Why read, p.6
Why Read, page 6
I might have found Dennis’s dégagé manner more difficult to understand, had I not dined the previous evening, in Kiev, with the writer and academic Oksana Zabuzhko, who’s the nearest thing Ukraine has to a literary superstar. Zabuzhko, whose novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was a bestseller in her native country – and has been translated into eight languages – has a formidable reputation as the doyenne of what was, effectively, Ukraine’s first feminist wave, and the cynosure of its ‘Post-Chernobyl’ generation of writers. A fierce patriot, she had arranged to meet in a Ukrainian-themed restaurant near to my hotel – which in turn was a short distance from St Sofia Cathedral with its signature golden onion domes. Arriving with photographer Lesya Malskaya; translator Irina Zaytseva; and a third young woman – the writer, Julia Kadenko, who had brokered our summit – Zabuzhko eyed me sceptically, and when I told her I was writing for Playboy her gaze narrowed, as if she was thinking: Ha! With his entourage of young native women he is Western male chauvinist Playboy incarnate.
However, as we were served with honey mead and baked river perch by waitresses in cod-Cossack dress, Zabuzhko unbent enough to set me straight in her steely accented but exact English. It was said, I remarked, that the Chernobyl disaster marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. ‘In psychological terms,’ she told me, ‘the experience was unique and insurmountable . . . it was the real collapse of the Soviet Union, the remaining five years were just a technical matter . . . The essence of the Soviet power was that the country was living in lethargy, and the reason for the lethargy was fear – Chernobyl killed the fear, because here was another fear much stronger than any provided by the KGB. And for the first time people saw the authorities – these people who were all-knowing and behaving like gods – for the first time they saw them as miserable, helpless, extremely ignorant and arrogant people not giving a damn about human lives.’
Zabuzhko recalled one such all-knowing authority, a physicist from the Soviet Academy, being interviewed on TV once the disaster had been partially admitted to. ‘He said, “Science calls for victims – it demands sacrifice.”’ It had been an unnaturally warm spring in Kiev, and as May came the air was dense with blossom – everywhere the city’s celebrated chestnut trees were in flower. The May Day parades were allowed to go ahead – science was offered its victims. The young Zabuzhko, who was teaching while studying for her doctorate, saw bizarre drifts of bees lying dead on the windowsills of her apartment block – then there was an apocalyptic cloud that split the sky in two, next an unseasonable snow shower. She assumes, now, these were side-effects of the seeding of clouds by the Soviet air force, in order that contaminated rain would fall away from urban centres. All that month she and her friends stayed shut up inside: ‘We were trying to move in the streets as little as possible.’ They drank red wine – like Lesya in Vladimir – because someone had said this would act as a prophylactic against the radiation, but even so: ‘For 29 days exactly we spoke like the old miners, with these rasping voices – because of the iodine.’
Zabuzhko was referring to radioactive iodine-131, absorbed by the human thyroid gland. The Soviet authorities were blamed for not providing the affected population with ordinary iodine, which would’ve prevented the absorption of the radioactive isotope, and to date, the only cancers proven to have been caused by the disaster – among those not directly involved in the Chernobyl clear-up – have been of the thyroid, and readily treatable. This being noted, there is nothing more contentious than these epidemiological statistics, with a wild disparity between the highest estimates of Chernobyl-caused fatalities – in the hundreds of thousands – and the lowest, which put the human cost, to date, at less than 150 lives.
As I spoke with Oksana Zabuzhko it started to impinge on me that my ideas about how Ukraine had reacted psychically to Chernobyl were well wide of the mark – my very Western notions of a fizzing anxiety that haloes nuclear power, hadn’t been operative here. ‘This was never a concern with us,’ Zabuzhko said. ‘It’s the primary concern for people who grew up in the atmosphere of public discussion . . . there was no public discussion in the Soviet Union, it was a Byzantine empire.’ To be so preoccupied had been – and remained even now – a luxury that couldn’t be afforded. After all, nuclear power had continued to be generated at Chernobyl until 2000 when the last reactor on the site was shut down. And just as the reaction to Chernobyl was a political rather than an environmental one, so my desire to visit the scene of this tragedy was dismissed by Oksana as ‘some kind of voyeurism’; she herself had never felt the need to go.
