Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT A MAN WHOSE TOOTH WAS HURTING WHEN HE SAW CHRIST FALL

I was thinking about something else then. You’ll find this strange, but I was splitting up with my wife.

They came suddenly, gave me a notice, and said, There’s a car waiting downstairs. It was like 1937. They came at night to take you out of your warm bed. Then that stopped working: people’s wives would refuse to answer the door, or they’d lie, say their husbands were away on business, or vacation, or at the dacha with their parents. The soldiers would try to give them the notice, the wives would refuse to take it. So they started grabbing people at work, on the street, during a lunch break at the factory cafeteria. It was just like 1937.

But I was almost crazy by then. My wife had cheated on me, everything else didn’t matter. I got in their car. The guys who came for me were in street clothes, but they had a military bearing, and they walked on both sides of me, they were clearly worried I’d run off. When I got in the car, I remembered for some reason the American astronauts who’d flown to the moon, and one of them later became a priest, and the other apparently went crazy. I read that they thought they’d seen cities, some kind of human remnants there. I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they’re safer than samovars. They’re like stars and we’ll “light” the whole earth with them. But my wife had left me, and I could only think about that. I tried to kill myself a few times. We went to the same kindergarten, the same school, the same college. [Silent. Smokes.]

I told you. There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen. I had thoughts like, It’s not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn’t see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn’t care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn’t necessary. I have medals and awards—but that’s because I wasn’t afraid of dying. I didn’t care! It was even something of an out. They’d have buried me with honors, and the government would have paid for it.

You immediately found yourself in this fantastic world, where the apocalypse met the stone age. And for me it was sharper, barer. We lived in the forest, in tents, twenty kilometers from the reactor, like partisans. Partisans are the people who get called up for military training. We were between twenty-five and forty, some of us had university degrees, or vocational-technical degrees. I’m a history teacher, for example. Instead of machine guns they gave us shovels. We buried trash heaps and gardens. The women in the villages watched us and crossed themselves. We had gloves, respirators, and surgical robes. The sun beat down on us. We showed up in their yards like demons. They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say, “Boys, what is this—is it the end of the world?”

In the house the stove’s on, the lard is frying. You put a dosimeter to it, and you find it’s not a stove, it’s a little nuclear reactor. “Boys,” the men say, “have a seat at the table.” They want to be friendly. We say no. They say, “Come, we’ll drink a hundred grams. Have a seat. Tell us what’s going on.” What do we tell them? At the reactor the firefighters were stomping on burning fuel, and it was glowing, but they didn’t know what it was. What’s to know? We go in units, and each unit has one dosimeter. Different places have different levels of radiation. One of us is working where there are two roentgen, but another guy is working where there are ten. On the one hand, we have no rights, like prisoners, and on the other hand, we’re frightened. But I wasn’t frightened. I was watching everything from the side.

A group of scientists flew in on a helicopter. In special rubber suits, tall boots, protective goggles. Like they were going to the moon. This old woman comes up to one of them and says, “Who are you?” “I’m a scientist.” “Oh, a scientist. Look how he’s dressed up! Look at that mask! And what about us?” And she goes after him with a stick. I’ve thought a few times that someday they’re going to start hunting the scientists the way they used to hunt the doctors and drown them in the Middle Ages.

I saw a man who watched his house get buried. [Stops.] We buried houses, wells, trees. We buried the earth. We’d cut things down, roll them up into big plastic sheets . . . I told you, nothing heroic here.

One time we’re coming back late at night—we worked twelve-hour shifts, without any holidays, so the only time we could rest was at night. So we’re in the APC and we see a person walking through this abandoned village. We come a little closer and it’s a young guy with a rug on his back.

There’s a Zhiguli nearby. We stop, have a look: the trunk is stuffed with televisions and telephones. The APC turns around and wham: the Zhiguli just collapses, like a soda can. No one says a word.

We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over—as if it were alive—live tracts of land—with bugs, spiders, worms—I didn’t know any of them, what they were called, just bugs, spiders, ants. And they were small and big, yellow and black, all different colors. One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them.

Leonid Andreev, whom I love very much, has this parable about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss. And now he’s alien, he’ll never be the same as other people, even though Christ resurrected him.

Maybe that’s enough? I know you’re curious, people who weren’t there are always curious. But it was still a world of people, the same one. It’s impossible to live constantly in fear, a person can’t do it, so a little time goes by and normal human life resumes. [Continues.] The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls, had kids. They talked a lot about money. But it wasn’t for money that we went there. Or most people didn’t. Men worked because you have to work. They told us to work. You don’t ask questions. Some hoped for better careers out of it. Some robbed and stole. People hoped for the privileges that had been promised: an apartment without waiting and moving out of the barracks, getting their kid into a kindergarten, a car. One guy got scared, refused to leave the tent, slept in his plastic suit. Coward! He got kicked out of the Party. He’d yell, “I want to live!” There were all kinds of people. I met women there who’d volunteered to come, who’d demanded to come. They were told no, we need chauffers, plumbers, firemen, but they came anyway. All kinds of people. Thousands of volunteers guarding the storehouses at night. There were student units, and wire transfers to the fund for victims. Hundreds of people who donated blood and bone marrow.

And at the same time you could buy anything for a bottle of vodka. A medal, or sick leave. One kolkhoz chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialists so they’d cross his village off the lists for evacuation; another would bring the same case so that they’d put his village on the list—he’s already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk. No one checked the radiation reports. It was just your average Russian chaos. That’s how we live. Some things were written off and sold. On the one hand, it’s disgusting, and on the other hand—why don’t you all go fuck yourselves?

They sent students. They pulled the goose-foot out in the fields. Collected straw. A few couples were really young, a husband and wife. They were still walking around holding hands. That was impossible to watch. And the place was so beautiful! Really incredible. The horror was more horrible because it was so pretty. And people had to leave here. They had to run away, like evildoers, like criminals.

Every day they brought the paper. I’d just read the headlines: “Chernobyl—A Place of Achievement.” “The Reactor Has Been Defeated!” “Life Goes On.” We had political officers, they’d hold political discussions with us. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That’s why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our “courage and heroism.”

Our political officer read notices in the paper about our “high political consciousness and meticulous organization,” about the fact that just four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they’d given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can’t say. I wasn’t afraid to die, then. My wife didn’t even send a letter. In six months, not a single letter. [Stops.] Want to hear a joke? This prisoner escapes from jail, and runs to the thirty-kilometer zone at Chernobyl. They catch him, bring him to the dosimeters. He’s “glowing” so much, they can’t possibly put him back in prison, can’t take him to the hospital, can’t put him around people.

Why aren’t you laughing?

[Laughs.]

When I got there, the birds were in their nests, and when I left the apples were lying on the snow. We didn’t get a chance to bury all of them. We buried earth in the earth. With the bugs, spiders, leeches. With that separate people. That world. That’s my most powerful impression of that place—those bugs.

I haven’t told you anything, really. Just snippets. The same Leonid Andreev has a parable about a man who lived in Jerusalem, past whose house Christ was taken, and he saw and heard everything, but his tooth hurt. He watched Christ fall while carrying the cross, watched him fall and cry out. He saw all of this, but his tooth hurt, so he didn’t run outside. Two days later, when his tooth stopped hurting, people told him that Christ had risen, and he thought: “I could have been a witness to it. But my tooth hurt.”

Is that how it always is? My father defended Moscow in 1942. He only learned that he’d been part of a great event many years later, from books and films. His own memory of it was: “I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive.” That’s it.

And back then, my wife left me.

Arkady Filin, liquidator