something’s not right. And then it hits me: I don’t smell anything. The garden is blooming, but there’s no smell! I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can’t smell, and I figured this had happened to me too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don’t smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn’t smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake.
