Voices from Chernobyl

MONOLOGUE ABOUT INSTRUCTIONS

I have a lot of material, I’ve been collecting it now for seven years—newspaper clippings, my own comments. I have numbers. I’ll give you all of it. I’ll never leave this subject now, but I can’t write it myself. I can fight—organize demonstrations, pickets, get medicine, visit sick kids—but I can’t write about it. You should, though. I just have so many feelings, I’ll never be able to deal with them, they’ll paralyze me. Chernobyl already has its own obsessives, its own writers. But I don’t want to become one of the people who exploits this subject.

But if I were to write honestly? [Thinks.] That warm April rain. Seven years now I’ve thought about that rain. The raindrops rolled up like quicksilver. They say that radiation is colorless, but the puddles that day were green and bright yellow. My neighbor told me in a whisper that Radio Freedom had reported an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I didn’t pay her any mind. I was absolutely certain that if anything serious happened, they’d tell us. They have all kinds of special equipment—special warning signals, bomb shelters—they’ll warn us. We were sure of it! We’d all taken civil defense courses, I’d even taught them. But that evening another neighbor brought me some powders. A relative had given them to her and explained how to take them, he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Physics, but he made her promise to keep quiet. As quiet as a fish! As a rock! He was especially worried about talking on the phone.

My nephew was living with me then, he was little. And me? I still didn’t believe it. I don’t think any of us drank those powders. We were very trusting—not just the older generation, but the younger one, too.

I’m remembering those first impressions, those first rumors, and I go from this time to that, from this condition to that one. It’s difficult, from here—as a writer, I’ve thought about this, how it’s as if there are two people inside me, the pre-Chernobyl me and the post-Chernobyl one. And it’s very hard now to recall with any certainty what that “pre-” me was like. My vision has changed since then.

I started going to the Zone from the very first days. I remember stopping in some village, and I was shocked by how silent it was. No birds, nothing. You’re walking down the street and there’s—nothing. Silence. I mean, all right, the houses are empty, the people have all left, but all around everything’s just shut down, there’s not a single bird.

We got to the village of Chudyany—they have 149 curies. Then the village of Malinovka—59 curies. The people were absorbing doses that were a hundred times those of soldiers who patrol areas where nuclear testing takes place. Nuclear testing grounds. A thousand times! The dosimeter is shaking, it’s gone to its limit, but the kolkhoz offices have signs up from the regional radiologists saying that it is all right to eat salad: lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers—all of it. Everything’s growing and everyone’s eating. What do those radiologists say now? And the regional Party secretaries? How do they justify themselves?

In the villages we met a lot of drunk people. They were walking around on benders, even the women, especially the milkmaids.

In one village we visited a kindergarten. The kids are running around, playing in the sandbox. The director told us they got new sand every month. It was brought in from somewhere. You can probably guess where they brought it from. The kids are all sad. We make jokes, they don’t smile. Their teacher says, “Don’t even try. Our kids don’t smile. And when they’re sleeping they cry.” We met a woman on the street who’d just given birth. “Who let you give birth here?” I said. “It’s 59 curies outside.” “The doctor-radiologist came. She said I shouldn’t dry the baby clothes outside.” They tried to convince people to stay. Even when they evacuated a village, they still brought people back in to do the farming, harvest the potatoes.

What do they say now, the secretaries of the regional committees? How do they justify it? Whose fault do they say it is?

I’ve kept a lot of instructions—top-secret instructions, I’ll give them all to you, you need to write an honest book. There are instructions for what to do with contaminated chickens. You were to wear protective gear just as you would if handling any radioactive materials: rubber gloves and rubber robes, boots, and so on. If there are a certain number of curies, you need to boil it in salt water, pour the water down the toilet, and use the meat for pate or salami. If there’s more curie than that, then you put it into bone flour, for livestock feed. That’s how they fulfilled the plans for meat. They were sold cheaply from the contaminated areas—into clean areas. The drivers who were taking them told me that the calves were strange, they had fur down to the ground, and they were so hungry they’d eat anything—rags, paper. They were easy to feed. They’d sell them to the kolkhoz, but if any of the drivers wanted one, they could take it for themselves, into their own farm. This was criminal! Criminal!

We met a small truck on the road. It was going so slowly, like it was driving to a funeral and there was a body in back. We stopped the car, I thought the driver was drunk, and there was a young guy at the wheel. “Are you all right?” I said. “Yes, I’m just carrying contaminated earth.” In that heat! With all the dust! “Are you crazy? You still have to get married, raise kids!” “Where else am I going to get fifty rubles for a single trip?” Fifty rubles back then could get you a nice suit. And people talked more about the rubles than the radiation. They got these tiny bonuses. Or tiny anyway compared with the value of a human life.

It was funny and tragic at the same time.

Irina Kiseleva, journalist