All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

  The city is utterly, utterly dead.

  So you first encounter it not as a stranger, a foreigner who doesn’t understand its ways, but instead as a pathologist, slicing through a cadaver stiffened by rigor mortis.

  We stop at the main square and get out to walk. We find ourselves speaking in low murmurs, conscious of the silenced past. Pripyat is, above all else, a place of eloquent absence.

  We walk with deliberation, intently aware of our movements. Perhaps this is because we’re so alert to the air we’re breathing, as though we’re instructing our limbs to take note that we’re in an alien atmosphere.

  Kolya, our guide, warns us not to touch anything and to be careful not to step on any moss, which zigzags through the cracked concrete. “It’s a sponge for radioactivity,” he tells us. And so our motions become even more pronounced. We watch where we tread, then we stop and look around, then watch where we tread once more, like a small child negotiating a flight of stairs.

  The square fronts onto the city’s Palace of Culture, an imposing building, its ranks of steps facing us. To the right sits the Communist Party Headquarters. To our left is the first in a regimented row of apartment blocks. On its roof stands a set of giant Cyrillic letters in opaque grey, outlined in communist scarlet. Russian is a language that resists a Latinate eye; swirled letters are sharpened with geometric edges, as though they can only be transcribed by chisel. I ask Kolya for a translation. “Let the atom be a worker not a solider,” he says, then hesitates with his explanation. “Basically they’re saying they want to use it for electricity, not for . . . you know . . . bombs.”

  Kolya is twenty-two or twenty-three; wears green camouflage fatigues even though he’s not in the military, and speaks in flowing bullet points, which gives him an air of deliberate insouciance. On our drive in, we passed the nuclear complex.

  • That is reactor 1.

  • That is reactor 2.

  • Pripyat had a population of maybe forty thousand people.

  • Chernobyl village had a population of twelve thousand people.

  • Now there are maybe one thousand.

  • A few scientists, guides, officials, safety workers.

  • It’s boring but we play cards and keep ourselves busy.

  • Of course, we get to go home regularly.

  • We have two weeks on, then a month off.

  “Let the atom be a worker not a soldier.” The phrase carries a particularly Soviet sense of absolutism and obligation. Even the simple atom is forced to take on a role, to sublimate itself to the orders of others.

  Shapes are very consciously defined here. No building seems out of place in relation to another. This is a city that prizes regularity, precise planning, built in the 1970s on the Ukrainian side of the Polesia woodlands, an area popular with hunters. Next to it runs the Pripyat River, two hundred metres wide, which flows into the Dnieper and onwards towards Kiev. Pripyat was the city where the workers for the Chernobyl nuclear plant lived, grateful for their posting in a town that was once the jewel of Soviet modernity. This was a city of boundless promise. A population of high-level professionals who all served the same employer, so their professional unity no doubt extended to their private lives as well. You sense it was once a children’s sanctuary, free of malign influences. Behind the Palace of Culture sits a playground with bumper cars and a Ferris wheel. We walk through crèches that once were state of the art. Rooms with metal enamel cots and cushioned play areas, an abundance of dolls, even still; they lie scattered near windows, sprawled underneath miniature tables and chairs.

  Many elderly parents accompanied their children and grandchildren here, eager to escape the grind of larger cities. Families squeezed together in their apartments to make room. Communal living was a situation they were used to. No doubt it was much easier to do so here, with a river nearby to fish in, forests that invited walkers.

  We make our way through a loading door to the backstage area inside the Palace of Culture. Stage backdrops lean against the wall in preparation for the Mayday celebrations that were due to be held that year, in 1986, six days after the disaster, five days after the evacuation.

  The backdrops are print portraits of prominent Communist Party leaders, their faces twenty feet high. I recognise Lenin and Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party for almost two decades from the mid-sixties. The others I can’t place. I ask Kolya if he can name them, but he shakes his head. “It was all over by the time I was born.”

  The faces look out with neutral disinterest, resigned to their oblivion.

  The auditorium still impresses. Everything intact. Damp has yet to find its way in. The carpet looks spotless and full, as if recently vacuumed. The rows of seats await their patrons. A mezzanine level overlooks us.

  The silence here is of a different quality to that outside. It feels familiar to me. I spent most of my twenties as a theatre director and even though my productions mostly took place in small black studios or cold improvised venues, I’ve stood many times on a silent stage. As with other spaces built for public events, a courtroom or a stadium, it’s a place that naturally hums with expectation.

