Chernobyl: The leaked Reactor 4 Tapes

For three years I walked the night rounds on Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Power Station. There were four reactors there, and hours was the newest. Walking the round meant going through the whole reactor side of the building every couple of hours, midnight to eight. You felt the pumps, checked the seals, and read the gauges, and you wrote all of it in the log. It paid better than anything back in your overruch where I grew up. I was twenty-eight that spring. My wife Lesia was twenty-five, and we had a son, Bodan, born in September, so by April he was seven months old. We lived in a two-room flat on the fifth floor in Pripyat. That was the town they built for the plant workers, a few kilometers up the road. From our kitchen window you could see the plant's lights at night. I used to stand there with a glass of tea before I went for the bus. I called the boy Bodic, and Lesia said that was a name for a dog. Is that what you want, a son who comes when you whistle? Bodan's a good name, I picked it. Bodic woke it for every morning and cried, near enough to the minute, and he wasn't much quieter the rest of the day. I'd get two hours when I came in off the shift and another hour in the afternoon if Lesia took him out in the pram, seven months of that. It was a good baby apart from it. April was warm early that year. They were putting up a ferris wheel in the park for Mayday. Coming home from the bus in the mornings I'd see the men up on the frame, bolting on the yellow cars. One afternoon there was a queue for oranges outside the shop on our street, all the way down to the corner. We ate one each, standing at the kitchen window, and she put the other four in a bowl on the table where we could look at them. My mother died in April seven years ago in her village near Avrooch. Her name was Halina. I thought about her more that month than the rest of the year put together. She spoke village Ukrainian all her life and nothing else. She called me Yasko, and nobody else ever called me that. One Friday's Lesia ironed my whites, the white cotton overalls and white cap we wore on the reactor side. They didn't need ironing. She did them anyway at the board in the kitchen with the radio going, and if I said anything about it, she'd say, "Who's going to look at you down there? Nobody. They'll be ironed, though." The night bus to the plant left at a quarter to midnight from the stop at the end of our street. This was in the middle of April, a Saturday, I think. There was a man who waited at that stop most nights, older, in a brown jacket, nobody I knew, and when the bus came, he'd step back and let it go without him. He was there that night, too. Basel and Atiyuk got on two stops after me. He was 34, an electrician on our shift. He could talk enough for two people, and I didn't mind listening. At night it was the catfish. The cooling pond was the big lake beside the plant where the warm water went, and Basel's swore there were catfish in it, the size of a man. Bigger than a man's lava, I'm not joking. The water comes out warm, so they eat all winter. They never stop. I saw one roll over by the outlet. The mouth on it, you could have put your head in. Ask anybody on the day shift. I'd heard it before. The first time he told it, the fish was about as long as my arm. At the plant we changed into our whites, and I signed on at the shift desk. Yuri Romanenko was the shift supervisor, a man in his 40s with glasses he kept pushing up to rub the bridge of his nose. I said good evening. Evening's lava. He didn't look up from the handover sheet. Two words was about average for him. My round started in the main corridor, the long one that ran the length of our side of the unit. Halfway along was the stair down to the pump hall, steel, two flights, and I touched the handrail at the top before I went down. The pump hall was the big hall with the eight main pumps, the ones that pushed the cooling water through the reactor. They were numbered one to eight. Once you were on the floor, the heat felt overwhelming. I went down the row and felt the casing on each one. Number six had been running rough all week. I'd already put it in the log, and nobody had come to look. It was still knocking that night, so I wrote it up. Just the pump hall where the cable rooms were vassal worked. They were low rooms full of racks, cables running off on trays to every part of the unit. He had a bench in the second one, and at the start of most shifts, he rolled three or four cigarettes and lined them up along the edge of it. He wasn't allowed to smoke inside. When I came through, he said something else about the fish, and I kept going. The lower pump room was the last place on that part of the round. It was a smaller pump room on the level under the pump hall, with nothing in it running that spring, and nobody down there at night. All I had to do down there was look in, check the floor was dry, and log it. Like most rooms in the plant, it had a loud speaker high up on the wall, a grey box on the broadcast line that the control room used for announcements. It was about three in the morning. I was standing in the middle of the room with the log open when the loudspeaker clicked on. There was always a click and some hiss before anybody spoke, so I looked up at the box and waited. It said, "Slaver." It was my mother's voice, a bit hoarse, the way she sounded the last year she was alive. Then it said, "The seal on number three is leaking," and it clicked off. I stood with the log, looking up at the grey