But long ago Dnipro had tumbled over that edge. Snow cloaked its dirty Dnieper banks. Deep drifts shrouded its deserted gatehouses and graveyards. Severed power lines fell short of its frozen office blocks. Soiled white mantles ruched against its abandoned factories and gathered around its empty dormitories.
On a cold nightmare evening I’d made tracks to the so-called circus building, following broken pipelines that brought to mind enormous serpents sleeping beneath filthy blankets.
‘Theatre is a place for reliving human experience,’ said Yuliya, the angry young director of the Theatre of Bad Dreams. I’d come to Dnipro to meet her and her collective of wounded souls: part installation artists, part performers, all marked by life. Some of the company had war wounds. One was an amputee. Three or four suffered from developmental disorders and birth defects – poor motor skills, cleft lip, Down’s syndrome. Yuliya’s head was small for her body, emphasising her dark brown eyes and elongated nose. Her forehead appeared collapsed as if in a lifelong frown. She was prone to a sudden loss of balance.
‘I am interested in the events and stories that shape our lives,’ she said when we met in the foyer. The bed-sheet maze was the first of the evening’s three short performances. ‘In the stories that a person keeps for themself, and the stories over which we have no control.’
Yuliya’s father had met Yuliya’s mother in a staff canteen at the Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant. Their shifts and lunch trays had collided in the queue when he knocked her liver dumpling onto the red linoleum floor. At work he’d always prided himself on the accuracy of his guidance systems. That lunchtime he felt doubly pleased to have hit his target.
In Soviet days Dnipro had been an industrial powerhouse. One of the key centres of the nuclear and space industries, its factories had built the launch vehicles for the first Sputniks, as well as entire ballistic missile systems. At Yuzhmash, Yuliya’s father had played his part in the production of SS-27 ‘Sickle B’ ICBMs. Yuliya’s mother had organised the transport of the 120 nuclear missiles produced by the plant every year.
Yuliya’s parents married in the Dnipro’s Domsoviet, taking their honeymoon at her family’s old dacha near to the headwaters of the Dnieper. When she fell pregnant in 1986, her mother returned alone to the isolated cottage with plans for a peaceful, extended pregnancy.
It wasn’t to be.
On a Friday night in April the nearby Chernobyl nuclear reactor burst into flames. The cause was not so much an accident as an overdue turbine test that had gone wrong. Engineers attempted to shutdown but the control rods – which had been tipped in graphite as a cost-saving measure – superheated the core, causing a full-scale meltdown. Open-air graphite fires leapt into the air. Plumes of radioactive smoke spiralled into the atmosphere. But local party bosses hushed up the disaster, issuing no health warnings or explanations. No one let on that the fallout was worse than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead a new fairground with Ferris wheel and dodgems was opened early to distract the plant’s 5,000 workers. Saturday’s football matches and outdoor school gymnastic displays went ahead as planned. Kiev’s May Day parade – with ranks of children waving paper flowers and military bands playing patriotic marches – took place as radioactive soot showered on the capital. Moscow made no statement for two weeks, other than to accuse the Western media of spreading ‘malicious mountains of lies’ about the explosion.[15]
Alone at the family dacha, Yuliya’s mother knew nothing of the disaster, the house being outside the initial six-mile exclusion zone. She tended the garden, made meals of its fresh vegetables and took gentle walks by the black poplars that lined the riverbank. By the time Yuliya’s father managed to contact her – by way of a local defence unit – she had been exposed to as much as 100 roentgens of ionised radiation. She left for Dnipro as winds carried Chernobyl’s contamination across Belarus and Poland, into Sweden and Norway, as far as the Welsh mountains and the Scottish Highlands. In the autumn Yuliya was born with microcephaly.
On the stage the bed-sheet maze had been adapted for the evening’s second performance. As the lights went up, an amorphous shape occupied the centre. Around it on the floor the metal poles had been laid out in a wide circle, cut through with an arrow-straight line like a slashed zero. Two actors rolled their wheelchairs round and round its rim, gazing towards the hub in suspicion. To them the shape was something unknown, something foreign and not understood. In their fear they began to shout at it, provoking it with ‘Khto ty? Khto ty?’ The audience – encouraged to participate – took up the call, also demanding in angry Ukrainian: ‘Who are you?’
In response the shape began to stir, moving to the sound of its own eerie oscillations. Within lengths of sheeting, the hidden performers rose to their feet, moving as if a single being, calling out in strange half-heard tongues.
‘Who am I? Who am I?’
Again the rhythmic chanting lifted in volume, filling the space, aggravating both the shape and the wheelchairs that circled around it. Again there was something hypnotic, even spellbinding in the performance piece. Our raised voices agitated the shape, making it weave and rock in its place. Then in a kind of sordid wonder, it expelled – gave birth to – a body, wrapped in a single sheet as if in swaddling clothes. That body, that newborn, lay curled like a foetus on the zero’s metal slash and started to whimper.
Now the other actors stole to the back of the stage and the far end of the slash. There they formed up behind the two wheelchairs to bellow together: ‘Who are you? Who are you?’
Finally, in this most surreal show, they added in the sound of a train. The actors had become the wagons behind wheelchair locomotives. In the uproar they started to move forward, hobbling along the metal slash, pushing the wheelchairs into the circle and towards the whimpering foetal figure.
I thought of the trains that had taken Ukraine’s victims to Siberia and Auschwitz, that had carried away its nuclear missiles, that had brought me to Dnipro. The crying, crippled troupe of players bore down on the child, on the feared unknown, intent on crushing it.
At that point the stage lights were meant to snap off and the actors disperse, to return for a curtain call. But the company’s technical person – who doubled as stagehand and box-office manager – had slipped out for a cigarette, caught his mechanical hand on a door handle and missed his cue. To avoid squashing the ‘baby’ the wheelchairs veered off the track. In the confusion the limping players lost their footing and fell on each other. Yuliya screeched as she struggled to free herself from the swaddling clothes. Only then did the lights go out on the troubling, amateur tragicomedy.
Ukrainians had seen themselves as a nation without a state, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991, 90 per cent of them voted for independence, their Orange and Maidan revolutions then ousting pro-Russia politicians and deepening ties with democratic Europe. Yet Moscow saw the new state as a source of instability, poisoned by infectious Western ideas, and set about undermining it by annexing Crimea and fomenting war on its eastern borders.
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The Chernobyl nuclear disaster – which irradiated and led to the deaths of tens of thousands – convinced Mikhail Gorbachev of the need for radical political reforms. ‘Chernobyl shed light on many of the sicknesses of our system as a whole,’ he said later.