Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen). (1/2)
Title: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.
Author: Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen).
Genre: Non-fiction, man-made disasters, politics, social criticism, conspiracy.
Country: Belarus.
Language: Russian.
Publication Date: 1997.
Summary: On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. This book is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. The author interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown-from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster-and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised on interviews in monologue form, the book is crucially important and unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty. (Only Part 1 in this post, refer to PART 2 for the rest of the quotes.)
My rating: 10/10.
My review:
♥ Svetlana Alexievich collected these interviews in the early to mid 1990s-a time when anti-Communism still had some currency as a political idea in the post-Soviet space. And it's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of crynyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. "If I'd known he'd get sick I'd have closed all the doors," one of the Chernobyl widows tell Alexievich about her husband, who went to Chernobyl as a liquidator. "I'd have stood in the doorway. I'd have locked the doors with all the locks we had." But no one knew.
And yet, as these testimonies also make all too clear, it wasn't as if the Soviets simply let Chernobyl burn. This is the remarkable thing. On the one hand, total incompetence, indifference, and out-and-out lies. On the other, a genuinely frantic effort to deal with the consequences. In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets evacuated tens of thousands of residents and then poured thousands of men into the breach. They dropped bags of sand onto the reactor fire from the open doors of helicopters (analysts now think this did more harm than good). When the fire stopped, they climbed onto the roof and cleared the radioactive debris. The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly. In 1986 the Soviets threw untrained and unprotected men at the reactor just as in 1941 they'd thrown untrained, unarmed men at the Wehrmacht, hoping the Germans would at least have to stop long enough to shoot them. And as the curator of the Chernobyl Museum, correctly explains, had this effort not been made, the catastrophe might have been av lot worse.
~~from Translator's Preface by Keith Gessen.
♥ There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl.
On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century.
For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%.
As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The areas of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year.
-Belaruskaya entsiklopedia
~~from Historical Notes.
♥ I don't know what I should talk about-about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?
♥ I couldn't get into the hospital that evening. There was a sea of people. I stood under his window, he came over and yelled something to me. It was all so desperate! Someone in the crowd heard him-they were being taken to Moscow that night. All the wives got together in one group. We decided we'd go with them. Let us go with our husbands! You have no right! We punched and clawed. The soldiers-there were already soldiers-pushed us back. Then the doctor came out and said, Yes, they were flying to Moscow, but we needed to bring them their clothes. The clothes they'd worn at the station had been burned. The buses had stopped running already and we ran across the city. We came running back with their bags, but the plane was already gone. They tricked us. So that we wouldn't be there yelling and crying.
It's night. On one side of the street there are buses, hundreds of buses, they're already preparing the town for evacuation, and on the other side, hundreds of fire trucks. They came from all over. And the whole street is covered in white foam. We're walking on it, just cursing and crying. Over the radio they tell us they might evacuate the city for three to five days, take your warm clothes with you, you'll be living in the forest. In tents. People were even glad-a camping trip! We'll celebrate May Day like that, a break from routine. People got barbeques ready. They took their guitars with them, their radios. Only the women whose husbands had been at the reactor were crying.
♥ He started to change-every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks-at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers-as white film... the color of his face... his body... blue... red... gray-brown. And it's all so very mine! It's impossible to describe! It's impossible to write down! And even to get over. The only thing that saved me was, it happened so fast; there wasn't any time to think, there wasn't any time to cry.
I loved him! I had no idea how much! We'd just gotten married. When we walked down the street-he'd grab my hands and whirl me around. And kiss me, kiss me. People are walking by and smiling.
It was a hospital for people with acute radiation poisoning. Fourteen days. In fourteen days a person dies.
♥ Meanwhile the nurse is gesturing through the film that I can't eat it. It's been near him a while, so not only can you not eat it, you shouldn't even touch it. "Come on, eat it," he says. "You like oranges." I take the orange in my hand. Meanwhile he shuts his eyes and goes to sleep. They were always giving him shots to put him to sleep. The nurse is looking at me in horror. And me? I'm ready to do whatever it takes so that he doesn't think about death. And about the fact that his death is horrible, that I'm afraid of him. There's a fragment of some conversation, I'm remembering it. Someone is saying: "You have to understand: This is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You're not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself." And I'm like someone who's lost her mind: "But I love him! I love him!" He's sleeping, and I'm whispering: "I love you!" Walking in the hospital courtyard, "I love you." Carrying his sanitary tray. "I Love you." I remembered how we used to live at home. He only fell asleep at night after he'd taken my hand. That was a habit of his-to hold my hand while he slept. All night. So in the hospital I take his hand and don't let go.
♥ I'm walking out of the room into the hallway. And I'm walking toward the couch, because I don't see them. I tell the nurse on duty: "He's dying." And she says to me: "What did you expect? He got 1,600 roentgen. Four hundred is a lethal dose. You're sitting next to a nuclear reactor." It's all mine... it's my love. When they all died, they did a remont at the hospital. They scraped down the walls and dug up the parquet.
♥ They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn't get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all-wounds. The last two days in the hospital-I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
..The Extraordinary Commission met with us. They told everyone the same thing: impossible for us to give you the bodies of your husbands, your sons, they are very radioactive and will be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a special way. In sealed zinc caskets, under cement tiles. And you need to sign this document here.