box, and the noise didn't come back. My palms were wet. I said, "Mama, nothing." I went back up to the pump hall faster than I'd come down. Number three was the third along the row. I felt the casing first out of habit, and it was running smooth. When I crouched down by the seal at the bottom, there was a wet patch on it about the width of my hand, warm with a drip coming off the lower edge onto the floor. I'd been past it at one o'clock, it hadn't been there then, or I hadn't seen it. I logged the leak and called it up to the control room. Roman Enco picked up. I told him number three's seal was leaking, a patch about a hand-wide, and he said, "Noted and put the phone down." The broadcast line picked up radio stations sometimes. I'd heard a key of station on it once. I put it down to that, and to seven months without a full-night sleep. If I said I'd heard my dead mother on the loudspeaker, they'd have my plant pass off me by the end of the week, and the flat came with the job. There was a small drain valve, low on the pipe, a quarter open, with a thin run of water coming out of it into the channel in the floor. Somebody on the day shift must have left it like that. I shut it and wrote it in the log. A week went by, and I kept hearing the voice in the radio. I put it down to random frequencies on the radio, and to seven months without a full-night sleep. The last thing I wanted was anyone to think I'm going crazy. I did my round at five, and again at seven, the same as any other night. Another night, it said, "Don't use the left stair tonight." At eight, at shift change, the electrician who looked after the loudspeaker line was in the locker room. He was a day shift man, though I didn't know his name. I asked him, like it was nothing, whether the speakers on the lower level had been playing up picking up the radio, that sort of thing. From there, we took those off in March for the rewiring, they're not connected to anything. Vassal was the first one to say anything about how I looked. I was passing through the second cable room one night. He was at his bench with four cigarettes, and he finished rolling a fifth before he said anything. You looked terrible, Slava. Are you sleeping? You're not sleeping. Listen, did I tell you I saw it again? The fish, out by the outlet, with my brother-in-law. I've never seen anything like it. I said I'd heard about the fish, he told me anyway. The last time on the bus, it had been longer than Vassal. Now it was the size of a rowing boat, and he held his arms out as wide as they'd go and said that was only the head. Go and see the medic, he said, when he'd finished. Get a powder offer, something to make you sleep. My brother-in-law had a powder, slept like a stone for a week. He sleeps like a stone anyway, to be honest. I don't know. what he wanted it for. I said it was the baby. I knew what happened to a man on the reactor side who went to the medic and said he was hearing voices. They'd have his plant pass off him that week, and maybe he'd end up in the hospital in Kiev, the one with bars on the windows, and after a bit, fossil went back to his cables. I had a night off after that. Friday. Podiek was awake. He was lying on his back with his eyes open, looking straight up past my face at the ceiling, and he wasn't making a sound. Then I reached in and put my hand flat on his chest. It was warm and going up and down. He didn't look at me. I got back into bed and lay facing the cot with my eyes open until it got light. On my next round, or the one after, I tested it. I stood over the drain in the pump hall and set out loud. What was the cow called when I was six? We'd had one cow then, and mama had named her. Nobody at the plant knew we'd ever had a cow. It said, "Zirka," before I'd properly finished asking. That was her name. I thought, "Well, of course it knew. My own head knew the cow's name." One night around then it said, "It's going to open, Slava." I took it to mean the reactor. "It's going to go on Friday, Slava. Friday night. You're the only one who can stop it." Everybody at the plant knew Unit 4 was being shut down for maintenance on Friday the 25th. There was a test to run as the power came down and it was planned for the day shift. The voice told me what to do there, slowly, and made me say it back. I was to push over the two switches under the covers on the left, then hold the long handle down for a count of five, and then press the red one. It said, "If I didn't, the reactor would melt and take appropriate with it, and Bodeck with it." And I went over the sequence in the dark. Friday the 25th was warm. Lesia ironed my whites in the afternoon with the radio on, and Bodeck sat on a blanket on the floor chewing a wooden spoon. We'd finished the oranges by then, the Ferris wheel had all its cars on, and from the window you could see its standing in the park. We had potatoes and sausage. I ate all of mine. My hands felt cold, and it was a warm night. At the shift desk, our supervisor, Romanenko, pushed his glasses up and rubbed his nose. Busy night. I did my round at one. Number six was still knocking, and I called it up to the control room from the pump hall phone. Romanenko picked up. Not now. His voice was high and tight, nothing like usual, and he put the phone down before I'd said any of it. I went up the stair to the long corridor. At the top, there was an alarm going somewhere toward the control room, and then a second one on top of it. The voice came up the stairwell behind me. Now Slava. I touched the handrail at the top and went down and walked the length