Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT A MOONLIT LANDSCAPE

I suddenly started wondering about what’s better—to remember or to forget? I asked my friends. Some have forgotten, others don’t want to remember, because we can’t change anything anyway, we can’t even leave here.

Here’s what I remember. In the first days after the accident, all the books at the library about radiation, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even about X-rays, disappeared. Some people said it was an order from above, so people wouldn’t panic. There was even a joke that if Chernobyl had blown up near the Papuans, the whole world would be frightened, but not the Papuans. There were no medical bulletins, no information. Those who could got potassium iodide (you couldn’t get it at the pharmacy in our town, you had to really know someone). Some people took a whole bunch of these tablets and washed them down with liquor. Then they had to get their stomachs pumped at the hospital. Then we discovered a sign, which all of us followed: as long as there were sparrows and pigeons in town, humans could live there, too. I was in a taxi one time, the driver couldn’t understand why the birds were all crashing into his window, like they were blind. They’d gone crazy, or like they were committing suicide.

I remember coming back one time from a business trip. There was a moonlit landscape. On both sides of the road, to the very horizon, stretched these fields covered in white dolomite. The poisoned topsoil had been removed and buried, and in its place they brought white dolomite sand. It was like not-earth. This vision tortured me for a long time and I tried to write a story. I imagined what would be here in a hundred years: a person, or something else, would be galloping along on all fours, throwing out its long back legs, knees bent. At night it can see with a third eye, and its only ear, on the crown of its head, can even hear how ants run. Ants are the only thing left, everything else in heaven and earth has died.

I sent the story to a journal. They wrote back saying that this wasn’t a work of literature, but the description of a nightmare. Of course I lacked the talent. But there was another reason they didn’t take it, I think.

I’ve wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren’t writing much about it—they write about the war, or the camps, but here they’re silent. Why? Do you think it’s an accident? If we’d beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we’d understood Chernobyl. But we don’t know how to capture any meaning from it. We’re not capable of it. We can’t place it in our human experience or our human time-frame.

So what’s better, to remember or to forget?

Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Brovkin,

instructor at Gomel State University