Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

A lone human voice

I was so happy recently. Why? I’ve forgotten …

Everything has been left behind, in some other life. I don’t understand. I don’t know how I’ve been able to live again. I suppose I wanted to go on living, and here I am laughing and talking. I missed him so much. It was like being paralysed. I wanted to talk to someone, but not with any other people. I would go into the church, and it would be so quiet there, like in the mountains. So quiet. You can forget about your life there. But in the morning, I wake up and reach out for him. Where is he? His pillow, his smell. A tiny bird I can’t identify runs along the windowsill, trilling like a little bell and waking me up. I’ve never heard a sound, a voice like it. Where is he? I can’t convey everything. Not everything can be put into words. I don’t know how I managed to go on living. In the evening, my daughter comes to me and says, ‘Mum, I’ve done all my homework.’ Then I remember that I have children. But where is he? ‘Mum, one of my buttons has come off. Can you sew it back on?’ How can I follow after him? See him again? I close my eyes and think about him until I fall asleep. He comes to me in my sleep, but only briefly, fleetingly. He vanishes immediately. I even hear his footsteps. But where does he disappear to? He so much wanted not to die. He looked out the window, at the sky … I would prop him up on a pillow, on two, three, to raise him higher. He took so long to die, a whole year. We couldn’t bear to part … (A long silence.)

No, no. It’s all right, I’m not going to cry. I’ve forgotten how to do that. I want to talk … Sometimes it’s so hard, so unbearable. I try to tell myself, persuade myself, I don’t remember anything. Like a friend of mine. Just so as not to go mad. She … Our husbands died in the same year. They were together in Chernobyl. She is planning to remarry, wants to forget, to close that door. The door to over there. After him. No, no, I understand her. I know … We have to live on … She has children … We’ve been somewhere no one else has, seen things no one else has seen. I bottle it up, keep it to myself; but once, in the train, I started telling other people, complete strangers, all about it. What for? It’s so terrible being alone.

He went to Chernobyl on my birthday. Our guests were still sitting round the table. He apologized to them, kissed me. There was a car already waiting below our window. It was 19 October 1986. My birthday … He was a fitter, travelled the length and breadth of the USSR, and I waited for him. It was like that for years. Our life was the life of people in love, saying goodbye and meeting again. But then … It was only our mothers who were gripped by fear, his mother and mine, but he and I were not afraid. I wonder now why that was. We knew very well where he was going. We might at least have borrowed a tenth-grade physics textbook from our neighbour’s boy and skimmed through it. He didn’t wear a hat there. The other lads in his team had all their hair fall out within a year, but his actually grew thicker. None of them are alive today. His team, seven of them, all died. Young men. One after the other. The first died three years afterwards. Well, we thought, that doesn’t mean anything. Just his fate. But then a second died, a third, a fourth … Then they were all waiting for it to be their turn. That was how they lived! My husband was the last to die … They were fitters, used to heights. They disconnected the electricity in the villages that had been evacuated, climbing poles, clambering over dead houses, working along dead streets. Always at a height, overhead. He was nearly two metres tall, weighed ninety kilograms. Who could kill a big man like him? For a long time, we weren’t afraid. (Suddenly smiles.)

Oh, how happy I was! When he came back and I saw him again. There was a holiday atmosphere in our home. It was always a celebration when he came back. I have a long, long, very pretty nightie. I would put that on. I loved expensive underwear. All mine is good quality, but this nightdress was special. For special occasions. For our first day together again, our nights … I knew every part of his body, intimately. I kissed all of it. I would even sometimes dream I was part of his body, that’s how inseparable we were. When he was away, I missed him terribly. It hurt physically. Whenever we parted, I was completely at sea for a while, not sure where I was, what street I was in or what the time was. Time stood still for me.

