It was four o’clock. Five o’clock. Six o’clock. At six, we were planning to visit his parents. We were going to plant potatoes. From our town of Pripyat to Sperizhye, the village where his parents lived, was forty kilometres. He loved planting and tilling. His mum often spoke of how they never wanted him to leave for the town. They even built him a new house. He was called up, served in the Moscow firefighting troops, and when he came back, it was only the fire brigade for him! There was nothing else he wanted to do. (She falls silent.)
Sometimes it’s like I’m hearing his voice. Like he’s alive … Even the photos don’t get at me the way his voice does. But he’s never calling me. Even in the dreams. It’s always me calling him.
Seven in the morning. At seven, they told me he was in the hospital. I rushed over, but there was a police cordon round the hospital, they weren’t letting anyone in. Only the ambulances were let through. The police were warning us not to go near the ambulances. The Geiger counters were going berserk! I wasn’t the only one. All the wives rushed over, everyone whose husband had been at the power plant that night. I ran to look for my friend. She was a doctor at the hospital. I grabbed her by her white coat as she was coming out of an ambulance. ‘Let me in there!’ ‘I can’t! He’s in a terrible state. They all are.’ I wouldn’t let go of her: ‘I just want to look at him.’ ‘All right, then,’ she says, ‘but we’ll have to be quick. Just fifteen or twenty minutes.’ So I saw him. He was all puffed up and swollen. His eyes were almost hidden. ‘He needs milk, lots of it!’ my friend told me. ‘They need to have at least three litres of milk.’ ‘But he doesn’t drink milk.’ ‘Well, he will now.’ Later, lots of the doctors and nurses in the hospital, and especially the orderlies, came down sick. They died. But back then, nobody knew that would happen.
At ten in the morning, Shishenok, one of the plant’s operators, died. He was the first. On that first day. We heard another was trapped under the rubble: Valery Khodemchuk. They never got him out. He was buried in concrete. We didn’t know at that time they were only the first.
I said, ‘Vasya, what should I do?’ ‘Get out of here! Just go away! You’re having a baby.’ I was pregnant. But how could I leave him? He begged me: ‘Get out! Save the baby!’ ‘First I need to bring you some milk, and then we’ll see.’
My friend Tanya Kibenok came rushing over. Her husband was in the same ward. She was with her father. He’d brought her by car. We jumped in and drove to the nearest village to get fresh milk. It was three kilometres out of town. We bought lots of three-litre jars of milk. We got six, so there’d be enough for everyone. But the milk just made them violently sick. They kept losing consciousness all the time. They were put on drips. For some reason, the doctors kept insisting they’d been poisoned by gas, no one said anything about radiation. And the town filled up with these army vehicles, they blocked off all the roads. There were soldiers everywhere. The local trains and the long-distance ones all stopped running. They were washing down the streets with some sort of white powder. I was worried about how I’d get to the village the next day to buy fresh milk. Nobody said anything about radiation. It was just the soldiers who were wearing respirators. People in town were taking bread from the shops, buying loose sweets. There were pastries on open trays. Life was going on as normal. Only they were washing down the streets with that powder.
In the evening, they wouldn’t let us into the hospital. There was a whole sea of people. I stood outside his window, he came over and was shouting something to me. Shouting desperately! Somebody in the crowd heard him: they were being moved to Moscow that night. The wives all huddled together. We decided we were going with them. ‘Let us see our husbands!’ ‘You can’t keep us out!’ We fought and scratched. The soldiers were pushing us back, there were already two rows of them. Then a doctor came out and confirmed they were being flown to Moscow, but he said we needed to bring them clothes – what they were wearing at the power station had all got burned. There were no buses by then, so we ran, all the way across town. We came running back with their bags, but the plane had already gone. They had done it to trick us. So we wouldn’t shout and weep.
It was night. On one side of the street were buses, hundreds of them (they were already preparing to evacuate the town), on the other side were hundreds of fire engines. They’d brought them in from everywhere. The whole street was covered in white foam. We were walking over it, cursing and crying.
On the radio, they announced: ‘The town is being evacuated for three to five days. Bring warm clothes and tracksuits. You’ll be staying in the forests, living in tents.’ People even got excited: a trip to the countryside! We’ll celebrate May Day there. That’ll be something new! They got kebabs ready for the trip, bought bottles of wine. They took their guitars, portable stereos. Everybody loves May Day! The only ones crying were the women whose husbands were ill.
I don’t remember how we got there. It was like I woke up only when I saw his mother: ‘Mum, Vasya’s in Moscow! They took him away in a special plane!’ We finished planting the vegetable plot with potatoes and cabbage, and a week later they evacuated the village! Who could have guessed? Who knew back then? That evening, I began throwing up. I was six months pregnant. I was feeling so awful. At night, I dreamed he was calling my name. While he was still alive, I’d hear him in my dreams: ‘Lyusya! My Lyusya!’ But after he died, he never called my name. Not once. (She cries.) I got up in the morning with the idea of going to Moscow on my own. ‘Where are you off to in your state?’ his mother asked, so upset. They decided his father should get packed too: ‘He’ll go with you.’ They took out all their savings. All their money.
I don’t remember the trip. It’s gone from my memory. In Moscow, we asked the first policeman we found for the hospital the Chernobyl firemen were in, and he told us. I was quite surprised, because they had been scaring us, saying, ‘It’s a state secret, top secret.’
It was Hospital No. 6, at Shchukinskaya metro station.
It was this special radiation hospital and you couldn’t get in without a permit. I slipped the receptionist some money, and she told me to go on in. She told me which floor. I asked someone else, I was begging them. Then there I was, sitting in the office of Dr Guskova, the head of the radiation department. At the time, I didn’t know her name, couldn’t hold anything in my mind. All I knew was I had to see him. Had to find him.
First thing she asked me was: ‘You poor, poor thing. Have you got children?’
How could I tell her the truth? I realized I needed to hide my pregnancy. Or they wouldn’t let me see him! A good thing I was skinny, you couldn’t tell by looking at me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How many?’
I thought: ‘I’ve got to say two. If I say one, they still won’t let me in.’
‘A boy and a girl.’
‘As you’ve got two, you probably won’t be having any more babies. Now listen: the central nervous system is severely affected, the bone marrow too.’
‘So, all right,’ I thought, ‘he’ll become a bit excitable.’
‘And another thing: if you start crying, I’ll send you straight out. No hugging or kissing. You mustn’t get close. I’ll give you half an hour.’