If anyone got indignant and wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now heroes, you see, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were heroes of the State. They belonged to the State.
♥ Right away they bought us plane tickets back home. For the next day. The whole time there was someone with us. He wouldn't even let us out of the dorm to buy some food for the trip. God forbid we might talk with someone-especially me. As if I could talk by then. I couldn't even cry. When we were leaving, the woman on duty counted all the towels and all the sheets. She folded them right away and placed them in a polyethylene bag. They probably burnt them. We paid for the dormitory ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning. Fourteen nights. That's how long it takes a person to die.
♥ They showed her to me-a girl. "Natashenka," I called out. "Your father named you Natashenka." She looked healthy. Arms, legs. But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgen. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead. And again: we won't give her to you. What do you mean you won't give her to me? It's me who won't give her to you! You want to take her for science. I hate your science! I hate it!
[She is silent.]
I keep saying the wrong thing to you. I'm not supposed to yell after my stroke. And I'm not supposed to cry. That's why the words are all wrong. But I'll say this. No one knows this. When they brought me the little wooden box and said, "She's in there," I looked. She'd been cremated. She was ashes. And I started crying. "Put her at his feet," I requested.
There, at the cemetery, it doesn't say Natasha Ignatenko. There's only his name. She didn't have a name yet, she didn't have anything. Just a soul. That's what I buried there. I always go there with two bouquets: one for him, and the other I put in the corner for her. I crawl around the grave on my knees. Always on my knees. [She becomes incomprehensible.] I killed her. I. She. Saved. My little girl saved me, she took the whole radioactive shock into herself, she was like the lightning rod for it. She was so small. She was a little tiny thing. [She has trouble breathing.] She saved... But I loved them both. Because-because you can't kill something with love, right? With such love! Why are these things together-love and death. Together. Who's going to explain this to me? I crawl around the grave on my knees.
♥ There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called-Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop-someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.
But I was telling you about love. About my love...
~~from Prologue: A Solitary Human Voice by Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko.
PART ONE
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
♥ What should I tell you? Death is more just than anything else in the world: no one can escape it. The earth takes everyone-the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no justice on earth. I worked hard and honestly my whole life. But I didn't get any justice. God was dividing things up somewhere, and by the time the line came to me there was nothing left. A young person can die, an old person has to die... At first, I waited for people to come-I thought they'd come back. No one said they were leaving forever, they said they were leaving for a while. But now I'm just waiting for death. Dying isn't hard, but it is scary. There's no church. The priest doesn't come. There's no one to tell my sins to.
♥ It was war! My husband liked to say that people may shoot, but it's God who delivers the bullet. Everyone has his own fate. The young ones who left, some of them have already died. In their new place. Whereas me, I'm still walking around. Slowing down, sure. Sometimes it's boring, and I cry. The whole village is empty.
♥ Sometimes now I can't even make it all the way through the house. For an old woman even the stove is cold during the summer. The police come here sometimes, check things out, they bring me bread. But what are they checking for?
It's me and the cat. This is a different cat. When we hear the police, we're happy. We run over. They bring him a bone. Me they'll ask: "What if the bandits come?" "What'll they get off me? What'll they take? My soul? Because that's all I have." Thety're good boys. They laugh. They brought me some batteries for my radio, now I listen to it. I like Lyudmilla Zykina, but she's not singing as much anymore. Maybe she's old now, like me. My husband used to say-he used to say, "The dance is over, put the violin back in the case."
♥ I go to the cemetery. My mom's there. My little daughter. She burned up with typhus during the war. Right after we took her to the cemetery, buried her, the sun came out from the clouds. And shone and shone. Like: You should go and dig her up. My husband is there. Fedya. I sit with them all. I sigh a little. You can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you're alone... And when you're sad. When you're very sad.
♥ During the war-we lost so many people! Vassily Kovalev. Maksim Nikoforenko. They used to live, they were happy. On holidays they'd sing, dance. Play the harmonica. And now, it's like a prison. Sometimes I'll close my eyes and go through the village-well, I say to them, what radiation? There's a butterfly flying, and bees are buzzing. And my Vaska's catching mice. [Starts crying.]
Oh Lyubochka, do you understand what I'm telling you, my sorrow? You'll carry it to people, maybe I won't be here anymore. I'll be in the ground. Under the roots...
-Monologue About What Can Be Talked About With the Living and the Dead by Zinaida Kovalenko, re-settler
♥ I want to bear witness...
It happened ten years ago, and it happens to me again every day.
We lived in the town of Pripyat. In that town.
♥ You can't take your belongings! All right, I won't take all my belongings, I'll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can't leave the door. I'll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door-it's our talisman, it's a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don't know whose tradition this is, it's not like that everywhere, but my mother told me that the deceased must be placed on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That's me growing up. It's marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my song grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?>
..But I took it with me, that door. At night. On a motorcycle. Through the woods. It was two years later, when our apartment had already been looted and emptied. The police were chasing me. "We'll shoot! We'll shoot!" They thought I was a thief. That's how I stole the door from my own home.
