As I step into the arrivals lounge, the light seems cigarette stained, a wash of ochres and beiges. The space is shallow, it’s no more than five metres to the doors. A queue trails in front of the currency exchange. Next to it is a café with dark plastic tables. By the cash register, Russian salads are displayed on white styrofoam dishes covered in cling wrap. The hanging smell of grease lines my throat.
I meet our group and we walk to the car park where Alexi, our driver, leans against a weary German-made minibus, his face bone pale. Nodding in greeting, he opens the back doors and we sling our bags inside, then settle into our seats for the six-hour drive to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Conversation is stuttered but friendly. Two of us have arrived from the USA, two from Ireland. We are mind-weary, the drag of skipped time zones slurring our thoughts. We wipe condensation from the windows; the glass, with the passing hours, gathers layers of handprints.
The countryside is too dark to be unfamiliar. Occasionally I can catch the gleam of silver birches. Ladas and UAZ vans speed by with regularity, classic snub-nosed Soviet vehicles at home in their natural habitat.
A bottle of whiskey is unscrewed. Tullamore Dew, chosen in my honour, distilled in the town of my childhood, back there in the boglands of Ireland. Two drinks in, I turn to the window once more and a line of Pasternak is dislodged in my memory.
“The running birches chasing leaden instants.”[2]
In Pripyat we step into apartment blocks, names still on the grids of postboxes in the lobbies. In the stairwells, the handrails have been sheared away, sold for scrap. The same is true of each apartment. All possessions have been looted, their radioactive contents sold off to unwitting buyers in the markets of who knows what towns or cities. Only some skeletal remains of furniture are left. Some chipboard shelving units. The base of a bed.
The apartments are differentiated only by wallpaper. Painted walls are uniformly coloured in beige, magnolia, or sky blue.
I slide open a door to a balcony and stare down at the communal yard, which houses a small climbing frame and a slide. Next to them, a copse of thin trees still holds its landscaped shape. Scenes from the evacuation play themselves out below me. My mind skips forward and back, without guidance, time frames overlapping. What rises is a piece of testimony I’ve come across somewhere; families gathering on these balconies the night after the explosion to gaze at the magenta sky, an evening portrayed in wistful tones. A week later, back in my own apartment, I take a book from my shelf and listen to Nadezhda Vygovskaya recall the day her life changed irrevocably:
I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation. It was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have them went to their friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, “Look! Remember!” And these were people who worked at the reactor—engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn’t say that it had no smell—it wasn’t a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn’t the smell of the earth. My throat tickled, and my eyes watered.
…In the morning I woke up and looked around and I remember feeling—this isn’t something I made up later, I thought it right then—something isn’t right, something has changed forever. At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks…
All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they’d take us away for three days, wash everything, check things out. The kids were told to take their school books. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos in his briefcase. The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad.[3]
Later, Nadezhda tells us that their future wasted little time in making itself apparent. “In Kiev,” she says, “many had heart attacks and strokes, right there at the train station, on the buses.”[4]
In the spring of 1914, on the eve of the First World War, H. G. Wells published The World Set Free. The novel imagined a bomb made from atomic energy, a device that was so potent it would produce a continual radioactive discharge into the atmosphere, long after the initial blast had stilled.
In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to abandon around them.[5]
Wells’s paragraph now reads as a remarkable premonition. If you look at radionuclide dispersal rates in the weeks following the Chernobyl accident, the granular black dots denoting radioactivity are spread out like a fistful of iron filings thrown across a map.
But there is a clear distinction between Wellsian fiction and current reality. The “death areas” have not been abandoned. Far from it.
More than 50 percent of the surface of thirteen European countries and 30 percent of eight other countries have been covered by Chernobyl fallout.[6] In 1986 the number of people living in areas with pronounced Chernobyl contamination was at least 150 million.[7]
I quote the following from a study published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences, the most comprehensive report available regarding the consequences of Chernobyclass="underline"
For the past 23 years it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundredfold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covered the entire Northern Hemisphere.[8]
These numbers are overwhelming, but the evidence behind them is unambiguous. Given what we know about the laws of biology (and there are enormous gaps in scientific knowledge regarding the relationship between the body and the radionuclide), the aftereffects of this disaster haven’t even reached full fruition.
Broadly speaking, radiation exposure can be categorised into two groups.
Acute radiation is a short-term severe exposure, usually external, and is responsible for the initial deaths of the type that Nadezhda Vygovskaya witnessed, those that occurred soon after the disaster in the countries most affected: Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
Chronic radiation is a much more stealthy phenomenon; it builds imperceptibly over the long term and affects the body internally, engendering an array of debilitating illnesses, most prominently cancer. We can say with certainty that multiple future generations will be at least as vulnerable to it as we are today.
Put simply: acute radiation is the hare, chronic radiation is the tortoise.
John Gofman, former professor of molecular and cell biology at UC– Berkeley, wrote candidly that “low-dose ionizing radiation may well be the most important single cause of cancer, birth defects, and genetic disorders.”[9]
2
Boris Pasternak, “Träumerei,”
3
Svetlana Alexievich,
6
Ian Fairlie and David Sumner,
7
Alexey V. Nesterenko, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Yablokov,