Chernobyl Prayer

Bleak and relentless. The technique is brave, but - I think - works. It’s like watching a long ‘talking heads’ style documentary. It gives a powerful immediacy and it’s clear that not everything is objective, but is purely how a particular individual experienced what happened

Everything has changed, except us.

I’ve forgotten my own life. Don’t ask me about it. I remember what I read in books and the things other people told me, but I’ve forgotten my own life.

In the field, there’s wild wheat. Mushrooms and berries in the forest. There is total freedom. I do a lot of reading.

Man is horrifying. And peculiar.

We sometimes got blood coming out of our ears, our noses. A tickling in the throat, your eyes stinging. There was this constant drone in your ears. You felt thirsty, but lost all appetite.

‘So that’s our life?’ I asked myself, looking at everything through fresh eyes. ‘That’s how we live?’ Like some warrior tribe had moved on from its makeshift camp. Hurried off somewhere. Chernobyl blew my mind. I began thinking.

But the thing is, if they’d handed the flag to me, I would have climbed up there too. Why? I can’t really answer that.

Just before the world ends, human beings will be exactly the same as they are now. The same as always.

I think about things. Do a lot of thinking. It feels like painting on glass with water, I’m the only one who knows what I’m drawing, nobody else sees it, nobody can guess what it is. Nobody can imagine it …

Who is to blame? Well, who can we blame other than ourselves?

Our memory was prompting us. We have always lived in horror. We’re good at it. Horror is our natural habitat. Our nation is unrivalled at that.

I’m a soldier. I sealed other people’s houses, went into other people’s homes. It’s a peculiar feeling, like you’re prying … Or there’s the land no one can sow on, a cow butting at a closed gate. The house is padlocked and the cow’s milk is dripping on the ground. A peculiar feeling.

I remember, in Kiev, at the railway station. Trains, one after another, taking away thousands of frightened children. Men and women crying. For the first time, I thought, ‘Who needs this kind of physics, this kind of science, at such a high price?’

What sense is there in our suffering? What is it for? Why is there so much of it?