Nuclear Silence

The lights on the roof of the tour bus flickered on and off as we slowed to a stop. I kept my eyes focused on the cloudy light covers until I heard the clearing of a throat, suggesting I join the rest of the group. I stepped off the last rusted step and onto the hard, frozen ground of the place my ancestors lived and died; Ukraine. The starting location for our nighttime tour of Chernobyl and the commemorative memorial was not quite what I expected. The bus discarded me and my companions in front of the Cafe Pripyat, where nature had reclaimed this once popular place known by the locals as "The Dish". Ukrainian friends and families once held their lively events here or met for morning coffee and newspaper readings.

I wanted to make this trip alone but my roommate, Hillary, insisted that she and her boyfriend Neal come as well. Neal then brought a friend of his own named Sam. None of them could understand my connection to this place, and I didn't want any of them here with me. This God-forsaken nuclear wasteland was a part of my ancestry. I had to come. I felt called here like something was pulling me, more and more every step of the way. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. Hillary thought I was crazy for wanting to visit this place, I'm sure, but she never saw the things that I saw, or experienced the things that I did. She didn't see the wandering souls with blurred faces, hear the carnival music, or smell the smoke of a forever burning fire. The crying and screaming in my nightmares were the things that kept me awake at night.

Once a nice place for get-togethers, the cafe was now a graveyard of lost memories. In the evening light, the unburied shattered plates and glasses glistened through the dirt and trash. Wooden tables with broken legs, stripped of their paint, laid at unrest. Pieces of stained-glass windows, hanging only by thin and fragile limbs of rebar, made a creaking sound as they slightly moved in the wind, sending a shiver through me from the outside-in. We made our way out of the cafe and to the apartment building next door.

Thirty-five years ago today, on April 26th, just three days before I was born, the world's first and only nuclear disaster occurred right here in Ukraine. Was it a coincidence that I was born three days later? Which of my ancestors died here? My ancestors, whom I'd never met, were either killed or purposefully displaced by officials due to the 28 tons of radiation that escaped nuclear Reactor Number Four.

They had no time to prepare or pack any of their belongings. Items of all sorts of clothes, toys, and photographs lay on the dirt and leaf-covered floors of the apartment building. A stroller, missing its wheels, lay on its side, no doubt that the mother ran with her baby in her arms to the hundreds of buses that evacuated Chernobyl's residents. Kneeling by the stroller, Neal made the sound of a crying baby, and I glared at him with distaste. How Hillary dated him, I couldn’t understand. Even Sam seemed like a different type of person than Neal. This trip was the first I had heard of or met Sam, but I was grateful for him at least. He remained relatively quiet the whole trip, and I could tell he wasn't impressed by Neal's shenanigans. I wondered how those two had become friends.

We left the apartments and followed the tour guide listening to his broken and thickly accented English along the way to a nearby neighborhood, a ghost town of Pripyat. We turned the corner and saw about a dozen abandoned houses. I caught a dark shadow from the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look head-on, it was gone. I knew I'd see them here. The shadows seemed to follow me everywhere. I opened my mouth to tell Hillary, but she was preoccupied with Neal.

The houses were identical in their desolate conditions; cream-colored concrete blocks, most with doors left open; window shutters were missing slabs of wood, with shards of broken glass in some windows, while others were devoid of glass entirely. Old bicycles missing wheels, rust spreading like a virus over their metal frames. BANG! The sound of a gunshot rang through the air in the distance, causing us all to jump and bend down towards the dirt path. A scare tactic for the tour, I guessed. The tour guide chuckled, a disgusting, sick laugh, and I wondered if the thyroid cancer that showed up in the generations following the disaster had found its way to him. Once we stood again, shaken, he spoke.

"The babushkas claim, to this day, they can still hear the gunshots from time to time. The KGB scanned the homes and surrounding areas and shot all remaining animals to stop the spread of the radioactive material. Hm." I looked away from his face, irritated with this guide now and in the distance, saw a mangy, limping coyote with black eyes, looking right at me. I blinked, and it was gone. The greedy and corrupt politicians did everything they could to hide the nuclear blast from the world, including killing anything and everything left alive. The disaster was not discussed for 36 hours after the initial meltdown, letting the residents live their lives as normal, while cancer and other ailments developed and spread throughout their bodies. They breathed those particles of poison for three days until the radiation levels were discovered in a power plant in Sweden.

