Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

The author interviews herself on missing history and why Chernobyl calls our view of the world into question

I am a witness to Chernobyl. The most important event of the twentieth century, despite the terrible wars and revolutions for which that century will be remembered. More than twenty years have passed since the accident, yet I have been asking myself ever since: what was I bearing witness to, the past or the future? It would be so easy to slide into cliché. The banality of horror. But I see Chernobyl as the beginning of a new history: it offers not only knowledge but also prescience, because it challenges our old ideas about ourselves and the world. When we talk about the past or the future, we read our ideas about time into those words; but Chernobyl is, above all, a catastrophe of time. The radionuclides strewn across our earth will live for 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years. And longer. From the perspective of human life, they are eternal. What are we capable of comprehending? Is it in our power to extract and decipher the meaning of this still unfamiliar horror?

What is this book about? Why have I written it?

This is not a book on Chernobyl, but on the world of Chernobyl. Thousands of pages have already been written on the event itself, hundreds of thousands of metres of film devoted to it. What I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our stay on earth and in time. I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul. A day in the life of ordinary people. Here, though, everything was extraordinary: both the event itself and the people, as they settled into the new space. Chernobyl for them is no metaphor, no symbol: it is home. How many times has art rehearsed the apocalypse, offered different technological versions of doomsday? Now, though, we can be assured that life is infinitely more fantastical. A year after the disaster, someone asked me, ‘Everybody is writing. But you live here and write nothing. Why?’ The truth was that I had no idea how to write about it, what method to use, what approach to take. If, earlier, when I wrote my books, I would pore over the suffering of others, now my life and I have become part of the event. Fused together, leaving me unable to get any distance. The name of my small country, lost in some corner of Europe, which until then the world had heard almost nothing about, now blared out in every language. Our land became a diabolical Chernobyl laboratory, and we Belarusians became the people of Chernobyl. Wherever I go, people eye me with curiosity: ‘That’s where you’re from? What’s happening there?’ I could, of course, have quickly penned a book (the likes of which have appeared in their dozens) on that night’s events at the power plant; on who bears the blame; on how they hid the accident from their own people and from the whole world; on the number of tonnes of sand and concrete needed to build the sarcophagus placed over a reactor spewing death. But something stopped me, something was tying my hands. What was it? A feeling of mystery. At the time, this sudden haunting feeling hung over everything: our conversations, our actions and fears, and it followed in the wake of the event. The monstrous event. A feeling arose in all of us – whether voiced or unvoiced – that we had touched on the unknown. Chernobyl is a mystery that we have yet to unravel. An undeciphered sign. A mystery, perhaps, for the twenty-first century; a challenge for it. What has become clear is that, besides the challenges of Communism, nationalism and nascent religion which we are living with and dealing with, other challenges lie ahead: challenges more fiendish and all-embracing, although still hidden from view. Yet, after Chernobyl, something had cracked open.

The night of 26 April 1986. In the space of one night we shifted to another place in history. We took a leap into a new reality, and that reality proved beyond not only our knowledge but also our imagination. Time was out of joint. The past suddenly became impotent, it had nothing for us to draw on; in the all-encompassing – or so we’d believed – archive of humanity, we couldn’t find a key to open this door. Over and over in those days, I would hear, ‘I can’t find the words to express what I saw and lived through’, ‘Nobody’s ever described anything of the kind to me’, ‘Never seen anything like it in any book or movie’. Between the time when the disaster struck and when people began talking about it, there was a pause. A moment of muteness we all remember. Somewhere high up, decisions were made, secret instructions were written, helicopters were launched into the skies, vast numbers of vehicles were put on the roads, while down below we waited in fear for reports, we lived on rumours, and yet nobody spoke about the one big issue: what had really happened? Unable to find the words for these new feelings and emotions, unable to find emotions for these new words, we no longer knew how to express ourselves; but we were gradually immersed in the atmosphere of a new way of thinking, and so it has become possible today to pinpoint our state at the time. The truth is that facts alone were not enough; we felt an urge to look behind the facts, to delve into the meaning of what was happening. The effect of the shock. I was searching for those shocked people. They were speaking in new idioms. Voices sometimes broke through from a parallel world, as though talking in their sleep or raving. Everybody near Chernobyl began to philosophize. They became philosophers. The churches filled up again with people – with believers and former atheists. They were searching for answers that could not be found in physics or mathematics. The three-dimensional world came apart, and I have not since met anyone brave enough to swear again on the bible of materialism. We were dazzled by infinity. The philosophers and writers fell silent, derailed from the familiar tracks of culture and tradition. What was most interesting of all in those early days was not talking with the scientists, not with the officials or the high-ranking military men, but with the old peasants. They lived without Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, without the Internet, yet their minds somehow made space for the new picture of the world. Their consciousness did not crumble. Perhaps we would have coped better with a military nuclear crisis like Hiroshima. In fact, that was what we had been drilled for. But the accident happened at a civilian nuclear facility, and we were men and women of our times who believed, as we had been taught, that Soviet nuclear power stations were the most reliable in the world: so reliable, you could even build one in Red Square. Military nuclear power meant Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whereas peaceful nuclear power meant an electric light in every home. Nobody had guessed yet that military and peaceful nuclear power were in fact twins. Accomplices. We grew wiser, the whole world grew wiser, but only after Chernobyl. Today, like living black boxes, Belarusians are recording information for the future. For everybody.

