Lydia Stryk

contact/last word

contact: info@lydiastryk.com

Dear Doppelganger

As someone who harbors a fascination for doubles and doppelgangers in art and fiction, where I had assumed such figures live, you might imagine my surprise when, in a weak moment of self-Googling, I discovered an entry for my name to which someone else was attached.

I have an unusual name. In fact, until that fateful day, I would have bet a chunk of change that I was the only Lydia Stryk in the world. When you have an unusual name, there’s no hiding out on Google. Up you come, over and over, without relief or mercy. But here was a result for one “Lydia Stryk” who for all intents and purposes was not me, but instead, a troubling imposter in my small cyber world.

The macabre is the norm in the 21st Century. But certainly a cooling liquid chill quickening into the fallout heat of irony entered me as I clicked on ‘Lydia Stryk’ and discovered upon my screen a Chernobyl returnee—one of a small group of residents of the “exclusion zone” surrounding the Chernobyl disaster site who chose to return to their fallout ghost villages after the catastrophe.

There sits Lydia Stryk—a stubborn entry in the annals of defiance—on the brightly colored and flower-patterned settee of her Ukrainian village home, captured in a Chernobyl portrait series by the photographer, Daniel Berehulak: Set face, determined eyes framed by her babushka, bulkily solid, willfully alive.

* * * *

I ask my German girlfriend what it was like that late April day in ‘86 when news of the Chernobyl disaster first broke in Berlin.

“The radio bulletins reported that radioactive clouds were flowing through the atmosphere,” she recalls, “and that no one knew in which direction they would go. We were advised not to take part in any sports activities and whenever possible to remain indoors. We were asked to remain calm and to stay tuned for updates. A hotline was erected.”

I ask her if she felt panic. “No.” she says. “The mothers. The mothers felt the panic.” And many who could, fled with their children, buying up last minute tickets to the Canary Islands.

“You had the feeling the world might be coming to an end. We shrugged our shoulders. It was unusually warm for April. We sat in cafes (against instructions) the closest to ‘sports activities’ most Berliners ever come. A certain fatalism descended.”

She tries to explain. The world was out of control. Something was separating the earth—a segment of the world—had been cut off. The planet was breaking apart.

“There was massive aggression, against the politicians, the scientists. The fury and debate were unimaginable. The accusations. And yet, looking back, what is astonishing is how calm we were.”

I don’t understand that.

When you think the unavoidable is coming, then you go into a kind of shock. Wir warren in eine Starre—a kind of paralysis.

How long did this go on?

A long time.

Did the clouds pass over you?

They may have. But they headed elsewhere.

When reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing 400 times the radiation fallout released by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the world quickly learned (and as quickly forgot) that an inexperienced night crew expected to complete a safety experiment delayed until their shift by the exigencies of the “power” business (a terribly planned experiment to redress a disastrous risk in the system that had not stopped the opening of the plant going ahead two years previously without the necessary safety feature due to political expediency) could make errors so fatal and thus unleash something so dangerous, that it could only be compared favorably with the plans of any rogue terrorist.

* * *

The forbidden zone around Chernobyl has a 30-kilometer radius encompassing not only an abandoned city, but many ghostly villages. The city, Prypiat, has been taken over by grass and wild rose bushes. And it is said that trees grow on rooftops there and inside of buildings.

Lydia Stryk and the other returnees—now elderly—returned home to their villages inside the zone soon after the catastrophe of April 26, 1986. Meanwhile, experts predict it will take up to 900 years until the region is officially inhabitable again. And beyond this, the radiation has not yet been contained, but continues to leak out of reactor number four.

* * *

In Hiroshima, John Hershey’s remarkable reportage on a small group of survivors of the A-bomb drop on Hiroshima, one survivor, Miss Sasaki, recounts with particular horror, how within a month of the explosion, the wrecked city was covered “in a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green . . . Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones.” (The flesh slid off the bones of the living, Hershey’s witnesses report elsewhere.)

