Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT EXPENSIVE SALAMI

In those first days, there were mixed feelings. I remember two: fear and insult. Everything had happened and there was no information: the government was silent, the doctors were silent. The regions waited for directions from the oblast, the oblast from Minsk, and Minsk from Moscow. It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. Just a few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.

At the same time, a few people could kill us all. They weren’t maniacs, and they weren’t criminals. They were just ordinary workers at a nuclear power plant. When I understood that, I experienced a very strong shock. Chernobyl opened an abyss, something beyond Kolyma, Auschwitz, the Holocaust. A person with an ax and a bow, or a person with a grenade launcher and gas chambers, can’t kill everyone. But with an atom . . .

I’m not a philosopher and I won’t philosophize. Better to tell you what I remember. There was the panic in the first days: some people ran to the pharmacy and bought up all the iodine, others stopped going to the market, buying milk, meat, and especially lamb. Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping that it would be made of good meat. Then we found out that it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it. We turned out to be defenseless. But you know that already. I want to tell about something else, about how we were a Soviet generation.

My friends—they were doctors and teachers, the local intelligentsia. We had our own circle, we’d get together at my house and drink coffee. Two old friends were there, one of them was a doctor, and they both had little kids.

“I’m leaving tomorrow to go live with my parents,” says the doctor. “I’m taking the kids with me. I’d never forgive myself if they got sick.”

“But the papers say that in a few days the situation will be stabilized,” says the second. “Our troops are there. Helicopters, armored vehicles. They said so on the radio.”

The first says, “You should take your kids too. Get them away from here! Hide them! This isn’t a war. We can’t even imagine what’s happened.”

And suddenly they took these tones with one another and it ended up in recriminations and accusations.

“What would happen if everyone behaved like you? Would we have won the war?”

“You’re a traitor to your children! Where is your maternal instinct? Fanatic!”

And everyone’s feeling there, including mine, was that my doctor friend was panicking. We needed to wait until someone told us, until they announced it. But she was a doctor, she knew more: “You can’t even defend your own children! No one’s threatening them? But you’re afraid anyway!” How we hated her at that moment, she ruined the whole evening for us. The next day she left, and we all dressed up our kids and took them to the May Day demonstration. We could go or not go, as we pleased. No one forced us to go, or demanded that we go. But we thought it was our duty. Of course! At such a time, on such a day—everyone should be together. We ran along the streets, in the crowd.

All the secretaries of the regional Party committee were up on the tribunal, next to the first secretary. And his little daughter was there, standing so that everyone could see her. She was wearing a raincoat and a hat, even though it was sunny out, and he was wearing a military trench-coat. But they were there. I remember that. It’s not just the land that’s contaminated, but our minds. And for many years, too.

From a letter from Lyudmila Dmitrievna Polenkaya,

village teacher, evacuated from the Chernobyl Zone