Voices from Chernobyl

A SOLITARY HUMAN VOICE

Not long ago I was so happy. Why? I’ve forgotten. It feels like another life now. I don’t even understand, I don’t know how I’ve been able to begin living again. Wanting to live. But here I am. I laugh, I talk. I was so heartbroken, I was paralyzed. I wanted to talk with someone, but not anyone human. I’d go to a church, it’s so quiet there, like in the hills. So quiet, you can forget your life there. But then I’d wake up in the morning, my hand would feel around—where is he? It’s his pillow, his smell. There’s a tiny bird running around on the windowsill making the little bell ring, and it’s waking me up, I’ve never heard that sound before, that voice. Where is he? I can’t tell about all of it, I can’t talk about all of it. I don’t even understand how I stayed alive. In the evening my daughter would come up to me: “Mom, I’m already done with my homework.” That’s when I remember I have kids. But where is he? “Mom, my button fell off. Can you sew it back?” How do I go after him, meet up with him? I close my eyes and think of him until I fall asleep. He comes to me in my sleep, but only in flashes, quickly. Right away he disappears. I can even hear his footsteps. But where does he go? Where? He didn’t want to die. He looks out the window and looks, looks at the sky. I put one pillow under him, then another, then a third. So that he could be high up. He died for a long time. A whole year. We couldn’t part. [She is silent for a long time.]

No, don’t worry, I don’t cry anymore. I want to talk. I can’t tell myself that I don’t remember anything, the way others do. Like my friend. Our husbands died the same year, they were in Chernobyl together, but she’s already planning to get married. I’m not condemning her—that’s life. You need to survive. She has kids.

He left for Chernobyl on my birthday. We had guests over, at the table, he apologized to them. He kissed me. But there was already a car waiting for him outside the window.

It was October 19, 1986, my birthday. He was a construction worker, he traveled all over the Soviet Union, and I waited for him. That’s just how we lived over the years—like lovebirds. We’d say goodbye and then we’d reunite. And then—this fear came over our mothers, his and mine, but we didn’t feel it. Now I wonder why. We knew where he was going. I could have taken the neighbor boy’s tenth-grade physics textbook and taken a look. He didn’t even wear a hat. The rest of the guys he went with lost their hair a year later, but his grew out really thick instead, like a mane. None of those boys is alive anymore. His whole brigade, seven men, they’re all dead. They were young. One after the other. The first one died after three years. We thought: well, a coincidence. Fate. But then the second died and the third and the fourth. Then the others started waiting for their turn. That’s how they lived. My husband died last. He worked high in the air. They’d turn the lights off in evacuated villages and climb on the light poles, over the dead houses, the dead streets, always high up in the air. He was almost two meters tall, he weighed ninety kilograms—who could kill him? [Suddenly, she smiles.]

Oh, how happy I was! He came back. We had a party, whenever he came back there was a party. I have a nightgown that’s so long, and so beautiful, I wore it. I liked expensive lingerie, everything I have is nice, but this nightgown was special—it was for special occasions. For our first day, our first night. I knew his whole body by heart, all of it, I kissed all of it. Sometimes I’d dream that I was part of his body, that we’re inseparable that way. When he was gone I’d miss him so much, it would be physically painful. When we parted, for a while I’d feel lost, I wouldn’t know what street I was on, what the time was.

When he came back he had knots in his lymph nodes, they were small but I heard them with my lips. “Will you go to a doctor?” I said. He calmed me down: “They’ll go away.” “What was it like in Chernobyl?” “Just ordinary work.” No bravado, no panic. I got one thing out of him: “It’s the same there as it is here.” In the cafeteria there they’d serve the ordinary workers with noodles and canned foods on the first floor, and then the bosses and generals would be served fruit, red wine, mineral water on the second. Up there they had clean tablecloths, and a dosimeter for every man. Whereas the ordinary workers didn’t get a single dosimeter for the whole brigade.

Oh, how happy I was! We still went to the sea then, and the sea was like the sky, it was everywhere. My friend went with her husband, too, and she thinks the sea was dirty—“We were afraid we’d get cholera.” It’s true, there was something about that in the papers. But I remember it differently, in much brighter lights. I remember that the sea was everywhere, like the sky. It was blue-blue. And he was nearby.

