BioMed
After entering a radioactive lake near Soviet nuclear tests, Yerzhan stops growing while his Kazakh community continues beneath the shadow of contamination.
People who must keep living beside a threat fold it into daily life rather than escape it. Childhood joy, music and the open landscape exist side by side with a constant dread of the next rumbling and shaking from the forbidden zone.
Damage made by people can take an inviting form. A lake created by a bomb blast is emerald-green, perfectly still, like something from a fairy tale. Its very stillness draws people in, especially those who want relief from the violent shaking around them.
A state racing to outdo a rival superpower can place the costs of that contest on a far-off population that never chose it. Four decades of weapons testing released many times the force of a city-destroying bomb onto people living nearby, with little regard for them as human beings.
In a contaminated place, a single act of youthful showing-off can fix a person's whole future. A boy wades into forbidden water to impress the girl he loves. That one dare stops his body from ever growing up.
When the body stops developing but the mind keeps maturing, others go on treating the person by how they look, not who they have become. A twenty-seven-year-old in a twelve-year-old's body is always handled as a child.
Being frozen in time hurts most beside someone who keeps moving forward. The boy must watch the girl he loves become a beautiful woman while he stays a child. Each year widens the gap between his longing and what he can be.
A cheerful national slogan, repeated in everyday life, can sit right beside the damage it is causing and sound almost like a parody. People parrot the goal of catching up with the rival while the explosions tear through their own homes.
People harmed by forces outside their control often experience the damage as personal shame, not as injury done to them. The boy's blood-red urine is described as turning red as if from shame. He also makes naive, private attempts to will his body into growing.
Even when powerful states inflict catastrophic, needless harm, the people living through it keep loving, making music and telling their stories. In the boy, pure violin music brings back a clear sky and joyful birds even inside a poisoned land.