Thick forest surrounded Slavutych. The tidy wooden cottages along streets in one neighbourhood reminded me of an alpine resort. After the accident, all the Soviet republics contributed to construction in Slavutych. The Lithuanian government donated the cottages.
I enjoyed being here. The air smelled fresh. Leaves in treetops rustled with the breeze. Dappled light patterned the roads. I thought of cottage country in Quebéc. This might be a nice place to visit for a holiday.
We met the mayor at the town hall. Armed with statistics for Slavutych, he recited the population figure, the number of housing units, each republic’s contribution and the number of construction projects still unfinished. When we asked why so much remained to be done, the mayor said that Soviet authorities had accidentally built Slavutych on land contaminated by radioactive fallout. More than 80 percent of the construction workers fled when they learned the extent of the contamination.
“They told us we were safe here, but now we find we’re trapped in a sack,” the mayor said. “The population is confined to the town. We can’t go out to the forest to gather mushrooms.”
I felt the weight of this last statement. Ira had already informed me that mushroom picking, considered a sport in Ukraine, was an important part of weekend family outings. More than once I had been served up dishes of sautéed freshly picked mushrooms and listened to families reminisce about enjoyable days in the woods competing for the best mushroom find. I dreaded eating these mushrooms but always did so to be polite. My mother, a pediatrician, had been the director of a poison control centre in Ottawa. Several species of poisonous mushrooms grew in local woods. She had seen patients with mushroom poisoning from eating some of them. Two of these patients died. My mother had made me promise not to touch any mushrooms that grew wild.
When the mayor finished his talk, we met workers from the Chernobyl plant. They described their daily routine. I was glad not to be alone as I did not know how to respond. What could one possibly say to men and women who dutifully reported to a special “sanitation chamber” near the railway station, where they changed into white cotton outfits before boarding the train bound for Chernobyl. They then transferred to a second train and changed clothes again once they entered the ultra-high-security final ten-kilometre zone surrounding the plant. When work was over, they came home to relax in a radioactive town. I wondered if we were speaking to a group of people who were unwittingly committing suicide.
A Chernobyl host took me to the accident site. I shivered as we stood in front of the destroyed reactor encased in a cement and metal cover, a sarcophagus. I saw no traditional memorial to those who died — no crosses, commemorative plaques, statues or flowers — but this bleak sarcophagus looked like a huge tomb. Cranes and electricity pylons poked up from the landscape. A long patch of desiccated grass ran in front of the reactor. Otherwise I saw only cement, metal, wires and steel. Other reactors nearby still worked. Ghostlike figures dressed all in white scuttled between buildings at the complex. I thought of the men and women that I had met in Slavutych. We did not linger long at Chernobyl.
Our next stop was Pripyat, a modern Soviet city built to house Chernobyl workers, a few kilometres farther down the road. We were going with a Ukrainian MP, Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi, who had worked at the plant and wanted to visit his old apartment. Although he was middle-aged, he still had the unruly hair of a rebellious student and a long moustache that curved down and made him look sad.
“Come this way,” our Chernobyl host said, as he led us into a changing room. “You’ll need protective clothing.”
“You don’t need to change to wear these,” he said, pointing to green army fatigues hanging on clothes pegs. The other option was white suits with matching puffy hats that looked like chef’s outfits. I chose army fatigues that I could slide over my own clothes and special rubber boots for my feet. Then we boarded a zone mini bus to travel the short distance to Pripyat. “When the bus is too contaminated it will be buried in a graveyard,” our Chernobyl host said.
I knew what he meant. A friend who worked in TV had already shown me footage from the time of the accident. Rows and rows of heavily contaminated helicopters, ambulances, buses, cars and trucks, no longer safe to use, filled fields near Chernobyl. Some vehicles were buried but many still lay out in the open. In Kiev, it was difficult to find spare car parts, so they had to be bought on the black market. My mechanic warned me to always go through trusted contacts to avoid contaminated car parts cannibalized from vehicles in the zone.
It only took minutes to reach the checkpoint at Pripyat. The last person that we saw was the guard who waved us in. We drove along a grid of straight streets lined with tall apartment blocks. This city should have been bustling with life, but all we heard was silence. The only noise came from birds that had reclaimed Pripyat. Not a soul came in or out of the deserted apartment blocks. We stared down empty streets. I thought I saw someone standing on a diving board at the local pool. I probably just conjured up a person to try to make this urban ghost town a more normal place. I felt like one of the last survivors on Earth after an apocalypse.
We visited the local fairground. Grass grew as high as the bottom seats of the Ferris wheel. Our Chernobyl host warned us not to step off paved surfaces.
“We wash these down regularly to keep them radiation free,” he said. After a brief tour of public sites, Shovkoshytnyi felt ready to face his apartment and all the memories this might trigger. He remembered Pripyat as a lively city. I considered it one huge graveyard and a warning of what might happen in the event of nuclear war.
We walked to Shovkoshytnyi’s apartment. We saw dolls propped in windows in many places that we passed.
“They told us we were only being evacuated for a few days,” Shovkoshytnyi said. “It happened so fast, we grabbed just a few things. Children left those dolls to welcome us back.” When we reached Shovkoshytnyi’s building the front door stood ajar.
“Looters have been here,” he said. He did not want to touch the door because of radiation contamination. He kicked it with his foot so that it swung open wide. Debris littered the stairwell. Glass crunched underfoot. We climbed slowly, stepping over slippers, badminton rackets, empty picture frames and a home distilling kit.
Shovkoshytnyi’s apartment had been spared by the looters. He took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door. We stepped into a time capsule.
“Everything is just as we left it,” he said. A frying pan stood on the stove and a flour pot on the counter. Shovkoshytnyi’s gym equipment lay on the living room floor. We did not stay long. I could not imagine visiting my past like this. I hoped the trip brought Shovkoshytnyi closure. He sat quietly on the bus during our journey back.
When we arrived at the plant, we took off our protective clothing and boots. Chernobyl workers measured us for radiation. “You’re clean,” one worker said after he swept me with a Geiger counter. “Take a shower when you get back and make sure you wash your hair.” We boarded our own bus. A guard dressed in khaki and open-toed sandals with socks measured radiation levels on the bus tires before waving us on. We drove onto the road and out of the zone.
5
UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE
On a chilly early autumn evening in 1990 I sat on a sofa in the office that Yaroslav and I shared — a studio apartment that Yaroslav “rented” from a friend through some complicated arrangement that let two Ukrainians reach an agreement no foreigner here could. It had been an extraordinary few months. Ukrainians had elected pro-independence Rukh politicians to Parliament. Then the Communists, who dominated Parliament, supported Rukh’s declaration of Ukrainian sovereignty. I never thought this would happen so quickly. I felt excited by these political developments but discouraged about my personal circumstances. I wondered who would become independent first — Ukraine or me. I still could not rent an apartment, leave Kiev or do so many things I took for granted in my old life. Working from this office was my one taste of freedom.