“Three Days” is the title of a short story I wrote in January 2021 for an anthology accompanying the exhibition “Ukraine – Ansichtssachen”. This story is – very briefly – about the days after the reactor accident in Chernobyl.
You can find the anthology with many interesting texts at Amazon:
It was also very interesting for me how I came up with the topic of the story in the first place, the perspective and the characters I wanted to write about and for:
Admittedly, the topic was somewhat predetermined, because I wanted to write texts for the anthology for the exhibition “Ukraine – Ansichtssachen” by the painter Thorsten Böckmann – so it was clear that it had to do “somehow with Ukraine”. But that was all that was clear, at least to me. And I also realized what frightening gaps in my knowledge I had regarding Ukraine, how little I knew about geography, culture, people, history.
Unfortunately, I had little time. – Side note: Incidentally, also an interesting realization for me – because I haven’t participated in “something with a deadline” for a long time, much less in the middle of a period when deadlines and work for the textbooks were just lining up, with which I earn at least a little money – so I couldn’t just throw them down. And at that moment I realized more than ever before how important “free space in the head” is for creative work, for being able to develop ideas at all. – In any case, I “took time off” from other obligations for almost a week to work on texts for the Ukraine exhibition. And then, at the beginning of this week, I first tried to find my way into the topic, I read various articles on the subject, looked at Thorsten’s pictures several times, watched documentaries about Ukraine. And in exactly such a documentary it caught me: I saw a photo of a boy on a carousel, without knowing where exactly this photo was taken. From the documentary I learned only that there had been an amusement park, a carnival, near Chernobyl, and that it had not been opened because of the reactor accident. But before the official opening, which never took place, there had been a trial run – and that’s when that photo was taken. The boy is looking into the camera, the photo is black and white. And I had the complete story in me at that very moment, maybe it was already there, and the photo was, in a way, just the key to the drawer where I had put it. When I say the story was “complete,” I mean the framework – what the situation is, what characters appear, from whose perspective it is told. Not all the details, not all the characters’ thoughts, not all the sentences they say. At first, I had to and wanted to research many of these details – where the park was, what exactly the timeline had been at the time.
I began to write, and even as I was writing, I had the feeling that this short story was actually going to be “unfinished,” that it was going to become a longer text, perhaps even a novel. This impression was reinforced, by the way, when I reread the story a few weeks later (for the first time since I had written it and sent it off). The fact that I couldn’t “make the story longer” in January had, unfortunately, simply practical reasons – time was short for me and, above all, the editors of the anthology were also waiting for my manuscript (I had first submitted “only” a couple of shorter texts that had been written on the paintings of Thorsten Böckmann, but then contacted me again and said that I would actually prefer to submit a short story, but that it was still in the works). Well, I was happy to have written at least the “short version” of this story, but I also realized how I still had the desire to really tell the subject, the story, with the detail and care it deserves. And that is one of the projects I am now currently working on.
If you want to watch the virtual reading with texts from the anthology here is the link:
