the nihilism, the rejection, and on the other, fatalism. They have no faith in the government. They don’t trust scientists and doctors, but they don’t do anything for themselves. They are innocent and vacant. They have found the meaning and justification of their existence in suffering. Nothing else seems to matter. Along the sides of fields are signs saying ‘High radiation levels’, but the fields are being ploughed. Thirty curies, fifty … The tractor drivers are sitting in open cabins breathing radioactive dust. Ten years have passed, yet we still have no tractors with sealed cabins. Ten years! Who are we, for heaven’s sake? We live on contaminated land, plough, sow, have children … What sense is there in our suffering? What is it for? Why is there so much of it? I talk about that a lot now with my friends. We discuss it often. Because the Zone is not just rems and curies and microroentgens. It is our people. Our nation. Chernobyl rescued our system, just as it was dying. We have gone back to eternal states of emergency, central allocation of jobs, rations. They used to drum into our heads, ‘If it had not been for the war …’ Now they can blame everything on Chernobyl. ‘If it had not been for Chernobyl …’ Our eyes immediately mist over as we relapse into self-pity. Give us aid! Give us aid, so we have something to divvy up between us! The trough. Something to divert our anger!

Chernobyl is already history, but it is also my job, my everyday routine. I travel. I see things. There used to be the patriarchal Belarusian village, the Belarusian cottage. No inside toilet or hot water, but it had an icon, a well with a carved wooden covering, embroidered towels and bedspreads. And hospitality. We went into one cottage for a drink of water, and the woman pulled a towel out of a coffer as old as herself and gave it to me. ‘This is for you, to remember your visit to my home.’ There was a wood, a field. The commune had survived and some fragments of freedom: her own land beside the house, a smallholding, her own cow. They were being resettled from Chernobyl to ‘Europe’, European-style settlements. You can build a house that’s better and more comfortable, but in a new place you cannot rebuild this vast world to which they were umbilically connected. It’s a terrible blow to a person’s sense of identity. Uprooting traditions and an age-old culture. As you approach these new settlements, they’re like a mirage on the horizon. Painted light blue, dark blue, orangey-red. And the names they give them! Maytime, Sunnyside! European houses are far more convenient than the old cottages. They are the future served on a plate. But you cannot parachute people into the future. The people have been turned into exotic natives. They sit on the ground and wait for a plane or a bus to arrive and bring them foreign aid. There’s no sense of being pleased at the opportunity to start over again. ‘I’ve got myself out of the inferno; I have a house, uncontaminated land; I need to work for the future of my children, who have Chernobyl in their blood, in their genes.’ They’re just waiting for a miracle to happen. They go to church. Do you know what they ask God for? The same thing – a miracle. Not for Him to grant them good health and the strength to achieve something for themselves. They’re used to begging now, if not from foreigners then from heaven.

They live in these tidy houses and it’s as if they were hutches. They crumble, fall to pieces. The people living there are not free, they are doomed. They live in fear and resentment, and wouldn’t hammer in a nail on their own account. They want Communism. They’re waiting for it. The Zone needs Communism … In every election, the people there vote for the ‘firm hand’ candidate. They’re nostalgic for the order of Stalin’s time, military order. For them, that is synonymous with justice. They even live in military surroundings, with police outposts, people in military uniform, a system of permits, rations. Officials distribute the foreign aid. In German and Russian, the boxes have written on them: ‘Not for trade. Not to be sold.’ It is sold. You will find it everywhere. In every kiosk.

Again, like a game, a promotional trip, I lead a convoy of humanitarian aid donors. Outsiders, foreigners … They come to us in the name of Jesus and in the name of who knows what else. And there are my fellow tribesmen, standing in the puddles and the mud, in jerseys and quilted jackets, in cheap boots … ‘We don’t need anything! The officials will only steal it!’ I read in their eyes. But immediately, alongside that, the urge to grab a box, a crate of something foreign. We know by now what kind of old woman lives where. Like in a zoo. It’s humiliating, and I feel a wicked, crazy urge. I sometimes suddenly say to them: ‘Now we’re going to show you something you could never see, even in Africa. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world! Two hundred curies, 300 curies …’ I notice too how the old women themselves have changed. Some have become real film stars. They’ve memorized their lines, and will shed a tear in just the right places. When the first foreigners came, they used to say nothing, just weep. Now, though, they’ve learned to talk. With a bit of luck, there’ll be some chewing gum for the children, or a carton of clothing might come their way. Who knows? And this coexists with a philosophical profundity, with the fact that they have a special relationship here with death and time. They refuse to abandon their cottages, their families’ graveyards; and that’s not because of German chocolate, or chewing gum.

