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

alcohol!" “There aren't any drugs or alcohol." They put the doctor up against the wall—give it here! And then the woman who's giving birth yells with relief. happily. And the baby starts crying, it's just-just come out. I lean over it to look, I can't even remember now whether it was a boy or a girl. It didn’t have a name or anything yet. And these robbers say to us: What is it, a Kulyab or a Pamir? Not, boy or girl, but Kulyab or Pamir ? We don't say anything. They start yelling: “What is it?” We don’t say anything. So they grab the little baby, it's been on this earth for maybe five, ten minutes, and they throw it out the window. I’m a nurse, I’d never seen a baby die before. And here—I'm not supposed to remember this now. [Starts crying.] How are you supposed to live after that? How are you supposed to give birth? [Cries.]
    After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn’t want to get out of bed. [Cries.] I’d get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself. I couldn’t give birth there. So we came here. To Belarus. To Narovlya. Small, quiet town. And don’t ask me anything else. I’ve told you everything. [Cries.] Wait. I want you to know. I'm not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man. At first we asked people: “Where is the radiation?" “See where you're standing? That’s where it is.” So it's everywhere? [Cries.] There are many empty houses. People left. They were scared.
    But I’m not scared here the way I was there. We were left without a homeland, no one claims us as their own. The Germans all went back to Germany, the Tatars to the Crimea, when they were allowed to, but no one needs Russians. What are we supposed to hope for? What do we wait for? Russia never saved its people, because it's so big, it’s endless. And to be honest, I don't feel like Russia is my homeland. We were raised differently, our homeland is the Soviet Union. Now it's impossible to know how to save yourself. At least here no one’s playing with guns. Here they gave us a house, and they gave my husband a job. We wrote a letter to our friends back home, and they came yesterday. For good. They came at night and they were afraid to come out of the train station, they stayed there all night, sitting on their suitcases, not letting their kids out. And then they see: people are walking down the street, laughing, smoking. They showed them our street, escorted them right to our house. They couldn’t believe it, because back there we stopped living normal lives. Here they got up in the morning and went to the store, they saw butter, and cream—and right there, in the store, they told us this themselves, they bought five bottles of cream and drank them right there. People were looking at them like they were crazy. But they hadn't seen cream or butter in two years. You can't buy bread in Tajikistan. There's a war. It’s impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t seen what it’s like.
    My soul was dead there. I would have given birth to something without a soul. There aren't many people here, and the houses are empty. We live near the forest. I don’t like it when there are a lot of people. Like at the train station. Or during the war. [Breaks into tears completely and stops talking .]
    Mother:
    The war—that’s the only thing I can talk about. Why did we come here? To Chernobyl? Because no one’s going to chase us out of here. No one will kick us off this land. It’s not anyone’s land now. God took it back. People left it.
    In Dushanbe I was deputy chief of the train station. There was one other deputy, a Tajik. Our kids grew up together, went to school, we all got together on the holidays: New Year’s, May Day. We drank beer together, ate plof together. He’d call me “sister, my sister, my Russian sister.” And then one day he comes in, we sat in the same office, and he stops in front of my