“The bomb,” Hershey explains, “had not only left the underground organ of the plants intact, it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean…”

Is there any comfort to be taken in the knowledge that when the nuclear holocaust comes, as it inevitably will (the paralysis—that Starre—has set in), the planet earth will explode with a profusion of color and scent?

* * *

If I could write Lydia Stryk, here is what I would tell her. And who knows but a relative now living in Brooklyn will read these words and pass it on. Stranger things have happened.

Dear Lydia Stryk!

Forgive my addressing you, a perfect stranger, with this unexpected letter. I must confess that it came as something of a shock to learn of your existence. One gets used to being the only Lydia Stryk in the world. And perhaps you will be equally surprised to learn of me.

What’s in a name? We are very different, you and I. Although my family came from your region of the world, they were cursed and set upon and those who were not murdered, escaped with nothing but the skin on their backs. I can’t call your world ‘home.’

But I know exactly why you went back there. You have something there. And no nuclear fallout in the world can take that away.

“It’s all a question of attitude” I hear you saying with a shrug. “And a sense of humor. After all, who has 900 years to wait around?”

The water tastes like champagne. The fruit so sweet you shiver as you bite into its skin. Many died, of course, after longer or shorter illnesses, but others, well you just go on. Here I am speaking for you, Lydia—may I call you Lydia?—forgive me, but...

You are in my dreams. You haunt me. You’ve been there all along. My dreams about the atom bomb. The fallout sun. I think that I am you. You will go on living 900 years or more. You’ve stolen my name, my will. It all makes sense. My constant exhaustion, irritation, the listlessness. The strange taste in my mouth, my lost sense of touch, the marks that climb across my skin.

You’ve brought me back there with you. Beyond the acceptable, what is forgivable. The forbidden zone where anything is possible. Because it is all over now and will be forever.

Might I visit you?

Yours faithfully,

Lydia Stryk.

This essay first appeared in the Brooklyn Rail in the February 2009 edition.

DeKalb Makes the News

I was born and raised in DeKalb, Illinois, home of barbed wire and some of the richest soil in the whole world. It’s a farming community and small city known for the Flying Ear of Corn logo of DeKalb Ag, the foremost research and development center for genetically modified crops in the country, now owned by the giant corporation Monsanto—producing corn with “Strong Roots, Stalks and Yields.” It’s also famous as the birthplace of Cindy Crawford.

And now, it’s infamous DeKalb, Illinois, the latest mass campus shooting site. As I write, people are grieving wildly, pulled over the brink into the netherworld. Young lives choked off by buckshot and bullets, and a lot of people are again asking why. The usual ghoulish cottage industry of questioners and answerers has descended. I sit here in Berlin, where I have lived for years, as far from DeKalb as worlds can get, but I am back in DeKalb now. Back in that small, unplanned unlovely town where my father taught poetry at Northern Illinois University all his working life, after arriving there, a young poet educated on the GI Bill, from his hometown, Chicago (60 miles to the east), with his Londoner wife. And now I am feeling a strange painful nostalgia for a town I fled from, along with sadness and fury.

I know that blood-soaked campus well, a stomping ground for teens like me in the late ’70s with nothing to do and nowhere to go. There’s no denying that NIU is an ugly school, a hodgepodge of eyesore buildings spread across mostly treeless pathways and parking lots. And it’s only gotten uglier as the years have passed. Fewer fields, more office blocks. But unlike some bloggers out there, I don’t think the dreary commuter campus built up on cornfields set Steven K. off on his rampage. We grow up among the fields and the flatness and there’s nothing to do. That’s what we know. It can get you down, all right. By the time I was born, the trains that came through town didn’t stop there anymore. But their constant music and rush scores my childhood and early youth. Trains so regularly brought movement to a standstill that the pause was like the pause of your own breath. You stop still while the train passes. That’s just what you do.

