I’ll be in the ground. Under the roots . . .
Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenko, re-settler
MONOLOGUE ABOUT A WHOLE LIFE WRITTEN DOWN ON DOORS
I want to bear witness . . .
It happened ten years ago, and it happens to me again every day.
We lived in the town of Pripyat. In that town.
I’m not a writer. I won’t be able to describe it. My mind is not capable of understanding it. And neither is my university degree. There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can’t. People look at you differently. They ask you: was it scary? How did the station burn? What did you see? And, you know, can you have children? Did your wife leave you? At first we were all turned into animals. The very word “Chernobyl” is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He’s from there!
That’s how it was in the beginning. We didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole lives. We left on the third day. The reactor was on fire. I remember one of my friends saying, “It smells of reactor.” It was an indescribable smell. But the papers were already writing about that. They turned Chernobyl into a house of horrors, although actually they just turned it into a cartoon. I’m only going to tell about what’s really mine. My own truth.
It was like this: They announced over the radio that you couldn’t take your cats. So we put her in the suitcase. But she didn’t want to go, she climbed out. Scratched everyone. You can’t take your belongings! All right, I won’t take all my belongings, I’ll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can’t leave the door. I’ll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door—it’s our talisman, it’s a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don’t know whose tradition this is, it’s not like that everywhere, but my mother told me that the deceased must be placed to lie on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That’s me growing up. It’s marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my son grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?
I asked my neighbor, he had a car: “Help me.” He gestured toward his head, like, You’re not quite right, are you? But I took it with me, that door. At night. On a motorcycle. Through the woods. It was two years later, when our apartment had already been looted and emptied. The police were chasing me. “We’ll shoot! We’ll shoot!” They thought I was a thief. That’s how I stole the door from my own home.
I took my daughter and my wife to the hospital. They had black spots all over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear. About the size of a five-kopek coin. But nothing hurt. They did some tests on them. I asked for the results. “It’s not for you,” they said. I said, “Then for who?”
Back then everyone was saying: “We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By the year 2000, there won’t be any Belarussians left.” My daughter was six years old. I’m putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: “Daddy, I want to live, I’m still little.” And I had thought she didn’t understand anything.
Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room . . . But enough! That’s it! When I talk about it, I have this feeling, my heart tells me—you’re betraying them. Because I need to describe it like I’m a stranger. My wife came home from the hospital. She couldn’t take it. “It’d be better for her to die than to suffer like this. Or for me to die, so that I don’t have to watch anymore.” No, enough! That’s it! I’m not in any condition. No.
We put her on the door . . . on the door that my father lay on. Until they brought a little coffin. It was small, like the box for a large doll.
I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.
Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father
MONOLOGUES BY THOSE WHO RETURNED
The village of Bely Bereg, in the Narovlyansk region, in the Gomel oblast.
Speaking: Anna Pavlovna Artyushenko, Eva Adamovna Artyushenko, Vasily Nikolaevich Artyushenko, Sofya Nikolaevna Moroz, Nadezhda Borisovna Nikolaenko, Aleksandr Fedorosvich Nikolaenko, Mikhail Martynovich Lis.
“And we lived through everything, survived everything . . .”
“Oh, I don’t even want to remember it. It’s scary. They chased us out, the soldiers chased us. The big military machines rolled in. The all-terrain ones. One old man—he was already on the ground. Dying. Where was he going to go? ‘I’ll just get up,’ he was crying, ‘and walk to the cemetery. I’ll do it myself.’ What’d they pay us for our homes? What? Look at how pretty it is here! Who’s going to pay us for this beauty? It’s a resort zone!”
“Planes, helicopters—there was so much noise. The trucks with trailers. Soldiers. Well, I thought, the war’s begun. With the Chinese or the Americans.”
“My husband came home from the kolkhoz meeting, he says, ‘Tomorrow we get evacuated.’ And I say: ‘What about the potatoes? We didn’t dig them out yet. We didn’t get a chance.’ Our neighbor knocks on the door, and we sit down for a drink. We have a drink and they start cursing the kolkhoz chairman. ‘We’re not going, period. We lived through the war, now it’s radiation.’ Even if we have to bury ourselves, we’re not going!”
“At first we thought, we’re all going to die in two to three months. That’s what they told us. They propagandized us. Scared us. Thank God—we’re alive.”
“Thank God! Thank God!”
“No one knows what’s in the other world. It’s better here. More familiar.”
“We were leaving—I took some earth from my mother’s grave, put it in a little sack. Got down on my knees: ‘Forgive us for leaving you.’ I went there at night and I wasn’t scared. People were writing their names on the houses. On the wood. On the fences. On the asphalt.”
“The soldiers killed the dogs. Just shot them. Bakh-bakh! After that I can’t listen to something that’s alive and screaming.”
“I was a brigade leader at the kolkhoz. Forty-five years old. I felt sorry for people. We took our deer to Moscow for an exhibition, the kolkhoz sent us. We brought a pin back and a red certificate. People spoke to me with respect. ‘Vasily Nikolaevich. Nikoleavich.’ And who am I here? Just an old man in a little house. I’ll die here, the women will bring me water, they’ll heat the house. I felt sorry for people. I saw women walking from the fields at night singing, and I knew they wouldn’t get anything. Just some sticks on payday. But they’re singing . . .”
“Even if it’s poisoned with radiation, it’s still my home. There’s no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest . . .”
“I’ll say more: I lived at my son’s on the seventh floor. I’d come up to the window, look down, and cross myself. I thought I heard a horse. A rooster. I felt terrible. Sometimes I’d dream about my yard: I’d tie the cow up and milk it and milk it. I wake up. I don’t want to get up. I’m still there. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes there.”
“During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home—in our dreams.”
“The nights are very long here in the winter. We’ll sit, sometimes, and count: who’s