Microsoft Word voices from chernobyl doc

PART ONE
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
MONOLOGUE ON WHY WE REMEMBER
bu've decided to write about this? About this] But I 
wouldn't want people to know this about me, what I went 
through there. On the one hand, there's the desire to open 
up, to say everything, and on the other—I feel like I'm 
exposing myself, and I wouldn't want to do that. 
Y
Do you remember how it was in Tolstoy? Pierre Bezukhov 
is so shocked by the war, he thinks that he and the whole world 
have changed forever. But then some time passes, and he says 
to himself: "I'm going to keep yelling at the coach-driver just 
like before, I'm going to keep growling like before." Then why 
do people remember? So that they can determine the truth? For 
fairness? So they can free themselves and forget? Is it because 
they understand they're part of a grand event? Or are they look-
ing into the past for cover? And all this despite the fact that 
memories are very fragile things, ephemeral things, this is not 
exact knowledge, but a guess that a person makes about himself. 
It isn't even knowledge, it's more like a set of emotions. 
My emotions . . . I struggled, I dug into my memory and I 
remembered. 
The scariest thing for me was during my childhood—that 
was the war. 

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26 SVETLANA 
ALEXIEVICH
I remember how we boys played "mom and dad"—we'd 
take the clothes off the little ones and put them on top of one 
another. These were the first kids born after the war, because 
during the war kids were forgotten. We waited for life to appear. 
We played "mom and dad." We wanted to see how life would 
appear. We were eight, ten years old. 
I saw a woman trying to kill herself. In the bushes by the 
river. She had a brick and she was hitting herself in the head 
with it. She was pregnant from an occupying soldier whom 
the whole village hated. Also, as a boy, I saw a litter of kittens 
being born. I helped my mother pull a calf from its mother, I 
led our pig to meet up with a boar. I remember—I remember 
how they brought my father's body, he had on a sweater, my 
mother had knit it herself, and he'd been shot by a machine 
gun, and bloody pieces of something were coming out of that 
sweater. He lay on our only bed, there was nowhere else to put 
him. Later he was buried in front of the house. And the earth 
wasn't cotton, it was heavy clay. From the beds for beetroot. 
There were battles going on all around. The street was filled 
with dead people and horses. 
For me, those memories are so personal, I've never spoken 
of them out loud. 
Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth. I had 
the same feeling when I saw a calf come out of a cow—and the 
kittens were born—as when I saw that woman with the brick 
in the bushes killing herself. For some reason these seemed to 
me to be the same things—birth and death. 
I remember from my childhood how a house smells when a 
boar is being cut up. You've just touched me, and I'm already 
falling into there, falling—into that nightmare. That terror. 
I'm flying into it. I also remember how, when we were little, 
the women would take us with them to the sauna. And we saw 

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VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL 
27
that all the women's uteruses (this we could understand even 
then) were falling out, they were tying them up with rags. I saw 
this. They were falling out because of hard labor. There were no 
men, they were at the front, or with the partisans, there were 
no horses, the women carried all the loads themselves. They 
ploughed over the gardens themselves, and the kolkhoz fields. 
When I was older, and I was intimate with a woman, I would 
remember this—what I saw in the sauna. 
I wanted to forget. Forget everything. And I did forget. I 
thought the most horrible things had already happened. The 
war. And that I was protected now, that I was protected. 
But then I traveled to the Chernobyl Zone. I've been there 
many times now. And understood how powerless I am. I'm 
falling apart. My past no longer protects me. There aren't any 
answers there. They were there before, but now they're not. The 
future is destroying me, not the past.