In Europe (111 page)

THE COLD HOLDS NO SECRETS FOR THE RUSSIAN RAILWAYS. UPSY-DAISY
, scoop a little more coal into the furnace and the train compartments turn into cozy living rooms, the corridors into warm loggias, the passengers eat and drink, someone sings a tune, and meanwhile the Moscow-Kiev Express barrels on through the moonlit night. In the bar, as they say here, ‘we let our souls fly’.

The next morning, Irina Trantina is waiting for me at the station in Kiev. Through her many contacts, she has arranged a special tour for me, and it's all she can talk about. As soon as we are in the car she says: ‘Do you know where I was that day, 26 April, 1986? Right here, at this station. I worked in the ticket office, I had night duty, and the first thing that struck me in those early morning hours was the total silence. There were no police, no one. We thought that was very strange, but no one could explain it. The next day a friend of mine picked up a report on Voice of America, they said something about an explosion near Kiev. That was all. When I got to work that day, the whole station was full of panicked people. Someone said: “They're from Chernobyl. The nuclear power plant there blew up.” More and more rumours like that started going around. On 30 April I saw a special train from Chernobyl come through here, full of top officials and their families. Then everyone in Kiev knew that something had gone very wrong. But the radio still didn't say a thing.’

Kiev celebrated May Day in the normal fashion, with the usual shows and parades. ‘The whole charade had been going on for five days, and I'd had enough of it. A friend of the family was quite high in the military, and I called him. He was extremely candid: “Irina, we have an enormous problem. A nuclear power plant has blown up. No one knows what
to do, that's the reality of it.” The next day all of Kiev was in total panic, everyone was trying to get away, it was like a war. We simply devoured iodine, we thought that could keep the problems at bay.’

The official announcement came on 5 May: ‘There are a few problems, but absolutely no risk.’ Four days later the order came for all children to be evacuated. The newspapers in the West talked about nothing else. But most of the people of Kiev still knew nothing at all.

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further.

In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: first in the direction of Sweden and Finland, then across Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, by way of Switzerland, northern Italy and France, all the way to Great Britain and Norway. Some residue also reached the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Rumania. Twenty countries were contaminated. Years afterwards, British sheep were still failing inspection on the grounds of being a threat to public health.

Around 200 people died during and immediately after the explosions, but in the years that followed thousands more died from radioactive contamination and resulting illnesses. According to the most conservative estimates, the disaster claimed a few thousand lives; other reports speak of many times that number.

These days Chernobyl is inhabited again. It is an inconspicuous town, only an hour from Kiev, full of people whose job it is to make sure that no one else comes to town: forest rangers, security people, soldiers,
firemen, maintenance personnel, office workers, cafeteria help. Cars drive in and out of town, laundry flaps cheerfully on the line, three babies have been born here recently. At least 10,000 people work at Chernobyl these days – more or less at their own risk, only time will tell. But then, with two weeks on and two weeks off, an early-retirement plan and double overtime, what Ukrainian could resist?

Thanks to Irina's efforts, I am today the guest of Nikolai Dmytruk, assistant director of the Chernobyl InterInform agency of the ministry of emergency affairs. He shows me his collection of maps, full of faded ink spots, red, yellow and green. The official ‘zone’, as the most hazardous area is called, is shown on the map by means of concentric circles tightening in around the exploded plant, several kilometres apart, each one indicating greater danger, each one accompanied by increasingly strict security controls, as though the good Lord himself had gone to the drafting table during the explosion with compass and ruler. The truly radioactive areas look much more jagged on the map, big red smears, blown along by the wind. Some sections of the zone were upwind during the disaster itself, and are now quite safe. But on the other hand, in the densely populated town of Narodichi, in real terms outside the zone, the radioactivity is just as strong as in Chernobyl itself.

Some 100,000 people have since moved from the most heavily contaminated areas, but around 200,000 remain. Ukraine simply lacks the funds to evacuate them. Meanwhile, strange things continue to happen. Osteoporosis, cancer of the larynx and immune diseases, the statistics tell it all. Almost all of the young people here have health problems. In the same way Belgian or Dutch physicians deliver the diagnosis ‘stress’ when they don't know what else to say, the doctors in Kiev say ‘radiation’ and go on about their business.

Dmytruk has me put on a kind of prison suit, then we climb into an old Volkswagen van and drive to the reactor. ‘Everyone expects to see something unusual here,’ he says. ‘Ruined forests, rabbits with six legs, death and destruction. But that's exactly it: you don't feel anything, you don't see anything, you don't smell anything, not a single human sense sounds the alarm.’ The scene of the disaster itself, popularly referred to as ‘the sarcophagus’, looks like a huge concrete coffin built around the ruins of the reactor. The Geiger counter reads 1.05 microroentgens. ‘Not
bad,’ Dmytruk says. ‘When the wind is blowing hard we sometimes get up to 1.5. Then you can hear the sarcophagus creaking and groaning in the distance.’

Fifteen minutes further along lies the Pompeu of the twentieth century.

In the 1980s, Pripyat – specially built for the workers at the power plant – was a modern town of about 50,000 inhabitants, mostly young families. It was, by Soviet standards, a model town: lots of greenery, good schools, excellent facilities. Then, on 26 April, 1986, everything suddenly stopped. Hundreds of cars and buses were driven to the central square; all of the city's inhabitants had to leave within the hour and none of them moved back. Only very few among them have ever set foot here again.