I turned slightly away from the group and saw a little blonde girl, or divchyna, in Ukrainian. The first soul or spirit I'd seen here with a face. Dirt covered her and caked her face, arms, and legs. She cried a silent cry that shook my core. She wore a pale pink, tattered scarf over her head, and strands of dirty blonde hair escaped through the sides and the bottom. She held her ragged and torn mocha-colored teddy bear by one arm, the only arm it had as she stared right at me. My breath caught as blood started to drip from her nose and the corner of her eyes. She wiped at the blood with her free arm as she reached her hand up and pointed upwards to the house behind her.

My heart was pounding now. Not sure how much more I could take. Afraid I’d run to the hotel, my gaze followed to where she pointed, up towards the broken concrete wall where I saw a man by a window. His arms hung slack next to his sides as he looked down at the girl. The grief on his face was palpable. Tear stains, through the muck and grime, could be seen from where I stood. Two souls were stranded in a desolate, chemical graveyard. His head tilted to meet my eyes, and he let his jaw fall open, falling far beyond what was humanly capable. Leaning forward, he placed his hands on the windowsill and unleashed a horrifying wail that I would never hear, and then he was gone.

The remaining tour of the town brought more horrific scenes and more despair, and I was grateful when our first tour ended. I needed a break, to collect myself before the evening candlelight vigil. I opened the door and looked at the motel room from the doorway. Though it was nicer than the tour bus that we arrived on, the interior lacked any color or life at all. It was fitting, in a way; there could be no reprieve from the terror or sadness of what was lost here. This place would forever haunt anyone who stepped here and everyone that left. I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and watched as dust and dirt particles sprung to life in the late evening light. I imagined for a second how much radiation I was breathing while being here and held my breath for just a second. I washed my face in the too-small bathroom sink and just sat on the bed when a knock came at the door. I opened it to see Sam.

"I've been kicked out of my room. Do you mind if I sleep on the floor?" He asked, irritated.

He looked miserable. How had Neal even convinced him to come along on this trip? I felt sorry for him but was glad for his company.

“We can share the bed. I don't mind." He offered me a grateful smile as he walked in and placed his things on the floor of the other side of the bed.

"You and Hillary seem pretty different," he said.

“I could say the same for you and Neal,” I countered, and he offered a shy, embarrassed smile. He was handsome, but not too handsome. I liked how quiet he was the most.

“Hillary mentioned your family is from here?”

"Yeah. I'm not sure exactly where in Pripyat, but that ancestry website led me here," I inhaled slowly, "I'm sorry you got roped into coming." I looked up to gauge his reaction, but he shrugged with indifference and smiled. "It's not all bad though."

~

Later, we gathered with the others for the candlelight vigil. Though it was spring, it was cold in a blanket of darkness, without the warmth of the sun. We wore long coats, gloves, and scarves. The older women wore scarves on their heads, like the babushkas; the old women I once saw in documentaries about Chernobyl. Women who stayed behind, even in the exclusion zone, when everyone else had evacuated. Only men and women were here, no children as they were still forbidden to tour any of this land. We stood with lit candlesticks, the beeswax melting onto the paper circles or our hands. Ukrainian was spoken among a lot of the visitors. I wasn't fluent, but I could pick out a few vocabulary words that I had recently learned. "Sim'ya”. “Druzi”. “Mohyly"; family, friends, graves. Other tour members gathered in front of old black and white photographs of lost loved ones. Small sobs could be heard from some in the group.

