Voices from Chernobyl

THREE MONOLOGUES ABOUT A HOMELAND

Speaking: The K. family—mother and daughter, plus a man who doesn’t speak a word (the daughter’s husband).

Daughter:

At first I cried day and night. I wanted to cry and talk. We’re from Tajikistan, from Dushanbe. There’s a war there.

I shouldn’t be talking about this now. I’m expecting—I’m pregnant. But I’ll tell you. They come onto the bus one day to check our passports. Just regular people, except with automatic weapons. They look through the documents and then push the men out of the bus. And then, right there, right outside the door, they shoot them. They don’t even take them aside. I would never have believed it. But I saw it. I saw how they took out two men, one was so young, handsome, and he was yelling something at them. In Tajik, in Russian. He was yelling that his wife just gave birth, he has three little kids at home. But they just laughed, they were young, too, very young. Just regular people, except with automatic weapons. He fell. He kissed their sneakers. Everyone was quiet, the whole bus. Then we drove off, and we heard: ta-ta-ta. I was afraid to look back. [Starts crying.]

I’m not supposed to be talking about this. I’m expecting a baby. But I’ll tell you. Just one thing, though: don’t write my last name. I’m Svetlana. We still have relatives there. They’ll kill them. I used to think we’d never have any more wars. Such a big country, I thought, my beloved country. The biggest! During Soviet times they’d tell us that we were living poorly and humbly because there had been a big war, and the people suffered, but now that we have a mighty army, no one will ever touch us again. No one will defeat us! But then we started shooting one another. It’s not a war like there used to be, like my grandfather remembered, he marched all the way to Germany. Now it’s a neighbor shooting his neighbor, boys who went to school together, and now they kill each other, and rape girls that they sat next to in school. Everyone’s gone crazy.

Our husbands are silent. The men here are silent. They won’t say anything to you. People yelled at them as they were leaving, that they were running away just like women. That they were cowards, betraying their motherland. But is that bad? Is it a bad thing not to be able to shoot? My husband is a Tajik, he was supposed to go and kill people. But he said: “Let’s leave. I don’t want to go to war. I don’t need an automatic.” That’s his land, but he left, because he doesn’t want to kill another Tajik, the same kind of Tajik as he is. But he’s lonely here, his brothers are all still there, fighting. One already got killed. His mother lives there. His sisters. We rode here on the Dushanbe train, the windows were broken, it was cold and unheated. No one was shooting, but they threw rocks at the train, broke the windows. “Russians, get out! Occupiers! Quit robbing us!” But he’s a Tajik, and he had to listen to all this. And our kids heard it. Our daughter was in first grade, she was in love with a boy, a Tajik. She came home from school: “Mom, what am I, a Tajik or Russian?” How do you explain?

I’m not supposed to be talking about this . . . but I’ll tell you. The Pamir Tajiks are fighting the Kulyab Tajiks. They’re all Tajiks, they have the same Koran, the same faith, but the Kulyabs kill the Pamirs, and the Pamirs kill the Kulyabs. First they’d go out into the city square, yelling, praying. I wanted to understand what was happening, so I went too. I asked one of the old men: “What are you protesting against?” They said: “Against the Parliament. They told us this was a very bad person, this Parliament.” Then the square emptied and they started shooting. All of a sudden it became a different country, an unrecognizable country. The East! And before that we thought we were living on our own land. By Soviet laws. There are so many Russian graves there, but there’s no one to cry at them. They graze livestock on the Russian cemeteries. And goats. Old Russian men wander around, going through trash cans . . .

I worked in a maternity ward as a nurse. I had night duty. This woman is giving birth, it’s a difficult birth, and she’s yelling—suddenly an orderly runs in, she’s not wearing gloves, no robe. What’s going on? To come into the maternity ward like that? “Girls, there are people! They’re wearing masks, they have guns.” Then they come in: “Give us the drugs! And the alcohol!” “There aren’t any drugs or alcohol.” They put the doctor up against the wall—give it here! And then the woman who’s giving birth yells with relief, happily. And the baby starts crying, it’s just-just come out. I lean over it to look, I can’t even remember now whether it was a boy or a girl. It didn’t have a name or anything yet. And these robbers say to us: what is it, a Kulyab or a Pamir? Not, boy or girl, but Kulyab or Pamiri? We don’t say anything. They start yelling: “What is it?” We don’t say anything. So they grab the little baby, it’s been on this earth for maybe five, ten minutes, and they throw it out the window. I’m a nurse, I’d never seen a baby die before. And here—I’m not supposed to remember this now. [Starts crying.] How are you supposed to live after that? How are you supposed to give birth? [Cries.]

After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn’t want to get out of bed. [Cries.] I’d get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself. I couldn’t give birth there. So we came here. To Belarus. To Narovlya. Small, quiet town. And don’t ask me anything else. I’ve told you everything. [Cries.] Wait. I want you to know. I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man. At first we asked people: “Where is the radiation?” “See where you’re standing? That’s where it is.” So it’s everywhere? [Cries.] There are many empty houses. People left. They were scared.

