Granta 125: After the War (21 page)

On the way out, she’d stopped by an open window in the hallway and looked down: the garden in front of the inpatient building, which was maintained with a perfect geometrical pattern, looked like a perfect place to spend a day, if not a life, yet no patient would be allowed to leave the building, and no gardener could be seen. Next door was a clinic, with the paediatrics department on the first floor – Hui was used to taking herself there when she had a fever, and
later lining up at the second-floor pharmacy because her mother was too busy, always too busy. Across the street from the hospital was a wheat field, one of the last before Beijing transformed itself into a real metropolis; in the street were rusty red buses and flatbeds pulled by horses and streams of bicycles with clanging bells.

Too late, Hui thought, it was too late to go back to that autumn afternoon in 1984, and to claim the window and the garden and the freedom beyond. The skyscrapers that would replace the wheat fields had only been planned in blueprint; what came between the dream of life and the dream of death – education and career, her life in two countries, marriage and childbirth and everything else – could have not been. In her mind she could see herself again climbing up onto the windowsill; if someone in the hallway had screamed for her to stop, she did not heed the warning.

It would have been the only moment she had let out that sob from deep in her body, as she had not been able to when she had released the katydid on the platform of the train station in Beijing, as she was unable to when Sophie hugged her with soft arms and whispered a child’s love. Nothing matters, her father had hoped to make her see it, but how could he have known that in the end, everything mattered, and for that reason one had no other choice but to turn one’s back so the world would not see the violence directed inward?

Her mother would have believed it an accident; she would have grieved, but eventually she would have found consolation in more meaningful work in her community, for her community; perhaps she would have been awarded more prizes, a dedicated mother who had transferred her love of one child to generations of children. Would Hui’s father – for whom loneliness had been a habitat, as it had later become for his daughter – would he also have believed that it was an accident? But it didn’t matter what he would think, in the end: he would’ve held his heart like a bucket, waiting for his suffering to disappear, drip drop, drip drop.

T
he village war memorial stands in a grove of maple trees. A fresh wreath has been laid at the feet of the youthful bronze soldier, who wears a pensive expression, as if he’s aware that the world has become more complex since the heroic days of the Great Patriotic War. As I walk down the path behind him, the dosimeter begins to beep. The numbers on the display rise quickly. If I stood by the soldier for an hour, my body would absorb 0.59 microsieverts of radiation. A few paces further on the level is 2.89. Then 5.51. On the ground outside the nursery school is a rusty toy truck. Nearby, at the base of a tree, lies a plastic doll, missing one leg and both its arms, half buried in yellow leaves like a little murder victim. The level is 7.71, about seventy times the background level this morning in Kiev.

I photograph the doll, its hair bleached grey, the rubbery plastic of its head weathered to a sort of sickly puce. Then one of the Germans steps in front of me, crouching down to get his own shot. ‘Come now,’ says the tour guide. ‘We will look at the school. It is very emotional to think of the little children.’

K
iev is a recently reinvented place. Ten-year-old gold-domed churches dominate the skyline, exact replicas of those destroyed by Stalin in the thirties. Big black SUVs pull up outside private views at the art centre opened by Viktor Pinchuk, the billionaire steel magnate, who also owns four TV stations and is married to the ex-president’s daughter. At Murakami Sushi you can try ten kinds of Philadelphia roll, unless you’re across the street at Tarantino’s, eating pizza. You can shop at Dior or Zara, but GUM, the Soviet-era department store, has closed its doors.

In a few days there will be an election. The atmosphere is brittle, crackling with new money and potential violence. Black-clad ultranationalist Cossacks (riding boots, wool hats, facial hair, swords) are banging huge kettledrums at the base of an equestrian statue of their culture hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led a seventeenth-century uprising against the Poles. Portraits of imprisoned ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko are fly-posted on the facades of the neoclassical buildings on Khreshatkyk Street, her distinctive peasant braid reproduced in graphic black and white. They last a few hours before they’re torn down.

‘I’m responsible for you to be safe and sound and not glow in the dark after your tour.’ The guide, a businesslike young woman with auburn-tinted hair, is giving her introduction. ‘I’m responsible for your protocols. Don’t touch anything. Don’t lie down or go off the path. Don’t eat. Don’t smoke …’ Then she distributes bright yellow Ukrainian-made dosimeters. When you sign up to go to Chernobyl, you have the option to rent one of these or buy a T-shirt. Some operators offer souvenir mugs and army-issue gas masks.

We sign waivers and are driven out of the city, twenty of us on a bus. The massive housing blocks at the periphery give way to fields of sugar beets and winter wheat. Informal roadside markets are selling fruit and vegetables and more than once we pass a farmer in a horse-drawn cart. It is early in the morning, and as I look out at the misty landscape, a video screen plays an English-language film about the disaster that has led to a thousand square miles of this fertile countryside turning into a radioactive wilderness.

At 1.23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a sudden power surge during a routine systems test. A series of explosions ensued, rupturing the reactor vessel and starting a fire, which eventually destroyed most of the building, vaporizing tons of uranium fuel and sending a vast radioactive plume into the atmosphere. The Soviet authorities kept the event secret as fallout began to drift across Europe. Only when alarms were triggered at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden two days later did the USSR admit to the world that there had been an accident.

