[b]Svetlana Alexievich
There’s something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person’s courage in the face of danger.[/b]
Sometimes even obscene. But, really, who is to say?
They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we’d never become real people. That’s how we’re made. If we just work each day and eat well—that would be strange and intolerable!
Conpletely ridiculous of course. Except for the part that’s true.
The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.
We’ve had lies like that over here too. A whole bunch of them.
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.
With any luck then it’s all God’s will.
We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl. He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn’t believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. She should at least have fingers.
Anyone here doubt it’s a true story?
My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I’d once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka.
Of course with Putin now in power that’s all in the past.