A SOLITARY HUMAN VOICE

We are air, we are not earth...

-- M. Mamardashvili

I don't know what I should talk about -- about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, "I love you." But I didn't know then how much. I had no idea... We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. On the second floor. There were three other young couples, we all shared a kitchen. On the first floor they kept the trucks. The red fire trucks. That was his job. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. "Close the window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I'll be back soon."

I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he's still not back.

The smoke was from the burning bitumen, which had covered the roof. He said later it was like walking on tar. They tried to beat down the flames. They kicked at the burning graphite with their feet...They weren't wearing their canvas gear. They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves. No one told them. They had been called for a fire, that was it.

Four o'clock. Five. Six. At six we were supposed to go to his parents' house. To plant potatoes. It's forty kilometers from Pripyat to Sperizhye, where his parents live. Sowing, plowing -- he loved to do that. His mother always told me how they didn't want him to move to the city, they'd even built a new house for him. He was drafted into the army. He served in the fire brigade in Moscow and when he came out, he wanted to be a fireman. And nothing else! [Silence.]

Sometimes it's as though I hear his voice. Alive. Even photographs don't have the same effect on me as that voice. But he never calls to me...not even in my dreams. I'm the one who calls to him.

Seven o'clock. At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran there, but the police had already encircled it, and they weren't letting anyone through. Only ambulances. 

The policemen shouted: The ambulances are radioactive, stay away! 

I wasn't the only one there, all the wives whose husbands were at the reactor that night had come. 

I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. "Get me inside!" 

"I can't. He's bad. They all are." 

I held on to her. "Just to see him!" 

"All right," she said. "Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes."

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.

"He needs milk. Lots of milk," my friend said. "They should drink at least three liters each." 

"But he doesn't like milk." 

"He'll drink it now." 

Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital, and especially the orderlies, would get sick themselves and die. But we didn't know that then.