Through the window of the living room in front of us, I can see a neighbouring block. Its lintels and windowsills are painted in confectionary pink, its doors and archways in baby blue. Veins of cracks run down the façade, leaking onto the pavement, running into potholes in the driveway, where an elderly woman beats the dust out of a suspended rug. Vasily, spent, beckons us forward. We step inside the living room and he motions to the sofa. Sasha is resting there.
The sofa is a two-seater, but there is still ample room for her to lie outstretched upon it. She faces the wall. The outline of her body can be clearly seen through the tightly wrapped blanket covering her. She has the body of a six-year-old. A short, frail frame; without contours. Her head generates a response of shock and pity. Sasha is hydrocephalic, a congenital condition that caused her head to swell to grotesque proportions. Weighing twenty pounds, it is almost the size of her upper body and shaped like a speech bubble; an enormous dome tapering off into a slender chin. She lies in a foetal position, each breath a struggle, her inhalations catching in her sinuses. She is almost hairless, a light down covers her skull, which is pockmarked with large, seeping calluses. Vasily has treated them carefully with white antiseptic powder to soak up and quell the irritation. A bandage is wrapped from her forehead around to the back of her crown to catch any discharge. She is blind and vulnerable as a newborn. The sofa is not a temporary resting place, it is her bed. On a normal day, Vasily cradles her in the armchair and at night lays her here, then unrolls a mattress onto the ground next to her, where he settles down for the night, reaching up to place a hand of reassurance on her body.
Sasha’s and Vasily’s lives have changed only minimally since her mother left. Vasily has the option of admitting Sasha to an orphanage, but he refuses to do so. Neglect there is assured. In these institutions even the official documentation refers to congenitally deformed children as imbeciles and retards. Despite their numbers, they are not considered part of the general population. Stories of sexual abuse in orphanages—even amongst the most stricken cases—are rife.
Born ten years after the catastrophe, it cannot be irrefutably proven that Sasha’s condition is linked to nuclear fallout.
Nor can it be proven that the congenital disorder affecting Denis and Georg—our next port of call—is anything other than a consequence of bad luck. They are afflicted with Cockayne syndrome, a condition rare in every country but Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The syndrome causes premature aging, so despite the fact that the brothers were born in 2010 and 2011, they have the faces of preteens, wrinkled to fit their small heads. The condition also impairs growth, so viewed from behind they would easily be mistaken for infants. Like Sasha, they have rarely, if ever, felt fresh air on their skin. Unlike Sasha, they have never seen sunlight: the acute sensitivity of their nervous systems means that they must be kept in this darkened room, in this broiling apartment. Their bed, an outstretched futon.
Their parents, Olga and Misha, weren’t even born by April 1986. They cradle their boys, carry them over their shoulders, sing to them, pat their backs in consolation. A wedding photograph hangs on their wall, taken five years ago, when Misha was twenty-three and Olga twenty. She in a dress of sapphire blue. He in a black suit, black shirt, without a tie. Visitors are rare, so they are pleased to see us. As with Vasily, they receive no aid from the state.
We sit and watch Georg take tentative steps, we listen as he forms some words. Denis could do the same a year ago until he developed encephalitis, a swelling of the brain, which has rendered him mute and almost immobile. Georg’s young parents smile, clap their hands in encouragement.
These cases are far from being exceptions to the national situation. While the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko (Europe’s longest-reigning dictator), lays the foundations for a new nuclear plant, the proportion of children with chronic illness in his country is without doubt far greater than in the years immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Experts estimate that only 10 percent of the overall expected damage regarding congential deformation can be seen in the first generation born in the wake of the disaster.*
The Russian writer Andrei Platonov wrote of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Those he observed he called dushevny bednyak, meaning literally “poor souls.” Platonov used it as a descriptive, rather than sympathetic, term. He reasoned that when everything has been taken from the living, all that is left is the soul; the ability to feel and to suffer. “Out of our ugliness,” he writes, “will grow the world’s heart.”*
Stand in a darkened corridor of no distinction. Open a door. Each apartment contains its own particular sorrow, washed over with undiluted love.
In one: Igor, twelve, lies contorted on a sofa. In his mouth, his gums overwhelm his tiny teeth. As he’s unable to produce tears, his pupils—despite his mother’s attentiveness with an eyedropper—have the texture of sandpaper.
In another: Kyrill, nine, is missing a chromosome and a father. His right shoulder is implanted under his neck. His condition doesn’t have a name. His father, like many Belarusian men, took his child’s frailty to be a slight on his masculinity. Olga hasn’t seen him in almost a decade.
