Microsoft Word voices from chernobyl doc

PART TWO: THE LAND OF THE LIVING
About Old Prophecies 
85
About a Moonlit Landscape 
88

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About a Man Whose Tooth Was Hurting When 
90
He Saw Christ Fall
About a Single Bullet 
96
About How We Can't Live without Chekhov and Tolstoy 
104
About War Movies 
109
A Scream 
118
About a New Nation 
119
About Writing Chernobyl 
126
About Lies and Truths 
133
People's Chorus 
143
PART THREE: AMAZED BY SADNESS
About What We Didn't Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful 
155
About the Shovel and the Atom 
158
About Taking Measurements 
165
About How the Frightening Things in Life Happen 
167
Quietly and Naturally
About Answers 
174
About Memories 
177
About Loving Physics 
179
About Expensive Salami 
185
About Freedom and the Dream of an Ordinary Death 
187
About the Shadow of Death 
193
About a Damaged Child 
197
About Political Strategy 
199
By a Defender of the Soviet Government 
205
About Instructions 
206 
About the Limitless Power One Person Can Have over Another 210
About Why We Love Chernobyl 
217
Children's Chorus 
221
A Solitary Human Voice 
225
In Place of an Epilogue 
239

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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
n September 11, 2001, after the first hijacked plane hit 
the World Trade Center, emergency triage stations 
were set up throughout New York City. Doctors and 
nurses rushed to their hospitals for extra shifts, and 
many individuals came to donate blood. These were touching 
acts of generosity and solidarity. The shocking thing about 
them was that the blood and triage stations turned out to be 
unnecessary. There were few survivors of the collapse of the 
two towers. 
o
The effects of the explosion and nuclear fire at the Chernobyl 
power plant in 1986 were the exact opposite. The initial blast 
killed just one plant worker, Valeriy Khodomchuk, and in the 
next few weeks fewer than thirty workers and firemen died 
from acute radiation poisoning. But tens of thousands received 
extremely high doses of radiation—it was an accident that pro-
duced, in a way, more survivors than victims—and this book 
is about them. 
Much of the material collected here is obscene. In the very 
first interview, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a fireman 
whose brigade was the first to arrive at the reactor, talks about 
the total degeneration of her husband's very skin in the week 
before his death, describing a process so unnatural we should 

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viii KEITH 
GESSEN
never have had to witness it. "Any little knot [in his bedding], 
that was already a wound on him," she says. "I clipped my nails 
down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him." 
Some of the interviews are macabre. Viktor losifovich 
Verzhikovskiy, head of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer 
Hunters and Fisherman, recalls his meeting with the regional