Microsoft Word voices from chernobyl doc

Done?, Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned. We laughed. "How 
many refrigerators do you have?" "Just one, and that one's been 

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62 
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
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. 
I walk through the forest and think. Everyone else is always 
watching television—what's happening there? How is every-
one? But I don't want to. 
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 felt sorry for 
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. 
Lena M.—from Kyrgyzstan. She sits at the entrance to her home 
as if posing for a photograph. Her five children sit near her, as does 
their cat, Metelitsa, whom they brought with them: We left like 
we were leaving a war. We grabbed everything, and the cat 
followed us to the train station, so we took him, too. We 
were on the train for twelve days. The last two days all we 
had left was some canned cabbage salad and boiled water. 
We guarded the door—with a crowbar, and an axe, and a 
hammer. I'll put it this way—one night some looters 
attacked us. They almost killed us. They'll kill you now 

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VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL 
63
for a television or refrigerator. It was like we were leaving a 
war, although they're not shooting yet in Kyrgyzstan. There 
were massacres, even under Gorbachev, in Osh, the Kyrgyz 
and the Uzbeks—but it settled down somehow. But we're 
Russian, though the Kyrgyz are afraid of it too. You'd be in 
line for bread and they'd start yelling, "Russians, go home! 
Kyrgyzstan for the Kyrgyz!" And they'd push you out of line. 
And then they'd add something in Kyrgyz, like, Here we 
are, there's not even enough bread for us, and we have to 
feed them? I don't really know their language very well, I 
just learned a few words so I could haggle at the market, buy 
something. 
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. We're like bats now. 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. 
I was born there. I grew up there. I helped build a factory, 
then I worked at the factory. "Go back where you're from; this 
is all ours." They didn't let me take anything but my kids. 
"This is all ours." And where is mine? People are fleeing. All 
the Russians are. The Soviets. No one needs them, and no one 
is waiting for them. 
And I was happy once. All my children were born of 
love. I gave birth like this: boy, boy boy, and then girl, 

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64 SVETLANA 
ALEXIEVICH
girl. I don't want to talk anymore. I'll start crying. [But