Another Chornobyl anniversary was marked and this author again relived experiences and feelings already long passed. Much remains, clothes, property, memorabilia, things purchased before 1986 which we still keep. Something stops us from throwing them away, burning them, or just forgetting about them. We can live in high style, wear expensive suits, dresses, shoes, but inwardly we differ little from the old ladies in Polissia who steal back into their contaminated fenced off villages at night, back to their ramshackle village hovels and kitchen gardens overgrown with weeds, digging and planting potatoes and vegetables in soil that has enough radiation to glow in the dark. Philosophy? There is none. Personally, I am baffled by a repetition of certain situations, something the Austrian writer Robert Musil calls parallel actions. Take freedom. How do we perceive it, imagine it, or live with it? The 1986 disaster meant not only overwhelming horror, total helplessness. It not only divided people into instant refugees willing to part with everything they had to flee this damned country, and “patriots.” It also entailed an entirely new awareness. It was as if some burden had been finally lifted. Somehow we felt that from now on things would be different. I for one remember this very clearly. I happened to spend one night in May 1986 at the writers’ complex in Irpyn (near Kyiv). I couldn’t sleep. I watched the stars that looked very unusual. Early in the morning I walked out and washed myself with dew on top of a hill basking in the sun, which rising to its full glory which seemed especially blinding.
A real tragedy is perceived not by so many physical and moral indicators, not even by the death toll. Ukrainian history is traditionally interpreted as an endless chain of misfortunes and tragic occurrences reaching back centuries. After 1986 we understood that tragedy was history itself. This catastrophically unexpected realization came even before we became fully aware of the disaster on hand. In me, too, there is an inexplicable combination of the grandeur of nature, helpless human despair, and the expectation of some freedom which is sure to come, as a reward for all human sacrifice. Innocent victims will be delivered from their sorrow and pain. This expectation is very disturbing. Freedom as nightmare. We will never be able to use it: not if we win it by fighting for it, nor if we are handed it, nor even if we perceive it as an unavoidable reality.
Back in 1986 that foresight of freedom was a dream destined to come true. We have freedom now. So much we know not what to do with it.
Using that parallel actions pattern, there should be latter-day freedom chronicles. This author is still haunted by the radiation complex (clothes, food, and drink), by thoughts about people having to work from morning until night to make ends meet, people for whom this freedom is still nonexistent. He finds it increasingly hard to perceive the phenomenon of freedom, even in its ideal manifestation. Freedom in Ukraine today is easy to see: each is left to his/her own devices, meaning no one gives a damn about what happens to you. In the year of Chornobyl Kyiv looked almost deserted (not only because a great many residents fled the city but because most stayed indoors sipping or gurgling down cheap red wine, hoping to get rid of excessive radionuclides). Now the city looks to me even emptier.
Squirming in my contaminated clothes, I suddenly notice that there are fewer pretty women in the streets. Eventually I understand why. Because there are so many newspaper stories by and about Ukrainian prostitutes. We learn about how our beautiful maidens are lured abroad by promises of interesting jobs and excellent pay and where they wind up. Now the state seems to be taking steps to protect our better half. Freedom making people curse their destiny? Something is very wrong. Ukrainian feminists promise to start fighting pornography and the social degradation of women. We welcome back prostitutes fleeing their overseas brothels. At the same time female beauty is increasingly often associated with infectious diseases. Ukrainian children never receive the inexpensive top quality homemade juices promised them. Will the state give our sick prostitutes some of the medicines received as humanitarian aid, at least those who managed to flee hell and get back to paradise (or maybe vice versa)?
So much for the latter-day freedom discourse. Current history is being created hand in glove with freedom. All one is left is pondering the infectious nature of current Ukrainian realities.
Have I made myself clear?