I was born for love. In school all the girls dreamt of going to the university, or on a Komsomol work trip, but I dreamt of getting married. I wanted to love, to love so strongly, like Natasha Rostov. Just to love. But I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because back then you were only supposed to dream of the Komsomol construction trip. That’s what they taught us. People were rearing to go to Siberia, to the impenetrable taiga, remember they’d sing: “past the fog and the smell of the taiga.” I didn’t get into the university during the first year, I didn’t have enough points at the exams, and I went to work at the communications station. That’s where I met him. And I proposed to him myself, I asked him: “Marry me. I love you so much!” I fell in love up to my ears. He was such a great-looking guy. I was flying through the air. I asked him myself: “Marry me.” [Smiles.]

Another time I’ll think about it and find ways of cheering myself up—like, maybe death isn’t the end, and he’s only changed somehow and lives in another world. I work in a library, I read a lot of books, I meet many people. I want to talk about death, to understand it. I’m looking for consolation. I read in the papers, in books, I go to the theater if it’s about death. It’s physically painful for me to be without him—I can’t be alone.

He didn’t want to go to the doctor. “I don’t hear anything, and it doesn’t hurt.” But the lymph nodes were already the size of eggs. I forced him into the car and took him to the clinic. They referred him to an oncologist. One doctor looked at him, called over another: “We have another Chernobylite here.” After that they didn’t let him go. A week later they did an operation: they took out the thyroid gland and larynx and replaced them with some tubes. Yes . . . [She is silent.] Yes—now I know that that, too, was a happy time. God! The errands I sent myself on—running to the stores buying presents for the doctors, boxes of chocolates, imported liqueurs. I got chocolates for the nurses. And they took them. Meanwhile he’s laughing at me: “Understand, they’re not gods. And they’ve got enough chemo and radiation to go around. They’ll give me that without the candies.” But I was running to the other side of town for some soufflé cake or French perfume. In those times you couldn’t get that stuff without knowing someone, it was all under the counter. That was right before they sent him home.

They sent him home! They gave me a special needle and showed me how to use it. I was supposed to feed him through the needles. I learned how to do everything. Four times a day I’d cook up something fresh, it had to be fresh, and I’d grind it all up in the meat grinder, put it onto a stringer, and then pour this all into the needle. I’d stick the needle into the biggest of his tubes, and that one went into his stomach. But he’d lost his sense of smell by then. I’d say, “How does this taste?” He wouldn’t know.

We still went to the movies a few times. And we’d kiss there. We were hanging by such a thin thread, but we thought we were digging into life again. We tried not to talk about Chernobyl, not to remember it. It was a forbidden topic. I wouldn’t let him come to the phone, I’d intercept it, all his boys were dying one by one. It was a forbidden topic. And then one morning I wake him up and give him his robe, but he can’t get up. And he can’t talk. He’s stopped talking. His eyes are huge. That’s when he got scared. Yes . . . [She is silent again.]

We had one year left after that. He spent that whole year dying. He got worse with each day, but he didn’t know that his boys were dying, too. That’s what we lived with—with that thought. It’s impossible to live with, too, because you don’t know what it is. They say, “Chernobyl,” and they write, “Chernobyl.” But no one knows what it is. Something frightening opened up before us. Everything is different for us: we aren’t born the same, we don’t die the same. If you ask me, How do people die after Chernobyl? The person I loved more than anything, loved him so much that I couldn’t possibly have loved him more if I’d given birth to him myself—turned—before my eyes—into a monster. They’d taken out his lymph nodes, so they were gone and his circulation was disrupted, and then his nose kind of shifted, it grew three times bigger, and his eyes became different—they sort of drifted away, in different directions, there was a different light in them now, and I saw expressions in them I hadn’t seen, as if he was no longer himself but there was still someone in there looking out. Then one of the eyes closed completely.

