Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

Author:Svetlana Alexievich [Alexievich, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781439566398
Google: US1APwAACAAJ
Published: 2008-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

MONOLOGUE ABOUT WRITING CHERNOBYL

The ants are crawling along the tree branch. There’s military equipment everywhere. Soldiers, cries, curses, swearing, helicopters rattling. But they're crawling.

I was coming back from the Zone and, of all the things I saw that day, the only one that remained clear in my memory was the image of those ants. We'd stopped in the forest and I stood smoking next to a birch. I stood very close, leaning on it. Right in front of my face the ants were crawling on the branch, not paying us any mind. We’ll be gone, and they won't notice. And me? I'd never looked at them so closely before.

At first everyone said, “It's a catastrophe," and then everyone said, “It's nuclear war." I'd read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I'd seen documentary footage. It's frightening, but understandable: atomic warfare, the explosion’s radius. I could even imagine it. But what happened to us didn’t fit into my consciousness.

You feel how some completely unseen thing can enter and then destroy the whole world, can crawl into you. I remember a conversation with this scientist: “This is for thousands of years," he explained. “The decomposition of uranium: that's 238 halflives. Translated into time: that’s a billion years. And for thorium: it's fourteen billion years." Fifty, one hundred, two hundred. But beyond that? Beyond that my consciousness couldn’t go. I couldn't even understand anymore: what is time? Where am I?

To write about that now, when only ten years have gone by. Write about it? I think it's senseless. You can't explain it, you can't understand it. We’ll still try to imagine something that looks like our own lives now. I've tried it and it doesn’t work. The Chernobyl explosion gave us the mythology of Chernobyl. The papers and magazines compete to see who can write the most frightening article. People who weren't there love to be frightened. Everyone read about mushrooms the size of human heads, but no one actually found them. So instead of writing, you should record. Document. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl—there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

I keep a separate notebook. I write down conversations, rumors, anecdotes. It’s the most interesting thing, and it's outside of time. What remains of ancient Greece? The myths of ancient Greece.

Here's my notebook.

“For three months now the radio has been saying: the situation is stabilizing, the situation is stabilizing, the situation is stab . . .”

“Stalin's old vocabulary has sprung up again: ‘agents of the Western secret services,' ‘the cursed enemies of socialism,' ‘an undermining of the indestructible union of the Soviet peoples.' Everyone talks about the spies and provocateurs sent here, and no one talks about iodine protection. Any unofficial information is considered foreign ideology.''

“Yesterday my editor cut the story about the mother of one of the firemen who went to the station the night of the nuclear fire. He died of acute radiation poisoning. After burying their son in Moscow, the parents returned to their village, which was soon evacuated.

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