Sightseeing wasn’t part of his mission, but he had the time — and the curiosity. “Drive on.”
It was only fifteen kilometers, or seven miles, but along the way they passed east of the village of Chernobyl on the banks of the Pripyat River, which at the time of the accident fed the plant’s cooling pond.
Elena arced around Chernobyl to the east, passing through dozens of villages, all abandoned save for a few hundred die-hard farmers who’d returned despite the government’s warnings. Elena translated the Cyrillic signs as they drove: Yampol, Malyy Cherevach, Zapol’ye — one by one they appeared and disappeared in the Opel’s headlights, wooden farmhouses and sheds and barns, many of them crumbling, overgrown with foliage and moss, fences so coiled in vines and underbrush they leaned at wild angles to the ground, structures so primitive Fisher had little trouble imagining himself transported back a hundred years.
“This is surreal,” Fisher said.
“This is nothing. Just wait.”
As they drew closer to the city, farmhouses and barns gave way to smaller buildings, made mostly of gray concrete and faded brown brick. The signs were all in Cyrillic, but there was something universal about the structures: a gas station, a grocery store; a bank… Soon the scrub pines and marshland gave way to vacant lots and paved intersections.
They approached Pripyat from the west, so Fisher’s first glimpse of the city’s skyline was backlit by the first hints of sunlight on the horizon. Great rectangular blocks of buildings, tall and narrow, short and squat, rose from the terrain. In twilight they were dark and dimensionless, as though painted on the skyline by a movie set designer.
As they entered the city limits and the horizon brightened, details began to stand out.
Pripyat was in many ways a typical Soviet-era city. The structures, from apartment high-rises to four-story schools and office buildings, were built in gray cinder block. Everything had an almost Lego-like atmosphere, as though geometric blocks were simply dropped into the empty spaces between the streets and then given designations: Apartment Block 17; People’s Bank Number 84; General Office Complex 21. The only bits of color Fisher saw were faded murals painted on the sides of buildings, traditional Revolution-era scenes of Lenin or of iron-jawed, blond-haired men standing knee deep in golden fields of wheat, one hand clutching a sickle, the other shielding eyes that stared at some distant horizon.
What struck Fisher the most was the utter stillness of the place. If the outlying farms seemed trapped in the 1800s, Pripyat seemed frozen on that fateful day in April of 1986. Cars sat parked in the middle of intersections, their doors still open as though the occupants had simply gotten out and run away. Suitcases and footlockers and wheelbarrows piled high with clothes, pots and pans, and framed pictures lay strewn on the sidewalks.
They passed an elementary school. The playground, once a clearing surrounded by trees, had been reclaimed by weeds and bushes. A jungle gym rose from the undergrowth, its steel frame choked with vines; a raised play- house in the shape of an elephant with a slide for a trunk was a nothing more than a rusted hulk. The school’s doors stood yawning — shoved open, Fisher imagined, by fleeing children and teachers. As the school disappeared in the car’s side window, Fisher glimpsed a child’s doll sitting perfectly upright on the rim of a sandbox.
This, he decided, is what nuclear Armageddon would look like.
“Is it all like this?” he asked.
“Yes. And it will be for the next three hundred years. It’ll take that long for the contamination levels to fade. I come here sometimes, just to remind myself it’s real. But never at night. I never come at night.”
“I don’t blame you.”
Next they passed a six-story apartment building, another gray cube lined with balconies that ran the length of the structure. With only a few exceptions, each balcony door on the sixth floor stood open. It took Fisher a moment to understand why. These apartments faced southeast — toward the power plant. The upper floor would have offered an unobstructed view of the reactor’s explosion and subsequent fire. He imagined women in housecoats and children in pajamas standing at the railing watching the spectacle, not yet realizing what had happened. Not knowing an invisible cloud of cesium was already falling on them. Below, many of the balconies a faded number had been painted in red or orange.
“What are those?” Fisher asked.
“It wasn’t until the next morning, after many of the children had left for school, that the evacuation order was given. People were told to mark their balconies with the number of their evacuation bus so if loved ones returned home, they would know.”
“My God,” Fisher murmured.
“Have you seen enough?”
Fisher nodded, still staring out the window.
32
They drove south for ten minutes before Fisher saw the first sign they were approaching Chernobyl itself. In the distance an obelisk rose from the marshlands. It was the plant’s smokestack, Elena explained. As they drew closer, Fisher could see the stack was painted in faded red and white horizontal bands. Beside it stood a crane that he guessed was being used for nearly constant rebuilding of the Sarcophagus, which had over the years begun to crack and crumble.
Twelve kilometers from the plant, Elena veered off the paved road and onto a gravel track that wound through a copse of stunted pine trees. After a few hundred yards, she turned into a driveway. She pulled to a stop before a ranch-style bungalow painted a washed-out yellow. Like the farmhouses Fisher had seen in the outlying villages, the bungalow was encased in a labyrinth of vines that snaked up the walls, along the eaves, and around the front porch’s post, like snakes frozen in mid-slither.
“PRIA’s headquarters is just inside the inner zone,” Elena said, getting out. “Moscow built it about a year after the disaster. Of course, we all spend as little time there as possible.”
“Who does this place belong to?”
“Me, now. Back then, a local party boss from Kiev. When the plant was first build, Moscow ordered bigwigs to take dachas here, to prove the reactor was safe. Officially, all the PRIA scientists are supposed to live in a block of renovated apartments south of Pripyat.”
“I saw them.” Fisher grabbed his rucksack from the backseat. “Not very cozy.”
“Yes, lovely, aren’t they? This place is better. The outside isn’t much, but the roof doesn’t leak and the insulation is good. Plus, it wasn’t in the plume.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The plume of radioactive dust. Most of it was blown west and then north, toward Belorus. We’re on the east side of the plant. Come on in.” She started walking. She realized Fisher wasn’t following, and turned back and smiled. “Relax. You see that?” She pointed to what looked like a weather vane jutting from the roof. “It’s a dosimeter; I check it twice a day. Trust me, this is one of the cleanest places in Chernobyl.”
“Guess it pays to be a biologist,” Fisher said, and started walking toward the porch.
“I’m very careful. I would like to have children some day.”
She directed Fisher to the spare bedroom, where he dropped his rucksack, and then he joined her in the kitchen. She was crouched before the open door of a woodstove, shoving sticks into a growing flame. She shut the door and stood up. “Sit. Tea will be ready in a few minutes.”
She got a loaf of black bread and a tin of blackberry jam from the cupboard and laid them on the table. She chose an apple from the windowsill, washed it, then sliced it into a bowl.
“The water comes from a new artesian well,” she said before he had a chance to ask. “I test that every day, too.”
Fisher said, “Sorry. This takes some getting used to.”
“Don’t apologize. I was the same way when I first came here. I didn’t want to touch anything. I even found
