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June 25th, 1990
I lay in bed next to Isabella, feeling her warmth. But my chest felt tight. Something was wrong, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. She kissed my face. “What’s upsetting you, darling?” I didn’t know. “Bella, can you hold me?” I felt her arms wrap around me as I buried my head into her shoulder. Then I stopped. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t ask to be held…
I opened my eyes slowly, facing the cold concrete wall. I could hear the faint breaths and snores of the other inmates, still in a peaceful sleep. I felt exhausted. I’d barely slept since the last visiting day.
As I gained consciousness, I felt the familiar sensation of the burns on my legs that had never quite healed. Like every other injury from the accident, it had faded into the background. But still, I was marked. It was just a sign on my body of what had happened to me.
I shivered and pulled the blankets tighter. The cold was just a fact of life. No matter how you bundled yourself up, it was still there. Just like the dead flies that lined the windowsill, and the mold growing along the walls. I never truly got used to it. On a good day it was a minor nuisance. On a bad day, it was all I needed to curl up in a corner, sulking and crying because every little thing was wrong.
I walked over to the stack of envelopes on the windowsill, pulling letters out at random. I had read each one before, knew it by heart, actually. But every time I read them, something new jumped out at me, something to keep my mind occupied.
I could picture my wife sitting at the kitchen table writing to me. How neat and careful her writing was at the beginning, listing off everything that was happening at home, with enough detail to fill the pages, but not enough to make me jealous. Visits with our friends, drama with her colleagues. She must’ve sat there for hours forcing herself to think of more mundane things that had gone on in the last few days.
Then her writing became scrawled and hurried as she described her efforts to get me out of prison. Each authority she went to, each letter she’d sent. Her words spilled over the lines, jumbled together, eager to tell me everything. I could read her letters like she was talking to me. She closed her letters with a lipstick kiss, a dark red stain, just below her signature. I traced each kiss with my index finger every night before I fell asleep.
I took a letter from May 16th back to my bed, and started reading. I stopped at the words “You’ll love what I’ve done to the place in Kiev.” She thought I would make it through this, live to see the new apartment. But I couldn’t force myself to think of a life after this. I couldn’t get my hopes up. I had wasted all of our years together in a state of deep misery, and now I would never live them over again. I would die before I made it home. This I knew.
I had the fantasy, as my health deteriorated, of begging the guards to let me go home to spend one last night in her arms as I died. And if I pleaded hard enough, fell to my knees sobbing, maybe they’d say yes. She would read to me. One of her books about the First World War, or the Russian Revolution or something equally as fascinating. And I would listen to the stories, and her sarcastic commentary as I fell asleep. I would hold her tight with my head on her chest, feeling warm and safe. That way I could die happy, the way I always wanted.
It was easy to write back to her. I sat alone in my cell frantically spilling every thought I’d had since I last wrote. Every time I thought of her, which was always, I was hit with regret for the way things ended the night of the accident. How I whispered “I love you,” quietly, as I left the room, too weak to wake her up and say it. She deserved so much better. So I wrote it over and over again, sometimes three times in one letter. Someone reading my letters might think I’d lost my mind.
And someone was reading them. The guards were a constant, looming presence in prison. They checked every letter in and out for plans of escape, or anti-government conspiracy. I had long ago come to terms with the fact that my most private feelings were not mine anymore.
The guards watched everything we did. Mealtimes, sleeping, even showering. We weren’t spared a moment of discretion. And they enforced the rules of the prison so strictly. We couldn’t take even a step outside of our cells before we were given direction to do so. Everything was monitored, and every little mistake was punished. But the guards had a curious blindspot. Many inmates committed suicide during my time in prison, and no one stopped them. The guards must have seen. They saw everything. I didn’t understand how someone could have such a lack of a soul. To be able to see how people suffered in here, and still go home at night seemed impossible.
June 26th, 1990
I spent my days writing. To my wife, to my kids, to whatever authorities could get me out of here, and to the families of my coworkers. That was the most difficult part. What could I say to the parents of a dead operator, when I was the one who survived? And worse still, when they were the ones being blamed for the accident. Had they not died, they would have been prosecuted - which the government made absolutely clear to their families. I spent so much of my time reliving that night over and over again, thinking of anything I could’ve done differently. If I had sent them home earlier, if I had known the reactor was flawed.
I looked over at the letter I had started to Leonid Toptunov’s mother, and felt a sense of dread. I had spent hours forcing the words out of myself, and all I had was a sentence. “I want you to know that your son was completely innocent.” There was so much that I could write to her. I knew exactly how it felt to lose a child. And as I lay next to Leonid’s bed in the hospital, watching him die slowly, hearing him cry out in agony, I felt it all over again.
