Status Updates From La pregària de Txernòbil: C...

I ask the Party worker: “Does the tractor driver wear a gas mask?”
“We don’t give them out, otherwise there’d be a panic. Everyone would run off.”
“How can you do that?”
“Easy for you to say, Professor. If you lose your job, you’ll find another one. Where am I going to go?”
What power! This limitless power that one person could have over another. This isn’t a trick or lie anymore, it’s a war against the innocent.

“De pronto hemos descubierto que no somos necesarios. Que no hacemos ninguna falta. Yo ni siquiera me puedo comprar los libros más imprescindibles. Cuando los libros son mi vida. Yo necesito… Necesitamos más que nunca nuevos libros, porque a nuestro alrededor nace una vida nueva. Pero nosotros somos en esta vida una gente extraña”.

“Yo enseñaba con el amor y quería vencer con el amor”.

“En estos años he cambiado más que en toda mi vida anterior, en cuarenta años. He pensado mucho”.

“Lo principal es la vida y la muerte.
No existe nada más. No hay nada más que colocar en la balanza. He comprendido que solo tiene sentido el tiempo vivido. Nuestro tiempo vivido”.

This is already history—the history of a crime.

They took away all the Institute’s radiation-measuring equipment. They just confiscated it, without any explanations. I began receiving threatening phone calls at home. “Quit scaring people, Professor. You’ll end up in a bad place. Want to know how bad? We can tell you all about it.” There was pressure on scientists at the Institute, scare tactics.

Why did I make the copies? That’s the sort of country we live in. I always locked up my office myself, but I came back from a trip, the folders were gone. But I grew up in Ukraine, my grandfathers were Cossacks, I have a Cossack character. I kept writing. I kept speaking out. You need to save people! They need to be evacuated immediately! Our institute was the first to put together a map of the contaminated areas.