of the pump hall to the panel at the far end. The covers on the left came up easily. I pushed both switches over, then held the long handle down and counted out loud. One, two, three, four, five. The same as I'd set it in bed. Then I pressed the red one. A shutter came up through my boots, and then the floor jumped. I came to on the floor of the pump hall on my side with water running past my face. I'd been out a minute, maybe less. It was dark, and then the emergency lamps came on along the walls, red, one after another down the hall. The alarm was going over my head. Hot water was pouring down on me from somewhere up in the roof, and steam was coming off the floor all round me. My ears were ringing so hard that I could only just hear the alarm over it. I got onto my hands and to knees. I was at the far end by number eight in the panel. The other end of the hall, the end with the stair I'd come down, wasn't there anymore. It was a heap of broken concrete and pipe going up into the dark, and the stair was under it. There was dust in the water round me, and black lumps lying in it. Some of them as big as a brick. They weren't concrete. I didn't know what they were. I'd been too late. I'd done the sequence exactly like Mama told me, but I hadn't got down the stair quick enough, and did it gone anyway. That was all it was. The phone was on the wall by number five, about halfway down the hall, and the heap hadn't reached that far. I went along to it, bent over, a hand on each pump as I passed. It rang in the control room for a long time, a minute, I think, and then it was Romanenko. Slava, is that you? Are you hurt? I said I didn't think so. Some things blown up. In the unit, some things gone, we don't know what yet. We don't know. Listen. Vossel was down in the cablerooms when it went, and he isn't answering the phone down there. Find him. Find him, and then come up. In three years, he'd never said that many words to me at once. On the way back, past number seven, there was a little brass tap, low on the wall, the one the cleaners filled their buckets from, and it was running into the drain. I turned it off. I couldn't tell you why I bothered with all that water coming down out of the roof. The cablerooms were past the far end of the pump hall, through the door by the panel. A few meters along, the blast had torn a whole panel off the right-hand wall, and behind it, there was a steel door standing open that I'd never seen in three years. The passage on past it was blocked to the ceiling with fallen pipe and cable trays, so I went through the door. Behind it was a corridor I'd never been in, with water up to my knees, warm, and all of it moving the same way. Things floated past me on it, a clipboard faced down, and a glove, and somebody's thermosflask turning slowly round as it went. My boots were full. I had to lift my feet high to walk and with every step the water dragged at the backs of my legs. Vossel's catfish came into my head down there, the one the size of a rowing boat, and I nearly laughed in all that. Anyway, at the end of the corridor there was a stair going up, and I climbed it. It went nine or ten steps and stopped. Past the last step, there wasn't anything, no landing, and no wall, only steam coming up out of the dark, and the water running off the broken edge into it. I stood on the top step of it. Then I came back down it backwards like coming off a ladder. When I got to the bottom, a man was coming along the corridor toward me through the water, walking. He was talking before he got close, like he'd met me at the bus stop. I was over on the turbine side on the stairs, it's all down over there. The roof's in, there's fire up on the roof. The turbine side was the other half of the building where the generators were. His face and his hands were red-brown and shiny all over, and he held his hands a little way out in front of him, not touching anything. If you've seen a cap, I've lost my cap, I had it on when it went, I know I had. I said I hadn't seen it. He looked down at the water round his knees like it might be in there. There'd been a narrow stair going up halfway back along that corridor, one I'd waited straight past. I took him by the sleeve, not the hand, and walked him back to it. It went up as far as the lamps reached. I told him to keep going up until he found somebody. He went up slowly, still talking about the cap. The corridor came out into a longer one, dry apart from a stream of water down the middle of the floor, with lamps along the wall the whole length of it. Two men came running past me the other way, or three. I didn't see their faces. At the far end a man in whites like mine was standing in the middle of the floor. The water was running past his feet, his arms were down by his sides, and he wasn't moving at all while everybody else down there was running. I shouted "Vasel" in case it was him. He didn't answer. He stepped sideways without turning round into a passage off the left-hand wall. I went down the corridor after him as fast as I could, shouting for Vasel again, with the alarm going, and the other men's boots splashing off behind me. When I got there it was an empty passage, three or four meters, that ended at a steel door with a padlock through the handle. On the wall above the door there were handprints, wet, four or five of them, higher than I could reach with my arm all the way up. But the water was still running down the wall from them in thin lines. There were holes in the ceilings everywhere by then. I still had vassal to find. Further in the corridor