The plaza was bordered on three sides by large buildings. To the right, a defunct neon sign announced the Hotel Polissia, seven stories of square, gaping windows. From where we stood, more than twenty years of looting and abandonment had not significantly worsened the stark, unforgiving aspect of the hotel’s architecture. A few hardy shrubs even peeked from among the freestanding letters of the roof sign. It’s amazing where things will grow when people stop all their weeding.
Between drags on his cigarette, Dennis answered my questions with the jaded economy of someone who had been to this spot a thousand times. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at the building to the left of the hotel.
“Culture palace,” he said.
“What’s a culture palace?”
“Discos.” Another drag. “Movies.”
To our left was a blocky building with a sign reading PECTOPAH. Using my nascent Cyrillic, I decoded this as RESTAURANT. I pointed to a low-slung gallery that jutted from its side.
“What was there?”
Dennis looked up and removed the cigarette from his mouth.
“Shops.”
The plaza where we stood was gradually surrendering itself to shrubs and moss. Vegetation spilled over its borders and crept along its seams. A set of low, crumbling stairs led up from the plaza’s lower level, purple wildflowers and a few tree saplings poking out from the cracks.
“Don’t step on the moss,” Dennis ordered as we walked up the mossy stairs from the mossy lower level to the mossy upper level.
“Why’s that?” I asked, and hoped he hadn’t seen the contorted tap dance of my reaction.
“The moss… concentrates the radiation,” he said, and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. The same could have been said for the mushrooms he had freely admitted to gathering in the zone, but I didn’t bother to point it out.
I stopped to take a picture. Dennis dangled another cigarette from his mouth and posed on the concrete path, the pectopah in the distance. Behind his sunglasses, he could have been the bassist for a Ukrainian rock band. FOOTBALL, said the writing on his sleeveless black T-shirt. SYNTHETIC NATURE. He held up his detector for the camera to see. It read 120. But what did 120 microroentgens mean on a sunny day? More than a little. Less than a lot. Panic in Kiev.
Dennis wandered away along the side of the plaza, his detector in a lazy warble. I lingered in front of the gutted pectopah. There was nothing left but a shell of cracked concrete and twisted metal. I tried to imagine the plaza before the accident, when it had been the center of a living city. A place to meet a friend after work, maybe. Somewhere to have a cup of bad coffee. What was it like to have your entire town evacuated in three hours? To lose not only your house or apartment but also your workplace, your friends, your entire environment? I tried to imagine the terror of that day.
But in the peace that reigned over present-day Pripyat, it was difficult. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. The trees and grass rustled in the wind. Insects buzzed past on their way to somewhere else. I heard the easy cacophony of the birds. And as Dennis made his way down the plaza, the chirping of his dosimeter dissolved into the birdsong, becoming just another note in nature’s symphony.
I caught up with him at the far corner of the shops, and we headed around back to visit the amusement park. As we walked, I asked Dennis how he had gotten his job. Leading guided tours through the world’s most radioactive outdoor environment didn’t seem like a gig you would find on Craigslist. And Dennis had started early; at twenty- six, he had already been working for the Chernobyl authority for three years, alternating every two weeks between the zone and Kiev to keep his radioactive dose under the permitted limit. He told me that originally he had worked only in the Kiev office, before getting transferred to the zone. “I asked for it. I wanted to do it instead of sit in front of a computer,” he said, and took a swig of water. “And most people don’t work at all, if the computer has Internet.” Here was someone who believed that boredom was worse for you than radiation.
He went on, recounting how he had read about a doctor who argued that constant, low-level doses of radiation were actually good for you. “The people who didn’t leave the zone after the accident lived better,” he said, referring to the several hundred aging squatters who have been allowed to live, semi-legally, in their houses in the zone. “This doctor said they had adapted to the radiation and would die within fifteen years if they suddenly leave, but could live to a hundred if they stay.”
I had heard similar claims before, and I was doubtful. There probably were health benefits for zone squatters, but surely they came from living in a little cottage in the countryside, where they grew their own (albeit contaminated) vegetables and breathed clean (if radioactive) air, instead of being evacuated to a crappy apartment in Kiev. I suggested this to Dennis, that perhaps around here, quality of life just trumped radiation dose. He shrugged. But not everyone in Ukraine was as casual as he was about radiation. He later told me how, whenever he would visit his sister in Kiev, she would make him leave his boots outside.
The amusement park is Pripyat’s iconic feature, an end-times Coney Island, with a broad paved area surrounded by rides and attractions that are slowly being overcome by rust and weeds. Dennis was more interested in the moss. He was a collector of hotspots, and around here the moss had all the action. Near the ruined bumper car pavilion, he waited for a reading before picking his radiation meter up from a mossy spot on the ground.
“One point five mili,” he said, wiping the meter’s backplate on his fatigues.
We left the amusement park and walked down the street, past the post office, past a low building that Dennis said was a technical school, past more apartment blocks. Turning off the road, we scurried through a large concrete arch attached to another building; Dennis eyed the unstable structure warily as we passed underneath.
We continued through the rear courtyard of the building and into an overgrown area beyond. The warm shade of the forest was alive with the hum of bees. As we walked, I pushed aside branches and squeezed between bushes that grew in our way. At the end of the narrow path was a two-story building made with pink brick set in a vertical pattern.
“Kindergarten number seven,” said Dennis.
If you have been insufficiently sobered by the sight of a deserted city, Kindergarten No. 7 will do the trick. We came through a dank stairwell into a long, spacious playroom with tall windows on one side, their glass long since smashed out. Thick fronds of peeling, sky-blue paint curled from the walls. What had been left behind by the looters—or shall we call them the first tourists?—was strewn on the floor and coated with twenty years of dust from the slowly disintegrating ceiling. Mosquitoes made lazy spirals through the humid air.
The door was torn off its hinges. Next to it lay piles of orange play blocks and a mound of papers printed with colorful illustrations—marching elephants, rosy-cheeked little Soviet children. A gray plastic teddy bear, its face pushed into the back of its hollow head, sat on a moldering pyre of Russian learn-to-read posters. I recognized the Cyrillic letter
Dennis was by the windows with his detector. “Eighty,” he said. He walked to the far wall. “Five.”
A toy car with a yellow plastic seat just large enough for a single child was parked in the middle of the room. It was missing its wheels and its windshield. Even it had been stripped for parts. On the floor next to it was a child-size gas mask.
Stepping around pools of stagnant water, we made our way out through the stairwell, pausing in front of some black-and-white photographs still hanging on the wall. In them, children played and did exercises in a tidy classroom. With a gnawing temporal vertigo, I felt the pictures snap into familiarity: It was the same room. The destroyed room we had just left. And the toys the children were playing with in the photographs were the same toys we had seen just now, fossilized in dust.
Nikolai picked us up on the street, the car appearing out of nowhere, and we left Pripyat in silence.
The classroom lingered in my mind. I had come to the Exclusion Zone to witness its unexpected and riotous efflorescence, and there was something joyous in the sight of nature rushing into an unpeopled world. But it was a garden fed with suffering. Although the meltdown in Chernobyl was no death sentence for the people of Pripyat— and although most of the children who attended Kindergarten No. 7 are probably alive and well today—at the bare minimum it displaced and terrorized hundreds of thousands of people, and threw a pall of doubt over their health, a sickening uncertainty that will haunt the region for at least a lifetime. In this, the verdant bubble of the zone was unlike any other oasis in the world. It had been wrenched into existence, with violence. Something had created it.
