Mencionar brevemente los que considero los mejores monólogos: el 'Monologue on what St Francis preached to the birds', el de Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko, antiguo director del Instituto Atómico y posiblemente el mejor el de Gennady Grushevoy, miembro del parlamento Bielorruso.
Los pasajes más conmovedores:
-I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our stay on earth and in time. I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul. A day in the life of ordinary people. Razón del libro.
-The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that’s all the justice you’ll find in this world. La verdad más certera.
-Apples from Chernobyl!’ Someone told her, ‘Don’t advertise the fact they’re from Chernobyl, love. No one will buy them.’ ‘Don’t you believe it! They’re selling well! People buy them for their mother-in-law or their boss!’. Humor negro
-a former partisan, described how during the war their unit broke out of an encirclement. She was carrying her little baby in her arms, just one month old, as they went through a swamp with enemy forces all around. The baby was crying. He could give them away, then they’d all be found, the whole unit. So she smothered him. She spoke about it with this odd detachment, as though it had been some other person that did it, and the baby hadn’t been hers. I can’t remember any more why she brought it up. But I remember very clearly something else, my own horror. What had she done? How could she?Terrible pasaje de la guerra
-When my son was born, I stopped fearing death. The meaning of my life was revealed. Tener hijos como sentido de la vida
-That’s what I’ve realized. People will keep gossiping, kowtowing to their bosses, rescuing their TV sets and astrakhan coats. Just before the world ends, human beings will be exactly the same as they are now. The same as always. No hay héroes en la vida real
-Because they will always go together in history: the downfall of Socialism and the Chernobyl disaster. They coincided. Chernobyl hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. It blew the empire apart. Chernobyl como catalizador de la caída de la URSS
-‘Okay, so maybe I can’t change a thing in this man’s life, but what I can do is eat a radioactive sandwich alongside him, so I won’t be ashamed. Share his fate.’ That is the attitude we take to our own lives. And yet I had a wife and two children. I was responsible for them. Bonita reflexión.
-The Soviet Union had fallen, collapsed, but people were still expecting to be coddled by a great, powerful country, which no longer existed. My characterization, if you want it: a hybrid between a prison and a kindergarten, that’s what Socialism is, Soviet Socialism. A citizen surrendered his soul to the state, his conscience, his heart, and in return received his rations for the day. Beyond that, it was a matter of luck: one person got a bigger ration, another a small one. The only constant was that you got it in return for selling your soul. Demoladora visión del socialismo soviético.
-The doctors urged me to have an abortion. ‘Your husband was in Chernobyl for a long time.’ He’s a truck driver, and he was called up to go there in the early days. He was transporting sand and concrete. I wouldn’t believe them. I didn’t want to. I had read in books that love conquers all. Even death. My little baby was stillborn, and lacking two fingers. A girl. I cried. ‘If she could at least have had all her pretty little fingers. She was a girl after all. Dramático
-They gave me a radiation meter, but what am I supposed to do with it? I wash the linen, I get it really clean, and the meter goes off. I make meals, bake a cake, it goes off. I make a bed, it goes off. What use is it to me? I feed the children and weep. ‘Why are you crying, Mum?’ Terrible el día a día.
-‘Mum, take me away from the hospital. I’ll die here. Everybody here dies.’ Where am I to cry? In the toilet? There’s a queue. Everyone is just like me. Terrible
-They chase each other through the wards shouting, ‘I’m radiation, I’m radiation!’ Terrible.
-My Artyom is seven, but he looks five. When he shuts his eyes, I think he’s fallen asleep. That’s when I can cry. When he won’t see. But he reacts: ‘Mum, am I dying now?’ He falls asleep and he’s barely breathing. I get down on my knees before him, in front of his little bed. ‘Artyom, little one, open your eyes. Say something.’ I think to myself: ‘You’re still warm, my sweet one.’ He opens his eyes. He falls asleep again. He’s so still. As if he’s died. ‘Artyom, dearest, open your eyes ...’ I’m trying not to let him die. Terrible
-Admiring the sight. Some people drove dozens of kilometres or cycled to see it. We had no idea death could look so pretty. Not that there was no smell; it was not a springtime or an autumn smell. Quite different. Not the smell of soil either. No, it gave you a tickle in your throat and made your eyes water. I couldn’t sleep all night. Death can look pretty.
-a cow covered in plastic, grazing, and beside it a village woman, also wrapped in plastic. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Dramático.
-Why had I spent so much time, so many hours and days, sitting in front of the television surrounded by piles of newspapers? What matters most is life and death. Nothing else exists. Nothing to throw on the scales. Reflexión de un científico.
-They send an American robot up to work on the roof. It operates for five minutes, then breaks down. Then a Japanese robot lasts nine minutes before it breaks down too. The Russian robot works for two hours, then, over the walkie-talkie, ‘Okay, Private Ivanov, you can come down now for a cigarette break.’ Ha ha! Humor negro.
