The Land of the Klyuchinskys

Nikolai Konstantinovich is 80; his wife, Sofya Nikitichna, is four years younger. They live in a village that was officially buried last year. In Rudnya-Dudichskaya, the bulldozers only spared their homestead. This is the resettlement and exclusion zone of the Chechersky district. The contamination level of these territories is 15-40 Curies.
The Klyuchinskys remember a time when their village had a hundred households, and the whole area was teeming with life. Now, it's crowded here only once a year — when you can enter the radiation-contaminated zone without a pass. On Radunitsa, the day of commemorating the dead, the door to the Klyuchinskys' house hardly ever closes. But when guests ask out of habit, "So, when are you planning to leave?" Nikolai Klyuchinsky gets angry:
— "That's when I start cussin', you understand? You left? Are you living well over there? Well, go on and live! Live your lives. But don't invite me."

In recent years, Klyuchinsky's legs have been failing him: they ache from the knees to the feet, so much so that it's hard to bend them, painful to stand up and sit down.

— "And what do you expect... after riding a motorcycle for 43 years and 7 months. The knee creaks..."

When he needs to leave the house and go down the porch steps, Sofya Nikitichna is often there to offer her shoulder.

— "My wife is my support," he says.
They try to count when they got married — it's been 56 years. They waited a long time for their only son. They finally had him, educated him, raised him, and sent him out into the world.

— "We've already gotten on each other's nerves. He even says it: 'I'm so sick of you already!'" chuckles Sofya Nikitichna, glancing sideways at her husband.
Klyuchinsky smiles with the corner of his mouth.

— "Then they stirred up a panic, started resettling everyone," the lady of the house sighs. "They'd come and measure the houses, create passports for them, assess them. And the money, you know: sixteen thousand for some, eighteen for others. They didn't give it to you in cash — only into a bank account. And when those sixteen thousand became so worthless you couldn't buy anything with them — only then was it 'here, you can take it in cash'."

Nikolai Konstantinovich adds, chuckling:

— "Our people were uneducated, what can you say. A specialist came from Chechersk and said: 'The concept of living here is as follows.' But she herself didn't even know what a 'concept' was! The old women asked: 'A concept — is that something scary?' She says: 'It's terribly scary!'"

In the garage, the man makes birdhouses. Thanks to this old, "pre-Chernobyl" endeavor, the yard is filled with cheerful birdsong. There are now a hundred birdhouses here. Nikolai Konstantinovich also builds special supports for swallows' nests — to keep the growing fledglings from falling out. He feels sorry for them.

— "Did the number of birds decrease after the explosion?"

— "It did. There are no larks. Not a single one. Those birds that sang in the rye, 'time for bed, time for bed,' what were they called... they're gone. The blue-necked one is gone — it was like a jackdaw, but blue. The wrynecks are gone — there was a bird whose head could turn all the way around, they'd lay thirty-six tiny eggs."

In the Soviet years, the St. Nicholas Church in Rudnya-Dudichskaya was first a reading room, and then a granary. Later, the building became a place of worship again. The Klyuchinskys remember that the liquidators helped a great deal — they repaired the church roof.
When the area became deserted, the church was robbed many times.
— "I used to walk around at night, guarding it. All sorts of impostors would drive up, measuring the icons... They were very old, made of linden wood."
"The church caught fire from the top" on March 19, 2002. The Klyuchinskys believe that the abandoned houses in their village were deliberately "baked," and since the weather was dry and the wind was strong, the fire spread to the temple.

The husband and wife recall how they took turns calling the fire department. At first, they were told "no trucks available — we're fighting peat bog fires," then a fire truck arrived without water... The necessary help only arrived in the afternoon, when it was no longer needed.
— "Did you cry for the church?"
— "We cried..."

The owner of the garage, where a rickety tractor and several broken motorcycles now stand, is ready to talk for hours about the time when a Yak-52 airplane was here, its wings spread wide.
Sofya Nikitichna clarifies:
— "The collective farms were falling apart — they were giving away the equipment. So people took tractors, seeders, potato planters, and what did he drag home — an airplane!"

— "I badly wanted to fly," Klyuchinsky explains. "Just like that, I don't know — I was drawn to the sky. Oh, you can't imagine! It seems fast when you look from the ground, but up there — you're just floating gently, observing everything."

He fondly remembers making connections at the DOSAAF (a Soviet-era paramilitary sports organization). He would take a car, finish work early, and drive to the local airfield to fly with an instructor over his own garden:

— "My wife would be doing the laundry — and I'd deliberately make a circle right over here. With the instructor, we'd buzz the engine — and she'd shake her fist at me!" Klyuchinsky laughs.

So when a drunk mechanic crashed the collective farm's Yak-52 and the machine was written off, he didn't hesitate for a moment to take the remains of the plane for himself.

— "I turned in 300 kilograms of lead, from batteries — traded it for the plane and took it. That was still before the radiation."

After the exchange, the Klyuchinskys toiled together over the tractor, adding the missing parts — some from a motorcycle, some from the remains of the plane.
Nikolai Klyuchinsky riveted the body himself. Last year, the tractor's engine became very poor. And it's understandable:

— "It's old, from the GDR. And now there's no GDR, and no spare parts."

The owners are worried: they need an engine or a new tractor. A small one, like the ones MTZ makes nowadays. Nikolai Konstantinovich says he was even about to send a letter to the president, "so that he might gift a tractor."

Especially for TUT.BY, Klyuchinsky charged the battery and, for the first time since winter, drove his tractor out of the garage. Sofya Nikitichna was doubtful whether her husband, with his bad legs, could climb onto the machine, but he managed.