From 1986 to 1988 in the heavily contaminated Luninets District, 167 children per 1,000 had diagnosed illnesses. From 1992 to 1994 that number had risen to 611 per 1,000.*
Another: Ludmilla regularly breaks her conversation with us to vacuum out Nastya’s saliva through the hole left in her neck from a tracheostomy. On the floor beside Nastya’s chair is a large pickle jar two-thirds full with murky green phlegm. In the next room, her elderly parents are bedridden.
In 1998, 68 percent of Belarusian children living in heavily contaminated areas had vascular dystonia and heart syndrome (characterised by dizziness, breathing difficulties, and fatigue). Three years later it was 74 percent. In less contaminated areas that number rose from 40 percent to 53 percent.*
Despite everything, Ludmilla’s apartment is neat and clean, scattered with homey touches. A small sprig of white wildflowers in a medicine bottle. Trinkets on a shelf. A decorative dishcloth pinned to the wall. A small holy water font nailed to the doorframe with a fragment of a sponge inside. I compliment her attentiveness. She shrugs. The whisper of a smile. “If you live in a cage, you should make it a nice one.”
6.
Gomel, for a brief few years, was at the forefront of medical research regarding nuclear contamination. In 1990, Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky, a pathologist, moved there with his wife, Galina, a paediatrician. The couple’s relocation to the city was not based on career advancement; rather, they believed it their duty to offer their expertise to those who have no choice but to live with chronic exposure. Upon taking the position of rector at the Gomel Medical Institute, Bandazhevsky observed an alarming pattern of heart problems, strokes, and rare birth defects amongst local children. In light of this, he initiated a series of long-term biological studies on a sample group of victims.
After nine years of systematic data collection and evaluation—which involved the design and manufacture of advanced dosimetric instrumentation—Bandazhevsky presented a lecture on his findings to the Belarusian Parliament and the president, Alexander Lukashenko. After Bandazhevsky’s presentation, Lukashenko had him arrested. Bandazhevsky, while awaiting trial, summarised his research in the study “Radioactive Caesium and the Heart.” He was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and, in his initial months of servitude, was repeatedly tortured. The Belarusian secret police also promptly raided his offices at the Gomel Medical Institute and destroyed his archived slides and samples. Most of Bandazhevsky’s colleagues at the Institute were fired, and many were also prosecuted. A new rector was appointed who denounced Bandazhevsky’s work and closed his research clinics. A few years later, this nefarious activity was extended by the deletion of all medical files holding information on Belarusian Chernobyl victims. By the time of Bandazhevsky’s release, three years later, many of those who had been evacuated after the meltdown were resettled bac
k into highly contaminated lands. Currently Bandazhevsky is in exile.
His key finding was that the regular intake of radioactively contaminated food directly results in abnormal heart rhythms and irreversible damage to heart tissue and other vital organs. These findings alone are important, but more significant is the fact that Bandazhevsky discovered that the body concentrates Caesium-137—one of the most abundant of the radionuclides that were spread into the atmosphere from Chernobyl—in the organs, rather than uniformly distributing it throughout the body. This renders the idea of “acceptable dosages” to be a fallacy.
Just as radioactive matter is randomly distributed throughout a landmass, creating radioactive hotspots, so too the body absorbs radioactivity in uneven ways, processing it through the pancreas, the brain, the thyroid, the adrenal glands, the heart, and the intestinal walls, and no doubt in many other ways which we have yet to identify. Some people can absorb significant dosages to little apparent effect, while others can absorb a miniscule amount internally and develop cancer or severe organ defects. The most vulnerable to long-term damage are children, born and unborn, whose immune systems haven’t reached maturity and whose cells are developing at a much faster rate, so that any changes induced within the structure of a cell (from radiation exposure) are magnified and replicated to much greater degrees than in adults.
Even leaving aside Bandazhevsky’s findings, the pattern of evidence in the regions most affected by Chernobyl has made clear that chronic low-dose exposure leads to diseases of the circulatory systems, the endocrine system, the immune system, the respiratory system; to reproductive disorders; to changes in the composition of bones; to brain damage; to blindness; to congenital malformations and abnormalities; to thyroid cancer; to leukaemia; to intensified infections; to organ failures (especially to foetuses irradiated in utero); to premature aging; to gene mutations; to “Chernobyl AIDS, Chernobyl Heart, Chernobyl Limbs” and “Vegetovascular dystonia.” These latter names are a catchall for a variety of new syndromes that medical specialists have only come across in the post-Chernobyl years. The symptoms are so varied and diverse that doctors are obliged to group them under relatively generic names.*
Bandazhevsky’s findings are highly threatening to the nuclear establishment because every nuclear reactor routinely vents radioactive gases into the atmosphere. This “venting” is not an aberration of procedure; instead it is planned, sanctioned, and systematic.
