| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
Living to See the Funeral
The first funerals for miners who died in the blast in the Ulyanovskaya mine were held yesterday in Novokuznetsk. Relatives of other missing miners are searching through the burned bodies. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov met people in Novokuznetsk who are still hoping to find survivors in the mines.
At 7:30 a.m. yesterday morning, a 30-year-old investigator from the Novokuznetsk prosecutor's office told me an unpleasant story that had occurred the evening before. The Artyushov family claimed their son's body. His sister had come several times to look at bodies and finally she identified her brother. His face was practically gone, but childhood scars were still on the body. Many people could have envied the Artyushovs nonetheless: They had still not found their loved ones.
They brought the body home. The coffin laid in the apartment overnight. His mother sat by the coffin for several hours and then said, “That's not him!”
“It's him!” his sister cried. She was frightened for her mother and told her again that she was sure it was him. Everything was the same.
“Then why don't I have any tears?” the mother asked. “Take him back. That's not my son.”
They tried to bring her around. They explained that all the documents had already been filled out. One relative thought her mind had just not withstood the loss of her son.
But, in the end, she made then take the coffin back to the medical examiners.
That night, the Rychkov family identified his in the morgue as theirs. It was the fifth or sixth time they had been there. They had even searched through the fragments of bodies. Artyushov's mother was right – that wasn't her son.
They hinted that it might be better not to argue about it any way, but identifying anyone after what happened there was a stroke of luck.
They found Artyushov the second time the same night. There was practically nothing left of him except the scar on his leg, but it couldn't possibly be confused with anything else.
“A lot of men have the same scar, it seems,” the investigator said. “On their faces, stomachs and legs. Men's scars are a lot alike. An interesting observation, no?”
“Is there any chance anyone is still alive there?” I asked him.
“Are you serious?” He retorted. “Not the least. Not one. None. They all died. Do you understand that there was an explosion? The relatives understand. They are not even surprised when we are filling out the documents before the identification of the bodies that we write widow' immediately instead of wife' and then going back and changing it.”
An older woman was driven up to the morgue. She couldn't walk on her own. Half an hour ago, she left the morgue and fainted. She was revived in the Emergencies Ministry tent on the street. Now she was going to try to look for her son some more. She couldn't do it. She couldn't make herself go back in again. She wasn't afraid of what she would see. She was afraid of what she wouldn't see.
“Did they identify the Englishman who was in the mine?” I asked.
“Yes,” the investigator answered with a smile. “Right away.”
“By his clothes?”
“What clothes?” he answered, cringing slightly. “There's almost no clothes left on them. No. He had a special feature. They even wrote it in that blank: even white teeth.'”
A boy came in and asked in a sullen tone, “Can I look at watches?”
His father was wearing a watch at the moment of his death. He just wanted to see it. They had already found the father's body.
“What does it look like?” the investigator asked.
“A usual Cartier,” the boy answered, confidently stressing the first syllable of the name.
“Expensive?”
“No. We bought it in Kemerovo for 2000 rubles.”
“Let's go,” the investigator tilted his head toward the other room.
I went with them. In the other room, the investigator pulled a cardboard box out from under a desk. It was full of small items in plastic bags with labels on them.
“There it is!” the boy spotted it on top. He sounded glad.
He pulled it out of the bag and began to wipe the soot off. “Cartier,” he confirmed.
He rubbed harder.
“It's no use,” the investigator said. “It won't rub off. It's stuck on for good. Burnt in the explosion. Put it back for now.”
The boy put the watch back in the bag, resealed it and put the bag in the box.
“I'm from the Yuzhkuzbassugol concern,” a woman of about 40 announced. “Do you know if they've found Senchikhin yet? We have everything ready.”
“What ready?” the investigator asked, taken aback.
“We reserved a cafeteria for the wake and they are sending fruit from Novosibirsk. But they still haven't identified him. We don't understand.” She shrugged. Can a wake be postponed?”
