Granta 125: After the War (22 page)

In the first days after the accident, the forest absorbed huge quantities of radiation, its canopy turning a vivid red as it died. 135,000 people were evacuated, as liquidators struggled to contain the damaged reactor before a two-ton blob of radioactive lava nicknamed the ‘elephant’s foot’ melted its way through the base of the building into the earth. Once the immediate danger was averted, at terrible cost to the liquidators, helicopters sprayed polymer film across the land to capture radioactive particles, then crews scooped up the topsoil. Pits were dug. The red forest was bulldozed into them. They buried the topsoil. They buried the most contaminated villages. An estimated 600,000 people, mostly soldiers, were involved in the clean-up operation. Right by Reactor 4 is a memorial to the liquidators, in the form of a pair of enveloping hands, protecting the power plant as an alarm bell sounds in the heavens. We stand beside it to take photographs, with the reactor in the background. A girl clasps her boyfriend, kicking out a coquettish leg. The two Swedish hipsters take it in turns to hold up their dosimeter, like a talisman.

‘Now,’ says the tour guide, ‘we will have lunch.’ And so we pass through radiation detectors into a canteen, where beefy ladies serve us a meal of cheese pastries and boiled vegetables. In answer to the unspoken question, she reassures us that all the ingredients have been brought in from outside.

A
few miles further into the Zone, we stop at a ruined village. A main street; a post office; empty vodka bottles lying on the floor of what was probably a shop. The forest is beginning to encroach on the local palace of culture, its facade choked by young birch trees.
The vestibule is decorated with reliefs of idealized couples whose geometrically decorated bodies suggest both peasant fabrics and industrial structures, men and women made of the same substance as the power plant where they worked. We pick our way across broken floorboards into a hall, with a stage at the far end. Above it, a permanent surtitle for weddings and concerts, is the slogan
Long Live Communism – Radiant Future of Mankind
.

If the Zone abounds in ironies, it is because it offers the spectacle of a vanished political order, organized around a vanished vision of the future. All that was solid about the civic life of this community has melted into air; all that was holy has been profaned, and the tourist can tell himself that – at least for as long as the tour lasts – he is facing with sober senses his real conditions of life and relations with his kind. He is an ideological survivor.

On the outskirts of Pripyat, a concrete sign in a distinctive Soviet space-age font gives the name and the date of its foundation – 1970. Fifty thousand people used to live in this town built to house Chernobyl workers. It was abandoned in the space of a couple of hours, the residents forbidden to take their possessions, which lie mouldering in their empty apartments.

Lenin Boulevard, once a broad avenue flanked by high-rise housing, is now almost blocked by trees. Only a narrow path, just wide enough for a vehicle, remains passable. The town centre is an open square, with all the facilities necessary for life under Communism – a supermarket, a restaurant, government offices, the ‘Energetik’ cultural centre. The town plan (based on Le Corbusier’s notion of the ‘ville radieuse’) is yet another Zone irony, its high modernist rationality a relic of an era when the idea of top-down central planning appeared optimistic, liberating.

Strange conjunctions in the wreckage: a sewing machine, a hatstand and a record player; a high board poised over an empty swimming pool. Walter Benjamin: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.’ A ruin always tells some story about impermanence and decay, but Pripyat is also
where Soviet futurism came to die. Its modernity is our antiquity: the unachieved future of the perfect worker citizen coexists with the ghost of a greater disaster, the virtual future in which the containment efforts were unsuccessful, and a huge area of Europe was rendered uninhabitable for thousands of years.

As the guide walks us to the amusement park, a minivan drives up and disgorges a group of tourists, who are sporting a motley collection of protective gear – builders’ dust masks, disposable suits, gaiters, goggles, overshoes made of plastic bags. We walk into the funfair together. They pose for each other in front of the rusting dodgem cars against the backdrop of the rusty big wheel. Like us they are quiet. The silence is only broken by the relentless beeping of dosimeters.

I watch two guys in white, with decorators’ dust masks and plastic bags tied round their shoes. They take pictures, exploring the alien planet with their technological devices,
detecting
, bravely enduring an environment hostile to human life. Yet the planet looks exactly like this planet. It looks like a town, with a supermarket and an amusement park and a sports centre and a high school. It looks like this planet, but it isn’t.