And what was I afraid of? Only that he’d see it. But he began asking me, showing me with his hands, like, bring me the mirror. I’d run off to the kitchen, as if I’d forgotten, or I hadn’t heard, or something else. I did that for two days, tricking him, but on the third he wrote in his notebook in large letters with three exclamation points: “Bring the mirror!!!” We already had a notebook, a pen, a pencil, that’s how we communicated because by then he couldn’t even whisper. He was completely mute. I ran off to the kitchen, started banging on the pots and pans. As if I hadn’t read what he’d written, or I’d misunderstood. He writes again: “Bring the mirror!!!” With those exclamation points.

So I brought him the mirror, the smallest one. He looked, and then he grabbed his head and he rocked, rocked back and forth on the bed. I start pleading with him—“As soon as you get a little better, we’ll go off to a village together, an abandoned village. We’ll buy a house and we’ll live there, if you don’t want to live in a big town with a lot of people. We’ll live by ourselves.” And I wasn’t kidding, I would have gone with him anywhere, just so he’d be there, anywhere. He was all that mattered. I wasn’t kidding.

I won’t remember anything I wouldn’t want to talk about. But everything happened. I looked very far, maybe further than death. [Stops.]

I was sixteen when we met, he was older than me by seven. We dated for two years. I love that neighborhood in Minsk near the main post office, Volodarkovo Street, we’d meet there under the big clock. I lived near the worst industrial complex and I’d take bus #5, which didn’t stop near the main post office but went a little further, to the children’s clothing store. I’d always be just a tiny bit late so I could go by on the bus and see him there and think: oh, what a handsome man is waiting for me! I didn’t notice anything for two years, not the winter, not the summer. He took me to concerts, to Edith Piekha, my favorite. We didn’t go dancing, he didn’t know how. We kissed, we just kissed. He called me “my little one.” My birthday, it was always my birthday, it’s strange but the most important things happened to me on my birthday, and after that try not believing in fate. I was waiting for him under the clock, we were supposed to meet at five but he wasn’t there. At six I’m upset, I wander over to my stop in tears, cross the street, then I look around because I feel something—and there he is running after me, against the light, in his work clothes, in his boots. That’s how I liked him best, in his hunter’s jacket, a sailor’s shirt—everything looked good on him. We went to his house, he changed and we decided to celebrate my birthday in a restaurant. But we couldn’t get in, it was evening and slipping the maitre d’ a five or a ten, like other people, neither of us knew how to do that. “Okay,” he said, he was shining, “let’s buy some champagne and some cake and go to the park, that’s where we’ll celebrate.” Under the stars, under the sky! That’s how he was. We sat on a bench in Gorky Park until morning. I never had another birthday like that, and that’s when I said to him: “Marry me. I love you so much!” He laughed, “But you’re still little.” But the next day we went to register.

I was so happy! I wouldn’t change anything in my life, even if someone had told me, from above . . . On the day we got married he couldn’t find his passport, we turned the whole house over. They wrote us down at the registry on a piece of paper, temporarily. “My daughter, it’s a bad sign,” my mom cried. We found the passport later in some old pants of his in the attic. Love! It wasn’t even love, it was a long falling in love. I used to dance in front of the mirror in the mornings—I’m young, I’m pretty, he loves me! Now I forget that face—the face I had then, with him. I don’t see that face anymore in the mirror.

Is this something I can talk about? Call it with words? There are secrets—I still don’t understand what that was. Even in our last month, he’d still call for me at night. He felt desire. He loved me more than he did before. During the day, I’d look at him, and I couldn’t believe what had happened at night. We didn’t want to part. I caressed him, I petted him. In those minutes I remembered the happiest times, the light. Like when he came back from Kamchatka with a beard, he’d grown a beard there. My birthday in the park on the bench. “Marry me.” Do I need to talk about it? Can I? I myself went to him the way a man goes to a woman. What could I give him aside from medicine? What hope? He didn’t want to die.

