There Is No Return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986
Two years later, at four in the morning, my father and I drove into the Zone. The headlamps dissolved picturesquely into the pre-dawn mist, but my father’s driver refused to slow down. It was like being in a road rally. The driver sat on a lead sheet he’d cadged from an x-ray technician. For his balls, he explained when he saw me looking at it. Armored troop carriers with special spotlights were parked here and there working as chemical defense detachments. The soldiers wore black suits and special slippers.
Even through the misty darkness we could see that nature was blooming. The sun rose. We passed pear trees gone to riot and chaotic banks of wildflowers. A crush of lilacs overwhelmed a mile marker.
Mikhail had died after two bone-marrow transplants. He’d lasted three weeks. The attending nurse reported final complaints involving dry mouth, his salivary glands having been destroyed. But I assumed that that was Mikhail being brave, because the condition of his skin had left him in agony for the final two weeks. On some of my visits he couldn’t speak at all, but only kept his eyes and mouth tightly closed, and listened. I was in Georgia at the start-up of a new plant the day he died. He was buried, like the others in his condition, in a lead-lined coffin that was soldered shut.
Petya was by then an invalid on a pension Father and I had arranged for him. He was 25. He found it difficult to get up to his floor, since his building had no elevator, but otherwise, he told me when I occasionally called, he was happy. He had his smokes and his tape player and could lay about all day with no one to nag him, no one to tell him that he had better amount to something.
“It’s a shame,” my father mused on the ride in. “What is?” I asked, wild with rage at the both of us. But he looked at me with disapproval and dropped the subject.
At Pripyat a sawhorse was set up as a checkpoint, manned by an officer and two soldiers. The soldiers had holes poked in their respirators for cigarettes. They’d been expecting my father, and he was whisked off to be shown something even I wasn’t to be allowed to see. His driver stuck his feet out the car’s open window and began snoring, head thrown back. I wandered away from the central square and looked into a building that had been facing away from the reactor. I walked its peeling and echoing hallways and gaped into empty offices at notepads and pens scattered across floors. In one there was a half-unwrapped child’s dress in a gift box, the tulle eaten away by age or insects.
Across the street in front of the school, a tree was growing up from beneath the sidewalk. I climbed through an open window and crossed the classroom without touching anything. I passed through a solarium with an empty swimming pool. A kindergarten with little gas masks in a crate. Much had been looted and tossed about, including a surprising number of toys. At the front of one room over the teacher’s desk someone had written on a red chalkboard, There Is No Return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986.
Self-Improvement
The territory exposed to the radioactivity, we now knew, was larger than 100,000 square kilometers. Many of those who’d worked at Chernobyl were dead. Many were still alive and suffering. The children in particular suffered from exotic ailments, like cancer of the mouth. The Director of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow announced that there hadn’t been one documented case of radiation sickness among civilians. Citizens who applied to the Ministry of Health for some kind of treatment were accused of radiophobia. Radionuclides in large amounts continued to drain into the reservoirs and aquifers in the contaminated territories. It was estimated that humans could begin repopulating the area in about 600 years, give or take 300 years. My father said 300 years. He was an optimist. Nobody knew, even approximately, how many people had died.
The reactor was encased in a sarcophagus, an immense terraced pyramid of concrete and steel, built under the most lethal possible circumstances and, we’d been informed, already disintegrating. Cracks allowed rain to enter and dust to escape. Small animals and birds passed in and out of the facility.
I left the schoolyard and walked a short way down a lane overhung with young pines. Out in the fields, vehicles had been abandoned as far as the eye could see: fire engines, armored personnel carriers, cranes, backhoes, ambulances, cement mixers, trucks. It was the world’s largest junkyard. Most had been scavenged for parts, however radioactive. Each step off the road added 1000 microroentgens to my dosimeter reading.
The week after Mikhail died, I wrote my father a letter. I quoted him other people’s moral outrage. I sent him a clipping decrying the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, corruption and protectionism, narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege that had created the catastrophe. I retyped for him some graffiti I’d seen painted on the side of an abandoned backhoe: that the negligence and incompetence of some should not be concealed by the patriotism of others. I typed it again: the negligence and incompetence of some should not be concealed by the patriotism of others. Whoever had written it was more eloquent than I would ever be. I was writing to myself. I received no better answer from him than I’d received from myself.
Science Requires Victims
My father and I served on the panel charged with appointing the commission set up to investigate the causes of the accident. The roster we put forward was top-heavy with those who designed nuclear plants, neglecting entirely the engineers who operated them. So who was blamed, in the commission’s final report? The operators. Nearly all of whom were dead. One was removed from a hospital and imprisoned.
During his arrest it was said he quoted Petrosyant’s infamous remark from the Moscow press conference the week after the disaster: “Science requires victims.”
“Still feeling like the crusader?” my father had asked the day we turned in our report. It had been the last time I’d seen him. “Why not?” I’d answered. Afterward, I’d gotten drunk for three days. I’d pulled out the original blueprints. I’d sat up nights with the drawings of the control rods, their design flaws like a hidden pattern I could no longer unsee.
But then, such late night sentimentalities always operate more as consolation than insight.
I could still be someone I could live with, I found myself thinking on the third night. All it would take was change.
A red fox, its little jaws agape, sauntered across the road a few meters away. It was said that the animals had lost their skittishness around man, since man was no longer about. There’d been a problem with the dogs left behind going feral and radioactive, until a special detachment of soldiers was bused in to shoot them all.
Around a curve I came upon the highway that had been used for the evacuation. The asphalt was still a powdery blue from the dried decontaminant solution. The sky was sullen and empty. A rail fence ran along the fields to my left. While I stood there, a rumble gathered and approached, and from a stand of poplars a herd of horses burst forth, sweeping by at full gallop. They were followed a few minutes later by a panicked and brindled colt, kicking its legs this way and that, stirring up blue and brown dust.
“Was I ever the brother you hoped I would be?” I asked Mikhail toward the end of my next-to-last visit. His eyes and mouth were squeezed shut. He seemed more repelled by himself than by me, and he nodded. All the way home from the hospital that night, I saw it in my mind’s eye: my brother, nodding.