MONOLOGUE ABOUT THE SHADOW OF DEATH

You need facts and details of those days? Or just my story? For example, I was never a photographer, and there I started taking photographs, I happened to have a camera with me. I thought I was just doing it for myself. But now it’s my profession. I couldn’t rid myself of the new feeling that I had there. Does that make sense? [As he talks he spreads photographs on the table, chair, windowsills: giant sunflowers the size of carriage wheels, a sparrow’s nest in an empty village, a lonely village cemetery with a sign that says, “High radiation. Do not enter.” A baby carriage in the yard of an abandoned house, the windows are boarded up, and in the carriage sits a crow, as if it’s guarding its nest. The ancient sight of cranes over a field that’s gone wild.]

People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!” But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there. But my story? It’s just commentaries to these [points to the photographs]. But all right. I’ll try. Although it’s all in here. [Points again to the photographs.]

At the time I was working at a factory, and also finishing my degree in history at the university by correspondence. At the factory I was a plumber, second class. They got us into a group and sent us off at emergency speed, like we were going to the front.

“Where are we going?”

“Where they tell you to go.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What they tell you to do.”

“But we’re builders.”

“Then you’ll build. You’ll build around.”

We built support structures: laundries, warehouses, tents. I was assigned to unload cement. What sort of cement, and where from—no one checked that. They loaded it, we unloaded it. You spend a day shoveling that stuff and by the end only your teeth are showing. You’re made of cement, of gray cement, and your special protective gear is too. You shake it off in the evening, and the next day you put it on again.

They held political discussions with us—they explained that we were heroes, accomplishing things, on the front line. It was all military language. But what’s a bec? A curie? What’s a milliroentgen? We ask our commander, he can’t answer that, they didn’t teach it at the military academy. Milli, micro, it’s all Chinese to him. “What do you need to know for? Just do what you’re ordered. Here you’re soldiers.” Yes, soldiers—but not convicts.

A commission came to visit. “Well,” they told us, “everything here’s fine. The background radiation is fine. Now, about four kilometers from here, that’s bad, they’re going to evacuate the people out of there. But here it’s normal.” They have a dosimetrist with them, he turns on the little box hanging over his shoulder and waves that long rod over our boots. And jumps to the side—it was an involuntary reaction, he couldn’t help it.

But here’s where the interesting part starts for you, for a writer. How long do you think we remembered that moment? Maybe a few days, at most. Russians just aren’t about to think only of themselves, of their own lives, to think that way. Our politicians are incapable of thinking about the value of an individual life, but then we’re not capable of it either. Does that make sense? We’re just not built that way. We’re made of different stuff. Of course we drank a lot in the Zone, we really drank. By nighttime there wasn’t a sober guy around. Now, after the first couple of glasses some guys would get lonely, remember their wives, or their kids, or talk about their jobs. Curse out their bosses. But then later, after a bottle or two—the only thing we talked about was the fate of the country and the design of the universe. Gorbachev and Ligachev, Stalin. Are we a great empire, or not, will we defeat the Americans, or not? It was 1986—whose airplanes are better, whose space ships are more reliable? Well, okay, Chernobyl blew up, but we put the first man in space! Do you understand, we’d go on like that until we were hoarse, until morning. The fact that we don’t have any dosimeters and they don’t give us some sort of powder just in case? That we don’t have washing machines so that we can launder our protective gear every day instead of twice a month? That was discussed last. In between. Damn it, that’s just how we’re built!

Vodka was more valuable than gold. And it was impossible to buy. Everything in the villages around us had been drunk: the vodka, the moonshine, the lotion, the nail polish, the aerosols. So picture us, with a three-liter bottle of moonshine, or instead a bottle of Shipr eau de cologne and we’re having these endless conversations. There were teachers and engineers among us, and then the full international brigade: Russians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians. We had philosophical debates—about how we’re the prisoners of materialism, and that limits us to the objects of this world, but Chernobyl is a portal to infinity. I remember discussions about the fate of Russian culture, its pull toward the tragic. You can’t understand anything without the shadow of death. And only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe. Only Russian culture was prepared for it. We’d been afraid of bombs, of mushroom clouds, but then it turned out like this; we know how a house burns from a match or a fuse, but this wasn’t like anything else. We heard rumors that the flame at Chernobyl was unearthly, it wasn’t even a flame, it was a light, a shining. Not blue, but more like the sky. And not smoke, either. The scientists had been gods, now they were fallen angels, demons even. The secrets of nature were hidden from them, and still are. I’m a Russian, from Bryanschin. We used to have an old man who sat on his stoop, the house is leaning over, it’s going to fall apart soon, but he’s talking about the fate of the world. Every little factory circle will have its Aristotle. And every beer stand. Meanwhile we’re sitting right under the reactor. You can imagine how much philosophy there was.

Newspaper crews came to us, took photos. They’d have these invented scenes: they’d want to photograph the window of an abandoned house, and they’d put a violin in front of it; then they’d call the photo, “Chernobyl Symphony.” But you didn’t have to make anything up there. You wanted to just remember it: the globe in the schoolyard crushed by a tractor; laundry that’s been hanging out on the balcony for a year and has turned black; abandoned military graves, the grass as tall as the soldier statue on it, and on the automatic weapon of the statue, a bird’s nest. The door of a house has been broken down, it’s all been robbed, but the curtains are still pulled back. People have left, but their photographs are still in the houses, like their souls.

There was nothing unimportant, nothing too small. I wanted to remember everything exactly and in detail: the time of day when I saw this, the color of the sky, my own feelings. Does that make sense? Mankind had abandoned these places forever. And we were the first to experience this “forever.” You can’t let go of a single tiny thing. The faces of the old farmers—they looked like icons. They were the ones who understood it least of all. They’d never left their yard, their land. They appeared on this earth, fell in love, raised bread with the sweat of their brow, continued their line. Waited for their grandchildren. And then, having lived this life, they left the land by going into the land, becoming the land. A Belarussian peasant hut! For us, city dwellers, the home is a machine for living in. For them it’s an entire world, the cosmos. So you’d drive through these empty villages, and you so want to meet a human being. The churches have been robbed—you walk in and it smells of wax. You feel like praying.

I wanted to remember everything, so I started photographing it. That’s my story. Not long ago we buried a friend of mine who’d been there. He died from cancer of the blood. We had a wake, and in the Slavic tradition we drank. And then the conversations began, until midnight. First about him, the deceased. But after that? Once more about the fate of the country and the design of the universe. Will Russian troops leave Chechnya or not? Will there be a second Caucasian war, or has it already started? Could Zhirinovsky become president? Will Yeltsin be re-elected? About the English royal family and Princess Diana. About the Russian monarchy. About Chernobyl, the different theories. Some say that aliens knew about the catastrophe and helped us out; others that it was an experiment, and soon kids with incredible talents will start to be born. Or maybe the Belarussians will disappear, like the Schythians. We’re metaphysicians. We don’t live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it. Even when you’re near death.


Viktor Latun, photographer

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