..We put her on the door... on the door that my father lay on. Until they brought a little coffin. It was small, like the box for a large doll.
I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.
-Monologue About A Whole Life Written Down on Doors by Nikolai Kalugin, father.
♥ There are still posters: "Our goal is the happiness of all mankind." "The world proletariat will triumph." "The ideas of Lenin are immortal." You go back to the past. The collective farm offices have red flags, brand-new wimples, neat piles of printed banners with privileges of the great leaders. On the walls-pictures of the leaders; on the desks-busts of the leaders. A war memorial. A village churchyard. House that were shut up in a hurry, gray cement cow-pens, tractor mechanic's shops. Cemeteries and victims. As if a warring tribe had left some base in a hurry and then gone into hiding.
We'd ask each other: is this what our life is like? It was the first time we saw it from the outside. The very first time. It made a real impression. Like a smack to the head... There's a good joke: the nuclear half-life of a Kiev cake is thirty-six hours. So... And for me? It took me three years. Three years later I turned in my Party card. My little Red book. I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.
~~Vasily Gusinovich, driver and scout.
♥ The farmers didn't understand why, for example, they couldn't take a bucket from their yard, or a pitcher, saw, axe. Why they couldn't harvest the crops. How do you tell them? And in fact it was like this: on one side of the road there were soldiers, keeping people out, and on the other side cows were grazing, the harvesters were buzzing, the grain was being shipped. The old women would come and cry: "Boys, let us in. It's our land. Our houses." They'd bring eggs, bacon, homemade vodka. They cried over their poisoned land. Their furniture. Their things.
♥ The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, everything was so-beautiful! That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful. I would never see such people again. Everyone's faces just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.
~~Gennady Demenev, police officer.
♥ For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months), are the most memorable moments of my life.
I didn't tell my parents I'd been sent to Chernobyl. My brother happened to be reading Izvestia one day and saw my picture. He brought it to our mom. "Look," he says, "he's a hero!" My mother started crying.
~~Vitaly Karbalevich, liquidator.
♥ I went. I didn't have to go. I volunteered. At first you didn't see any indifferent people there, it was only later that you saw the emptiness in their eyes, when they got used to it. I was after a medal? I wanted benefits? Bullshit! I didn't need anything for myself. An apartment, a car-what else? Right, a dacha. I had all those things. But they appealed to our sense of masculinity. Manly men were going off to do this important thing. And everyone else? They can hide under women's skirts, if they want. There were guys with pregnant wives, others had little babies, a third had burns. They call cursed to themselves and came anyway.
We came home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years ago they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his rain... You can write the rest of this yourself. I don't want to talk anymore.
~~Valentin Kmkov, driver and private.
♥ Before we went home we were called in to talk to a KGB man. He was very convincing when he said we shouldn't talk to anyone, anywhere, about what we'd seen. When I made it back from Afghanistan, I knew that I'd live. Here it was the opposite: it'd kill you only after you got home.
~~Eduard Korotkov, helicopter pilot.
♥ Don't call these the "wonders of Soviet heroism" when you write about it. Those wonders really did exist. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn't have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they'd put out a new "Action Update": "men are working courageously and selflessly," "we will survive and triumph."
They gave me a meal and one thousand rubles.
~~Ivan Lukashuk, private.
♥ Every April 26, we get together, the guys who were there. We remember how it was. You were a solider, at war, you were necessary. We forget the bad parts and remember that. We remember that they couldn't have made it without us. Our system, it's a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You're finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We'll never be Dutch or German. And we'll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there'll always be plenty of heroes.
~~Aleksandr Mikhalevich, Geiger operator.
♥ There were already jokes. Guy comes home from work, says to his wife, "They told me that tomorrow I either go to Chernobyl or hand in my Party card." "But you're not in the Party." "Right, so I'm wondering how do I get a Party card by tomorrow morning?"
♥ That's how it was. But I know people robbed the place, took out everything they could lift and carry. They transported the Zone back here. You can find it at the markets, the pawn shops, at people's dachas. The only thing that remained behind the wire was the land. And the graves. And our health. And our faith. Or my faith.
~~Major Oleg Pavlov, helicopter pilot.
♥ I got home, I'd go dancing. I'd meet a girl I liked and say, "Let's get to know one another."
"What for? You're a Chernobylite now. I'd be scared to have your kids."
~~Anatoly Rybak, commander of a guard regiment.
♥ The soldiers worked next to the reactor. I'd drive them there for their shifts and then back. I had a total-radiation-meter around my neck, just like everyone else. After their shifts, I'd pick them up and we'd go to the First Department-that was a classified department. They'd take our readings there, write something down on our cards, but the number of roentgen we got, that was a military secret. Those fuckers! Some time goes by and suddenly they say, "Stop. You can't take any more." That's all the medical information they give you. Even when I was leaving they didn't tell me how much I got. Fuckers! Now they're fighting for power. For cabinet portfolios. They have elections. You want another joke? After Chernobyl you can eat anything you want, but you have to bury your shit in lead.
&heatrys; The prayer of the Chernobyl liquidator: "Oh, Lord, since you've made it so that I can't, will you please also make it so I don't want to?" Oh, go fuck yourselves, all of you.