On our way back, I point out to them: ‘See what a beautiful land this is!’ The sun has sunk low on the horizon, lighting up the forest and fields, a gift to us as we are leaving. ‘Yes,’ someone in the German group who speaks Russian replies, ‘beautiful, but poisoned.’ He is holding a dosimeter.

I realize that this sunset is dear only to me. This is my native land.

Natalia Arsenyevna Roslova, chairwoman of the Mogilyov

Women’s Committee of Children of Chernobyl

The Children’s Choir

Alyosha Belsky, aged nine; Anya Bogush, ten; Natasha Dvoretskaya,

sixteen; Lena Zhudro, fifteen; Yura Zhuk, fifteen; Olya Zvonak, ten;

Snezhana Zinevich, sixteen; Ira Kudryacheva, fourteen; Yulya Kasko,

eleven; Vanya Kovarov, twelve; Vadim Krasnosolnyshko, nine; Vasya

Mikulich, fifteen; Anton Nashivankin, fourteen; Marat Tatartsev,

sixteen; Yulya Taraskina, fifteen; Katya Shevchuk, fourteen; Boris

Shkirmankov, sixteen.

I was in hospital …

I was in such pain. I said to my mother: ‘Mum, I can’t stand it. It’s best if you kill me!’

There was this black cloud … This really heavy rain …

The puddles turned yellow … and green … as if someone had poured paint in them. People said it was just pollen from the flowers. We didn’t run through the puddles, just looked at them. Grandma shut us in the cellar. She knelt down and prayed. She told us to pray too. ‘Pray! It’s the end of the world. God’s punishment for our sins.’ My brother was eight and I was six. We started remembering our sins: he had broken a jar of raspberry jam, and I hadn’t told Mum my new dress had got caught on the fence and torn … I hid it in the wardrobe.

Mum often wears black. A black headscarf. On our street, someone is getting buried all the time. People cry. If I hear music, I run home and pray. I say the Lord’s Prayer.

I pray for my mum and dad …

Soldiers in trucks came to take us away. I thought a war had started …

The soldiers had real rifles hanging from their shoulders. They said words I couldn’t understand: ‘decontamination’, ‘isotopes’ … On the journey, I had a dream: there was an explosion, but I was alive! My home had gone, my parents. There were not even any sparrows and crows. I woke up in horror. I jumped up. I peeped through the curtains to see if there was that nightmarish mushroom cloud in the sky.

I remember a soldier chasing a cat. It made the radiation meter rattle like a machine gun: click-click-click. A boy and girl were running after them: it was their cat. The boy didn’t say anything, but the girl was shouting, ‘You can’t have her!’ She shouted as she ran, ‘Pussy, run for it! Run, pussy!’

The soldier had a big plastic bag.

We left my hamster at home when we locked everything up. He was a little white hamster. We gave him enough food for two days.

But we never went back.

It was the first time I had been on a train …

The train was packed with children. The little ones were screaming and dirtying themselves. There was one carer for every twenty children and they were all crying, ‘Mummy! Where’s my mummy? I want to go home!’ I was ten. The girls like me helped to calm the little ones down. Women met us on the train platforms and made the sign of the Cross over the train. They brought us biscuits they had made, and milk and warm potatoes …

We were taken to Leningrad Province. There, when we were approaching the stations, people made the sign of the Cross, but watched us from far away. They were afraid of our train, and at every station they washed it down for a long time. When we jumped out at one station and ran to the buffet, they stopped anybody else going in: ‘Chernobyl children are eating ice cream in there,’ they said. The woman at the counter told someone over the phone, ‘When they leave, we’ll wash the floor with bleach and boil the glasses.’ We heard that.

Some doctors met us. They were wearing gas masks and rubber gloves. They took our clothes and all our things away, even our envelopes and pens and pencils, and put them in plastic bags and buried them in the forest.

We were so scared. For a long time afterwards, we were expecting we would start to die.

Daddy kissed Mummy and I was born …

I used to think I would never die, but now I know I will. A boy was lying next to me in the hospital. He was called Vadik Korinkov. He drew little birds for me, little houses. He died. Dying isn’t frightening. You just sleep for a long, long time and don’t wake up. Vadik told me that, when he died, he would live in another place for a long time. One of the older boys told him. He wasn’t frightened.

I dreamed I died. I could hear my mummy crying in my dream and woke up.

We were leaving …

I want to tell you how my grandma said goodbye to our house. She asked my dad to bring a sack of millet from the pantry, and scattered it over the garden, ‘For God’s birds.’ She collected eggs in a sieve and scattered them through the farmyard, ‘For our cat and dog.’ She sliced up pork fat for them. She emptied all the seeds out of her little bags: carrots, pumpkins, cucumbers, her blackseed onions, all the different flowers … She shook them out over the vegetable plot: ‘Let them live in the soil.’ Then she bowed to the house. She bowed to the barn. She went round and bowed to every apple tree.

