The night of 26 April 1986. In the space of one night we shifted to another place in history. We took a leap into a new reality, and that reality proved beyond not only our knowledge but also our imagination. Time was out of joint. The past suddenly became impotent, it had nothing for us to draw on; in the all-encompassing – or so we’d believed – archive of humanity, we couldn’t find a key to open this door. Over and over in those days, I would hear, ‘I can’t find the words to express what I saw and lived through’, ‘Nobody’s ever described anything of the kind to me’, ‘Never seen anything like it in any book or movie’. Between the time when the disaster struck and when people began talking about it, there was a pause. A moment of muteness we all remember. Somewhere high up, decisions were made, secret instructions were written, helicopters were launched into the skies, vast numbers of vehicles were put on the roads, while down below we waited in fear for reports, we lived on rumours, and yet nobody spoke about the one big issue: what had really happened? Unable to find the words for these new feelings and emotions, unable to find emotions for these new words, we no longer knew how to express ourselves; but we were gradually immersed in the atmosphere of a new way of thinking, and so it has become possible today to pinpoint our state at the time. The truth is that facts alone were not enough; we felt an urge to look behind the facts, to delve into the meaning of what was happening. The effect of the shock. I was searching for those shocked people. They were speaking in new idioms. Voices sometimes broke through from a parallel world, as though talking in their sleep or raving. Everybody near Chernobyl began to philosophize. They became philosophers. The churches filled up again with people – with believers and former atheists. They were searching for answers that could not be found in physics or mathematics. The three-dimensional world came apart, and I have not since met anyone brave enough to swear again on the bible of materialism. We were dazzled by infinity. The philosophers and writers fell silent, derailed from the familiar tracks of culture and tradition. What was most interesting of all in those early days was not talking with the scientists, not with the officials or the high-ranking military men, but with the old peasants. They lived without Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, without the Internet, yet their minds somehow made space for the new picture of the world. Their consciousness did not crumble. Perhaps we would have coped better with a military nuclear crisis like Hiroshima. In fact, that was what we had been drilled for. But the accident happened at a civilian nuclear facility, and we were men and women of our times who believed, as we had been taught, that Soviet nuclear power stations were the most reliable in the world: so reliable, you could even build one in Red Square. Military nuclear power meant Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whereas peaceful nuclear power meant an electric light in every home. Nobody had guessed yet that military and peaceful nuclear power were in fact twins. Accomplices. We grew wiser, the whole world grew wiser, but only after Chernobyl. Today, like living black boxes, Belarusians are recording information for the future. For everybody.
I’ve spent a long time writing this book. Almost twenty years. I met and talked with former workers at the power plant, with scientists, doctors, soldiers, displaced people and people who returned to their homes in the Zone. With people whose world was Chernobyl; for them, everything inside and out was poisoned, not just the land and the water. They told their stories, searched for answers. Together we pondered. Often they were in a hurry, afraid that time would run out; I didn’t recognize that the price of their witness would be their lives. ‘Record this,’ they would say. ‘We didn’t understand everything we saw, but let’s leave this behind. Someone will read it and make sense of it. Later, after we’re gone.’ And they had good reason to hurry: many of them are no longer alive. But they managed to send a message.
Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin’s Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we appear to see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: ‘nuclear’, ‘explosion’, ‘heroes’. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials.
My first journey into the Zone.
The orchards were blossoming, young grass sparkling joyfully in the sun. Birds were singing. Such a profoundly familiar world. My first thought was: everything here is as it should be and carrying on as usual. Here was the same earth, the same water and trees. And their shapes, colours and scents were eternal. It was in nobody’s power to alter a thing. But on the first day, I was warned: don’t pick the flowers, don’t sit on the ground, don’t drink the water from the spring. Towards evening, I watched the cowherds trying to drive their weary cattle into the river, but the cows approached the water and turned straight back. Somehow they could sense the danger. And I was told the cats had stopped eating the dead mice, leaving them strewn over the fields and yards. Death lurked everywhere, but this was a different sort of death. Donning new masks, wearing a strange guise. Man had been caught off guard, he was not ready. Ill-prepared as a species, our entire natural apparatus, attuned to seeing, hearing and touching, had malfunctioned. Our eyes, ears and fingers were no longer any help, they could serve no purpose, because radiation is invisible, with no smell or sound. It is incorporeal. All our lives, we had been at war or preparing for war, we were so knowledgeable about it – and then suddenly this! The image of the adversary had changed. We’d acquired a new enemy. Or rather enemies. Now we could be killed by cut grass, a caught fish or game bird. By an apple. The world around us, once pliant and friendly, now instilled fear. Elderly evacuees, who had not yet understood they were leaving forever, looked up at the sky: ‘The sun is shining. There’s no smoke or gas, nobody is shooting. It doesn’t look like war, but we have to flee like refugees.’ A world strange yet familiar.