~~Grigory Khvorost, liquidator.
♥ And if they'd let me talk, who would I have talked to? I worked at a factory. My boss says: "Stop being sick or we'll have to let you go." They did. I went to the director: "You have no right to do this, I'm a Chernobylite. I saved you. I protected you!" He says: "We didn't send you there."
At night I wake up from my mother saying, "Sonny, why aren't you saying anything? You're not asleep, you're lying there with your eyes open. And your light's on." I don't say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I've come back from. And I can't tell anyone.
~~Aleksandr Shinkevich, police officer.
♥ We're lonely. We're strangers here. They even bury us separately, not like they do other people. It's like we're aliens from outer space. I'd have been better off dying in Afghanistan. Honest, I get thoughts like that. In Afghanistan death was a normal thing. You could understand it there.
~~Vladimir Shved, captain.
♥ Two paratroopers refused-their wives were young, they hadn't had any kids yet. But they were shamed and punished. Their careers were finished. And there was also the court of manhood, the court of honor! That was part of the attraction-he didn't go, so I will. Now I look at it differently. After nine operations and two heart attacks, I don't judge them, I understand them. They were young guys. But I would have gone anyway. That's definite. He couldn't, I will. That was manhood.
♥ Their feeling was they'd pretty much had enough, with Afghanistan, they'd fought enough. They're sitting in the forest near the reactor, catching roentgen. That was the order! They didn't need to send all those people there to get radiation. What for? They needed specialists, not a lot of human material. From above I saw a ruined building, a field of debris-and then an enormous number of little human shapes. There was a crane there, from East Germany, but it wasn't working-it made it to the reactor and then died. The robots died. Our robots, designed by Academic Lukachev for the exploration of Mars. And the Japanese robots-all their wiring was destroyed by the radiation, apparently. But there were soldiers in their rubber suits, their rubber gloves, running around...
Before we went back we were warned that in the interests of the State, it would be better not to go around telling people what we'd seen. But aside from us, no one knows what happened there. We didn't understand everything, but we saw it all.
~~Aleksandr Yasinskiy, police officer.
-Soldiers' Chorus
♥ If everyone was smart, then who'd be the dumb ones? It's on fire-so it's on fire. A fire is temporary, no one was scared of it then. They didn't know about the atom. I swear on the Cross! And we were living next door to the nuclear plant, thirty kilometers as the bird flies, forty on the highway. We were satisfied. You could buy a ticket and go there-they had everything, like in Moscow. Cheap salami, and always meat in the stores. Whatever you want! Those were good times!
♥ They scare us and scare us with the radiation. But our lives have gotten better since the radiation came. I swear! Look around: they brought oranges, three kinds of salami, whatever you want. And to the village! My grandchildren have been all over the world. The littlest just came back from France, that's where Napoleon attacked from once-"Grandma, I saw a pineapple!" My nephew, her brother, they took him to Berlin for the doctors. That's where Hitler started from on his tanks. It's a new world. Everything's different. Is that the radiation's fault, or what?
What's it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it's black. Like earth. But if it's colorless, then it's like God. God is everywhere, but you can't see Him. They scare us! The apples are hanging in the garden, the leaves are on the trees, the potatoes are in the fields. I don't think there was any Chernobyl, they made it up. They tricked people.
♥ But here's what did happen. My grandfather kept bees, five nests of them. They didn't come out for two days, not a single one. They just stayed in their nests. They were waiting. My grandfather didn't know about the explosion, he was running all over the yard: what is this? What's going on? Something's happened to nature. And their system, as our neighbor told us, he's a teacher, it's better than ours, better tuned, because they heard it right away. The radio wasn't saying anything and the papers weren't either, but the bees knew. They came out on the third day. Now, wasps-we had wasps, we had a wasps' nest above our porch, no one touched it, and then that morning they weren't there anymore-not dead, not alive. They came back six years later. Radiation: it scares people and it scares animals. And birds. And the trees are scared, too, but they're quiet. They won't say anything. It's one big catastrophe, for everyone. But the Colorado beetles are out and about, just as they always were, eating our potatoes, they scarf them down to the leaves, they're used to poison. Just like us.
♥ On that street, on the other side of the river-all the women are without men, there aren't any men, all the men are dead. On my street, my grandfather's still alive, and there's one more. God takes the men earlier. Why? No one can tell us. But if you think about it-if only the men were left, without any of us, that wouldn't be any good either. They drink, oh do they drink! From sadness. And all our women are empty. Not all of them managed to give birth in time.
What else will I say? You have to live. That's all.
♥ Before, we churned our butter ourselves, our cream, made cottage cheese, regular cheese. We boiled milk dough. Do they eat that in town? You pour water on some flour and mix it in, you get these torn bits of dough, then you put these in the pot with some boiled water. You boil that and pour in some milk. My mom showed it to me and she'd say: "And you, children, will learn this. I learned it from my mother." We drank juice from birch and maple trees. We steamed beans on the stove. We made sugared cranberries. And during the war we gathered stinging-nettle and goose-foot. We got fat from hunger, but we didn't die. There were berries in the forest, and mushrooms. But now that's all gone. They don't let you eat the mushrooms or the berries. I always thought that what was boiling in your pot would never change, but it's not like that.
