“And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham.”
Vayera Genesis 18:1 - 22:24
The author thanks and acknowledges Craig Mazin, Johan Renck, and all the other creative individuals who put together the Chernobyl miniseries, particularly episode 4, which supported any factual basis and imagery in this story. This is a work of fiction. All characters other than Tarakanov were entirely invented.
This will, I hope, be my last hour on earth. The only relief from the searing pain of the blisters covering my body is the occasional company of the pretty nurse who is so kindly writing down my words for me. Being blind now, I work to recall her smile for occasional comfort. Thank you, comrade.
Until recently I was assistant and secretary to Nikolai Dmitrievich Tarakanov. My boss was brought here to Chernobyl to supervise the cleanup of the nuclear reactor which is now exploded and sending radiation across the Soviet Union. We’re here on a good mission, to save tens of thousands of lives. Maybe hundreds of thousands. My own life is a small sacrifice, and I blame only myself for my pain.
I want to especially tell the story of Semyon Artemovich Schevchenko, now a middle ranking member of the party. My boss Comrade Tarakanov and I had arrived at Chernobyl several months after the explosion. Everything around us was desolation. There was the plant itself, especially the base that supported the shards of exploded concrete, some clinging to rebar suspended in the sky. There was the surrounding city and villages that had been evacuated and sometimes bulldozed, scraped clean of whatever life had not been burnt away. Finally, there were the armies of the dying – which I have now been recruited into – blistered and red, and groaning in the hospital beds, which I felt a duty to see for myself when I arrived.
Our immediate mission was to deal with the hell that was throbbing on the roof of the plant. Thousands of kilograms of graphite chunks were sitting there, spitting radiation into the country. Unless we could clear it off the roof, and get it back into the core, it would continue to spread its sickness for longer than humans would probably still live on the planet. The machines we brought in failed. That’s when General Lyadov and his poor civilian assistant, Semyon Schevchenko, were called in.
I wish Lyadov also had a dog to accompany him, as I would have liked to have seen which he treated better, his dog or Schevchenko. Whatever Lyadov whimsically demanded became Schevchenko’s order. Water, vodka, cigarettes. Lyadov would have probably expected Schevchenko to round up a brigade of whores, had there been any women within a kilometer. Schevchenko responded to each demand without question. I wondered what the General had over him.
Within a couple of days, I was able to sit in on a meeting called by Lyadov with my own boss, Nikolai Dmitrievich. We explained to him the desperation we faced. A nation was being poisoned, and we had no means to move the graphite from the roof into what was left of the reactor core, where it could be contained. Lyadov asked why we didn’t use men to do the work. I thought my boss was going to punch him, but he calmly explained how this graphite was so hot with radiation that picking it up would kill any man who did so. Lyadov was undisturbed. He worked with both Nikolai and other engineers to perform some calculations: how much time on the roof was tolerable; how much exposure to radiation it would take to cut a man’s life in half. I thought to myself: well, this gives an entirely new meaning to the term “half-life.”
Finally, Lyadov pushed his chair back and said “let’s do it.”
It was our job to create a routine to bring men to the roof in an orderly manner, figure out how to send them out onto the platform of death for their ninety seconds, and get them back in. The general devised the plan to call up soldiers, ship them in secretly, and put them to work. Schevchenko’s duty was to provide the rosters of brigades from which “volunteers” could be recruited.
It was in overhearing these conversations between Lyadov and Schevchenko that I finally came to understand the nature of their relationship.
“Semyon Artemovich, you’ve been doing this same shit job for eight years. I almost feel sorry for you, having to work for a son of a bitch like me. And all you ever wanted was to be a real party member, with a nice salary, a nice pension, and someone to listen to you for a change. Well I think you may have a chance to finally prove your dedication to the party and to the Soviet people.”
That was it? Schevchenko just wanted a promotion and party membership. And for this he put up with Lyadov’s abuse.
“We’re going to be calling up the sixth brigade. That’s about five thousand men, but we won’t need them all. Any objections?”
