Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Born ten years after the catastrophe, it cannot be irrefutably proven that Sasha’s condition is linked to nuclear fallout.

Nor can it be proven that the congenital disorder affecting Denis and Georg—our next port of call—is anything other than a consequence of bad luck. They are afflicted with Cockayne syndrome, a condition rare in every country but Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The syndrome causes premature aging, so despite the fact that the brothers were born in 2010 and 2011, they have the faces of preteens, wrinkled to fit their small heads. The condition also impairs growth, so viewed from behind they would easily be mistaken for infants. Like Sasha, they have rarely, if ever, felt fresh air on their skin. Unlike Sasha, they have never seen sunlight: the acute sensitivity of their nervous systems means that they must be kept in this darkened room, in this broiling apartment. Their bed, an outstretched futon.

Their parents, Olga and Misha, weren’t even born by April 1986. They cradle their boys, carry them over their shoulders, sing to them, pat their backs in consolation. A wedding photograph hangs on their wall, taken five years ago, when Misha was twenty-three and Olga twenty. She in a dress of sapphire blue. He in a black suit, black shirt, without a tie. Visitors are rare, so they are pleased to see us. As with Vasily, they receive no aid from the state.

We sit and watch Georg take tentative steps, we listen as he forms some words. Denis could do the same a year ago until he developed encephalitis, a swelling of the brain, which has rendered him mute and almost immobile. Georg’s young parents smile, clap their hands in encouragement.

These cases are far from being exceptions to the national situation. While the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko (Europe’s longest-reigning dictator), lays the foundations for a new nuclear plant, the proportion of children with chronic illness in his country is without doubt far greater than in the years immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Experts estimate that only 10 percent of the overall expected damage regarding congential deformation can be seen in the first generation born in the wake of the disaster. [11] Sebastian Pflugbeil, Henrik Paulitz, Angelika Claussen, and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Health Effects of Chernobyl (Berlin: IPPNW, GFS Report, 2011), 6.

The Russian writer Andrei Platonov wrote of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Those he observed he called dushevny bednyak , meaning literally “poor souls.” Platonov used it as a descriptive, rather than sympathetic, term. He reasoned that when everything has been taken from the living, all that is left is the soul; the ability to feel and to suffer. “Out of our ugliness,” he writes, “will grow the world’s heart.” [12] John Berger, Hold Everything Dear (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 95.

Stand in a darkened corridor of no distinction. Open a door. Each apartment contains its own particular sorrow, washed over with undiluted love.

In one: Igor, twelve, lies contorted on a sofa. In his mouth, his gums overwhelm his tiny teeth. As he’s unable to produce tears, his pupils—despite his mother’s attentiveness with an eyedropper—have the texture of sandpaper.

In another: Kyrill, nine, is missing a chromosome and a father. His right shoulder is implanted under his neck. His condition doesn’t have a name. His father, like many Belarusian men, took his child’s frailty to be a slight on his masculinity. Olga hasn’t seen him in almost a decade.

From 1986 to 1988 in the heavily contaminated Luninets District, 167 children per 1,000 had diagnosed illnesses. From 1992 to 1994 that number had risen to 611 per 1,000. [13] B. K. Voronetsky, N. E. Porada, N. E. Gutkovsky, and T. V. Blet’ko, “Morbidity of Children Inhabiting Territories with Radionuclide Contamination,” Materials, Gomel Medical Institute (November 1995): 9–10.

Another: Ludmilla regularly breaks her conversation with us to vacuum out Nastya’s saliva through the hole left in her neck from a tracheostomy. On the floor beside Nastya’s chair is a large pickle jar two-thirds full with murky green phlegm. In the next room, her elderly parents are bedridden.

In 1998, 68 percent of Belarusian children living in heavily contaminated areas had vascular dystonia and heart syndrome (characterised by dizziness, breathing difficulties, and fatigue). Three years later it was 74 percent. In less contaminated areas that number rose from 40 percent to 53 percent. [14] Nesterenko, Nesterenko, and Yablokov, Chernobyl , 38.

Despite everything, Ludmilla’s apartment is neat and clean, scattered with homey touches. A small sprig of white wildflowers in a medicine bottle. Trinkets on a shelf. A decorative dishcloth pinned to the wall. A small holy water font nailed to the doorframe with a fragment of a sponge inside. I compliment her attentiveness. She shrugs. The whisper of a smile. “If you live in a cage, you should make it a nice one.”

Gomel, for a brief few years, was at the forefront of medical research regarding nuclear contamination. In 1990, Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky, a pathologist, moved there with his wife, Galina, a paediatrician. The couple’s relocation to the city was not based on career advancement; rather, they believed it their duty to offer their expertise to those who have no choice but to live with chronic exposure. Upon taking the position of rector at the Gomel Medical Institute, Bandazhevsky observed an alarming pattern of heart problems, strokes, and rare birth defects amongst local children. In light of this, he initiated a series of long-term biological studies on a sample group of victims.

After nine years of systematic data collection and evaluation—which involved the design and manufacture of advanced dosimetric instrumentation—Bandazhevsky presented a lecture on his findings to the Belarusian Parliament and the president, Alexander Lukashenko. After Bandazhevsky’s presentation, Lukashenko had him arrested. Bandazhevsky, while awaiting trial, summarised his research in the study “Radioactive Caesium and the Heart.” He was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and, in his initial months of servitude, was repeatedly tortured. The Belarusian secret police also promptly raided his offices at the Gomel Medical Institute and destroyed his archived slides and samples. Most of Bandazhevsky’s colleagues at the Institute were fired, and many were also prosecuted. A new rector was appointed who denounced Bandazhevsky’s work and closed his research clinics. A few years later, this nefarious activity was extended by the deletion of all medical files holding information on Belarusian Chernobyl victims. By the time of Bandazhevsky’s release, three years later, many of those who had been evacuated after the meltdown were resettled back into highly contaminated lands. Currently Bandazhevsky is in exile.

His key finding was that the regular intake of radioactively contaminated food directly results in abnormal heart rhythms and irreversible damage to heart tissue and other vital organs. These findings alone are important, but more significant is the fact that Bandazhevsky discovered that the body concentrates Caesium-137—one of the most abundant of the radionuclides that were spread into the atmosphere from Chernobyl—in the organs, rather than uniformly distributing it throughout the body. This renders the idea of “acceptable dosages” to be a fallacy.

Just as radioactive matter is randomly distributed throughout a landmass, creating radioactive hotspots, so too the body absorbs radioactivity in uneven ways, processing it through the pancreas, the brain, the thyroid, the adrenal glands, the heart, and the intestinal walls, and no doubt in many other ways which we have yet to identify. Some people can absorb significant dosages to little apparent effect, while others can absorb a miniscule amount internally and develop cancer or severe organ defects. The most vulnerable to long-term damage are children, born and unborn, whose immune systems haven’t reached maturity and whose cells are developing at a much faster rate, so that any changes induced within the structure of a cell (from radiation exposure) are magnified and replicated to much greater degrees than in adults.