Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,75

his being a qualified dentist seemed strongly counterintuitive. “Does he still practice?”

“What?” said the Swede, who was no longer chuckling.

“Does he still practice dentistry, I mean?”

The Swede shook his head in bewilderment, looking at me as if I had just said something completely insane, as if it was I who had just invoked the half-forgotten specter of Dr. Alban and started asking unprovoked whether he practiced dentistry.

“I have no idea,” he said, and went back into the classroom he’d emerged from, gazing down at his camera settings.

I went with Igor and Vika into another classroom, where we were followed by the wild dog Vika had fed earlier. The dog did a quick circuit of the room, sniffed perfunctorily at a papier-mâché doll, an upturned chair, some torn copybook pages, then settled himself down beside Vika. Igor opened a cupboard and removed a stack of paintings, spread them out on a table flaked with aquamarine paint. The pictures were beautifully childish things, heartbreakingly vivid renderings of butterflies, grinning suns, fish, chickens, dinosaurs, a piglet in a little blue dress. They were expressions of love toward the world, toward nature, made with such obvious joy and care that I felt myself getting emotional looking at them. I could all of a sudden see the children at their desks, their tongues protruding in concentration, their teachers bending over to offer encouragement and praise, and I could smell the paper, the paint, the glue.

I picked up a painting of a dinosaur, and I was surprised by sadness not at the unthinkable dimensions of the catastrophe itself, but at the thought that the child responsible for this picture had never been able to take it home to show his parents, had had to leave it behind just as he had had to leave behind his school, his home, his city, his poisoned world. And I became conscious then of the strangeness of my being here, the wrongness of myself as a figure in this scene: a man from outside, from the postapocalyptic future, holding this simple and beautiful picture in his hand and looking at it as an artifact of a collapsed civilization. This, I now understood, was the deeper contradiction of my presence in the Zone: my discomfort in being here had less to do with the risk of contamination than with the sense of myself as the contaminant.

* * *

—

Czesław Miłosz’s poem “A Song on the End of the World” conjures a last day that is just like any other, where nature continues about its business, and where “those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps / Do not believe it is happening now.” The poem closes with a white-haired old man repeating the following lines as he harvests tomatoes in his field: “There will be no other end of the world, / There will be no other end of the world.”

The poem was written in 1944, in occupied Warsaw. Nowhere in it does Miłosz mention or even allude to Auschwitz, where as he wrote, just a couple of hundred miles away the end of the world had been under way for some time. But it’s impossible to read the poem now without thinking of that localized apocalypse. The fact that the world is continuing on as always—that the sun is shining, and the bees circling the clover, and the tomatoes ripe in the fields—doesn’t mean it hasn’t already come to an end.

The image of Miłosz’s white-haired old man, his prophet who is not a prophet, came to me when we were taken to meet Ivan Ivanovich Semeniuk, a farmer in his early eighties who was one of the last remaining returnees to the Zone. He was one of two remaining inhabitants of the village of Paryshev, which had once been home to about six hundred people. (The other was a cheerful and exceptionally tiny old lady named Darya. Darya lived a short walk across the fields with a small brown terrier.) Ivan Ivanovich carried for some reason an ear of corn in his hand the entire time we were with him, and wore a khaki army jacket and loose-fitting lavender running pants, and though he walked with the aid of a cane he seemed in excellent shape for a man of his age, let alone a man of his age who had lived for the last three decades in a zone of nuclear alienation. He told us, via the medium of Vika’s halting simultaneous translation, that when he and his family