  I think of Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR at the time of the disaster. His face is perhaps included in the solemn portraits behind me. His visit to the site came on May 2. He arrived accompanied by Yegor Ligachev, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

  They sat for a few days with the scientific delegations, impressed them with their willingness to listen to the assembled expertise, to engage with the intricate complexities of the issue. A governmental commission was formed in situ, headed by Ryzhkov himself. On the fourteenth of July he surprised and invigorated the leaders of the cleanup with a speech in Moscow, declaring that the Chernobyl accident “did not occur by chance,” stating instead, “It was inevitable.”* An extraordinary admission by an official of his status.

  The resonances of the empty stage seem to counter its surroundings. Unlike its sister buildings, this auditorium doesn’t hark back to former glories; instead, it sits in stoic anticipation of its future, prepared for what is to come.

  2.

  I land at Minsk airport the previous evening. I’ve arrived to join a delegation from the Irish charity Chernobyl Children International, which has been working in Belarus for the past twenty years. Its founder, Adi Roche, has invited me along to see some of their projects firsthand.

  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.”*

  3.

  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.*

  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.*

  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.* In 1986 the number of people living in areas with pronounced Chernobyl contamination was at least 150 million.*

  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 Chernobyl:

  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.*

  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.”*

  Whether in the guise of a worker or a soldier, the rush of energy from a split atom runs directly to the heart of a nation’s power. Its capabilities are placed squarely at the nexus of immense military and economic interests. As the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson puts it: “The industry worldwide is protected by secrecy and by its significance in maintaining the prestige of governments and by its military significance, whether as licit or illicit supplier of fissile materials or as potential target.”*

  5.

  Gomel, Belarus. Two hundred and fifteen kilometres from Chernobyl.

  The morning after our visit to Pripyat we open the door to an apartment and see a man buckle in front of us.

  He is tall and lean. The stripes on the side of his tracksuit bottoms take the line of his lank hair and elongated face. The hair drops away from behind his ears as he bends forward, a hand obscuring his features, tears gaining momentum. The only sound comes from his laboured breathing. It seems as though he remains standing only because of the arrangement of his skeleton. His muscles have gone slack, his head hangs on a wavering forearm. Roche steps forward to embrace him and he dissolves into her shoulder. His cries release in convulsions. We close the door gently behind us and stand in his orange vestibule, so narrow that we’re almost touching him. We gaze into the other rooms in an attempt to salvage some privacy for him.

  Roche’s charity provides hospice care for Vasily’s daughter, Sasha. They make sure a nurse calls on the apartment four times a week, bringing diapers, wipes, and baby food. Vasily also receives a small stipend, enough to feed himself and his daughter but not his gambling habit. This is his only income. They receive no state benefits.

  Our call is a routine visit. Though Roche has been here several times before, we can see from her eyes that her reception has never been like this. Something has happened.

  A nurse is in the kitchen. Our translator moves to speak to her. As we wait, I notice the stench: wheaty and stale; the scent of sweat and faeces, magnified by the overpowering heat. The heat is so strong that I can feel vapour streams trickle out from under my coat. Later, I find out that the windows don’t open, apparently a typical feature of Soviet tower blocks, and residents don’t have any control over the temperature. In wintertime all the apartment blocks in Belarus are as stifling as a sauna.

&
nbsp; Recently, Sasha’s health has plummeted, turning to pneumonia in the past few days. An hour ago, a visiting doctor ordered that she be moved to a country hospital fifteen miles away. The ambulance is due this afternoon.

  Vasily has no car and won’t be allowed to stay in residence. In the city, only the children’s hospital has space available. They refuse to take her. Their age limit is fourteen. Now seventeen, Sasha’s death on their premises would mean multiple explanations and extra paperwork.

  Seven years ago, Vasily’s marriage ended. He gave up his job as a night watchman to be his daughter’s sole carer, a position that is broken only for an hour or two each week when the nurse arrives to check on things or a relative comes by to let him go outside for an evening. Sasha hasn’t touched fresh air for a decade.

  The room to my left is furnished only by a large armchair and a TV set that sits on a dilapidated stand next to the window. The chair has a stained hand towel draped around its armrest. Surrounding it is an archipelago of carer’s paraphernalia: diapers and diaper cream, baby wipes and talc, bandages, gels, towels, a feeding bottle, moisturiser, cotton balls. The chair retains the indentations of many hours of use.