In Alexiyevich’s “Chernobyl Prayer”
Ludmila Ignatenko tells the story of her husband and herself.
I thought I couldn’t find it more heartbreaking than I did in the show, but I did. Vasily knew she was pregnant and before he deteriorated he wanted desperately to keep Ludmila safe from harm.
She talks in such great detail about Vasily’s final days, and about how madly she loved him to the last. She did take care of him, as his skin peeled of and remained on her fingers, as he spat his own intestines... she wasn’t there when he died. She left for a couple of hours. Nurses told her he called out for her with his last breath.
There is so much love in her words. They got so little time together. And she lost him, and she lost their daughter, and the entire world around her just died away, burned, peeled to the bone and turned to ashes...
her son was born without an arm. She talks about how she had separation anxiety well into his adulthood. How she stroked on the street, holding onto him so madly doctors had to forcibly uclench her fingers even as she was unconscious.
I don’t know really, but there is something so powerful in her words, the emotions are so intense, it’s like a human body opened and fleshed out to find and dissect the soul.