Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT A DAMAGED CHILD

The other day my daughter said to me: “Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I’m still going to love him.” Can you imagine that? She’s in the tenth grade, and she already has such thoughts. Her friends, too, they all think about it. Some acquaintances of ours recently gave birth to a son, their first. They’re a young, handsome pair. And their boy has a mouth that stretches to his ears and no ears. I don’t visit them like I used to, but my daughter doesn’t mind, she looks in on them all the time. She wants to go there, maybe just to see, or maybe to try it on.

We could have left, but my husband and I thought about it and decided not to. We’re afraid to. Here, we’re all Chernobylites. We’re not afraid of one another, and if someone gives you an apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don’t hide it shamefully in your pocket, your purse, and then throw it out. We all share the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we’re foreign, we’re lepers. Everyone is used to the words, “Chernobylites,” “Chernobyl children,” “Chernobyl refugees.” But you don’t know anything about us. You’re afraid of us. You probably wouldn’t let us out of here if you had your way, you’d put up a police cordon, that would calm you down. [Stops.] Don’t try to tell me it’s not like that. I lived through it. In those first days . . . I took my daughter and ran off to Minsk, to my sister. My own sister didn’t let us into the her home, she had a little baby she was breast-feeding. Can you imagine that? We slept at the train station.

I had crazy thoughts. Where should we go? Maybe we should kill ourselves so as not to suffer? That was just in the first days. Everyone started imagining horrible diseases, unimaginable diseases. And I’m a doctor. I can only guess at what other people were thinking. Now I look at my kids: wherever they go, they’ll feel like strangers. My daughter spent a summer at pioneer camp, the other kids were afraid to touch her. “She’s a Chernobyl rabbit. She glows in the dark.” They made her go into the yard at night so they could see if she was glowing.

People talk about the war, the war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won the war! It gave them a very strong life-energy, as we say now, it gave them a really strong motivation to survive and keep going. They weren’t afraid of anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We’re afraid of everything. We’re afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don’t exist yet. They don’t exist, and we’re already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone’s depressed. It’s a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it’s changed our everyday life, and our thinking.

Sometimes I think it’d be better if you didn’t write about us. Then people wouldn’t be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who’s sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.

Nadezhda Afanasyevna Burakova,

resident of the village of Khoyniki