Alexi tells us that he rides the morning train with thousands. We accompany him. The workers file in, crowding into the seats, keys and hats left on benches by regulars to mark their seat. Men gather in fours and fives, get out faded playing cards, set up chessboards. When Christophe films some dark-haired men playing cards, they yell out in Russian, “We don’t want to be filmed.” It’s aggressive—we know what they say before our translator tells us. There are few women on board the train. One woman—“the reader,” Christophe calls her—sits all in beige, turning the pages of a book in the glistening sunlight.
In one apartment we found a set of black-and-white photos of children dressed for a party. Who left it behind?
The 40-minute ride takes us from outside the exclusion zone to the area closest to the reactor. The train chugs slowly, crossing over into Belarus then back to Ukraine. We pull into the station as the night shift is readying to board the train home to Slavutich. “Don’t film,” our translator says. Instead I record everything in my mind: the scene of thousands rushing toward the reactor, thousands rushing toward Slavutich, old Soviet-style music playing in the background, the young uniformed guards who sit in chairs at the entranceway to the reactor and check everyone in. This seems to be the last place on earth where the Soviet Union is still alive. No one mentions the word radiation. They hand you a small necklace to wear when you arrive, a miniature dosimeter.
All in this land of make-believe, where everyone says everything is all right. And after you are here for a while, you start to believe it. Maybe radiation isn’t so bad. Maybe the body does adapt. Mice aren’t affected. Maybe humans aren’t either. Then I flash back to the apartment building in Kiev they call the House of Widows, where emergency workers’ wives outlive their husbands, and to the worker raising his shirt to show me his mile-long scar, and to his wife with thyroid problems, and their son Kolia, who was taken to Cuba for his health problems.
In Slavutich, we stop a group of gleaming schoolboys walking home from the nearby grammar school. “Do you want to work at the nuclear power plant?” I ask.
Image courtesy of International
Atomic Energy Agency
“Nyet, nyet, nyet,” they scream at once.
“Do you think nuclear power is good?”
“Nyet.”
“Why?”
“Radiation.”
Slavutich is the town created in 1987 by the Soviet Union to replace Pripyat. There are Estonian neighborhoods, Latvian, and others. The town was the city of hope, Pripyat the city of the future. Both the future and hope died in these towns.
Youri, our guide, told us: “They built it after the accident when the other reactors were still operating. We still believed the future was bright. We had hope that the reactors would keep operating, that Slavutich would replace Pripyat, that everything would go back to normal. But it didn’t, and then the Soviet Union collapsed. Then the reactor closed, and everything in Slavutich started to fall apart. People left, the city faded, began to look like the abandoned Pripyat. People didn’t have hope anymore. It became like Pripyat. Sure, people still live here, still work in the reactor, but all the hope is gone. I didn’t want to live there anymore. Then I went to work in Chernobyl as a guide.”?
During our filming, we returned again to Pripyat with Maxim, a young Ukrainian filmmaker. He has a question. ?
“Are you making a film about death?” he asks.
“No,” I answer.
“Is radiation death?” he asks.
I don’t answer. After a long silence, he asks again.
“Yes, I guess so,” I say.
Maxim strokes the car window when he sees his apartment house. “My house, my house,” he says in English. In his bedroom he goes to a large poster of a white horse and strokes the face of the horse. He wanders from room to room picking up things. He picks up a blue ball. “This was my favorite toy,” he says. And then at the closet door he stops and looks at a wall-size 1986 calendar. He begins to rip apart the months after April.
“I need some time here alone,” he says.
He doesn’t take long, and when he walks out of the apartment, he says, “I won’t come back here anymore. This is the last time,” and bounces the blue ball he has been carrying back into the apartment.
He walks down the stairs and heads back to the car.
