anyway? And who would’ve thought that those rods would ever need to enter the heart of the reactor with a crash, in such a state of wild panic—according to the regulations, they should never have even been taken out at all! And so on and so forth—an endless stream of mutual accusations and justifications between the builders, users, enemies, and friends of peaceful nuclear power for Soviet aims.
I know there are no longer birches, poplars, a city, houses, Lenin Street, the school; the 50,000 inhabitants have disappeared somewhere. But my dear little Soviet comrade, I still keep your address, I write you letters that never arrive—just so you know that I am eternally grateful to your father and to all those fathers who, despite the efforts of the control system, managed to blow the reactor sky-high. To blow me sky-high.
>>>
I, unlike everyone else, do not blame K-shev for not warning us. I don’t care—I have unique personal memories, historical ones. For me, Chernobyl is a flash of a moment that surpasses all moments worthy of the name “epic.” Like the eureka light bulb going off in Edison’s skull: the day you understand everything without needing to think.
I already know—now, later, after reading all those books, all those declassified documents. I, as they say, bless the right hand of the creators of those uranium-graphite reactors, with all of their thoughtlessness. The greatness of scientists is not measured by some abstract perfection—on the contrary, it is measured by their talent to make a predicted mistake. To hide it in a system of complicated formulas and terminology so as to remain invisible to small-minded Party leaders.
My brothers, may it be strong as ore,
that blessed right hand of yours—
with the valiant Reactor Four
you lit up a star!
>>>
“We trusted the experts’ evaluations,” they whisper on the upper floors, hidden in offices behind oak doors, huddled in corners near the trashcans. “All for the good of the people and the working class”—nodding, the participants in the Party schools explain this to one another, smoking during breaks, and come to an agreement with insulting ease. Comrade K-shev is somewhere among them, a guest in the great Soviet nation, sent by a small tomato republic, with his pompadour and hand-knit sweater vest. Sent on business from a quiet little country poised to soon become yet another car in the bullet-train—right after the end of lessons in mastering solidarity.
“We . . .” a slightly guilty and listless voice begins a summary over a radio loudspeaker that is somewhat sagging, yet well-slathered with paint just like the wallpaper and doorframe in the yellowish-dusky color of the era.
Now I realize why the hallways are so empty as she and I creep through them—the stairways, the corners, the railings, the mirrors without reflections in them, the crimson curtains and the empty pedestals. They are all at a meeting. They are making important decisions.
“We trusted the scientists,” they sniffle into the loudspeaker, passing around the responsibility like lice in a kindergarten. They squint an eye, pick at the ugly guts of this wart—an imaginary one, of course, yet still dangerous, even twice as dangerous for its imaginariness. What did you inadvertently touch in the pandemonium? Why are you still wiping your fingers on the curtains—to get rid of the invisible contagion of fear—could it be that something has happened? That something has finally happened to you.
“We carried out our orders. We met the deadlines.”
“The bosses, the Party . . . the Congress . . .”
K-shev remains silent, however; he doesn’t justify himself to anyone. There’s something I like about the guy, something that excites me to a particularly strange, radioactive degree, especially at the moment when I bury my fingers in the milky-blue, fleshy-cloth combination of the pleated skirt and naked thighs of his daughter.
He revolves around the axis of his own unshakable foundation, built over the void. It’ll only take a bit more to convince me, just a bit more. Just some extra gesture, accidental, seemingly trivial, that will let me know that he is not simply a Party flunky, but divine. He doesn’t need to run from responsibility because he is in a completely different relationship to responsibility itself. He himself is the creator of responsibilities.
Strangely, his illness now seems at first glance like a failure, a tumble from the altar I was prepared to place him on. But perhaps this is only at first glance—for this reason I’m not rushing to pity him so easily; I’ve seen many falls. Could the illness be the final proof I need to deify him once and for all? A strange sort of god, ready to die even—from an illness no less, one we ourselves all feared becoming infected with. Is he capable of such an act purely and solely to win our faith?
>>>
There, there, my dear little Soviet comrade: don’t cry, don’t be sad, don’t change your surname, don’t be ashamed of your name. Take flowers to your daddy’s grave, even though only a blue suit with metal buttons is buried there. After the hydrogen-oxygen explosion at the reactor, fueled by uranium dioxide UO2 on a bed of zirconium, under the skeleton of niobium—nothing was left of the bodies.
“But we did everything just as we were supposed to”—only evaporated ghosts repeat these words now.
“We did everything correctly, following the established plan approved by the management!” Just as under socialism—we do and did everything correctly, yet life, the world, continues to collapse beneath our feet like a reactor that has entered a runaway state of nuclear meltdown. Is there any need to explain what those two great liberating words mean: chain reaction?
A reaction that breaks chains. Indeed, freedom is equal in strength to the truth. But first the opposite had to happen.
And I had to come across his daughter, of course.
>>>
K-shev watches me from the framed black-and-white photograph. Only in the meaning of that gaze, in the subsections of the ideological tract can I search for the true foundations. The sick passion that firmly grips and envelops both our bodies—mine and his daughter’s. It changes from tenderness into exertion, from exertion into force, into tension to the point of pain: power.
At the end, as usual, the tempo should speed up, just a bit more and everything is over. The moment of the happy ending, the verge of that thirsting absurdity. But that is precisely the moment when I can throw a wrench in the spokes of natural progression, of desire: I slow the beating of my heart, the throbbing of blood in the basement of my organism, the boiling of seething lava. All internal muscles push and jerk, hopelessly trying to overcome the built-up ballast—but I resist, working against them.
I’m pretty vile, that’s clear—I’m obviously depraved. Because I keep a dark and repulsive memory like a worn-out old photograph in my hand. And at the decisive moment, under cover of a final cherished kiss, of a free fusion of lips—I paste it onto her face.
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