We’ll die, and then we’ll become science

“We’ll die, and then we’ll become science” is Andrei’s repeated saying about the children’s deaths. Its force lies in the bleak sequence it names: first the children suffer and die; only afterward might their lives become legible as material for scientific understanding. The line does not promise that they will be remembered as individuals. It imagines their bodies and deaths entering knowledge, a prospect at once lasting and dehumanizing.

The Speaker and the Children

The narrator recalls Andrei’s words while naming a succession of children: Yulia, Katya, Vadim, Oksana, Oleg, and now Andrei. The phrase belongs to a shared horizon of loss, not to an abstract debate about science. Andrei had undergone two operations, been sent home, and was expected to have a third six months later. He hanged himself from his belt in an empty classroom after everyone else had gone to gym class. The saying acquires its terrible finality beside that account: the future tense in “We’ll die” has become a record of a death already suffered.

The other children’s words give the saying its emotional counterpoint. Katya feared that everyone would forget them; Oksana feared the cemetery and asked to be buried in a field. Andrei’s formulation differs: instead of asking for remembrance or naming a place of burial, it imagines a transformation into knowledge. The children’s separate statements converge on what death will mean—oblivion, burial, or a scientific afterlife—without resolving their fear.

From Exposure to Evidence

The phrase resonates with the book’s concrete accounts of radiation measurement. On one trip, a researcher measured forest background radiation at five to six times the level on roads or fields. Thyroid activity measured in adults and children in some villages reached one hundred, and sometimes two or three hundred, times the allowable dosage. Breast milk was radioactive; food in village stores was tested and found to be radioactive byproduct. These details show how exposure was rendered in readings and samples. They do not establish that these particular children were studied, but they make the saying’s imagined passage from suffering to scientific evidence materially plausible within the surrounding testimony.

That conversion is not presented as an uncomplicated triumph of knowledge. The researcher recalls knowing that living beings should leave the area, yet following instructions to take measurements and watch television. Reports and explanatory notes were compiled, while the researchers remained silent and obeyed because of Party discipline and faith in the system. In this context, becoming science sounds less like rescue than a bitter prospect: measurement can make danger visible, but visibility alone does not ensure that people are protected.

The Saying’s Double Meaning

The line holds together two meanings that cannot be comfortably separated. Science may preserve evidence of what happened, allowing suffering to become knowable rather than simply disappear. Yet Andrei’s wording makes that possibility arrive too late: the children become legible as science only after death. Their lived experience is compressed into the very evidence that future observers might examine.

The narrator’s final image, that the sky is alive because the dead children are there, offers a different kind of persistence. It does not replace the scientific record or undo the deaths; it keeps the children present in memory rather than reducing them to findings. Against the possibility of being forgotten, or surviving only as material for study, Andrei’s sentence remains a child’s unsparing account of what the future may demand in exchange for knowledge.