-I seized my daughter and fled to Minsk, to my sister. My own sister wouldn’t let us in the door because she had a baby she was breastfeeding. I could never have imagined that in my worst nightmare! Dramático.
-He thought he could sit there drinking his mineral water, being afraid even to touch my mug, and I was supposed to pour out my heart to him, let him into my soul. Dramático.
-The secret instructions about what to do if there was a threat of nuclear war specified immediately carrying out the precautionary administration of iodine to the population. And that was just if there was a threat! But here we were looking at 3,000 microroentgens per hour. And all they cared about wasn’t people, but managing to hold on to power. Resumen URSS.
De los trabajos de limpieza:
- At first, they were dropping lead panels into it, but they vanished down the hole without trace. Then someone remembered that lead vaporizes at 700 degrees Celsius and the temperature down there was 2,000 degrees. After that, sacks of dolomite and sand were dropped down. Material para apagar fuego del reactor
-Colonel Yaroshuk. A man who walked through the radiation zone mapping the contamination hotspots. He was literally used as a biological robot, but even though he was aware of this, he moved out from right next to the walls of the atomic power station itself. On foot, carrying his radiation measuring instruments. If he detected a hotspot, he went along its edge so it could be accurately mapped. And what about the soldiers working up on the reactor roof? In all, some 210 military units, about 340,000 troops, were brought in to clean up in the aftermath of the accident. The most lethal work was done by those cleaning the roof. They were issued lead aprons, but the radiation was coming up from below and they were not protected from that direction. They wore synthetic leather army boots and were exposed each day to intense radiation on the roof for one and a half to two minutes. Afterwards, they were discharged from the army with a certificate of commendation and a hundred-rouble bonus. They disappeared into the vast expanses of the Soviet homeland. On the roof, they were scraping up fuel and graphite from the reactor, lumps of concrete and reinforcing steel. They had twenty to thirty seconds to load a litter, and the same amount of time again to tip the waste down from the roof. These specialist litters weigh forty kilograms unloaded, so you can imagine the strain of wearing a lead apron, a mask, manoeuvring the littersand working at breakneck speed. [...] They were nicknamed ‘green robots’, after the colour of their army uniforms. Three thousand six hundred soldiers crossed the roof of the wrecked reactor. Trabajo de limpieza - brutal.
-and it was essential to drain the ground water beneath the reactor so it wouldn’t be reached by a molten mix of uranium and graphite which, coming in contact with the water, would achieve critical mass. The power of the resultant explosion would have been three to five megatons. Not only would Kiev and Minsk have been wiped out, but an enormous area of Europe would have been made uninhabitable. Aún pudo haber sido bastante peor.
-The situation required volunteers to dive into the water and open the latch on the drainage valve. They were promised a car, an apartment, a dacha, and a pension for their families to the end of their days. Volunteers came forward! The boys dived, repeatedly, and managed to open the latch. They were given 7,000 roubles to share between them, and the promised cars and apartments were quietly forgotten about. Needless to say, they hadn’t agreed to make those dives because of the promised rewards. That was the least part of their motivation. Our people are not that naive. They knew the value of those promises. (Very upset.) Those people are no longer with us. Trabajo de los buceadores.
-He himself made 120 sorties and dropped 200 to 300 tonnes of ballast. He was making four or five flights a day, at an altitude of 300 metres above the reactor. The cabin temperature could reach sixty degrees. And what happened down there when they did drop the sandbags? Can you imagine the furnace? The level of radioactivity reached 1,800 roentgens per hour. The pilots were sick while they were flying. In order to aim accurately and hit the target, which was a volcanic crater, they stuck their heads out of the cabin and looked down. There was no other way. At meetings of the government commission dealing with the disaster, they reported matter-of-factly,
‘We shall have to expend two or three lives on this ... This operation will cost one life.’ Straightforward and factual. Colonel Vodolazhsky died. In their records of the radiation to which individuals were exposed above the reactor, the doctors wrote that he had been subjected to seven rem. The true figure was 600! Trabajo de los pilotos de helicóptero.
-400 miners who day and night dug under the reactor? They needed to carve out a tunnel that could be filled with liquid nitrogen to freeze the ground. Otherwise, the reactor would have sunk down into the ground water. There were miners from Moscow, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk. I have never read a word about them and yet, naked, in temperatures of fifty degrees, they pushed mine carts in front of them on all fours. Down there, the radiation level was also in the hundreds of roentgens. Today, they are dying; but what if they had not done what they did? Trabajo de los mineros.
-technician who told me about the construction of the Smolensk atomic power station: how much cement and sand, how many planks and nails, found their way from the building site to nearby villages. In return for a bribe or a bottle of vodka. Corrupción en la construcción de las centrales.
-We left my hamster at home when we locked everything up. He was a little white hamster. We gave him enough food for two days. But we never went back. Personal.
