I always take two bouquets: one for him, and the second one I put on the corner for her. I crawl on my knees at their grave. Always on my knees. (Incoherently.) I killed her. I … she … saved … My little girl saved me, she took the whole brunt of the radiation herself, like she was a buffer. So small. Such a teeny little thing. (Gasping.) She protected me. But I loved the two of them. Can you … Can you kill with love? With such love! Why are they so close? Love and death. They’re always together. Who can explain that to me? Who can help me understand? I crawl on my knees at their grave. (She falls quiet for a long time.)
In Kiev, they gave me an apartment. In a big block where everyone who left the nuclear plant lives now. We all know each other. It’s a big one-bedroom flat, the kind me and Vasya dreamed of. But I went out of my mind there! In every corner, wherever I look: he’s there. His eyes. I started redecorating, just so I wouldn’t be sitting about, to keep myself occupied. And it’s been like that for two years. I’ve been having this dream. He and I are walking, but he’s barefoot. ‘Why do you never have shoes on?’ ‘Because I’ve got nothing at all.’ I went to the church. The priest told me, ‘You need to buy some large slippers and put them in somebody’s coffin. Write a note that they’re for him.’ That’s what I did. I arrived in Moscow and went straight to a church. In Moscow, I’m closer to him. That’s where he is, in Mitino Cemetery. I told the church man that blah-blah-blah, I need to pass on these slippers. He asked, ‘Do you know the way to do it?’ He explained it again to me. Just then they brought in an old man for a funeral service. I went up to the coffin, lifted the cloth and put the slippers in. ‘And did you write the note?’ ‘Yes, but I didn’t mention which cemetery he was in.’ ‘They’re all in the one world there. They’ll find him.’
I had no desire at all to live. At night, I used to stand at the window, staring at the sky. ‘Vasya, what should I do? I don’t want to live without you.’ In the daytime, I’d be passing the kindergarten and would stop and stand. I would have happily looked at the children for hours. I was going crazy! And at night I began asking, ‘Vasya, I’d like a baby. I’m frightened of being alone. I can’t take it any more, Vasya!’ Or another time I asked, ‘Vasya, I don’t need a man. No one could ever be better than you. But I want a baby.’
I was twenty-five.
I found a man. I told him everything. The whole truth: that I had just one love in my life. I was completely honest with him. We used to meet, but I never invited him home, I couldn’t bring him home. Vasya was there.
I worked in pastry. I used to be trimming the sides of a cake, and the tears were rolling down my cheeks. I wasn’t crying, but the tears were flowing. All I asked of the girls was: ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. If you start pitying me, I’ll have to leave.’ There was no need to feel sorry for me. I had known happiness once.
They brought me Vasya’s medal. It was red. I couldn’t look at it for long – the tears would flow.
I had a boy. Andrey. Little Andrey. My girlfriends tried to stop me: ‘You mustn’t have a baby.’ And the doctors tried to frighten me: ‘Your body won’t be able to cope.’ And then … Then they said he’d be born with one arm missing. His right arm. That’s what the screen had shown. ‘So?’ I thought. ‘I’ll teach him to write with his left hand.’ But he was born normal. A beautiful boy. He’s already at school, gets top marks. Now I’ve got someone who I live and breathe for. The light of my life. He understands me perfectly. ‘Mummy, if I go to Granny’s for two days, will you be able to breathe all right?’ No, I won’t! I’m frightened of being apart from him for just a day. We were walking down the street, and I felt myself falling. That was my first stroke. It happened in the street. ‘Mummy, should I get you some water?’ ‘No, you stand right by me. Don’t go anywhere.’ And I grabbed his arm. I don’t remember the rest. Opened my eyes in the hospital. I grabbed Andrey’s arm so hard that the doctors could barely unclench my fingers. His arm was blue for ages after. Now, whenever we leave the house, he says, ‘Mummy, don’t grab me by the arm. I won’t leave your side.’ He is poorly too: does two weeks at school, then two at home seeing the doctor. That’s our life. We worry about each other. And in every corner, there’s Vasya. His photos. At night, I talk and talk to him. Sometimes I dream that he’s saying, ‘Show me our baby.’ I bring Andrey, and he leads our little daughter by the hand. He’s always with our daughter. He plays only with her.
