He wrote down in his notebook: “When I die, burn the remains. I don’t want you to be afraid.” There’d been rumors that even after dying the men from Chernobyl are radioactive. I read that the graves of the Chernobyl firefighters who died in the Moscow hospitals and were buried near Moscow at Mitino are still considered radioactive, people walk around them and don’t bury their relatives nearby. Even the dead fear these dead.