But this remains a story about time – and timing. And while I may still be sitting in the themed Ukrainian restaurant, watching its patron flick his Taras Bulbastyle forelock back and forth over his shaved pate while Oksana Zabuzhko straightens me out, I’m also still standing in that stairwell at Kindergarten No.7. Standing there watching time as it grows fungus-like in the dank atmosphere . . . From some corner of my mind floats the fact that mushrooms – whose rhizomes can spread in thin filaments through miles of earth – have some of the highest concentrations of contamination found in the Zone of Alienation, a bitter irony for the Ukrainians who, like their Russian cousins, love mushrooming above all other country pursuits. As for the rampant wildlife of the Zone – the wolves, the wild boar, the lynxes and reintroduced Przewalski horses – well, in an area twice as big as Rhode Island it would take more than a couple of days to run them to ground. Instead there was birdsong of a strength and intensity only heard – one imagines – before the Industrial Revolution.
Leaving the Sarcophagus behind, Dennis had stopped the car on an inconspicuous bridge over a railway and explained that this was known as ‘the Bridge of Death’, partly because when the rescue workers arrived during the night of 26 April 1986, it was across this that the maimed and the wounded were being carried – but also because it remained one of the most contaminated areas of the Zone. Donning cheap sneakers provided by Dennis so that we wouldn’t have our own shoes impounded on leaving the Zone, Lesya and I scrambled down the embankment to the tracks. Dennis showed me the dosimeter he carried – it registered twenty microsieverts per hour – he smiled sardonically, and said ‘I guessed that,’ as if he were gifting the decadent Westerner the jolt he’d paid for. It wasn’t that big a jolt – about the same as receiving a chest X-ray, if, that is, we’d stuck around for a couple of hours – but the confirmation of its presence was enough to tint the perfectly ordinary scene – the overgrown railway line and the stacks of ties wreathed with weeds – with the same numinous tint you see in photos of the railways that terminated in the Nazis’ death camps: the banal coloration of evil. Hitler understood about time. Following a trip to Rome in 1938 he promulgated an order known as the Theorie vom Ruinenwert. Henceforth, all Nazi buildings were to be of marble, stone and brick alone – steel and ferro-concrete were too perishable – so that even if the 1,000-year Reich were to fall, evidence of its mightiness would remain.
Back in Kiev, Dr Yuri Saienko had presented me with his statistics. He sent out exhaustive questionnaires to the Chernobyl displaced as often as he could – money for social science research was, unsurprisingly, in short supply. The results were in some ways predictable – in others wildly counter-intuitive. As, over the years, people’s fear of another nuclear accident had declined, so their anxiety about that staple Ukrainian disaster – famine – had increased. In the last set of results Dr Saienko had tabulated – those for 2010 – his sample feared hunger twice as much as radiation. And why wouldn’t they? The famine during the Russian civil war, then the still more devastating genocide inflicted by Stalin on Ukraine through forced collectivisation – these were deep scars on the collective memory. Then there were the Nazis. Babi Yar is a suburb of Kiev – a hecatomb that’s a subway ride away. Chernobyl itself was marked by death before the reactor blew. At the tip of one of the trails of maximum contamination that extend westward from the doomed reactor like fingers warding off the evil eye, lies Buriakivka, the site of a wartime mass grave of Soviet soldiers; it’s here that the corpses of vehicles used in the Chernobyl clean-up were also interred – dumpsters, earthmovers and lead-sheeted armoured personnel carriers rusting behind barbed wire. And elsewhere in the Zone are other mass graves of Jews killed by the Nazis’ einsatzgruppen during the 1941 invasion, graves that in places abut the contaminated villages buried by these same dumpsters after the disaster. In Ukraine, death has a geological stratigraphy.
