Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,69

of the Zone. Two uniformed men emerged from a small building, languidly smoking, emanating the peculiar lassitude of armed border guards. Igor reached out and plucked the microphone from its nook in the dashboard.

“Dear comrades,” he said. “We are now approaching the Zone. Please hand over passports for inspection.”

* * *

—

You feel immediately the force of the contradiction. You feel, contradictorily, both drawn in and repelled by this force. Everything you have learned tells you that this is an afflicted place, a place that is hostile and dangerous to life. And yet the dosimeter, which Igor held up for inspection as we stood by the bus on the far side of the border, displayed a level of radiation lower than the one recorded earlier that morning outside McDonald’s in Kiev. Apart from some hot spots, which must be known in order to be avoided, much of the Zone is relatively low in radiation. The outer part of the 30k Zone—the thirty-kilometer radius of abandoned land around the reactor itself—is for the most part perfectly amenable to life.

“Possible to use this part of Zone again humans today,” said Igor.

Someone asked why, in that case, it wasn’t used.

“Ukraine is very big country. Luckily we can spare this land to use as buffer between highly contaminated part of Zone and rest of Ukraine. Belarus not so lucky.”

Immediately you are struck by the strange beauty of the place, the unchecked exuberance of nature finally set free of its crowning achievement, its problem child. The road you walk on is cracked with the purposeful pressure of plant stems from below, the heedless insistence of life breaking forth, continuing on. It is midsummer, and the day is hot, but with the sibilant whisper of a cool breeze in the leaves, and butterflies everywhere, superintending the ruins. It is all quite lovely, in its uncanny way: the world, everywhere, protesting its innocence.

“All the fields are slowly turning into forest,” Igor said. “The condition of nature is returning to what it was before people. Mooses. Wild boar. Wolves. Rare kinds of horses.”

This is the colossal irony of Chernobyl: because it is the site of history’s most devastating ecological catastrophe, this region that was once home to 120,000 Soviet citizens has been for decades now basically void of human life; and because it is basically void of human life, it is effectively the largest nature preserve in all of Europe. To enter the Zone, in this sense, is to have one foot in a prelapsarian paradise and the other in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

Not far past the border, we stopped and walked a little way into a wooded area that had once been a village. We paused in a clearing to observe a large skull, a scattered miscellany of bones.

“Moose,” said Igor, prodding the skull gently with the toe of a trainer. “Skull of moose,” he added, by way of elaboration.

Vika directed our attention toward a low building with a collapsed roof, a fallen tree trunk partially obscuring its entrance. She swept a hand before her in a stagey flourish. “It is a hot day today,” she said. “Who would like to buy an ice cream from me?” She went on to clarify that this had once been a shop, in which it would have been possible to buy ice cream, among other items.

I exchanged a wary glance with Dylan. He was dressed, as ever, for comfort. Black and gray Nike shell suit, box-fresh white sneakers, dark shades: he looked like a Mafia capo who had by way of some implausible comic contrivance found himself touring the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in a minibus.

Thirty-one years is a long time, of course, but it was still impressive how comprehensively nature had seized control of the place in that time. In these ruins, it was no easier to imagine people standing around in jeans and sneakers eating ice cream than it was, in the blasted avenues of Pompeii, to imagine people in togas eating olives. It was astonishing to behold how quickly we humans became irrelevant to the business of nature.

Igor pointed out the home of a woman he had often taken his tourists to visit. She had returned in 1988, two years after the accident. Like most of the 140 or so permanent residents of the Zone, known to Ukrainians as samoseli (self settlers), she was nearing old age by the time of the evacuation and government resettlement and found it difficult to adjust to life outside of the only