A new tour guide met us for the nighttime tour. He was older than the evening guide and had a thick, graying beard and a tweed wool cap. I wondered if he had lost anyone to the nuclear devastation. He spoke slowly, tender with care. "Invisible were the radioactive particles that contaminated everything," he began. "Food, livestock, the trees and grass on the ground. They couldn't destroy the radiation. They could only try and hide it, seal the contamination up with bulldozing, cutting down forests, and ripping up layers of the ground." I could feel it in my bones as he spoke. His eyes told us an untold story of what he lived through and what he had lost. "The pain that Mother Earth had endured," He shook his head, and he was right; Earth has cried and mourned for years due to man's destruction and weeps even now, for the pieces of her that were so crudely amputated, to hide as much radiation as possible. I looked past the guide and into the dark abyss that was Ukraine’s winter night, and surveyed the thick, dark branches of the poisoned trees, as they reached to the heavens for relief. "If you'll follow me, we will visit Opachici, a popular cemetery in the exclusion zone. However," he hesitated, “You must stay on the path and not wander off. If you touch anything, you could be very sick, very quickly." He advised.

           As we approached the graveyard, thick wooden crosses of different heights covered the field to our right. I wondered if the smaller ones were for children and babies and the taller ones for men and women. Maybe heroes of the disaster; men who took on more radiation while lifting others onto the buses that would take them away.

I saw him then, a man sitting at the base of one of the smaller crosses, another tortured spirit. He wore suspenders overtop a white shirt, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His black, wool cap sat low over his face so that I couldn't see his eyes, just his nose, and set mouth. He sat cross-legged, with his hands folded on his lap. Was he at his child's grave, his wife's, or his own?

He lifted his head as we walked closer and in a blur of movement, he stood with a shovel in hand and moved at an impossible speed, digging more graves. He moved from one spot to another and picked up piles of fireman coats, boots, and helmets, and dumped them into the graves. I had seen pictures of the first responders’ belongings thrown into the basement of hospitals; still giving off high amounts of radiation to this day. He stopped to look at his hands, blistering and oozing, and then turned and lifted his head in my direction. I inhaled sharply and took a step back, bumping into someone who placed a hand on my lower back.

"Are you ok?" someone whispered in my ear.

I nodded and turned, expecting to see a concerned tour member, but instead found myself face to face with the spirit from the graveyard. I let out a slight scream, bringing my hands to my mouth, and ran to catch up to the group, stumbling into Sam, who stopped me from hitting the ground.

“Whoa there,” he said quietly. “You look like you saw a ghost."

I nodded, glancing back towards the graves, afraid to answer, afraid that what I would say would condemn me to insanity. I met his eyes filled with concern and offered a small smile, grateful for his kindness.

We continued on the wooden planked path, holding our candlesticks and lanterns emitting an eerie orange and yellow glow into the night forest. No one talked not even the tour guide. In the distance, shown by the moonlight, we could see the yellow bucket seats of the infamous Ferris wheel of Chernobyl. I knew that only I could hear the carnival music playing at a slowing, dying speed.

When the tour guide spoke again, his husky voice pulled me away from the creepy music and I was grateful. "To our left is one of our dearest babushka's cottages. We lost her last year. She gave interviews 'till the very day she died. She loved our Ukraine and would never abandon it. She lived to be 87 years old." I saw a small stone cottage. Only two small concrete steps sat in front of the door. Ivy vines and other vegetation had climbed the walls and covered the yellowing, clouded windows. The chimney sat quietly. A small shed and a hen house, still with no life. A leaning wired fenced-in patch of the earth once held a small garden that was now overgrown with weeds. It would take a millennium for the nuclear radiation to officially die off. I wondered if any humans would be around to see this place alive again.

Sam took a few steps in front of me, leaving me to trail the group, and then I saw her, the babushka who had once lived here. She backed out of her small shed slowly with her tiny, rusted, empty wheelbarrow. There wasn’t anything scary about this spirit. Just a sadness that radiated from her, through the cool, nighttime air.

  Her long skirts clung to the mud, soiling the blue and yellow linen, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Her scarf was pulled tightly over her head and tied into a thick knot under her wrinkled chin. I watched as she slowly made her way to her cottage, stopping only briefly to put down the wheelbarrow, and wipe her wrinkled, dirty hands on her skirts then disappear through the closed door, into her home, all alone. She had been more alone in life and death than I had ever felt or known. I waited only a moment longer for the glow of candlelight that would never come.