My grandfather, when we were going away, took his hat off.

I was little …

Six, no, eight I think. Yes, eight. I’ve just counted it. I remember there was so much to be afraid of. I was afraid of running barefoot on the grass. Mum warned me I would die if I did. Swimming, diving – I was scared of everything. Picking nuts in the forest. Lifting up a beetle … because he crept over the ground, and it was infected. Ants, butterflies, bumblebees – they were all infected. My mum remembers they told her at the pharmacy to give me a teaspoonful of iodine. Three times a day! But she was too frightened …

We were waiting for spring: would the daisies come up again, like they did before? Everybody was saying the world was going to change. On the radio and television … The daisies were going to turn into … what? Into something else, anyway. And the foxes would grow a second tail. The hedgehogs would be born without prickles, the roses would have no petals. People would appear, and they would be like humanoids and be coloured yellow. They would have no hair, no eyelashes. Only eyes. And the sunsets would be green, not red.

I was little. Eight years old.

Then it was spring. In the spring, leaves unfolded out of the buds like they always did. They were green. The apple trees blossomed. They were white. The cherry trees had the same fragrance. The daisies, they were the same as usual. Then we ran to the river to the anglers, to see if the roach still had heads and tails. And the pike. We checked the starlings’ nest boxes to see if they had flown back, and whether they would have babies.

We had a lot of work to do. We had so much to check.

The grown-ups were whispering. I could hear …

In the year I was born, 1986, there were no other boys or girls born in our village. I’m the only one. The doctors didn’t allow it. They frightened Mum. Something horrid … but my mum ran away from the clinic and hid with Grandma. And then there was me … just turned up … Well, was born, I mean. I overheard all that.

I have no little brother or sister, and I so want one. Where do children come from? I would go and look till I found my little brother myself.

Grandma keeps giving me different answers: ‘The stork brings them in its beak. Or sometimes a little girl grows in the fields. Little boys are found in berries, if a bird drops them.’

Mum told me something different. ‘You fell from heaven.’

‘How?’

‘It started raining, and you fell right into my arms.’

Miss, are you a writer? How could there not be a me? And where would I be? Somewhere high up in the sky? Or maybe on another planet?

I used to love going to exhibitions, looking at the pictures …

They brought an exhibition about Chernobyl to our town … a young colt is running through the forest, but he is all legs, eight or ten of them; a calf has three heads; bald rabbits sitting in a cage, looking as if they’re plastic. People walking through a meadow wearing spacesuits. Trees higher than churches, flowers as high as trees … I didn’t make it to the end. I came upon a photo of a boy stretching out his arms, perhaps for a dandelion, or perhaps to the sun, but instead of a nose he had something like an elephant’s trunk. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shout, ‘We don’t need exhibitions like this! Don’t bring them! Everybody around here is already talking about death. About the mutants. I don’t want any more!’ On the first day it opened, people came, but after that, not a single person. In Moscow and St Petersburg, they wrote all about it in the newspapers and crowds of people went to see it. In our town, the exhibition hall was empty.

I went to Austria for treatment. There are people there who can hang a picture like that up at home – a boy with a trunk, or flippers instead of hands – and look at it every day, in order not to forget about people in misfortune. But when you live here, it’s not a fantasy or art, it’s real life. My life … If I had the choice, I’d rather hang something pretty in my room. A beautiful landscape, where everything is normal, the trees, the birds. Ordinary. Cheerful …

I want to think about pretty things.

The first year after the accident …

All the sparrows in our village disappeared. They were lying all over the place, in gardens, on the tarmac. They got raked up and taken away in containers, along with the leaves. That year, you weren’t allowed to burn leaves. They were radioactive. They had to be buried.

Two years later, the sparrows reappeared. We were so pleased. We were shouting to each other, ‘I saw a sparrow yesterday. They’re back.’

The cockchafers vanished. They still haven’t come back. Perhaps they will in a hundred or a thousand years’ time, like our teacher says. Even I won’t see them, though I’m only nine.

And what about my grandma? She’s very old.

On 1 September, starting school again …

There wasn’t a single bunch of flowers. We knew by then there was a lot of radiation in flowers. Before school started, it wasn’t carpenters and painters working like it used to be, it was soldiers. They scythed down the flowers, stripped off the soil and took it away somewhere in trucks with trailers. They cut down a big, ancient park, the old lime trees. Old Nadya – she was always called to the house when someone died, to do the keening and say the prayers – said, ‘’Twas not the lightning struck you … Not the drought that brought you low … The sea did not flood you … Yet there you lie like coffins black.’ She mourned the trees as if they were human beings. ‘Alas, my oak tree, my apple tree, gone …’

A year later, we were all evacuated and they buried the village. My dad is a driver. He took me there, and told me about it. First, they dug a deep pit, five metres deep … Then the firemen came with their fire engine and hosed a house down, from the roof ridge to the foundations, so as not to raise radioactive dust. The windows, the roof, the doorway, they washed everything. Then a crane lifted the house up and put it in the pit. Dolls, books, jars everywhere. The digger scooped them up, covered everything with sand and clay and firmed it all down. Where the village had been was just a flat field. Our house was under it, and the school, and the village soviet. My dried-flower collection and two stamp albums. I so wanted to take them with me.

