Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich Read Free Book Online Page A

people. Or they’d written: “we’re leaving in the morning," or, “we’re leaving at night,” and they’d put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: “Don’t beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything." And then in a child’s handwriting: “Don't kill our Zhulka. She’s a good cat.” [Closes his eyes.] I've forgotten everything. I only remember that I went there, and after that I don't remember anything. I forgot all of it. I can’t count money. My memory’s not right. The doctors can't understand it. I go from hospital to hospital. But this sticks in my head: you're walking up to the house, thinking the house is empty, and you open the door and there’s this cat. That, and those kids' notes.
    *
    I was called. My assignment was not to let any of the old inhabitants back into the evacuated villages. We set up roadblocks, built observation posts. They called us "partisans," for some reason. It's peacetime, and we’re standing there in military fatigues. The farmers didn’t understand why, for example, they couldn't take a bucket from their yard, or a pitcher, saw, axe. Why they couldn't harvest the crops. How do you tell them? And in fact it was like this: on one side of the road there were soldiers, keeping people out, and on the other side cows were grazing, the harvesters were buzzing, the grain was being shipped. The old women would come and cry: “Boys, let us in. It’s our land. Our houses." They'd bring eggs, bacon, homemade vodka. They cried over their poisoned land. Their furniture. Their things.
    Your mind would turn over. The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there'd be a soldier to make sure that when she was done milking, she poured the milk out on the ground. An old woman carries a basket of eggs, and next to her there’s a soldier to make sure she buries them. The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them very quietly, but in fact they had to be buried. The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, everything was so—beautiful! That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful. I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.
    *
    I’m a soldier. If I'm ordered to do something, I need to do it. But I felt this desire to be a hero, too. You were supposed to. The political workers gave speeches. There were items on the radio and television. Different people reacted differently: some wanted to be interviewed, show up on television, and some just saw it as their job, and then a third type—I met people like this, they felt they were doing heroic work. We were well paid, but it was as if that didn't matter. My salary was 400 rubles, whereas there I got 1000 (that’s in those Soviet rubles). Later people said, “They got piles of money and now they come back and get the first cars, the first furniture sets." Of course it stings. Because there was that heroic aspect, also.
    I was scared before I went there. For a little while. But then when I got there the fear went away. It was all orders, work, tasks. I wanted to see the reactor from above, from a helicopter—I wanted to see what had really happened in there. But that was forbidden. On my medical card they wrote that I got 21 roentgen, but I'm not sure that's right. The procedure was very simple: you flew to the provincial capital, Chernobyl (which is a small provincial town, by the way, not something enormous, as I'd imagined), there's a man there with a dosimeter, 10-15 kilometers away from the power station, he measures the background radiation. These measurements would then be multiplied by the number of hours that we flew each day. But I would go from there to the reactor, and some days there'd be 80 roentgen, some days 120. Sometimes at night I'd circle over the reactor for two hours. We photographed it with infrared lighting, but the pieces of scattered graphite