This, of course, is the premise of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker
. Made in 1979, seven years before the explosion at Reactor 4, it is an adaptation of
Roadside Picnic
, a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The novel describes the aftermath of an event in which unknown and unseen alien visitors left behind them areas of contamination, where bizarre phenomena occur and artefacts can be found. Tarkovsky strips this story down to a metaphysical minimum, a tale of three men, Stalker, Writer and Professor, who trespass into a Zone, in search of a room where wishes will be granted. The black and white of an industrial town gives way, in a moment of incredible beauty, to the colour of the Zone, a pastoral landscape through which the Stalker leads his clients. In the Zone the danger is invisible, inaudible; it has no taste or scent.

S
.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
is a first-person shooter game published by a Ukrainian company in 2007. It has a storyline in which the player assumes the identity of an amnesiac stalker, scavenging and trafficking in artefacts in a near-future version of the Zone. There’s a lot of shooting at boxes to find guns, a lot of running around killing mutants. Drinking a bottle of vodka wards off radiation sickness. It’s a ‘sandbox’ game – you have a great deal of freedom to roam as you wish, instead of being funnelled through a predefined maze. Pripyat town, the reactor complex and other features of the real-world Zone of Alienation are faithfully reproduced.

The game is a weird collision between Tarkovsky and zombie culture. In the grand teenage-boy tradition of angst-ridden psychopaths trudging through a post-apocalyptic landscape with only their enormous weapons for company, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for ‘Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, Robbers’. Trailers cut archive film of Soviet-era plant operators against a truck full of mutant corpses blowing up. The game was enough of a success for the company to release two sequels,
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
and
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
. Online, fans are posting screenshots, Chernobyl-related art and photos taken in the real Zone. They also post pictures of themselves cosplaying in gas masks and quasi-military ‘stalker gear’. At the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shop, the ‘long-awaited’ women’s stalker pants have now sold out. A Russian-language book series now runs to over fifty titles, racking up sales of five million copies. On the official web page you can see a photo of the game designers, in khaki overalls and face masks, outside Reactor 4.

A recent American horror film,
Chernobyl Diaries
, also mines the Zone for thrills, bolting radiation-mutation onto that other genre staple, ‘college students on a road trip’. After some faux home-movie larking about in front of bits of old Europe, its squad of young Americans abroad wind up in Kiev, where (what could go wrong?) they decide to take a trip to the Zone in a camo-painted minibus driven by a man in a tracksuit. One by one they are picked off by
packs of wild dogs and zombies or driven mad by the ghost of a little girl, before the last survivor is incarcerated by government scientists, part of a sinister cover-up.

S
ome people detect a terrible purification in what has happened here.
Pharmakon
, both poison and cure. Against James Lovelock, whose intellectual project is founded on the claim that the world self-heals or self-corrects, other biologists argue that the wolves and boar and birds that have begun to populate the new wilderness of the Zone are lured into this accidental sanctuary as if into a radioactive trap. Is the Zone healing itself? What would it mean if it is? What if it can’t? Or could this wound on the earth have meaning in another way, as the herald of some future state of grace?

We are pointing our cameras up at a twenty-foot-high metal statue of an angel blowing a trumpet, the focal point of the government-run Wormwood Star Memorial Complex, which opened inside the Zone in 2011. President Yanukovych of Ukraine took President Medvedev of Russia to cut the ribbon. The angel stands in what was once a cinema parking lot and is now a grassy field, with a conceptual display combining an abstract mural with an avenue of signs bearing the names of vanished villages and a couple of rather forlorn racks of empty postboxes, each about the size of a filing cabinet and wrapped in a yellow ribbon. The complex, the work of a ‘People’s Artist of Ukraine and laureate of the T. Shevchenko State Prize’, seems typical of a local taste for heavy symbolism. The Chernobyl Museum in Kiev has displays of winter trees growing up through broken cradles, soft toys in an ark and radiation-control equipment wrapped in
the national flag. A new monument to the victims of Stalin’s man-made famine in the thirties takes the form of a hundred-foot candle surrounded by crosses; the day I visited, speakers were playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor on a continuous loop.

In post-Soviet Ukraine, the state and the omnipresent Orthodox Church are taking control of the memory of the disaster, turning the Zone into a site of millennial prophecy. Chernobyl, says the tour guide, means ‘wormwood’, and references the Bible. Later, when I look up Revelations 8:10 –11, the connection becomes clearer:
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; / And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter
.

With the fall of the wormwood star, the boundary between heaven and earth has been breached. The land has been contaminated by the profane splitting of the atom, but the people are being taught not to dwell on past mistakes. Instead they will prepare for the second coming.