for a long time. Now we walk out of the house, he says, “Mommie, just don’t grab my arm. I won’t go anywhere.” He’s also sick: two weeks in school, two weeks at home with a doctor. That’s how we live.
[She stands up, goes over to the window.]
There are many of us here. A whole street. That’s what it’s called—Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that’s how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they’re invalids, but they don’t leave their jobs, they’re scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop—someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one’s really asked us. No one’s asked what we’ve been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.
But I was telling you about love. About my love . . .
Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko
PART ONE
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
MONOLOGUE ON WHY WE REMEMBER
You’ve decided to write about this? About this? But I wouldn’t want people to know this about me, what I went through there. On the one hand, there’s the desire to open up, to say everything, and on the other—I feel like I’m exposing myself, and I wouldn’t want to do that.
Do you remember how it was in Tolstoy? Pierre Bezukhov is so shocked by the war, he thinks that he and the whole world have changed forever. But then some time passes, and he says to himself: “I’m going to keep yelling at the coach-driver just like before, I’m going to keep growling like before.” Then why do people remember? So that they can determine the truth? For fairness? So they can free themselves and forget? Is it because they understand they’re part of a grand event? Or are they looking into the past for cover? And all this despite the fact that memories are very fragile things, ephemeral things, this is not exact knowledge, but a guess that a person makes about himself. It isn’t even knowledge, it’s more like a set of emotions.
My emotions . . . I struggled, I dug into my memory and I remembered.
The scariest thing for me was during my childhood—that was the war.
I remember how we boys played “mom and dad”—we’d take the clothes off the little ones and put them on top of one another. These were the first kids born after the war, because during the war kids were forgotten. We waited for life to appear. We played “mom and dad.” We wanted to see how life would appear. We were eight, ten years old.
I saw a woman trying to kill herself. In the bushes by the river. She had a brick and she was hitting herself in the head with it. She was pregnant from an occupying soldier whom the whole village hated. Also, as a boy, I saw a litter of kittens being born. I helped my mother pull a calf from its mother, I led our pig to meet up with a boar. I remember—I remember how they brought my father’s body, he had on a sweater, my mother had knit it herself, and he’d been shot by a machine gun, and bloody pieces of something were coming out of that sweater. He lay on our only bed, there was nowhere else to put him. Later he was buried in front of the house. And the earth wasn’t cotton, it was heavy clay. From the beds for beetroot. There were battles going on all around. The street was filled with dead people and horses.
For me, those memories are so personal, I’ve never spoken of them out loud.
Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth. I had the same feeling when I saw a calf come out of a cow—and the kittens were born—as when I saw that woman with the brick in the bushes killing herself. For some reason these seemed to me to be the same things—birth and death.
I remember from my childhood how a house smells when a boar is being cut up. You’ve just touched me, and I’m already falling into there, falling—into that nightmare. That terror. I’m flying into it. I also remember how, when we were little, the women would take us with them to the sauna. And we saw that all the women’s uteruses (this we could understand even then) were falling out, they were tying them up with rags. I saw this. They were falling out because of hard labor. There were no men, they were at the front, or with the partisans, there were no horses, the women carried all the loads themselves. They ploughed over the gardens themselves, and the kolkhoz fields. When I was older, and I was intimate with a woman, I would remember this—what I saw in the sauna.
I wanted to forget. Forget everything. And I did forget. I thought the most horrible things had already happened. The war. And that I was protected now, that I was protected.
But then I traveled to the Chernobyl Zone. I’ve been there many times now. And understood how powerless I am. I’m falling apart. My past no longer protects me. There aren’t any answers there. They were there before, but now they’re not. The future is destroying me, not the past.
Pyotr S., psychologist
MONOLOGUE ABOUT WHAT CAN BE TALKED ABOUT WITH THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
The wolf came into the yard at night. I look out the window and there he is, eyes shining, like headlights. Now I’m used to everything. I’ve been living alone for seven years, seven years since the people left. Sometimes at night I’ll just be sitting here thinking, thinking, until it’s lights out again. So on this day I was up all night, sitting on my bed, and then I went out to look at how the sun was. What should I tell you? Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth. I worked hard and honestly my whole life. But I didn’t get any fairness. God was dividing things up somewhere, and by the time the line came to me there was nothing left. A young person can die, an old person has to die . . . At first, I waited for people to come—I thought they’d come back. No one said they were leaving forever, they said they were leaving for a while. But now I’m just waiting for death. Dying isn’t hard, but it is scary. There’s no church. The priest doesn’t come. There’s no one to tell my sins to.
The first time they told us we had radiation, we thought: it’s a sort of a sickness, and whoever gets it dies right away. No, they said, it’s this thing that lies on the ground, and gets into the ground, but you can’t see it. Animals might be able to see it and hear it, but people can’t. But that’s not true! I saw it. This cesium was lying in my yard, until it got wet with rain. It was an ink-black color. It was lying there and sort of dripping into pieces. I ran home from the kolkhoz and went into my garden. And there’s another piece, it’s blue. And 200 meters over, there’s another one. About the size of the kerchief on my head. I called over to my neighbor, the other women, we all ran around looking. All the gardens, and the field nearby—about two hectares—we found maybe four big chunks. One was red. The next day it rained early, and by lunchtime they were gone. The police came but there was nothing to show them. We could just tell them. The chunks were like this. [She indicates the size with her hands.] Like my kerchief. Blue and red . . .
We weren’t too afraid of this radiation. When we couldn’t see it, and we didn’t know what it was, maybe we were a little afraid, but once we’d seen it, we weren’t so afraid. The police and the soldiers put up these signs. Some were next to people’s houses, some were in the street—they’d write, 70 curie, 60 curie. We’d always lived off our potatoes, and then suddenly—we’re not allowed to! For some people it was real bad, for others it was funny. They advised us to work in our gardens in masks and rubber gloves. And then another big scientist came to the meeting hall and told us that we needed to wash our yards. Come on! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! They ordered us to wash our sheets, our blankets, our curtains. But they’re in storage! In closets and trunks. There’s no radiation in there! Behind glass? Behind closed doors! Come on! It’s in the forest, in the field. They closed the wells, locked them up,