The minibus slowed as we approached the checkpoint marking the outer perimeter of the Zone. Two uniformed men emerged from a small building, languidly smoking, emanating the peculiar lassitude of armed border guards. Igor reached out and plucked the microphone from its nook in the dashboard.
“Dear comrades,” he said. “We are now approaching the Zone. Please hand over passports for inspection.”
* * *
—
You feel immediately the force of the contradiction. You feel, contradictorily, both drawn in and repelled by this force. Everything you have learned tells you that this is an afflicted place, a place that is hostile and dangerous to life. And yet the dosimeter, which Igor held up for inspection as we stood by the bus on the far side of the border, displayed a level of radiation lower than the one recorded earlier that morning outside McDonald’s in Kiev. Apart from some hot spots, which must be known in order to be avoided, much of the Zone is relatively low in radiation. The outer part of the 30k Zone—the thirty-kilometer radius of abandoned land around the reactor itself—is for the most part perfectly amenable to life.
“Possible to use this part of Zone again humans today,” said Igor.
Someone asked why, in that case, it wasn’t used.
“Ukraine is very big country. Luckily we can spare this land to use as buffer between highly contaminated part of Zone and rest of Ukraine. Belarus not so lucky.”
Immediately you are struck by the strange beauty of the place, the unchecked exuberance of nature finally set free of its crowning achievement, its problem child. The road you walk on is cracked with the purposeful pressure of plant stems from below, the heedless insistence of life breaking forth, continuing on. It is midsummer, and the day is hot, but with the sibilant whisper of a cool breeze in the leaves, and butterflies everywhere, superintending the ruins. It is all quite lovely, in its uncanny way: the world, everywhere, protesting its innocence.
“All the fields are slowly turning into forest,” Igor said. “The condition of nature is returning to what it was before people. Mooses. Wild boar. Wolves. Rare kinds of horses.”
This is the colossal irony of Chernobyl: because it is the site of history’s most devastating ecological catastrophe, this region that was once home to 120,000 Soviet citizens has been for decades now basically void of human life; and because it is basically void of human life, it is effectively the largest nature preserve in all of Europe. To enter the Zone, in this sense, is to have one foot in a prelapsarian paradise and the other in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
Not far past the border, we stopped and walked a little way into a wooded area that had once been a village. We paused in a clearing to observe a large skull, a scattered miscellany of bones.
“Moose,” said Igor, prodding the skull gently with the toe of a trainer. “Skull of moose,” he added, by way of elaboration.
Vika directed our attention toward a low building with a collapsed roof, a fallen tree trunk partially obscuring its entrance. She swept a hand before her in a stagey flourish. “It is a hot day today,” she said. “Who would like to buy an ice cream from me?” She went on to clarify that this had once been a shop, in which it would have been possible to buy ice cream, among other items.
I exchanged a wary glance with Dylan. He was dressed, as ever, for comfort. Black and gray Nike shell suit, box-fresh white sneakers, dark shades: he looked like a Mafia capo who had by way of some implausible comic contrivance found himself touring the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in a minibus.
Thirty-one years is a long time, of course, but it was still impressive how comprehensively nature had seized control of the place in that time. In these ruins, it was no easier to imagine people standing around in jeans and sneakers eating ice cream than it was, in the blasted avenues of Pompeii, to imagine people in togas eating olives. It was astonishing to behold how quickly we humans became irrelevant to the business of nature.
Igor pointed out the home of a woman he had often taken his tourists to visit. She had returned in 1988, two years after the accident. Like most of the 140 or so permanent residents of the Zone, known to Ukrainians as samoseli (self settlers), she was nearing old age by the time of the evacuation and government resettlement and found it difficult to adjust to life outside of the only home she had ever known. It was December of last year, and it was cold, and when he saw no smoke coming from the roof of her cottage, Igor called her name—“Rosalia! Rosalia!”—and heard no reply. He found her dead in her cottage. She was eighty-eight years old, the last remaining resident of her village.
* * *
—
Strictly speaking, everything here is tightly controlled. Strictly speaking, visitors are forbidden from entering any of the buildings in the abandoned city of Pripyat—all of which are in variously advanced states of decay and structural peril, many clearly ready to collapse at any moment. Igor and Vika’s employer could in theory lose its license to enter the Zone if its guides were caught taking tourists into buildings. It had been known to happen, said Igor, that guides had had their permits revoked. But the company found itself in something of a double bind in this regard, he explained, on account of the proliferation in recent years of rival outfits offering trips to the Zone. If they didn’t take customers into the buildings—up the stairways to the rooftops, into the former homes and workplaces and schoolrooms of the citizens of Pripyat—some other tour company would, and what people wanted more than anything in visiting Pripyat was to enter the intimate spaces of an abandoned world.
One of the Swedish men who accounted for about a third of the group’s number asked whether any visitors to Pripyat had been seriously injured or killed while exploring the abandoned buildings.
“Not yet,” said Igor, a reply more ominous than he may have intended.
He went on to clarify that the fate of the small but thriving tourism business hung in the balance and depended, by general consensus, on the nationality of the first person to be injured or killed on a tour. If a Ukrainian died while exploring one of the buildings, he said, fine, no problem, business as usual. If a European, then the police would have to immediately clamp down on tour guides bringing people into buildings. But the worst-case scenario was, of course, an American getting killed or seriously injured. That, he said, would mean an immediate cessation of the whole enterprise.
“American gets hurt,” he said, “no more tours in Zone. Finished.”
Tourism to Chernobyl had expanded rapidly over the last decade or so—according to Igor, there were thirty-six thousand visitors in 2016—boosted by popular entertainments using Pripyat as a postapocalyptic verité setting. Films like Chernobyl Diaries and A Good Day to Die Hard, television shows like the History Channel’s Life After People (an entire series devoted to the fetishistic representation of nature’s reclamation of the built environment after the disappearance of the human species) and video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.