Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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
b.
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 un-
expected 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 melt-
down 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.
On the far side of the bridge out of Pripyat, we coasted to a stop. Dennis turned to me.
“Perhaps you would like to take a picture,” he said. I was confused. Why here? But then
my eyes wandered up to the horizon, and for the first time, I saw the reactor in person.
It hunkered in the distance, perhaps a mile away, its latticed cooling tower rising over a
nasty confusion of buttressed metal walls. The Sarcophagus. Officially known as the Shel-
ter Object, it had been built to contain the shattered reactor. Floating over an expanse of
low forest, it had a strange and massive presence. It could have been a crashed spaceship.
By the time we reached the reactor complex, the day had turned itself inside out. We
had heard thunder rumbling in the southeast only moments after I'd first seen the Shelter
Object. Now a thick lid of clouds had slid over the sky, and heavy raindrops were striking
the car's metal roof. Our surroundings were similarly changed, overtaken by forbidding ex-
