Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT HOW THE FRIGHTENING THINGS IN LIFE HAPPEN QUIETLY AND NATURALLY

From the very beginning—we heard that something had happened somewhere. I didn’t even hear the name of the place, but it was somewhere far from our Mogilev. Then my brother came running home from school, he said all the kids were getting pills. So apparently something really had happened.

And still we had a great time on May 1. We came home late at night, and my window had been blown open by the wind. I would remember that later on.

I worked at the inspection center for environmental defense. We were waiting for some kind of instructions, but we didn’t receive any. There were very few professionals on our staff, especially among the directors: they were retired colonels, former Party workers, retirees or other undesirables. If you messed up somewhere else, they’d send you to us. Then you sit there shuffling papers. They only started making noise after our Belarussian writer Aleksei Adamovich spoke out in Moscow, raising the alarm. How they hated him! It was unreal. Their children live here, and their grandchildren, but instead of them it’s a writer calling to the world: save us! You’d think some sort of self-preservation mechanism would kick in. Instead, at all the Party meetings, and during smoke breaks, all you heard about was “those writers.” “Why are they sticking their noses where they don’t belong? They’ve really let themselves go! We have instructions! We need to follow orders! What does he know? He’s not a physicist! We have the Central Committee, we have the General Secretary!” I think I understood then, for the first time, a bit of what it was like in 1937. How that felt.

At that time my notions of nuclear power stations were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we’d been taught that this was a magical factory that made “energy out of nothing,” where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren’t prepared. And also there wasn’t any information. We got stacks of paper marked “Top Secret.” “Reports of the accident: secret”; “Results of medical observations: secret”; “Reports about the radioactive exposure of personnel involved in the liquidation of the accident: secret.” And so on. There were rumors: someone read in some paper, someone heard, someone said . . . Some people listened to what was being said in the West, they were the only ones talking about what pills to take and how to take them. But most often the reaction was: our enemies are celebrating, but we still have it better. On May 9th the veterans will still go out on their victory parade. Even those who were fighting the fire at the reactor, as it later turned out, were living among rumors. “I think it’s dangerous to take the graphite in your hands. I think . . .”

This crazy woman appeared in town suddenly. She’d walk around the market saying, “I’ve seen the radiation. It’s blue-blue, it spills over everything.” People stopped buying milk and cottage cheese at the market. An old lady would be standing with her milk, no one’s buying it. “Don’t worry,” she’d say, “I don’t let my cow out into the field, I bring her her grass myself.” If you drove out of town you’d see these scarecrows: a cow all wrapped in cellophane, and then an old farmer woman next to her, also wrapped in cellophane. You could cry, you could laugh.

And by this point they started sending us out on inspections. I was sent to a timber processing plant. They weren’t receiving any less timber—the plan hadn’t been altered, so they kept to it. I turned on my instrument at the warehouse and it started going nuts. The boards were okay, but if I turned it on near the brooms, it went off the chart. “Where are the brooms from?” “Krasnopol.” And Krasnopol as it later turned out was the most contaminated place in the Mogilev region. “We have one shipment left. The others went out already.” And how are you going to find them in all the towns they were sent to?

There was something else I was afraid of leaving out . . . Oh, right! Chernobyl happened, and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren’t used to it, that everyone has his separate life. Until then no one needed this life. But now you had to think: what are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What’s dangerous, what isn’t? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living—how? As an entire village, as a collective—a factory, a kolkhoz. We were Soviet people, we were collectivized. I was a Soviet person, for example. Very Soviet. When I was in college, I went every summer with the Student Communist youth group. We’d go work for a summer, and the money was transferred to some Latin American CP. Our unit was working at least partially for Uruguay’s.

Then we changed. Everything changed. It takes a lot of work to understand this. And also there’s our inability to speak out.

I’m a biologist. My dissertation was on the behavior of bees. I spent two months on an uninhabited island. I had my own bee’s nest there. They took me into their family after I’d spent a week hanging around. They wouldn’t let anyone closer than three meters, but they were letting me walk up next to them after a week. I fed them jam off a match right into the nest. Our teacher used to say: “Don’t destroy an anthill, it’s a good form of alien life.” A bee’s nest is connected to the entire forest, and I gradually also became part of the landscape. A little mouse would come running up and sit on my sneakers—he was a wild forest mouse but he already thought I was part of the scene, I was here yesterday, I’d be there the next day.

After Chernobyl—there was an exhibit of children’s drawings, one of them had a stork walking through a field, and then under it, “No one told the stork.” Those were my feelings too. But I had to work. We went around the region collecting samples of water, earth, and taking them to Minsk. Our assistants were grumbling: “We’re carrying hotcakes.” We had no defense, no special clothing. You’d be sitting in the front seat, and behind you there were samples just glowing.