Schevchenko just picked up his notebooks and left.
In the next few days, Nikolai Dmitrievich and I created the plan on how to manage the men – Lyadov called them the “bio-robots” – when they’d be on the roof. Five men at a time, fit them with lead armor, ninety second shifts, call them back by banging on an iron pipe, dispose of the armor, shower them down. We saw the buses of young men coming in – clearly not understanding the danger they were about to be subjected to.
It is the next conversation I overheard between Lyadov and Schevchenko that makes me want to have this story written down for whatever posterity I can imagine. Lyadov asked his assistant to choose which he believed was more important – service to the party and to the people, or service to his own selfish needs. Of course, Schevchenko chose the first – but I could see he was uncomfortable with his answer.
“Then I would like you to prove that you live by your words. Your son Feliks is in the sixth brigade. He sits shoulder to shoulder with these other boys coming in on the buses. You may have the honor to assign him to the roof of the reactor, to help move the radioactive debris, as a sacrifice for the Soviet people. The choice is yours alone.”
I wanted to rush up to this bedraggled man, shake him and slap him and demand that he not even give a quarter second’s worth of thought to making such a vulgar sacrifice – of his own son! I could barely contain myself. I stood up, almost believing for a moment that I might actually run over to him.
Lyadov was amused to see me bolt up in my boots. “Dmitri Sergeyevich, what’s your interest in this? Did you come to volunteer as well? Good man you are!”
Strangely I did feel honored. We had worked restively on these plans because, whatever the sacrifice, we really believed that this was, maybe not a good plan, but a plan for the greater good.
“Yes, I volunteer,” I told him.
Then the general turned back to Schevchenko and raised his eyebrows, waiting for an answer. I feared that I had now put pressure on the poor man. He begged for more time and told the general that he needed more time to consult with his wife.
“Are you crazy?” the general asked him. “First of all, the one phone we have here cannot be used for personal purposes. But if you even ask her that question, she’ll never sleep with you again. This is a man-to-man question,” he said, and then promised Schevchenko that whatever he decided, his wife would never know who had made the decision. But Schevchenko was in a daze and Lyadov was obviously impatient.
The general barked “Semyon Artemovich!”
“Here I am!” Schevchenko reflexively answered back. And then after some silence, Schevchenko told his comrade that he would personally instruct his son Feliks on the necessary operation.
General Lyadov had assigned Feliks and I to the same team of five that would be on the roof together. As we all climbed the stairs together, I realized that Feliks had been in the company of his father for the entire time since arriving at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. There had been no one else to explain to him exactly what was going on, why this mission was necessary, or the nature of the hostile environment that we were travelling together through. Schevchenko explained the whole protocol which to me was now as familiar as an old song. Wait for the clang. Run on the roof and shovel as much debris as you could, come back when you hear the clang again.
We got to the top, where we were protected from the radiation by a concrete wall. There was a broad hole in the wall which we were to run through, single file, when the alarm sounded. I was handed my lead suit and dressed myself. But Schevchenko helped his son into the suit, and bound him in tightly.
“Papa, what’s with the heavy suit? Why do I need all this?”
“This protects you if you fall on a sharp rock.”
Then the sergeant in charge shouted. “Men! You enter quickly! You have ninety seconds! When you hear me bang again on the pipe you immediately return! Do not delay and under no circumstances do you look over the edge into the pit!“
Then the young man asked his father again “Why the rush? Let’s do a good job!”
And as I held my breath and prepared to run into the fire, a junior officer came running up.
“Semyon Artemovich!”
“Here I am!” he said.
“And you”, looking at his son, “are Feliks Semyonevich? You have orders to not enter the roof, but to return with me. Both of you!”
And they just disappeared and I was alone with four other comrades and the sergeant, and then suddenly the pipe was clanging and I led them all out onto the roof.
