How can we make sense of where we are? What is happening to us, right here and now? There is no one to ask.
In the Zone and around it, there were astonishing numbers of military vehicles. Soldiers were marching with brand-new assault rifles. In full combat gear. For some reason, what stuck in my mind was not the helicopters and armoured personnel carriers, but those assault rifles. The weapons. Men with guns in the Zone. Who were they meant to fire at, defend themselves against? Physics? Unseen particles? Gun down the contaminated earth or the trees? The KGB were working at the power plant. They were looking for spies and saboteurs. The accident was rumoured to be a Western intelligence operation designed to undermine the Socialist order. We needed to stay vigilant.
It was a picture of war. This culture of war crumbled before my eyes. We entered an opaque world where evil offered no explanation, would not reveal itself and did not know the rules.
I watched people transform from their pre-Chernobyl selves into Chernobyl people.
More than once – and this is something to think about – I have heard people say that the behaviour of the firemen extinguishing the fire at the power station on the first night, and the behaviour of the clean-up workers later, resembled suicide. Collective suicide. The clean-up workers often did the job without protective clothing, unquestioningly heading into places where even the robots were malfunctioning. The truth about the high doses they were receiving was concealed from them, yet they were compliant, and later even delighted with the government certificates and medals awarded to them just before they died. Many did not survive that long. So what are they: heroes or suicides? Victims of Soviet ideology and upbringing? For some reason, as the years go by, it is being forgotten that they saved their country. They saved Europe. Just imagine for a moment the scene if the other three reactors had exploded …
They were heroes. Heroes of the new history. Sometimes compared to the heroes at the Battle of Stalingrad or the Battle of Waterloo, but they were saving something greater than their homeland. They were saving life itself. Life’s continuity. With Chernobyl, man imperilled everything, the whole divine creation, where thousands of other creatures, animals and plants live alongside man. When I visited the clean-up workers, I heard their stories of how – first on the scene and for the first time ever – they dealt with the new human yet inhuman task of burying earth in the earth, meaning they buried in concrete bunkers contaminated layers of soil, along with their entire populace of beetles, spiders and maggots. Insects whose names they didn’t even know or couldn’t remember. They had an entirely different understanding of death, encompassing everything: from the birds to the butterflies. They were already living in a completely different world – with a new right to life, new responsibilities and a new sense of guilt. Their stories continually featured the idea of time. They were constantly saying, ‘the first time’, ‘never again’, ‘forever’. They remembered driving through the deserted villages, occasionally meeting some solitary old men who hadn’t wanted to leave with the others or had later returned from some unfamiliar places. Those men would sit in the evenings around a rushlight. They mowed with a scythe, reaped with a sickle, chopped down trees with an axe, turned in prayer to the animals and spirits. To God. Just like 200 years earlier. While somewhere high above spacecraft were flying. Time had bitten its own tail, the beginning and end had merged. Chernobyl, for those who were there, did not end in Chernobyl. They were returning not from war, but almost from another world. I realized that they were consciously converting their suffering into new knowledge, donating it to us. Telling us: mind you do something with this knowledge, put it to some use.
The monument to Chernobyl’s heroes is the man-made sarcophagus in which they laid to rest the nuclear fire. A twentieth-century pyramid.
In the land of Chernobyl, man’s plight makes you sad, but the plight of the animals is even more pitiful. I’ll explain. After the humans had gone, what was left in the dead zone? The old graveyards and the so-called bio-burial sites: the cemeteries for animals. Man saved only himself: everything else he betrayed. Once the villages were evacuated, units of armed soldiers and hunters came in and shot the animals. The dogs ran over to the sound of humans. So did the cats. The horses could not understand what was happening. They were in no way to blame – neither the beasts nor the birds, yet they died silently, which was even worse. There was a time when the Mexican Indians, and indeed our own Slav ancestors in pre-Christian Rus, would ask for forgiveness from the animals and birds they killed for food. In ancient Egypt, animals had the right of complaint against humans. In a papyrus preserved in a pyramid, it is written that no complaint by any bull has been found against N. Before departing for the Kingdom of the Dead, the Egyptians would recite a prayer containing the statement: ‘I hurt no creature, deprived no animal of grain or grass.’
What has the Chernobyl experience taught us? Has it turned us towards this silent and mysterious world of those other beings?
Once I saw the soldiers go into an abandoned village and begin shooting.
The helpless cries of the animals. They were shrieking in all their different languages. This was written about in the New Testament. Jesus Christ comes to the Temple in Jerusalem and sees animals prepared for ritual sacrifice: with throats slit, dripping blood. Jesus cries out: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ He might have added, ‘Ye have made it a place of carnage.’ To my mind, the hundreds of bio-burial sites left in the Zone are like pagan temples. Only, to which gods were these sacrifices being offered? The God of Science and Knowledge, or the God of Fire? In this sense, Chernobyl has surpassed the camps of Auschwitz and Kolyma. It has gone beyond the Holocaust. It proposes finitude. It leads to a dead-end.
With fresh eyes, I look at the world around me. A little ant is crawling on the ground, and now it is closer to me. A bird flies in the sky, and it too is closer. The distance between us shrinks. The previous chasm is gone. All is life.
Something an old beekeeper said remains in my memory. I have heard the same thing from others. ‘In the morning, I went out into the garden and something was missing, the usual sound was gone. Couldn’t hear a single bee – not one! Eh? What was that about? And they wouldn’t fly out the second day. Nor the third. Later, they told us there was an accident at the power plant, which wasn’t far off. But for a good while we didn’t know. The bees knew, but we didn’t. From now on, if anything happens, I’ll keep an eye on them. On how they live.’ Here is another example. I started chatting with some anglers on the river. They told me, ‘We were waiting for them to explain it on the TV. For them to tell us how to keep safe. But the worms, just ordinary worms, they buried themselves deep in the ground, a good half a metre or one metre down. We couldn’t make sense of it. We kept digging and digging, but couldn’t find a single worm for our fishing.’
Who was here first? Who is the stronger and more enduring on the earth: us or them? We could learn a thing or two from the animal kingdom about survival. About how to live too.
Two disasters coincided: a social one, as the Soviet Union collapsed before our eyes, the giant Socialist continent sinking into the sea; and a cosmic one – Chernobyl. Two global eruptions. The first felt closer, more intelligible. People were wrapped up in their day-to-day world of what to buy and where to go. What to believe. Which banner to rally round next. Or whether we should now learn to live for ourselves, find our own lives. The idea was unfamiliar to us, we had never lived like that and did not know how to set about it. Each and every one of us was going through this dilemma. But we would have liked to forget Chernobyl, because our minds just wanted to capitulate. It was a cataclysm for our minds. The world of our beliefs and values had been blown apart. Had we conquered Chernobyl or understood it fully, we would have spent more time thinking and writing about it. Thus we’ve ended up living in one world, while our minds remain stuck in another. Reality slips away; our consciousness doesn’t have room for it.