In most cases, about one hundred cubic feet of radioactive gases are released hourly from the condensers at any given reactor. If a reactor is temporarily shut down because of a mechanical malfunction, the ventings increase in frequency and scale.*
Though radiation is also a naturally occuring phenomenon, the type of long-lived radionuclides emitted from nuclear reactors—such as Caesium-137—are new to us as a species. They didn’t exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life and are millions of times more poisonous than naturally occuring radionuclides.
Again, Professor John Gofman can be relied upon to shine clarity on the overall situation:
Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. . . . It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.*
7.
In 2006, the deputy head of the Ukrainian National Commission for Radiation Protection, Dr. Nikolai Omelyanets, stated:
We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident. All this information has been ignored by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the WHO [World Health Organisation].*
In 1989 it was typical for Ukrainian children in heavily contaminated areas to have major organ difficulties associated with hormonal or immune imbalance. By 1996, these had turned chronic and untreatable.*
By 2004, morbidity rates among Ukrainian adults and teenagers in heavily contaminated areas was 573 per 1,000.* By 2011, only 5 to 10 percent of children in these regions were considered to be healthy.*
By 2004, in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, 99.9 percent of Chernobyl cleanup workers were officially ill. In Sumy province it was 96.5 percent; in Donetsk province it was 96 percent.*
Even in the distant future, the situation is likely to get worse as the genetic effects from the disaster take hold. Research on animals has indicated that after twenty generations of reproduction the resistance to radioactivity amongst those exposed will drop significantly, likely creating even more varied and virulent illnesses in four hundred years’ time.*
All of which doesn’t even take into account the problems associated with nuclear waste storage. Problems of such scale and intricacy that it is irrefutable, even by the nuclear bodies, that for several hundred thousand years each generation of our descendants will be obliged to manage our toxic legacy.
8.
In my hotel room in Minsk, I pack for my flight home. I’ve been told to throw away any clothes I wore in the exclusion zone, so I fold whatever remains into a sports bag. The wallpaper around me is of patterned bricks, with sections where the bricks have fallen away to repeatedly reveal a pastoral farmhouse. On the edge of the scene, a woman throws feed over a picket fence to her chickens. I can’t escape the sense that the management is encouraging me to get away, to take a break from the grinding oppression.
On the TV in the corner a chef cooks a spaghetti carbonara with all the typical decorum of a cookery show, but then he breaks from routine and conscientiously cleans up after himself, using a spray bottle and a soft cloth. He smiles and presents the bottle of oven cleaner to the camera, extolling its virtues.
Alexi drives me back to the airport in his battered grey van. We are alone and silent. He steers with one hand; with the other he clenches a cigarette between his thumb and index finger. The landscape is covered in fog.
“My father was involved in the cleanup.”
I turn to him.
“Chernobyl?”
“Yes.”
“You should have mentioned it. I would have liked to speak to him.”
“He’s not well. He wouldn’t have been able to hold a conversation.”
“How long has he been ill?”
“Seven years. He’s had two heart attacks and a stroke. He’s fifty-six.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It’s normal. All his friends are sick. They can’t leave their homes. They never see each other.”
“Do you remember that time?”
He flicks the cigarette out the window.
“Not much. I remember being excited about the day he was coming back. I thought he’d bring me home a military belt buckle or something.”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
“Are you kidding me?”
His paleness extends to his demeanour, like all life has been washed out of him.
“What about your friends? When you’re drinking together, do they talk about what they know?”
He keeps his gaze on the road. His head shifts back in an ironic snicker.
“You don’t fucking get it. I’ve probably said the word ‘Chernobyl’ four times in my life.”
9.
H. G. Wells’s predictions are as relevant as ever. Reflecting on The World Set Free in 1921, three years after the end of World War I, sixty-five years before the explosion in Chernobyl, Wells observed that:
Either the disaster has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that increase would go on forever, so now it would seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into disregard.*
Or more simply, Vladimi
r Gubaryev, the first journalist to reach the Chernobyl accident site, reflects:
This tragedy should be a lesson for all of us and a reproach to those for whom a quiet life with materialistic benefits matters above all else.*
It is only a few decades since the tobacco industry was publishing medical papers proclaiming the health benefits of cigarettes. So there’s perhaps something apt in the reports that Lord Walter Marshall won a round of applause at a meeting of the British Nuclear Forum in 1986 for stating that the effects of radiation exposure within the Chernobyl exclusion zone would be “no worse than smoking a couple of extra cigarettes a year.”*
These attitudes continue unabated. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have predicted that the suffering brought about by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima is, and will continue to be, of a similar magnitude to Chernobyl.*
Radiation is the ultimate assassin. Silent, invisible, tasteless, formless, odourless. It eviscerates the human body, devising sadistically imaginative forms of suffering. And it will keep on doing so for as long as we inhabit the earth. And we create it to boil water.
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Copyright
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
All That Is Solid Melts into Air Page 36
