CHERENKOV:

The rooster, my great-uncle had reported, didn’t crow on the morning the event happened. You should know that my great-uncle was living in the country, on his own little farm in Vanavara, very near the Evenki, even though he was not one of them, but Russian. He was on friendly terms with them, however. The other birds had remained silent too. That’s why my uncle had woken up only when the sun was shining on his face— an unusually blinding light on that day, as he emphasized whenever he talked to me about the event. At any other time, the birds would start singing shortly before dawn. That’s when he would usually get up, though at times he’d stay in bed and listen to their singing. Then, at the rooster’s crow, he’d start the fire in the kitchen stove. But there was no singing on that day.
On that day, he awoke in an uncanny silence, drenched in sweat. The sun was not only glaring but already hot when he sat up on the side of his bed. A glistening silence surrounded him, my great-uncle reported, as he was filling the kettle in the kitchen and kindling the stove fire to make his morning coffee. Even his dog didn’t get up from his cushion to greet him as he always did when he started off his day at the stove. Head ducked and ears laid back, the dog looked at him from his cushion with the eyes of a bad conscience. Had he snitched a sausage? The dog didn’t get up even when my uncle whispered his name in a friendly voice and patted his right thigh— the sign for the dog to heel. That’s when my great-uncle realized that something wasn’t right. He stepped outside through the kitchen door and looked at the sky. It seemed to him that, judging by the brightness, it was already nine or ten but at the same time, it was still as quiet as at two in the night. The clock on the church steeple across the road indicated it was only a little after seven. The light, he said, had been strangely constant. “I stood there as if in a hot night that is garishly illuminated by many floodlights,” is how my great-uncle Kulik would always put it. Then he saw the glaring strings or threads shining blue-white across the bright sky, like tracer rockets, only much, much brighter. Never before had he seen such a bright light. It had been like a slow rain of shooting stars, a meteor shower during daylight, more and more of it. So he sat down on the bench beneath his kitchen window without turning his eyes away from the sky so as to observe this spectacle undisturbed. Streams of sweat were running down all over his body.
He didn’t know if it was the heat or his strange mental state that made him sweat so hard. Perhaps, my great-uncle was musing whenever he told his story as if he were thinking of this possibility for the first time, perhaps his body had been gripped by an intense fear even then, a fear that had reached his mind only later and that had been so horrible that his body could not help having broken out in a cold sweat, as it were, before he felt fear. My uncle didn’t know how long he had been sitting there. The kettle had completely slipped his mind. All he could do was incessantly stare into this rain of shooting stars, when at last a droning sound started and grew louder and louder. It came from the sky. The dog was whimpering, a noise he could still hear when the droning started. Shortly thereafter, crouching low and with its tail between its legs, it came out of the kitchen and crawled under the bench. bench. The meteor shower had become more and more intense. Then, he said, a clanking like very heavy pieces of sheet metal was added to the droning that had already grown into an almost thunderous rumbling. At that moment, it seemed to him as if an immense light were darting across the sun, obscuring it for a moment. Then, perhaps after ten seconds, came the first flash of lightning, which turned everything everything into light. Nothing could be seen any longer but the light. This white light stood around him— he always said “stood around”— for several seconds, and then the rumbly droning and clanking, through a kind of concentration, turned into a loud clap, followed by a bright bang. When he heard this bang, the light had already become milder. Then a tremor went through the earth, and the dog howled once again, only louder and more fearful. Then, for a few seconds, he could again recognize objects, the fence around his house and the steeple of the wooden church across the road. But then the droning intensified again, for seconds once more a “standing”  flash of lightning, the clash, this time accompanied by a hissing, then again the bright bang and the earth’s trembling. All that went on like that for several minutes. Over and over again: lightning, bang, tremor, hissing, lightning, bang, tremor, hissing