yard next to the apple tree. At first they’ll go cry at the cemetery, then they go to their yards. And they cry there, too, and pray. They leave candles. They hang them on their fences. Like on the little fences at the cemetery. Sometimes they’ll even leave a wreath at the house. A white towel on the gate. The old woman reads a prayer: ‘Brothers and sisters! Have patience!’ ”
“People take eggs, and rolls, and whatever else, to the cemetery. Everyone sits with their families. They call them: ‘Sis, I’ve come to see you. Come have lunch.’ Or: ‘Mom, dear mom. Dad, dead dad.’ They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don’t. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don’t know how to pray, also pray.”
“The only time I don’t cry is at night. You can’t cry about the dead at night. When the sun goes down, I stop crying. Remember their souls, oh Lord. And let their kingdom come.”
“If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’ ”
“There was one guy, he came back here from jail. 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 tender, real tender. 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 front. I wrote my name on the Reichstag: Artyushenko. I took off my overcoat to build Communism. And where is this Communism?”
“We have 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 Ukrainians. Vasko, Sashko. The next day the Germans come on their motorcycles. We beg them, we get 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. And we’ve lived through everything, survived everything . . .”
“But I’m talking about something else—I think about it a lot. At the cemetery. Some people pray loudly, others quietly. And some people say: ‘Open up, yellow sand. Open up, dark night.’ The forest might do it, but the sand never will. I’ll ask gently: ‘Ivan. Ivan, how should I live?’ But he doesn’t answer me anything, one way or the other.”
“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 peaks 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 don’t make 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, girls. Oh, it hurts! Let’s be quiet. They bring your coffin quietly. Careful. Don’t want to bang against the door or the bed, don’t want to touch anything or knock it over. Otherwise you have to wait for the next dead person. Remember their souls, oh Lord. May their kingdom come. And let prayers be said for them where they’re buried. We have everything here—graves. Graves everywhere. The dump trucks are working, and the bulldozers. The houses are falling. The gravediggers are toiling away. They buried the school, the headquarters, the baths. It’s the same world, but the people are different. One thing I don’t know is, Do people have souls? What kind? And how do they all fit in the next world? My grandpa took two days to die, I was hiding behind the stove and waiting: how’s it going to fly out of his body? I went to milk the cow—I come back in, call him, he’s lying there with his eyes open. His soul fled already. Or did nothing happen? And then how will we meet?”
“One old woman, she promises that we’re immortal. We pray. Oh Lord, give us the strength to survive the weariness of our lives.”
MONOLOGUE ABOUT WHAT RADIATION LOOKS LIKE
My first scare was—some mornings in the garden and the yard we’d find these strangled moles. Who strangled them? Usually they don’t come out from underground. Something was chasing them out. I swear on the Cross!
My son calls from Gomel: “Are the May bugs out?”
“No bugs, there aren’t even any maggots. They’re hiding.”
“What about worms?”
“If you’d find a worm in the rain, your chicken’d be happy. But there aren’t any.”
“That’s the first sign. If there aren’t any May bugs and no worms, that means strong radiation.”
“What’s