-Monologue About What Radiation Looks Like by Anna Badaeva, re-settler.
♥ She never learned how to read, so we never got any letters from her. The lonely and the sick were put in special places. They hid them. But no one knows where. Write this down...
-Monologue About A Song Without Words by Mariya Volchok, neighbor.
♥ I used to think we'd never have any more wars. Such a big country, I thought, my beloved country. The biggest! During Soviet times they'd tell us that we were living poorly and humbly because there had been a big war, and the people suffered, but now that we have a mighty army, no one will ever touch us again. No one will defeat us! But then we started shooting one another. It's not a war like there used to be, like my grandfather remembered, he marched all the way to Germany. Now it's a neighbor shooting his neighbor, boys who went to school together, and now they kill each other, and rape girls that they sat next to in school. Everyone's gone crazy.
♥ The Pamir Tajiks are fighting the Kulyab Tajiks. They're all Tajiks, they have the same Koran, the same faith, but the Kulyabs kill the Pamirs, and the Pamirs kill the Kulyabs. First they'd go out into the city square, yelling, praying. I wanted to understand what was happening, so I went too. I asked one of the old men: "What are you protesting against?" They said: "Against the Parliament. They told us he was a very bad person, this Parliament." Then the square emptied and they started shooting. All of a sudden it became a different country, an unrecognizable country. The East! And before that we thought we were living on our own land. By Soviet laws. There are so many Russian graves there, but there's no one to cry at them. They graze livestock on the Russian cemeteries. And goats. Old Russian men wander around, going through trash cans...
♥ But I'm not scared here the way I was there. We were left without a homeland, no one claims us as their own. The Germans all went back to Germany, the Tatars to the Crimea, when they were allow to, but no one needs Russians. What are we supposed to hope for? Russia never saved its people, because it's so big, it's endless. And to be honest, I don't feel like Russia is my homeland. We were raised differently, our homeland is the Soviet Union. Now it's impossible to know how to save yourself. At least there is no one playing with guns.
♥ They couldn't believe it, because back there we stopped living normal lives. Here they got up in the morning and went to the store, they saw butter, and cream-and right there, in the store, they told us this themselves, they bought five bottles of cream and drank them right there. People were looking at them like they were crazy. But they hadn't seen cream or butter in two years. You can't buy bread in Tajikistan. There's a war. It's impossible to explain to someone who hasn't seen what it's like.
My soul was dead there. I would have given birth to something without a soul.
~~Daughter.
♥ So they left. And if they'd opened the hall? They'd have... And me, too, while they were at it, a bullet to the head. There's only one government there-the man with the gun. In the morning I put the kids on the train to Astrakhan, I told the conductors to transport them like they do watermelons, to not open the door. [Silent. Then cries for a long time.] Is there anything more frightening than people? [Silent again.]
♥ Not a day went by there when I didn't think of death. I always left the house wearing clean clothes, a freshly laundered blouse, skirt, underthings. Just in case I got killed. Now I walk through the forest by myself and I'm not afraid of anyone. There aren't any people in the forest, not a soul. I walk and wonder whether all of that really happened to me or not? Sometimes I'll run into some hunters: they have rifles, a dog, and a dosimeter. They also have guns, but they're not like the others, they don't hunt people. [Silent.]
♥ Then I looked him in the eye and I said: "Why are you chasing one another? Why are you killing?" And he looked like he felt ashamed. "All right, ma'am, not so loud." But when they're together, they're different. If there'd been three of them, or even two, they'd have put me up against the wall. When you're one-on-one you can still talk to a person.
♥ We spent the whole night picking through it: clothes, some mattresses, an old refrigerator, two bags of books. "You're shipping valuable books?" We looked: Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned. We laughed. "How many refrigerators do you have?" "Just one, and that one's been broken." "Why didn't you bring declarations?" "How were we supposed to know? It's the first time we've run away from a war." We lost two homelands at once-Tajikistan and the Soviet Union.
♥ We had a life... a different life. I was considered an important person, I had a military rank, lieutenant colonel of train-based troops. Here I was unemployed until I found work cleaning up at the town council. I wash the floors. This life has passed, and I don't have enough strength for another. Some people here feel sorry for us, others are unhappy-"the refugees are stealing the potatoes, they dig them up at night." My mother said that during the big war people took pity on each other more. Recently they found a horse in the forest that had gone wild. It was dead. In another place they found a rabbit. They hadn't been killed, but they were dead. This made everyone worried. But when they found a dead bum, no one worried about that. For some reason everyone's grown used to dead people.
~~Mother.
♥ We had a motherland, and now it's gone. What am I? My mother's Ukrainian, my father's Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We're all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says "Russian," but we're not Russian. We're Soviet! But that country-where I was born-no longer exists. The place we called our motherland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which was also our motherland. I have five children. The oldest is in eighth grade, and the youngest is in kindergarten. I brought them here. Our country no longer exists, but we do.
And I was happy once. All my children were born of love.
♥ We'll wait in Chernobyl. This is our home now. Chernobyl is our home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue.