I’ve spent a long time writing this book. Almost twenty years. I met and talked with former workers at the power plant, with scientists, doctors, soldiers, displaced people and people who returned to their homes in the Zone. With people whose world was Chernobyl; for them, everything inside and out was poisoned, not just the land and the water. They told their stories, searched for answers. Together we pondered. Often they were in a hurry, afraid that time would run out; I didn’t recognize that the price of their witness would be their lives. ‘Record this,’ they would say. ‘We didn’t understand everything we saw, but let’s leave this behind. Someone will read it and make sense of it. Later, after we’re gone.’ And they had good reason to hurry: many of them are no longer alive. But they managed to send a message.

Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin’s Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we appear to see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: ‘nuclear’, ‘explosion’, ‘heroes’. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials.

My first journey into the Zone.

The orchards were blossoming, young grass sparkling joyfully in the sun. Birds were singing. Such a profoundly familiar world. My first thought was: everything here is as it should be and carrying on as usual. Here was the same earth, the same water and trees. And their shapes, colours and scents were eternal. It was in nobody’s power to alter a thing. But on the first day, I was warned: don’t pick the flowers, don’t sit on the ground, don’t drink the water from the spring. Towards evening, I watched the cowherds trying to drive their weary cattle into the river, but the cows approached the water and turned straight back. Somehow they could sense the danger. And I was told the cats had stopped eating the dead mice, leaving them strewn over the fields and yards. Death lurked everywhere, but this was a different sort of death. Donning new masks, wearing a strange guise. Man had been caught off guard, he was not ready. Ill-prepared as a species, our entire natural apparatus, attuned to seeing, hearing and touching, had malfunctioned. Our eyes, ears and fingers were no longer any help, they could serve no purpose, because radiation is invisible, with no smell or sound. It is incorporeal. All our lives, we had been at war or preparing for war, we were so knowledgeable about it – and then suddenly this! The image of the adversary had changed. We’d acquired a new enemy. Or rather enemies. Now we could be killed by cut grass, a caught fish or game bird. By an apple. The world around us, once pliant and friendly, now instilled fear. Elderly evacuees, who had not yet understood they were leaving forever, looked up at the sky: ‘The sun is shining. There’s no smoke or gas, nobody is shooting. It doesn’t look like war, but we have to flee like refugees.’ A world strange yet familiar.

How can we make sense of where we are? What is happening to us, right here and now? There is no one to ask.

In the Zone and around it, there were astonishing numbers of military vehicles. Soldiers were marching with brand-new assault rifles. In full combat gear. For some reason, what stuck in my mind was not the helicopters and armoured personnel carriers, but those assault rifles. The weapons. Men with guns in the Zone. Who were they meant to fire at, defend themselves against? Physics? Unseen particles? Gun down the contaminated earth or the trees? The KGB were working at the power plant. They were looking for spies and saboteurs. The accident was rumoured to be a Western intelligence operation designed to undermine the Socialist order. We needed to stay vigilant.

It was a picture of war. This culture of war crumbled before my eyes. We entered an opaque world where evil offered no explanation, would not reveal itself and did not know the rules.