When he came back, he already had swollen lymph nodes on his neck. I felt them with my lips. They were small, but I asked him, ‘Will you go to see the doctor?’ He reassured me. ‘They’ll go away.’ ‘What was it like there, in Chernobyl?’ ‘Just normal work.’ No bravado, no panic. One thing he did tell me: ‘It was just the same there as here.’ In the canteen where they had their meals, they served the ordinary people on the ground floor: noodles, tinned food; while on the second, the brass, army generals, they had fruit, red wine, mineral water. Clean tablecloths. Every one of them had a dosimeter for the radiation. They didn’t give him a single one for the whole of his team.

I remember the seaside. He and I went to the seaside. What I remember is that there was just as much sea as there was sky. My friend and her husband … They came with us too. She remembers: ‘The sea was dirty. Everyone was afraid of getting cholera.’ The newspapers had been writing something about it. I remember it differently. In very vivid colours. I remember the sea was everywhere, and so was the sky. Such a deep, deep blue. And him there beside me. I was born to love, to be happy in love. At school, all the girls had ambitions. Some wanted to go to college, some to go away on a Young Communist League construction project, but I just wanted to get married. To love incredibly, as passionately as Natasha Rostova in War and Peace. Just to love someone! Only I couldn’t admit it to anyone, because at that time, you must remember, the only permissible dreams were of going to work on a YCL project. We had that drummed into us. People were desperate to go to Siberia, into the impenetrable forests of the taiga. Do you remember, we used to sing, ‘for the mists and for the smell of the taiga’? I didn’t manage to get into college at my first attempt. I didn’t have enough credits, so I went to work at the telephone exchange. That’s where we met. I was on duty. I got him to marry me. I said to him, ‘Marry me. I love you so much!’ I was head over heels in love. He was so handsome. I was flying in the sky. I asked him myself: ‘Marry me!’ (Smiles.)

At times, I think about things and try to comfort myself in different ways: perhaps death is not the end, and he has just changed and is living somewhere in a different world. Somewhere near me. I work in a library, read a lot of books, meet all sorts of people. I would like to talk about death. To understand. I’m looking for consolation. I find things in the newspapers and in books. I go to the theatre if there’s something on there about it, about death. I am physically in pain without him, I can’t live on my own …

He didn’t want to go to the doctor: ‘I don’t feel anything. I’m not in pain.’ By now, his lymph nodes were the size of hens’ eggs. I had to push him into the car by force and drive him to the clinic. They referred us to a cancer specialist. One doctor looked at him and called another: ‘I’ve got one more here from Chernobyl.’ They kept him in the hospital. A week later they operated: they completely removed his thyroid gland and larynx and replaced them with a lot of tubes. Yes … (Trails off.) Yes. Now I know that was still a happy time. Lord! What silly things I was doing, running round the shops, buying presents for the doctors: boxes of chocolates, imported liqueurs. Bars of chocolate for the nurses. And they took them. He laughed at me: ‘Sweetheart, they’re not gods. The chemotherapy and radiation treatment aren’t in short supply. They’ll give it without expecting chocolates.’ But I rushed to the outskirts of the city to get a chocolate and marshmallow cake, or some French perfume. At that time, you could get these things only if you knew someone. It all came from under the counter. That was before they discharged him to come home. We … We were coming home! I was given a special syringe and shown how to use it. I had to feed him with it. I learned all that. Four times a day, I cooked something fresh, fresh every time. I ground it up in a mincer, rubbed it through a strainer, and then sucked it up into the syringe. I pierced one of the tubes, the biggest one, and it went into his stomach. But he lost his sense of smell, he couldn’t tell one food from another. I would ask, ‘Do you like that?’ but he didn’t know.

