The orchards were blossoming, young grass sparkling joyfully in the sun. Birds were singing. Such a profoundly familiar world. My first thought was: everything here is as it should be and carrying on as usual. Here was the same earth, the same water and trees. And their shapes, colours and scents were eternal. It was in nobody’s power to alter a thing. But on the first day, I was warned: don’t pick the flowers, don’t sit on the ground, don’t drink the water from the spring. Towards evening, I watched the cowherds trying to drive their weary cattle into the river, but the cows approached the water and turned straight back. Somehow they could sense the danger. And I was told the cats had stopped eating the dead mice, leaving them strewn over the fields and yards. Death lurked everywhere, but this was a different sort of death. Donning new masks, wearing a strange guise. Man had been caught off guard, he was not ready. Ill-prepared as a species, our entire natural apparatus, attuned to seeing, hearing and touching, had malfunctioned. Our eyes, ears and fingers were no longer any help, they could serve no purpose, because radiation is invisible, with no smell or sound. It is incorporeal. All our lives, we had been at war or preparing for war, we were so knowledgeable about it – and then suddenly this! The image of the adversary had changed. We’d acquired a new enemy. Or rather enemies. Now we could be killed by cut grass, a caught fish or game bird. By an apple. The world around us, once pliant and friendly, now instilled fear. Elderly evacuees, who had not yet understood they were leaving forever, looked up at the sky: ‘The sun is shining. There’s no smoke or gas, nobody is shooting. It doesn’t look like war, but we have to flee like refugees.’ A world strange yet familiar.

[…]

I clasped my head in my hands and paced about the orchard. There were so many apples! Everything’s lost. Damn, it’s all gone!

[…]

On Radio Yerevan, a caller asks: ‘Is it okay to eat Chernobyl apples?’ The answer: ‘Yes, but bury the cores deep in the ground.’ A second caller asks: ‘What is seven times seven?’ The answer: ‘Ask a Chernobyl survivor, they’ll count it on their fingers.’ 

[…]

They’re all longing to come here for Radunitsa. To the last man. Everyone wants to pray for their dead. The police will let in those who are on their lists, but no children under eighteen. People get here, and they’re so happy to stand near their house, near an apple tree in the orchard. First they cry at the graves, then they go to their old houses. And there they cry some more and pray. Light some candles. They lean against their fences as if they were graves. They might put a wreath by the house, hang a white towel over the gate. The priest will read a prayer: ‘Brothers and sisters! Have patience!’

[…]

Laugh and the world laughs with you. There’s a Ukrainian woman sells big red apples at the market. She was touting her wares: ‘Come and get them! Apples from Chernobyl!’ Someone told her, ‘Don’t advertise the fact they’re from Chernobyl, love. No one will buy them.’ ‘Don’t you believe it! They’re selling well! People buy them for their mother-in-law or their boss!’

[…]

They’re trying to frighten us! But we’ve got apples hanging in the orchard, and leaves on the trees, potatoes in the field. I don’t believe there ever was any Chernobyl, they made it all up. Tricked people. My sister and her man left. Didn’t move far, just twenty kilometres away. They’d been there two months, when a neighbour comes running: ‘Your cow’s radiation has got on to ours. The cow keeps falling down.’ ‘And how did it get on to her?’ ‘It flies around in the air, like dust. It can fly.’

[…]

We were driving along, and do you know what I saw? On the roadsides, in the sunlight, this barely visible sparkling. Some sort of tiny crystal particles glinting. We were driving towards Kalinkovichi, via Mozyr. Something was shimmering in different colours. We all talked about it, we were amazed. In the villages where we were working, we immediately noticed holes burned through the leaves, especially the cherry trees. We picked tomatoes and cucumbers, and there were tiny black holes in the leaves. It was autumn. The redcurrant bushes were bright red with berries, the branches were sagging to the ground with apples – and of course we couldn’t resist. We ate them. They’d warned us not to, but we decided to hell with it and ate them.

