La Supplication

The first interview is with the widow of one of the firemen who were sent in on the first day. He'd been shoveling radioactive sludge dressed in only jeans and a t-shirt, his skin turned grey over an afternoon, he literally fell apart within days. She caught cancer from sitting at his bedside as he died.

The second interview is with a psychologist who lived through World War II in the Ukraine and still can't find anything that compares to working in the Zone.

The third is with one of the old women who moved back a few years later, lives illegally in her little cottage out in the woods. What else is she supposed to do? The radiation can't be that bad if you can't see it.

The fourth is with a father trying to explain how it feels to bury his daughter, dead from a disease that, officially, cannot exist.

And so on and so on and so on.

Voices From Chernobyl is one of the harshest reportage books I've read. Aleksievich doesn't try for objectivity, for a whole picture, for a rational explanation of the hows and whys and the why nots of what happened on 26 April 1986 outside Pripyat, Ukraine, and the aftermath. The coverups, the reassurances, the suicidal heroism, the disintegration of the USSR along with the people who had to keep on living on radioactive ground. Chernobyl is too big, she argues; its a trauma of mythical proportions, one whose full effect we don't even know yet (certainly not in 1997), it cannot be understood with mere numbers anymore than the Holocaust or the plague can, you need stories. So the book consists of only that; interviews, with Aleksievich's own questions removed, leaving only a chorus of disembodied voices identified only by their first name and a title. Some have enough distance to it to offer their ideas of how it could happen (blame communism, blame decadence, blame deep-rooted Russian fatalism, blame alcohol, blame...), while others cannot look away from their own memories. What it all means to them.

The soldiers who dove, voluntarily, into the cooling tank to vent it manually. Dead now, of course.

The people sent in with orders to find entire cities clean. Who measured lethal radiation in breast milk and could do nothing about it.

The flag they raised over the reactor when the sanitation was supposedly finished, to celebrate the Soviet state's victory.The radiation annihilated it within days. So they raised another one.

A joke: both the Japanese and the US donated experimental remote-controlled robots to be used in the cleanup. The Japanese robot lasted an hour before the radiation fried it. The US robot lasted three hours. The Soviet robot worked for 8 hours, then its commanding officer said "Good work, Private Ivanov, you may take a break." The soldiers were told vodka was good for flushing the radiation out of your system.

The teacher who thought she would be safe by only buying the most expensive food, surely that would be OK... until she found out that the officials had raised the prices on food from contaminated areas to make sure people ate less of that.

The official who realised, to his horror, that the pits they dug to bury the tools and machines they used at the accident site were empty; everything sold on the black market, spread all around the Union, with no way to tell a highly radioactive tractor from a normal one.

The mother, fighting desperately for the life of a daughter born without a lower body; forget walking, she can't even take a dump.

And so on and so on and so on.

It's not the book you should read to get an overview of what happened. It doesn't have any answers, any conclusions, its subjectis too big to do anything but start to outline the questions surrounding a trauma that, argues Aleksievich, hasn't been dealt with yet. 25 years on, 15 years after being written, it's probably in dire need of a sequel. But it is an absolutely bone-chilling documentary.