It’s clouding over and getting gloomy. Powdery snow starts to fall. Around us are heaps of fine, granite stone – they must be output from the tunnels. There are some pieces of old railway tracks, some fallen power poles and ruined houses overgrown with osier. There are lots of bits of metal lying about all over the place, but so bent and torn apart that it’s hard to tell what they were once part of.
We have trouble finding the tunnel. The entrances to all the paths Daniar knows have been blocked. For some years Americans in silver overalls have been roaming about the mountains. They look like spacemen. At the expense of an American ecological foundation they are stopping up the entrances to all the corridors. The Americans aren’t exaggerating with this precaution. My Geiger counter shows that in the valley there is radiation of 50 micro-roentgens an hour – two-and-a-half times higher than the norm, in other words the natural background radiation that’s present everywhere.
In one of the side valleys we come across a lorry carrying a large pipe. They’re treasure seekers from Semipalatinsk, looting anything that can be used for building. They have black faces like miners. They won’t let me take their photo, but they say that prisoners do the work to block the tunnels. They show us how to get into one passage that’s not yet closed.
Outside the tunnel entrance there’s a snowdrift. Easy access to the path is obstructed by some rotten wooden beams which are blocking the entrance, though there’s room to squeeze through. But I’m disappointed – Daniar says he’s not going in. To fetch wire he would, but they took it all out of here long ago, so he’s not going to take the risk just for sport. I offer to pay him, but we can’t agree on a price – he’s asking for too much. Kulanysh has never been in here, and he’s not going in now either.
I squeeze past the pile of beams and stand in the corridor. I measure the radiation – it’s 160 micro-roentgens per hour. A lot. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, about two or three thousand metres away, the bomb went off. But what kind? An ordinary nuclear one, which causes massive contamination, or a ‘more ecological’ thermonuclear warhead? How big was it? One, twenty, one hundred, or maybe one hundred and forty kilotons? And another question – when did it happen? Ten, twenty or thirty years ago? That’s significant. But the main thing is whether it caused an eruption of radioactive gases.
The tunnel is cut out of solid granite rock, but just like in a mine, the walls are supported by wooden props. Lots of them are cracked, probably during the explosion, under the weight of the rocks that have showered down and created heaps of tiny stones underfoot. Here and there I can see the buried tracks of a mine railway. Naturally it never occurred to the Soviet managers that before setting off the charge they could have dismantled the rails. After all, there are several kilometres of track and thousands of wooden sleepers that could have been used in the next tunnel.
I count my steps. After going about 300 metres I stop by a wall made of reinforced concrete. There’s a steel pipe about thirty centimetres in diameter sticking out of the middle. That’s where the wires came through for the bomb’s fuse and for dozens of research instruments positioned the entire length of the tunnel. Next to the pipe the copper hunters have carved out a narrow passage in the concrete.
I check the radiation again. 320 micro-roentgens. Not good. I scramble through the passage.
The partition is ten metres thick. To carve through something like that, the copper hunters must have worked away for about five months with hammer and chisel. They did it all by hand, without any machinery, taking turns to hack every half hour.
In the next chamber the corridor turns right at a ninety-degree angle. There’s lots of equipment smashed by the coloured metal hunters and by big rocks that have fallen from the ceiling.
There’s another 300 metres, another wall with a passage hacked through it and another right-angle bend, but this time to the left.
The radiation is 1170 micro-roentgens an hour.
Time to run!
I go back to the surface. Such high radiation relatively close to the tunnel entrance testifies to the fact that the force of the explosion must have destroyed a number of thick partitions closest to the epicentre. That very often happened here.
In the atomic silo shut inside the mountain the explosion melts, fries and vaporizes hundreds of tons of rock. Pressure measuring millions of atmospheres can tear through all the barriers and shoot a geyser of radioactive gases out of the tunnel. On Degelen there were even incidences when the barriers held out but the mountain didn’t. The explosion blew its insides out, and not just in the vicinity of the tunnel, but in completely different places too. That is what happened on 17 February 1989 during the final nuclear test in Kazakhstan. A vast radioactive cloud escaped into the atmosphere, where the wind drove it onto the city of Chagan, halfway to Semipalatinsk.
No-one would have worried about it, but for the fact that Chagan was a closed military town with a large airfield. There were some Soviet strategic air force squadrons stationed there, which transported nuclear detonators on board bombers. Panic erupted in the city. The women and children fled, and the pilots, the elite of the Soviet armed forces, raised a rebellion.
It was 1989, and perestroika was in full swing, so instead of sending some KGB divisions, as they usually did in such cases, the authorities announced a moratorium on nuclear testing in the Polygon near Semipalatinsk.