But I’m not scared here the way I was there. We were left without a homeland, we’re no-one’s. The Germans all went back to Germany, the Tatars to the Crimea, when they were allowed to, but no one needs Russians. What are we supposed to hope for? What do we wait for? Russia never saved its people, because it’s so big, it’s endless. And to be honest, I don’t feel like Russia is my homeland. We were raised differently, our homeland is the Soviet Union. Now it’s impossible to know how you’re supposed to save yourself. At least here no one’s playing with guns, and that’s good. Here they gave us a house, and they gave my husband a job. We wrote a letter to our friends back home, and they came yesterday. For good. They came at night and they were afraid to come out of the train station, they stayed there all night, sitting on their suitcases, not letting their kids out. And then they see: people are walking down the street, laughing, smoking. They showed them our street, escorted them right to our house. They couldn’t believe it, because back there we stopped living normal lives. Here they got up in the morning and went to the store, they saw butter, and cream—and right there, in the store, they told us this themselves, they bought five bottles of cream and drank them right there. People were looking at them like they were crazy. But they hadn’t seen cream or butter in two years. You can’t buy bread in Tajikistan. There’s a war. It’s impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t seen what it’s like.

My soul was dead there. I would have given birth to something without a soul. There aren’t many people here, and the houses are empty. We live near the forest. I don’t like it when there are a lot of people. Like at the train station. Or during the war. [Breaks into tears completely and stops talking.]

Mother:

The war—that’s the only thing I can talk about. Why did we come here? To Chernobyl? Because no one’s going to chase us out of here. No one will kick us off this land. It’s not anyone’s land now. God took it back. People left it.

In Dushanbe I was deputy chief of the train station. There was one other deputy, a Tajik. Our kids grew up together, went to school, we all got together on the holidays: New Year’s, May Day. We drank beer together, ate plof together. He’d call me “sister, my sister, my Russian sister.” And then one day he comes in, we sat in the same office, and he stops in front of my desk and yells:

“When are you going back to your Russia, huh? This is our land!”

I thought I’d go crazy. I jumped up at him.

“Where’s your coat from?”

“Leningrad,” he said. He was surprised.

“Take off that Russian coat, you son-of-a-bitch!” And I tore the coat off him. “Where’s your hat from? You bragged to me they sent it from Siberia! Off with it, you! And the shirt! The pants! Those were made in Moscow! They’re Russian, too!”

I’d have stripped him to his underwear. He was a big guy, I came up to his shoulder, but I’d have torn everything off him. People were already gathering around. He’s crying: “Get away from me, you’re crazy!”

“No, give me back everything that’s mine, that’s Russian! I’ll take it all!”

I almost went crazy.

“Give me your socks! Your shoes!”

We worked at night and during the day. Trains were leaving overfilled. People were running. Many Russians left—thousands, tens of thousands. There’s still one Russia. I see the Moscow train off at two in the morning, and there are still some kids in the hall from the town of Kurgan-Tyube, they didn’t make it to the train. I covered them up, I hid them. Two men come over to me, they’ve got automatics.

“Oh, boys, what are you doing here?” Meanwhile my heart’s beating.

“It’s your own fault, all your doors are wide open.”

“I was sending off a train. I didn’t get a chance to close them.”

“Who are those kids over there?”

“Those are ours, from Dushanbe.”

“Maybe they’re from Kurgan? They’re Kulyabs?”

“No, no. They’re ours.”

So they left. And if they’d opened the hall? They’d have . . . And me, too, while they were at it, a bullet to the head. There’s only one government there—the man with the gun. In the morning I put the kids on the train to Astrakhan, I told the conductors to transport them like they do watermelons, to not open the door. [Silent. Then cries for a long time.] Is there anything more frightening than people? [Silent again.]

One time, when I was here already, I was walking down the street and I started looking back, because I thought someone was following me. Not a day went by there when I didn’t think of death. I always left the house wearing clean clothes, a freshly laundered blouse, skirt, underthings. Just in case I got killed. Now I walk through the forest by myself and I’m not afraid of anyone. There aren’t any people in the forest, not a soul. I walk and wonder whether all of that really happened to me or not? Sometimes I’ll run into some hunters: they have rifles, a dog, and a dosimeter. They also have guns, but they’re not like the others, they don’t hunt people. If I hear gunfire, I know they’re shooting some crows or chasing off a rabbit. [Silent.] So I’m not scared here. I can’t be afraid of the earth, the water. I’m afraid of people. Over there he goes to the market and buys an automatic weapon for a hundred dollars.

I remember one guy, a Tajik, I saw him chasing this other guy. He was chasing another person! The way he was running, the way he was breathing, I could tell he wanted to kill him. But the other one got away. He hid. And this one comes back, he walks past me and says, “Ma’am, where do I get some water around here?” He’s so casual about it, like nothing happened. We had a bucket of water at the station, I showed it to him. Then I looked him in the eye and I said: “Why are you chasing one another? Why are you killing?” And he looked like he felt ashamed. “All right, ma’am, not so loud.” But when they’re together, they’re different. If there’d been three of them, or even two, they’d have put me up against the wall. When you’re one-on-one you can still talk to a person.

