I received the call on the morning of April 27th, a Sunday. My supervisor said there had been an accident at the Chernobyl plant and that engineers with structural assessment experience were needed immediately. He said the word accident the way officials use that word in a country where the size of the truth is adjusted before it is released to the people who need to act on it. I had been an engineer for fourteen years. I understood that the word accident was a container that could hold many different things.
I was on a bus to the exclusion zone by noon. On the road, we passed the evacuation buses going the other direction — long lines of them, carrying the people of Pripyat away from the city they had been told they were leaving temporarily. The children on the buses pressed their faces against the windows. Some of them waved.
The First Days
The reactor building was a ruin. I had seen bombed buildings — I was old enough to have seen the aftermath of the war — and the destroyed reactor looked more like a bombing than an accident. The fourth unit was open to the sky. A fire was burning inside it. The air had a strange quality: clean-smelling, almost antiseptic, with a faint metallic taste. Later I understood what the taste was.
We were given dosimeters. The dosimeters, I was told later, were set to read only up to a certain level, above which the needle simply stopped moving — which meant that once you exceeded that level, the instrument told you nothing further had happened. This detail was not explained to us at the time.
My job in the first weeks was structural assessment: which buildings adjacent to the reactor could be entered, which could be used, which needed to be demolished. I walked through buildings wearing a respirator and a dosimeter and I wrote numbers in a notebook. Somewhere in the notebooks I kept are the radiation readings from those rooms. I do not have the notebooks now.
The Roof
In May, teams of men were sent onto the roof of the reactor building to shovel radioactive debris — pieces of graphite from the reactor core, highly contaminated material that helicopters could not remove — off the roof into the destroyed reactor below. Each man was allowed ninety seconds on the roof. Then he climbed down and was done.
I did not do roof shifts. My work was below, at the base of the building. But I watched the men come down from the roof — two at a time, every ninety seconds, rotating through — and I watched their faces, which had the expression of people who had done something and were now waiting to find out what it meant.
Some of them were sick within hours. The acute cases were evacuated to Hospital No. 6 in Moscow. I heard later that the doctors there had developed a look they used with each other, across the beds of patients, that meant: we cannot save this one. A look with no name, because naming it would have required acknowledging what it named.
Afterward
I worked at Chernobyl for four months in 1986. My cumulative dose, as recorded by the official dosimetry, was within acceptable limits. Whether those limits reflected the actual dose I received is a question I have learned to stop asking, because the answer is not knowable and because the process of asking it is its own kind of contamination.
I have been healthy, mostly. Some colleagues have not been. The ones who worked the roof shifts in May are fewer now than they were. Whether the work shortened their lives or something else shortened their lives is almost always impossible to prove, which is convenient for certain parties and inconvenient for the families.
Chernobyl is a forest now — or becoming one. The trees have grown back. Animals have returned to the exclusion zone in numbers that surprised the scientists who expected desert. Nature, it turns out, finds radiation less threatening than it finds human beings. The boars and wolves and foxes of the exclusion zone are mildly contaminated and entirely alive.
Reactor No. 4 is under a new confinement structure, a massive arch of steel completed in 2016, that will contain it for the next hundred years. After that, someone else's problem. Everything with a half-life long enough becomes someone else's problem eventually.
Narrator's note: Vasyl Kovalenko is a fictional figure. The events described — the dosimeter limitations, the 90-second roof shifts, the evacuation of Pripyat, the Moscow hospital — are documented in Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl (1997), Adriana Petryna's Life Exposed (2002), and official Soviet and IAEA reports.