I used to write poems. I was in love with a girl. In fifth grade. In seventh grade I found out about death.
I read in Garcia Lorca: “the cry’s black root.” I began to learn how to fly. I don’t like playing that game, but what can you do?
I had a friend, Andrei. They did two operations on him and then sent him home. Six months later he was supposed to get a third operation. He hanged himself from his belt, in an empty classroom, when everyone else had gone to gym glass. The doctors had said he wasn’t allowed to run or jump.
Yulia, Katya, Vadim, Oksana, Oleg, and now Andrei. “We’ll die, and then we’ll become science,” Andrei used to say. “We’ll die and everyone will forget us,” Katya said. “When I die, don’t bury me at the cemetery, I’m afraid of the cemetery, there are only dead people and crows there,” said Oksana. “Bury me in the field.” Yulia used to just cry. The whole sky is alive for me now when I look at it, because they’re all there.
Excerpt from Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen.