Workers burst out from the canteen and the locker rooms and run through waterlogged corridors, gas and dust whirling from the air vents. All is washed in the red glow from emergency lights. They wear white laboratory coats, white caps tied over their heads like kitchen porters. They are in a painting, a movie, a palette of red and black, light and shadow. They run into the bowels of the building finding stricken bodies: men foaming at the mouth, writhing listlessly on the floor. Radiation has already worked its way through their cells, their skin showing large, dark blotches mapping their bodies. The rescuers lift their fellow workers to standing, slipping hands underneath their armpits and heaving them upwards, their bodies limp as marionettes. They hoist these men over their backs and struggle down the stairwells.
One of them remembers the first-aid room in Sector 11, three doors away from his former office. He reaches the room, but the door is locked; it takes him several minutes to kick it open, several critical minutes. He knows that the radiation must be rising to deathly levels. Eventually the door plunges open and he staggers into a room lined with metal shelves, a gurney in its centre. There is nothing else. No iodine or medicine. No bandages. No cream for treating burns. Grey metal shelving and a steel gurney. Why stock a first-aid room in a building where no accident could ever occur?
Outside, the firemen arrive dressed in shirtsleeves. None of them thinks to bring radioactive protection. None of them has even heard of such a thing. Small fires are dotted everywhere, but they gaze at a single thick column of smoke rising thirty metres into the sky. Two of them walk to the roof adjoining the smokestack to assess the damage, their shoes lingering on the melting tar. They kick the lumps of burning graphite at their feet back into what remains of the reactor hall. Through the smoke they see the upper plate of the reactor’s biological shield, a giant slab of concrete, a thousand tonnes in weight, shaped like a jam-jar lid. They see it resting casually against the rim of the chamber, lying askew, as if the owner had been distracted by a boiling kettle or a knock at the door and had neglected to replace it. They look at the span of the thing, the sheer bulk of the thing, and they feel smaller, weakened, standing there in their shirtsleeves, witnesses to the raw force of this mysterious energy.
When they return, they find the militia has arrived and are arranging the gathered firemen into groups. The men in uniform pass out some respiratory masks, made from thin, white cloth. These will last mere minutes before collapsing from heat and sweat and dust, and the men discard them midwork so they can still be seen, several weeks later, cartwheeling around the complex or lingering guiltily on chain-link fences.
Hoses are hefted from their spools and carried through to the sites of ancillary fires. There are five fire trucks, and they travel back and forth to the Pripyat River, sucking thirstily at its waters. Men climb onto roofs with their ladders, traversing contorted iron and shattered concrete. They climb over withered pylons and steel joists that point aimlessly towards the heavens, stripped of their function. These men are efficient and brave, swiftly overcoming the smaller, scattered blazes. They return to the fire trucks and vomit. Vomiting men dot the scene, a choreography of retching: men doubled over, lab technicians and firemen and militiamen discharging the contents of their bodies onto the quivering landscape. A warm, metallic sheen lingers on their tongues, as if they have spent the evening sucking on coins. They lick their sleeves but the taste remains.
They feel so alone, individually, but collectively too. Here in this field, this nowhere, there are no panicked crowds to confirm their private fears, no mass concentration of shared terror, just a relentlessly churning sense of apprehension.
There are hundreds of men outside now, many standing furtively, wondering what to do. Nobody flees the scene. They stand in groups but do not speak. Conversation seems inappropriate. Someone comes down with a case of bottled water from one of the other reactors and the men take it and dispense it to those on the ground. They cradle their colleagues’ heads and slowly pour water down their throats.
Some local doctors arrive, startled by what they observe, their training providing them with an intuitive appreciation of the consequences of such a morning. They set up improvised consultation tables around the perimeter of the plant and dispense whatever iodine is available, shine torchlight into pupils, check heart rates, spread gauze and ointment over rapidly angering burns. They order ambulances from every hospital within driving range, screaming of the urgency of the situation to impassive military orderlies.
Some men stand and smoke, despite the nausea, because really, what else is there to do?
The firemen make their way to the roof adjacent to the central reactor hall—by now the only remaining fire. They are red-eyed and tear-dappled, their eyes streaming in silent protest to the cut and taint in the air. They feel unsteadied, disconcerted by the vomiting, but there is a job, they have been called upon, they work.
The military officials have finally recognized the risks of exposure, and they adjust their procedures accordingly. The men are separated into five groups, with each group assigned to a hose. Two men stand at the front of the hose for no more than three minutes, then are relieved by their co-workers. Men sprint forward and back on the long roof, lungs bursting, attempting to hold back the impulse to gulp down great draughts of air as they reach their destination. Those who view them from a distance see the silhouettes of these men stretched against the dawn sky, moving with a regularity that is somehow comforting to observe, forward and back, merged together in the all-encompassing smoke, pushing on relentlessly, enduring.
Ambulances make multiple journeys, drivers setting out from Zhytomyr and Chernigov, from Kiev and Rechytsa and Mazyr and Gomel, and when they return, there are militiamen standing guard outside the hospitals, keeping all nonessential staff from the contaminated vehicles.
The constant drone of sirens, blending together with varied frequencies, their pitch rising and falling in accordance with movement and distance. Sirens droning on through the morning into the middle of the day.
Chapter 5
Another interminable meeting. The sound of paper being shuffled. Monotone speeches. Grigory sits in the hospital committee room at the weekly gathering of department heads. They each have assigned chairs, all wearing the same suit they had worn the previous Saturday, and the one before that, and the one before that. He sits and listens and has no idea of the time. These meetings can take hours, speaker after speaker; the same statements being uttered; the same political posturing.
The only element of change with these sessions is the different seasons displaying themselves outside the window. Afterwards he usually drives to the allotment to sift soil through his hands. Today, he will tend to his potatoes, pile the ridges covering the sprouting tubers. A simple pleasure the spring delivers. April. A warm April Saturday. And he longs to be out there, with the drizzle and the birds, out where things are things, a growing potato, a gardening fork, rubber boots, where language is real—solid nouns—not contorted to ensure the satisfaction of one’s superior or one’s superior’s superior and so on and so on along the line of carefully manicured delusion.