We rounded the top of the stairs, and as I set off down a corridor after Igor, I realized that those images of technological disaster—of explosions, mutations—had haunted my childhood, and that I had arrived at the source of a catastrophe much larger than Chernobyl itself, or any of its vague immensity of effects. Panic. Huge disaster. I remembered a line from the French philosopher Paul Virilio—“The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”—which seemed to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe. And it occurred to me that Pripyat was a graveyard of progress, the final resting place of the future.
In a large upstairs classroom, a dozen or so toddler-size chairs were arranged in a circle, and on each was perched a rotting doll or distempered teddy bear. The visual effect was eerie enough, but what was properly unsettling was the realization that this scene had been carefully arranged by a visitor, probably quite recently, precisely in order for it to be photographed. And this went to the heart of what I found so profoundly creepy about the whole enterprise of catastrophe tourism, an enterprise in which I myself was just as implicated as anyone else who was standing here in this former classroom, feeling the warm breeze stirring the air through the empty window frames. What got to me about Pripyat was not its desolation, nor even the ever-present potential for radioactive toxicity, but rather the sense of the place as fitting neatly into a preexisting aesthetic framework, a sense that in merely being here we were partaking of, were in fact in pursuit of, a kind of apocalyptic kitsch. We were, in other words, consuming a product here. On some level I had understood this all along, but what unsettled me was the failure to hide this uncomfortable fact, the failure even to try. I’d paid two hundred quid for this tour, inclusive of meals and accommodation and transport.
I wondered whether Igor and Vika held us in contempt, us western Europeans and Australians and North Americans who had forked over a fee roughly equivalent to Ukraine’s average monthly wage in order to be guided around this discontinued world, to feel the transgressive thrill of our own daring in coming here. If it were me in their position, I knew that contempt is exactly what I would have felt. The fact was that I didn’t even need to leave my own position in order to hold myself in contempt, or anyone else.
“How often do you come here?” I asked Igor.
“Seven days a week, usually,” he said. He had a strange way of avoiding eye contact, of looking not directly at you but at a slight angle, as though you were in fact beside yourself. “Seven days a week, eight years.”
“How has that affected you?” I asked.
“I have three children. No mutants.”
“I don’t mean the radiation so much as just the place. I mean, all this must have an impact,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward my own head, indicating matters broadly psychological.
“I don’t see my wife,” he said. “My family. I get up at five-thirty a.m., they are asleep. I get home late night, already they are asleep again. I am a slave, just like in Soviet Union time. But now I am a slave to money.”
I nodded shrewdly, in a sing-it-sister kind of way, though I was not myself especially a slave to money.
“You know Dr. Alban? The rapper? It’s like he says in his song ‘It’s My Life.’ ”
I must have looked confused, because Igor clarified: “It’s my life. This.”
Just then, one of the Swedes emerged from a smaller classroom, a lumbering man in middle age, heavily weighted with a large backpack and a great deal of expensive-looking photographic equipment.
“Did you say Dr. Alban?”
“Dr. Alban, yes,” agreed Igor.
“Swedish!” said the Swede, with a certain prideful complacency. “From Sweden.”
“Really?” said Igor.
“He is a dentist, you know,” said the Swede. “In Sweden, he is in fact a dentist.”
“Really?” I said. Granted, I knew very little about Dr. Alban, of the details of his biography either before or after his 1992 pan-European smash hit “It’s My Life,” but this fact of his being a qualified dentist seemed strongly counterintuitive. “Does he still practice?”
“What?” said the Swede, who was no longer chuckling.
“Does he still practice dentistry, I mean?”
The Swede shook his head in bewilderment, looking at me as if I had just said something completely insane, as if it was I who had just invoked the half-forgotten specter of Dr. Alban and started asking unprovoked whether he practiced dentistry.
“I have no idea,” he said, and went back into the classroom he’d emerged from, gazing down at his camera settings.
I went with Igor and Vika into another classroom, where we were followed by the wild dog Vika had fed earlier. The dog did a quick circuit of the room, sniffed perfunctorily at a papier-mâché doll, an upturned chair, some torn copybook pages, then settled himself down beside Vika. Igor opened a cupboard and removed a stack of paintings, spread them out on a table flaked with aquamarine paint. The pictures were beautifully childish things, heartbreakingly vivid renderings of butterflies, grinning suns, fish, chickens, dinosaurs, a piglet in a little blue dress. They were expressions of love toward the world, toward nature, made with such obvious joy and care that I felt myself getting emotional looking at them. I could all of a sudden see the children at their desks, their tongues protruding in concentration, their teachers bending over to offer encouragement and praise, and I could smell the paper, the paint, the glue.
I picked up a painting of a dinosaur, and I was surprised by sadness not at the unthinkable dimensions of the catastrophe itself, but at the thought that the child responsible for this picture had never been able to take it home to show his parents, had had to leave it behind just as he had had to leave behind his school, his home, his city, his poisoned world. And I became conscious then of the strangeness of my being here, the wrongness of myself as a figure in this scene: a man from outside, from the postapocalyptic future, holding this simple and beautiful picture in his hand and looking at it as an artifact of a collapsed civilization. This, I now understood, was the deeper contradiction of my presence in the Zone: my discomfort in being here had less to do with the risk of contamination than with the sense of myself as the contaminant.
* * *
—
Czesław Miłosz’s poem “A Song on the End of the World” conjures a last day that is just like any other, where nature continues about its business, and where “those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps / Do not believe it is happening now.” The poem closes with a white-haired old man repeating the following lines as he harvests tomatoes in his field: “There will be no other end of the world, / There will be no other end of the world.”