Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

Under the amnesty. He lived in the next village. His mother died, the house was buried. He came over to us. ‘Lady, give me some bread and some lard. I’ll chop wood for you.’ He gets by.”
    “The country is a mess—and people come back here. They run from the others. From the law. And they live alone. Even strangers. They're tough, there's no friendliness in their eyes. If they get drunk, they're liable to burn something down. At night we sleep with axes and pitchforks under our beds. In the kitchen next to the door, there's a hammer.”
    “There was a rabid fox here during the spring—when they’re rabid they become friendly, very friendly. But they can't look at water. Just put a bucket of water in your yard, and you’re fine. She'll run away.”
    “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 from. I wrote my name on the Reichstag: Artyushenko. I gave the shirt off my back for Communism. And where is this Communism?”
    “We have the best kind of Communism here—we live like brothers and sisters . . .”
    “The year the war started, there weren't any mushrooms or any berries. Can you believe that? The earth itself felt the catastrophe. 1941. Oh, how I remember it! I've never forgotten the war. There was a rumor that they'd brought over all the POWs, if you recognized yours you could take him. All our women ran over! That night some brought home their men, and others brought home other men. But there was one scoundrel . . . He lived like everyone else, he was married, had two kids—he told the commandant that we’d taken in some Ukrainians who weren’t from our village. There were Vasko, Sashko, and others. The next day the Germans came on their motorcycles. We begged them, we got down on our knees. But they took them out of the village and shot them with their automatics. Nine men. And they were young, they were so good! Vasko, Sashko . . .”
    “The boss-men come, they yell and yell, but we’re deaf and mute. We’ve lived through everything, survived everything . . ."
    “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."
    ‘‘I’m not afraid of anyone—not the dead, not the animals, no one. My son comes in from the city, he gets mad at me. ‘Why are you sitting here! What if some looter tries to kill you?’ But what would he want from me? There’s some pillows. In a simple house, pillows are your main furniture. If a thief tries to come in, the minute he peeks his head through the window, I’ll chop it off with the axe. That’s how we do it here. Maybe there is no God, or maybe there’s someone else, but there’s someone up there. And I’m alive.”
    “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." “But now we're free. The harvest is rich. We live like barons."
    “The only thing I have is a cow. I’d hand her in if only they wouldn't start another war. How I hate war!"
    “Here we have the war of wars—Chernobyl.”
    “And the cuckoo is cuckooing, the magpies are chattering, roes are running. Will they reproduce—who knows? One morning I looked out in the garden, the boars were digging. They were wild. You can resettle people, but the elk and the boar, you can't. And water doesn’t listen to borders, it goes along the earth, and under the earth."
    “It hurts,