All That Is Solid Melts into Air (37 page)

For the past 23 years it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundredfold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covered the entire Northern Hemisphere.
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These numbers are overwhelming, but the evidence behind them is unambiguous. Given what we know about the laws of biology (and there are enormous gaps in scientific knowledge regarding the relationship between the body and the radionuclide), the aftereffects of this disaster haven’t even reached full fruition.

Broadly speaking, radiation exposure can be categorised into two groups.

Acute radiation is a short-term severe exposure, usually external, and is responsible for the initial deaths of the type that Nadezhda Vygovskaya witnessed, those that occurred soon after the disaster in the countries most affected: Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Chronic radiation is a much more stealthy phenomenon; it builds imperceptibly over the long term and affects the body internally, engendering an array of debilitating illnesses, most prominently cancer. We can say with certainty that multiple future generations will be at least as vulnerable to it as we are today.

Put simply: acute radiation is the hare, chronic radiation is the tortoise.

John Gofman, former professor of molecular and cell biology at UC– Berkeley, wrote candidly that “low-dose ionizing radiation may well be the most important single cause of cancer, birth defects, and genetic disorders.”
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Whether in the guise of a worker or a soldier, the rush of energy from a split atom runs directly to the heart of a nation’s power. Its capabilities are placed squarely at the nexus of immense military and economic interests. As the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson puts it: “The industry worldwide is protected by secrecy and by its significance in maintaining the prestige of governments and by its military significance, whether as licit or illicit supplier of fissile materials or as potential target.”
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5.

Gomel, Belarus. Two hundred and fifteen kilometres from Chernobyl.

The morning after our visit to Pripyat we open the door to an apartment and see a man buckle in front of us.

He is tall and lean. The stripes on the side of his tracksuit bottoms take the line of his lank hair and elongated face. The hair drops away from behind his ears as he bends forward, a hand obscuring his features, tears gaining momentum. The only sound comes from his laboured breathing. It seems as though he remains standing only because of the arrangement of his skeleton. His muscles have gone slack, his head hangs on a wavering forearm. Roche steps forward to embrace him and he dissolves into her shoulder. His cries release in convulsions. We close the door gently behind us and stand in his orange vestibule, so narrow that we’re almost touching him. We gaze into the other rooms in an attempt to salvage some privacy for him.

Roche’s charity provides hospice care for Vasily’s daughter, Sasha. They make sure a nurse calls on the apartment four times a week, bringing diapers, wipes, and baby food. Vasily also receives a small stipend, enough to feed himself and his daughter but not his gambling habit. This is his only income. They receive no state benefits.

Our call is a routine visit. Though Roche has been here several times before, we can see from her eyes that her reception has never been like this. Something has happened.

A nurse is in the kitchen. Our translator moves to speak to her. As we wait, I notice the stench: wheaty and stale; the scent of sweat and faeces, magnified by the overpowering heat. The heat is so strong that I can feel vapour streams trickle out from under my coat. Later, I find out that the windows don’t open, apparently a typical feature of Soviet tower blocks, and residents don’t have any control over the temperature. In wintertime all the apartment blocks in Belarus are as stifling as a sauna.

Recently, Sasha’s health has plummeted, turning to pneumonia in the past few days. An hour ago, a visiting doctor ordered that she be moved to a country hospital fifteen miles away. The ambulance is due this afternoon.

Vasily has no car and won’t be allowed to stay in residence. In the city, only the children’s hospital has space available. They refuse to take her. Their age limit is fourteen. Now seventeen, Sasha’s death on their premises would mean multiple explanations and extra paperwork.

Seven years ago, Vasily’s marriage ended. He gave up his job as a night watchman to be his daughter’s sole carer, a position that is broken only for an hour or two each week when the nurse arrives to check on things or a relative comes by to let him go outside for an evening. Sasha hasn’t touched fresh air for a decade.