split, right and left. Right was toward the cable rooms I was nearly sure, and I'd already turned to that way when the voice came. Turn left, Slava. It was close to my ear, like somebody standing just behind me with their face next to mine. It was Mama's voice, horse, the same as always. I didn't look round, I turned left. I'd gone along at a minute, maybe not even that, when the right-hand corridor came down behind me. Or, and then a push of air and dust in my back that put me forward into the wall. Grit fell on my head in shoulders. When I turned round, there was only dust where the corner had been, from the floor, right up. My ears were ringing again, worse than before. I stood with my hand on the wall and got my breath back. If I'd gone right, I'd have been under all that. She'd known about it before it happened, and she'd come up close to me to say so. I said, "Thank you, Mama," out loud into the dust. Then I wiped my face on my sleeve and went on down the left-hand corridor. Bihori Lee Senko was on the landing halfway up the stairs, swearing quietly and shaking his meter like a thermometer. He was the shift's radiation monitor in his fifties. He swore at everything. The left-hand corridor had brought me out at the bottom of those stairs, and Mama hadn't said a word since the other corridor came down behind me. He held the meter out so I could see the needle, then shook it again. Off the scale, he said. Right off. It's been off since I came down here, the useless thing. The one that goes hires locked in a cupboard upstairs, and God knows who's got the key. Nobody does, so I don't know how much it is. More than this. Half of them up there are being sick, and two of them have told me already they're seeing things. Slava. Don't you start? My mouth tasted of metal, it had for a while since the pump hall maybe, and I'd put it down to the dust. I went to tell him and was sick instead through the railings and down into the water. It was the first time I'd been sick all night. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. That's you as well then, he said, and went back to shaking his meter. He'd just been on the phone to the control room. They say the reactors are still there, and it needs water. They want every man who can walk up on the valves on the level above, opening them by hand. I said Romanenko had sent me to find Vassal. Vassal can wait an hour, the reactor can't. He went on up the stairs, and I followed him. The valves were in a long room on the level above. The wheel valves on pipes as thick as I was, and there were men at them already. There were maybe ten of us in the end, some in whites, and some in their shirts, and nobody said much. You got both hands on the rim and put your weight into it. I opened valves by hand until my palms blistered. Then the blisters broke and I kept turning. The backs of my hands were going red like sunburn. Nobody up there could say where the water was going. There wasn't a gauge any of us could read, and you couldn't hear it moving in the pipes. We turned to them because the control room said to. The man on the next wheel was from Unit 3, I think. He kept saying he'd left his car in the car park with the window down. He'd say it, and turn the wheel for a while, and then say it again like he'd only just remembered. A little blue car with the driver's window wound down. I said it probably wouldn't rain. You were up there an hour, maybe more. When none of the wheels on our side would go round any further, Rehory went off to find a telephone and I went back down to look for Vassal. I took a different stare down, the one at the far end of that room. I thought it went toward the pumps. At the first landing I sat down and tipped the water out of my boots. It didn't do any good. They were full again before the next landing. Two flights further down, or three, I put my torch on the landing below me. There was water lying across it, and somebody was standing in the middle of it, looking up the stairs at me. It had whites on, but it was too tall for them. The overalls stopped halfway down at shins and the sleeves finished well short of its wrists, and the white had gone brown at the cuffs. Its skin was brown all over, like the man from the turbine side. I had the torch right on its face. The face was too long, from the eyes down to the chin was much too far longer than any face I'd ever seen. The eyes were wrong in it as well. They were too high up and too far apart, out nearly at the sides of the head. It didn't blink. It looked up at me with the light full on it. The team came across the stairwell between us, only for a second or two, and when it cleared the landing was empty. The next flight down was thick with black dust, and there were footprints in it, bare and wet, and longer than my boots, with the toes spread wide apart. They went down the steps, one under another, into the water at the bottom, and none of them came back up. Freehoree had said two men were seeing things already. I'd been sick through the railings. I climbed back up a flight and found another way round to the cable rooms. Vossel was in the second cable room by his bench, sitting on the floor against a rack with the water round his legs. His cigarettes were still lined up, three of them dry. His face and neck were brown and shiny like the turbine man's, and he had his hands in his lap, but the palms turned up. He was talking as soon as the torch was on him. "Slava, it's you. I was just telling you about the fish, the one in the river under the bridge into town, me and my brother-in-law, I'm not