The poem was written in 1944, in occupied Warsaw. Nowhere in it does Miłosz mention or even allude to Auschwitz, where as he wrote, just a couple of hundred miles away the end of the world had been under way for some time. But it’s impossible to read the poem now without thinking of that localized apocalypse. The fact that the world is continuing on as always—that the sun is shining, and the bees circling the clover, and the tomatoes ripe in the fields—doesn’t mean it hasn’t already come to an end.
The image of Miłosz’s white-haired old man, his prophet who is not a prophet, came to me when we were taken to meet Ivan Ivanovich Semeniuk, a farmer in his early eighties who was one of the last remaining returnees to the Zone. He was one of two remaining inhabitants of the village of Paryshev, which had once been home to about six hundred people. (The other was a cheerful and exceptionally tiny old lady named Darya. Darya lived a short walk across the fields with a small brown terrier.) Ivan Ivanovich carried for some reason an ear of corn in his hand the entire time we were with him, and wore a khaki army jacket and loose-fitting lavender running pants, and though he walked with the aid of a cane he seemed in excellent shape for a man of his age, let alone a man of his age who had lived for the last three decades in a zone of nuclear alienation. He told us, via the medium of Vika’s halting simultaneous translation, that when he and his family were evacuated six days after the accident, they were informed, like everyone else in what would become the Exclusion Zone, that they would be returning within a few days, and so they took almost nothing with them, a few bags of potatoes. All their animals were taken away and slaughtered, buried in the ground.
(There was no end to the things that were buried by the liquidators in the days and months and years after the accident: they bulldozed schools and houses, buried the rubble of entire towns, and they buried whole forests, sawing up trees and packing the logs in plastic and putting them deep in the ground, and they buried the earth itself, removing the contaminated layer of soil and burying that, and they buried the bodies of the first responders—men exposed to such severe doses of radiation that they died with blisters on their hearts—in lead coffins welded shut to minimize radioactive leak from the corpses.)
In 1987, after about a year and a half living elsewhere in Ukraine, Ivan brought his family back to their village and this home he had built with his own hands from wood and corrugated iron. Returning was not, strictly speaking, legal, but the government tolerated the two thousand people who decided they would rather risk the consequences of returning to the only land they’d ever known than live healthy but miserable lives in the government-provided apartments in inner-city Kiev. Many of those who were resettled after the accident were isolated and shunned by their new urban neighbors, who were wary of contamination through the physical proximity of these Chernobyl people.
After his return, Ivan Ivanovich worked for a few years as a guard at the power plant, and then as a road builder, before retiring to live off the land with his wife, Maria. She had died the previous year, and he now lived alone, though he had a son in Kiev who visited him often. Ivan Ivanovich grew his own vegetables, gathered mushrooms and berries from the forest around his house, kept chickens and a pig, and he burned radioactive wood in his stove to keep warm, and if this life in the Zone had caused him any serious harm, he had failed to notice it. He observed with a kind of rueful satisfaction that he had outlived many evacuees of his age who had declined to return to the Zone.
“You’re living your life,” says one of the anonymous interviewees in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer.
An ordinary fellow. A little man. Just like everyone else around you—going to work, coming home from work. On an average salary. Once a year, you go on holiday. You’ve got a wife, children. A normal sort of guy. And then, just like that, you’ve turned into a Chernobyl person. A curiosity! Some person that everyone shows interest in, but nobody knows much about. You want to be the same as anyone else, but it’s no longer possible. You can’t do it, there’s no going back to the old world. People look at you through different eyes […] In the beginning, we all turned into some kind of rare exhibits. Just the word Chernobyl still acts like an alarm. They all turn their heads to look at you. “Oh, from that place!” That’s what it felt like in the first days. We lost not just a town but a whole life.
We followed Ivan Ivanovich around his little property in the manner of visiting dignitaries, respectfully taking note of his kitchen garden and his grapevines and the ancient orange Lada (“Soviet Porsche!” announced Vika) that sat rusting in his garage, and which he assured us would still be absolutely roadworthy had he anywhere to go. We passed a low, shack-like construction made of rusting scrap metal and wood, insulated with black plastic sheeting, referred to by Igor as Ivan Ivanovich’s “moonshine reactor,” the means by which he was able to keep himself in booze. There was much photography, and many comradely selfies were taken with our smiling host, and it was clear to me that we as a group were at least as strange and remarkable, at least as worthy of anthropological consideration, as this elderly farmer and the dwindling postapocalyptic peasantry to which he belonged.
* * *
—
The tour company had put us up in the town of Chernobyl itself, in a place called Hotel 10—a name so blankly utilitarian that it sounded chic. Hotel 10 was in reality no more chic than you would expect a hotel in Chernobyl to be, and arguably even less so. It looked like, and essentially was, a gigantic two-story shipping container. Its exterior walls and roof were corrugated iron. Internally it seemed to be constructed entirely from drywall, and it smelled faintly of creosote throughout, and the long corridor sloped at a nauseating angle on its final descent toward the room Dylan and I were sharing on the ground floor.
The Ukrainian government imposes a strict 8:00 p.m. curfew in the Zone, and so after a dinner of borscht, bread, and unspecified meats, there was nothing to do but drink, and so we drank. We drank an absurdly overpriced local beer called Chernobyl, which the label assured us was brewed outside the Zone, using nonlocal wheat and water, specifically for consumption inside the Zone itself—a business model that Dylan rightly condemned as needlessly self-limiting. (The hotel had run out of all other beers; it was either this stuff or nothing at all, and it was decided that Chernobyl, despite its comparatively exorbitant price point, was clearly preferable to nothing at all.)
We all turned in early that night. Even if we’d wanted to walk the empty streets of the town after dark, we’d have been breaking the law in doing so, and possibly jeopardizing the tour company’s license to bring tourists to the Zone. Unable to sleep, I took out the copy of Chernobyl Prayer I’d brought with me. As I reached the closing pages, after dozens of monologues about the loss and displacement and terror endured by the people of Chernobyl, I was unsettled to encounter an image of myself. The book’s coda was a composite of 2005 newspaper clippings about the news that a Kiev tour company was beginning to offer people the chance to visit the Exclusion Zone.