The Flowers Told the Story by Sylvia Nagl

Sylvia is a scientist who grew up in Europe and in her writing is particularly interested in the impacts of large world events on the lives of individuals.

It was the 26th of April 1986, my mother’s 60th birthday. A day of hiking in the mountains had been her special birthday wish. So here we were, on an exposed track through a large pine plantation that had just been clear felled. As we were nearing the summit, my mother was turning east, towards Russia. She said: ”I don’t know what it can possibly be, but there is something really wrong. I can feel it.”

​This was the day that reactor number 4 at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded. Later it was said that the radioactive contamination ejected was five hundred times greater than that released by the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
           
My parents lived about 1,000 km west of Chernobyl. This felt alarmingly close. At the same time, it is an enduring mystery to me how my mother could have sensed serious, intangible danger from this distance. But she did.

Over the next days, we were locked down like we are now, but could follow the ominous radioactive cloud growing and drifting across the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, the Baltic states, Finland, Norway and Sweden on the evening news. Then it was further advancing across Europe on its unrelenting westward progress. As bad weather set in and rain came down, the radioactive fallout came down too. All we could do was shelter in my parents’ home.

Growing up in Europe during the Cold War, I had lived with a potential radioactive cloud over my head every day of my life. The numbers of accumulated nuclear weapons on either side of the Iron Curtain were beyond comprehension. We all were acutely aware that we could be annihilated at any moment, either through a nuclear accident or an act of war. Now, our worst fears seemed to have materialised. But then, in the following weeks, it emerged that the wind and rain patterns in this fateful time seemed to have largely spared my hometown, so very close to the Iron Curtain, from the fallout.

But the living world had not been untouched. As spring turned to summer, my mother’s carefully tended organic vegetables in the garden and the flowering plants in the forest she loved developed strange mutations. Spiders were building asymmetrical webs. The ordered geometries of nature’s forms were lost and what had taken their place was chaotic. It was an overwhelming experience, although it happened almost imperceptibly. It was like an apocalyptic horror movie without special effects. One had to observe closely to realise the monstrous events that had taken place. It was a catastrophe at the level of the molecules that make up life.