In the city we enter, the Soviet era is still in full bloom: the central square with its hammers and sickles, the square buildings, the mottos inscribed above the entrances: ‘Lenin's Party Leads us to the Triumph of Communism’. Between the blocks of flats it is deathly quiet, the snow on all the streets and squares lies untouched, as if in a remote forest. A little fancy fair, ready for the May Day celebrations, is still standing: a rusty Ferris wheel, weathered bumper cars, sheets of canvas on the ground. A little tree is growing out of the floor of the hall of the hotel.

In the cupboards at the day-care centre, the little shoes still stand neatly in a row, the way they were left behind thirteen years ago. On the floor are two red canisters of toy cars, a box of building blocks, a toy shop, two dolls with plaster in their hair, a shelf of honour bearing the best clay figures of the week. The next room is full of baby beds, with half-decayed sheets and mattresses.

‘This must have been an excellent day-care centre,’ Dmytruk says as we walk through the abandoned rooms. ‘Look at all the things they had here. It's almost hard to believe: in those days, every child in this country still went to school, they got a warm meal every afternoon, later they could fall in love with whomever they pleased, Russian, Ukrainian, it didn't matter, we were all brothers and sisters.’ The snow has drifted into the corridors. On the wall is a drawing of the May Day celebration, half finished.

Night is coming and the air is icy cold. We drive on, through Kopachi, a village buried beneath a layer of soil, past rows of long mounds, a
graveyard of houses and barns. Then a medieval darkness falls, the sky is full of stars, here and there we see the blinking of a candle or a kerosene lantern.

Dmytruk and my interpreter think I should meet old Nikolai Czikolovitch. Nikolai and his wife Anastasia Ivanovna live deep in the woods, in the middle of the restricted zone, in the lee of the plant. They are deeply attached to their smallholding, their chickens, pigs and cows, and after the catastrophe they stubbornly went on living there. Today they are among the 600 or so people who live illegally in the zone.

Anastasia, wrinkled and bowed, climbs down hastily from the tile stove when we come in; she had already gone to bed. Amid the groves of Chernobyl, it appears, Philemon and Baucis still reside, no radiation seems to touch them, they live on and on like two trees sharing one trunk. They have been together for more than half a century; he was once a tractor driver, she worked all her life at the agricultural collective. After that they received their pension, which these days they use to buy a little soap and tobacco every month, then it's gone. In their poverty, they produce everything themselves. The fireplace is poked up, the cupboards are plundered, home-made vodka, eggs, sausage, pickles and jars of cherries appear on the table, all for the guests.

We talk back and forth in sign language, take pictures of each other, laugh, sing a song, have another drink, Dmytruk from the ministry of emergency affairs, the interpreter, Nikolai, Anastasia and I, the ikons bless us all, day and night.

‘
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY THIS COUNTRY IS SO MELANCHOLY?
I'll tell you: the Rumanians have always seen history in terms of a single person. When you look at old Dutch paintings, usually you see groups: the city militia, people partying, street and village scenes. The Rumanians in their paintings are always quite alone, they are kings or dictators: Prince Michael, King Carol II, Nicolae Ceauşsescu. That dependence on a single person, it's deeply embedded in us. It also provides us with a sense of certainty, even if it's only the certainty of life close to the minimum.

‘For us, the academics at the University of Bucharest, the problems started in 1971, after Nicolae and Elena Ceauşsescu visited China. The two of them came back wildly enthusiastic: our country too needed a cultural revolution. Agriculture was to be fundamentally reorganised, old villages had to be torn down, flats had to be built for the farmers, the birth rate was to be raised artificially.

‘Back then we didn't have all that many material worries, it was more the moral pressure we lived under. For example: I once quoted Marx during a meeting. That was a real blunder: we were allowed to quote only from the collected works of Ceauşsescu. When I walked out of the room, a colleague came up to me. He shouted loudly, so everyone could hear: “Cezar Tabarcea, why were you drinking again before you came here?” That man saved me. Because, after doing that, he could write in his report to the Securitate: “Cezar Tabarcea came to the meeting drunk, and did not realise the inappropriateness of his comments.” That, in the situation of the day, was a very great favour.

‘Yes, we all went through a great deal together at the institute. Of course we always taught the mandatory subjects, but we were able to
insert our own irony in the margins, and the students never failed to pick up on that.

‘The revolution of December 1989 was not unexpected. Why do I say that? Purely on the basis of my own feelings. That autumn, I suddenly sensed a great excitement among my students. And then came the Christmas holidays. They always start here in the middle of the week, and the students usually begin going home the weekend before. So I was used to presiding over almost empty classrooms during those last few days. That last Wednesday, I was actually hoping I wouldn't have to give a lecture. But to my utter amazement the auditorium was packed to the brim. Between passages of my lecture on grammar, I wondered aloud what was going on. After the lecture a student came up to me and said: “Are you with us?” I said: “You all know that my existence revolves exclusively around every one of you, so I'm afraid I don't understand your question.” Then they all came up and stood around me and sang to me. That was on 20 December, three days after the massacre at Timişsoara. There was a Hungarian preacher there, László Tökés, who had stood up for the rights of the Hungarian minority. When the Securitate tried to close down his church by force, a revolt broke out. The Securitate shot and killed dozens of demonstrators. Everyone was furious – and maybe that was the idea. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that certain elements within the Securitate were deliberately trying to bring about Ceauşsescu's fall.