But I didn’t tell my mother anything. She wouldn’t have understood me. She would have judged me, cursed us. Because this wasn’t just an ordinary cancer, which everyone already is afraid of, but Chernobyl cancer, even worse. The doctors told me: if the tumors had metastasized within his body, he’d have died quickly, but instead they crawled upward, along the body, to the face. Something black grew on him. His chin went somewhere, his neck disappeared, his tongue fell out. His veins popped, he began to bleed. From his neck, his cheeks, his ears. To all sides. I’d bring cold water, put wet rags against him, nothing helped. It was something awful, the whole pillow would be covered in it. I’d bring a washbowl from the bathroom, and the streams would hit it, like into a milk pail. That sound, it was so peaceful and rural. Even now I hear it at night. While he was still conscious, if he started clapping, that was our sign: Call the ambulance. He didn’t want to die. He was forty-five years old. I’d call the ambulance, and they know us, they don’t want to come: “There’s nothing we can do for your husband.” Just give him a shot! Some narcotic. I learned how to do it myself, but the shot leaves a bruise under the skin, and it doesn’t go away.

One time I managed to get an ambulance, it comes with a young doctor. He comes over and right away staggers back. “Excuse me, he’s not from Chernobyl is he? One of the ones who went there?” I say, “Yes.” And he, I’m not exaggerating, he cries out: “Oh, dear woman, then let this end quickly! Quickly! I’ve seen how the ones from Chernobyl die.” Meanwhile my husband is conscious, he hears this. At least he doesn’t know, he hasn’t guessed, that he’s the last one from his brigade still alive.

Another time the nurse from the nearby clinic comes, she just stands in the hallway and refuses to come in. “Oh, I can’t!” she says. And I can? I can do anything. What can I think of? How can I save him? He’s yelling, he’s in pain, all day he’s yelling. Finally I found a way: I filled a syringe with vodka and put that in him. He’d turn off, forget the pain. I didn’t think of it myself, some other women told me, they’d been through the same thing.

His mom used to come: “Why’d you let him go to Chernobyl? How could you?” It didn’t even occur to me then that I could keep him from going, and for him, he probably didn’t think it was possible to refuse. That was a different time, a military time. I asked him once: “Are you sorry now that you went there?” He shakes his head no. He writes in his notebook: “When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don’t marry Tolik.” That was his brother, Tolik. He liked me.

There are things—I’m sitting next to him, he’s asleep, and he has such pretty hair. I took some scissors and quietly cut off a lock of it. He opened his eyes and looked and saw what I had in my hand, he smiled. I still have his watch, his military ID, and his medal from Chernobyl. [She is silent.] I was so happy! I’d spend hours in the maternity ward, I remember, sitting at the window, waiting for him and looking out. I didn’t really understand what was happening: What’s wrong with me? I couldn’t get enough of looking at him. I figured it would end at some point. I’d make him some food in the morning and then wonder at him eating it. And him shaving, him walking down the street. I’m a good librarian, but I don’t understand how you can love your job. I loved only him. Him alone. And I can’t be without him. I yell at night. I yell into the pillow, so that my kids don’t hear.

It never occurred to me that he’d leave the house, that we’d be apart for the end. My mom, his brother, they started telling me, hinting, that the doctors, like, were advising, you know, in short, there was a place near Minsk, a special hospital, where hopeless cases like this used to die—they used to be the soldiers from Afghanistan, without arms, without legs—now they sent the ones from Chernobyl there. They’re begging me: it’ll be better there, there are always doctors around. I didn’t want to, I didn’t even want to hear about it. Then they convinced him, and he started asking me. “Take me there. Stop torturing yourself.” Meanwhile I’m asking for sick leave, or just for personal leave, on my own account, because you’re only supposed to take sick leave in order to care for a sick child, and personal leave isn’t supposed to be longer than a month. But he wrote all over his notebook, made me promise that I’d take him there. Finally I go in a car with his brother. It’s at the edge of a village, it’s called Grebenka, a big wooden house, a broken well next to it. The toilet is outside. Some old ladies in black—religious women. I didn’t even get out of the car. I didn’t get up. That night I kissed him: “How could you ask me for that? I’ll never let it happen! Never!” I kissed him all over.

