The journalist Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, interviewed several of the victims of the nuclear accident that she published in her work ‘Voices from Chernobyl’. One of them was Liudmila Ignatenko, wife of the deceased firefighter Vasili Ignatenko, one of the first workers who tried to put out the fire and who, along with other colleagues, was admitted due to the high doses of radiation he received. This is part of the testimony of Liudmila, who was represented in the award-winning television series Chernobyl of the year 2019:
“He started to change. Every day he met a different person than the day before. The burns were sticking out. They appeared in the mouth, on the tongue, on the cheeks… At first they were small sores, but then they grew. His mucous membranes were falling off in layers… as if they were white films… The color of his face, and that of his body… blue… red… a brownish gray. And yet, everything in him was so mine, so dear! It is impossible to tell this!”
He had between twenty-five and thirty bowel movements a day. With blood and mucus. Her skin began to crack on her hands, on her feet. Her entire body was covered in boils. When she moved her head on the pillow, clumps of hair remained.
No doctor knew that I slept with him in the hyperbaric chamber. It didn’t cross their minds. The nurses let me through. At first they also wanted to convince me:
-You’re young. How can you think? If this isn’t a man anymore, it’s a nuclear reactor! You will both burn.
In the hospital I also held her hand and did not let go.
It is night. Silence. We’re alone. He looks at me carefully, fixed, very fixed, and suddenly he tells me:
“I can’t wait to see our son.” How is he.
“What shall we call it?”
“Well, that’s for you to decide.”
“Why me alone, or is it not two of us?”
—Okay, if it’s a boy, let it be Vasia, and if it’s a girl, Natasha.
“What do you mean Vasya?” I already have a Vasia. You! And I don’t want another.
They placed him in the coffin barefoot. They put the gala dress on him, and placed the visor on his chest. They did not put shoes on him. They couldn’t find suitable shoes, because his feet were swollen. Instead of feet, some bombs. They also cut the dress uniform, they could not put it on. He had his entire body destroyed. All of him was a bloody sore. In the hospital, the last two days… I raised his hand and his bone moved, danced, the flesh had separated… Little pieces of lung, liver, came out of his mouth. He was choking on his own entrails. He wrapped my hand in gauze and inserted it into his mouth to get everything out of him.
I called her Natasha. Your dad named you Natasha. From the looks of him, he looked like a healthy baby. With her little arms, his legs. But he had cirrhosis. In his liver there were 28 roentgens. I killed her. It was my fault. She, on the other hand… She has saved me. My girl saved me. She received all the radioactive impact, she became, as it were, the recipient of all the impact ”.
The journalist also collected other curious passages about how the accident affected the animals in the area:
“An old beekeeper told me (and later I heard it from other people): “I went out into the garden in the morning and noticed something was missing, a certain familiar sound. There was not a bee. Not a bee was heard! Not even one! What is this? What’s happening? They did not take flight on the second day either. Not the third. Then they informed us that there had been a breakdown at the nuclear power station, and the power station is right next door. But for a long time we knew nothing. The bees had noticed, but we hadn’t. Now, if I notice anything weird, I’ll look at them. In them is life.” Another example. I struck up a conversation by the river with some fishermen and they told me: «We expected that they would explain the thing to us on television. To be told how to save ourselves. On the other hand, the worms… The most common worms buried themselves very deep in the earth, they went half a meter and even a meter deep. On the other hand, we did not understand anything. We dug and dug. And we didn’t find a single worm to go fishing.”
In its desire not to alarm, the secrecy of the Soviet regime came to deny the status of victims, these were the complaints of one of Larisa Z, mother of a girl affected by radiation:
“My girl… My girl is not like the others. And when she grows up she will ask me: “Why am I not like the rest?” When she was born she… she was not a baby, but a living sack, sewn all over, without a slit, just with her eyes open. In the medical card it is written:
«Girl, born with a multiple complex pathology: aplasia of the anus, aplasia of the vulva, aplasia of the left kidney». This is how it sounds in medical language, but in normal words it is: no pee, no bottom and only one kidney. I took her to operate the next day, the second day after she was born. Her eyes widened, she even seemed to smile, although at first I thought she wanted to cry. Dear God, she had smiled! Children like her don’t live, they die right away. She didn’t die, because I love her.
It’s been four years since we lived with her in the hospital; she can’t be left there alone, she doesn’t know that it’s normal to live at home. When I take her home for a month or two, the girl asks me: “Are we going back to the hospital soon?” There are her friends, there they live and grow.
I have fought for four years. With the doctors, with the officials. I have knocked on the doors of the most important offices. And only after four years have they given me a medical certificate confirming the relationship between ionizing radiation (in small doses) and his terrible pathology. For four years they denied me: “Your girl is a child invalid.” What do you mean a child invalid? She’s a Chernobyl invalid. I have studied my family tree: there was never anything like it among my ancestors, they all lived eighty and ninety years; my grandfather lived to be ninety-four.”
A population used to having their politicians lie to them and hide information, added to a major incident, was fertile ground for rumors that spoke of concentration camps and evacuations to the Stalinist gulags for those affected, UFO photographs over the plant just before the explosion, amphibious fish, or “cosmic experiments” on the population.
And since opportunists appear in every tragedy, Alexievich tells the story of several sorcerers:
I need a helicopter. And that’s when I got furious. Both against Paraska and against our bureaucrats who, open-mouthed, believed this woman’s lies.
“The helicopter can wait,” I told him. Now we will bring some contaminated soil and we will spread it on the ground. Even if it’s half a meter, let’s see… And let’s see if you lower the radiation. And so we did. We brought dirt… and she, at first, first whispered, spit, expelled I don’t know what spirits with her hands. And what happened? Well nothing. Any result. Now Paraska is locked up in some prison in Ukraine, for fraud.
Another witch promised us to speed up the decay of strontium and cesium by 100 hectares. Where did these characters come from? I think they were engendered by our desire for a miracle. Our hope. His photographs, his interviews. Because someone was giving them entire columns in the newspapers, giving them prime time on television. If faith in reason abandons man, fear settles in his soul, as happens with savages. And the monsters appear. Regarding this, my opponents are silent… They are silent.
Bibliography:
Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich