A Letter Beyond the Curtain

Dear Karen,

You were already dead by the time I was born. Yet, I’ve come to realize that you might be able to understand me better than many of the living. So here’s my story.

It was late one night when I felt my mom pull back the covers and tug on my shoulder.

“Mom?” I rubbed my eyes and tried to regain control of the blanket. It was dark and my hair still felt wet from the bath. I couldn’t have been asleep long.

“Mom…” I struggled to stay in bed but she reached for me and I felt her hands tremble.

“Come on, let’s take a bath,” she whispered, pulling me toward her chest.

“But we just took one! Mom, what’s going on?” I noticed tears in her eyes and instantly felt like crying too.

“Come on,” she kept repeating as she dragged me into the tub and pulled the nightgown over my head.

“Mom, please!” I sobbed.

The scalding hot water poured out of the faucet and drowned out my cries.

The Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded on Saturday, April 26th, 1986. I was eight years old and spent the day playing outside in the rain. That rain, we would later learn, carried the bulk of the fallout materials from the disaster site 200 miles away.

That explosion was an accident. They were performing a test and something went wrong. But in your case, Karen, it was no accident. The men, who ran the Oklahoma plant where you worked, exposed you to a lethal dose of plutonium as retaliation for your testimony on the conditions at the plant. And so you, too, had to endure a decontamination shower, although I suspect being stripped and scrubbed by strangers was far worse. Or so the movie Silkwood would suggest.

You were a young woman in your twenties, who I suspect had about as much to do with radiation prior to taking the job at the plant, as I did in second grade. And then, in one day, it all changed for both of us.

I had already been asleep when grandma called with the news. Her friend at the Energy Ministry phoned to say that there had been a release following an explosion and that the winds were blowing it all towards us in the city of Minsk. She also hinted that the authorities were going to try and conceal it for as long as they could, so my family started spreading the word.

It would indeed be several days before the general public was told about the accident. The contaminated milk and produce continued making their way through the channels of a planned economy. We even heard rumors that tainted bread had made it as far east as Uzbekistan.

By then my parents began administering iodide to me, which I suspect you also had to take. Did they have it in the pill form in America? Ours were these vile brown drops. They were so disgusting that even diluting them in milk made me gag.

I imagine that working at a nuclear plant you were around Geiger counters every day. I wouldn’t see my first I until the beginning of the next school year. A man in a white lab coat walked between desks, pointing the little machine at our necks. We giggled nervously, as it chirped like a baby pigeon.

TV began showing footage from the accident site and terms like sarcophagus, cesium, and liquidators soon entered our vocabulary. I asked my grandma what half-life meant but she just stroked my head. She was a physicist but a grandma first. You probably would’ve gotten a much more satisfying answer out of her, Karen. I wonder, who did you have around to ask these questions? Did anyone make you feel okay?

By summertime mushroom hunting was out for us, and so was picking berries. That bummed me out almost as much as the fishing ban. In fact, all wonders of the countryside were now off limits, and I was trapped in the city, gagging on brown milk. For a third grader this fate was probably as maddening as your fight with Kerr-McGee’s management, who claimed that you had poisoned yourself.

However for me the worst was yet to come. It was the first day of winter break, when dad came home dragging a large festive looking box. My initial excitement quickly turned to disappointment when its contents were revealed to be an imitation pine tree.

“But, Dad!” I pleaded in indignation. “We are not the fake tree kind of people. You said so yourself!”

“Yes, well, that was before all the real ones had turned orange.”

“But, Dad…”

“Can’t. Radiation.”

My little world collapsed on itself. I couldn’t imagine anything worse at that. And even as I would go on to suffer health problems brought on by cesium replacing calcium in my bones, as blood flowed out of my nose like the Buckingham Fountain, it was the Christmas tree that I missed more than anything.

But I was lucky. Much luckier than you, Karen. Your life came to a tragic end when you were run off the road and killed in a traffic accident. It isn’t clear how or why. Most suspect foul play. I went on to as normal a life as can be expected. We left for America and after a few years my health improved. Better still, I can have as many live trees as I want: spruce, pine, even a palm, like the one that now grows outside my place in LA.

The thing is, I still have no idea what it all meant. I was too young, too close to the epicenter of the catastrophe to understand it. All I know is that I was scared, terrified of it all. “Radiation” became the monster which lived under my bed. It lurked around corners and picked off victims almost at random. Yet when people ask me how I feel about nuclear energy, I struggle to give them the answer they want.

I am very conflicted and wonder how you felt about it? You, too, experienced it, quite literally, on your own skin. And yet your concern was for the workers, the safety precautions, things that would make it a better industry. But the same men who could make those changes were also those who used plutonium to poison you.

I certainly know that neither of us has, had, or ever will have the answer. But I suspect that you, too, would have a hard time with the question.

Until one day,

-Elina