~~Lena M.-from Kyrgystan.
-Three Monologues About A Homeland.
♥ I still don't understand where I was-how it was-and it doesn't matter. I can live or not live, it doesn't matter. The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire. I fell in love with contemplation. Here you can die equally well from an animal or from the cold. There's no one for tens of kilometers. You can chase off demons by fasting and praying. You fast for your flesh, and you pray for your soul. But I'm never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages-I used to find spaghetti, flour-even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries-people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don't need it. They don't mind. In the fields there's wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here.
♥ Question: Is the world as it's depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.
-Monologue About Repentance.
♥ "Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest..."
♥ "During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home-in our dreams."
♥ "When a person's dying, you can't cry. You'll interrupt his dying, he'll have to keep struggling."
♥ "I prayed that we'd go together. Some gods would have done it, but He didn't let me die. I'm alive..."
♥ "Girls! Don't cry. We were always on the front lines. We were Stakhanovites. We lived through Stalin, through the war! If I didn't laugh and comfort myself, I'd have hanged myself long ago."
♥ "I washed the house, bleached the stove. You need 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 cattle hadn't had water in three days. No feed. That's it! A reporter came from the paper. The drunken milkmaids almost killed him."
♥ "No one's going to fool us anymore, we're not moving anywhere. There's no stove, no hospital. No electricity. We sit next to a kerosene lamp and under the moonlight. And we like it! Because we're home."
♥ "The cats came back with us, too. And the dogs. We all came back together. The soldiers didn't want to let us in. The riot troops. So at night-through the forest-like the partisans."
♥ "We don't need anything from the government. Just leave us alone, is all we want. We don't need a store, we don't need a bus. We walk to get our bread. Twenty kilometers. Just leave us alone. We're all right by ourselves."
♥ "At night we pray to God, during the day to the police. If you ask me, 'Why are you crying?' I don't know why I'm crying. I'm happy to be living in my own house."
♥ "We lived through everything, survived everything..."
♥ "Any animal is afraid of a human. If you don't touch him, he'll walk around you. Used to be, you'd be in the forest and you'd hear human voices, you'd run toward them. Now people hide from one another. God save me from meeting a person in the forest!"
♥ "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."
♥ "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air."
"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 just like that socialism is finished and we live under capitalism. And the Tsar is coming back. Is tat true?"
♥ "I came back! They should let people in-they'd all come crawling back on their knees. They scattered our sorrow all over the globe. Only the dead come back now. The dead are allowed to. But the living can only come at night, through the forest."
♥ "If you don't play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. 'Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.'"
♥ "There's no television. No movies. There's one thing to do-look out the window. Well, and to pray, of course. There used to be Communism instead of God, but now there's just God. So we pray."
"We're people who've served our time. I'm a partisan, I was with the partisans a year. And when we beat back the Germans, I was on the front. I wrote my name on the Reichstag: Artyushenko. I gave the shirt off my back for Communism. And where is this Communism?"
♥ "I don't have my own to cry about, so I cry about everyone. For strangers. I'll go to the graves, I'll talk to them."
♥ "Why did that Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists' fault. They grabbed God by the beard, and now he's laughing. But we're the ones who pay for it."
♥ "We never did live well. Or in peace. We were always afraid. Just before the war they'd grab people. They came in black cars and took three of our men right off the fields, and they still haven't returned. We were always afraid."
♥ "We have everything here-graves. Graves everywhere. The dump trucks are working, and the bulldozers. The houses are falling. The gravediggers 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?"
"One old woman, she promises that we're immortal. We pray. Oh Lord, give us the strength to survive the weariness of our lives."
-Monologues by Those Who Returned by Anna Artyushenko, Eva Artyushenko, Vasily Artyushenko, Sofya Moroz, Nadezhda Nikolaenko, Aleksandr Nikolaenko, and Mikhail Lis, from the village of Bely Bereg in the Narovlyansk region in the Gomel oblast (evacuated after the explosion).
PART TWO
THE LAND OF THE LIVING
♥ She's the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies. I love her so much. [Stops.] I won't be able to give birth again. I wouldn't dare. I came back from the maternity ward, my husband would start kissing me at night, I would lie there and tremble: we can't, it's a sin, I'm scared. I heard the doctors talking: "That girl wasn't born in a shirt, she was born in a suit of armor. If we sowed it on television, not a single mother would give birth." That was about our daughter. How are we supposed to love each other after that?
♥ But from here on out they've advised us to seek medical help abroad. Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: "With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They would be interested." So I write. [Tries not to cry.] I write that every half hour we have to squeeze out her urine manually, it comes out through artificial openings in the area of her vagina. Where else is there a child in the world who has to have her urine squeezed out of her every half hour? And how much longer can it go on? No one knows the effect of small doses of radiation on the organism of a child. Take my girl, even if it's to experiment. I don't want her to die. I'm all right with her becoming a lab frog, a lab rabbit, just as long as she lives. [Cries.] I've written dozens of letters. Oh, God!
-Monologues About Old Prophecies by Larisa Z., mother.