The room to my left is furnished only by a large armchair and a TV set that sits on a dilapidated stand next to the window. The chair has a stained hand towel draped around its armrest. Surrounding it is an archipelago of carer’s paraphernalia: diapers and diaper cream, baby wipes and talc, bandages, gels, towels, a feeding bottle, moisturiser, cotton balls. The chair retains the indentations of many hours of use.

Through the window of the living room in front of us, I can see a neighbouring block. Its lintels and windowsills are painted in confectionary pink, its doors and archways in baby blue. Veins of cracks run down the façade, leaking onto the pavement, running into potholes in the driveway, where an elderly woman beats the dust out of a suspended rug. Vasily, spent, beckons us forward. We step inside the living room and he motions to the sofa. Sasha is resting there.

The sofa is a two-seater, but there is still ample room for her to lie outstretched upon it. She faces the wall. The outline of her body can be clearly seen through the tightly wrapped blanket covering her. She has the body of a six-year-old. A short, frail frame; without contours. Her head generates a response of shock and pity. Sasha is hydrocephalic, a congenital condition that caused her head to swell to grotesque proportions. Weighing twenty pounds, it is almost the size of her upper body and shaped like a speech bubble; an enormous dome tapering off into a slender chin. She lies in a foetal position, each breath a struggle, her inhalations catching in her sinuses. She is almost hairless, a light down covers her skull, which is pockmarked with large, seeping calluses. Vasily has treated them carefully with white antiseptic powder to soak up and quell the irritation. A bandage is wrapped from her forehead around to the back of her crown to catch any discharge. She is blind and vulnerable as a newborn. The sofa is not a temporary resting place, it is her bed. On a normal day, Vasily cradles her in the armchair and at night lays her here, then unrolls a mattress onto the ground next to her, where he settles down for the night, reaching up to place a hand of reassurance on her body.

Sasha’s and Vasily’s lives have changed only minimally since her mother left. Vasily has the option of admitting Sasha to an orphanage, but he refuses to do so. Neglect there is assured. In these institutions even the official documentation refers to congenitally deformed children as imbeciles and retards. Despite their numbers, they are not considered part of the general population. Stories of sexual abuse in orphanages—even amongst the most stricken cases—are rife.

Born ten years after the catastrophe, it cannot be irrefutably proven that Sasha’s condition is linked to nuclear fallout.

Nor can it be proven that the congenital disorder affecting Denis and Georg—our next port of call—is anything other than a consequence of bad luck. They are afflicted with Cockayne syndrome, a condition rare in every country but Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The syndrome causes premature aging, so despite the fact that the brothers were born in 2010 and 2011, they have the faces of preteens, wrinkled to fit their small heads. The condition also impairs growth, so viewed from behind they would easily be mistaken for infants. Like Sasha, they have rarely, if ever, felt fresh air on their skin. Unlike Sasha, they have never seen sunlight: the acute sensitivity of their nervous systems means that they must be kept in this darkened room, in this broiling apartment. Their bed, an outstretched futon.

Their parents, Olga and Misha, weren’t even born by April 1986. They cradle their boys, carry them over their shoulders, sing to them, pat their backs in consolation. A wedding photograph hangs on their wall, taken five years ago, when Misha was twenty-three and Olga twenty. She in a dress of sapphire blue. He in a black suit, black shirt, without a tie. Visitors are rare, so they are pleased to see us. As with Vasily, they receive no aid from the state.

We sit and watch Georg take tentative steps, we listen as he forms some words. Denis could do the same a year ago until he developed encephalitis, a swelling of the brain, which has rendered him mute and almost immobile. Georg’s young parents smile, clap their hands in encouragement.

These cases are far from being exceptions to the national situation. While the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko (Europe’s longest-reigning dictator), lays the foundations for a new nuclear plant, the proportion of children with chronic illness in his country is without doubt far greater than in the years immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Experts estimate that only 10 percent of the overall expected damage regarding congential deformation can be seen in the first generation born in the wake of the disaster.
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The Russian writer Andrei Platonov wrote of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Those he observed he called
dushevny bednyak
, meaning literally “poor souls.” Platonov used it as a descriptive, rather than sympathetic, term. He reasoned that when everything has been taken from the living, all that is left is the soul; the ability to feel and to suffer. “Out of our ugliness,” he writes, “will grow the world’s heart.”
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Stand in a darkened corridor of no distinction. Open a door. Each apartment contains its own particular sorrow, washed over with undiluted love.

