Sunday, May 15, 2022

Here the accident had never happened.

 From Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith.  Page 153.

Katamay energetically swung his chair around and propelled himself into the next room, a study where his granddaughter had been gathering names and phone numbers at a desk. The desk and all the furniture had been pushed against the wall to make space for a draftsman's table holding an architectural model of the Chernobyl power plant, with stylized green trees and a broad blue Pripyat River cut from blue plastic. All six reactors were there, suggesting a moment in time—past, present or future—that never existed. The panorama was complete with cardboard cooling towers, turbine halls, fuel storage, the domes of water tanks and a parade of transmission towers. On the access roads were miniature trucks and human figures for scale. Here the accident had never happened. Here the Soviet Union was intact.

No comments:

Post a Comment