May Day

May Day enters Voices from Chernobyl not as a celebration already underway, but as a promise people make to themselves during the night of an evacuation. Told they may be away for only three to five days, residents imagine a change of scenery and a break from routine; they pack barbeques, guitars, and radios. Against that holiday mood, the wives of men who had been at the reactor are already crying. May Day marks the distance between the disaster as most people understand it and the danger some families have recognized firsthand.

Holiday inside the evacuation

The scene is organized around two opposing columns of response. Hundreds of buses are lined up to prepare the town for evacuation, while hundreds of fire trucks have arrived from elsewhere. The street is covered in white foam. On the radio, the authorities describe a short departure: bring warm clothes, live in the forest, perhaps in tents, for three to five days. Many people accept that account readily enough to imagine May Day as an impromptu outing. Their preparations make the evacuation sound temporary and almost festive.

That expectation sits beside a more intimate knowledge. The women whose husbands had worked at the reactor do not share the general anticipation; they are the ones crying. The holiday does not erase the alarm but exposes how unevenly it is felt. For some, the buses mean a brief interruption of ordinary life. For others, the men already taken into danger make the same night impossible to mistake for a camping trip.

The promise of a short absence

The account moves from the crowded town to a family’s attempt to keep living through familiar routines. The narrator cannot remember the journey to her parents’ village. On seeing her mother, she says that Vasya has been flown to Moscow on a special plane; nevertheless, the family finishes planting the garden. A week later, the village is evacuated. The garden work, continued in the face of uncertainty, makes the promise of a temporary absence tangible: life is still being arranged around a home that its inhabitants will soon have to leave.

The narrator is six months pregnant, becomes violently ill, and dreams that her husband is calling to her. After he dies, he never calls to her in her dreams again. She decides to go to Moscow by herself; her mother protests, and her father accompanies her, withdrawing all the family’s money from the bank. In this sequence, the imagined holiday recedes behind separation, illness, and the effort to reach a hospitalized husband. The short timetable announced over the radio cannot contain what the evacuation will mean for this family.

Evacuation remembered as war

Other accounts in the book make clear that evacuation was not experienced as a shared, orderly departure. One woman remembers low-flying planes heading toward the reactor while soldiers came to move residents out. Livestock moaned, children cried, and old women pleaded on their knees. She refused to leave her house, cursed the young soldiers, and stayed inside as the shouting outside gave way to quiet. Later, she heard that people had walked in one column and livestock beside them. Her recollection turns the evacuation into a war scene, sharply unlike the temporary excursion imagined around May Day.

An account by a historian gives that comparison a different voice: an old woman kneels with an icon by her house and asks who will compensate her for her life, recalling that her two sons killed in an earlier war are buried there. Apple trees are blooming and no one is shooting, yet the place is being evacuated. No one present can answer her question. Such memories show why the holiday’s language of a brief absence could not hold: the loss involved homes, graves, and a landscape people understood through earlier wars, even when no visible attack explained what was happening.

A changed measure of time

A decade later, one witness describes people measuring the aftermath against war. Since that war lasted four years, the speaker says, the intervening ten years feel like two wars. The range of daily reactions runs from confidence that everything has passed to fear that everyone will die, a wish to leave the country, and the insistence that people still have to live. May Day’s imagined break from routine belongs to an earlier moment, before the duration of the disaster could be measured in years and the possibility of return had become uncertain.

The book also gives the disaster to children who remember a black cloud and hard rain, puddles colored yellow and green, and a grandmother praying with them in a cellar. Soldiers later arrive in cars, using unfamiliar words such as deactivation and isotopes; a child hears that no other boys or girls have been born in the village since the year of their birth. These memories do not describe the holiday itself. They show the altered world against which its promise of a few days away is heard: a crisis that entered childhood, family life, and the future, long after the evacuation had ceased to be a brief excursion.