We got to Tashkent from Dushanbe, but we had to go further, to Minsk. There weren’t any tickets—none! It’s very clever the way they have it set up, until you’ve given someone a bribe and you’re on the plane, there are endless problems: it’s too heavy, or too much volume, you can’t have this, you have to put that away. They made me put everything on the scale twice, until I realized what was happening and gave them some money. “Should have done that from the start, instead of arguing so much.” Everything’s so simple! Our container, it weighed two tons, they made us unload it. “You’re coming from a war zone, maybe you’ve got some firearms in there? Marijuana?” They kept us there two nights. I went to the station boss but in the waiting room I met a good woman, she explained things to me: “You won’t get anywhere here, you’ll demand fairness, meanwhile they’ll throw your container in a field and take everything you own.” So what do we do? We spent the whole night picking through it: clothes, some mattresses, an old refrigerator, two bags of books. “You’re shipping valuable books?” We looked: Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned. We laughed. “How many refrigerators do you have?” “Just one, and that one’s been broken.” “Why didn’t you bring declarations?” “How were we supposed to know? It’s the first time we’ve run away from a war.” We lost two homelands at once—Tajikistan and the Soviet Union.

I walk through the forest and think. Everyone else is always watching television—what’s happening there? How is everyone? But I don’t want to.

We had a life . . . a different life. I was considered an important person, I had a military rank, lieutenant colonel of train-based troops. Here I was unemployed until I found work cleaning up at the town council. I wash the floors. This life has passed, and I don’t have enough strength for another. Some people here feel sorry for us, others are unhappy—“the refugees are stealing the potatoes, they dig them up at night.” My mother said that during the big war people felt sorry for each other more. Recently they found a horse in the forest that had gone wild. It was dead. In another place they found a rabbit. They hadn’t been killed, but they were dead. This made everyone worried. But when they found a dead bum, no one worried about that. For some reason everyone’s grown used to dead people.

Lena M.—from Kyrgyzstan. She sits at the entrance to her home as if posing for a photograph. Her five children sit near her, as does their cat, Metelitsa, whom they brought with them:

We left like we were leaving a war. We grabbed everything, and the cat followed us to the train station, so we took him, too. We were on the train for twelve days. The last two days all we had left was some canned cabbage salad and boiled water. We guarded the door—with a crowbar, and an axe, and a hammer. I’ll put it this way—one night some looters attacked us. They almost killed us. They’ll kill you now for a television or refrigerator. It was like we were leaving a war, although they’re not shooting yet in Kyrgyzstan. There were massacres, even under Gorbachev, in Osh, the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks—but it settled down somehow. But we’re Russian, though the Kyrgyz are afraid of it too. You’d be in line for bread and they’d start yelling, “Russians, go home! Kyrgyzstan for the Kyrgyz!” And they’d push you out of line. And then they’d add something in Kyrgyz, like, Here we are, there’s not even enough bread for us, and we have to feed them? I don’t really know their language very well, I just learned a few words so I could haggle at the market, buy something.

We had a motherland, and now it’s gone. What am I? My mother’s Ukrainian, my father’s Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We’re all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says “Russian,” but we’re not Russian. We’re Soviet! But that country—where I was born—no longer exists. The place we called our motherland doesn’t exist, and neither does that time, which was also our motherland. We’re like bats now. I have five children. The oldest is in eighth grade, and the youngest is in kindergarten. I brought them here. Our country no longer exists, but we do.

I was born there. I grew up there. I helped build a factory, then I worked at the factory. “Go back where you’re from; this is all ours.” They didn’t let me take anything but my kids. “This is all ours.” And where is mine? People are fleeing. All the Russians are. The Soviets. No one needs them, and no one is waiting for them.

And I was happy once. All my children were born of love. I gave birth like this: boy, boy boy, and then girl, girl. I don’t want to talk anymore. I’ll start crying. [But she adds a bit more.] We’ll wait in Chernobyl. This is our home now. Chernobyl is our home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there’s still a Lenin statue. [When we’re already at the gate, saying goodbye, she says some more.] Early one morning the neighbors are hammering away on the house, taking the boards off the windows. I see a woman. I say, “Where are you from?” “From Chechnya.” She doesn’t say anything more, just starts crying . . .

People ask me, they’re surprised, they don’t understand. “Why are you killing your children?” Oh, God, where do you find the strength to meet the things that the next day is going to bring? I’m not killing them, I’m saving them. Here I am, forty years old and completely gray. And they’re surprised. They don’t understand. They say: “Would you bring your kids to a place where there was cholera or the plague?” But that’s the plague and that’s cholera. This fear that they have here in Chernobyl, I don’t know about it. It’s not part of my memory.