***

I grew up happily in DeKalb, Illinois. Like the killer, Steven K., I grew up on a tree-lined street, mine on the south side of town. There was a big, old tree in front of the house and another behind it. The simple, frame house was covered in asbestos siding, but in those days no one knew it. We had a yard, and the alleyway behind the house, lined with flowering bushes, led me like an enchanted pathway to my little girl gang and our adventures, which were colored by seasons—snow forts, leaf piles, summers smoking found cigarette butts and skateboarding, riding bikes and swimming in the local pool in the local park. And the alleyway brought me home to the warmth of my mother, a big city girl dying a thousand deaths trapped in that town. I didn’t know this, of course. I knew parades and little plays and horror houses we created as kids in our garages. And our dawdling walks downtown to McDonalds for fries and 31 Flavors for cones and the local library—as beautiful a building as any in the country and one of less than a handful the town didn’t tear down. And Haish school, now torn down, the old red brick building with its “spinster” teachers who taught me to love reading. And the many churches of all denominations. Churches with prayers now hovering like trapped doves in the rafters for the victims of the shootings.

My friends were the children of workers at General Electric, Wurlitzer (sending music out into far-off corners of the world), Del Monte Cannery (with its Mexican workers bringing an other-world music to the outskirts of town) —most of these plants long gone. Some of the parents were in agribusiness or were farmers, some taught at the college. A lot of kids, like my brother, spent at least one summer “detasseling” corn at the cannery, though I never did. It was a rite of passage marked by deeply burned skin caked with dirt. As a child, I learned to shoplift on Lincoln Highway, our main street, at Woolworth’s and Walgreen’s. At Ralph’s newspaper store, we ogled porno magazines hidden in Archie comics while Ralph sold snuff movies and ammunition from the back of the shop.

How often I walked up the strip mall highway past the Elks Club, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and the fast food chains to “The Pond”—a small murky brown lake dotted with trees that marks the entrance to the campus grounds from the main highway. Or later, drove recklessly to meet friends at the off-campus diner, The Junction, a lasting DeKalb institution, where a bran muffin covers an entire plate and is soaked in butter.

I live in Berlin but DeKalb is in my DNA. It fed me sweet corn and later vodka and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and drugs—taken as I sped down those country roads past corn fields at 90 miles an hour. Rooting on the “Barbs” team as a member of the middle school cheerleading squad (graduating to pom-pom girl in high school), I learned something about being popular and the cost of not fitting in, another cause attributed to mass murder. I had dirty hair and nominal boyfriends, and inwardly was something of a loner. And I was determined to get out as soon as possible and did so at sixteen. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d stayed. I think I would have died in a car wreck, but that’s just guessing. So many did.

The influence of the big state commuter school wafted in on the town’s people and their ways. But hardly. You can’t even call DeKalb a college town, in the conventional sense. NIU is a campus of kids who go home on weekends as well as holidays—home to cities and suburbs, mainly. And you can’t blame them. Later, I’d come home from New York City, holidays and summers, and find utter peace there—sanity and respite and even salvation in its modesty, its sheer lack of ambition. A plain town without expectations where a little girl could roam the streets blissfully, pulling dogwood flowers from alleyways as her mother called out to her from the back steps to get home for supper.

One thing I never felt there was fear, I am quite sure of that. I didn’t know it existed.

***

I want to share this DeKalb with you, DeKalb before the slaughter.

Game violence, the perversion of fame, middle-class despair, the new dependency on meds. Yes, they all play a part in what DeKalb has now become. But it’s the guns that are manifesting this new death cult with mayhem. In other troubled regions, suicide bombers strap their weapons on. We drive to Tony’s Gun Shop or order online. Hoist a shotgun on to the shoulder and take aim. Students, shoppers, children, workers— drop like deer or big game.

I want to beg you to join any movement out there, to join in demanding—from the politicians who want our votes, and from any communities in which we find ourselves—the expulsion of the Second Amendment from our Constitution and the dissolution of the NRA, which is busy filling our politicians and candidates’ coffers with blood money. Before, your town, like my DeKalb, becomes the next to be shot through with infamy.

No more half-way measures. No more debates and examinations and prayers. We need that kind of guts. The Second Amendment provides no safety or self-defense. It’s killing us off.

This article first appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in the March 2008 edition.