Truth, Lies, and Radiation
25 October 2020
“What is the cost of lies?” So goes the opening and closing line of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, spoken by scientist Valery Legasov, played by Jared Harris. The answer to this question may be found in three words: number of dead. In the case of the miniseries, as Masha Gessen wisely illustrates in the New Yorker, the answer may be “more lies”. It’s a miniseries after all, not a docu-series.
Was it human error, or untruth built upon untruth, or both that led the reactor to explode? According to the BBC, 31 dead in the accident’s immediate wake in 1986 is the “internationally recognized” number. Yet according to a 2005 UN report, “4,000 more individuals might die as a result of radiation exposure.” What about the 830,000 individual liquidators, those who helped clean up the mess? What about the women carrying sheep wool?
There were 298 women working at a wool processing plant in Chernihiv, Ukraine in the days and weeks following the explosion. When MIT science historian Kate Brown visited the wool factory (the year was not noted in the BBC article), only ten of the women remained. Brown says, “The bales of wool the women were carrying were like hugging an X-ray machine while it was turned on over and over again.”
What is the cost of lies?
The lie of Nazi Germany lead to the mass genocide of six million Jewish persons.
What is the cost of lies?
The lie of being White, as James Baldwin describes in “Being White and Other Lies” led to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Dijon Kizzee and many more in this year alone.
What is the cost of lies? Number of dead?
Number of Coronavirus deaths in the United States (as I type this on November 8th): 241,186.
If we measure the cost of lies in number of dead, what about those of us who did not die? To call upon June Jordan, whose hearing of the voice of Elly Gross on Pacifica Radio in 1998, perhaps altered her perception on what it means to live. Gross, born in 1929, is an Auschwitz survivor, and to quote Jordan, “part of a class action suit seeking compensation for the slave labor enjoined upon her and thousands of other Jews in 1944. / What struck me to my soul was her spontaneous, on air, declaration! She said: I guess it was my destiny to live.”
Gross’ mother and five year old brother were “waved to the left — to their death” on June 2nd, 1944 while Gross was waved to the right. She seeks justice for her mother and brother. She feels that to live one owes something to those who have died, who were murdered — “something big to those whose lives were taken from them.”
Why do I think of surviving, of the number of dead, the cost of lies, on a seemingly calm Sunday morning? Because the cost of lies abounds? Radiation? Yes. But really, radiation? My grandmother lies in a sleep, or in a stupor, in the other room, incapacitated now for six days. She’s seen a radiologist twice this week, in some desperate attempt to discover the cause of the pain in her lower right back, hip area. The pain is so sharp and constant that her only means of relief is lying horizontal on the bed.
On Thursday her doctor ordered us to Emergency on the grounds that her potassium could be dangerously low (it was not) and that we get an IV for pain (we did not). It’s not her doctor’s fault. But the ER experience gave us nothing but the wonderfully comprising potential exposure to COVID-19. However, it did give me one other thing. Two things, actually. Proof that age and living do not relieve me of being a fool, and well, thoughts on radiation.
At the ER my grandmother was given a room, shared with a man for which a thin curtain admitted a shard of privacy. Chaos generally ensued. Nurses were calm and kind but scant, and the idea of a doctor became a thing twice removed, an unheard of apparition relayed to the recess of one’s imagination. Not unlike a leashed puppy, I was confined to my grandmother’s bedside and the edge of our shared room. COVID precautions. So when the X-ray man showed up with his omnipotent machine on wheels to peer inside our suffering neighbor, a female nurse pulled me into the hall.
“You got a uterus?” She casually asked.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Then you don’t wanna be in there. Not if you’re of child bearing age. Not if you wanna still have a uterus in a few years.”
My grandmother, aged 89, stayed behind, hooked up to her bed. I nodded, as if I was in on the joke, like yeah duh radiation, that of course wasn’t a joke. “Thanks,” I said. But the unflinching words of the nurse hit me with a grain of truth, a nauseating wave of mortality. Uterus. Child bearing age. It seems a simple act, to pull me aside and say directly what she said. Yet it shocked me. Why?
What kind of person am I not to know the danger of exposure to X-rays? Would I have stepped out of the room had she not pulled me? Was my brain overwhelmed by caring for my grandma and COVID risk at the ER? Hadn’t I just seen Chernobyl? So why did I even enter the X-ray room with my grandma on Tuesday, and sit there like a fool while the oz man behind the curtain pushed the button, came out to adjust the machines, stared at me with suspicion and possible contempt, said nothing, and returned to the safety of his control room to release more radiation?
“I mean, you gotta be like five to six feet away…” the nurse in her NorCal kind of surfer voice kept on about women’s bodies and camping and having kids, all muffled behind her mask. I wanted more distance. I wanted to be twenty feet away. I wanted out of the ER. Grandma and me, out.
How could I not know?
Maybe it’s okay because there was a chair in that room. A chair for whom? I sat in that chair. Was my uterus being X-rayed to death? Probably not. Probably I’m overreacting.
How could I not know?
My grandmother had a cane. She hadn’t that far to go. There was the radiologist himself, sturdy and large, with solid limbs to support her the five steps, eight steps, to the door. Surely, he would have said if it was dangerous for me to be in the room. Surely.
Maybe I will never have children anyway.
But I think of Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose husband, fireman Vasily Ignatenko, died because he was one of the first responders at Chernobyl. Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose unborn child absorbed the radiation that would have killed her. Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose child died.
I haven’t died. Lie or human error or otherwise has not yet taken my life. And yet I ask, what lies do I tell myself? Is it possible not to? At what cost? I am among the living. What is my responsibility to those who are among the number of the dead? To those whose lives have been taken from them? Perhaps the answer lies in telling the truth.
