"Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen
I was thinking about something else, then. You'll find this strange, but I was splitting up with my wife.
They came suddenly, gave me a notice, and said, "There's a car waiting downstairs." It was like 1937. They came at night to take you out of your warm bed. Then that stopped working: People's wives would refuse to answer the door, or they'd lie, say their husbands were away on business, or vacation, or at the dacha with their parents. The soldiers would try to give them the notice, the wives would refuse to take it. So they started grabbing people at work, on the street, during a lunch break at the factory cafeteria.
But I was almost crazy by then. My wife had cheated on me, everything else didn't matter. I got in their car. The guys who came for me were in street clothes, but they had a military bearing, and they walked on both sides of me, clearly worried I'd run off. But my wife had left me, and I could only think about that. I tried to kill myself a few times. We went to the same kindergarten, the same school, the same college. [Silent. Smokes.]
I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer's pen. I had thoughts like, It's not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there.
I saw nutcases, who didn't care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn't necessary. I also have medals and awards-but that's because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it.
You immediately found yourself in this fantastic land, where the apocalypse met the Stone Age. We lived in the forest, in tents, twenty kilometers from the reactor. We were between twenty-five and forty, some of us had university degrees, or vocational-technical degrees. For example, I am a history teacher. Instead of machine guns they gave us shovels. We buried trash heaps and gardens. We had gloves, respirators, and surgical robes. The sun beat down on us. We showed up in their yards like demons. They didn't understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say: "Boys, what is this-is it the end of the world?"
Maybe that's enough? I know you're curious, people who weren't there are always curious. But it was still a world of people, the same one. It's impossible to live constantly in fear, a person can't do it, so a little time goes by and normal human life resumes…
The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls, had kids. They talked a lot about money. But we didn't go there for money. Or most people didn't. Men worked because you have to work. They told us to work. You don't ask questions. Some hoped for better careers out of it. Some robbed and stole. People hoped for the privileges that had been promised: an apartment without waiting and moving out of the barracks, getting their kid into a kindergarten, a car. One guy got scared, refused to leave the tent, slept in his plastic suit. Coward! He got kicked out of the Party. He'd yell: "I want to live!"
There were all kinds of people. They were told, No, we need chauffeurs, plumbers, firemen, but they came anyway. Thousands of volunteers guarding the storehouses at night. There were student units, and wire transfers to the fund for victims. Hundreds of people who donated blood and bone marrow.
Every day they brought the paper. I'd just read the headlines: Chernobyl — A Place of Achievement; The Reactor Has Been Defeated; Life Goes On. We had political officers, they'd hold political discussions with us. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That's why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our "courage and heroism."
Our political officer read notices in the paper about our "high political consciousness and meticulous organization," about the fact that just four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they'd given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can't say. I wasn't afraid to die, then. My wife didn't even send a letter. In six months, not a single letter. [Stops.] Want to hear a joke? This prisoner escapes from jail, and runs to the thirty-kilometer zone at Chernobyl. They catch him, bring him to the Geiger counters. He's "glowing" so much, they can't possibly put him back in prison, can't take him to the hospital, can't put him around people.
Why aren't you laughing?
Source: The Paris Review
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