In spite of everything, we still managed to get out a few times to the cinema. We would kiss in there. We were hanging by such a very thin thread, but it seemed to us we were managing to hold on to life. We tried not to talk about Chernobyl, never to remember it. It was a taboo subject. I wouldn’t let him near the phone. I intercepted it. His lads were dying, one after another. It was taboo … But then one morning I woke him, gave him his dressing gown, and he couldn’t get up. He couldn’t say anything either. He’d stopped talking. His eyes were ever so big. That’s when he got really frightened. Yes … (Trails off again.) He stayed with us for another year. All that year, he was dying. Every day, he got worse and worse, and he knew his mates were dying too. That was something else we had to live with, that waiting. They talk about Chernobyl, they write about it, but nobody knows what it’s like. Everything here is different now. We aren’t born the same, we don’t die the same way. Not like everybody else. Ask me how people die after Chernobyl! The man I loved, loved so much that I couldn’t have loved him more if I had given birth to him, turned in front of my eyes into a monster.

They took out his lymph nodes, and that affected his circulation. His nose got somehow out of place and three times bigger, and his eyes weren’t the same any more. They moved in opposite directions. There was a different light in them, one I didn’t know, and an expression as if it wasn’t him looking out of them but someone else. Then one eye closed completely. And what was I really afraid of? I just didn’t want him to see himself, to have to remember what he looked like. But he began asking me, showing me with his hands that he wanted me to bring him a mirror. Sometimes I would run out to the kitchen, pretending to have forgotten, or I would come up with something else. I played those tricks on him for two days, and on the third day he wrote in large letters in his notebook, with three exclamation marks, ‘Give me a mirror!!!’ We already had a notebook, a pen, a pencil, that was how we communicated now because he couldn’t speak even in a whisper, he couldn’t even manage a whisper. He was completely mute. I ran to the kitchen, rattling saucepans about. I hadn’t read it! I hadn’t heard! Again, he wrote: ‘Give me a mirror!!!’ again with all those exclamation marks. I brought him a mirror, the smallest I could find. He looked in it, clutched his head and rocked and rocked on the bed. I went to him and wanted to talk him round. ‘When you’re a bit better we’ll go and live in some abandoned village. We’ll buy a house and live there, if you don’t want to live in the city with a lot of people. We’ll live alone.’ I meant it. I would have gone anywhere with him, just so long as he stayed alive, and what he looked like didn’t matter. I just wanted him. I meant it.

I won’t mention anything I don’t want to talk about. There were such things … I saw terrible things, perhaps more terrible than death. (She stops.)

I was sixteen when we met. He was seven years older than me. We were seeing each other for two years. I really love the area here in Minsk around the main post office, Volodarsky Street. He used to meet me there, under the clock. I lived near the worsted mill and took the No. 5 trolleybus. It didn’t stop at the post office, but a bit past it, near the children’s clothes store. It slowed down before the turn, which was just what I wanted. I was always a little bit late, so I could look out the window and gasp when I saw how handsome the man waiting for me was! For those two years, I was in a world of my own. I wouldn’t have known whether it was winter or summer. He took me to concerts, to see my favourite singer, Édith Piecha. We didn’t go running off to dances, because he couldn’t dance. We used to kiss, only kiss. He called me ‘my little girl’. On my birthday … again my birthday … It’s strange, all the most important things in my life seem to have happened on that day, so I won’t let anyone tell me they don’t believe in fate. I was standing under the clock. We had a date to meet at five, but he wasn’t there. At six, terribly upset, in tears, I wandered back to my bus stop. I was crossing the street, when my sixth sense told me to look round. He was running after me, despite the red light on the crossing, in his boiler suit and boots … They wouldn’t let him off work any earlier. I really loved the way he looked then. In camouflage fatigues, in a quilted bodywarmer – everything suited him. I went home with him and he changed his clothes. We decided to celebrate my birthday in a restaurant, but couldn’t get in. It was already too late in the evening, there were no seats left, and neither of us could afford to slip five or ten roubles (in the old currency) to the man on the door, like other people did. ‘Come on!’ he said, suddenly beaming. ‘Let’s buy some champagne and cakes and go to the park. We’ll celebrate your birthday there.’ Under the stars, under the sky! That’s the kind of man he was. We sat on a bench in Gorky Park until morning. I never had another birthday like it in my life. That’s when I said to him, ‘Marry me. I love you so much!’ He laughed and said, ‘You’re still little.’ But the next day, we took our application to the registry office …