In 1986 I was a teenager at a school in suburban London. On 2 May, the plume began to drift over the UK. Upland areas, particularly in Wales, were contaminated with Caesium-137. Iodine-131 started to turn up in milk. We made jokes about radioactive sheep and not going out in the rain. To us, the disaster – and the sinister fog of secrecy which enveloped it – was both horribly glamorous and totally unsurprising. The Cold War seemed like a permanent and immutable condition, a dominating binary that had drilled down beyond politics into the very structure of thought. The latest generation of leaders – Reagan, Thatcher and their sclerotic Soviet counterparts – sounded hysterical, punchy. Sometimes it seemed as if they actively relished the prospect of nuclear attack. If we sixteen-year-olds wanted to know about our probable future, we had only to watch bleak docudramas like
Threads
and
The Day After
, screened to massive audiences on the BBC and ITV. Even if we made it to adulthood, chances were we’d find ourselves covered in sores, grubbing around for canned food in the ruins of our city.

Two hours out of Kiev, we arrive at the checkpoint that marks the border of the Zone of Alienation, the thirty-kilometre exclusion area around the power plant. It’s a sleepy place, a few administrative buildings, a foul-smelling long-drop toilet, dogs sleeping by the barrier that blocks the road. Four or five other minivans are stopped here, and tourists mill about as names and documents are given to the guards. I’m fooling around with my dosimeter, switching
between display modes I don’t understand, when a young man walks past, dressed head to foot in Eastern Bloc army surplus. Dangling from his belt is a gas mask. Is this genuine preparation to enter the contaminated zone? He looks more as if he’s here to participate in a re-enactment, costumed as one of the ‘liquidators’ who cleaned up after the disaster. Not for the first time, I wonder what we’re all doing here. Tourism has – self-evidently – an element of pleasure to it. What pleasure do we expect to derive from visiting this tragic, threatening place?

I
t was no longer a hurricane, and the alliteration of ‘Superstorm Sandy’ tripped off the tongue, so that’s what the broadcast media had taken to calling it by the time it hit New York on Monday, 29 October 2012. A storm surge of fourteen feet of water entered
the city, destroying houses in Staten Island and the Rockaways, inundating Red Hook, and cutting off Lower Manhattan, which became briefly known as the ‘Powerless Zone’. The next morning Nana Gouvêa, a thirty-year-old Brazilian soap actress and model, went out with her husband, who photographed her striking dramatic poses among the wreckage. Pouting at the camera, dressed in a tight black minidress, she can be seen striding around in front of downed trees, mounting the bumper of a crushed car, her arms stretched wide in a kind of winged swoop. In that shot another figure appears to the left of the frame, an unglamorous person in jeans and a white cycle helmet, crouching down to take her own picture, which may or may not include Gouvêa.

That same day, I cycled round my Brooklyn neighbourhood, which, being far from the water, had got away relatively unscathed. I also took some pictures of wreckage. In almost every one, I had to crop other photographers – sometimes five or more – out of the frame. After a while I gave up.

Gouvêa gave the photos to a Brazilian news site called
Ego
, which ran them alongside an interview in which she confided that she ‘adored’ hurricanes and had spent most of the storm in bed with her husband, only leaving to take pictures and go to the gym. The crassness of her response to an event that had killed hundreds of people turned her into a meme, a global laughing stock. A blog was launched devoted to photoshopped pictures of Gouvêa posing in front of famous images of devastation – the sinking
Titanic
, the little napalm-burned girl fleeing down a road in Vietnam. In one, she is on the roof of Reactor 4 at Chernobyl, as soldiers in heavy lead suits scramble to clear wreckage.

The original photograph is by Igor Kostin, a photojournalist who had previously covered the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Nine days after the explosion, he climbed onto the roof of the damaged reactor with a group of liquidators, who had been told to clear it of debris. The radiation level was so high that the soldiers, working in eight-man teams, could spend no longer than forty seconds on the roof at a time.
Many of these ‘biorobots’ (their own bleak slang) were exposed to lethal doses. The ‘invisible’ danger which Kostin braved to make the image has inscribed itself visually: a pattern of overexposed white bands rises up from the bottom, the result of radiation damage to the film.

Here at last Gouvêa is where – perhaps without knowing it – she aspired to be, in a high place where others could not go, triumphantly human amid the faceless biorobots, glamorous in the Zone.

T
here it is, Reactor 4, just like in the pictures: the striped chimney, the concrete buttresses of the sarcophagus. My dosimeter is beeping, but the radiation level near the plant is much lower than in many other parts of the Zone. For about ten days after the explosion,
radionuclides were released into the atmosphere, carried up and then deposited unevenly by wind or rain. Some of these substances had short half-lives, and decayed in hours or days. Others continue to work their way through the entire ecosystem of the Zone, through the soil and water, saturating the mosses and fungi on the forest floor, carried up into leaves and bark and berries and through the bodies of birds and deer, just as they worked through the bodies of the liquidators, the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants who stubbornly harvested their radioactive crops, the Kiev citizens who weren’t told of the risk and went out to join their May Day parade, smiling and waving in the fallout. A mutagenic legacy of cancers and birth defects has been passed on to their children, and other children across Europe and as far away as Japan.

Despite the severity of the accident, the authorities kept the other three Chernobyl reactors running. The last one wasn’t shut down until December 2000. Surrounded by former agricultural land that is steadily reverting to wilderness, the area around Reactor 4 is a workplace, with well-maintained roads and newly mown grass verges. Nearby, workers (two weeks on, two weeks off, so their exposure is restricted) are building a vast structure known as the New Safe Confinement, to replace the sarcophagus, which has begun to degrade. Other workers are involved in decommissioning the reactors, a process which will take many years.