Until late 1996 there was still a medium-sized atom bomb lying in the mountain. As treasure hunters pillaged the entire area, there it lay. It should have been detonated seven years earlier, but just then the authorities had announced the end of the experiments. Panic erupted when the DIY enthusiasts from Sarzhal started tinkering with the warhead.They reckoned just about anything could come in handy on the farm – screws, hinges, cogs . . . Finally some experts came from Russia, removed the uranium, and blew up the rest of the bomb with TNT.
At the tunnel entrance my Kazakhs greet me with a glass of vodka. I’ve been gone for more than an hour. They were starting to worry.
‘Now drink’, says Daniar. ‘And another one . . . Bloody lip. It’s still bleeding.’
We go back to the village.
Eighteen kilometres outside Sarzhal a huge mound of fresh earth rises from the steppe, just as if a giant mole had dug it up yesterday. Daniar and Kulanysh say it appeared in 1959.Then why isn’t it overgrown with grass, like the entire steppe around it? I scramble up to the top of it and then I know – not even grass will grow in a crater left by a nuclear bomb. In the middle there’s a big hole full of water.
The bomb was very small, with a force of 1.2 kilotons (more or less the same as 1200 of the biggest air bombs used during the Second World War combined). The small lake is sixty metres long and thirty wide. It’s called Tel’kem-1, and it is the most badly radioactively contaminated place on earth, apart from a few spots on Degelen and in the so-called research field (fifty kilometres west of here, where most of the overground and underground tests were done). Here the radiation is 400 times above the norm – it’s 8000 micro-roentgens.
At one point there’s a narrow passage dug through the top of the crater. The herders drive their animals here to drink, including mares that they milk, and then give the milk to their children to drink.
In 1959 the prisoners were released from the Gulag, so in someone’s sick mind the idea was born of digging canals using nuclear warheads – one bomb blast after another, and your canal’s ready. They also seriously considered mining deposits of natural resources with the help of nuclear warheads. In January 1965, in other words two years after the USSR signed the treaty banning overground tests, thirty kilometres north of Sarzhal, near the village of Znamienko, a thermonuclear explosion with a force of 140 kilotons created a large reservoir 400 metres in diameter and 100 metres deep. The Soviet scientists planned to irrigate all the deserts in the country in this way. A few years later fish began to appear in the reservoir near Znamienko – but they had no eyes.
In all, my walk along the t
unnel and by the lake cost me the same number of roentgens as two big X-rays, of the spine or the rib cage for example.
THE FOURTH CIRCLE – THE SUICIDES
I’ve seen various messes in my life, including more than one collective farm, but what I saw at Sarzhal passed all imagination. They say the nomad doesn’t respect his place, because no place is really his – tomorrow he’ll be leaving it and moving on.The Bolsheviks forced the Kazakhs to lead a settled life, but in more than ninety years they’ve never managed to get used to it. Even the very solid farmsteads that the Kazakhs bought from the Russian Germans when they left for the West (Stalin exiled them here in 1941), after three or four years were reduced to ruins. The gardens shrivel up, the paint peels, the fences and outhouses rot and fall over . . .
I spend the night at Daniar’s home. In the morning his cracked lip is still bleeding. We have breakfast – buckwheat with sour mare’s milk, known as rymchik, and we say farewell.
Here, although it’s a village, life begins somewhere around ten. They get up, do the milking and water the animals, if they have any . . . They move slowly, as if every day were Sunday. The men spend all day doing nothing, except changing the site of their confab – now on a metal bar sticking out of the ground for no reason, now on a fallen concrete pillar, a beam, or a heap of rubble . . .
The houses in the village are set out in several straight rows a good hundred metres apart – unusually broad for village streets. The idea was to chuck out the sewage from each private outhouse onto these very streets. Every few days a collective-farm bulldozer came along and in a single go cleared the entire street’s ‘output’ away from the buildings. But the collective farm has gone, and the broken bulldozer has been given away for scrap – though not all of it, because there was no way to lift it. Everything that could be unscrewed from it has gone for scrap. The rest stands in the middle of the street, buried in manure. It’s a veteran bulldozer, an exemplary worker bulldozer, a Hero bulldozer. It fell on the field of labour.
And so among the houses mighty slag heaps of sewage are rising, and even though we are on the icy, desert steppe, the entire village is covered in appalling, stinking mounds of frozen shit. Some people burn the tops of the mounds that have dried in the sun, but that doesn’t improve the situation at all, apart from making it harder to breathe.
Amid the piles of shit there are wrecked cars, pieces of concrete structures, piles of solidified cement in sacks, and rickety outhouses with wide open jaws, which every few days are shifted to perch above a different hole. There are lots of stray dogs everywhere, or rather dog skeletons coated in scabby skin. The cows and goats are let loose in the street to compete with them for refuse, children black with filth rummage with sticks in the rubbish heaps, while the men sit and stare. They hate the Russkies, their president, civil servants – everyone. They even hate Kazakhstan, because what sort of a fatherland is it that can’t even remove the sewage? They hate everything that isn’t the Soviet Union. I’ll have you know the Soviet Union even left them that wire when it went, so they’d have something to live on for a few more years.