All I could think was: “This is the roof of death? It’s just junk! It’s just rocks and strangely shaped, black chunks of graphite, and the only fire was the bright welcoming sun that I loved because I had barely seen it for days. But here I was and I was determined to do a good job. I found the largest chunk of graphite I could find and tried to get my shovel under it. It would barely budge. And time was ticking. I thought of using my glove to help place it onto the shovel, but I knew that would be stupid. So, I just continued wrestling with the shovel until I got a little hold and could shove it under with a kick from my boot heel. But it was so heavy, I couldn’t run, even as the time pushed on, so I stumbled over the rocks trying to carry the chunk forward as my arms trembled. Then, three feet away from the edge, the entire shovel twisted in my hands and the huge chunk fell back to the ground, right in front of me. That’s exactly the moment when I heard them banging on the pipe for us to come back in. I hadn’t achieved a single thing! I was not coming back until I had successfully pushed this little mountain of shit into the pit where it belonged. I used my boot again to get the shovel under the chunk and then summon some last strength in my arms to lift it up. And then I walked calmly with it to the edge of the roof as I heard the sergeant call my name.
“Dmitri Sergeyevich, get back in here now, you idiot!”
“Fuck you!” I told him. “I’m here to get this done!” and I hoisted the chunk up over the rail and let it fall into the pit.
But then – what came over me? I was standing in hell and it felt peaceful. Was I missing something? So, I felt compelled, craned my neck, and looked into the pit, now just a pile of graphite. And there in the radioactive chunks I saw it; Chernobyl — our city where all of the sins of the Soviet Union had come to burn. I looked at it good and hard because I knew that none of the generals and none of the party secretaries who had built it all and brought us to this day had ever looked at it or would ever dare to look at it. One man had to.
Then he called my name again.
“Dmitri Sergeyevich!”
I told him to shut up and that I was coming. I ran back in. They stripped off my lead suit, and then my normal clothes, and they led me to a shower room where they blasted hoses of freezing cold water at me while they scrubbed me with stiff bristles. Then they gave me some new clothes that were too big and told me to go back downstairs where my boss and the general were waiting for me.
They were all there. Comrade Tarakanov, General Lyadov, and of course Schevchenko. My boss began to walk to me warmly as though to shake my hand and embrace me, but then he stopped and just thanked me. He obviously realized I was human poison.
And there was Lyadov looking at Schevchenko. I thought he would thank his assistant. Maybe he already had. But instead, what he said to him was:
“So, you think I’m a monster?”
I had to bite my own lip.
“Do you think I’m a man who would actually have a father send his own son to a probable death?”
“I don’t think you’re a monster.” Shevchenko dutifully answered.
“Or do you think that the Soviet Union is the monster, perhaps, and I’m just one of its tentacles? And so this is your goal, you want to be Comrade Tentacle. Yes?”
Schevchenko continued, and he sounded like a dead man. “I put the Soviet Union above all else. I wish to return to Kiev to serve my country.”
“What you want is a promotion” Lyadov said, and he was telling the truth. “You’ve earned it. But serving your country is not about eating blinis and drinking vodka in Kiev. I’m moving you to Grozny in Chechnya. There’s talk that the people there are getting restive, and they need someone who can be the eyes and ears of the party without stirring shit up. Congratulations. Maybe I’m a monster, but I’m also a good judge of character.”
That’s when my boss spoke up.
“All I know is that at least one of us is a monster. Maybe it is you, Comrade Lyadov. Maybe it’s Comrade Schevchenko. Or possibly it’s me.”
Then he threw his arms in the air, stood up, and walked out of the room.
And I had maybe five seconds to appreciate how my boss was either more important than I had ever appreciated or else crazy, before I felt the violent need to vomit. That’s when I went charging out the room to the toilet, but as you may have heard, I didn’t make it on time. The last thing I remember was just puking a tidal wave onto the floor, onto the general’s boots, and then falling to my knees into the vomit.
And then I guess it must have been a day or so. I woke up in this hospital bed. I could barely see. My skin was turning red. I could feel the blisters start to be forming on my arms, and I thought, well,
“Here I am.”