♥ Here's what I remember. In the first days after the accident, all the books at the library about radiation, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even about X-rays, disappeared. Some people said it was an order from above, so that people wouldn't panic. There was even a joke that if Chernobyl had blown up near the Papuans, the whole world would be frightened, but not the Papuans. There were no medical bulletins, no information.
♥ Then we discovered a sign, which all of us followed: as long as there were sparrows and pigeons in town, humans could live there, too. I was in a taxi one time, the driver couldn't understand why the birds were all crashing into his window, like they were blind. They'd gone crazy, or like they were committing suicide.
♥ This vision tortured me for a long time and I tried to write a story. I imagined what would be here in a hundred years: a person, or something else, would be galloping along on all fours, throwing out its long back legs, knees bent. At night it could see with a third eye, and its only ear, on the crown of its head, could even hear how ants run. Ants would be the only thing left, everything else in heaven and earth would have died.
I sent the story to a journal. They wrote back saying that this wasn't a work of literature, but the description of a nightmare.
♥ I've wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren't writing much about it-they write about war, or the camps, but here they're silent. Why? Do you think it's an accident? If we'd beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we'd understood Chernobyl. But we don't know how to capture any meaning from it. We're not capable of it. We can't place it in our human experience or our human time-frame.
So what's better, to remember or to forget?
-Monologues About A Moonlit Landscape by Yevgeniy Brovkin, instructor at Gomel State University.
♥ The guys who came for me were in street clothes, but they had a military bearing, and they walked on both sides of me, they were clearly worried I'd run off. When I got in the car, I remembered for some reason the American astronauts who'd flown to the moon, and one of them later became a priest, and the other apparently went crazy. I read that they thought they'd seen cities, some kind of human remnants there. I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them. But my wife had left me, and I could only think about that. I'd 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 ere, 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 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.
♥ A group of scientists flew in on a helicopter. In special rubber suits, tall boots, protective goggles. Like they were going to the moon. This old woman comes up to one of them and says, "Who are you?" "I'm a scientist." "Oh, a scientist. Look how he's dressed up! Look at that mask! And what about us?" And she goes after him with a stick. I've thought a few times that someday they're going to start hunting the scientists the way they used to hunt the doctors and drown them in the Middle Ages.
♥ We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over-as if it were alive-live tracts of land-with bugs, spiders, worms-I didn't know any of them, what they were called, just bugs, spiders, ants. And they were small and big, yellow and black, all different colors. One of the poets says somewhere that animals are different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them.
Leonid Andreev, whom I love very much, has this parable about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss. And now he's alien, he'll never be the same as other people, even though Christ resurrected him.
♥ And at the same time you could buy anything for a bottle of vodka. A medal, or sick leave. One collective farm chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialists so they'd cross his village off the lists for evacuation; another would bring the same case so that they'd put his village on the list-he's already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk. No one checked the radiation reports. It was just your average Russian chaos. That's how we live. Some things were written off and sold. On the one hand, it's disgusting, and on the other hand-why don't you all go fuck yourselves?
♥ 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."
♥ When I got there, the birds were in their nests, and when I left the apples were lying on the snow. We didn't get a chance to bury all of them. We buried earth in the earth. With the bugs, spiders, leeches. With that separate people. That world. That's my most powerful impression of that place-those bugs.
♥ Is that how it always is? My father defended Moscow in 1942. He only learned that he'd been part of a great event any years later, from books and films. His own memory of it was: "I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive." That's it.
And back then, my wife left me.
-Monologues About A Man Whose Tooth Was Hurting When He Saw Christ Fall by Arkady Filin, liquidator.
♥ The next time I killed a doe, and then I swore never to kill another one. They have such expressive eyes.
It's us, people, who understand things. Animals just live. So do birds.
♥ You meet someone in the Zone, they'll never tell you the truth about themselves. Or very rarely. But this one was intelligent. "Chernobyl," he'd say, "happened so that philosophers could be made." He called animals "walking ashes," and people, "talking earth." The earth talked because we consume earth, that is, we are made from earth.
♥ The first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them. Waiting for the people to come back. They were happy to see us, they ran toward our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards. We'd drag them out onto the street and load them onto the dump truck. It wasn't very nice. They couldn't understand: why are we killing them? They were easy to kill. They were household pets. They didn't fear guns or people. They ran toward our voices.
♥ And people thought they'd come back. I'll tell you, it was a war zone. The cats looked people in the eye, the dogs howled, trying to get on the buses. The mutts and the shepherds both. The soldiers pushed them out. Kicked them. They ran a long way after the cars. An evacuation-it's a terrible thing.
♥ It's better to kill from far away, so your eyes don't meet.
♥ Horses-when you took them to be shot, they'd cry.
♥ And I'll add this-any living creature has a soul, even insects. This wounded doe-she's lying there. She wants you to feel sorry for her, but instead you finish her off. At the last moment she has an understanding, almost human look. She hates you. Or it's a plea: I also want to live! I want to live!
-Three Monologues About A Single Bullet by Viktor Vershikovskiy, chairman of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen, and two hunters, Andrei and Vladimir, who did not want their full names used.
♥ I remember-we're leaving, the sky is blue as blue. And Grandma-she couldn't get used to the new place. She missed our old home. Just before she died she said, "I want some sorrel!" We weren't allowed to eat that for several years, it was the thing that absorbed the most radiation.
