"Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen
Oh, I don't even want to remember it. It was scary. They chased us out, the soldiers chased us. The big military machines rolled in. The all-terrain ones. One old man-he was already on the ground. Dying. Where was he going to go? "I'll just get up," he was crying, "and walk to the cemetery. I'll do it myself."
We were leaving-I took some earth from my mother's grave, put it in a little sack. Got down on my knees: "Forgive us for leaving you." I went there at night and I wasn't scared. People were writing their names on the houses. On the wood. On the fences. On the asphalt.
The nights are very long here in the winter. We'll sit, sometimes, and count: Who's died?
My man was in bed for two months. He didn't say anything, didn't answer me. He was mad. I'd walk around the yard, come back: "Old man, how are you?" When a person's dying, you can't cry. You'll interrupt his dying, he'll have to keep struggling. I didn't cry. I asked for just one thing: "Say hello to our daughter and to my dear mother." I prayed that we'd go together. Some gods would have done it, but He didn't let me die. I'm alive…
I washed the house, bleached the stove. You needed to leave some bread on the table and some salt, a little plate and three spoons.
As many spoons as there are souls in the house. All so we could come back.
The chickens had black coxcombs, not red ones, because of the radiation. And you couldn't make cheese. We lived a month without cheese and cottage cheese. The milk didn't go sour-it curdled into powder, white powder. Because of the radiation.
I had that radiation in my garden. The whole garden went white, white as white can be, like it was covered with something. Chunks of something. I thought maybe someone brought it from the forest.
We didn't want to leave. The men were all drunk, they were throwing themselves under cars. The big Party bosses were walking to all the houses and begging people to go. Orders: "Don't take your belongings!"
No one's going to fool us anymore, we're not moving anywhere. There's no store, no hospital. No electricity. We sit next to a kerosene lamp and under the moonlight. And we like it! Because we're home.
The police were yelling. They'd come in cars, and we'd run into the forest. Like from the Germans. One time they came with the prosecutor, he huffed and puffed, they were going to put us up on Article 10. I said: "Let them give me a year in jail. I'll serve it and come back here." Their job is to yell, ours is to stay quiet. I have a medal-I was the best harvester on the kolkhoz. And he's scaring me with Article 10.
This one reporter said we didn't just return home, we went back a hundred years. We use a hammer for reaping, and a sickle for mowing. We flail wheat right on the asphalt.
We turned off the radio right away. We don't know any of the news, but life is peaceful. We don't get upset. People come, they tell us the stories-there's war everywhere. And like that, socialism is finished and we live under capitalism. And the czar is coming back. Is that true?
Everyone's rearing to get back for the harvest. That's it. Everyone wants to have his own back. The police have lists of people they'll let back, but kids under eighteen can't come. People will come and they're so glad just to stand next to their house. In their own yard next to the apple tree. At first they'll go cry at the cemetery, then they go to their yards. And they cry there, too, and pray. They leave candles. They hang them on their fences. Or on the little fences at the cemetery. Sometimes they'll even leave a wreath at the house. A white towel on the gate. An old woman reads a prayer: "Brothers and sisters! Have patience!"
People take eggs, and rolls, and whatever else, to the cemetery. Everyone sits with their families. They call them: "Sis, I've come to see you. Come have lunch." Or: "Mom, dear Mom. Dad, dear Dad." They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don't. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don't know how to pray, also pray.
We have everything here-graves. Graves everywhere. The dump trucks are working, and the bulldozers. The houses are falling.
The grave diggers are toiling away. They buried the school, the headquarters, the baths. It's the same world, but the people are different. One thing I don't know is, do people have souls? What kind? And how do they all fit in the next world? My grandpa died for two days. I was hiding behind the stove and waiting: How's it going to fly out of his body? I went to milk the cow-I came back in, called him, he was lying there with his eyes open. His soul fled already. Or did nothing happen? And then how will we meet?
Source: The Paris Review
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