-‘Chernobyl children are eating ice cream in there,’ they said. The woman at the counter told someone over the phone, ‘When they leave, we’ll wash the floor with bleach and boil the glasses.’ We heard that. Dramático.
-‘If I stay alive, I want nothing to do with physics or chemistry. I’ll retire from the factory and be a shepherd.’ Cambio de mentalidad.
-They’re all silent: the professor, the doctors and nurses. They think I have no idea that I’m going to die soon. But at night, I’m learning to fly ... Durísimo. Continuación: I fell in love with a girl in fifth grade. In seventh grade, I discovered there was such a thing as death. My favourite poet is García Lorca. I read his words, ‘the dark root of a cry’. At night, poetry has another sound. A
different one. I’ve started learning to fly. It’s not a game I like, but what can you do?
-For me, the sky is alive now when I look up at it. They are up there. Terrible monólogo (el del último niño).
-I pierced one of the tubes, the biggest one, and it went into his stomach. But he lost his sense of smell, he couldn’t tell one food from another. I would ask, ‘Do you like that?’ but he didn’t know. Terrible.
-We will wait for him together. I will say my Chernobyl prayer, and he will look at the world with the eyes of a child. Final del libro.
-Do you think I am out of my mind? You would be mistaken: atomic tourism is in great demand, especially among Westerners. People crave strong new sensations, and these are in short supply in a world so much explored and readily accessible. Life gets boring, and people want a frisson of something eternal ... Visit the atomic Mecca. Affordable prices. Broche final. Hasta dónde puede llegar la estupidez humana.
De las cantidades de radiación:
-The village of Malinovka. Fifty-nine curies per square metre.
-The village of Chudyany. One hundred and fifty curies per square metre.
-fifty roentgens was a fatal dose.
-rem, or a curie, or a milliroentgen. Las unidades de radiación.
-sieverts. Otra unidad de radiación.
-caesium in milk, or strontium. We transported milk with caesium to the dairies, delivered meat, scythed grass contaminated with radiation at forty curies. Remedio para la radiación.
-I took a reading of my son’s thyroid gland: 180 microroentgens an hour! At that moment, the thyroid gland was a perfect radiation monitor. What was needed was potassium iodide, standard iodine. Importancia del iodino.
-stripped away topsoil poisoned with caesium and strontium, Elementos contaminantes.
Hay que distinguir entre las diferentes unidades de radiación. Según la unidad, hacen referencia a uno de los cuatro fenómenos: Actividad, Exposición, Dosis absorbida o Dosis equivalente:
- Actividad: Curie (o becquerel o rutherford) Número de transformaciones radiactivas por segundo que ocurre en un radionúclido en particular. Relacionada con la radioactividad del radionúclido.
- Exposición: Röntgen (o colulomb per kilogram) Es una medida de la ionización del aire debido a los fotones (es decir, rayos gamma y rayos-X).
- Dosis absorbida: Rad (o erg per gram o gray) Es la medida de energía depositada en la materia por radiación iónica por unidad de masa.
- Dosis equivalente: Sievert (o röntgen equivalent man) Representa la probabilidad de daños genéticos y cancerígenos. Es el que hay que considerar.
- Las radiografías provocan entre 0.01-0.4 milisieverts.
- De forma natural cada año recibimos 2 milisieverts.
- Se recomienda un límite de radiación de 100 milisieverts en cinco años.
- Una dosis de 1.000 milisieverts puede causar mareos, náusesas, vómitos pero no la muerte.
- Una dosis de 5.000 milisieverts puede matar al 50% de las personas expuestas.
- Una dosis de 6.000 milisieverts es lo que sufrireron los trabajadores de Chernobyl que murieron en un mes.
- Una dosis de 10.000 milisieverts mata al 100% de las personas expuestas en semanas.
Otras citas de interés:
-The Pamiri Tajiks are fighting the Kulobi Tajiks. They are all Tajiks, they’ve got the one Koran, the one faith, but Kulobis are killing Pamiris, and Pamiris killing Kulobis. Sobre los Tajiks
-The fairy tale most popular in the Zone is that Stolichnaya vodka is the best antidote to strontium and caesium. Sobre el vodka Stolichnaya
-the French religious philosopher Malebranche, who undertook to interpret the Bible from the perspective of the rational mind. The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment. Filósofo francés como Tomás de Aquino
- The bookshops began stocking Solzhenitsyn, then Shalamov, Bukharin. It wasn’t so long ago that you could have been arrested for possessing those books. Autores rusos prohibidos en la URSS
-Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, Venedikt Yerofeyev. Más autores censurados.
-Bragin, Khoyniki and Narovlya, Ciudades ucranianas cerca de la central.
-Kyshtym plutonium production plant in 1957, or the effects of the fallout after atomic tests at Semipalatinsk in 1949 and 1951? Otros incidentes nucleares.
