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Child of Chernobyl

 

        The Ukrainian castastrophe being a highly political subject which people all around the world have very strong feelings about, I first wish to say that all of my observations on the matter are based on personal contact alone. Although I was only briefly in the Chernobyl Zone itself this spring, and for a reason unrelated to the nuclear explosion, I then spent the better part of the summer alone under the same smallish roof with a well-informed inhabitant thereof, Miss Anastasiya Petrova (see photo).

        As for the Spanish connection with the matter, I speak from my own direct experience of the ways and whims of the 5,000-odd natives of Montefrio, the very traditional town in the hills of north-western Granada province of which I have been the only foreign resident for well over a decade, running a cottage industry of my own and dabbling in local politics too. So I feel entitled to say that, as the local expression goes, I know the montefrieños as if they were my own flesh and blood - como si los hubiera parido.

        Chernobyl was for me a distant place in the full sense of the word, until, in mid-summer one year ago, I suddenly began to see strange, round-faced, small-nosed, fair-complexioned youngsters walking about the village. These, the villagers told me, were los niños de Chernobyl, children who, being from the part of Byelorussia which was downwind from the Ukrainian nuclear plant, had directly suffered the effects of the explosion and who as a result of their exposure were, it wa said, unlikely to live beyond the age of 30. A humanitarian organisation had arranged for thousands of the poorest ones - it being understood that the others could afford to pay for their own holidays, or simply move away from the zone altogether - to stay a month in Spanish homes, which, the villagers had been told, would have the effect of prolonging their lives by about one year, and of course making them happier, by getting them away from the radioactive area.

        I had immediate doubts about the whole operation, first and foremost because I know how gullible the villagers are in their dealings with outsiders, and also because the children themselves didn't seem either poor or sick. They had all their hair, and hair loss is the first sign of radioactive exposure; they were well-built and even quite well-dressed - in fact, they looked just like middle-class Western teenagers.

        There were other blatant signs of non-poorness. Some were seen to be riding the motorcycles of the children of their Spanish hosts with obvious skill, and others were said to be astonishingly good at running the family computer, when the family had one. There were indeed cases of children who came with only the clothes on their backs and formed strong attachments to their adopted families, but others behaved more like sharp city kids having a lark at the expense of their country cousins. One friend told me that although his wife bent over backwards thinking of well-balanced meals for her little ruso, young Igor would only eat ice cream and pizza, and - like the rest of them - refused to drink anything but Coca Cola. Another boy constantly demanded money for the discoteca, and when it was refused actually attacked the good señora and tried to throw her out of the window of her flat. Families who had girls staying with them understandably worried about them being out dancing late at night, imagining unwanted pregnancies, detected by indignant parents back in Byelorussia, or wherever they came from.

        One of the main problems, of course, was that the families could not communicate with their young charges. Each group was accompanied by a Byelorussian monitor who was by qualification a teacher of Spanish, but ours was never to be seen. I am told that she pooled her allowance with the monitoress in the next village and they rented a car, with which they spent their nights roaming the region's bars and discos, where it seems they seldom if ever had to pay. As a nighthawk friend of mine here put it, they had the time of their lives, with men hovering around them the whole month long "como moscas"...

        Then there were the host families themselves, with their own ulterior motives. Many were politically and socially prominent people, both of right and left persuasions, who had every reason to want to be seen, in the eyes of the community, as humane and charitable - what the Spanish naively call buenas personas. One was our Assistant Mayor, who may be "good" but is also a very clever and ambitious politician; another was the previous Mayor, who ruled the town with an iron hand for 12 years and who could not possibly be described as a buena persona except in the eyes of his former political clients, the notorious enchufados. There was also an otherwise respectable fellow who, to go by his own unabashed declarations, finds no contradiction in being a regular church-goer, on the one hand, and wishing, on the other, that our entire gypsy community - children included - be packed off to an extermination camp.

        It was clear, therefore, that taking a poor, fatally contaminated, and authentically Caucasian child into their homes and hearts for a month could only enhance the benefactors' images in the eyes of the average folk, who would normally view their every action, with merciless Spanish scepticism, as being purely self-serving. If a group of sick, needy children came to live in Montefrio full-time, familiarity would soon breed the inevitable contempt, or at least indifference, but this was clean "package" charity - just one month in paradise, and then back to miserable Minsk...

        It all reminded me of the pro-Third World movement which galvanised the country some years back, the famous "07", so called because a grass-roots coalition of back-to-the-sixties types demanded that Spain contribute .07% of the GDP to aid for poor countries - with hunger strikes, protest marches, camp-ins and painted slogans against the foreign debt. But the movement was then suddenly found to be a last-ditch invention of the Socialist Party, wanting to improve its morally tarnished image (and about which I commented in this newspaper at the time). Before it faded, however, it received wide public and press support and many Town Halls in the region pledged to contribute 0.07% of their budgets to it ad infinitum.

        It is wise to remember that, until very recently, Spain was a very poor country which was on the receiving rather than the giving end of such projects, so that its people were denied one of life's greatest satisfactions, and one which is deeply entrenched in the Spanish culture to boot, that of being magnanimous towards those less fortunate than oneself.

        That same summer of 1996 the Faculty of Translation of Granada University received a group of Ukrainian professors, the beneficiaries of an EU programme aimed at bringing the countries of Eastern Europe up to Western academic levels. They attended a two-week course here on linguistic matters, and since some of them did not have Spanish or French as foreign tongues, I was asked to simultaneously provide the English translation of the various talks, which were all given in those languages. And I went along for the same purpose when a team of our professors travelled to the University of Kiev last May.

        There, while stepping out of my booth at the end of a conference, I met Anastasiya, a brilliant language student and a translator and interpreter herself. She looked at me with her huge, anguished eyes - strongly resembling one of those smoky Byzantine ikons of the Virgin Mary decorating the Cathedral of Kiev - and said these words, in perfect Spanish: "That was the first time I have heard an interpreter in capital letters!" (un intérprete en mayúsculas). I was so touched by her compliment that I didn't stop to think that they probably didn't hear many good interpretations in Kiev, but our conversations over the rest of my time there confirmed my first impression of absolute sincerity. For human rather than strictly humanitarian reasons I invited this mysterious creature to spend the summer here in my Andalucian cortijo, and a month later, as if by magic, she arrived on the mid-day bus from Granada. Since Kiev lies within the notorious "zone", I jokingly told the villagers, when they asked where she came from, that she was my niña de Chernobyl...

        Since the villagers were expecting another batch of Russian-speaking children at the time, and in view of the fact that I had recently given a series of cultural programmes on the local FM station, it occurred to me that the newly-arrived Anastasiya might endear herself to everyone by interviewing the children on the air in Russian and translating their words into Spanish, so that we could learn about what they thought of our town, what it was like back home, etc. The Mayor loved the idea and we started hunting for tapes of Russian and Ukrainian folk music to play in the intervals. Anastasiya, as the translator of a 300-page report on the disaster, would provide the listeners of Radio Montefrio with detailed information on its social repercussions. (She herself was spared direct exposure, because her father, being a nuclear biologist, was called to the plant when the fire started, and thanks to his advance knowledge of the event he got his family out of the zone immediately. As the readers may recall, the Soviet Government withheld all news for two weeks, during which time people walked about unaware that the clouds overhead were radioactive smoke...).

        Then, in mid-July, just as the kids were about to arrive, the news broke. While reading the Bar Marengo's copy of El Pais over my midday vino de verano, I stumbled across a full-page report on the Children of Chernobyl project, denouncing it as a fraud which only existed to fill the organisers' pockets. According to the article, and all the other reports which were later published on the subject, the "humanitarian foundation" was a disguised travel agency, selling holidays in Spain to middle-class families who could pay hard cash, wherever they were from.

        Few of the beneficiaries, therefore, were really needy children affected by radioactivity; rather, they were well-off teenagers who didn't have to live in the affected zone, if they had ever lived there at all. Our new conservative government, hearing complaints from families in Madrid that the children were consumer-wise, well-fed and had even boasted about regularly taking holidays in Greece and Italy with their parents, smelled a Socialist rat - another scam from the days of Roldán and Mario Conde - and investigated the matter... The Spanish government's decision: further flights of children to Spain would be suspended, until the matter could be cleared up.

        In Montefrio, we did get a few though - they were already on their way when the truth leaked out. Since I had already promised to do the programme, I decided to at least sound some of them out, off the air. In my presence, Anastasiya spoke to two hulking teenage boys - one was as big as me, almost 6 feet tall - with earrings, baseball caps and track shoes. Sergei and Nicolai were sullen and uncommunicative and seemed uncomfortable at being asked questions in Russian, which made us suspect that they had been instructed to avoid such situations before leaving for Spain. According to Anastasiya, one spoke with a Muscovite accent and the other actually said he lived in Russia, which according to my friend is a long way from Chernobyl.

        We soon gave up, disheartened - it was obvious that these kids were not victims of the Chernobyl disaster and had probably never even been as close to the place as we had. In any case, Anastasiya tells me that in Ukraine the project is considered to be unscientific - being out of the zone a month does not necessarily prolong life for a year, and all the money would have been much better spent sending the truly sick children to live by the Black Sea, for example, and giving them proper medical treatment. As for the programme, I did consider going on the air and "telling all", but then I thought better of it. It would be tantamount to attacking all those buenas personas who had made the gesture of reaching out to an underfed, dying child, which would automatically brand me as a callous cynic, a mala persona.

        Now I am told that on the black market in Kiev you can buy the Chernobyl victim's identity card, stating that you come from one of the concentric circles around the plant - Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3 - for 400 US dollars, entitling the bearer to housing subsidies, free public transport and a host of other advantages. We really do live in a sordid world, where the best of intentions are quickly trodden down in the sacrosanct stampede for profit, even at the expense of all the poor children whose health has really been blighted by history's greatest nuclear disaster.

        Meditating on all of this, I decided that the most humanitarian thing I could do, under the circumstances, was to teach Anastasiya French, the missing jewel in her linguistic tiara (she was named, after all, for the last Czarina). In any case, she had already endeared herself to the villagers by simply being a charming, kind and beautiful young woman - and, of course, by speaking almost flawless, highly idiomatic Spanish. More of my friends made the trip out to my cortijo this summer to see her than in the 12 years I have been living here. One scholarly type, who hardly ever walks at all, even came the two miles on foot because he was afraid of scratching the bottom of his Mercedes on my carril, just to hear Anastasiya talk about Unamuno's El sentimiento trágico de la vida and the 19th century Guerras Carlistas. Don Pepe just can't believe that a 22 year old Ukrainian could know that much about his own country...

        It took me about three weeks, starting from scratch - the only sentence she knew in French was the old chestnut "Voulez-vous faire l'amour avec moi?" - to have her reciting a poem by Verlaine, from memory. She did most of the drudgery herself, upstairs in the granary with tape recordings she made of my voice repeating various phrases, which was just as well because I am a very impatient teacher. And when she came downstairs one afternoon and began to say, very slowly and with a soulful look in her Slavic eyes, "Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville..." I felt that the achievement merited a bit of splurging, as we say in America. I decided to take Anastasiya to Paris, where I had been invited to stay in the home of a Franco-Spanish friend called Soledad, to discover the City of Light for herself, after years of reading about it in Russian books - just as she has spent years reading Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and other English writers with whom I myself am in many cases barely acquainted, without ever having set foot in England...

        It cost me a fortune - we had to fly in different planes because I had booked seats on the last leg of the Aerolineas Argentinas milk-run from Buenos Aires, and when we got to the counter in Barajas we were informed that her student's visa was only good for one entry to the countries of the Schengen Agreement, and that if she arrived in Paris on a flight originating in South America she would be technically - and illegally - trying to enter Europe for a second time, which forced me to buy her a separate ticket at the last minute on Air Inter, rather than give up the trip altogether. It was all very dramatic - we barely had time to kiss goodbye before rushing for our separate departure gates, me carrying both of our bags and a jamón serrano de Montefrío for Soledad slung over my shoulder.

        But it was worth it! Every day for a week we set out to explore my old haunts as a Sorbonne student in the early sixties; she insisted that we meticulously study, guide book in hand, every panel of the stained glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle, as the sun outside made them shimmer like an encrustation of jewels; we ate gigot aux flageolets at a tiny table in a workers' lunchtime bistro, washed down with a ballon de Beaujolais; we drove, in the small car which dear Soledad loaned me, to Chartres to visit the greatest Gothic cathedral in Christendom and, a bit further west, to the monastery of Solesmes, to hear the monks singing Gregorian chant at vespers... But the crowning moment - for me at least, since my greatest reward in all of this was her pleasure - was when she called her mother on my cell phone sitting by the Grand Lac in front of the Palace of Versailles, and cried out in Russian, "Mamulshka, you can't imagine where I am!".

        It is very possible that, next summer, Anastasiya will be the only child of Chernobyl staying in Montefrio, now that the villagers realise that they were being cheated. La rusa, they fondly call her, just as they have always called me el inglé - our relationship itself being, for the villagers, an incongruous one, and not only because of the third of a century which separates our dates of birth. Manichean to the marrow, they they have always taken it for granted that the English are by nature right-wingers and capitalists, and Russians leftists and communists. How wonderfully simple the world can seem, as long as you never stray far from your village in Spain!

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