Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (19 page)

At first the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do? How do we save ourselves? After realizing that this would not be for one year or for two, but for many generations, we began to look back, turning the pages.

It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber's. I'm preparing lunch when my husband comes back. “There's some sort of fire at the nuclear plant,” he says. “They’re saying we are not to turn off the radio.” I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn't have them went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, “Look! Remember!” And these were people who worked at the reactor—engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn’t say that it had no smell—it wasn't a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn't the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and my eyes watered.

I didn't sleep all night, and I heard the neighbors walking around upstairs, also not sleeping. They were carrying stuff around, banging things, maybe they were packing their belongings. I fought off my headache with Citramon tablets. In the morning I woke up and looked around and I remember feeling—this isn't something I made up later, I thought it right then—something isn't right, something has changed forever. At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military vehicles, we didn’t grow frightened—on the contrary, it calmed us. The army is here, everything will be fine. We didn’t understand then that the “peaceful atom" could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics.

All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they'd take us away for three days, wash everything, check things out. The kids were told to take their school books. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos in his briefcase. The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad.

From the very first I felt that we were Chernobylites, that we were already a separate people. Our bus stopped overnight in a village; people slept on the floor in a school, others in a club. There was nowhere to go. One woman invited us to sleep at her house. “Come," she said, ‘I'll put down some linen for you. I feel bad for your boy." Her friend started dragging her away from us. “Are you crazy? They’re contaminated!" When we settled in Mogilev and our son started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to a girl who said she didn’t want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him “Shiny." His childhood ended so early.

As we were leaving Pripyat there was an army column heading back in the other direction. There were so many military vehicles—that’s when I grew frightened. But I couldn't shake the feeling that this was all happening to someone else. I was crying, looking for food, sleeping, hugging my son, calming him down, but inside, this constant sense that I was just an observer. In Kiev they gave us some money, but we couldn’t buy anything: hundreds of thousands of people had been uprooted and they'd bought everything up and eaten everything. Many had heart attacks and strokes, right there at the train stations, on the buses. I was saved by my mother. She’d lived a long time and had lost everything more than once. The first time was in the 1930s, they took her cow, her horse, her house. The second time, there'd been a fire, the only thing she’d saved was me. Now she said, “We have to get through it. After all, we're alive."

I remember one thing: we're on the bus, everyone's crying. A man up front is yelling at his wife. “I can’t believe you’d be so stupid! Everyone else brought their things, and all we’ve got are these three-liter bottles!" The wife had decided that since they were taking the bus, she might as well bring some empty pickling bottles for her mother, who was on the way. They had these big bulging sacks next to their seats, we kept tripping over them the whole way to Kiev, and that's what they came to Kiev with.

Now I sing in the church choir. I read the Bible. I go to church—it's the only place they talk about eternal life. They comfort a person. You won’t hear those words anywhere else, and you so want to hear them.

I often dream that I’m riding through sunny Pripyat with my son. It’s a ghost town now. But we’re riding through and looking at the roses, there were many roses in Pripyat, large bushes with roses. I was young. My son was little. I loved him. And in the dream I’ve forgotten all the fears, as if I were just a spectator the whole time.

Nadezhda Vygovskaya, evacuee from the town of Pripyat

___

I tried to commit those days to memory. There were many new emotions—fear, a sense of tearing into the unknown, like I’d landed on Mars. I’m from Kursk. In 1969, they built a nuclear reactor nearby in the town of Kurchatov. We used to go there to buy food—the nuclear workers always received the best provisions. We used to go fishing in the pond there, right near the reactor. I thought of that often after Chernobyl.

So here’s how it was: I received a notice, and, being a disciplined person, I went to the military recruiter’s office the next day. They went through my file. “You,” they tell me, “have never gone on an exercise with us. And they need chemists out there. You want to go for twenty-five days to a camp near Minsk?” And I thought: Why not? It’ll be a break from my family and my job for a while. I'll march around a bit in the fresh air.

At 11 A.M. on June 22, 1986, I came with a bundle and a toothbrush to the gathering spot. I was surprised by how many of us there were for a peacetime exercise. I started remembering scenes from war films—and what a day for it, June 22, the day the Germans invaded. All day they tell us to get in formation, then to break up, finally as it's getting dark we get on our buses. Someone gets on and says: “If you’ve brought liquor with you, drink it now. Tonight we'll get on the train, and in the morning we’ll join our units. Everyone is to be fresh as a cucumber in the morning, and without excess baggage.” All right, no problem, we partied all night.

In the morning we found our unit in the forest. They put us in formation again and called us up in alphabetical order. We received protective gear. They gave us one set, then another, then a third, and I thought, This is serious. They also gave us an overcoat, hat, mattress, pillow—all winter gear. But it was summer out, and they told us we’d be going home in twenty-five days. “Are you kidding?” says the captain who came with us, laughing. “Twenty-five days? You'll be in Chernobyl six months.” Disbelief. Then anger. So they start convincing us: anyone working twenty kilometers away gets double pay, ten kilometers means triple pay, and if you’re right at the reactor you get six times the pay. One guy starts figuring that in six months he’ll be able to roll home in a new car, another wants to run off but he’s in the army now. What's radiation? No one's heard of it. Whereas I’ve just gone through a civil defense course where they gave us information from thirty years before, like that 50 roentgen is a fatal dose. They taught us to sit down so the wave of the explosion would miss us. They taught us about irradiation, thermal heat. But about the radioactive contamination of an area—the most dangerous factor of all— not a word.

