In the closing stretch of the Bible, in the Revelation, appear these lines: “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.” Wormwood is a woody, bitter-tasting shrub that is used throughout the Bible to mean a curse, the wrath of a vengeful God. In Ukrainian, and in other Slavonic languages, the word for wormwood is chernobyl. (The plant grows in lavish abundance along the banks of the River Pripyat.)
This matter of linguistic curiosity is frequently raised in commentaries on the accident, its apocalyptic resonances. In one of the long monologues recorded by Alexievich in Chernobyl Prayer, the speaker quotes the lines from the Revelation and then says this: “I’m trying to fathom that prophecy. Everything has been predicted, it’s all written in the holy books, but we don’t know how to read.”
Laborers in construction hats ambled in and out of the plant. It was lunchtime. The cleanup was ongoing. This was a place of work, an ordinary place. But it was a kind of holy place, too, a place where all of time had collapsed into a single physical point. The Elephant’s Foot would be here always. It would remain here after the death of everything else, an eternal monument to our civilization. After the collapse of every other structure, after every good and beautiful thing had been lost and forgotten, its silent malice would still be throbbing in the ground like a cancer, spreading its bitterness through the risen waters.
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Before returning to Kiev, we made a final stop at the Reactor 5 cooling tower, a lofty abyss of concrete that had been nearing completion at the time of the accident and had lain abandoned ever since, both construction site and ruin. Igor and Vika led the way through tall grass, and across a long footbridge whose wooden slats had rotted away so completely in places that we had to cling to railings and tiptoe along rusted metal sidings.
“Welcome to Indiana Jones part of tour,” said Igor. Neither the joke itself nor the halfhearted titters it received seemed to give him any pleasure whatsoever. It was a part of the job, like any other: he walked across the rotted footbridge; he delivered the Indiana Jones line; he proceeded to what was next.
Once inside, we wandered the interior, mutely assimilating the immensity of the structure. The tower ascended some five hundred feet into the air, to a vast opening that encircled the sky. In puckish demonstration of the cooling tower’s dimensions, Igor selected a rock from the ground and pitched it with impressive accuracy and force at a large iron pipe that ran across the tower’s interior, and the clang reverberated in what seemed an endless self-perpetuating loop. Somewhere up in the lofty reaches a crow delivered itself of a cracked screech, and this sound echoed lengthily in its turn.
In the Old Testament, some of God’s more memorable threats to various insubordinates, various enemies of his people, involve ruined cities as the terrain of roosting birds. In the Book of Jeremiah, He declares that the city of Hazor, in the wake of its destruction by Babylon, will become “a haunt for jackals, a desolation forever.” And then there is the great blood-fevered edict of Isaiah 34, where it is foretold that the Lord’s righteous sword will descend on the city of Edom—her streams turned into pitch, her dust to blazing sulfur, her land lying desolate from generation to generation—and that this city, too, will become “a haunt for jackals, a home for owls.” They will possess it forever, God says, and dwell there from generation to generation.
The more adventurous of us clambered up the iron beams of the scaffolding in search of more lofty positions from which to photograph the scene. I was not among them. As was my custom, I sought the lower ground, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, having forgotten for a moment the obvious danger of doing so. There was a concrete wall ahead of me, on which was painted a monochrome mural depicting a surgeon in scrubs and mask, hands pressed to his face, eyes staring ahead in deep weariness and horror. This image I recognized as a photograph by Igor Kostin, a press photographer known for his documentation of the disaster and its aftermath. It was an incongruous enough thing, this work of street art inside the abandoned shell of the tower, but it also struck me as trite and banal, as somehow a violation of the integrity of the ruin. It subtracted from the pitiless poetry of the place.
I looked up. Hundreds of feet overhead, two birds were gliding in opposing spirals around the inner circumference of the tower, kestrels I thought, drifting upward on unseen currents toward the vast disk of sky, impossibly deep and blue. I sat there watching them a long time, circling and circling inside the great cone of the tower. I remembered Alladale, the death-thrill of the fighter jet shrieking through the valley toward me, the blank brutality of technology in a wild solitude. These birds of prey, drifting and mysterious, seemed an equal and opposite revelation, a fleeting disclosure of some hidden code or meaning.
This place is a message. A haunt of jackals, and a desolation forever.
I laughed, thinking of the Yeatsian resonances of the scene, the millenarian mysticism: the tower, the falcons, the widening gyres. But there was in truth nothing apocalyptic about what I was seeing, no blood-dimmed tide. It was an aftermath, a calm restored.
These birds, I thought, could have known nothing about this place. The Zone did not exist for them. Or rather, they knew it intimately and absolutely, but their understanding had nothing in common with ours. This cooling tower, unthinkable monument that it was to the subjugation of nature, was not distinguished from the trees, the mountains, the other lonely structures on the land. There was no division between human and nonhuman for these spiraling ghosts of the sky. There was only nature. Only the world remained, and the things that were in it.
8
THE REDNESS OF THE MAP
Our daughter was born into a drought. The weather all that year had been strange, volatile, careening between opposing extremes.
Six weeks before her due date, the snow lay deeper over Dublin than it had before in the years of my lifetime, and the airports were shut, and the streets were becalmed, and the shops had run out of sliced bread, and across the city eight men—driven perhaps by panic, but more likely the wild festive euphoria of an extreme weather event—had stolen a digger from a construction site and used it to smash in the back wall of a supermarket in the night. Briefly but memorably, the army was called in. It was funny, in that it confirmed Ireland’s sense of itself as a place never far from lawlessness, and comically ill-equipped to deal with anything more extreme than drizzle, but it also suggested how much less funny things might get if the weather stayed weird much longer.
The government issued a Status Red weather warning, advising that people stay indoors unless absolutely necessary. It was a reminder of how fragile everything was, how flimsy the supply chains, how a few days of snow could bring everything to a stop.