“No, not yet,” the investigator said. “What unit was he from? If it's the eighth, there's some hope.”
“Hope for what?”
“Hope of identifying him. If he's from the sixth, there's less hope. From the fifth, almost no hope. That is, there's none.”
The woman rummaged through some papers. “The fifth,” she said.
“Postpone the wake.”
She looked at him uncertainly and then read the information posted at the entrance to the morgue slowly and carefully. “The elite, landscaped Novokuznetsk cemetery allows burial and reburial from other cities and neighborhoods, even in mausoleums. Upkeep of graves, plot maintenance, round the clock guard…” For some reason, she wrote down the contact phones.
At that moment, 87 of the 108 dead had been identified. Four bodies “almost undamaged,” as the Emergencies Ministry phrased it, could not been identified.
“Or they just don't want to,” the relative of a victim said with annoyance. “If they wanted to, they could. They're not even burned.”
When I went to the church for a memorial service for the dead miners, several people were having a loud argument inside the Emergencies Ministry tent, which had a sign on it reading “Waiting Room.” They were specialists from the mining company and representatives of an insurance company. The company men were saying that the body of Englishman Ian Malcolm Robertson would be shipped back to his homeland in a sealed zinc coffin. “That's our rule,” one said. “You won't do anything against the rules.”
“Yes, we will,” an insurance man replied in a patient tone. “They are going to cremate him in England. What are they supposed to do? Unsolder the coffin?”
“Well, have some understanding for us,” an equally patient voice, apparently that of a high-placed Yuzhkuzbassugol executive. “We respect the traditions of a country like England, but you understand that we have to ship him there. You have an interest in that. Maybe even more than we do.”
Clearly, the argument had been going on for a while.
Bishop Aristarkh of Kemerovo held the service for the dead. Then he said that a commission had been set up under his leadership.
“The purpose of the commission is to inform the public of the free memorial services available to the miners in their homes. A hotline has been set up. Anyone can receive information,” he explained.
“Who picks up the phone at that end, Father?” I asked the priest as he made his way toward his Chevy Blazer.
“What do you mean who'?” he shot back. “Oh. On that end…”
He rolled his eyes upward and smiled indecisively.
The memorial for the chief mechanic of the Ulyanovskaya mine, Sergey Dudin, was supposed to begin at the church in half an hour. Other victims' survivors had taken the recommendation given on the hotline and not tied up the church.
Five-story apartment buildings stood across the street from the church. Barely stood. Alexander Lysak, an electrical engineer at the mine, lived in one of them. There were some people standing around the entranceway, mainly neighbors. They were supposed to bring his coffin out. People were standing in groups of three and four talking quietly. A woman of about 45 was standing about a hundred meters to one side. Tears tinted by eye shadow poured down her face, gathering around her orange-colored lips. She was beyond noticing.
“Who was he to you?” I asked.
“A close friend. We were just friends,” she answered.
Inside the apartment, around the coffin, were wreathes from Kemrovo Region Governor Aman Tuleev, presidential representative for the Siberian Federal District Anatoly Kvashnin and the United Russia Party. I expected to see a wreath from the Just Russia Party, but there wasn't one.
There was no service for the electrical engineer. His relatives wanted a quiet parting.
As I was heading back to the church, someone told me that there was another funeral nearby, 500 meters away, and one on the next street. It was a hard day for Novokuznetsk, probably the hardest day ever there.
The service in the church lasted over an hour. Chief mechanic Dudin had an open coffin. His face was red, as if he had just come from the steam room. He lie in the coffin as though he had had a shot of vodka after the steam and dozed off.
Dudin was buried in the elite cemetery described in the announcement at the morgue. There were already seven graves dug there. It was cold, three below zero (Centigrade) and windy.
“He left us,” one of Dudin's colleagues said leaning against the coffin. “That's what happened. No one is guilty probably. It just happened. He left. I don't know what to say.”