They had protocols written up for burying radioactive earth. We buried earth in earth—such a strange human activity. According to the instructions, we were supposed to conduct a geological survey before burying anything to determine that there was no ground water within four to six meters of the burial site, and that the depth of the pit wasn’t very great, and also that the walls and bottom of the pit be lined with polyethylene film. That’s what the instructions said. In real life it was of course different. As always. There was no geological survey. They’d point their fingers and say, “Dig here.” The excavator digs. “How deep did you go?” “Who the hell knows? I stopped when I hit water.” They were digging right into the water.

They’re always saying: it’s a holy people, and a criminal government. Well I’ll tell you a bit later what I think about that, about our people, and about myself.

My longest assignment was in the Krasnopolsk region, which as I said was the worst. In order to keep the radionuclides from washing off the fields into the rivers, we needed to follow the instructions again. You had to plow double furrows, leave a gap, and then again put in double furrows, and so on with the same intervals. You had to drive along all the small rivers and check. So I get to the regional center on a bus, and then obviously I need a car. I go to the chairman of the regional executive. He’s sitting in his office with his head in his hands: no one changed the plan, no one changed the harvesting operations, just as they’d planted the peas, so they were harvesting them, even though everyone knows that peas take in radiation the most, as do all beans. And there are places out there with 40 curies or more. So he has no time for me at all. All the cooks and nurses have run off from the kindergartens. The kids are hungry. In order to take someone’s appendix out, you need to take them in an ambulance to the next region, sixty kilometers on a road that’s as bumpy as a washboard—all the surgeons have taken off. What car? What double furrows? He has no time for me.

So then I go to the military people. They were young guys, spending six months there. Now they’re all very sick. They gave me an armored personnel carrier with a crew—no, wait, it was even better, it was an armored exploratory vehicle with a machine gun mounted on it. It’s too bad I didn’t get any photos of myself in it, on the armor. So, like I say, it was romantic. The ensign, who commanded the vehicle, was constantly radioing the base: “Eagle! Eagle! We’re continuing our work.” We’re riding along, and these are our forests, our roads, but we’re in an armored vehicle. The women are standing at their fences and crying—they haven’t seen anything like this since the war. They’re afraid another war has started.

According to the instructions, the tractors laying down the furrows were supposed to have driver’s cabins that were hermetically sealed and protected. I saw the tractor, and the cabin was indeed hermetically sealed. But the tractor was sitting there and the driver was lying on the grass, taking a break. “Are you crazy? Haven’t you been warned?” “But I put my sweatshirt over my head,” he says. People didn’t understand. They’d been frightened over and over again about a nuclear war, but not about Chernobyl.

It’s such beautiful land out there. The old forests are still there, ancient forests. The winding little streams, the color of tea and clear as day. Green grass. People calling to each other through the forest. For them it was so natural, like waking up in the morning and walking out into your garden. And you’re standing there knowing that it’s all been poisoned.

We ran into an old lady.

“Children, tell me, can I drink milk from my cow?”

We look down at the ground, we have our orders—collect data, but don’t interact with the locals.

Finally the driver speaks up.

“Grandma, how old are you?”

“Oh, more than eighty. Maybe more than that, my documents got burned during the war.”

“Then drink all you want.”

I feel worst of all for the people in the villages—they were innocent, like children, and they suffered. Farmers didn’t invent Chernobyl, they had their own relations with nature, trusting relations, not predatory ones, just like they had one hundred years ago, and one thousand years ago. And they couldn’t understand what had happened, they wanted to believe scientists, or any educated person, like they would a priest. But they were told: “Everything’s fine. There’s nothing to fear. Just wash your hands before eating.” I understood, not right away, but after a few years, that we all took part in that crime, in that conspiracy. [She is silent.]

You have no idea how much of what was sent into the Zone as aid came out of it as contraband: coffee, canned beef, ham, oranges. It was taken out in crates, in vans. Because no one had those products anywhere. The local produce salesmen, the inspectors, all the minor and medium bureaucrats lived off this. People turned out to be worse than I thought. And me, too. I’m also worse. Now I know this about myself. [Stops.] Of course, I admit this, and for me that’s already important. But, again, an example. In one kolkhoz there are, say, five villages. Three are “clean,” two are “dirty.” Between them there are maybe two to three kilometers. Two of them get “graveyard” money, the other three don’t. Now, the “clean” village is building a livestock complex, and they need to get some clean feed. Where do they get it? The wind blows the dust from one field to the next, it’s all one land. In order to build the complex, though, they need some papers signed, and the commission that signs them, I’m on the commission. Everyone knows we can’t sign those papers. It’s a crime. But in the end I found a justification for myself, just like everyone else. I thought: the problem of clean feed is not a problem for an environmental inspector.

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

Zoya Danilovna Bruk, environmental inspector