We buried her in her old village of Dubrovniki. It was in the Zone, so there was barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns guarding it. They only let the adults through-my parents and relatives. But they wouldn't let me. "Kids aren't allowed." I understood then that I wold never be able to visit my grandmother. I understood. Where can you read about that? Where has that ever happened? My Mom admitted: "You know, I hate flowers and trees." She became afraid of herself.
♥ I'm afraid. I'm afraid to love. I have a fiancé, we already registered at the house of deeds. Have you ever heard of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima? The ones who survived after the bomb? They can only marry each other. No one writes about it here, no one talks about it, but we exist. The Chernobyl Hibakusha. He brought me home to his mom, she's a very nice mom. She works at a factory as an economist, and she's very active, she goes to all the anti-Communist meetings. So this very nice mom, when she found out that I'm from a Chernobyl family, a refugee, asked: "But, my dear, will you be able to have children?" And we've already registered! He pleads with me: "I'll leave home. We'll rent an apartment." But all I can hear is: "My dear, for some people it's a sin to give birth." It's a sin to love.
..Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before.
-Monologue About How We Can't Live Without Chekhov and Tolstoy by Katya P.
♥ When I was a kid, the neighbor woman, she's been a partisan during the war, she told me a story about how their unit was surrounded but they escaped. She had her little baby with her, he was one month old, they were moving along a swamp, and there were Germans everywhere. The baby was crying. He might have given them away, they would have been discovered, the entire unit. And she suffocated him. She talked about this distantly, as if it hadn't been her, and the child wasn't hers. I can't remember now why she told me this. What I remember very clearly is my horror. What has she done? How could she? I thought the whole unit was getting out from the encirclement for that little baby, to save him. Whereas here, in order to save the life of strong healthy men, they choked this child. Then what's the point of life? I didn't want to live after that. I was a boy but I felt uncomfortable looking at this woman after I'd found this out about her.
But how did she see me? [Silent for a while.]
♥ In Khoyniki, there was a "plaque of achievement" in the center of town. The best people in the region had their names on it. But the real hero was the alcoholic cab driver who went into the radioactive zone to pick up the kids from kindergarten, not any of the people on the plaque. Everyone became what he really was.
♥ I thought I'd get back to Minsk and they'd e evacuating there, too. How will I say goodbye to my wife and son? And I imagined myself making that same gesture: we'll win! We're warriors. As far back as I can remember, my father wore military clothing, though he wasn't in the military. Thinking about money was bourgeois, thinking about your own life was unpatriotic. The normal state of life was hunger. 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!
♥ Where did that rumor come from? I think from the incongruity of the scale of the event with the number of victims. For example, the Battle of Kursk-thousands dead, that was something you could understand. But here, in the first few days it was something like seven firemen. Later, a few more. But after that, the definitions were too abstract for us to understand: "in several generations," "forever," "nothing." So there were rumors: three-headed birds, chickens pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs. Well, so on.
♥ One time I filmed people who'd been in concentration camps. They try to avoid meeting one another. I understand that. There's something unnatural about getting together and remembering the war. People who've been through that kind of humiliation together, or who've seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There's something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don't really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don't behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren't heroes.
We're all-peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. I have these images in my mind, these pictures. The chairman of the collective farm wants two cars so that he can transport his family with all its clothes and furniture, and so the Party organization wants a car, too, it demands fairness. Meanwhile, I've seen that for several days they don't have enough vehicles to transport kids to nursery school. And here two cars aren't enough to pack up all their things, including the three-liter cans of jam and pickled vegetables. I saw how they packed them up the next day. I didn't shoot that, either. [Laughs suddenly.] We bought some salami, some canned food, in the store, but we were afraid to eat it. We drove it around with us, though, because we didn't want to throw it out. [Serious now.] The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That's what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.
..I have this big, long film in my memory, the one I didn't make. It's got many episodes. [Silent.] We're all peddlers of the apocalypse.
♥ Now I only film animals. I once showed my Chernobyl films to children, and people were mad at me: why'd you do it? They don't need to see that. And so the children live in this fear, amid all this talk, their blood is changing, their immune systems are disrupted. I was hoping five or ten people would come; we filled the whole theater. They asked all sorts of questions, but one really cut into my memory. This boy, stammering and blushing, you could tell he was one of the quiet ones, asked: "Why couldn't anyone help the animals?" This was already a person from the future. I couldn't answer that question. Our art is all about the sufferings and loves of people, but not of everything living. Only humans. We don't descend to their level: animals, plants, that other world. And with Chernobyl man just waved his hand at everything.
..It's a philosophical dilemma. A perestroika of our feelings is happening here.
♥ A strange thing happened to me. I became closer to animals. And trees, and birds. They're closer to me than they were, the distance between us has narrowed. I go to the Zone now, all these years, I see a wild boar jumping out of an abandoned human house, and then an elk. That's what I shoot. I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. "What are you shooting?" people say to me. "Look around you. There's a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn't he who condescended to them?
-Monologue About War Movies by Sergei Gurin, cameraman.