I had a conversation once with a young priest. We were standing at the grave of Sergeant-Major Sasha Goncharov. He’d worked on the roof of the reactor. It’s snowing and the wind is blowing. Terrible weather. The minister is reading the mourning prayer without a hat on his head. “It’s like you didn’t feel the weather,” I said to him afterward. “It’s true,” he said. “In moments like that I feel all-powerful. No church rite gives me so much energy as the mourning prayer.” I remember that—the words of a man who was always near death.