Time drips in the stairwell – it’s been raining outside and I can hear the drops that have percolated through the warped joists and cracked concrete falling on the debris strewn throughout the nursery school. Rain falling inside a building was the signature motif of the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky; he used it again and again in his movies to symbolise the inexorability of time, its erosion of all human aspirations – whether noble or pathetic. Before leaving for Ukraine I had sat up late one night watching again Tarkovsky’s Stalker, an adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ classic science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. The book was written in 1971, but was refused publication in the Soviet Union in its original form – only versions bowdlerised by the censor appeared in Russian for many years, and the first unexpurgated edition was published in English, in the US in 1977. Stalker, the credits of which list the Strugatskys as joint screenwriters, was released in 1979; both works, of course, antedate the Chernobyl disaster by several years, yet both uncannily prefigure the particular ambience of the Zone of Alienation, with its Modernist ruins and perimeter fence manned by armed and uniformed guards.
In Roadside Picnic we are told that the zone was caused by an alien visitation – but Stalker is utterly opaque; all the viewer discovers is that the stalker of the title is a man others pay to lead them into this wilderness of rampant nature and mouldering concrete, lead them in search of a mysterious room where their innermost wishes will come true. Lesya, as became a good child of the Soviet intelligentsia, had told me she had seen Stalker ‘at least twenty times’ – I couldn’t claim that level of immersion in Tarkovsky’s water-world, but my recent late-night communion with the movie had certainly been the right entrée to Pripyat’s warped time zone. Particularly uncanny was the moment when the party of three – known only as the Stalker, the Writer, and the Scientist – are on the brink of entering the wish-fulfilling room, and a telephone rings. A telephone! The intrusion of the outside world, of functioning technology, to this seemingly illimitable realm of flooded tunnels and rusting machinery is chilling. The Stalker gestures sharply: don’t answer it. But after it’s stopped ringing, the Scientist picks up the receiver and makes an outgoing call. We hear the voice on the end of the line – but we have no idea who it is. The Scientist says he is in ‘the old building, Bunker Four . . .’
Bunker Four where wishes are fulfilled – Reactor No.4 where nightmares came true. You would need to be a lot less credulous a writer than me not to feel that prescience was involved here . . . And now, turning away from Doctor Ouch-Hurts’s floating clinic, I crunch into a large room where there seems a disturbing artfulness to the destruction – a child-size gas mask is arranged by a picture of Lenin just so, a rotten doll is propped up in a pedal car, a plastic duck on wheels has been manoeuvred into an escape lane of fallen plaster chunks – and there, on the filthy wall, is a spray-painted graffito of a flung bolt trailing a length of cloth: the Stalker’s way finder – his equivalent of Dennis’s radiation dosimeter. This is the method he uses in the movie to move through the zone, chucking it ahead of the party to check for invisible and unearthly mantraps.
Does it matter, I wonder, that others so precisely like me have been here before? Does it matter that Pripyat is a palimpsest that has been worked over with these troubling cultural references? No, of course not, the idea that anyone can approach ruins de novo is absurd – even Modernist ones. And besides, Chernobyl cries out for such mysticism – demands it, even. The very word ‘chornobyl’ means ‘wormwood’ in Ukrainian and the herb of the same name grows in great profusion throughout the Zone of Alienation. That the star called Wormwood is, in the Book of Revelation, the harbinger of the sinful world’s imminent destruction was lost on no one at the time of the disaster. The biblical quotation has even been posted by the door of the small museum of the disaster just opened in the town of Chernobyl, a door that takes the chilling form of the whole-body Geiger counter you must pass through in order to enter and leave the thirty-kilometre Zone.
Still, the amount of radiation visitors to the Zone receive is negligible – between 0.03 and 0.2 microsieverts for the duration of a stay – it’s said that you sop up more flying from London to Kiev. Even sleeping the night in the government’s hostel in Chernobyl, as we did, is no big deal. After all, we were only spending a couple of days in the Zone – some people remained there, at least in spirit, for their entire lives. People like Anatoly, who, the previous evening, we had met at his painfully neat apartment in Kiev, his district a Brutalist wasteland of Soviet-era blocks on the eastern bank of the Dnieper. A fit-looking man in his mid-fifties with iron-filing hair, Anatoly led us into a plain white room dominated by enormous stereo speakers and a shrub-choked balcony, then made us coffee. When the coffee arrived he got out a bottle of cognac and offered us a tot: ‘I have low blood pressure,’ he explained through Irina, ‘and this helps.’
