Two years later, at four in the morning, my father and I drove into the Zone. The headlamps dissolved picturesquely into the pre-dawn mist, but my father’s driver refused to slow down. It was like being in a road rally. The driver sat on a lead sheet he’d cadged from an x-ray technician. For his balls, he explained when he saw me looking at it. Armored troop carriers with special spotlights were parked here and there working as chemical defense detachments. The soldiers wore black suits and special slippers.
Even through the misty darkness we could see that nature was blooming. The sun rose. We passed pear trees gone to riot and chaotic banks of wildflowers. A crush of lilacs overwhelmed a mile marker.
Mikhail had died after two bone-marrow transplants. He’d lasted three weeks. The attending nurse reported final complaints involving dry mouth, his salivary glands having been destroyed. But I assumed that that was Mikhail being brave, because the condition of his skin had left him in agony for the final two weeks. On some of my visits he couldn’t speak at all, but only kept his eyes and mouth tightly closed, and listened. I was in Georgia at the start-up of a new plant the day he died. He was buried, like the others in his condition, in a lead-lined coffin that was soldered shut.
Petya was by then an invalid on a pension Father and I had arranged for him. He was 25. He found it difficult to get up to his floor, since his building had no elevator, but otherwise, he told me when I occasionally called, he was happy. He had his smokes and his tape player and could lay about all day with no one to nag him, no one to tell him that he had better amount to something.
“It’s a shame,” my father mused on the ride in. “What is?” I asked, wild with rage at the both of us. But he looked at me with disapproval and dropped the subject.
At Pripyat a sawhorse was set up as a checkpoint, manned by an officer and two soldiers. The soldiers had holes poked in their respirators for cigarettes. They’d been expecting my father, and he was whisked off to be shown something even I wasn’t to be allowed to see. His driver stuck his feet out the car’s open window and began snoring, head thrown back. I wandered away from the central square and looked into a building that had been facing away from the reactor. I walked its peeling and echoing hallways and gaped into empty offices at notepads and pens scattered across floors. In one there was a half-unwrapped child’s dress in a gift box, the tulle eaten away by age or insects.
Across the street in front of the school, a tree was growing up from beneath the sidewalk. I climbed through an open window and crossed the classroom without touching anything. I passed through a solarium with an empty swimming pool. A kindergarten with little gas masks in a crate. Much had been looted and tossed about, including a surprising number of toys. At the front of one room over the teacher’s desk someone had written on a red chalkboard, There Is No Return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986.
Two years later, at four in the morning, my father and I drove into the Zone. The headlamps dissolved picturesquely into the pre-dawn mist, but my father’s driver refused to slow down. It was like being in a road rally. The driver sat on a lead sheet he’d cadged from an x-ray technician. For his balls, he explained when he saw me looking at it. Armored troop carriers with special spotlights were parked here and there working as chemical defense detachments. The soldiers wore black suits and special slippers.
Even through the misty darkness we could see that nature was blooming. The sun rose. We passed pear trees gone to riot and chaotic banks of wildflowers. A crush of lilacs overwhelmed a mile marker.
Mikhail had died after two bone-marrow transplants. He’d lasted three weeks. The attending nurse reported final complaints involving dry mouth, his salivary glands having been destroyed. But I assumed that that was Mikhail being brave, because the condition of his skin had left him in agony for the final two weeks. On some of my visits he couldn’t speak at all, but only kept his eyes and mouth tightly closed, and listened. I was in Georgia at the start-up of a new plant the day he died. He was buried, like the others in his condition, in a lead-lined coffin that was soldered shut.
Petya was by then an invalid on a pension Father and I had arranged for him. He was 25. He found it difficult to get up to his floor, since his building had no elevator, but otherwise, he told me when I occasionally called, he was happy. He had his smokes and his tape player and could lay about all day with no one to nag him, no one to tell him that he had better amount to something.
“It’s a shame,” my father mused on the ride in. “What is?” I asked, wild with rage at the both of us. But he looked at me with disapproval and dropped the subject.
At Pripyat a sawhorse was set up as a checkpoint, manned by an officer and two soldiers. The soldiers had holes poked in their respirators for cigarettes. They’d been expecting my father, and he was whisked off to be shown something even I wasn’t to be allowed to see. His driver stuck his feet out the car’s open window and began snoring, head thrown back. I wandered away from the central square and looked into a building that had been facing away from the reactor. I walked its peeling and echoing hallways and gaped into empty offices at notepads and pens scattered across floors. In one there was a half-unwrapped child’s dress in a gift box, the tulle eaten away by age or insects.
Across the street in front of the school, a tree was growing up from beneath the sidewalk. I climbed through an open window and crossed the classroom without touching anything. I passed through a solarium with an empty swimming pool. A kindergarten with little gas masks in a crate. Much had been looted and tossed about, including a surprising number of toys. At the front of one room over the teacher’s desk someone had written on a red chalkboard, There Is No Return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986.