I watched people transform from their pre-Chernobyl selves into Chernobyl people.

More than once – and this is something to think about – I have heard people say that the behaviour of the firemen extinguishing the fire at the power station on the first night, and the behaviour of the clean-up workers later, resembled suicide. Collective suicide. The clean-up workers often did the job without protective clothing, unquestioningly heading into places where even the robots were malfunctioning. The truth about the high doses they were receiving was concealed from them, yet they were compliant, and later even delighted with the government certificates and medals awarded to them just before they died. Many did not survive that long. So what are they: heroes or suicides? Victims of Soviet ideology and upbringing? For some reason, as the years go by, it is being forgotten that they saved their country. They saved Europe. Just imagine for a moment the scene if the other three reactors had exploded …

They were heroes. Heroes of the new history. Sometimes compared to the heroes at the Battle of Stalingrad or the Battle of Waterloo, but they were saving something greater than their homeland. They were saving life itself. Life’s continuity. With Chernobyl, man imperilled everything, the whole divine creation, where thousands of other creatures, animals and plants live alongside man. When I visited the clean-up workers, I heard their stories of how – first on the scene and for the first time ever – they dealt with the new human yet inhuman task of burying earth in the earth, meaning they buried in concrete bunkers contaminated layers of soil, along with their entire populace of beetles, spiders and maggots. Insects whose names they didn’t even know or couldn’t remember. They had an entirely different understanding of death, encompassing everything: from the birds to the butterflies. They were already living in a completely different world – with a new right to life, new responsibilities and a new sense of guilt. Their stories continually featured the idea of time. They were constantly saying, ‘the first time’, ‘never again’, ‘forever’. They remembered driving through the deserted villages, occasionally meeting some solitary old men who hadn’t wanted to leave with the others or had later returned from some unfamiliar places. Those men would sit in the evenings around a rushlight. They mowed with a scythe, reaped with a sickle, chopped down trees with an axe, turned in prayer to the animals and spirits. To God. Just like 200 years earlier. While somewhere high above spacecraft were flying. Time had bitten its own tail, the beginning and end had merged. Chernobyl, for those who were there, did not end in Chernobyl. They were returning not from war, but almost from another world. I realized that they were consciously converting their suffering into new knowledge, donating it to us. Telling us: mind you do something with this knowledge, put it to some use.

The monument to Chernobyl’s heroes is the man-made sarcophagus in which they laid to rest the nuclear fire. A twentieth-century pyramid.

In the land of Chernobyl, man’s plight makes you sad, but the plight of the animals is even more pitiful. I’ll explain. After the humans had gone, what was left in the dead zone? The old graveyards and the so-called bio-burial sites: the cemeteries for animals. Man saved only himself: everything else he betrayed. Once the villages were evacuated, units of armed soldiers and hunters came in and shot the animals. The dogs ran over to the sound of humans. So did the cats. The horses could not understand what was happening. They were in no way to blame – neither the beasts nor the birds, yet they died silently, which was even worse. There was a time when the Mexican Indians, and indeed our own Slav ancestors in pre-Christian Rus, would ask for forgiveness from the animals and birds they killed for food. In ancient Egypt, animals had the right of complaint against humans. In a papyrus preserved in a pyramid, it is written that no complaint by any bull has been found against N. Before departing for the Kingdom of the Dead, the Egyptians would recite a prayer containing the statement: ‘I hurt no creature, deprived no animal of grain or grass.’

What has the Chernobyl experience taught us? Has it turned us towards this silent and mysterious world of those other beings?

Once I saw the soldiers go into an abandoned village and begin shooting.

The helpless cries of the animals. They were shrieking in all their different languages. This was written about in the New Testament. Jesus Christ comes to the Temple in Jerusalem and sees animals prepared for ritual sacrifice: with throats slit, dripping blood. Jesus cries out: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ He might have added, ‘Ye have made it a place of carnage.’ To my mind, the hundreds of bio-burial sites left in the Zone are like pagan temples. Only, to which gods were these sacrifices being offered? The God of Science and Knowledge, or the God of Fire? In this sense, Chernobyl has surpassed the camps of Auschwitz and Kolyma. It has gone beyond the Holocaust. It proposes finitude. It leads to a dead-end.