I declined, but Irina and Lesya obliged. Clearly, Anatoly was an emotional man – he got out a neatly compiled dossier of government documents in order to support what he was about to tell us, then asked for my reassurance that it would be helpful – I said: just tell us. And so he told us about the six and a half days that had dominated his entire life, days that began on the evening of 28 April 1986 when he was visited by an army captain and a policeman who informed him that martial law had been declared and he was being conscripted into a special formation bound for Chernobyl. So Anatoly became one of the so-called ‘liquidators’, part of the first batch of 350 who were installed by hastily erected helipads on the banks of the Pripyat river a couple of miles from Reactor No.4. Here, as the reactor continued to belch out contamination, he and his comrades had laboured to fill parachutes full of sand, dolomite and lead ingots, so these could be dropped by helicopters onto the pile to damp it down.
‘We had no tents,’ he said, ‘we slept on the bare ground and worked for sixteen hours a day breathing in the dust whipped up by the helicopters. The first couple of days there was no food – but anyway, our commanders had told us we would not be coming back alive.’ As he spoke, even through the medium of a translator, I could tell that there was no bitterness in Anatoly. True, after he had collapsed on the seventh day, the authorities marked on his discharge card that he had only been exposed to 20 roentgens of radiation – because this was the maximum allowable; true, he had received medical follow-up for only a few years after the disaster; true, he had never worked again, while his pension – especially now that inflation was rampant in Ukraine – was inadequate; true, of the 700 first-wave liquidators that he knew of, only 93 were still alive; true, his best friend, Sasha, had died of cancer only the previous week – yet, when I put it to him that he couldn’t be certain that all these deaths were caused by Chernobyl he readily concurred. And when I raised the spectre of Fukushima, Anatoly shuddered with sympathy then said: ‘If it happened here again and they called me, I would go.’
A chill wind soughs through the symbol of the hated regime. I’m up on top of a sixteen-storey block in Pripyat, hanging on to a scaffolding of rusting steel that holds aloft a massive hammer and sickle. Lesya is on top of this, her camera whirring away as she captures the desolate scene: the pines, spruces and birches infiltrating the streets and squares of the empty city. In the mid-distance crouches the Sarcophagus; a crane’s arm dallies over the building site beside it and an ominous clanking bash resonates rhythmically – over there another, still bigger, concrete container is being built; and so it will have to go on, container containing container, like a monumental matryoshka doll for all the millennia that the ghost of Reactor No.4 continues to haunt us – if, that is, we’re still around to be haunted.
I’m up on top of the block, but naturally, I also remain standing in the stairwell of Kindergarten No.7, transfixed by time – and timing. As my British Airways flight to Kiev took off from Heathrow Airport outside London and headed east, I looked down through pellucid air on a land that over the decades has become legible to me from 20,000 feet. Where, I wondered, would we be crossing the east coast of England? Then I saw it, the stark white dome of the Sizewell B nuclear power plant, which sits on the shore a few miles north of the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh. I had lived near Sizewell for a couple of years in the mid-1990s, and on summer days I would drive there then walk along the beach to swim in the artificial marine micro-climate created by seawater used to cool the reactor. Floating on my back in the choppy waters I would look back, awed by the massive reactor building, its childlike geometry of white dome and iridescent blue plinth.
Fission is the most mysterious of processes, an ineffable moment when a particle is also a wave. The decay of radioactive isotopes is measured in half-life – the average time it takes half the material to decay – because it can only be apprehended statistically, no given particle can ever be fixed or located. No wonder nuclear energy has always inspired such a fierce awe in humans, whose time on this earth is so definitively circumscribed. I had set out for Ukraine hoping for what, an answer to the question of the safety of nuclear power? I hardly think so. The Japanese government may have announced the closure of one plant in the wake of the tsunami, and a slow-down on their nuclear programme, but other countries will do what they do regardless. No, it was always about time for me, holding the small measure of my own life against these vast half-ones. And in this respect, the stairwell of Kindergarten No.7 hadn’t let me down – this room had granted my innermost wish and made time visible. I’m standing there still – and perhaps I always will be.