June 27th, 1990
I reminisced about the first time my wife came to visit me in Poltava. That prison had been kinder to the visitors. I was allowed to sit with her in the courtyard, instead of talking to her over a phone through plexiglass like I did in Kiev. She immediately threw her arms around me, and started kissing me, and I kissed her back. But it felt so wrong in that place. She wasn’t meant to be there with all of the heavy surveillance, and strict rules, and hardened criminals. I pulled away instantly. “What’s wrong, Tolya?” she asked quietly, cupping my face in her hands. “Nothing, Bella. I just hate it here.”
Sometimes I thought her love was the only thing keeping me alive, that if I didn’t live with the fleeting hope of a better life with her, my heart would’ve just given out entirely. But I could never tell her that. It was an unfair pressure to put on someone. I had to get out of here to make it up to her, to give her the last moments of a loving marriage.
So now I just sat here waiting for the next visiting day. I wished I was strong enough to do the heavy labour that kept the other inmates busy. That would at least give me a purpose. But my purpose had been clear since I arrived. I had to avenge their deaths, and comfort their grieving relatives.
June 28th, 1990
My wife came to visit, as she did once every two months when it was allowed. For the whole week, my mood changed. It was the one thing I could truly look forward to. I knew how much this visit would torment me after, but I didn’t care. I got to see my wife for one whole hour.
I saw the guard open the gate to let her in. “Oh, Tolya,” she breathed before collapsing into the metal chair across from me. Her voice sounded strange through the phone, still hers, but muffled, far away. “It's good to see you, Bella.” I fought to keep my voice even. My throat tightened. Tears pricked my eyes. Seeing her like this, across the plexiglass always made me come undone. I saw so clearly in front of me, the life I was missing out on. I felt the waves of frustration crash over me. I wished I could just break through the plexiglass, and run away with her. It was like they were teasing me. “Oh darling, you’re so strong.” I heard the whisper coming through the phone. I couldn’t handle it. “Just tell me what’s going on,” I choked out.
She had somehow gotten a meeting with the Chairman of the Supreme Court. But like most men in those positions, he took her valid legal arguments for desperate begging. She had gathered every piece of evidence that said that the design of the reactor was flawed. She had notebooks full of eyewitness accounts, proving I had done nothing wrong. Still, he told her that he wouldn’t let me out on “kindness”, and sent her off. I was furious he would talk to my wife that way. She was smarter and stronger than anyone. A historian, a schoolteacher, a mother, and now, my unpracticed lawyer.
“I still don’t know what to write to Toptunov’s mother,” I told her. “I think you know exactly what you have to say, darling.” she responded, not unkindly. Isabella always knew what to say to people. She knew how to comfort someone who was hurting, and make anyone feel loved.
But it was over too soon. The night after a visiting day is when I felt the most lonely, when my bed felt the most empty. On those nights, I would reach over, almost expecting her to be there next to me, but my hands would touch nothing. It was an indescribable kind of pain to be completely alone. There was no one to know that I was hurting, no one to care. I would sob into my pillow, wishing there was someone, anyone, who could appear beside me to comfort me.
I suppose I’m lucky. Because feeling so alone in prison meant that Isabella had made sure that I could never get used to being lonely. My greatest regret would be to die in prison, without saying a proper goodbye to her. Not all of our years together had been happy. But I’d never been without her. She had been a constant in my life for thirty seven years. And it was so hard to be away from my wife when I had grown so used to her. So I thought of my wife, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself think about the night my son died.
***
I sat beside my wife next to the bed, hearing the monitor beeping. I felt a creeping sense of dread in my stomach as the beeping got slower and slower. But maybe I was imagining it. Isabella had fallen asleep on my shoulder. I wished she was awake. She would’ve told me I wasn’t going crazy. Eventually I started to drift off too.
A sudden alarm took me out of my sleep. I jumped up as three nurses rushed into the room and started to do CPR on Oleg. Isabella and I gripped onto each other so tightly, thinking we were holding each other back, but in reality we were paralyzed.
It was the worst pain I could ever imagine. The world was ending. All of my happiness was gone in that moment, and it would never come back. He was so innocent, so dependent, and so sweet. The moment I met him, it became my life’s purpose to take care of him. I had put every moment of the last ten years into making sure he had the best life. What was my purpose now?
And suddenly I knew what to write to Toptunov’s mother.
June 29th, 1990
I got to work writing as soon as I woke up. The words spilled out of me, easily. My tears dripped onto the page in front of me, blotching the words. But when I was done, it was like a weight had been lifted from me.
Vera,
I want you to know that your son was completely innocent. He acted like a hero that night, so strong, and so dedicated, just as you knew him. I hope that you can find solace in the fact that he went through life being the best he could be.
Your life will never be the same again. Everything will remind you of him, and make you want him back. You will feel heartbroken when you walk with no one beside you, when you pick up the phone with no one to call. You’ll wish you kept him close, and never let anything hurt him. But you were a great mother. You must have been for the way that Leonid turned out.
Over time, the burden will lessen. And although you will always feel him missing from you, one day you will heal. For now, I fully sympathize with you and grieve with you. There is nothing more unbearable than losing one’s child.
A.S. Dyatlov