Story of Den's life

Den doesn’t write much.
But it was the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, so I felt I had to send him an email.
Den and I met in 2003, and we were an unlikely pair of buddies. He was less than a year out of the American University of Central Asia, probably about 22. I was 54 and was in Bishkek to do a week-long seminar for the International Center for Journalists. Den was my interpreter.
At the end of the second day of the seminar, we found ourselves walking in the snow together. It was probably the last snow of winter. You could smell the mud of spring, but old mother winter was still shaking the last of the snow out of her broom.
We were walking down Frunze Street, toward the university, my hotel, and the apartment where Den still lived with his parents. All were pretty much in the same neighborhood.
And as we walked and the snow fell, Den told me about the events of 25 years ago last week, the events of Chernobyl.
He told me his father, an engineer at the ill-fated nuclear plant, was sick that dreadful morning and had stayed home with the flu. He told me about the chaos and confusion. He told me about his family’s evacuation and resettlement in Kyrgyzstan.
At first, it seemed to be a test.
Was this young interpreter spinning a remarkable story simply to test my credulity? Was he trying to measure my skepticism?
But as he talked, an odd thing happened.
On that stretch of Frunze Street, amid the intermittent snowfall, I knew he was telling the truth. He was sharing something with me, a key piece of his family’s history.
And at that moment, he was no longer just my interpreter. He became my friend.
And we’ve stayed friends ever since, in spite of his shortcomings when it comes to email. I was with Den and the young woman who is now his wife on the night they met. I was with the two of them about a year later in Tajikistan when their relationship nearly disintegrated. Since their marriage, they’ve shared wonderful photos of their beautiful little daughters. (All of them sent by Salla, Den’s wife, who is much more responsible when it comes to things like communication.)
But on Chernobyl day, on the 25th anniversary, it seemed especially important to get back in touch. So I wrote Den.
To my surprise, he wrote back about 24 hours later.
He wasn’t insulted by my initial reaction that he’d been spinning a yarn when he first told me about Chernobyl. Nor was he surprised by it.
Den’s life has been so complicated that simply to answer the question, “Where are you from?” isn’t simple.
Den tells people he was raised in Kyrgyzstan. Then he has to explain where that is.
So, you’re Kyrgyz? They ask.
Nope, his family was part of the Russian-speaking minority in Kyrgyzstan.
So, you’re Russian? They ask.
Nope, he says, he’s not Russian and he’s never set foot in Russia. Ethnically he’s Ukrainian and that’s where he was born.
Mention of Ukraine inevitably brings up the connection to Chernobyl.
At that point, people’s eyes are glazing over. This is all just too weird to believe.
Den runs into it all the time. There’s even a name for it: “improbability bias.”
A simpler version is that people feel a BS detector ought to be activated, though Den’s story is no yarn. It’s just his life.
But he knows it’s remarkable.
One of these days, he tells me, he may write a book about the whole thing, particularly about how his parents coped and maintained incredible optimism in the face of impossible odds.
It would start, he says, with his father alone in the Red Forest — the evergreen forest burned the shade of rust by radiation from the nuclear plant — standing there in silence, alone, his son and his wife evacuated, thinking about the future.[[In-content Ad]]