In one: Igor, twelve, lies contorted on a sofa. In his mouth, his gums overwhelm his tiny teeth. As he’s unable to produce tears, his pupils—despite his mother’s attentiveness with an eyedropper—have the texture of sandpaper.

In another: Kyrill, nine, is missing a chromosome and a father. His right shoulder is implanted under his neck. His condition doesn’t have a name. His father, like many Belarusian men, took his child’s frailty to be a slight on his masculinity. Olga hasn’t seen him in almost a decade.

From 1986 to 1988 in the heavily contaminated Luninets District, 167 children per 1,000 had diagnosed illnesses. From 1992 to 1994 that number had risen to 611 per 1,000.
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Another: Ludmilla regularly breaks her conversation with us to vacuum out Nastya’s saliva through the hole left in her neck from a tracheostomy. On the floor beside Nastya’s chair is a large pickle jar two-thirds full with murky green phlegm. In the next room, her elderly parents are bedridden.

In 1998, 68 percent of Belarusian children living in heavily contaminated areas had vascular dystonia and heart syndrome (characterised by dizziness, breathing difficulties, and fatigue). Three years later it was 74 percent. In less contaminated areas that number rose from 40 percent to 53 percent.
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Despite everything, Ludmilla’s apartment is neat and clean, scattered with homey touches. A small sprig of white wildflowers in a medicine bottle. Trinkets on a shelf. A decorative dishcloth pinned to the wall. A small holy water font nailed to the doorframe with a fragment of a sponge inside. I compliment her attentiveness. She shrugs. The whisper of a smile. “If you live in a cage, you should make it a nice one.”

6.

Gomel, for a brief few years, was at the forefront of medical research regarding nuclear contamination. In 1990, Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky, a pathologist, moved there with his wife, Galina, a paediatrician. The couple’s relocation to the city was not based on career advancement; rather, they believed it their duty to offer their expertise to those who have no choice but to live with chronic exposure. Upon taking the position of rector at the Gomel Medical Institute, Bandazhevsky observed an alarming pattern of heart problems, strokes, and rare birth defects amongst local children. In light of this, he initiated a series of long-term biological studies on a sample group of victims.

After nine years of systematic data collection and evaluation—which involved the design and manufacture of advanced dosimetric instrumentation—Bandazhevsky presented a lecture on his findings to the Belarusian Parliament and the president, Alexander Lukashenko. After Bandazhevsky’s presentation, Lukashenko had him arrested. Bandazhevsky, while awaiting trial, summarised his research in the study “Radioactive Caesium and the Heart.” He was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and, in his initial months of servitude, was repeatedly tortured. The Belarusian secret police also promptly raided his offices at the Gomel Medical Institute and destroyed his archived slides and samples. Most of Bandazhevsky’s colleagues at the Institute were fired, and many were also prosecuted. A new rector was appointed who denounced Bandazhevsky’s work and closed his research clinics. A few years later, this nefarious activity was extended by the deletion of all medical files holding information on Belarusian Chernobyl victims. By the time of Bandazhevsky’s release, three years later, many of those who had been evacuated after the meltdown were resettled back into highly contaminated lands. Currently Bandazhevsky is in exile.

His key finding was that the regular intake of radioactively contaminated food directly results in abnormal heart rhythms and irreversible damage to heart tissue and other vital organs. These findings alone are important, but more significant is the fact that Bandazhevsky discovered that the body concentrates Caesium-137—one of the most abundant of the radionuclides that were spread into the atmosphere from Chernobyl—in the organs, rather than uniformly distributing it throughout the body. This renders the idea of “acceptable dosages” to be a fallacy.