And the staff officers who took us to Chernobyl weren’t terribly bright. They knew one thing: you should drink more vodka, it helps with the radiation. We stayed near Minsk for six days, and for all six days we drank. I studied the labels on the bottles. At first we drank vodka, and then I see we're drinking some strange stuff: Nithinol and other glass cleansers. For me, as a chemist, this was interesting. After the Nithinol, your legs feel cottony but your head is clear, you give yourself a command, “Stand up!," but you fall down.

So here’s how it was: I’m a chemical engineer, I have a master’s degree, I was working as the head of a laboratory at a large production facility. And what did they have me do? They handed me a shovel—this was practically my only instrument. We immediately came up with a slogan: Fight the atom with a shovel! Our protective gear consisted of respirators and gas masks, but no one used them because it was 30 degrees Celsius outside, if you put those on it would kill you. We signed for them, as you would for supplementary ammunition, and then forgot all about it. It was just one more detail.

They transferred us from the buses to the train. There were forty-five seats in the train-car and seventy of us. We took turns sleeping.

So what is Chernobyl? A lot of military hardware and soldiers. Wash posts. A real military situation. They placed us in tents, ten men to a tent. Some of us had kids at home, some had pregnant wives, others were in between apartments. But nobody complained. If we had to do it, we had to do it. The motherland called and we went. That’s just how we are.

There were enormous piles of empty tin cans around the tents. The military depots have a special supply in case of war. The cans were from canned meat, pearl buckwheat, sprats. There were herds of cats all around, they were like flies. The villages had been emptied—you’d hear a gate open and turn around expecting a person, and instead there’d be a cat walking out.

We dug up the diseased layer of topsoil, loaded it into automobiles and took it to waste burial sites. I thought that a waste burial site was a complex, engineered construction, but it turned out to be an ordinary pit. We picked up the earth and rolled it, like big rugs. We'd pick up the whole green mass of it, with grass, flowers, roots. And bugs, and spiders, worms. It was work for madmen. You can't just pick up the whole earth, take off everything living. If we weren't drinking like crazy every night, I doubt we’d have been able to take it. Our psyches would have broken down. We created hundreds of kilometers of torn-up, fallow earth. The houses, barns, trees, highways, kindergartens, wells—they all remained there, naked. In the morning you'd wake up, you need to shave, but you're afraid to look in the mirror and see your own face. Because you're getting all sorts of thoughts. It's hard to imagine people moving back to live there again. But we changed the slate, we changed the roofs on houses. Everyone understood that this was useless work, and there were thousands of us. Every morning we'd get up and do it again. We’d meet an illiterate old man: “Ah, quit this silly work, boys. Have a seat at the table, eat with us." The wind would be blowing, the clouds floating. The reactor wasn't even shut down. We’d take off a layer of earth and come back in a week and start over again. But there was nothing left to take off—just some sand that had drifted in. The one thing we did that made sense to me was when some helicopters sprayed a special mixture that created a polymer film that kept the light-moving bottom-soil from moving. That I understood. But we kept digging, and digging . . .

The villages were evacuated, but some still had old men in them. To walk into an old peasant hut and sit down to dinner—just the ritual of it—a half hour of normal life. Although you couldn't eat anything, it wasn't allowed. But I so wanted to sit at the table, in an old peasant hut.

After we were done the only thing left were the pits. They were going to fill them with concrete plates and surround them with barbed wire, supposedly. They left the dump trucks, cargo trucks, and cranes they'd been using there, since metal absorbs radiation in its own way. I’ve been told that all that stuff has since disappeared, that is, been stolen. I believe it. Anything is possible here now.

One time we had a scare: the dosimetrists discovered that our cafeteria had been put in a spot where the radiation was higher than where we went to work. We’d already been there two months. That’s just how we are. The cafeteria was just a bunch of posts and these had boards nailed to them at chest height. We ate standing up. We washed ourselves from barrels filled with water. Our toilet was a long pit in a clear field. We had shovels in our hands, and not far off was the reactor.

After two months we began to understand things a little. People started saying: “This isn't a suicide mission. We've been here two months—that’s enough. They should bring in others now.” Major-General Antoshkin had a talk with us. He was very honest. “It's not advantageous for us to bring in a new shift. We've already given you three sets of clothing. And you're used to the place. To bring in new men would be expensive and complicated.” With an emphasis on our being heroes. Once a week someone who was digging really well would receive a certificate of merit before all the other men. The Soviet Union's best grave digger. It was crazy.

These empty villages—just cats and chickens. You walk into a barn, it's filled with eggs. We'd fry them. Soldiers are ready for anything. We'd catch a chicken, put it on the spit, wash it down with a bottle of homemade vodka. We’d put away a three-liter bottle of that stuff every night in the tent. Someone’d be playing chess, another guy was on his guitar. A person can get used to anything. One guy would get drunk and fall down on his bed to sleep, other guys wanted to yell and fight. Two of them got drunk and went for a drive and crashed. They got them out from under the crushed metal with the jaws of life. I saved myself by writing long letters home and keeping a diary. The head of the political department noticed, he kept asking me what I was writing, where was I keeping it? He got my neighbor to spy on me, but the guy warned me. “What are you writing?" “My dissertation.” He laughs. “All right, that’s what I’ll tell the colonel. But you should hide that stuff.” They were good guys. I already said, there wasn't a single whiner in the bunch. Not a single coward. Believe me: no one will ever defeat us. Ever! The officers never left their tents. They'd walk around in slippers all day, drinking. Who cares? We did our digging. Let the officers get another star on their shoulder. Who cares? That's the sort of people we have in this country.