Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (29 page)

I used to travel among other people’s suffering, but here I'm just as much a witness as the others. My life is part of this event. I live here, with all of this.

There are 350 atomic bombs in our land. People are already living after the nuclear war—though when it began, they didn’t notice.

Now people come here from other wars. Thousands of Russian refugees from Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Chechnya—from anywhere where there’s shooting, they come to this abandoned land and the abandoned houses that weren’t destroyed and buried by special squadrons. There are over 25 million ethnic Russians outside of Russia—a whole country— and there's nowhere for some of them to go but Chernobyl. All the talk about how the land, the water, the air can kill them sounds like a fairy tale to them. They have their own tale, which is a very old one, and they believe in it—it’s about how people kill one another with guns.

I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan,
Zinky Boys,
I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, “If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, “Is this something I should say?” I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it’s a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it’s more powerful than anything literature has to say.

For three years I rode around and asked people: the workers at the nuclear plant, the scientists, the former Party bureaucrats, doctors, soldiers, helicopter pilots, miners, refugees, resettlers. They all had different fates and professions and temperaments. But Chernobyl was the main content of their world. They were ordinary people answering the most important questions.

I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts—they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future.

Svetlana Alexievich