She refused to believe anything was amiss. Only when he showed her the dark specks of graphite on the leaves of her strawberry plants did she agree to return home. Prianichnikov suspected the accident was a catastrophic failure of the reactor, but without a dosimeter, he found it hard to convince his neighbors of such a heretical idea. He couldn’t make them listen, and—as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.
