Voices from Chernobyl

PART THREE:

AMAZED BY SADNESS

MONOLOGUE ABOUT WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW: DEATH CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL

At first, the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do? How do we save ourselves? After coming to terms with the fact that this would not be for one year or for two, but for many generations, we began to look back, turning the pages.

It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber’s. I’m preparing lunch when my husband comes back. “There’s some sort of fire at the nuclear plant,” he says. “They’re saying we are not to turn off the radio.” I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some sort of shining. It was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have them went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, “Look! Remember!” And these were people who worked at the reactor—engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn’t say that it had no smell—it wasn’t a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn’t the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and tears came to my eyes.

I didn’t sleep all night, and I heard the neighbors walking around upstairs, also not sleeping. They were carrying stuff around, banging things, maybe they were packing their belongings. I fought off my headache with Citramon tablets. In the morning I woke up and looked around and I remember feeling—this isn’t something I made up later, I thought it right then—something isn’t right, something has changed forever. At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military vehicles, we didn’t grow frightened—on the contrary, it calmed us down. Since the army has come to our aid, everything will be fine. We didn’t understand then that the peaceful atom could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics.

All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they’d take us away for three days, wash everything, check it over. The kids were told to take their school books. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos into his briefcase. The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad.

From the very first I felt that we were Chernobylites, that we were already a separate people. Our bus stopped overnight in a village; people slept on the floor in a school, others in a club. There was nowhere to go. One woman invited us to sleep at her house. “Come,” she said, “I’ll put down some linen for you. I feel bad for your boy.” Her friend started dragging her away from us. “Are you crazy? They’re contaminated!” When we settled in Mogilev and our son started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to a girl who said she didn’t want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him “Shiny.” His childhood had ended so early.

As we were leaving Pripyat there was an army column heading back in the other direction. There were so many military vehicles, that’s when I grew frightened. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all happening to someone else. I was crying, looking for food, sleeping, hugging my son, calming him down, but inside, this constant sense that I was just an observer. In Kiev they gave us some money, but we couldn’t buy anything: hundreds of thousands of people had been uprooted and they’d bought everything up and eaten everything. Many had heart attacks and strokes, right there at the train stations, on the buses. I was saved by my mother. She’d lived a long time and had lost everything more than once. The first time was in the 1930s, they took her cow, her horse, her house. The second time, there’d been a fire, the only thing she’d saved was me. Now she said, “We have to get through it. After all, we’re alive.”

I remember one thing: we’re on the bus, everyone’s crying. A man up front is yelling at his wife. “I can’t believe you’d be so stupid! Everyone else brought their things, and all we’ve got are these three-liter bottles!” The wife had decided that since they were taking the bus, she might as well bring some empty pickling bottles for her mother, who was on the way. They had these big bulging sacks next to their seats, we kept tripping over them the whole way to Kiev, and that’s what they came to Kiev with.

Now I sing in the church choir. I read the Bible. I go to church—it’s the only place they talk about eternal life. They comfort a person. You won’t hear those words anywhere else, and you so want to hear them.

I often dream that I’m riding through sunny Pripyat with my son. It’s a ghost town now. But we’re riding through and looking at the roses, there were many roses in Pripyat, large bushes with roses. I was young. My son was little. I loved him. And in the dream I’ve forgotten all the fears, as if I were just a spectator the whole time.

Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya,

evacuee from the town of Pripyat