Kulanysh Makashov, the man who drove me to the Polygon in his Volga, never went to Degelen.While everyone else in the village was extracting wire from the mountain, he was busy hollowing out the collective farm, from which he extracted 323 hectares of land, 400 sheep, a herd of horses, some cows, two tractors, a combine and three lorries. He had his gold mine right here, and a better one than any other. As the bookkeeper at the collective farm, he was responsible for closing it down and dividing up the property.
‘Only fools went to fetch wire’, he says, ‘shepherds, tractor drivers and loaders. Haven’t we got enough misfortune? They’re still keen to go there. In the past three years sixty-nine people have tried to take their own lives here.Young and old, normal people, not drunks at all. They left children . . .’
‘Maybe out of poverty?’
‘No way. Rich people did it too. In the evening they’re still laughing, meeting for a drink, saying what they’ll do tomorrow, and next morning they’re hanging in the attic. Children here hang themselves, the mullah – he was a really religious guy, but he killed himself, though he only lived here for three years.’
‘Maybe out of fear?’
‘Maybe. People are afraid to live to forty, because most of them contract cancer, but the children do themselves in too, and the women. You don’t live to fifty here. But why do the children cut their own throats?’
There is a rule known from Hiroshima that cancer usually attacks between the tenth and thirtieth year after the radiation. Research conducted in Nevada and on islands in the South Pacific, where the Americans did their atomic tests, has confirmed this, and it has also been observed near Chelyabinsk, where there was massive contamination in the 1960s following an accident at a plutonium factory. It’s the same here. Cancer has been devastating villages in the area since the 1960s.The suicides began after the Polygon was closed, that is from 1991. With each year there are more of them, lately about three a month.
Professor Murat Urazalin of the Medical Academy in Semipalatinsk told me that some Canadian research has proved a link between radiation higher than the acceptable norm and disturbances in certain centres within the cerebral cortex.
THE FIFTH CIRCLE – ELEVENTH ON THE LIST
Garin Kadbenlo has an excellent memory of various images from childhood.
‘How could I fail to remember when I spent all day in the car. Even when they went to collect a patient they had to take me with them.’
Garin’s father was a doctor in Sarzhal. Half the house was a small hospital, and the doctor’s family lived in the other half. Outside stood an ambulance.
‘I was four. It was August. It was hot and I was in that car. Finally I ran to my mother and complained that the window was so dirty that I couldn’t see anything. So she wiped it clean, and ten minutes later I couldn’t see anything again, and so on, all day long. It was a sort of slightly pinkish dust. People aren’t quite so dumb – they knew at once it was from the bomb that had exploded the day before. The earth here is red.’
The day before, troops had arrived at the village. They told people to turn off the cooker, not to switch on the lights, to stay indoors and not to approach the windows.
‘My mother hadn’t switched off the cooker because she was cooking for the hospital’, recalls Garin, ‘so when it went off, the stove lids and the flames in the cooker shot up to the ceiling. The windowpanes rattled, the door slammed, the cupboard came away from the wall, and some of the wallpaper tore. Then an immense mushroom cloud arose. My mother was pregnant at the time. She had just gone outside, so it blew all over her, and my sister was born with epilepsy.’
Garin is 49. He sounds hoarse, as if trying to speak in a loud whisper. He had a tumour in his larynx, but they cut it out.
‘Two years later, in November 1955, they took everyone forty kilometres away from here, to the city of Abay. We were one hundred kilometres from the biggest explosion there ever was here. They made everyone go outside. They told us to lie down on our stomachs and wouldn’t let us look, and the mothers were supposed to cover the children’s eyes, but as they’d said that, people were all the more curious to see what it was like. The kids were the most inquisitive of all. To this day I can still see it vividly: everyone’s lying down, but they’re craning their necks to get a better view.’
They weren’t allowed to return to Sarzhal for six months.
Garin is a metysh, which is what the Kazakhs call people of mixed race. The only Europeans to have lived here were Russians and Germans, but Garin’s mother, Wanda Kamieniecka, was a Pole, though she wasn’t a deportee, like all the Poles in the neighbouring district of Karaganda. Garin’s father was an army doctor. They fell in love in 1945 when he was on his way back from Berlin, so she went off to Kazakhstan with him.
Garin is the richest man in the village, far richer than even Kulanysh Makashov who plundered the collective farm.
‘Why is that?’
‘Because I have children. I can’t risk exposing them or myself. It’s quite enough that one of my children has died. I work with metal every day, and if something’s harmful, I keep well away from it.’
‘Do you throw it away?’
‘What do you mean? I don’t touch it. I don’t even go near it. The people do it all themselves.’
White Fever Page 14