[…]

What stands out, what’s burned in my memory?We spent the whole day running around between villages. With radiation monitoring technicians. And not one woman offered us an apple. The men were less frightened, they brought out the moonshine and the pork fat. ‘Come and have lunch.’ You felt bad about refusing, but the idea of dining on pure caesium didn’t exactly fill you with joy. So you’d down a drink, but no nibbles.

[…]

I arrived there when the birds were sitting in their nests, and left when the apples were lying on the snow. There was a lot we didn’t manage to bury. We buried earth in the earth. Along with the beetles, spiders and maggots, that whole separate nation. We buried a world. That was the deepest impression I came away with. Those creatures.

[…]

I saw an apple tree in blossom and started filming it: the bumblebees buzzing, the bridal white colour. And there were people working, the orchards were blossoming. I held the camera, but couldn’t understand. Something was wrong! The exposure was correct, the picture was beautiful, but there was something not right. Then suddenly it hit me: I couldn’t smell a thing. The orchard was in blossom, but there was no smell. It was only later I learned that the body reacts to high radiation levels by blocking certain senses. My mum was seventy-four and, now I thought about it, she complained of losing her sense of smell. So then, I thought, now it’s happening to me. I asked the others in my group, there were three of us, ‘Does the apple blossom smell?’ ‘You’re right, it doesn’t smell of anything.’ Something had happened to us. The lilac didn’t smell either. Even the lilac! And this sensation came over me that everything around was fake. I was in the middle of a stage set. And my mind wasn’t in a fit state to get to grips with this, it had nothing to fall back on. There was no map.

[…]

We had the choice of moving away, but my husband and I thought it over and turned it down. We’re afraid of other people; whereas here, we’re all just the people of Chernobyl, together. We’re not afraid of each other. If someone offers you apples or cucumbers from their plot, you accept them and eat them. We don’t politely put them away in a pocket or bag and throw them away afterwards. We have a shared memory, the same fate. And anywhere else we’re regarded as outsiders. People look askance at us, fearfully. Everybody is so used to the words ‘Chernobyl’, ‘Chernobyl children’, ‘Chernobyl evacuees’. ‘Chernobyl’: now that gets prefixed to everything about us. But you don’t know the first thing about us. You’re afraid of us. You run away. If we weren’t allowed out of here, if they put a police cordon round us, many of you would probably be relieved.

[…]

I saw an empty village, the apple trees in blossom, the cherries flowering. So luxuriant, so bright and cheerful. The wild pear blooming in the graveyard … Cats are running through the overgrown streets with their tails held high. There is nobody here. They mate. Everything is flowering. Such beauty and stillness. Then the cats run into the street, expecting someone. They probably still remember human beings …

[…]

We were leaving… I want to tell you how my grandma said goodbye to our house. She asked my dad to bring a sack of millet from the pantry, and scattered it over the garden, ‘For God’s birds.’ She collected eggs in a sieve and scattered them through the farmyard, ‘For our cat and dog.’ She sliced up pork fat for them. She emptied all the seeds out of her little bags: carrots, pumpkins, cucumbers, her blackseed onions, all the different flowers … She shook them out over the vegetable plot: ‘Let them live in the soil.’ Then she bowed to the house. She bowed to the barn. She went round and bowed to every apple tree.My grandfather, when we were going away, took his hat off.

[…]

There wasn’t a single bunch of flowers. We knew by then there was a lot of radiation in flowers. Before school started, it wasn’t carpenters and painters working like it used to be, it was soldiers. They scythed down the flowers, stripped off the soil and took it away somewhere in trucks with trailers. They cut down a big, ancient park, the old lime trees. Old Nadya – she was always called to the house when someone died, to do the keening and say the prayers – said, ‘’Twas not the lightning struck you … Not the drought that brought you low … The sea did not flood you … Yet there you lie like coffins black.’ She mourned the trees as if they were human beings. ‘Alas, my oak tree, my apple tree, gone …

svetlana alexijevitsj
perspectief: ‘a collage of oral testimony that turns into the psychobiography of a nation not shown on any map… the book leaves radiation burns on the brain.’ – julian barnes
titel: a chronical of the future
bron: chernobyl prayer: voices from chernobyl (2016, transl. anna gunin and arch tait)
mopw: meerstemmige encyclopedie / appel