into a monstrous mass they called the Elephant’s Foot. This was the holy of holies, the most toxic object on the planet. This was the center of the Zone itself. To be in its presence even briefly was to relinquish your life. Thirty seconds would bring about dizziness and nausea. Two minutes, your very cells would begin to hemorrhage. Four minutes: vomiting, diarrhea, a fever in the blood. Five minutes in its presence, and you would be dead within two days. Concealed though it was, its unseen presence emanated a shimmer of the numinous. It was the nightmare consequence of technology itself, the invention of the shipwreck.
In the closing stretch of the Bible, in the Revelation, appear these lines: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” Wormwood is a woody, bitter-tasting shrub that is used throughout the Bible to mean a curse, the wrath of a vengeful God. In Ukrainian, and in other Slavonic languages, the word for wormwood is chernobyl. (The plant grows in lavish abundance along the banks of the River Pripyat.)
This matter of linguistic curiosity is frequently raised in commentaries on the accident, its apocalyptic resonances. In one of the long monologues recorded by Alexievich in Chernobyl Prayer, the speaker quotes the lines from the Revelation and then says this: “I’m trying to fathom that prophecy. Everything has been predicted, it’s all written in the holy books, but we don’t know how to read.”
Laborers in construction hats ambled in and out of the plant. It was lunchtime. The cleanup was ongoing. This was a place of work, an ordinary place. But it was a kind of holy place, too, a place where all of time had collapsed into a single physical point. The Elephant’s Foot would be here always. It would remain here after the death of everything else, an eternal monument to our civilization. After the collapse of every other structure, after every good and beautiful thing had been lost and forgotten, its silent malice would still be throbbing in the ground like a cancer, spreading its bitterness through the risen waters.
* * *
—
Before returning to Kiev, we made a final stop at the Reactor 5 cooling tower, a lofty abyss of concrete that had been nearing completion at the time of the accident and had lain abandoned ever since, both construction site and ruin. Igor and Vika led the way through tall grass, and across a long footbridge whose wooden slats had rotted away so completely in places that we had to cling to railings and tiptoe along rusted metal sidings.
“Welcome to Indiana Jones part of tour,” said Igor. Neither the joke itself nor the halfhearted titters it received seemed to give him any pleasure whatsoever. It was a part of the job, like any other: he walked across the rotted footbridge; he delivered the Indiana Jones line; he proceeded to what was next.
Once inside, we wandered the interior, mutely assimilating the immensity of the structure. The tower ascended some five hundred feet into the air, to a vast opening that encircled the sky. In puckish demonstration of the cooling tower’s dimensions, Igor selected a rock from the ground and pitched it with impressive accuracy and force at a large iron pipe that ran across the tower’s interior, and the clang reverberated in what seemed an endless self-perpetuating loop. Somewhere up in the lofty reaches a crow delivered itself of a cracked screech, and this sound echoed lengthily in its turn.
In the Old Testament, some of God’s more memorable threats to various insubordinates, various enemies of his people, involve ruined cities as the terrain of roosting birds. In the Book of Jeremiah, He declares that the city of Hazor, in the wake of its destruction by Babylon, will become “a haunt for jackals, a desolation forever.” And then there is the great blood-fevered edict of Isaiah 34, where it is foretold that the Lord’s righteous sword will descend on the city of Edom—her streams turned into pitch, her dust to blazing sulfur, her land lying desolate from generation to generation—and that this city, too, will become “a haunt for jackals, a home for owls.” They