Oh, how happy I was! I wouldn’t change anything in my life, even if someone warned me from above, from the stars, gave me a signal … On the day of the wedding, he couldn’t find his passport. We turned the whole house upside down looking for it. They had to formalize our marriage at the registry office on some form. ‘Oh, daughter, this is a bad omen,’ my mother said, in tears. Later, we found the passport in a pair of his old trousers in the attic. Love! Actually, it was more than love: it was a long process of falling more and more in love. How I danced in the morning in front of the mirror: ‘I’m pretty, I’m young and he loves me!’ Now I’m beginning to forget my face, the face I had when I was with him. I no longer see it in the mirror …

Can we talk about this? Put it into words? Some things are secret … To this day, I don’t really understand what this was. Until our very last month … He would call me in the night. He had desires. He loved more strongly even than before. When I looked at him during the day, I couldn’t believe what was happening during the nights. We really did not want to be parted from each other. I caressed and stroked him. At those times, I remembered our most joyful, happiest moments. I remembered him coming back from Kamchatka with a beard he had grown there, my birthday on that bench in the park. ‘Marry me!’ Should I tell you this? Is it all right? I went to him myself, the way a man goes to a woman. What could I give him other than medicines? What hope? He so much didn’t want to die. He had a belief that my love would save us. It was such a love! Only I never told my mother anything about it. She wouldn’t have understood. She would have condemned me. Cursed me.

This wasn’t the normal cancer everybody’s afraid of, but Chernobyl cancer, which is even more terrible. The doctors explained it to me: if the metastases had affected him from inside his body, he would have died quickly, but they crawled over the surface. Over his body, over his face. He had a kind of black growth over him. Something happened to his chin, his neck disappeared, his tongue flopped out. His blood vessels burst and he began to haemorrhage. ‘Oh dear,’ I would cry. ‘The bleeding again.’ From his neck, his cheeks, his ears. All over the place. I would bring cold water, apply compresses. They didn’t really help. It was horrific. The pillow would get soaked. I would bring a basin from the bathroom. The blood dripped into it, like a cow’s milk hitting the pail. That sound, so peaceful and rural. I still hear it now, in the nights. While he was conscious he would clap his hands – that was a signal we’d agreed. Phone them! Call an ambulance! He didn’t want to die. He was forty-five.

I called the emergency service, but they knew us already and didn’t want to come. ‘We can do nothing to help your husband.’ Well, at least they might give him an injection! Morphine. I would inject him myself. I learned how to do it, but the injection just spread, like a bruise under the skin. It wasn’t taken up. One time, I managed to phone through and the ambulance came. It was a young doctor. He approached him, but then backed away. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose he’s from Chernobyl, is he? Was he one of the people sent there?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he literally, I’m not exaggerating, squealed, ‘My dear girl, this just needs to end as quickly as possible! The sooner the better! I’ve seen Chernobyl victims die.’ My man was conscious, he heard him say that. The only good thing was that he didn’t know, he hadn’t guessed, that he was the only member of his team still alive. The last one. Another time, they sent a nurse from the clinic. She stood outside in the hallway and wouldn’t even come into the apartment. ‘Oh, I can’t bear this!’ Well, what about me? I could. I could do everything! What could I think of? How could I help him? He was screaming, he was in pain … crying out all day. I did find a way: I used the syringe to pour a bottle of vodka into him. It put him out like a light. He could forget everything. I didn’t think of that myself, other women told me about it, who had the same problem. His mother would come and say, ‘Why did you let him go to Chernobyl? How could you?’ But at that time, it never came into my head that there was any possibility of not letting him go – or into his, probably, that he could refuse. It was a different time, like wartime. And we were different then ourselves. I did ask him once, ‘Don’t you regret now that you went there?’ He shook his head. ‘No.’ He wrote in the notebook, ‘When I die, sell the car and the spare wheels, and don’t marry Tolik.’ That was his brother. Tolik fancied me.

