Voices from Chernobyl (Lannan Selection)

MONOLOGUE ABOUT HOW A PERSON IS ONLY CLEVER AND REFINED IN EVIL

I was running away from the world. At first I hung around train stations, I liked it there, so many people and you’re all by yourself. Then I came here. Freedom is here.

I’ve forgotten my own life. Don’t ask me about it. I remember what I’ve read in books, and what other people have told me, but my own life I’ve forgotten. It was a long time ago. I did wrong. But there’s no sin that God won’t forgive if the penance is sincere.

A man can’t possibly be happy. He’s not supposed to be. God saw that Adam was lonely and gave him Eve. For happiness, not for sin. But man isn’t capable of happiness. Like me, for example, I don’t like twilight. I don’t like the dark. This corridor, like right now, between light and dark. I still don’t understand where I was—how it was—and it doesn’t matter. I can live or not live, it doesn’t matter. The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire. I fell in love with contemplation. Here you can die equally well from an animal or from the cold. There’s no one for tens of kilometers. You can chase off demons by fasting and praying. You fast for your flesh, and you pray for your soul. But I’m never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages—I used to find spaghetti, flour—even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries—people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don’t need it. They don’t mind. In the fields there’s wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here.

I read in a book—it was by Father Sergei Bulgakov—“It’s certain that God created the world, and therefore the world can’t possibly fail,” and so it’s necessary to “endure history courageously and to the very end.” Another thinker says, I don’t remember his name, but in effect he says: “Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light.” It’s easy to find books here. Now, an empty clay pitcher, or a spoon or fork, that you won’t find, but books are all over. The other day I found a volume of Pushkin. “And the thought of death is sweet to my soul.” I remembered that. Yes: “The thought of death.” I am here alone. I think about death. I’ve come to like thinking. And silence helps you to prepare yourself. Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is. But I’m here alone. Yesterday I chased a wolf and a she-wolf out of the school, they were living there.

Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.

And I’ll say this: birds, and trees, and ants, they’re closer to me now than they were. I think about them, too. Man is frightening. And strange. But I don’t want to kill anyone here. I fish here, I have a rod. Yes. But I don’t shoot animals. And I don’t set traps. You don’t feel like killing anyone here.

Prince Myshkin said: “Is it possible to see a tree and not be happy?” Yes . . . I like to think. Whereas man complains above all, instead of thinking.

What’s the point of looking at evil? Evil is important, of course. Sin isn’t a matter of physics. You have to acknowledge the nonexistent. It says in the Bible: “For those who walk in light, it is one way; and for the rest, there is the teaching.” If you take a bird—or any other living thing—we can’t understand them, because they live for themselves, and not for others. Yes. Everything around is fluid, to put it in just one word.

Everything that walks on four legs looks at the ground, heads for the ground. Only man stands up, and raises his hands and face to the sky. To prayer. To God. The old woman in the church prays, “To each of us according to our sins.” But neither the scientist, nor the engineer, nor the soldier will admit to it. They think: “I have nothing to repent of. Why should I repent?” Yes . . .

I pray simply. I pray for myself. Oh Lord, call upon me! Hear me! Only in evil is a man clever and refined. But how simple and sympathetic he is when speaking the honest words of love. Even when the philosophers use words they are only approximations of the thoughts they have felt. The word corresponds exactly to what is in the soul only in prayer, in the thought of prayer. I feel that physically to be true. Oh, Lord, call upon me! Hear me!

And man, also.

I am afraid of man. And also I want to meet him. I want to meet a good person. Yes. Here it’s either looters, who are hiding out, or people like me, martyrs.

What’s my name? I don’t have a passport. The police took it. They beat me. “What’re you hanging around for?” “I’m not hanging around—I’m repenting.” They beat me harder after that. They beat me on the head. So you should write: “God’s servant Nikolai. Now a free man.”