5.4.16 (#95) Clean Up by Myron Lysenko

I was one of the eight hundred thousand liquidators.
We were sent in to clean up the radiation

and the rest of the mess. We went in a convoy of buses.
They gave us overalls and surgical masks.
We shovelled all the radiated rubbish and wreckage
and contaminated earth into huge pits and poured

cement over the top of it. We worked very fast

in relays. It was hard to breathe in the masks

so we just wore them around our necks. It was hot, so hot.
We took off our shirts and kept shovelling.

It felt like my blood was being sucked out of me.
When a worker began to bleed from his nose

he was sent away to hospital;

when someone collapsed on his shift or afterwards

he was sent home immediately.

I just wanted to keep going. I wanted to do my duty,

to hold out as long as I could. We joked around

and worked hard to clean up all that radiation.
After seven months they gave us a certificate

and one hundred rubles as a bonus.