I had a bike. My parents had just bought it for me.

I’m twelve …

I’m at home all the time, an invalid. In our house, the postman brings a pension for my grandad and one for me. When the girls in my class learned I had leukaemia, they were afraid to sit next to me or touch me. I would look at my hands, my school bag and exercise book. Nothing had changed. Why were they afraid of me?

The doctors said I was ill because my dad had worked at Chernobyl. I was born after that.

But I love my dad.

I had never seen so many soldiers …

They washed down the trees, the houses and roofs. They washed down the collective farm’s cows. I thought, ‘Poor forest animals. Nobody washes them down. They will all die. Nobody washes the forest down. It will die too.’

Our teacher said, ‘Draw radiation.’ I drew it raining yellow rain, and a red river flowing.

From childhood, I loved technology …

I dreamed that, when I grew up, I would work in something technical. My father loved technology. He and I were forever designing something. Constructing.

My dad went away. I didn’t hear him leaving. I was asleep. In the morning, I saw Mum all tear-stained. She said, ‘Your father is at Chernobyl.’

We waited for Dad to come back, as if he was away in the war.

He came back and went to work at his factory again. He didn’t tell me anything. At school, I was boasting to everybody that my dad had come back from Chernobyl; he was a member of the clean-up team, and the clean-up workers were the ones who helped to overcome the accident. Heroes! The other boys envied me.

A year later, Dad became ill …

We were walking round the park at the hospital. That was after his second operation. It was the first time he talked to me about Chernobyl.

They were working quite near the reactor. It was as quiet as could be, he said, and beautiful. All sorts of things were happening. Orchards were blossoming, but who for? The people were gone from the villages. They drove through Pripyat. There was washing hanging on the balconies, pots of flowers. A bicycle had been left under a bush with a postman’s canvas bag full of newspapers and letters. A bird had nested on it. I saw it all, as if it was a film …

They ‘decontaminated’ things that just needed to be abandoned. They stripped away topsoil poisoned with caesium and strontium, and by the next day it was clicking on the meters all over again.

‘When we left, we got a handshake and a certificate of commendation for our selfless work.’ My dad reminisced and reminisced. The last time he came out of hospital he told us: ‘If I stay alive, I want nothing to do with physics or chemistry. I’ll retire from the factory and be a shepherd.’

My mother and I have been left on our own. I am not going to enrol at a technical college, which is what my mother would like. The one where my dad studied.

I have a little brother …

He likes playing Chernobyl. He builds air-raid shelters and pours sand on the reactor … or else he dresses up as a bogeyman and runs around trying to scare everyone by saying, ‘Ooh! I am Radiation! Ooh! I am Radiation!’

He wasn’t born when it happened.

At night, I fly …

I fly surrounded by bright light. It’s not real, but it’s not other-worldly either. It is both and neither. In my dream, I know I can go into this world and be in it … Perhaps stay in it? My tongue isn’t working properly, there’s something wrong with my breathing, but there I don’t need to be able to talk to anyone. Something similar has happened to me before, but when? I can’t remember. I want so much to join everybody else, but I can’t see anyone. Only light. I feel I can touch it. How huge I am! I am together with everybody, but somehow aside, apart. Alone. In my very earliest childhood, I saw some coloured pictures like what I am seeing today. In this dream, there comes a moment when I cannot think about anything else. Only, suddenly a window will open. An unexpected gust of wind. What is it? Where has it come from? There is a link now between me and someone else … A way to be in touch … But how these grey hospital walls hem me in! How weak I still am! I use my head to block off the light because it stops me seeing properly … I strain and strain and start looking higher …

My mum came. Yesterday, she hung an icon in the ward. She was whispering something there in the corner, knelt down. They’re all silent: the professor, the doctors and nurses. They think I have no idea that I’m going to die soon. But at night, I’m learning to fly …

Who said flying is easy?

I used to write poetry once … I fell in love with a girl in fifth grade. In seventh grade, I discovered there was such a thing as death. My favourite poet is García Lorca. I read his words, ‘the dark root of a cry’. At night, poetry has another sound. A different one. I’ve started learning to fly. It’s not a game I like, but what can you do?