Dylan zipped his tracksuit top up swiftly and decisively—a gesture that subtly conveyed that he was just about ready to stop contemplating the apocalyptic resonances of the empty swimming pool and move on to the next thing.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a lot to take in.”
* * *
—
We were in the dank foyer of a high-rise apartment building. One of the Swedes, a guy in his late thirties who worked as a school bus driver and seemed notably less enthusiastic about this jaunt than his friends, was standing by a stairwell gazing down at a pile of broken ceiling tiles. His expression was one of mild and obscurely humorous alarm.
“Asbestos,” he said. “This whole place is absolutely full of asbestos. All these buildings.”
I wasn’t all that sure what the deal was with asbestos. I knew only that it was not good. I said, “That stuff is highly flammable, right?”
“No,” said the bus driver. “The exact opposite, in fact. It’s a flame retardant material. But if you breathe in the dust from it, there are all these little microscopic fibers that get embedded in your lungs and you can never get rid of them, and you die horribly of lung cancer.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I knew it was something.”
Dylan stepped back from the pile of broken tiles and politely petitioned the attention of Igor.
“Should we be worried about asbestos at all, Igor?”
“If you don’t breathe it, no problem,” said Igor, with a shrug of aggressive intricacy and duration.
“Okay, but are you concerned about maybe breathing it without necessarily meaning to?”
“Me? No. Many Europeans and Americans, yes, they are concerned. They are more concerned about asbestos than radiation.” At this apparent absurdity Igor chuckled and shook his head.
“But not you,” said Dylan.
“Not me,” said Igor, and set off up a stairway that looked in its own right to be a grave hazard to public health. Dylan gazed at him as he went, and shook his head in quiet dismay.
“It’ll be fine,” I said, with no conviction whatsoever.
* * *
—
Outside in the street, a small wild dog approached us with disarming deference. Vika opened up her handbag and removed a squat pinkish tube, a snack from the lower reaches of the pork-product market, and presented it to the dog, who received it with patience and good grace.
There was a dark flash of movement on the periphery of my field of vision, a rustle of dry leaves. I turned and saw the business end of a muscular black snake as it emerged from beneath a rusted slide and plunged headlong for the undergrowth.
“Viper,” said Igor, nodding in the direction of the fugitive snake. He pronounced it “wiper.”
We were standing at the entrance to one of Pripyat’s many schools, a large tile-fronted building on the side of which was a beautiful mosaic of an anthropomorphic sun gazing down at a little girl. Dylan was rightly dubious as to the wisdom of entering a building in such an advanced state of dilapidation. Turning to Igor, he remarked that they must have been constructed hastily and poorly in the first place.
“No,” Igor replied, briskly brushing an insect off the shoulder of his camouflage jacket. “This is future for all buildings.”
I never once saw him smile, but his face at rest seemed expressive of a stern and abstruse Slavic irony, and there was undeniably a faint glow of merriment in his bulging eyes. He said that it was best that we go through the building quickly, because it was in particularly poor shape and might collapse at any moment. Dylan suggested that in that case he might sit this one out, but Igor countered that he would simply not allow it, and in a moment of what struck me as wildly uncharacteristic submissiveness, Dylan shrugged and trooped in with the rest of us. Although Igor didn’t offer any explicit rationale for this sudden imposition of authoritarianism, our assumption was that it was about minimizing the risk of people getting separated from the group, wandering around without Geiger counters, and potentially straying into invisible pockets of high radioactivity.
The school’s foyer was carpeted with thousands of textbooks and copybooks, a sprawling detritus of the written word. It felt somehow obscene to walk on these pages, but there was no way to avoid it if you wanted to move forward. Every building in Pripyat had long ago been looted by so-called stalkers—people, usually teenagers and young men, who entered the Zone illegally in order to explore and hunt for valuables and souvenirs—and the chaos of strewn objects we were met with inside these places was the result not of the disaster itself, but of its aftermath.
In Pripyat, you were always stepping on something that had once meant something to a person long gone. Igor bent down to pick up a colorfully illustrated storybook from the ground, and flipped through its desiccated pages.
“Propaganda book,” he said, with a moue of mild distaste, and dropped it gently again at his feet. “In Soviet Union, everything was propaganda. All the time, propaganda.”
He picked up another book, a thin monochrome text, and flipped through some pages, before showing me a section illustrated with a drawing of protesting industrial workers, bent and immiserated beneath the weight of exploitation. “This is lesson of Karl Marx,” he said. “Das Kapital.”
I asked him what he himself remembered of the disaster, and he answered that there was basically nothing to remember. Though he was five years older than me, he said that I would likely have a clearer memory of the accident and its aftermath, because in Soviet Ukraine little information was made public about the scale of the catastrophe. “In Europe? Panic. Huge disaster. In Ukraine? No problem.”
Climbing the staircase, whose railings had long since been removed or rotted away, I trailed a hand against a wall to steady myself and felt the splintering paintwork beneath my fingertips. I was six when the disaster happened—young enough, I suppose, to have been protected by my parents from the news and its implications. What did I recall of the time? Weird births, human bodies distorted beyond nature, ballooned skulls, clawed and misshapen limbs: images not of the disaster itself but of its long and desolate and uncanny aftermath. I remembered a feeling of fascinated horror, which was bound up in my mind with communism and democracy and the quarrel I only understood as the struggle between good and evil, and with the idea of nuclear war, and with other catastrophes of the time, too, the sense of a miscarried future. As I continued up the stairs, a memory came to me of a country road late at night, of my mother helping me up onto the hood of our orange Ford Fiesta, directing my attention toward a point of light arcing swiftly across the clear night sky, and of her telling me that it was an American space shuttle called Challenger, orbiting the planet. That memory was linked in my mind with a later memory, of watching television news footage of that same shuttle exploding into pure white vapor over the ocean. The vision of the sudden Y-shaped divergence of the contrails, spiraling again toward each other as the exploded remains of the shuttle fell to the sea, a debris of technology and death, eerily striking against the deep blue sky. That moment was for me what the moon landing was for my parents and their generation: an image in which the future itself was fixed.