So that’s my life. I’m living in a real and unreal world at the same time. I’m not sure which I like more. (She gets up and walks to the window.) There are lots of us here. The whole street. They call it Chernobyl Street. These guys worked their whole lives at the power plant. Many still go there to work shifts, they run the plant with a rotation system now. Nobody lives there any more, and they never will. They’ve all got serious illnesses, disabilities, but they won’t give up their work, they wouldn’t even think of it. They’d have no life without the reactor. The reactor is their life. Where else are they needed now? Who needs them? They keep dying. It’s a quick death, they die on the go. They’ll be walking along and just collapse, black out and never wake up. Bringing flowers to the nurse and their heart fails. Or standing at a bus stop. They’re dying, but no one ever really questioned them properly. About what we went through, what we saw. People don’t want to hear about death, all these terrible things.
But I’ve told you about love. About how much I loved.
Lyudmila Ignatenko, wife of Vasily Ignatenko, deceased fireman
The author interviews herself on missing history and why Chernobyl calls our view of the world into question
I am a witness to Chernobyl. The most important event of the twentieth century, despite the terrible wars and revolutions for which that century will be remembered. More than twenty years have passed since the accident, yet I have been asking myself ever since: what was I bearing witness to, the past or the future? It would be so easy to slide into cliché. The banality of horror. But I see Chernobyl as the beginning of a new history: it offers not only knowledge but also prescience, because it challenges our old ideas about ourselves and the world. When we talk about the past or the future, we read our ideas about time into those words; but Chernobyl is, above all, a catastrophe of time. The radionuclides strewn across our earth will live for 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years. And longer. From the perspective of human life, they are eternal. What are we capable of comprehending? Is it in our power to extract and decipher the meaning of this still unfamiliar horror?
What is this book about? Why have I written it?
This is not a book on Chernobyl, but on the world of Chernobyl. Thousands of pages have already been written on the event itself, hundreds of thousands of metres of film devoted to it. What I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our stay on earth and in time. I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul. A day in the life of ordinary people. Here, though, everything was extraordinary: both the event itself and the people, as they settled into the new space. Chernobyl for them is no metaphor, no symboclass="underline" it is home. How many times has art rehearsed the apocalypse, offered different technological versions of doomsday? Now, though, we can be assured that life is infinitely more fantastical. A year after the disaster, someone asked me, ‘Everybody is writing. But you live here and write nothing. Why?’ The truth was that I had no idea how to write about it, what method to use, what approach to take. If, earlier, when I wrote my books, I would pore over the suffering of others, now my life and I have become part of the event. Fused together, leaving me unable to get any distance. The name of my small country, lost in some corner of Europe, which until then the world had heard almost nothing about, now blared out in every language. Our land became a diabolical Chernobyl laboratory, and we Belarusians became the people of Chernobyl. Wherever I go, people eye me with curiosity: ‘That’s where you’re from? What’s happening there?’ I could, of course, have quickly penned a book (the likes of which have appeared in their dozens) on that night’s events at the power plant; on who bears the blame; on how they hid the accident from their own people and from the whole world; on the number of tonnes of sand and concrete needed to build the sarcophagus placed over a reactor spewing death. But something stopped me, something was tying my hands. What was it? A feeling of mystery. At the time, this sudden haunting feeling hung over everything: our conversations, our actions and fears, and it followed in the wake of the event. The monstrous event. A feeling arose in all of us – whether voiced or unvoiced – that we had touched on the unknown. Chernobyl is a mystery that we have yet to unravel. An undeciphered sign. A mystery, perhaps, for the twenty-first century; a challenge for it. What has become clear is that, besides the challenges of Communism, nationalism and nascent religion which we are living with and dealing with, other challenges lie ahead: challenges more fiendish and all-embracing, although still hidden from view. Yet, after Chernobyl, something had cracked open.