joking. I said it was the pond, the cooling pond. The pond, that's what I said. You don't listen, Slava, that's your trouble." He stopped and looked past the torch at me. Was that you before, sitting here? Somebody had sat down next to him in the dark, he said, and he'd talked to them the whole time and they never said a word back. I thought it was you. I said it wasn't me. He thought about that for a bit. Somebody then. Then he said the thing he'd been wanting to say since I came in, I think. They stopped, Slava, the pumps. I heard them go all eight at once right before it went. I'm next door to those pumps every night, I know what they sound like. One trip saw right, that happens. They don't all go together like that. Somebody switched them off. The flow must have dropped right off and then it blew. He coughed. Who'd switch the pumps off at a time like that? The panel at the far end of the pump hall was the panel for the pumps. In three years, I'd never known what it was for. That was where I'd done the sequence. Mama had told me I was the only one who could stop it and I'd gone down there and switched the pumps off myself. They'd already been fighting it up in the control room. I'd heard them on the phone and I'd taken the water away from it on top of that. That was what finished it. It was a few kilometers up the road with Lesia and Bodic asleep in it. It was warm enough that she'd have the window open. Bossel was still asking who'd do a thing like that. I didn't say anything to him. I got him up by his belt and the back of his whites, so I wouldn't have to take hold of his arms. There was a stair at the end of the cable rooms with torches at the top of it and men's voices, somebody calling out names. I got him to the bottom of it and shouted up. Two men came down a few steps and took him up between them. He was still talking about the fish. One of them shouted down from me to come on. Romanenko had said to find him and then come up and I'd found him. The voice came from behind me and lower down where the same stair went on below the cable rooms into the water. Slava. It was Mama. Come down to me Slava, come on. Up there were free-hory and Romanenko and the men off the valves and Bossel asking everybody who'd switched the pumps off. I couldn't go up and stand in front of any of them. Down there was the only place anybody was saying it wasn't me. I put my torch on the water at the bottom of the stair and went down toward her. My torch went yellow a few steps below the cable rooms. Then it went a dirty brown and then it went out. I shook it and nothing came. The water was past my knees and below me where the stair went on down it was completely black. Her voice came up from down there. This way Slava. It had to be her. She turned me left. left at the fork, before the other corridor came down, and that was all I had. If it wasn't Mama down there, then I'd walked the length of the pump hall and switched off all eight pumps with my own hands for nothing, for a voice out of a drain. I couldn't have that, so it was her. It was Mama, and she knew the way out, and I went down after her voice. I went by sound, I kept one hand flat on the wall, and felt for each step with my boot. The water came up my legs, warm as a bat, until the stair ran out, and there was floor under me. Every so often she said something, "Here, Slava, or keep coming, always a little way in front of me, and I turned toward it." When I looked back, the doorway at the top of the stair was red from the lamps. Then I went round a corner, or through another door it was too dark to tell. I was under the reactor by then, in the rooms right at the bottom of the unit that weren't on anybody's round. The water was up round my waist. The alarm was a long way above me, no louder than a radio through the wall of the next flat. Apart from that, there was only her voice, and the water slopping around me when I moved. Then she stopped. I stood in the water and waited for her to tell me which way. I still had the torch in my hand. I shook it hard, and it came on. The light was weak and brown, and only went a little way. It was standing in the water right in front of me, the one from the stairwell, close enough that I could have put my hand out and touched its chest, and it was the face from the stairs. The voice came from there. Slava. Mama called me Yosko every day of her life from when I was a baby to the last time I saw her, and she never once called me Slava. Slava was what the men at the plant called me, Romanenko at the desk and Vasil on the bus and the rest of them. It had called me Slava for two weeks, every time it spoke to me, and I'd never once noticed. It was never her. I'd stood in the lower pump room, saying Mama to a loudspeaker that wasn't connected to anything. Christ. Two weeks of it. Every night, no, not every night, most nights, and it didn't matter which. And it had talked to me in Russian every word for two weeks like the men on shift. Mama never said a word of Russian to me in her life. It was standing right there in front of me in the dark, and I didn't know what it was. Something took hold of my left leg under the water. It was a hand with long fingers, and they went right around my calf. It held on, and I didn't try to pull away from it. After that, there was nothing until the hospital. I woke up in the hospital in Pripyat. It was still the first morning, the Saturday, and nobody had thought yet to keep the families out. Lesia was sitting by the bed with Bowdick on her lap. My hands were blistered and bandaged, so she was holding me