He wife and mother wept as they lowered the coffin into the grave. But the coffin wouldn't fit. The Italian coffins they brought in for the miner were 2.1 meters long, but the grave was dug for a standard 1.9-meter-long coffin. They tilted the coffin. It still didn't fit.
“Lord! He doesn't want to go,” someone said under his breath.
“Idiots! It'll be another hour of work,” a miner exclaimed quietly. “That's all rocks. Not a centimeter of dirt. They'll have to use a jackhammer.”
Electrical engineer Lysak's coffin was also here at the elite cemetery and the gravediggers were using picks to accommodate it. Slowly, the miners drifted over to show the gravediggers the right way to handle a pick.
Other miners were discussing how it could have happened at the mine. They talked about methane and a spark. They knew very well how it happens.
“Maybe someone was fixing something with the current on,” an old man said. “They usually do. They're too lazy to go turn the power off. A spark and a methane emission. It doesn't happen any other way. If there hadn't been an explosion, they would have suffocated. But someone would have been saved.”
“Maybe someone was smoking,” someone else said disapprovingly.
No one argued with him.
“It happens all the time,” several people confirmed. “They go into a shaft and they have the nerve to take their cigarettes with them.”
“You never did it yourself?” I asked one.
“Of course. What am I better than the rest? But no one ever found them on me.”
Everyone began to ask where he hid his cigarettes when he got ready to go down. A pack of cigarettes is the nightmare of every mine supervisor. A pack of cigarettes is 20 games of Russian roulette played in one day.
“There was good reason to check the gas shield the English installed. The chief mechanic was walking with the Englishmen when it happened. They checked it all right…” someone said.
There were already several dozen busses around the entrance to the cemetery. Some of the miners were being buried in the elite cemetery, other in the regular Starokuznetskoe Cemetery. That was when I understood that we were on top of the mountain. The city was below. I thought that maybe they should have been buried elsewhere.
I returned to the medical examiner's office. Between the Emergency Ministry tents and the morgue, several people were standing. They were talking about miner Semenikin.
“Is he really still there?” I tall man about 35 asked me for some reason. “With the other two?”
“What other two?”
“The ones they still haven't found.”
“Maybe he hasn't been identified yet.”
“We've been trying to do that for days now,” he said. “We've identified everybody. There are too many coincidences. He didn't wear his backbrace when he went down into the shaft. He always wore it. He didn't take anything with him at all – no watch, no pen, nothing. Usually he did. He left the clothes he came in in his locker, put his old dirty ones on and left.”
I was talking to his cousin. He had a small metal lock in his hand.
“We will try to find out whether or not he is here in the morgue from the keys. Someone could have taken him by mistake. Couldn't they?”
“How will you check?” I asked.
“You're a man,” he answered. “What would you do if you had changed and locked your clothes up? Where would you put the key?”
“In my pocket probably.”
“Uh huh!” he said approvingly. “Of course in your pocket. A woman would think about putting it somewhere else or giving it to somebody. But not a man. Do you know how many keys from how many pockets the prosecutor has? All we have to do is find our, and that's it. If the key fit, that means he was here. Then we'll keep looking. It means someone made a mistake. We'll correct the mistake.”
“And if there is no key?”
I had never seen so much resting on a key in a lock before.
“There's water in there, and the air's bad,” I said.
“I know,” he said, cutting me off. “The main thing now is the key.”
Investigators were carrying that very cardboard box past as we spoke. They went into the tent marked “Investigators” and the miner's father followed them in. His cousin told me that hey thought they had found him yesterday.
“It looked just like him. Then they took away the person who was lying next to him and we saw his shoulder. There was a tattoo of a bat. He didn't have a tattoo.
They spent a long time trying keys. It was like some hellish puzzle.
“It's not there,” the father said. “None of them fit.”
“Lord! That means there's still hope,” the cousin said.
“One chance in a million?” asked a woman in a white lab coat who had come from the morgue.
“You don't understand,” he told her.
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 23, 2007
|
|
|