The last few weeks were the scariest. We spent half an hour peeing into a half-liter can. He kept his eyes down the whole time, he was ashamed. “Oh, how can you think like that?!” I said. I kissed him. On the last day, there was this moment, he opened his eyes, sat up, smiled and said: “Valyushka!” That’s me. He died alone. As everyone dies alone. They called me from work. “We’ll bring his red certificate of achievement.” I ask him: “Your boys want to come, they want to bring your certificate.” He shakes his head: no. But they came by anyway. They brought some money, and the certificate in a red folder with a photo of Lenin on the front. I took it and thought: “So is this what he’s dying for? The papers are saying that it’s not just Chernobyl, all of Communism is blowing up. But the picture is the same.” The guys wanted to say something nice to him, but he just covered himself with the blanket so that only his hair was sticking out. They stood there awhile and then they left. He was already afraid of people. I was the only one he wasn’t afraid of. When we buried him, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If someone asked me to, I lifted them up. One woman fainted. And she used to be in love with him, I was jealous of her once. “Let me look at him one last time.” “All right.” I didn’t tell her that when he died no one wanted to come near him, everyone was afraid. According to our customs you’re not supposed to wash and clothe your relatives. Two orderlies came from the morgue and asked for vodka. “We’ve seen everything,” they told me, “people who’ve been smashed up, cut up, the corpses of children caught in fires. But nothing like this. The way the Chernobylites die is the most frightening of all.” [Quietly.] He died and he lay there, he was so hot. You couldn’t touch him. I stopped the clocks in the house when he died. It was seven in the morning.

Those first days without him, I slept for two days straight, no one could wake me, I’d get up, drink some water, not eat anything, and fall back down on the pillow. Now I find it odd, inexplicable: how could I go to sleep? When my friend’s husband was dying, he threw dishes at her: why was she so pretty and young? But mine just looked at me and looked. He wrote down in his notebook: “When I die, burn the remains. I don’t want you to be afraid.” There’d been rumors that even after dying the men from Chernobyl are radioactive. I read that the graves of the Chernobyl firefighters who died in the Moscow hospitals and were buried near Moscow at Mitino are still considered radioactive, people walk around them and don’t bury their relatives nearby. Even the dead fear these dead. Because no one knows what Chernobyl is. People have guesses and feelings. He brought back the white costume he worked in from Chernobyl. The pants, the special protection. And that suit stayed up on our storage space right up until he died. Then my mother decided, “We need to throw out all his things.” She was afraid. But I wanted to keep even that suit. Which was criminal—I had children at home. So we took all the things outside of town and buried them. I’ve read a lot of books, I live among books, but nothing can explain this. They brought me the urn. I wasn’t afraid, I felt around with my hand, and there was something tiny, like seashells in the sand, those were his hip bones. Before that I’d touched his things but never heard him or felt him, but here I did. I remember the night, after he died, I sat next to him—and suddenly I saw this little puff of smoke—I saw it again at the crematorium—it was his soul. No one saw it except me. And I felt like we’d seen each other one more time.

I was so happy! He’d be off on a work trip, I’d count the days and hours until he came back. I, physically, can’t be without him. We’d go visit his sister in the country, in the evening she’d say, “I put the bedding down for you in that room, and for you in the other room.” We’d look at each other and laugh—we couldn’t imagine sleeping in different rooms. I can’t be without him. We eloped. His brother too. They’re so alike. But if anyone touched me now, I think, I’d cry and cry.

Who took him away from me? By what right? They brought a notice with a red banner across the top on October 19, 1986, like they were calling him up for the war.

[We drink tea and she shows me the family photographs, the wedding photographs. And then, as I’m getting up to go, she stops me.]

How am I going to live now? I haven’t told you everything, not to the end. I was very happy, insanely happy. Maybe you shouldn’t write my name? There are secrets—people pray in secret, in a whisper just to themselves. [Stops.] No, write down my name, let God know. I want to understand. And I want to understand why we need to suffer. What for? At first I thought that I’d have something new in my vision, something dark and not-mine. What saved me? What pushed me back out into life? My son did. I have another son, our son, he’s been sick for a long time. He grew up but he sees the world with the eyes of a child, a five-year-old. I want to be with him. I’m hoping to trade my apartment for one closer to Novinki, that’s where we have the mental hospital. He’s there. The doctors ordered it: if he’s to live, he needs to live there. I go there on the weekends. He greets me: “Where’s Papa Misha? When will he come?” Who else is going to ask me about that? He’s waiting for him.

We’ll wait for him together. I’ll read my Chernobyl prayer in a whisper. You see, he looks at the world with the eyes of a child.

Valentina Timofeevna Panasevich,

wife of a liquidator