by the wrist instead. She had her coat on over her night dress. Bowdick was chewing his fist and looking up at the light. You're awake. She was crying, and she kept talking right through it about the smoke she'd seen over the plant from the kitchen window. Prehor E was in the next bed, swearing at the drip in his arm. When he saw I was awake, he told me he'd found me. First lights, lava, down past the cable-rooms, up to your waist in it, standing there talking, talking away to the dark. I put my torch all around, and there wasn't a living soul. God knows what you were saying. I couldn't make out a word. A doctor came round, and he sent Lesia out into the corridor and turned the sheet back off my legs. The worst burn on me wasn't my hands. It was on my left calf, a deep red mark in the shape of a hand. What did you touch? I said I didn't know. He wrote something down and put the sheet back. When he'd gone, Lesia came back in and asked me what had happened down there. They said a fire. I shut my eyes and didn't answer. That evening, they flew some of us to Moscow. Lesia wasn't allowed to come. I'd never been on a plane before, and as a boy, I'd wanted to go up in one more than anything. I couldn't tell you now what it looked like out of the window. I was sick into a paper bag, the man next to me held for me. In Moscow, they put us in hospital number six. On the evening of the 28th, the nurses had the television on at the end of the ward, and the news came on. A man at a desk redded out. There'd been an accident at the Chernobyl power station, he said, and one of the reactors had been damaged. Measures were being taken and the help was being given to the people affected. So it was the reactor itself. The control room had said it was still there and needed water. We'd opened the valves by hand until our hands were raw. There was nothing left there to put the water in. Basel was in the next room along. They wouldn't let us out to see each other, so he sent me things through the nurse who did nights, mostly about the fish. A day or so after the news, she put her head round to the door and said he wanted to know what had happened down there. He kept asking her to ask me. I told her to tell him I didn't know. They brought food three times a day, soup, mostly, and a grey porridge in the mornings with a skin on it. My mouth had gone sore all round to the inside and I couldn't get anything down except water. The nurse put the tray by the bed every time anyway and came back later and took it away full. The porridge spoon had a bent handle. It was the same one every morning as far as I could tell. On the 30th, I think it was, I asked the doctor straight how long I had. She was a woman of about 50 with grey hair pushed up under her cap and she didn't tell me to rest or not to think about it. About a week, she said. She checked the dressing on my leg before she left. Basel died on the second of May in the night. The nurse told me in the morning when she brought the porridge in. As she came on the third with Bodhik, they'd put the whole of Pripyat on buses the day after I was flown out, she said, for three days, and she'd brought one bag. Three days is that what it is? It isn't, is it? They wouldn't let Bodhik into the room. She held him up to the glass in the door so I could see him and he was crying his head off, read in the face and kicking, the same as he did it for every morning. What was him? Then a nurse took him and Lesia sat by the bed for the 10 minutes they gave her. She didn't ask me again what happened and I didn't tell her anything. I said goodbye. I told her she'd been right about his name. When the nurse came for her, she said she wasn't going anywhere. They could put her out on the street if they liked. It's night now. I've turned the lights down on the ward and Lesia's asleep on a chair out in the corridor with Bodhik across her lap, just the other side of the glass in the door. I'm not going to tell her or anybody. Vossel was the only one who kept asking who'd switched the pumps off and he's gone. The doctor said a week, "I'll keep it to myself till then and after that there won't be anybody left who knows it was me at that panel. My legs hurting under the dressing where the hand is and I've got the sheet pulled down over it in case she wakes up and comes in before the nurses do." Record of a bedside interview, clinical hospital number six, Moscow, the 3rd of May, 1986. The patient is Kovalenko, Yaroslav Petrovich, 28, the operator on the night shift of Unit 4. Two investigators from the government commission were present. The patient answered from the bed. The interview was stopped after 11 minutes on the doctor's instruction, asked where he was at 23 minutes past 1 on the 26th of April, he answered, "The pump hall." But whether he saw or heard anything unusual before the explosion, he answered, "No." Asked whether he operated any equipment in the pump hall, he answered, "No." Asked about the burn on his left leg, he answered, "I don't know." Asked whether he had anything to add, he answered, "No." Kovalenko Yaroslav Petrovich died on the 9th of May, 1986. He was buried at Métino Cemetery in Moscow in a sealed zinc coffin under concrete. His widow and son were resettled in Kiev. The causes of the accident are still disputed. The story ends here, but the night is just getting started. If this helped you unwind, let me know and make sure to check out some of my other videos. Don't forget to subscribe and join the Nocturnal Crew so you don't miss what's coming next. Hopefully I'll see you on the next one.