With fresh eyes, I look at the world around me. A little ant is crawling on the ground, and now it is closer to me. A bird flies in the sky, and it too is closer. The distance between us shrinks. The previous chasm is gone. All is life.

Something an old beekeeper said remains in my memory. I have heard the same thing from others. ‘In the morning, I went out into the garden and something was missing, the usual sound was gone. Couldn’t hear a single bee – not one! Eh? What was that about? And they wouldn’t fly out the second day. Nor the third. Later, they told us there was an accident at the power plant, which wasn’t far off. But for a good while we didn’t know. The bees knew, but we didn’t. From now on, if anything happens, I’ll keep an eye on them. On how they live.’ Here is another example. I started chatting with some anglers on the river. They told me, ‘We were waiting for them to explain it on the TV. For them to tell us how to keep safe. But the worms, just ordinary worms, they buried themselves deep in the ground, a good half a metre or one metre down. We couldn’t make sense of it. We kept digging and digging, but couldn’t find a single worm for our fishing.’

Who was here first? Who is the stronger and more enduring on the earth: us or them? We could learn a thing or two from the animal kingdom about survival. About how to live too.

Two disasters coincided: a social one, as the Soviet Union collapsed before our eyes, the giant Socialist continent sinking into the sea; and a cosmic one – Chernobyl. Two global eruptions. The first felt closer, more intelligible. People were wrapped up in their day-to-day world of what to buy and where to go. What to believe. Which banner to rally round next. Or whether we should now learn to live for ourselves, find our own lives. The idea was unfamiliar to us, we had never lived like that and did not know how to set about it. Each and every one of us was going through this dilemma. But we would have liked to forget Chernobyl, because our minds just wanted to capitulate. It was a cataclysm for our minds. The world of our beliefs and values had been blown apart. Had we conquered Chernobyl or understood it fully, we would have spent more time thinking and writing about it. Thus we’ve ended up living in one world, while our minds remain stuck in another. Reality slips away; our consciousness doesn’t have room for it.

That’s right. We can’t catch up with reality.

Here is an example. We’re still using the old concepts of ‘near and far’, ‘them and us’. But what do ‘near’ and ‘far’ actually mean after Chernobyl, when, by day four, the fallout clouds were drifting above Africa and China? The earth suddenly became so small, no longer the land of Columbus’s age. That world was infinite. Now we have a different sense of space. We are living in a space that is bankrupt. What is more, over the last hundred years people have begun to live longer, yet our lifespan is still tiny compared to the life of the radionuclides that have settled on our land. Many of them will live for thousands of years. We can’t dream of even a glimpse of such a distant future! In their presence, you experience a new sense of time. And this is all Chernobyl, its imprint. The same thing is happening to our relationships with the past, science fiction, knowledge. The past has proved impotent, and all that is left of knowledge is an awareness of how little we know. We are going through an emotional retuning. Instead of the usual words of comfort, a doctor tells a woman whose husband is dying, ‘No going near him! No kissing! No cuddling! This is no longer the man you love, it’s a contaminated object.’ Here, even Shakespeare bows out, even Dante. The question is whether to go near or not. To kiss or not. One of the heroines of my book went near and kissed, and remained by her husband’s side until his death. She paid for it with her health and the life of their baby. But how can you choose between love and death? Between the past and an unfamiliar present? Who could presume to judge the wives and mothers who did not sit with their dying husbands and sons? Next to those radioactive objects. In their world, love has changed. And death too.

Everything has changed, except us.

It takes at least fifty years for an event to become history, but here we have to follow the trail while it is still fresh.

The Zone. It is a world of its own. First it was invented by science-fiction authors, then literature gave way to reality. We cannot go on believing, like characters in a Chekhov play, that in a hundred years’ time mankind will be thriving. Life will be beautiful! We have lost that future. A hundred years on, we have had Stalin’s Gulags and Auschwitz. Chernobyl. And September 11 in New York. It is hard to comprehend how all this could happen within one generation, within the lifetime of my father, for example, who is now eighty-three years old. Yet he survived it!

What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. The roads going nowhere, the cables leading nowhere. You find yourself wondering just what this is: the past or the future.

It sometimes felt to me as if I was recording the future.