I know secrets … I was sitting next to him. He was asleep. He still had lovely hair. I took a pair of scissors and quietly cut off a lock. He opened his eyes, saw what I was holding in my hands, and smiled. What I have left now is his watch, his army record card and his Chernobyl medal … (A long silence.) Oh, how happy I was! In the maternity hospital, I remember during the day I would sit by the window, waiting for him, looking out. I didn’t really understand anything, what was happening or where I was. I just wanted to look at him. I couldn’t see enough of him, as if I sensed this must all come to an end soon. In the morning, I would get him his breakfast and gaze at him as he ate it. Watch him shaving, walking down the street. I’m a good librarian, but I can’t understand how anyone could passionately love their job. I loved only him. Him alone. And I can’t go on without him. I wail at night, scream into the pillow so that the children won’t hear …

I never for a moment imagined we could be parted, that … I knew it, but couldn’t picture it. My mother, his brother … they were preparing me, hinting that the doctors were saying, advising, counselling … In short, there was a special hospital near Minsk where similarly doomed people had been taken in the past … veterans of the war in Afghanistan, without arms or legs, and now Chernobyl victims were being sent there. They urged that he would be better off there, with doctors constantly nearby. I didn’t want it, wanted to hear nothing about it. Then they worked on persuading him, and he started begging me: ‘Send me there. Don’t torture yourself.’ I was trying to get paid carer’s leave, or unpaid leave from work. The law, though, allowed carer’s leave only for looking after a sick child, and unpaid leave from work couldn’t be for more than a month. He filled up our entire notebook with his pleadings, and eventually made me promise I would take him there. His brother gave me a lift. On the outskirts of a village called Grebyonka stood a big wooden house with a well that had collapsed. There was an outside toilet. Pious old women in black … I didn’t even get out of the car. I didn’t go in. That night, I kissed him and said, ‘How could you ask me to agree to that? It’s not going to happen! Never!’ I kissed him all over.

Those horrible, horrible last weeks … Taking half an hour to piss into a half-litre jar. He wouldn’t look up, embarrassed. ‘How can you think like that?’ I kissed him. That last day, there was an amazing moment. He opened his eyes, sat up, smiled and said my name, ‘Valyushka!’ I was struck dumb with happiness, at hearing his voice again …

They telephoned from his workplace: ‘We want to bring him a certificate of honour.’ I told him, ‘Your lads want to come and give you a diploma.’ He shook his head. No, and no! But they came anyway … brought some money and the certificate, in a red folder with a picture of Lenin. I took it, and thought, ‘What is he dying for? In the newspapers, they’re writing it’s not just Chernobyl but Communism that has blown up. The Soviet way of life is finished, but that profile on the red folder is still the same.’ The lads wanted to say some words of appreciation to him, but he hid himself under the blanket, with only his hair showing. They stood over him for a time and then left. He didn’t want anyone to see him now. It was only me he would allow to see him. But we die alone. I called him, but he no longer opened his eyes. He was only just breathing …

For the funeral, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If anyone asked to see him, I drew them back. One woman collapsed … She had once loved him and I was jealous of her. ‘Let me see him one last time.’ ‘Go ahead.’

I didn’t tell you that, when he died, no one could bring themselves to go near him. They were all afraid. And family members can’t lay out a body themselves. It’s our Slavic tradition. They brought two male nurses from the mortuary. They asked for vodka: ‘We thought we’d seen it all,’ they admitted, ‘mangled corpses, knifed, bodies of children after a fire, but we’ve never seen anything like this …’ (She quietens down.) He died and lay there, so hot you couldn’t touch him. I stopped all the clocks in the house … It was seven in the morning … our clocks are all stopped to this day, you can’t restart them … The clock repairer came. He just shrugged and said, ‘It’s not mechanical, not physics. It’s metaphysics.’

Those first days, without him … I slept for two days. No one could wake me. I would get up, have a drink of water, not even eat, and then fall back on the pillow again. It seems strange to me now that I could sleep like that. When my friend’s husband was dying, he threw plates at her. He cried. He wanted to know why she was so young and beautiful. My husband just gazed and gazed at me. He wrote in our notebook, ‘When I die, have my remains cremated. I don’t want you to be frightened.’ Why did he make that decision? Well, there were various rumours around: even after death, Chernobyl victims were said to glow … At night, a light would appear above their graves. I had read myself that people gave a wide berth to the graves of the Chernobyl firemen who had died in Moscow hospitals and been buried nearby in Mitino. Local people wouldn’t bury their own dead alongside them. The dead afraid of the dead … to say nothing of the living. Because nobody yet understands Chernobyl. It’s all speculation, dread. He brought his white work clothes back from Chernobyl. Trousers, boiler suit. They were in our top cupboard until he died. Then my mother decided, ‘We need to throw out all his belongings.’ She was frightened, but I kept even his boiler suit. ‘You’re a criminal! You have young children in the house. A son and daughter.’ We took them outside the city and buried them. I’ve read a lot of books, I live among them, but they don’t explain anything. They brought us the urn. I wasn’t afraid of it. I touched the ashes and found something small in there, like seashells on the beach, in the sand. It was fragments of hip bone. Until then, when I touched his things, I hadn’t felt, hadn’t sensed anything, but then it was as if I had put my arms round him. During the night, I remember, he was dead and I was sitting beside him. Suddenly, there was a haze. I saw it above him a second time at the crematorium … His soul … No one else saw it, only me. I felt we had seen each other once more …

Oh, how happy I was, how happy! If he had to go away for his work, I counted the days and hours, the seconds, until we would be together again! I physically can’t do without him, I just can’t! (Covers her face with her hands.) I remember we went to visit his sister in the countryside. In the evening, she said, ‘I’ve made up this room for you, and that room for him.’ We looked at each other and burst out laughing. It had never occurred to us that we could sleep apart, in different rooms. We had to be together. I can’t live without him. I can’t! I’ve had plenty of offers, including from his brother. They’re so similar, in height, even the way they walk. But it seems to me that, if anyone else were to touch me, I would just cry and cry and never stop.

Who took him away from me? What right did they have? They handed him a call-up notice with a red stripe, dated 19 October 1986 … (She brings a photograph album and shows wedding pictures. When I want to say goodbye, she stops me.)

How can I go on living? I haven’t told you everything, not all of it. I was happy, madly happy. There are secrets … perhaps you shouldn’t include my name … People say their prayers in private. To themselves … (Trails off.) No, put my name! It will be a reminder to God … I want to know, I want to understand why we should have to bear this sort of suffering? What’s it for? At first, it seemed that after everything that had happened something dark would appear in my eyes, something alien. I wouldn’t be able to endure it. What saved me? What forced me back towards life? Brought me back? My son. I have another son … The first boy I had with him. He’s been ill for a long time. He’s grown up now, but sees the world through the eyes of a child, the eyes of a five-year-old. I want to be with him now. I hope to exchange my apartment for one closer to Novinki, the mental hospital there, where he’s lived all his life. That was the verdict of the doctors: for him to live, he needed to be there. I go every day. When he sees me, he asks, ‘Where is Daddy Misha? When will he come?’ Who else could ask me that? He’s waiting for him.

We will wait for him together. I will say my Chernobyl prayer, and he will look at the world with the eyes of a child …

Valentina Timofeyevna Apanasevich, wife of a clean-up worker